It wasn’t just Sinárr’s keeping Mérethe in darkness that had bled the light of life from her; it was the fact that she couldn’t make a single decision of her own.
Tanis knew he had to avoid that potentiality at all costs. When he surrendered responsibility for his own thoughts and choices, he really would become Sinárr’s puppet. He cast the thought outward, I think I’ll choose my own clothing, thanks.
“As you require,” replied the servant boy in the doorway. He indicated an armoire with one hand. “When you’re ready, my lord, he awaits above.” He closed the door as he left.
Tanis looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing his night clothes again. When he lifted his gaze to Mérethe, she was staring open-mouthed at him.
Tanis emerged from below decks into a raging storm. The sails of the barquentine’s main and mizzen masts were reefed, while the square-rigged sails on the foremast were fully let out, for they sailed with the wind. White-capped waves washed around the ship on all sides, and ashen sheets of rain pelted the sea, but only a stiff breeze crossed the deck.
Tanis saw Sinárr standing amidships at the starboard railing. His long black hair with its bands of silver stood out brightly against a wine-red cloak, which was snapping on the wind. Tanis walked to join him.
“A real ship would be pitching and hawing in this weather,” the lad noted as he reached Sinárr’s side.
The Warlock cast him a sidelong smile. “Yes, but I find that tiresome, don’t you?” He looked Tanis over appreciatively, his golden eyes noting the dark blue tunic and pants the lad had chosen for himself—albeit from an armoire stocked with items that Sinárr had created.
At least…Tanis presumed Sinárr had filled the wardrobe with clothes, but the hint of amused approval in the Warlock’s gaze now challenged this assumption.
Sinárr looked back to the sea. “It’s an interesting experience, having someone else form things in my universe.”
“Isn’t that why you brought me here?” Isn’t that why you’re holding me here?
Sinárr eyed him hungrily. “Indeed it is, Tanis-mine.”
Tanis’s fortitude thinned beneath the Warlock’s fervent look. He really wished that he might’ve possessed a sturdier defense against this immortal than his meager wits and unpredictable glimpses of Fate’s will. Back in his rooms, Tanis had felt a certain bravado to confront Sinárr. Now that he stood looking up at the tall and strangely compelling Warlock, he found words of challenge much harder to summon.
Sinárr studied him for a moment with the hint of a smile on his lips. “You want to know why I haven’t yet bound you.” He reached as if to touch Tanis’s face but instead held his ebony hand paused before his eyes. “You cannot see yourself as I see you.” Fingernails that glinted of gold hovered in front of him. “Even if a mirror existed that could reflect your essence as it appears to me, still you wouldn’t see what I see, for we perceive through different lenses.”
Sinárr closed his fingers into a fist and lowered his hand. “You are a delicious temptation, don’t you see, Tanis? I would not forgo the sensation of our courtship so quickly.” He stepped closer to Tanis, still offering that fervent gaze, his body leaning towards the lad as a tree inclining towards the sun. He caught Tanis beneath the chin and lifted the lad’s eyes to meet his. “You prefer I should be quick to end it?”
Tanis jerked free of the Warlock’s touch, feeling unnerved.
It wasn’t the avid look in Sinárr’s eyes or even his cold power that made the lad so uncomfortable. It was a sort of resonance he felt happening between them. Like two pitch forks tuned to the same note, Sinárr’s frequency was eliciting an odd and intensely unsettling recognition in Tanis. He backed away.
Sinárr followed as the lad retreated, forcing him up against the railing. Tanis could feel Sinárr’s power wrapped around him and growing tighter with every breath. What disturbed him, though, was this feeling of repulsion and connection—as much as he felt the need to get away from the Warlock, so also did he feel disconcertingly drawn to him.
Sinárr held up his hand as if to touch Tanis’s shoulder but again paused just shy of contact. “This feeling,” he murmured, “this desirousness that flows upon a sort of delirious energy…it’s not something I’ve often felt outside the raw creation of worlds.”
Tanis regarded Sinárr, feeling confused and more than a little panicked. It was absolutely impossible that he could be attracted to this creature. So what was he experiencing? And why was he experiencing it?
He clutched the railing with both hands, feeling like the ship was tossing on the waves and likely to pitch him overboard at any moment. His mind sought any logical thought to cling to and finally landed on one.
“Often.” Tanis looked up at Sinárr, still braced against that impending fall. “You said you’ve not often experienced this…” he paused…swallowed, “feeling.”
The Warlock finally straightened away from him, allowing the lad to recover his breath and his wits. “Yes.” Sinárr frowned slightly. “With Mérethe, in the beginning, I felt something similar, though far less strongly so.” He looked Tanis over quietly. Then he extended a hand inviting Tanis’s companionship and started off towards the stern.
Tanis exhaled a shuddering sigh of relief and followed him.
Sinárr clasped hands behind his back as he strolled the deck with his blood-red cloak snapping on the wind and his golden eyes lifted to the storm. He moved like a predatory cat flows over the mountainside, absorbing leaps and landings in its powerful limbs, seeming nearly to float along.
Actually…comparing Sinárr to a predatory cat didn’t seem so far off, now that Tanis thought about it. Certainly the more time he spent in Sinárr’s company, the less human the man seemed. Tanis admitted a certain fascination with the Warlock, but even this didn’t explain the strange energy that waxed and waned between them.
A flicker of amusement hinted on Sinárr’s lips. “You don’t like it, this sensation.”
Tanis still felt like the ship was heeling beneath his feet and walked with a hand half-outstretched, ready to grab the railing at any moment. “I don’t understand it. Do you?”
Sinárr turned him a curious eye. “No, admittedly.” His gaze took in Tanis’s slightly tilted stance—which must’ve looked ridiculous, considering the ship was sailing flat in the water—and gave a low chuckle. “Would you like to go somewhere more stable, Tanis?”
Abruptly the lad found himself standing within a grove of oak trees. Dappled sunlight fell on a carpet of leaves and gilded a brook off to the left.
Sinárr asked from beside him. “Better?”
Tanis still felt askew.
The Warlock laughed softly. “Somewhere else then.”
The world vanished. Suddenly Tanis gazed into a starscape. Everywhere he looked, he saw stars. What he didn’t see was any sign of his own body.
How is this meant to be better? Even without hearing his voice, he knew it sounded shrill.
You will see. Here…this will help.
Tanis felt Sinárr’s arms wrapping around his chest.
This is hardly better, Sinárr.
Sinárr chuckled. Not this part. I know you shy from my touch, but until we’re bound, physical contact is necessary for what I mean to show you. Watch…
At first, Tanis saw only pinpoints of light appearing on a velvet background—distant suns, perhaps with worlds of their own. Then a blackness appeared to spread in the center of his vision until it blocked out even the tiny points of light.
To build a world, it is necessary to first create space.
The blackness rapidly encompassed Tanis’s entire view.
We create space by first creating a point to view.
Tanis saw what appeared to be a distant sun blink into existence. Right away, he realized he was perceiving it rather than seeing it—an odd distinction, yet it felt somehow important to have noticed the difference between sight and perception. Sight used bodily eyes, and the other…well,
Tanis couldn’t explain where perception came from. It was more a sense of knowing, of receiving back from the world some manner of communication or context of being; it was an awareness of things that did not depend on human eyes.
As he let this perception deepen, Tanis realized that whatever else this ball of energy was, it wasn’t a star formed of exploding gasses.
Between us and the first of our starpoints spans the view of dimension. Now we frame space.
Tanis perceived more starpoints, as Sinárr had named them, blinking into existence to frame the darkness, forming the vertices of a shape that resembled a cube. But what truly excited him was that he could feel the space Sinárr had just carved into, or perhaps formed out of, Shadow’s aether.
Whereas before, the flat expanse of darkness had held no depth, now Tanis perceived space framed within the starpoints.
What shall we put into the space we’ve formed?
A spark of light appeared in the center of the empty space. The light started spinning and drew other sparks of light into its core, where they coalesced to form a sphere.
A colorful effluence began spreading outwards from the sphere. These vapors distilled into the space around them or were drawn back into the sphere by the gravity of its spin, so it seemed a twirling dancer trailing colorful ribbons of light. As the dancer spun, it gathered more energy unto itself. The lights combined, fused and became magnetized. The center grew denser, darker, as gaseous particles cohered and compacted to form a solid core.
Watching raw energy coalescing into being, seeing what was undeniably a world forming before his very eyes, Tanis knew awe and amazement on a scale that defied description.
Whatever sickly drink he’d imbibed that had made him feel so unbalanced before had faded, replaced by an intoxicating concoction of exhilaration and wonderment and a burgeoning urge to make something so marvelous himself.
Even more incredible to experience was the sense of largeness that accompanied this moment. What he saw was no small ball of energy mimicking the creation of a world. It was surely a planet as large as Alorin—perhaps larger. Tanis conceived that the space his mind occupied had become vast—so massive as to watch from afar as a true world was forming out of the aether. Of this truth Tanis had no doubt.
We can spin a world into being from the raw energy of Shadow, or…
Sinárr made the spinning orb vanish—an entire planet vanished before his eyes!
…fashion something new from our imagination alone.
Suddenly Tanis found himself standing on an outcropping of luminous black stone amid a crescent-shaped waterfall of stars. Sinárr held him close in his arms, but for once Tanis didn’t mind the Warlock’s nearness. All the heavens were dark save for the sparkling brilliance around and behind them, which was nearly too bright to look upon. The starfall tumbled from unknowable heights into an abyss of velvet dark, and every star promised a new experience, new worlds, new opportunities for making.
Sinárr’s arms tightened possessively around him. Changing what we’ve created is as simple as our decision.
All at once they were plunging inside a tube of stars—no, the stars were falling around them. The entire world had become formless streaks of light. Within the shifting veils of energy that coalesced and streamed around him, Tanis saw endless possibilities.
Imagining himself drawing upon that energy, thinking of what wonders he might create, Tanis knew a joy so light and airy—and yet so vibrant and real—that he had no idea how to express it in human terms. It made him feel like crying and laughing and—exploding—all at the same time; it offered the exhilaration of immense freedom channeled alongside a wondrous sense of play. And throughout it all threaded an infinite, nearly impossible feeling of expansion, like simply being so much greater and larger and just more than he was.
Tanis felt heady. He’d stopped caring if any of it was real. He rejoiced in the overwhelming wonder of the experience, thrilled in receiving—perceiving—so many wavelengths of existence, and in observing a kind of creation he’d never imagined possible.
Tanis exhaled a sigh and laid his head dizzily back against Sinárr’s chest. When is it my turn?
He perceived the Warlock’s surprise. I’ve never let another guide my intent.
But that’s what you want, isn’t it? To create worlds with me?
He felt Sinárr’s uncertainty…and then a distance, as if a ridge of energy had coalesced to form a wall between the two sides of their opposing thoughts.
Suddenly they were standing once again on the white balcony of their first meeting. A moon was rising beyond the edge of the world, looming close and full between the dawn-colored cosmos and the iridescent, striated sky. A second moon at half phase glowed above the first, higher and fainter, just shy of the gaseous nebula of violet-pink clouds and clustering stars.
Sinárr walked away from Tanis, breaking off their contact.
Loss descended like a predator upon the lad. He’d had but the barest glimpse of making—more observing the experience than participating in it—yet the idea of being denied it now opened a terrible, agonizing void.
Tanis wondered if this was what it meant to be courted by a Warlock: in one moment being devoured by his desires and in the next denied them, returned to what should’ve felt a blessed freedom but instead feeling tainted by an undertone of loss, the deepest part of you wondering why you missed the heady terror of his attention.
“I’ve been thinking on what you said, Tanis.” Sinárr turned a look over his shoulder. The moonlight limned his features, highlighting the angles of his nose and cheekbones, lips and jaw, while the planes of his dark skin faded into the background, forging him into an outline of himself. “I had never considered the idea before.” He arched a brow. “No one ever compelled me to consider it before.” Sinárr spread his hands along the railing and looked out over the edge of the world. “I see the logic in your argument, of course—if I truly want the benefit of your ability, your mind must be free to create with mine. Thus there can be only one solution.”
The lad barely dared hope—
“You must agree to be bound.”
Tanis choked on his own breath. “What?”
Sinárr turned from the railing and started towards him. The wind blew his cloak outwards behind him, and with his dark features limned in silver, he seemed alien and unearthly. “To create a world together that all might perceive—a world formed as your Alorin was formed, Tanis, with elae and deyjiin in perfect balance, a world forged of Shadow and Light…”
Sinárr stopped in front of him. His nearness woke that inexplicable resonance that Tanis dreaded, but his attention fixed on the lad felt oddly…engaging. “To create such a world, Tanis, our minds must act as one mind, working in concert to weave together the identical, inverse patterns that are respective to our natures.”
Tanis stepped unsteadily back from him and pushed a hand through his hair. There were at least a dozen things in what Sinárr had just said that made no sense to him—for instance, what was the real difference between the worlds Sinárr created in his own universe and those he intended for them to create together, if all were illusion to begin with? And how could Alorin be fashioned of both elae and deyjiin? Or, if making a world that anyone could perceive required both forces, how had Björn van Gelderan forged T’khendar without deyjiin?
The worst of it was that even though he didn’t understand Sinárr or agree with his actions, he didn’t see anything fundamentally wrong with his goals.
It was immensely confusing.
Tanis pushed palms to his temples and tried to force the chaos in his brain to take the shape of words. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’ve taken me away from everyone and everything I know and love, you’re holding me here against my will…but you want my consent to be imprisoned and bound for all eternity?” Frustrated by the absurdity of Sinárr’s expectations, he flung out a hand towards the world at large. “Shall I lock myself in my cell and place the manac
les on my own wrists and ankles too?”
Sinárr looked startled. “This…isn’t what you desired, Tanis?”
Tanis leveled him a telling look. “You’re holding me against my will in an alien realm, Sinárr.”
Sinárr seemed baffled by his ire. “You object to this treatment?”
“More than somewhat!”
Sinárr seemed pinned to immobility by Tanis’s unexpected censure. His brow constricted. “I have never understood this view. Yours is a lesser race and therefore subject to mine.”
Tanis’s eyes flashed. “Lesser by whose estimation?”
Sinárr opened palms to the heavens. “It is an objective truth. Your race is not immortal.”
“Immortal by one definition.” Tanis faced him squarely. “Our bodies may not be immortal without working the Pattern of Life, but the essence of an Adept’s being is immortal—everything that we truly are transfers from lifetime to lifetime: our minds, our experiences, even our memories. Have you heard nothing of the Returning?”
Sinárr turned up his palms in entreaty. “Tanis, be reasonable.”
“Reasonable?” the lad sputtered.
“Your race cannot work deyjiin.”
“And yours can’t work elae!”
“You cannot build worlds—”
“Nor can you, Sinárr!” Tanis was well and truly angry now. Oddly, in the fires of indignation, he found firmer footing. In fact, he felt a force thrusting him further into it and was suddenly quite certain of his path.
A furrow marred Sinárr’s brow. “How can you say this when I’ve just shown you—”
Tanis pointed at him in accusation. “You admitted all of this is illusion when you declared that you needed me to make your world solid to others.”
The Warlock looked taken aback. “Tanis, I thought you saw—”
Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4) Page 37