Her head fell back against the bark, and she looked up through the branches at the night sky. Pockets of black, spangled with distant stars, peeked between the dark gray of the close-twined tree limbs. Her vision blurred, and the dim specks of light shifted. She blinked in a futile attempt to focus.
She felt something stir within her tunic against the skin of her unwounded shoulder, something sinuous and cold. A snake, she thought, with a dull flare of alarm that soon faded into indifference. A snake has crawled beneath my clothes, seeking warmth. Poor worm. Soon I’ll be as cold as it is.
As if thinking about the cold had summoned it, an icy chill gripped her legs and passed up through her body, through her leg bones, her gut, her torso. The broken places inside her sparked with pain as the cold passed through them. The skin of her shoulders and neck prickled as if in response to the winter wind on Shadrun’s mountain. She breathed as deeply as she could, half expecting to smell the sharp scent of new-fallen snow, but instead she smelled the mingled scents of decaying leaf mold, crushed pine, and the dull copper of her own blood.
There were the stars, then nothing, then the stars, then an ever-greater nothing as her eyes closed and didn’t open.
She woke to a deeper night and a dull pain that penetrated every inch of her flesh. Her arm was locked into place across her body, still clutching the wad of fabric to her shoulder. As she became able to distinguish one sensation from another, she realized her improvised bandage was completely drenched, and that a small, steady trickle pulsed from beneath it with the rhythm of her heart.
Lakini let her right hand fall away, and the sodden fabric fell. There was something around her wrist, something metallic that glinted in the faint light of the stars that still shone down from between the tangle of branches.
Her arm seemed to weigh a ton. With great effort she shifted it, blinking at the object that coiled there. It was a bracelet, wound round her wrist several times, made of small flat links.
She didn’t have the strength to be curious about it.
She needed to find more cloth, find a way to stop the bleeding, find help and healing. She needed to regain her strength, get back to Jadaren Hold, and stop Lusk from his mad descent.
He would destroy two families, if she couldn’t prevent it. And he would destroy his own soul, if any remained to wreck.
There was no one here to help her. She couldn’t even help herself. She tried to meditate, to find the inner core of peace and strength from which she could summon and enforce her own healing, and push back the black tide that was rising to engulf her. But the ability eluded her.
She felt very light now. Although her shoulder still throbbed and her side ached where her ribs had snapped, the pain seemed almost a distant thing, something belonging to a body of flesh and feeling that was increasingly not part of her.
I am dying now, she thought. She wondered why it had taken her so long to realize that. Surely, after so many centuries, after taking so many bodily forms and shedding them like a tattered cloak at the end of the day, she should recognize death when it came for her.
This husk is finally fading now, she thought without terror. I will go on and forget my life as Lakini.
The throbbing pain radiating from her shoulder slowed and stilled, replaced by a gentle warmth that gradually suffused her entire body. The ache of her cracked ribs faded as well. She felt weak as a newborn kitten. Any number of dangerous beasts or beings, Lusk included, might be on her trail, but she felt no need to move. She knew it didn’t matter now.
Now she was ending, and soon enough she would begin again, and all this would be nothing but a faint memory.
She looked across the copse at the mazelike tangle of tree limbs opposite. It seemed that as her body faded, her sight grew ever sharper, even in the darkness, until she could see every vein in every budding leaf, each tiny insect that crawled across the twigs, the very sap as it pulsed beneath the bark. She could see faces in the mosaic the brambles made, female and male both. Faces that watched her, witnessing what was happening. Faced with markings across them, none exactly like hers or like Lusk’s, but unmistakably similar—each a sigil the Astral Sea crafted upon its own children.
Faces that were hers in previous lives, each shed like a snake’s skin when it grew dull, revealing the new patterns of a new life beneath it.
Devas rarely remembered, except in extremity, the lives they shed. Lakini could remember the drifts and the currents of the Astral Sea that had birthed her, millennia ago, better than the life and body she inhabited before this one. But now, on the cusp of death, staring at her own past faces witnessing her passing, she remembered. Images flickered through her consciousness, as if someone showed her the illuminated pages of a book depicting animate scenes from history—her own history.
She watched, impassive, as fire and melted rock poured down a mountainside, and man-size, serpentine creatures frolicked joyously in the lava. One turned to her and stretched out its arms covered in scales, imploring and mocking her at the same time.
She remembered the taste of wine made from grapes that grew and froze on an ice-bound rock that floated over isolated reaches of ocean, and the onyx-carved cup she drank it from, and the cruel, beautiful smile of the creature that had poured it out for her.
She ran with another, an incarnation of the deva who in this time had become Lusk, ran full pelt at the edge of the cliff rimmed in pale green grass and tiny white flowers, the dirt and rocks beneath their feet crumbling and falling into the sea far below. They were at the point of falling themselves but ran too fast for gravity to catch them, and the sunlight winked diamond-bright on the waves for miles before them.
She stood on a beach, on golden sand lapped by silver water, and bowed her head as she kneeled to an immense winged beast. She bore no weapon, and her body was very new. The beast’s warm breath stirred the hair at the base of her neck. She raised her head and saw the beast’s clawed hand holding out a sheathed sword. The sheath was white leather with a repeating leaf pattern stitched in gold, and the hilt and pommel were silver and gold worked together to form waves like the liquid fire in the heart of a mountain. The beast spoke, and in her memory she couldn’t hear the word it uttered, but she knew what it meant.
Dawnbringer.
It was both a naming and a benediction.
It was her first incarnation as a creature of the mortal plane, never remembered until now. Dawnbringer—her purpose to bring hope and justice, like the new sun spilling light at the edge of a darkened world.
Lakini could name her faces. Lakini. The one who had no name but was known as the Lady of the Sparrows. One of her rare male incarnations. Pashia the Golden.
Dawnbringer.
A thick mist clouded the edge of her vision, bright and shot through with silver. She blinked, but the mist didn’t go away, spreading instead and obscuring the faces so that one by one they faded away.
There was a great weight on her chest—not on, not exactly, but inside it, pressing against her heart. Beat by beat the flow of blood through her veins slowed. The pressure would have been painful if not for the warmth and lassitude that served as a drug, numbing all sensation.
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, knowing that as she exhaled, the mortal components of her body would dissolve, each tiny particle returning to the bosom of the land she’d wandered for so long. Like all things living and unliving beneath the sun and moon of Faerûn, she was composed of star-stuff, and as a dying star she would scatter for a time before being remade as something, someone else.
Everything changes. Everything dies. She had been an instrument of that cycle of killing and dying often enough to know. Dying, she remembered Wolfhelm and the smith.
There was a smell like gangrene in the smith’s small neat hut behind the smithy. His eyes were yellow, and thick black hair had sprouted all over the arm that had been bitten.
She sat by him a long time as he tossed and cried out in his sleep. At one point his lips drew b
ack, and she saw long yellow canines were sprouting from his gums, over his normal, human teeth.
He lunged at her and snapped. She drew back just in time.
Jonhan opened his eyes and looked up at her, startled. Lurid yellow eyes looked back into her gray ones.
Her voice was gentle. “How do you feel?”
“Terrible,” he said. “But I was dreaming, and that felt good.”
“What did you dream?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Killing. Eating.” He looked startled at his own words.
“Killing what?”
“Rosebud. You. Everybody. All meat. All rabbits to be eaten.” He drew a great, shuddering breath, then looked at her, stricken by what he said. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
“Yes,” she said, and then, “Are you ready?”
He swallowed. “Yes. Can you make it quick?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Yes,” she said, drawing her dagger.
Outside, the donkey’s braying sounded like weeping.
Lakini was floating in the warm waters, each ripple moving her body as if she were composed of water herself. This is death, she thought. It’s not familiar to me, although I’ve done it before.
Something tugged at her right wrist. She ignored it, and it tugged again, insistent.
Blinking her eyes open, she looked down at it and frowned.
There was no sea, no feeling of peace and contentment. Pain lanced through her again. She sprawled against a tree in the middle of the dark woods, cold and alone. The bracelet around her wrist tightened again and, as she watched, one end of it uncoiled from the rest, reared snakelike, and jabbed the skin of her palm.
It wasn’t painful, but her body jerked against it. She no longer felt as if she were dissolving. She was all too corporeal.
A voice, clear and implacable, came from the center of her being.
Your work is not done here.
Let me go, she thought, despairing.
Your purpose is unfulfilled. You must remain.
Reborn, she would be whole again, an unblemished weapon ready to do the will of the gods. She would remember nothing of the sanctuary, of the Houses of Beguine and Jadaren, of Kestrel or the Rhythanko. She might remember Lusk, even if he took a new form. She knew that the beings that were Lusk and Lakini had found each other again and again over the centuries, bound together in a time mortals would consider ancient.
Lusk … He had tried to kill her, at the behest of something outside them both. She knew, with a wisdom older than her Lakini body, that Lusk had begun to walk apart from the path of his deva nature long ago.
Should Lusk die, he would not return as a deva, but as a rakshasa, a tiger-demon, his outer form betraying what his inner nature had become.
If she denied her rebirth, would she take the first fatal step off that path, condemning herself as well?
Outside her, the Astral Sea called on her to let all go, to dissolve. The voice inside her called on her to remain. Lakini herself was trapped between them.
I must decide.
Another vision came to her, this one not of her past lives or the dwelling places of the gods. This was a mortal face; Kestrel’s face, with nothing divine about it. It was a human face, touched with the hands of time.
The thing on her wrist moved again. If she had had the strength to pry it away and cast it aside, she would have.
No. It was too much. She took everything that remained to her and flung it at the cosmos. No!
The cosmos struck back with a flash of white light. It erased all her senses. She was blind, deaf, paralyzed. Nothing existed but the light.
Then, slowly, she was aware of her body again. There was no pain. She lay half-curled on her side. She had a sense of a circular chamber, of huge, hand-wrought stones, and of powerful presences standing around her.
She should get up; she knew it. But she couldn’t, whatever the consequences.
One of the presences reached out and touched her mind. It felt cold, slightly alien, but it spoke to her gently.
What are you doing, child? By now you must have learned to accept death.
I have unfinished business here. Even to her, Lakini’s thought sounded childishly stubborn. Well, let it be so.
This body is finished, and so, too, all business it may have.
I … do not agree.
It cannot be that you refuse your reincarnation.
But I do.
She heard another thought-voice, imperious and impatient.
You dare contend that a few mortal creatures and their concerns are more important than the will of the gods? More important than the purpose for which you were created? A deva is more than herself. In you is contained the entire nature of life, death, and rebirth. In shedding your body and its wants, desires, and histories, you symbolize that everything can become pure again. Denying this is blasphemy.
Let her refuse, and so cease.
This voice came from something that seemed to coil through the air like thick, greasy smoke, overpowering the senses. It was amused, taking satisfaction in her distress.
She will dissolve into the aether, and it will be as if she never was, all her lambent memories fading. There was an underlying hunger to the voice. If that’s what she wishes, let it be.
She felt it pressing into her, as if it would crush her in its coils. Then something broke it apart, as a fresh breeze clears a smoky room. Lakini felt the new entity kneel beside her and touch her hair gently. She had a sudden vivid impression: green eyes in a pale face, with hair the color of sunset.
Lady, she thought at the entity. The human woman has lost everything she loved. Does that count for nothing?
Mortals lose everything, eventually. The goddess’s thoughts sounded resigned. Love, even that of a mortal for a mortal, is a spark in the world’s darkness, and a precious thing. Most love, but all die.
She claims unfinished business.
A sharp, silver thought; a bright light penetrated Lakini’s blindness, and she both cringed away from it and craved more. This light was hard and white, like the surface of the full moon on a clear night.
It continued. I may have unfinished business with her.
Lakini was deeply weary. She couldn’t fight them all. Shall I die then, Moonmistress?
She felt a cool touch on her face.
As the smith died at your hands? The thought was like the tinkle of silver chimes in a jeweler’s window.
What could I do? He had become a beast.
You didn’t give him his chance.
What chance?
All creatures of the night are mine, to some degree. You didn’t give him his chance to give himself over to my power, to control the beast inside.
Many are not able, and become dangerous.
But some can. There is hope for any infected with the curse of lycanthropy, so long as they seek help before they are sunk too deep in their bestial nature. I might have saved Jonhan Smith. You were too arrogant to let him try.
I thought it was for the best.
Even as your apostate companion, Lusk, thinks what he does is for the best.
It was Jonhan Smith, shaking with sweat and fever, his mangled arm scarring over unnaturally, his face changing to a beast’s.
It was Jonhan Smith, looking up in mute appeal as he drew her dagger, kneeled, stroked his hair, and slid it into his brain.
It was Jonhan Smith, who could have been saved.
So I have committed murder, thought Lakini.
She was as guilty as Lusk, slaughtering the innocent.
No, returned the silver voice. You did what you thought best. Now you know better.
Lakini felt them all withdraw from her, the silver presence and the red-haired goddess, and the coiling horror, the imperious one. The first presence, still patient, remained.
If you refuse this, you deny your entire nature. Are you prepared for the consequences?
N
o, I am not prepared. But I will face them.
A pause, then came the following words:
Because you understand this, it will be permitted. It will be harder than you know, Lakini, for so you will remain.
Your path will be difficult.
She felt a touch between her eyes, and everything exploded into white light.
She kneeled, alone in the clearing. Her shoulder and her ribs throbbed, but when she tentatively touched the wound, she found it had stopped bleeding, and the edges were already beginning to scar. The night was graying as dawn approached. From the shoulder to the hip, her tunic was stiff with dried blood.
The bracelet was still wound tight around her wrist, and she took a moment to contemplate it. The links were narrow, long, and flat, and embedded along the bracelet’s length were three dull red stones—rubies, perhaps, or more likely garnets.
Now she remembered. It was the bracelet Kestrel had given her in the Hold. Take it away, she had said. Don’t let them get it.
And then Lusk had come, demanding the bracelet.
She remembered tucking it inside her clothing, more to keep Kestrel quiet than for any other reason. How had it come to be around her arm? She had a vague memory of movement against her skin, of it questing like a snake, sometime before she had refused her reincarnation and faced the gods’ judgment. She must have been hallucinating.
But, as she watched, the bracelet flexed again and undid itself, wind by wind. It was very like a snake as it crawled up her arm, the small links tickling her skin.
She felt a wave of inquiry from it, not enough to distinguish words or even feelings, but certainly a sense that it possessed some sort of intelligence and wondered where it was. It was almost the feeling she had at Shadrun-of-the-Snows, that of some invisible presence quietly manipulating everyone it could.
When it got to her shoulder and started to wind around her neck, she tensed. She considered pulling it off and flinging it away, but it had had all night to strangle her, so she let it be. And, indeed, it simply looped around her neck, invisible beneath the neck of her shirt, and lay still.
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