by Billy Wright
A smaller contingent of Royal Guard—scouts, he supposed—wore no armor at all, but carried a weapon that resembled a rifle. Claude had said they used magic to fire the projectiles, contained in a magazine atop the stock.
Stewart rode a tall horse, Liz, a shorter one, and the kids, small ponies. Cassie carried Jaclyn and Jazlyn in saddlebags specially made for them.
A great road stretched before them through the mountains, leading toward a distant mountain range that looked impossibly high, its peaks swathed in snow. Their path looked as if it led them straight toward Shangri-La itself. Stewart wondered if that was what the Himalayas looked like from a distance.
The giant kaleidoscopic bear, Pooh, walked his own pace at the fringes of their party, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, but always somber, always alert. His ever-shifting camouflage made it easy to forget he was there.
Under their clothes, Stewart and his family all wore the armor they’d been given. The extra weight chafed on his shoulders a little, despite the soft undershirt, but he was growing accustomed to it.
“It’s not even scratchy!” Cassie said.
Stewart still cringed at the idea of his little girl having to wear armor, but if she was enjoying it, he wasn’t about to discourage her. The sheer weight of the diamonds they were wearing meant that the armor would be worth millions of dollars on Earth. Could diamonds even be formed into rings? Not by any means he’d ever heard of.
Their spirits were high as they traveled. He’d always wanted to take the kids horseback riding, but could never afford it. He had to admit he was enjoying the sense of adventure coupled with a sense of purpose. Maybe, for once in his life, he could do something that mattered.
They traversed lush valleys swathed in old-growth forest and bamboo groves, cut by babbling brooks and frothing cataracts of whitewater flowing the wrong direction. Villages grew sparse the higher into the mountains they went. Unlike their walk to the City, he felt the land moving past him much more quickly, as if his mind were becoming attuned to the journey.
The food he’d eaten in the Queen’s mansion and the food they’d brought with them made him feel more substantial, more acclimatized to the Light Realm. The bright elves had brought with them sacks of round, flat bread, about as thick as a finger. Even days old, it smelled and tasted fresh out of the oven. They loved to dip it in seasoned oil. It was so delicious, Stewart looked forward to meal stops. His edges had lost their fuzziness, but the sense of nagging unease wouldn’t leave him alone, that he would be discovered as an impostor and cast out of the Light Realm forever. But he wanted to be here. He hoped that was enough.
Bob rode what looked like a long-haired greyhound, but this dog looked more primitive somehow, more wolf-like. Nevertheless, its demeanor was sprightly and friendly. Bob took to riding alongside Hunter and Cassie. They peppered him with questions, and he did his best to answer with patience and equanimity.
The Royal Guard rode in silent vigilance. Stewart had never been around trained warriors before, much less non-human ones. They moved with a strange deliberateness and inhuman fluidity. Even half his size, they could doubtless slice him to ribbons if given reason.
Stewart guided his mount to ride alongside their commander, marked by the scarlet horsehair crest on his helmet, and introduced himself.
“I am most pleased to make your acquaintance,” the bright elf replied in a surprisingly smooth, sonorous voice. Stewart didn’t know what he was expecting the bright elf’s voice to sound like, but it was not that of a late-night radio DJ. “I am Wyn Ar-Chaheris. My family has always served the Queen, for as long as any of us can remember.”
“And how long is that?” Stewart asked.
“Time is fluid. It is difficult to say in Penumbral years.”
“Yeah, Claude tried to explain it, but I’m not quite getting it.”
A tiny smile curled the corner of the commander’s mouth. “Perhaps someday you will.”
“How long have you been the commander of the Royal Guard?”
“That is easier to reckon. Perhaps a thousand of your years. Time becomes less malleable over smaller spans.”
Stewart could not wrap his mind around a lifespan like that. “I can’t imagine how living as long as you, changes your perspective on life, the universe, everything.”
“We discuss such things often, given that the Penumbra is populated by comparatively short-lived humans. For us, it is easy to become bored, which leads to experimentation with greater and greater extremes of behavior simply to avoid the madness of monotony. Those who lack integrity or force of will sometimes fall to the Dark Realm. It is a tragic thing.”
“So, you’re saying that even your people can turn to the Dark side?”
“It happened to my cousin.” The commander’s voice hitched for a moment. “It was a terrible thing.” His tone said that his tolerance for this line of conversation was at an end.
“So, can Dark side people come back to the Light?” Stewart was thinking of himself, and what he might have to do after crossing over into the Dark Realm.
“It has never happened, although I suppose it is possible. A Dark side creature who went against the wishes of the Dark Lord and tried to redeem itself would be hunted and destroyed immediately, long before it could reach us. Unlikely that it would even reach the Borderlands.”
They rode on for a while, and Stewart listened to Claude entertaining the kids with stories. Some stories he recognized. Others were shades of stories he recognized. Heroes and heroines and myths and legends. Some sounded like Greek myths, others Native American, others from cultures he didn’t know, but in them he recognized the core of the stories and the power those stories carried to shape human beliefs, to shape the world itself.
As they traveled, their road grew narrower, less well made, from well-fitted flagstones to loose cobblestones to a dirt track. The towns and villages shrank, the inhabitants few, the City and the Lake lost in the misty distance. It was difficult to believe they’d gone so far in only one day.
As dusk approached, Commander Ar-Chaheris called a halt to camp at a broad sward of lush grass surrounded by a mix of pine forest and bamboo groves. The Royal Guard scouts immediately dispersed into the forest, no doubt seeking evidence of threat.
The commander said, “Nothing will approach our camp in the night without them knowing and warning us. We’ll be safe.”
They all dismounted.
Cassie yawned and rubbed her eyes. “My butt hurts.”
“Mine, too,” Hunter said.
Stewart’s backside and thighs felt tenderized as well. Casting an eye behind him, he saw no lights of the City, nor of any of the towns and villages they had passed along the way. They were alone in an alien land, an alien dimension. The mountains ahead looked jagged, forbidding, immense, and impossibly high on a scale his mind found difficult to encompass, as if they reached halfway to the moon.
As night fell, the Royal Guard set up a lively, comforting encampment, with bright watch fires and stone-baked bread in magic ovens molded from stones of the earth. There was nothing to fear here, so why not make a party of it?
Claude offered him a water pouch to drink from. “This will help whatever ails you.” The rotund shopkeeper was moving slowly and stiffly from a long day in the saddle.
“What is it?” Stewart asked.
“Water. But it’s from the Source.”
As Stewart upended the pouch and took a mouthful, it filled him with an energy he couldn’t describe, at once a burst of confidence, vitality, and strength, as if he could move boulders bare-handed, accomplish anything he set his mind to.
Claude waggled his eyebrows.
Stewart said, “That’s...like nothing I’ve ever tried before. Is it full of magic?”
“It’s the Source itself. It is magic.”
“What if I take some of this into the Dark with me?”
“It’ll be just as powerful there as it is here. But it will eventually become corrupted and provide yo
u only magic for dark purposes.”
“How long before that happens?”
Claude shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“How long before we reach the Tortoise?”
“Again, I don’t know. We traveled far today. It depends as much on our collective state of mind as anything. If we let our spirits flag, it will take longer. What I do know is that the road will disappear and we’ll be in the wilderness. Unlike Earth, we’ve little to fear in the wilderness.”
“That’s where they’ll strike,” Stewart said tonelessly.
“What? What did you say?” Claude’s gaze was suddenly sharp and penetrating.
Stewart shook himself and blinked. “Did I say something?”
“You said, ‘That’s where they’ll strike.’”
“Uh, I...”
The shopkeeper’s gaze was steady, pointed. “I do believe you’ve just scried the future, my boy. Do you not remember?”
“It was like I zoned out for a moment. When I came back, you were staring at me.”
“Perhaps you’ve still a connection with that dark elf who fiddled with your dreams.”
“Wouldn’t that mean he still has a connection with me?”
Claude’s expression turned grave. “It would.”
Several of the bright elves produced flutes, lutes, fiddles, and drums, and struck up a series of jigs, reels, and the occasional ballad. Watching the elves dance gave Stewart a chill up his spine, because while they looked like miniature humans, they did not move like humans. All of them moved with an uncanny precision and a quickness that deceived the eye.
Stewart, Liz, and the kids settled down into bedrolls and blankets under the open sky. Contemplating the worrisome things he and Claude had discussed, he lay looking up at the sky, head couched on his hands, gazing at these constellations he did not know, at the moon that was too close. He savored the warmth of the nearby campfire, the softness of the grass under his bedroll.
The two kids lay between him and Liz. Hunter was already snoring softly when Stewart heard Cassie say, “Mommy, the sky is too big!”
Liz leaned over and kissed her, and Stewart smiled as he drifted off.
***
Liz couldn’t remember when she’d felt more alive. Not when she was a kid, not when her kids were born. Her mother had always been ready and able to slap down any bursts of joy when Liz was growing up, and since she’d had kids, life had been an endless grind of daily obligation, such as feeding and clothing small people who couldn’t do it for themselves. She had never once regretted having children, and there were moments of joy to be found even in the doldrums. But this was different, like life squared, every color, taste, scent, sensation heightened. It was like her entire body thrummed with potential and purpose.
She tried to fight against it, but the daily grind—getting the kids to and from school, working in the day care, the nagging worries of near-poverty—often reduced the passing days to a blur of drudgery and obligation. Even marriage maintenance was hard sometimes, pushed aside for the needs of the moment. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Stewart had had a night out to themselves as grown-ups, like when they were dating. Nowadays, especially since Stewart had lost his job, they couldn’t afford a babysitter. At times like this, she missed who she used to be, and who Stewart used to be as well. Daily life ground him down, too, but in different ways than her. It made him more cynical, less trusting, snuffed out the boyish hopefulness in his soulful eyes that had attracted her when they were teenagers.
But all this had awakened them. How could she feel good about going back to their old life? She was having fun, and so were the kids. Her mother would be appalled.
Watching Stewart shed bits of his negativity, smile by smile and hug by hug, assured her that they were, in fact, doing the right thing, in spite of the danger. It was as if the weight of crushed dreams and foul memories was falling away from him. Throughout their relationship, she’d caught glimpses of the man he could be, only to see them crushed. He was a sensitive soul, which was why cruelty struck him so deeply, caused him to shut down and withdraw into himself. But everything he’d experienced as a child had built a rage in him that he kept carefully in check.
Now, seeing his spirits buoyed did the same to hers, but what would happen when their journey was over? He would leave them to go to the Dark Realm, possibly never to return. She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about raising these two kids on her own. But there was no doubt in her. Everything hinged on her husband. He was an amazing man, but still only one man.
For several more days the ground rose beneath their feet. Unlike Earth, where high altitude caused headaches, nausea, breathlessness, and sleeplessness, here they had no signs of altitude sickness. The road dwindled to a footpath and then ultimately disappeared. The air chilled dramatically, however, especially at night, as they approached the snow line. As they neared the timberline, the trees grew shorter and gnarled, hardly as tall as a man, frozen into wind-swept shapes. The air bit through their clothes here. Liz pulled her hoodie tighter around her, anxious for the bright elves to fashion their shelter for the night. She had watched the way they coaxed the plants out of the ground, encouraged them to twine together into a tight-knit weave with a smoke hole in the ceiling and only a small hole for an entrance.
One dusky evening found them at the foot of a towering, snow-rimed peak that was flanked by two others of roughly equal height. Before them loomed a cliff that stretched at least half a mile high and a mile across its face. They would have to find their way around it tomorrow.
She heard Hunter asked Bob, “How far do we still have to go?”
“Depends,” Bob said. “The Great Tortoise keeps his own counsel.”
“What does that mean?” Hunter asked.
“It means we’ve been walking on him for days. He’ll show his face when deems it fit.”
Hunter’s eyes bulged and he stared at the ground, as if looking for signs of Great Tortoise Shell underfoot.
They ate their bread and drank their Source water and bedded down for the night, just as they had done every night since leaving the City. How many was it now? Days and nights were difficult to follow here.
As they all settled into sleep, Liz couldn’t ignore the dread crawling up the back of her neck. As they lay spooned together for warmth under their woolen blankets, she squeezed Stewart’s hand, wondering if this would be the last time she ever would.
If she didn’t know better, she might have said there was the breath of evil on the air.
***
High atop the cliff looking down on the encampment, Jorath El-Thrim sat at the precipice. The watch fires flickered below, a patch of light against the night’s gathering dark. Alarm spells, undetectable to anything but a dark elf, circled the camp’s perimeter.
His skin thrummed and burned with the power required to hold him here in the Light Realm. The spell covered every scrap of his skin, painted in the language of the celestial spheres with ink made from the blood of the Light’s Princess.
Through his lingering connection to Stewart Riley’s mind, Jorath had gleaned enough vague and splotchy detail to know what the enemy planned. He had emerged from the Great Tortoise two days in advance of the Light side’s expedition. And he was not alone.
He settled himself, looking down from high above. His tendrils of mind and will remembered their anchors in the human’s mind. Jorath had almost succeeded in unleashing the human’s darker nature and completely preventing his entry into the Light Realm. This time, there would be no failure. If Jorath could set loose the human’s inner demons, whip them into a frenzy, the man would disappear from the Light Realm as if he never existed, slipping back to the Penumbra. Or, if Jorath’s efforts were particularly successful, he might slip into the Dark Realm to become a creature of the Master. In either case, the Light would lose their only hope.
The Master had been amused when Jorath told him of their intention to rescue the Princess.
Now, the human slid toward slumber in the arms of his wife. She would not be able to save him this time.
Jorath waited until the moon passed out of sight and the only light came from the distant, uncaring stars.
His minions awaited his command.
Jorath stood, stretched out his arms, and conjured an entity made of nightmare, a bat of smoke and shadow and webs that glided on the wind, circling down, down over the encampment, over the shelter of the human family. The Royal Guard would sense it, but they would not be able to stop it before it sank into Stewart’s mind and dug in its talons.
Down, down, down the shadow bat spiraled. Jorath looked out through the creature’s eyes at the upturned faces of the elves, whose expressions bore alarm and confusion.
It spiraled lower, lower, slipping through the walls of the shelter as easily as a breath of breeze, unseen by anyone, and settled onto the man’s skull, where it sank in like water into a sponge.
High atop the cliff, Jorath settled onto all fours, and initiated his own transformation.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Liz was having trouble sleeping, so she sat in the entrance to the hut of living foliage. Cassie had passed out, and Hunter lay snoring. Stewart appeared to be asleep, but the way he lay there twitching suggested he was in the midst of a dream. She hoped it was not one like the night he’d almost hurt Cassie.
The night was simply luminous, numinous. The beauty of the stars and moon gave her goosebumps with its simultaneous alien-ness and familiarity. The landscape was a dark, undulating carpet that swept away down the mountain slopes into the misty distance.
Silhouetted in the light of watch fires, some of the bright elves stood guard around the campsite here at the base of this huge cliff. The cliff made her feel like her back was to the wall. If something came at them, there was nowhere to run.