Pelas gazed intently at him. “Do you feel it, Ean? The tapestry is calling us back.”
Ean mostly felt the protest of overtaxed and much-abused muscles. He pressed palms to his eyes and stifled a groan. “Calling you, maybe. Me, it would rather spit out.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushed elbows to his knees and sank his head into his hands. The dream felt heavy in his mind, thick with Arion’s confusion, his loss webbed with guilt.
All this time, Ean had thought the blindfold was a result of Isabel’s promise to Arion…that it had something to do with his Return, that when they were bound anew she would remove it. He’d resented her still wearing it without realizing why.
Yet in the end, her promise hadn’t been to all the world. And Arion—he’d been so caught up in his personal loss over not seeing her eyes that he’d hardly considered Isabel’s sacrifice. Shade and darkness, to never look freely upon the world again?
He dropped his hands and looked up at Pelas. The Malorin’athgul was already dressed for a return to Faroqhar, looking splendid in a coat of muted plum, his long hair neatly queued. Pelas arched a brow at him. “Rough night?”
Ean rubbed his eyes and stood up. “Rough year.” He took up his shirt and slipped it on, casting a look at Pelas as he went for his pants. “You can feel the mortal tapestry?”
“A new perception Phaedor opened to me. But I wonder, Ean, can you not feel it also?”
Ean looked up under his brows while donning his pants. “Why would I?”
Pelas leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. Beyond him, the sea and sky appeared so deeply blue, it was difficult to separate the two. “In my understanding, Balance and the fifth strand are inseparable.”
Ean sank down on the bed to don his boots. “You and Phaedor have no paths in the tapestry. It follows you’d be able to view its pattern—at least, it explains some things.” He lifted his eyes to meet Pelas’s gaze. “Not so for me.”
“But your path through the tapestry is thick, Ean. You bind many threads to you. Perhaps you cannot see the overall pattern in the same way,” Pelas waved a hand vaguely, conceding his point, “but could you not perceive something of it?”
Ean frowned, considering the idea. He knew Balance played heavily in his life. He was bound to Balance in part for being a fifth-strand Adept, but even more so due to Arion’s choices and actions, for each time he’d died tragically and Returned, Balance had woven him more firmly into its fabric. Now his every action tugged upon the Balance to some degree.
He thought he saw Pelas’s point. While he was pulling against the Balance on one end, mustn’t it be pulling against him on the other? If he but learned how to perceive that force, could it direct him towards the right path, the right actions—choices that wouldn’t violate any cosmic equilibrium, yet could still result in achieving the effect he intended?
Pelas handed him his coat, and Ean slipped arms into it slowly, pensive now, for he was seeing an important truth. Both memory and instinct told him a violation of the Balance was central to why Arion had ultimately lost. It would be hugely beneficial if he could learn to perceive such signals.
Ean glanced to Pelas as he belted on his sword. “It’s the Fifth Law, isn’t it? ‘A wielder is limited by what he can envision.’ That includes what he can envision himself envisioning, per the Eleventh Esoteric—that is, in this case, what he can envision himself perceiving.”
“I believe you have firmly grasped my point.” Pelas looked him over with a smile. “Ready?”
“As ever.”
Pelas tore the fabric and escorted Ean into Shadow. As the portal was closing them into unmitigated darkness, the prince asked, “You can go anywhere traveling through Shadow?”
“Only to places you’ve been before. To open the portal on the other side, I must envision a clear and detailed concept of the space I want to arrive into—an application of both your First Law and the First Esoteric. It would be dangerous and ultimately futile to attempt a traverse through Shadow without this image in place.”
Light split the darkness before them, and Ean stepped into daylight, automatically summoning the currents—
He spun to Pelas. “Is that—”
“I’m not sure.” Pelas’s eyes tightened. “Something’s not right.”
“We should—”
“Split up, yes.”
They headed off in opposite directions.
As Ean took wary steps in pursuit of his vague premonition of unease, he wondered…could that feeling be the Balance speaking? If his every action tugged at Balance to some degree, shouldn’t he be able to feel its force tugging at the opposite end? And if he was limited only by what he could envision—per the Laws and Esoterics—then why not envision such godlike power for himself?
Because it doesn’t work unless you actually believe it, Ean. Fynn’s voice had a way of speaking Ean’s thoughts any time they became suitably sardonic.
Unfortunately, the Fynn voice had a point.
He was never going to be able convince himself that he had godlike power, but he might be able to convince himself that he could draw the people he needed to help him onto his path. That seemed well within Isabel’s explanation of how she and Ean bound many threads to themselves. Yet while this idea intrigued him, he had no clue how to consciously go about it.
He was apparently quite competent at wandering aimlessly through the Sacred City, though, because before he knew it, he was crossing a soglia’re and emerging onto the Sormitáge campus.
Where he came to a standstill.
Looking around at the immense buildings with their lawns as expansive manes; marbled paths, the veins of the university, pulsing with a constant stream of students and scholars; wide boulevards winding among groves of ancient trees shading boarding houses and dormitories…
Ean stood in that moment feeling a strange duality of lives. In one breath he saw the famous university for the first time; in the same breath he knew his own intimate connection to it, a breathtaking reunion with a place that had been as deeply woven into his being as he was into its. Arion had spent more than a century haunting these halls, studying, experimenting, honing his craft; arguing with friends and combating Markal Morrelaine’s pessimism. Ean could almost feel Arion’s energy still radiating from the limestone paths, in the way he’d felt Isabel in the imperial garden. Almost.
It didn’t take him long to discover that the Sormitáge was a city unto itself. Too easily one could become lost among the maze of courtyards, walls and cloisters, in one moment traversing a brightly lit tunnel beneath a walkway expecting to find the building’s front at its end, only to discover yourself in a private courtyard instead. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, Arion’s mental map hadn’t survived the transition into Ean’s head.
Even so, lost or not, the day was bright, the campus was beautiful and awash with colorful flora—not to mention the myriad Adepts milling or rushing about—and if he’d had a better idea of what he was looking for, he might’ve truly enjoyed the moment.
Ean couldn’t say with any certainty that a divine force was guiding his tour across the campus—he could’ve simply been moving on the path of least resistance—but in the spirit of optimism, he entertained the notion that Balance was leading him in the right direction.
He finally found his way out of a maze of arcaded courtyards into a broad piazza separating two massive halls. Both structures boasted impressive domes, but the one across the piazza from Ean had a cluster of them surrounding its central bulb.
Ean sat down on a set of wide marble steps and studied the currents beneath the comings and goings of Sormitáge life. When he shifted his perspective to view the world through the fifth strand, he saw something fascinating.
In the energy of the fifth, Adepts glowed as bright stars among the radiant, sweeping tides of elae’s other strands, while na’turna appeared far dimmer by comparison. The prince had never been among such a concentration of Adepts before. Seeing so many of them now, watching
how the currents swarmed around them…Adepts were magnets for the lifeforce. No wonder it was so easy for them to manipulate elae, whereas na’turna like Markal, or his brother Sebastian, had to labor for years sometimes even to sense the lifeforce.
He recalled tales from the days of the Quorum of the Sixth Truth, when na’turna had been relegated to the lowest caste of society because they couldn’t natively sense elae. Those had been dark times for the realm. Yet seeing this view of na’turna, as the Quorum’s members might’ve also viewed them—fifth-strand Adepts all, like himself—he could almost understand how the Quorum might’ve developed those prejudices.
He was studying a core of stars that had collected around the darker, shadowed radiance of a plinth, when he noticed a matrix of light caging one of the dimmer, na’turna stars. The matrix was so utterly unusual that it took Ean a moment—and a shift of his view of the currents—to realize what he was seeing:
A man wrapped in patterns. And not just any patterns. Compulsion patterns.
Apprehension quickened Ean’s pulse. Suspicion leapt to a fearful question: had Darshan sent this man in search of him—or, more likely, in search of Nadia?
Ean slowly got to his feet. The matrix surrounding the na’turna was so stark that Ean marveled no one else could see it, but then, he alone in that galaxy of stars possessed the variant trait of seeing patterns.
He descended the steps and started across the piazza, walking within a bubble of force that encouraged people out of his path long before he reached them, giving him an unimpeded view of the man who had become his unsuspecting quarry.
The latter moved out of a cluster of onlookers and headed towards the larger building. Ean put the second into his steps and within seconds was walking twenty paces behind the na’turna. The prince followed him through a pair of soaring bronze doors into palatial elegance.
Columns of marble supported friezes where life-sized statues acted out a drama fifty feet above the mortal one; and above this march, the marble arched like the branching limbs of trees into an exquisitely painted groin-vaulted ceiling and its multiple domes.
With mortal eyes, Ean noticed these tributes to the creativity of man, but his wielder’s gaze remained fixed on the matrix shouting man’s depravity ahead of him. The na’turna wore a Palmer’s masked hood and robes, as did many who traversed the crowded passages, but Ean easily singled out this Palmer from the others by the cage of compulsion he wore.
The Palmer turned down another passage and slipped through a pair of double doors midway down. Ean reached the doors soon after him. He searched the entrance for patterns and then followed the na’turna inside.
A long gallery extended into shadows. The Palmer was skirting the inside wall, the other providing the only source of light via tall windows overlooking a shaded garden, but to Ean’s elae-enhanced vision, the room might’ve been lit by a thousand torches.
In three steps, he’d caught up with the man. With his fourth step, he grabbed the na’turna’s shoulder and spun him around. Hazel eyes stared from beneath the Palmer’s hood, unfocused—but someone was watching.
Ean pushed his palm into the man’s chest and dove into his mind. It was like walking into a cage of kaleidoscopic light. He sought the pattern that bound the man’s consciousness, speeding along a rushing channel of the fourth, but when that river course opened upon the delta of another mind, an entirely unexpected mind—
Recognition’s spear impaled them both.
The prince reared mentally back—staggered physically back from the Palmer with bells of alarm shaking his certainty. And beneath these…the echo of haunting laughter.
Behind him, the air rippled.
Ean spun and drew his sword. A portal split the fabric. The same laughter that was echoing in Ean’s skull made its chilling arrival as the actual man stepped out of Shadow. His blood-red robes rippled like the currents as he strode into the realm
Tall and broad of shoulder, his features reflected an immortal’s symmetry, but the aspect of his brow, the flare of his nose, his thin lips and sharply angled chin—every part of his face seemed to have been molded by contempt.
“Shailabanáchtran.” The name burst out of Ean’s constricted chest, interwoven with disquiet. The one immortal he hadn’t expected, the last one he wanted to confront just then.
Shail’s contemptuous chuckle resolved into a cold smile. “Ean val Lorian.” He spoke the name as if savoring the shape of the letters upon his tongue. “Or should I say Arion Tavestra?” Darkly predatory eyes licked over Ean. “Do you even know the answer?”
Chagrin had Ean clenched in its icy hand. He’d been hoping Balance might lead him, but was this really where Balance had been taking him?
“‘Come and find me…’” Ean ground out the words beneath an exacting stare. “Have you been waiting?”
Shail’s smile slowly widened. “Fascinating.” He looked Ean over again with dark eyes that Ean remembered too well from Arion’s last moments. “So you really have recovered some of who he was. But how much do you recall?”
Enough to know he wasn’t prepared for this encounter. He moved opposite to Shail’s approach, pacing him in turn.
“I’ve sought you the realm-wide, Prince of Dannym. I freely admit, I never imagined we would meet here on Arion’s old stomping grounds.”
“I should’ve known you’d be here, haunting the scene of the crime.”
Shail’s smile became a disdainful sneer. “You inherited Arion’s insolence, I see.” His eyes smeared condescension across Ean’s form. “All this time, you’ve been the proverbial thorn in my side, and here with my least effort, you come right to me. It is astonishing how desperate the world is to submit to my will.”
Ean tightened his hold on his sword. “You won’t find all of us quite so willing.”
“No?” Shail smirked. “In the end, Arion seemed willing enough. He begged, as I recall.”
Ean believed Arion might’ve begged for a host of things there at the end, but he doubted any of them aligned with what Shail was implying.
Shail halted and crossed muscular arms. “You do realize you’ve died already three times by my hand?”
Ean held onto his fortitude and the Malorin’athgul’s gaze, though neither came to him easily. “They say the fourth time’s the charm.”
Shail barked a skeptical laugh. “Can you not see the futility of this endless cycle?” He waved vaguely to emphasize his point. “Returning again and again with no memory of your prior life; reborn as a wailing, helpless babe; damned to a perpetual amnesia, growth, and relearning of skills many times mastered and forgotten. The perverse futility of so-named parents doting on eternal beings trapped into mewling, drooling forms…” Disgust wrinkled his lip. “What use is it to perpetuate this cycle?”
With no further warning, Shail wrapped his power around the prince.
Ean felt it seeping through his shields, permeating them, darkly toxic and treacherously inviting, a mesmerizing power he seemed powerless to combat. This wasn’t compulsion, it was enthrallment, captivation, seduction. All of his work with Pelas to battle deyjiin—yet these were traps of elae wielded as expertly as anything Arion had done!
Shail watched Ean wrestling with his working, wearing a smile of foregone conclusion. “What perverted creator designed this way of life for you?”
Cold power caressed Ean’s mind. Submit, it encouraged, give up—give in.
“Where is the purpose in your existence?”
Spiny thorns stabbed at Ean’s thoughts, muting reason’s clear edge, luring disheartenment to the fore. Let another be in charge…shed the weight of your obligations…
Ean fought to maintain control over his thoughts, but Shail’s working unbalanced reason, exchanging rationality for irresponsibility, honor for ignobility. And it had melted right through his shields!
If you would know peace, relinquish your hold, submit to me…
Now the power teased, waking strange and unwelcome desires. It was a
courtesan’s smile of invitation, a licking tongue of arousal. You could know pleasure unlike anything you’ve known before, if you only submit…submit…
Shail effortlessly held Ean in his gaze and Ean’s mind—horrifyingly—in the thrall of his will. “Who would choose such an eternity?” he posed, and his power echoed the question with a thousand sweet caresses, a nursemaid stroking a sick child into sleep…or death. Release yourself, free yourself. Why endure this futile effort?
Ean felt his fingers loosening around his sword. The frightening part was how right it felt to let it go. He wanted to let go, and yet…
—No!—
Ean fought it with every ounce of will.
A vague recollection, so faint beneath the veils of Shail’s compulsion, floated to him. ‘…the only way to overcome the compulsion was to accept it…I had to let it permeate me. Do not counter force with force; channel it. This was the lesson your Isabel taught me…’
Ean’s fingers were growing looser, his sword heavier, his own thoughts harder to hold. He desperately cordoned off the tiny corner of his mind where rationality was cowering and hung there, gripping desperately to indecision’s slippery rope. Submit to this? Accept it? Could he trust Pelas enough to act on his advice against his own instincts? Did he trust Isabel enough?
Across the space of their tête-à-tête, Shail was smiling darkly, the outcome in his mind already assured.
Feeling even his small corner being overtaken now, Ean forced a swallow. If this was going to be the last thought he ever had as himself, it had best be a meaningful one. He cast the thought along their bond, Isabel…I trust you.
Then he embraced Absolute Being and opened himself fully to Shail’s power…
His consciousness was instantly consumed.
Ean let those compulsive waves permeate him, terrified it would be the last sensation he ever recalled…but within that surrender, within the open willingness to be consumed…
Suddenly Ean realized that while the compulsion was permeating him, he was also permeating it—and for every particle of energy pummeling his consciousness, he created one just like it of his own.
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