by S. M. Beiko
~
“You let her go.”
Killian lay, arms akimbo, in the centre of the summoning chamber. It was not active. He had repaired the place using the Emerald, but he was relishing the dark. The only light sources in the room were the pinpricks of flickering flame beneath the skin of his brooding children clutched in the room’s corners, watching him.
Urka loomed above, getting restless, eager to dig and tear. “The world is cracking even still. My masters shift against their prisons. They are impatient.”
“They’ve been down there for ages. They can wait a few more days.” Killian flexed his fingers, knew that the dark sludge of Seela was working beneath the surface, mending his cuts, subtracting what was left of him and replacing it with darkling. Good. Faster.
“I let her go because she is close. This is her test. She will come back and with the Moonstone. You’ll see.” It was less Killian, and more Seela, who was certain of this.
“If the girl proves unworthy,” Urka snarled, its furnace gleaming in time with its rage, “then I should have killed her and that howling bird when first they came upon me in my realm.”
Killian sneered. “Wretch,” he spat, sitting up with the darkness’s assistance, which propped him in its unholy embrace. “Ye knew this has all been as much a part of the Narrative as anything else. It will be carried out to that same plan. I can feel it. This is only a minor setback — she must come to the power of her own choice. She’s getting there.” He closed his eyes, the pulse of the Emerald insistent; he had nearly had her. He’d held her close and felt her make a quarter turn towards her true self that had woken within. Not close enough to stop them from coming to blows but nearly. Yet in that moment, their stones had connected, too, and now he cast for her, and he knew she floated above the world, dreaming of her part in it.
Soon she would awaken, and they could truly be together. Like she’d wanted. Like she’d promised.
Then the Emerald perceived something else. Another sister, across the same vast sea, rising to the surface.
“The Sapphire.” His eyes blazed, his blood seeping back into where it belonged, mingling with the blood of his true parents. The red rings glowed.
“The Seals have gathered then.” Urka seemed satisfied by this news. “But we have lost the Opal and the Moonstone . . .”
“Patience,” Killian smiled, the bone mask securing itself over his eyes, and he saw all the clearer as he transformed into Seela for the last time, the rest of what had been Killian all but erased. “They will return to us soon enough. But now, we must ready to meet the Emerald’s sister. The left hand of Ancient moves to strike. And we must be ready. Once more unto the breach.”
The flickering light of the burning children was a unified smile as the chamber went dark and Seela gathered them to him.
~
The place may have been bright, may have been beautiful, but Phae took no solace in any of it. She’d been walking for hours; though she didn’t tire, or thirst, or hunger (yet), she was still susceptible to the monotony, the tension. The fear.
She had to consciously separate her molars, relax her jaw. Think. Treat this like a problem that could be solved. There had to be rules. There always were with these realms in lore. She’d shied away from learning more about it because she was afraid it might all make too much sense. Think! Ancient mythos was Barton’s territory — so she called up his calm, soothing voice, the feeling of his arm around her as she nestled into his chest, staring at his hands and tracing the lines as he recited whatever particular bit of it he’d been delving into at the time.
Fia. Phae concentrated on the word. The Glen, the Deer, anything.
“I read a lot about your Family, you know. The Deer.”
His voice was so clear that Phae jerked to a stop and looked around, half expecting Barton to be walking beside her. But she was still alone, and not even a breeze shook the strange trees that seemed to tighten the deeper she travelled. She shook her head, went on, focused.
“Oh do you?” She’d been teasing him. Things were simpler then. Spending time with him was easy, wasn’t heavy with the regret she felt now, maybe parted from him forever.
“Yeah. And it would make me happy to share it with you. If you wanted me to.”
She had. She did.
“So your Family is pretty interesting, because there aren’t that many of you left. There used to be whole sanctuaries, like monastic dwellings in mountains and deep in the jungles and stuff, of Deer just following the ascetic life. While all the other Families represent some kind of physical element, the Deer represent and follow the intangible. The spirit. The centre of the five. The beating heart. And as healers, they were always drawn into conflicts, expected to bring people back from the dead, and sometimes manipulated into healing wounds when they shouldn’t have. They withdrew from the other Families, then realized that the only true way to live Ancient’s divinity was to return to the forms they’d forsaken at the beginning of time. Heavy, eh?”
Here in the suffocating rainforest, Phae smiled.
“So anyway . . . at first they were Therions, kind of like what Eli turns into — a sacred animal form. But then they didn’t want to turn back, felt more connected to Ancient that way. It’s hard to find out from anyone if there are any practising Deer left, really. So you’re rare!”
“And alone,” Phae said, as she came into a clearing, her voice ringing wretchedly in her head.
Something slithered through the grasses and she spun but saw nothing. Probably the one thing that bothered her the most about this realm was that it had been called the Glen — but it wasn’t much of one. She’d pictured a narrow, sun-kissed valley, like the pictures that Roan had sent over of Scotland. That made Phae’s heart contract, thinking of her friend now, and it only took that singular moment of distraction for the viper to lunge at her.
Phae screamed, leaping out of the way, but the thing reared back up, jaws wide. It came at her like a taut arrow, a head to kill, but she hadn’t come this far to be bitten, of all things, and her antlers snapped into a crown, and rather than generating a shield, she smashed the huge snake aside with a twitch of her neck.
The blood roared in her head, but the snake did not come back. It was as if it had never been there at all. She touched her antlers, her own hair, solid and, for the first time, used as a weapon. Looking at her hands, she felt different, more keyed in, blue sparks crackling over her fingertips. Was it because she truly had a connection to this place? Was she becoming more a Deer now than before?
“Well!” Phae shouted. She was not one to shout or even let her emotions rise to the surface, but she realized she’d reached a limit. She was tired of defending, of healing. She thought of Roan, and she wanted to be like her. She wanted to fight.
The earth rumbled, and the trees rose with the ground. But it wasn’t the ground; it was a massive head, a triangle of jagged antlers over the impassive face of an antelope. Phae staggered back, too panicked to hold her own crown of horns as the creature stood tall on its hooved hind legs, like an enormous satyr.
“What does Fia look like?” Phae had asked Barton. Her memory flickered against her present fear, painting the picture before her now.
Barton had shown her, but she hadn’t the imagination, at the time, to really fill in the blanks of the crude sketches.
“Fia’s sort of strange . . . From my readings she — well, the pronoun used is ‘they’ — has three faces. Not really gendered, like the other matriarchs are. I think the term is multi-spirited. You know the three gold rings that seem to show up everywhere in Ancient iconography? They represent Fia. The spirit. In fact the number three has a lot to do with Fia, lots of threes associated with them. And Fia is the pivot point of every Denizen’s power. Even Ancient’s.”
“Ancient’s heart.” The antelope’s face cracked and turned, like it was operated by a dial, revealing a second face — a w
oman’s, twisted in furious glee. “We are its beating heart, if it still has one, but not even we are sure.”
Phae didn’t move. There was nowhere else to go, to run. After all, this is why she’d been sent here. To find this fearsome god and challenge it.
The head creaked and clocked aside again, changing to that of a man, with chiselled cheekbones and eyes the blue of an impossible sky. “It has been so long since we’ve seen our own blood! And moved to fight, no less! How did you get here? Did our sister send you?”
Fia was enormous, draped in the woods, and when Phae looked past their body she saw the true Glen, a deep and fertile valley, leading to the vast mountain beyond.
Fia stomped their hoof and Phae jumped. The head swivelled back to the antelope’s.
“There is something in this one’s spirit. An intention I don’t like.”
The time to be defensive was now, but Phae tread carefully. “Fia! Matriarch of the Deer! I’ve come to . . .” But Phae stopped, something else Barton said tickling her memory.
“You’d think that Fia would be some kind of sage, representing the spirit and all. Full of wisdom and understanding. But, uh, how do I put this? Fia is angry. Miserable might be a better way to put it. They feel that the world was Ancient’s precious gift to humanity, and we kind of spoiled it, and they would be in absolutely no rush to save it from itself.”
The head swivelled three more painful times, sorting through the woman, the man, and back again to the antelope. Every face was unimaginably enraged.
“She was not born a Deer,” the three voices overlapped. “Someone else gave their power to her. And for what! To be misused in the world again!”
Phae felt her blood go cold. “Please,” she started. “There’s . . . The world is in danger. It’s in pain —”
The woman’s face: “Oh, she thinks we haven’t seen! That we don’t know the world’s pain!” Their laughter was a howl dimmed only when the man’s grave face swung back to the forefront.
“We know that pain too well, false-daughter. Because we bore it ourselves.”
“What does that mean?” Phae blurted.
Beneath Phae, the three gold rings flashed, searing. Then they were crimson.
The antelope swivelled back, deep eyes liquid. “Because the source of the world’s pain is the darklings. And it was we who gave birth to them, long ago, before the Narrative even began.”
There was a sound like a heart, like trampling hooves, and Fia bore down on Phae.
“She wants the Quartz,” Fia shrilled, but Phae darted between their legs, heading straight for the Glen, before they could stop her.
~
Barton lay awake in his bunk, numb.
His knees tingled as if he’d been running. He looked at his hands. He’d woken in the middle of the night, absolutely certain Phae had been curled against him, and she was asking him questions about Ancient, about the lore, and he was faithfully helping her solve some kind of puzzle.
This had been a welcome relief since, just hours before, he felt like the bottom had been ripped out of him like a bathtub drain. He’d sworn up and down to anyone who would listen that something had snapped. A cord, a ribbon. The tenuous connection to Phae.
He knew, without a doubt, that she wasn’t in this world anymore. And he was sick with it.
“You are just tired, stressed,” Kita had offered, trying to be comforting. “We all are. You more than the rest! You have been fighting hard, trying to undo all of those tree things. I am sure she is fine. You can try calling her . . .” She’d put a hand on Barton’s forearm, but he ripped it away, angry at the suggestion of the touch, as if that could erase Phae. As if anything could — though maybe something had.
“You don’t understand.” Even Barton barely had. He should’ve held on to Phae tighter when he’d had the chance. Should have kept her close to him. Should never have left her behind.
He stared at his hands, covered in blisters and still-healing cracks. For days he’d been sent from site to site — too many cropping up, and not enough Denizens stepping up to develop an early warning system to prevent the attacks that were ravaging cities, small towns. For every hope tree he’d undone (even the name sounded insipid when he thought of them), three more had appeared that he couldn’t undo, couldn’t save. And most of the Denizens he pulled free succumbed to Seela’s dark plague. Those who didn’t seemed unable to shake that they couldn’t outrun the Moth Queen for long. That the more darkness the world allowed through, the more it just seemed inevitable.
Phae. He reached out to her, not knowing if it’d get there. Not knowing if she could hear him. But he willed his heart to swell with the hope it’d lost, to help him find her across this terrible void, and to run alongside her if she needed him.
~
Phae ran forever. She still didn’t tire. It was such a blissful, strange feeling, even when she was fleeing for her life from a ferocious god that ruled the place where she’d trespassed.
She ran on, even though back in her own world she’d never been athletic. Yoga was one thing, a means of grounding her chaotic thoughts, but this was exhilarating. Now she understood why Barton loved it so. The air rushing against her skin, the delight in it. Don’t get carried away, she chided, losing herself down into a steep canyon, leaping, as her powersake would.
Soon, she realized, she was not running alone. Alongside her, what she at first took for shadows, were the lithe and streaking shapes of deer. Shades. Their eyes, regarding her with both gravity and curiosity, were steel-white, their strides far outstripping hers, but all the same her chest swelled with a sensation that they were running together. That these shades, likely the spirits of Denizens long passed, took her for one of their herd. She flicked the tears forming at the corners of her eyes and ran on.
She ran until she’d outstripped the hysterical bellowing of Fia at her heels. Until the shades dispersed back into the trees and the hills. She ran until she ended up on the other side of the mountain, where it was night. Strange to imagine that the otherworld had a divided day, but she didn’t wonder for long what use eternity might have for counting time.
Phae slowed down when she came to a great tree. She needed to think and to be still. False-daughter, they’d called her. That had hurt more than she’d thought it would. She hadn’t realized how much of her wanted Fia’s approval before coming here, that while she was here to get the stone and get out as quickly as she could, she also wanted to be told you’re doing fine. She’d felt that running among the Deer shades, but that seemed so far away now. She took a quick look behind her at the shuddering jungle. She was definitely not going to get that angry god’s approval anytime soon.
Phae looked up the tree. It was old and its bole spread wide. She felt calm here, so she found a foothold and climbed as high as she could until she pulled herself over a branch thick as her body and let out a ragged breath.
Despite the threat on her life, she did still feel something like belonging as she surveyed the island from the base of the mountain. Shades galloped and darted here and there, in clusters or on their own. She had so many questions — is there where she’d end up after her own life ran its course? And what was on the other side of the mountain? Would it be daylight, the inverse of where she’d planted herself now? That the Glen was really an island made her a bit sad — such an isolated place, cut off from the other realms. But Fia probably liked it that way. Easier to protect themselves from any pain that could be inflicted on them.
Phae.
Someone had called her name — someone inside. From far away. Across a floating thread. She shut her eyes and tugged back.
It’s so good to hear your voice. If her thoughts could weep, they surely were now, because she felt some part of Barton clasp her close.
I thought you were — He cut himself off.
How? she asked. How are we doing this?
You’d know better than me, he replied, but she knew he wasn’t wrapped up in the how. Where are you?
Phae opened her eyes. Nothing had changed. It was still night. Far away. The Glen. It’s nothing like your stories.
She felt Barton smile, almost rejoice. The book’s always better. His grin lit her up inside. Then his voice flashed to concern. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Why the hell are you in another realm? Can’t I leave for five seconds without you ending up in danger?
She frowned. Now you know what it feels like. She’d been his protector, after all, since last winter, since before his power came back to him.
He cooled. Why are you there and not here with me?
Now she really was crying. It’s like you said. I have to figure out my part in all of this. I think I’m close. For once I feel useful. Failing spectacularly was, at least, progress.
They held tight to their connection to each other. But Phae was still in this tree, at the base of a mountain in another dimension. And Barton couldn’t be here. With that thought, he faded away, and she leaned her head back into the thick bark behind her.
“Curious,” said a sibilant jeer, and Phae nearly fell out of the tree.
The snake hung from the branch above her, enormous and slightly injured from their earlier encounter. But it wasn’t dead nor nearly as angry as Fia had been — more amused than anything.
“What is?” Barton may have been well read in Ancient folklore, but Phae still did know a thing or two about snakes popping up in fables or parables. And if there was one common thread between Ancient and those stories, it was the riddles.
“You are not borne of Deer, yet you are in their realm. Your spirit is bright despite your Mundane flesh, so radiant it can speak across a universe to the one its heart holds precious.” The snake wound itself down, raising its head and slanted eyes at Phae. “Perhaps you are strong. Perhaps you should not be suffered to live.”
Phae was still scared, but curiosity overpowered that in the moment. “And what,” she asked, “is a snake doing in the Glen?”