Tabitha slowly drew breath. She had promised to fight for life.
“Jégeswo şuĥnustód ħést y niħhil,” she tried.
The Destroyer shuddered as the banishment touched his soul, but he remained standing, incarnate. Her voice was too faint; she did not have the command she needed. Yet, Garyll had come. Some things she had wished for had come true.
Before Garyll could reach her, a bearded young man staggered from the crowd, a man clad in rough leathers, with wild blond hair and a green disc glinting on his neck. He grasped at Garyll’s arms and, as Garyll held him up, they shared a moment. They turned as one to face Tabitha, and a presence touched her—a familiar mind. There was sudden understanding and he took the words from her like a pip from a fruit.
“Jégeswo şuĥnustód ħést y niħhil,” he repeated.
Ashley! He had grown wild, and he looked tired enough to fall without Garyll’s support. How had he come to be here? Another friend who had appeared, to answer her need. He turned and threw his arms out to the crowds and Tabitha felt a mental surge.
“Jégeswo!” roared the crowd. “Niħhil!”
He had come to save her.
They chanted the banishment together—Tabitha, Garyll, Ashley and a growing number of the crowd—and this time, Tabitha felt the hooks bite. The Destroyer pressed his giant fists to his head and crumpled to his knees. A war broke out among the worshippers, between those who chanted the banishment and those who tried to silence the revolution, but the worshippers closest to Tabitha held the others at bay, for they were affected most by her presence, and Tabitha raised her voice, and Ashley pushed the words out farther, and they chanted together, their voices carried across the plains. The Destroyer swelled again as the last word didn’t bite; there was something wrong with the banishment, right at the end. It failed to compel Him.
“Repeat the last word!” shouted Tabitha. “We must repeat the last word!”
Ashley nodded. “Niħhil.” Chanted the crowd. “Niħhil.”
Banishment, and a terrible resistance. In the final moment of doom, the Apocalypse rose against them. He roared and the horrid sound spread, pulsing Chaos through discordant veins.
_____
Twardy Zarost found himself on the boulder. Travelling by inference was a delight. When he inferred himself into a place, it wasn’t like travelling at all—it was more like finding the version of reality in which he was already in the place he sought. There was no pop of appearance, the jolt that startled inhabitants. He simply was there, as if he had always been there: Turmodin, or what was left of it.
Zarost marvelled at the mayhem. It was incredibly over-magicked, but then they had all been drawn to the heart of Chaos, and things had been bound to get overwrought. There had been a wildfire strike, that much was plain to see. The Mystery had abandoned them, wisely leaving the future to chance. She must have transferred away. The Shadowcaster had fled as well. Under Tabitha’s lead, the crowds were chanting, and Zarost recognised the final words of the banishment. It was almost as he would have said it, but there was something wrong, the last word didn’t have the right hooks in, and the Destroyer was a prime God—the banishment would need not only the hooks, but breath control as well. Language became more advanced the further back one went; mankind had inherited language from the Gods in the first place then slowly pulled it to pieces with years of innovation.
He could not have devised a better challenge to elevate Tabitha’s gift. He would not have risked a God so soon, he would never have done what had been done to Ethea to get there, but the Warlock’s excesses were a boon. It was the perfect pinnacle of riddling: if one needed a champion, present the candidate with a deadly challenge, and if they failed, they weren’t the champion. If they had the gift, they would be forged in the crucible of dire circumstance to exercise the talents which made them the champion. Depending on how one set up the conflict, one achieved a different result. This would be spectacular.
The Destroyer towered over them all, defying the ancient lore, a lore that had failed because it was being used incorrectly. Well, that was simple then; they faced the end of the world.
He pulled the Lorewarden from his pocket.
Only a second remained to save everything. It all relied on the Lorewarden’s memory.
It was a quiz night and the Lorewarden was the star. Twardy Zarost pricked his finger on the shard.
The Lorewarden tumbled out. He blinked in the wild light, his eyes bulging as he took in the form of the Destroyer, towering over them all, gathering the end of the world.
“Quiz: what is the last word in the banishment of The Book of Is?” asked Twardy Zarost.
The Destroyer’s hands closed around them, dragging the end of the world from the sides, crushing, breaking, tearing through earth, air, flesh and life.
The Lorewarden blinked. “N|iħhil,” he replied.
“N|iħhil,” repeated Zarost, emphasising the correct accents and breath control. Useless, he knew, unless she was the One, unless she truly had the power of ultimate command. He had gambled his life on this moment. He had gambled all of their lives.
“N|iħhil” repeated Tabitha, copying her Riddler.
“N|iħhil,” repeated the young man in leathers whom Zarost couldn’t place. Then, to Zarost’s great delight, the young man distributed his mind and touched thousands, a grand and dazzling network of thought. It was Logán, the Lightgifter from Eyri, the young man who had poked into Zarost’s mind one day long ago. Lightgifter no more! He was a wizard, one entirely of his own making. Nothing could have impressed Zarost more.
“N|iħhil,” roared the crowd.
Zarost felt the severing of the great soul. Aha! Aha!
With an endless hollow moan, the spirit of the Destroyer abandoned the plane of mankind. His great body fell to the ground, an empty sack, heavy as a mountain. Everyone was thrown down as the ground quaked and cracked. It was ended.
Zarost lay where he had fallen on his face.
Hell’s bells, but that had all happened quickly! He savoured the taste of dirt and rock-dust. It meant they were all alive. When he had rigged the game with his acts of prophecy, he had never anticipated how dangerous it would become for him, but he should have known. It was never possible to foresee oneself until one was living in the moment foreseen. Success and failure were always separated by an instant, and the greater the success he reached for, the greater the potential failure. In the distance he watched the Pillar fall. They had been separated from disaster by a sliver of a second. The knife-edge of knowledge had saved them. Sometimes an accurate fact really was the last word in a fight.
“Did I win a prize?” the Lorewarden asked, lying beside Zarost. His eyes wobbled like eggs on stalks. He was still in shock. He had won a prize, worth more than anything in the world.
Now Zarost could begin his ultimate plan. He had formed the right players in the crucible of manipulated fate. He had traded some pieces from his Gyre, it was true, but he had gained so much. He had the one card in his hand that trumped all the others.
“Yes,” Zarost replied. “Yes indeed. Listen.”
44. SORCERER’S SONG
“A treasured life; a small death.
Life spent; a coming alive.”—Zarost
The song rose on the winds.
At last she understood. Life was the ruling magic; it was the Lifesong that brought all the colours to the world. Reality was made of essence and formed by visions. The Lifesong guided the visions and so had an influence over everything. The Lifesong was like a fluid beneath a sponge; it soaked reality with vitality. The song was in everything, in substance and in the spaces in between. The world was the way it was because others had imagined parts of it before her, others like Ametheus, and the wizards before him. If the song was sung properly, it could inspire others to see the world in the way she saw it, and that vision would become reality. She had to take ownership of the vision of the world. She had to see it healed. She had to sing her song, to tell the story
as she would have it come to pass.
There was so much beauty to be expressed. It seemed to her that Life was a never-ending dance, and the more freedom there was to dance, the more beauty there was in the world. Tabitha gathered every scrap of essence to herself, felt it activate like a shimmering sea. She would strive to spread the Lifesong through everything, through the earth, through the air. She opened to the power and let it flow. The greater wisdom came upon her, she heard her voice alter and deepen in power. Ancient memories filled her mind, flashes of colour, of conflict, of the forming symphony of the elements, and under it all, a sense of time, aeons and aeons of time, as the stars danced in the darkness, as the patterns of the universe grew into order then were spun away in chaos, as a music breathed through it all, bringing life for a moment, then taking it away again.
Ethea was with her. She sang the new melodies that filled her, tunes that drew her on and away into a rich tapestry of music that filled her soul and let her soul fill the universe. She plucked a carrier note, spread her attention wide, and released the song all around her in a sonic wave, to travel as far as she could reach. She tried to touch everything, and to see everything in a natural state—uncontrolled, untainted, renewed. So the spell resonated through the earth and air, extending her power farther and wider than she had ever attempted before.
The black corpse of the Destroyer rippled as the ruined bodies were changed, writhing, growing, rising under her guidance to form a living monument to those who had died. It became a great tree, a sweeping tower of majestic curves, limbs that spread out to the sky, growing and growing until it was the greatest tree in all Oldenworld, the greatest tree that would ever be.
At the edge of her sonic wave, the light changed, and colours danced like an exploded rainbow. The ground rippled with verdant vegetation, a sudden growth that rushed across the scorched earth and under the feet of the thousands of witnesses, leaving insects flittering in the air and small birds darting among them. New trees stood in quiet huddled copses, throwing long shadows over their toes. Tabitha’s music resounded from every leaf, bird and butterfly in that landscape. She was filled with the melodies; she could feel everything as clusters of notes, streams of harmony, woven together.
Still, there was more to do, for the devastation upon Oldenworld was far-reaching. Ametheus might be ended, but Tabitha knew his wildfire was not rendered harmless. It lay like poison upon the land and across the sky, and the power within it was dormant until it found life. Anyone who was touched by that silver fire would become blighted. She sent her music running away on the threads of wildfire, seeking out Chaos and calming the essence.
The words formed on her lips. Tabitha played the lyre with abandon; her spirit was swept up in the intensity of creation. Although the music was something that had existed long before she had been born, something that would live long after her death, it bound everything into one theme, unifying them all.
She held the final note, which completed the aria. It was not a note she could hold on her lyre. As she sang it, she could sense the air growing thick around her, the rock solidifying underfoot and the clouds growing heavy above. The note reverberated through her and all the world, in a similar way to the Shiver, that high piercing note she had used to split the Shield of Eyri. This note was its opposite, the sound upon which all things could be drawn together—the binder: the unifier of Life and Death, Dark and Light, Chaos and Order. Everything was touched by the sound. All the axes could find a meeting in this centre.
Tabitha reached out with her hands and her awareness. The spirit of Ethea infused her for a glorious timeless moment. She felt connected to everything that lived, everything created, all the elements of earth, every place of fire, all the liquid seas and streams of water, all the air far above the mountains and beyond the high clouds, beyond the stars, beyond infinity. She was the centre of all reality for a moment, she touched it all and knew it all, through her note of integration—one sound which balanced everything.
There was no reference to lay her knowledge of immensity upon. She was at the beginning, middle and end of reality all at once. The long line of Time was turned upon its end, and Tabitha saw the whole of her life, and beyond. She was so young she had just been conceived, yet she was older than she could imagine, wise and full of knowing. In this strange place within the song’s climactic release, her life and death touched. She knew her highest moments of joy and her deepest sorrows together. Her triumphs and failures unified: her wrongs and rights, the good and evil, the Dark and Light welded into instantaneous coexistence. Energy and Matter were fused. Chaos and Order were one.
When her vision deepened, she could see the full extent of her being, a presence beyond one lifetime, beyond a thousand. She was overwhelmed. She saw the goddess Ethea.
She was the Goddess Ethea.
The world exploded with life.
Then the song was sung and she cried from the beauty of what she had seen. She returned to herself and, with her tears, came the rains.
_____
The dreamer who dreams has awoken,
the fearless have passed beyond fears,
the one who seeks wings, shall forever be free;
their song echoes through all the years.
Without you I am but a shadow,
yet your love fills me with light,
for I live in your grace and your beauty
and your vision inspires my sight.
Our dance is the centre of circles,
as the Lifesong weaves us tight.
SPREAD THE WORD!
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Regards,
Greg Hamerton
Table of Contents
SECOND SIGHT
FIRST THINGS FIRST?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPY, RIGHT?
THE FIRST MOVEMENT
1. A QUIVER IN THE STRINGS
2. TROUBLED CLEFF
3. THREE OF A KIND
4. GODDESS
5. THIEVES IN THE NIGHT
6. KING OF THE CASTLE
7. THE EDGE OF REASON
8. GOOD GRACIOUS ME
9. A SHADE OF ANGER
10. THE WRY PROPHET
11. THINKING OF GREATNESS
12. WITNESS OF RUIN
13. FRIENDS FOR LIFE
THE SECOND MOVEMENT
14. BROTHERHOOD
15. OLDENWORLD
16. THE BEAST AND BEAUTY
17. FOLLOW THE LEADER
18. SILVER SAND
19. CROOKED COVEN
20. A RIDDLE IN THE WOOD
21. A LOOK INTO THE FOREST
22. THE MUSIC, THE RHYTHM
23. TELLING TAILS
24. BATTLE CRY
25. A FAR AND DISTANT PLACE
26. OITAMBAKALKALISSEMI
THE THIRD MOVEMENT
27. A CRACKLING GOOD TIME
28. THE INHERITANCE SAGA
29. EYE SPY WITH MY LITTLE I
30. THE SCALES OF HONESTY
31. A PERFECT SLICE OF PI
32. THE WIZARD’S WAY
33. AN AWFUL APPRECIATION
34. RELATIVE INSANITY
35. A MOMENT OF LIFE
36. THE RULER OF THE REVERIE
37. THE CURSE OF CHAOS
38. A TROUBLED WORLD
39. AN EYE ON THE MOON
THE FOURTH MOVEMENT
40. THE BREAKING OF THE WORLD
41. CONVERGING ON CHAOS
42. CLOSING MOMENTS
43. ANOTHER VIEW
44. SORCERER’S SONG
SPREAD THE WORD!
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 76