Long, Dark Road

by Bianculli, Susan

  “Lise! Lise!” he said loud enough to get my attention.

  “Wh-what?” I cried to him, barely noticing the tears in his brown eyes for Arghen.

  “Grieve later. Pay attention now!”

  For him to be saying that right now meant he had a good reason. I held my breath to help me stop crying and managed to turn them into hiccups as Jason pointed out to me the venire being groggily brought to stand in front of the still seated Chirasnivian Conductivus, a pinkish colored blood dripping from the claw marks on her face to stain the flutters of her venire’s robes.

  “My venire, you have shamed me,” said the Chirasnivian Conductivus as sternly as she was able in her old, tired voice. “You have broken your oath to never make someone a soul. And you have behaved with impropriety by ordering another venire to death.”

  “They stood in the way of the Plan!” the venire said emotionally.

  “Plan?” The Kelsavaxian Conductivus asked, sliding a glance at his counterpart.

  The Chirasnivian Conductivus sighed as she responded to him. “Yes, the Plan. As you know, I was the first Conductivus. I did not understand what I was when I became what we are, but eventually I found ways of accommodating all the souls, and then started finding those rare others who could commune as I could, and training them so they did not have to go through it alone like I had done.”

  “We know all that,” he replied, somewhat impatiently. “You were my mentor.”

  I looked at him with irritation, though I said nothing. All this was news to me, after all.

  “I am the last of the original Elves to have taken part in the Great Divide,” she began.

  That information shocked me right out of my hiccups. The Chirasnivian Conductivus was as old as all that? Out of the corner of my eye I could see the same shock I felt on my friends’ faces.

  “I have over the last untold number of Brightenings been expanding what I know with each new soul who comes to be with me. This mixes with all the information I have from the older souls who have looked to me from the beginning, and ….”

  “And it is time for the Under-elves to not shy away from magic anymore!” the venire burst out in interruption, animation banishing the vagueness on her pale face.

  Everyone frowned at the venire, and she looked down in angry embarrassment. The Kelsavaxian Conductivus recoiled a little from the venire at the word “magic,” but he could not stop listening to his Chirasnivian counterpart.

  “My venire speaks true,” she continued. “I have been slowly nudging Chirasniv in the direction I desire, because I do believe it is time for Under-elves to take back that which is the birthright of all in this world. However, things seem to have gone somewhat astray from my original ideals, which in speaking with you I have been helped to recall. It has been harder and harder of late to deal with life, and I tire.” She shook her head to herself, then re-focused on her venire. “However, you have been in the wrong, Venire, and now must make restitution.”

  A look of surprise crossed every Under-elven face as the venire stood stock still.

  “What?” she asked, disbelief thick in her voice.

  The Chirasnivian Conductivus said, “I am quite sure you heard me.”

  “No!” she screamed. “I will not become a soul for furthering the Plan! Or for doing what you had said I must do!” She attacked her Conductivus, crashing both Conductivus and chair to the ground, knocking the staff out of the Conductivus’ lap. The venire, landing on top, clawed wildly at the Conductivus’ unprotected face.

  Jason, Dusk, Ragar, and I stood stock still with our mouths hanging open as the venire was immediately pulled off the Conductivus and knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head. But it was easy to see that the Chirasnivian Conductivus’ head was at an odd angle on her neck at the top edge of the chair. I gasped, tears welling up again.

  “Help her!” shouted the Conductivus, pointing to the crumpled body as his eyes turned black.

  The Chirasnivian Conductivus started vibrating on the ground, and then she started to glow under her skin. Everyone of their own accord, including the Kelsavaxian Conductivus whose eyes had returned to being white, started backing away from her body where it and the chair lay on the smooth stone ground. Everyone stopped moving and collectively held their breaths as the white-clad body rose into the air about six feet off the ground and the glow became an eerie blue-white in color that expanded to surround the corpse in a sphere of energy.

  “It’s colored sorta like the souls we released from that trapper knife of Morsca’s,” Jason breathed in my ear.

  Quickly, she changed. The Conductivus of Chirasniv no longer looked old and frail, like a strong breeze could whisk her away if one ever found its way down here. She looked in the peak of health and form, and certainly younger than she’d been, although she still looked on the older side of mature. Her now ankle-length hair was thick and white, and her skin had way less wrinkles than it had before. Her robe of office had morphed from white fabric to a silvery, floaty tissue material, although it was still cut in the same style. Her staff appeared back in her hand, now with fancy curlicues of silver running up and down the full length and a pulse of dim silver light sitting on the top end.

  A multitude of joyous sounding voices intoned loudly from everywhere and nowhere, “Behold Alveo, the newest of the Divine, and of the Concordance!”

  A collective gasp sounded from every being, Under-elven and Surfacer alike.

  “Did–did we just witness the birth of a goddess?” I whispered to no one in particular, clinging to Jason’s arm for support.

  Alveo opened her eyes. They were no longer white, but a clear, golden amber. At the same time the sort of Presence that I always felt around Caelestis and Quiris wrapped around me, and it was clear that everyone else there felt it as well. Each of us fell to our knees from the force of it—not because we had to, but because we wanted to. Alveo smiled a beautiful smile at all of us, and pirouetted in midair as she settled to the floor of the cavern beside the forgotten chair, sending her robe into a swirl of fluttering around her. Holes in the air appeared over us, like giant TV screens, and in them other Sub-realmers stood stock still and stared out at her. Under-elf, Troglodyte, Kobold, and other Sub-realmers of Chirasniv were united in looks of shock. Some were in hidey-holes, some were in pens, and many were on the battlefield wearing red waist cloths or green sashes. I was the first to regain my wits.

  “Please!” I said, jumping up to run and throw myself at her feet. “Please! Save Arghen! He did not deserve to die down here!”

  Alveo’s smiled dimmed, and she reached down a perfectly manicured hand to help me to my feet.

  “I am sorry,” she said in a cool, silvery tone tinged with sorrow, so unlike her previous way of speaking. “No Deity can bring someone back from the dead. Arghen was dead before I became Alveo. Even if I could, he is not one of Mine.” She let go of my hand regretfully.

  I heard the capital “M” she used to refer to herself and quirked a sad smile, recognizing it as a deity’s way of speaking. That, as much as anything else, clinched it for me. Alveo really was a goddess now. And Arghen was really dead.

  “But he is Mine,” said a familiar voice, and Quiris, wearing her blackened Elven chainmail with her signature thigh high black leather boots and black leather bracers, faded into sight not far away from Alveo.

  A second gasp sounded, though this time only from the Under-elves. I looked back and forth between the two smiling Goddesses and saw that there were more similarities than difference between them, though Alveo was clearly a major Goddess and not a lesser one as Quiris was, since Alveo’s Presence felt stronger. I opened my mouth to ask Quiris for Arghen’s return, but she held up a hand to forestall me.

  “Lise,” she said, “I did tell you that you might have to send him to Me, did I not?”

  I opened and shut my mouth like a beached fish. I remembered Quiris saying that was a possibility, but I had discounted it because I had been so sure that
we would be able to rescue Arghen like we’d rescued Jason.

  “You knew all along!” I accused her, suddenly angry, but the goddess shook her head at my words, making her long white braid flip from one shoulder to the other.

  “No, Lise. I did not. It was one of several possibilities that I could see, but it was not the only one.” Quiris turned and frowned at Arghen’s dead body still remaining where it had been. She walked over to the cage and waved her hand, palm out flat in in a circle before her, and Arghen’s body knit itself together. To the sounds of the Sub-realmers both present and watching through the holes in mid-air gasping and muttering to themselves, the Goddess stepped up to him and kissed his body full on the lips. As she stepped back, he stepped forward, or rather, his soul did, leaving his corpse behind. It remained whole only for an instant before it crumbled into dust and slid off the slanted metal display table. Arghen’s soul, instead of fading away, remained visible to all; and we watched as he dropped to one knee before her to have a private communing with her. The gasping and muttering stopped utterly dead at the sight.

  While Quiris and Arghen spoke together, the Kelsavaxian Conductivus cleared his throat nervously. “Ah, Conductivus–that is to say, A-Alveo?” he asked her with only a quiver to betray his emotions. “What–what does all this mean?”

  Alveo smile beatifically on him, and you could see him standing straighter and prouder under her gaze. “What it means is that Under-elven life needs to begin to change,” she said.

  Chapter 39

  “Change?” he cried over the sounds of renewed muttering from the other Under-elves around him and in the magical windows in the air, spreading his arms wide in a signal of confusion. “What do you mean?” He stopped short and dropped his arms to his sides, his fluttering white robes of office falling still against him. “This ‘plan’ then, that you mentioned,” the Conductivus finally said stiffly, not looking at her.

  “Yes,” Alveo replied calmly. “It is something I recognized some time ago, but it has taken until now for the beginnings to come about.”

  “Why now, specifically?” the Conductivus asked, shooting her a sideways glance.

  “Because I have become a Goddess due solely to your actions, accidental though they may have been. And for that happy accident, I do thank you. It will make it easier to effect the changes that must come about.”

  The Conductivus looked flabbergasted. “Me?” he managed to gasp out, after opening and closing his mouth a few times first. “My actions?”

  She smiled again, and then addressed not only him, but every being watching. “You all have heard My ascension trumpeted by Those who are now My compatriots. Know this, My people—because you are all My people—magic is a natural resource of this world. It is not abomination, and those who can perform it are not Abominations. I tell you this because I know what the ultimate power of magic is. It is the soul. Under-elves have acknowledged the existence of souls by the very revering of Conductivi. And as souls power magic, it follows that Under-elves cannot deny magic. Under-elves have cut themselves off from magic, and thus from their souls. But because that connection had to go somewhere, it went into certain Under-elves to cause them to become Conductivi.”

  The Conductivus’ mouth hung open at Alveo’s words. “Are you saying I–alread>—do-abominations?”

  “Magic,” she corrected him. “And in essence, yes.”

  “Nature abhors a vacuum,” murmured Jason in my ear.

  I couldn’t stop a smile quirking my lips at his words, and surprisingly saw an answering one on Alveo’s face before she turned to the Conductivus, who had been looking around him wildly.

  “No, Conductivus, there are no more souls around you. And will not be again until you call upon Me,” she informed him. “They are with Me now.”

  “Call upon you?” he asked in confusion.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Because you, and every other Conductivus and Conductivus-venire, will have the option to become one of my priests and priestesses.”

  Ragar, Dusk, Jason, and I shared incredulous glances with each other as a storm of voices arose from everywhere else, so loud that no one could hear anything or get a word in edgewise with their neighbor. Quiris, still by the cage Arghen’s body used to be in, frowned faintly as if not sure of the wisdom of Alveo’s revelations to us. Arghen’s soul, now standing beside her, smiled slightly as if in approval. But that Quiris was not openly disagreeing with the new goddess seemed telling to me.

  Alveo waited patiently for a little while, letting the beings around her vent their thoughts, then when she felt enough time had passed she raised one slender, chalk white hand and sent out what I could only describe as a pulse from her Presence. She was rewarded with instant silence.

  “When the Conductivus here tried to save his fellow Conductivus by giving power to the souls around us to go into her and save her life, he did more than just save her. He transformed her, or I should say, transformed Me. Because once the first soul cleared the path into her body to try and shore up what had been done, all souls in this area also joined in to help.”

  I blinked. That was what Morsca had been trying to do all along—get souls to transform herself into a goddess!

  “So that’s why Morsca did her stuff in that cueva deep under the keep,” Jason said in my ear. “She was hiding her plans from the gods.”

  “And why she only used Kobolds and other Sub-realmers from underground, because they had no Gods who would miss them when dead,” added Dusk, as he and Ragar came up to stand on my other side.

  “How did she know?” Jason asked.

  Dusk shrugged, and I shuddered. All of a sudden I was very glad we’d thwarted Morsca.

  “No, my Surfacer friends,” Alveo said, turning her clear amber gaze on us. “Though you are partly correct, you need not have worried that Morsca would have succeeded. The difference is willingness. The souls who have transformed Me, wished to save Me. The souls she wanted to transform her would have eventually killed her had she been successful.”

  “A whole lot of pain could have been saved had we known all that before,” muttered Ragar.

  I sighed in relief. Then my brain replayed the word “eventually,” and I shuddered again. Who knows what kind of problems Morsca could have caused before “eventually” happened?

  The Conductivus broke in on my thoughts, hysteria tinging his voice as he asked, “But, you? A Goddess? For the Under-elves? And needing priests? And priestesses? How would this all work? How can this all work?”

  Alveo smiled a warm smile at him, and I could practically see the Conductivus melting into a puddle of calm. “That will be a matter for discussion.”

  “With whom?” he asked.

  “With you,” she said frankly. “I can think of no one better than he who helped me to see where things had been straying when I was mortal.”

  A variety of emotions crossed his face. “Will we be living here in Chirasniv while the, ah, discussions happen?”

  “No,” she laughed, her voice sounding like silver bells ringing. “I have my After-lives to arrange as well. But I can do that while talking with you.”

  “What do you see as topics?” he asked cautiously.

  “For one, whether or not all the Conductivi and Conductivus-venires of the other Under-elven cities ought to become my priests and priestesses. I will need such physical Intercessors, especially in the beginning. For another, whether you will accept becoming my first High Priest.”

  Intercessor. I remembered being the Intercessor between Frelanfur the dragon and Dusk, which turned out to really be between the dragon and all Surfacers at the keep. Had I unwittingly played the part of a priestess then? A dragon priestess, if such a thing existed? It was kind of cool to think that.

  Meanwhile, astonishment had appeared on the Conductivus’ white face at Alveo’s words, but then his eyes flickered over to the venire of Chirasniv, still out cold where she had been laid on the floor after the attack. “Shouldn’t that be her pos
ition, ah, Goddess?”

  Alveo looked sad. “It could have been in another life, but not this one,” she said. “I will deal with her personally.” She waved her chalk-white hand, and the unconscious venire rose from the floor a few inches before vanishing.

  Gasps from all Under-elves sounded again.

  “So, will you come for discussions with Me?” the goddess asked, turning to the Conductivus.

  He looked like he would faint, but he managed to choke out a “yes.”

  Alveo then turned her attention to all the windows and to the Under-elves physically around her. “You are all to cease hostilities now. There is no longer anything to fight about because Life as you know it is changing. The Kelsavaxians are to be bedded down on the Chirasnivian training grounds, for I declare a holiday for the next three Lightenings.” She waved two hands together, and behind each being everywhere appeared a small camping spot consisting of a bedroll already laid out and a small open box containing a variety of foods as well as corked bottles. “Sit together, eat with one another, and learn of each other.”

  Alveo waved her hands again, and out of a silver mist in the middle of Ragar, Jason, Dusk, and me appeared Auraus and a healed Heather. Heather squealed and threw herself into Ragar’s arms while Dusk crushed Auraus in his own.

  The new Goddess then turned to the Conductivus, who looked completely nervous at having her full attention. “You and I have much to speak of,” she said.

  He nodded. She reached out to touch his shoulder as a silvery glow spread out from the top of her white and silver staff around them both. The silver light blazed bright like a burst of flash-paper, and when our eyes had cleared, both Alveo and the Conductivus were gone.

  Chapter 40

  “Wow,” I breathed, as the windows in the air started slowly closing one by one on scenes of faraway Under-elves on opposing sides cautiously implementing Alveo’s directives, while the Under-elves around us broke up into little discussion knots and avoided us.