A tremendous flash crossed the whole room, a fullness of light that seemed to fill their very bodies as it passed through them. The depiction of the door solidified, emerging from its age-old concealment behind the simple stone wall. Alizarin could only stare, her mouth open in astonishment.
Ilion walked to the doorway and beckoned to her to follow, stepping inside the mountain's wall into the hidden beyond.
“You did it! You found it! Is it the temple?” Alizarin asked,“Is it? Did we find it, finally?” Her hand reached for him, grasping, bridging the separation. “Oh, Ilion …”
He turned to answer her in his joy at having solved the sacred equation. He turned to tell her of their victory, moving forward through the winged doorway. For just a moment, the slimmest passage of time, their skin separated from direct contact.
Ilion stood alone inside the rockface. There was no door. Alizarin was nowhere in sight. Bewildered, he spun around searching for her. There was nothing and no one but him in the vast secret enclosure.
Ilion had lost her on the other side of the mountain's wall.
*
When Centen returned from scouting the edges of the forest (a sorry task that had gained him no new information about the infestation in the wooded lands), from the moment he walked back into the village, he was granted an earful of complaints and sideways glances. They were looks of disgust for the most part, although a few winked at him. He was unclear what the cause of the current general reaction to his presence was, since he had not yet gone to his home.
The trade store owner Bilton, who considered himself quite the hub of news from abroad and gossip at home, took him aside and gave him the brief yet vivid account of his son telling the whole village to stick it where the sun didn't rise. At least that was how the indignant store owner and his wife told the story.
Surprise was the first of his emotions, followed by pride and a wee bit of anger at his boy, the village, the priest, and whatever malign foe surrounded them that had pushed them all into this desperate situation. He couldn’t help shake his head, partly in admiration for his son’s courage, and partly in shame of his son’s reckless disrespect of the priest. Still, the boy was what he had personally raised him to be, a bit of a free thinker and a true survivor. How else did he return to us? The woods have already claimed thirty-nine others.
He felt a deep love of the boy who had seemed so moody and evasive as a child. His boy had managed to survive the perils of the surrounding enemy and face down what he thought was wrong in the heart of his own village. Must be his mother’s doing.
As Bilton finished the story with relish and admonition, Centen looked around the main square and could see the hardest of feelings glowering from once friendly faces. As if I am responsible for the headstrong boy. He has so much of Ranada in him. After all, Cethel was only one trip away from his manhood ceremony, the renaming and the new responsibilities that came with it. But until then—
After listening to Bilton drone on and on about his parenting and the woeful condition of the villagers' plight, Centen's thoughts turned to the very real urgency of survival, for his valiant boy, but also for the rest of his family from the scowls and icy stares that burrowed invisible holes into his back. After all of his initial emotions had run their course, he nodded his head politely and ducked out of the continuing chiding of Bilton and his harpy wife. He clearly had much, much more pressing matters to attend to at home.
The door creaked open as he entered and then slammed closed, almost flying off its pegs. Storming into the kitchen living area, he found his Ranada stirring soup, mumbling to herself. All of his words of fear, indignation, worry, and anger died on his lips.
He rushed to his wife's stirring stool, where she sat hollow-eyed, wasting away from the demands of worrying for a lost son, caring for a returned one and then losing him to the ferociousness of the village's fear.
Centen was a rough man, a certain man, not known for his pity nor his graciousness, but he saw clearly that her own pain was destroying her. He knew she was as torn in her heart as he was by the whole of the events. So, with the patience of the deer hunt learned for seasons on end, Centen held his wife and just let her cry. They both stared at the fire, flickering dimly under the suspended cauldron, and watched the flames flare and dance with the rhythm of their breaths.
“My Baby!” she muttered after a bit. “My Baby! Did you hear what they did? Did you?”
He nodded, shushing her. “Yes, Ranada. Bilton took quite a bit of pleasure in explaining the exact details. The whole town has decided to follow the worship of this new Falcon god, hoping that He might care more for them than the Bira Tre seemed to.” After a calculated pause, he said,“Did you tell our boy to do that?”
One look at her face, and he knew. He continued, “It was all his doing. Yes, I thought so. Brave in so many ways but foolish in this one. I thought he knew better, to survive first and change the world later.”
Looking at his wife, he held her shoulders and kept her gaze. “Ranada, you know that I know about you, right?”
She looked afraid for a moment and then confusion blanketed her face.
“There is no need for this, Ranada. I know what and who you are. I have almost since the day Cethel was born.”
Ranada's eyes stopped looking confused. She lowered them to her lap but he did not miss that they became sharp and piercing in her evaluation of her husband's words.
“Don't you remember? When you stole from our house in the middle of the Harvest Nightfall, carrying our infant son out into the deep forest? I followed you.”
She raised her eyes to look at his, to see her husband for the first time in a long, long while.
He continued, “I saw it all. I witnessed your worship and your binding of his hands to your cause.”
She watched him now with a hand slowly moving toward her belt, where her kitchen knife was cased.
“Now, now, Ranada.” His hand caught hers in a iron vise. “Now, darling let us be clear here. You have never taught me of your ways, and I have never stopped you from teaching the child or practicing your faith. There is no need for your dagger. I am not your enemy.”
Measuring him calmly, she made no move to fight him, only nodded slowly her agreement.
“Ranada, I don't care who you worship. The villagers and anyone else can ask me and I will deny any knowledge of you and your faith, but for this once, please tell me the truth. What happened to Cethel? Where is my boy? Can you do anything to help him or us? To save us from the darkness that gathers on our doorsteps and steals our son from our arms? Give me some reason to hope, something to do in the face of such disaster!”
Ranada's cool eyes, still filled with sorrow, seemed brighter, intensely capable and full of secret knowledge. She considered for a moment, still held in his embrace. Then she spoke in a distinct voice that he had never heard before. It was booming and hollow, whispered and sonorous. “The boy lives. He has found help. They will try to rescue the Child. They will fail. They are not enough to fight the enemy hidden in our lands.
“We must go, we must join them to retrieve the Legacy.”
Looking at her husband's concerned face, listening to her every word, Ranada spoke with majesty and power that seemed to emerge from within her own soul, no longer contained. He had always known that so much of what she showed the everyday world and the little village was but a tiny, masked part of her complete self. Now he saw it plain as the sun in the sky.
“Can I accompany you? Can he still be saved?” Centen asked quietly.
“Yes,” his wife answered, apparently to both questions.
Something in her manner softened; her voice changed. Ranada stood, still worn by sorrow, still grieving the disasters of her family's loss. Resolute, composed, and graceful, she turned and began to pull her pack together.
He watched as she retrieved hidden objects from all over the home, pulling daggers, slivers, darts, arrows, wires, and throwing discs from under the table, inside th
e firesplace, within the handles of pans, behind and under the furniture. Finally, she retrieved five sharpened needles of pure gold from her hair comb and used them to secure her braid.
He had known the location of some of those objects but never would have found all of them. Centen smiled. He had married himself quite a woman. A slight whistle of admiration escaped his lips as she belted on well over fifty different weapons, double slung over each shoulder. A formidable woman, and damn good in bed too! There is no doubt, I am a lucky man. No doubt at all.
With a nod to him allowing his accompaniment, the ordinary woman that he had lived with for cycles strode out of the house, transformed in an instant, set free. A highly-trained, eerily capable warrior with a mission to fulfill led the way down the path and into the familiar woods.
*
There was no doorway to open, no return path.
Alizarin might as well have been on the other side of the world as on the other side of the mountain's wall. The doorway had vanished taking her constant, reassuring presence with it.
Ilion stood alone in the middle of a great and hallowed room, a cavern of pulsating red light, the heat of which seemed to singe his blood dry. It was so hot that he could feel the hair on his eyelashes and eyebrows begin to curl and turn orange from damage, brittle to the touch.
Putting the staff directly in front of him, he gathered in, seeking a moment of reflection and decision. Great flames tore up each wall, burning with an intensity of a twelve tree fires-pile. The sparks seemed to soar farther and higher into the canopy of nightfall that covered the ceiling.
Within the calmness of his meditation, Ilion could sense something of the whole of the place. He did not mistake the impression of being alone with the real facts. He knew from talking to Alizarin that various beings appeared to different individuals. The appointed voices of the temple spoke to the mind of the observer, fitting their messages to the specific listener. Ilion waited to see how this temple, if that was what it was, would seek to communicate with him.
Within his mind, only the calm, deep interior darkness was seen. The flashing of imagined lights and a kaleidoscope of colors played behind his eyelids. Even though the heat was intense, Ilion chose to ignore that sensory assault and concentrated instead on listening to any message being sent.
Their situation was dire. Unless he gained information here that would apply to Alizarin and him in the true world, they would not be sufficient to fight the growing number of enemies that dogged their steps. Surely all of my training as a child, as a youth was not just instructional? Does the essence of the temple or the will of the gods want me to do something about the nightfall creatures that plague the lands?
With just the honeycombed staff to accompany him, again he waited, certain a messenger would come. As Ilion dwelt within his own gathering, a tranquil sea in the midst of a furnace, his thoughts kept flickering back to her declaration. If happiness is a choice, then I choose you. Alizarin had looked at him with kind eyes, full of hope.
He had not thought to see that emotion in a woman's eyes for the rest of his life. After Kalina had died, Ilion had spent so much time in other diversions, trying to reach past the almost unbreathable pain. He had had his uses for women, but found so many were what he expected them to be: heartless and cruel, selfish and vain. Why he would want those qualities in a friend, let alone a life companion, was never a question. He had gotten by with the rudiments of a solitary life, so alone some days that Ilion thought he had chosen the path of devotee, living monastically with only his thoughts and a few items to keep his body earthbound.
Even within the ancient, sturdy walls of Dressarna where he had many acquaintances, he had no friends. Relationships of convenience, passable but never deep, nor introspective, had been enough for him, stale crumbs for a starving man. Ilion had sought for contentment, gratitude for what he had in his life. Then, he had gotten hit on the head and fallen at Alizarin's feet in her mother's bakery.
Nothing had been the same since then. Perilous journeys, dead priests, dead friends, gruesome, sadistic monsters—chaos in every direction—all thrown in his path, one after another in breathtaking succession. Just when he thought they were clear of danger, the sharp ire of villagers and hunters had dogged their every step, chasing them up into the mountains. If there was no answer here, Ilion feared that there was not much chance of survival beyond these walls. Their enemies were too numerous and it only ever took just one tiny mistake.
“What I need is a true friend,” Ilion muttered to himself. “A true friend.”
“Why? Have you yourself ever been one?” a voice answered him with mockery. Ilion thought he must have imagined it, but then the voice continued, “That's the real question, you know.” A querulous voice echoed across the intervening space. “Why would any friend have you? So caught up in possessions and procurement. Idiot. No one wants to be owned! I should have thought that was obvious.”
“Who … ?” Ilion peered against the power of the flames, squinting into the glare of fire's glowering ember. He walked forward a few steps, trying to make out the identity of the speaker who mocked him. The intensity of the heat increased. It felt as if his skin was burning against a hot stove top. He tried to cover his face, attempting to move forward to little success.
“Who is there?” he yelled across the shimmer of heated air and the constant burning inside the mountain temple. The light was hazy and obscuring, at the same time so bright his eyes could barely open.
A cackle distinctly not of flame responded to his inquiry. “You? You wish to know me? Why should I tell you my name? It seems quite clear to me that you don't even know your own. Can't stand the flames, can you? Why are you sitting there burning, anyway?”
“What do you mean? It's so flaming hot in here, it's all I can do just to talk to you!” Ilion replied somewhat indignantly, his voice already spotty from the yelling. He could feel the water being taken from him, his skin shrinking by the moment.
Silence.
A bit of scuffing, as if someone very old stepped nearer to him, shuffling along on the stone floor. Sounds that came nearer, nearer. Ilion's heart started to pound. What is coming towards me from within the deepest reaches of the hidden room?
A large mass of tattered clothing emerged from the waves of air, as if she had just arrived in the vicinity as well. He had been alone in the vast cavern, and then suddenly she was with him, looking up at his sweating brow, the heat whisking away all perspiration before it could drop into his eyes.
“Who are you?” Ilion asked again, although not as loudly. He could make out eyes from within the pile of rags that had joined him, eyes that watched him merrily.
“Why do you torment yourself like this?” The newcomer asked him again.
“Like how? What do you mean? This heat?” Ilion did not understand.
The top of the gathered rags moved again, as if she shook her head at him. “Such a young one they sent, so young. Do you not know your own power? Or the power of the thing in your hands?”
Ilion's incomprehension was clear on his face. As the conversation continued, he looked at the honeycombed white staff, still easily grasped in his hand. So much a part of his traveling, he had almost forgotten it.
There, in the Room of Flames, the staff glowed softly, not quite the plain wood that had been his support for almost a whole cycle. The white light that emanated from the material was almost like a second reflection, as if he saw the un-shadow of the weapon. He wasn't astonished, after all he stood in a room hidden long ago by powers much greater than he was. This was a place of miracles and purity.
Speaking slowly, still braced against the onslaught of the mountain's inner heat, he said,“This is a Staff of Thenta, I believe. I do not own it, I merely purchased it for a client at the Dressarna's Thieves Auction. I have learned a few of its powers but nothing that extinguishes flames. Can it do that, as well?”
The crusty, garrulous voice challenged him,“Thenta? Thenta never has anythi
ng of her own. I am sure if you think on it, you'll come up with a solution, although I think you might want to hurry it up a bit, as your hair is almost all singed now. Your clothes begin to smoke.”
The level of uncomfortable-ness had been creeping up on him, but it was painfully clear that he was almost burning alive from the unrelenting heat. How can the staff help?
Putting away his concerns for Alizarin and his questions for and about the Rag Lady, Ilion centered the calm of his mind, even as the heat washed over him, smothering in its passion and desire to consume. Finding a place of quiet even as sheer power raged around him, he located the tiny doorway over on the edge of his vision, the barest entrance of light and knowledge from some foreign source. If he had learned about the first of the staff's powers there, it was there he must inquire as to any others.
Seeking in his mind's eye the answer to a dire question, he moved his attention to that limited area and knocked on the doorway. He expected no actual answer, and no one came. But the searching man continued to knock all the while wondering about the staff and its capabilities. He knew it could cloak its user in invisibility. Can it make other things invisible? Could he make the fire invisible? Or the heat of the fire? A new thought, Or just make me invisible to the elemental power?
Ilion engaged the staff's known properties, using the familiar pattern to create invisibility for himself that was so practiced that it was easy for him to accomplish. And then, as he held that ability in his mind, he turned it around and around, trying to change the pattern slightly, to adjust its capabilities to fit his current needs.
During the first few changes, nothing happened. Then, as he adjusted downward and through the ephemeral side of his thoughts, pushing at the command just so, everything in his eyesight vanished. Ilion was not physically injured, but now he existed in a white-filled ball of light, nothing above, around, or below his feet. The heat ceased, but so did all vision, all senses. He couldn't tell if he was still in the room or had been whisked away, so complete was the abruptness of the change.
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