The last step was more like a small jetty, providing room for them all to stand. Above them, in a rising spiral around the whole circumference of the room, the secondary sigils seemed to glow from someplace within the walls, as though the energies Thorn had called forth radiated from the essential fabric of the stone. The same held true for the key sigil. Viewed from the balcony before they started their descent, it appeared to float on the floor as something distinct and separate. Now, having reached what they thought was its level, it had sunk beneath the surface, its radiance suffusing the whole of the obsidian pool.
There was no movement to the substance of the pool, but it gleamed with a luster to rival the polished lacquer armor of the High Elves. Elora didn’t resist the impulse to peer into its depths in search of a reflection. Disturbingly she found one, but it wasn’t at all like gazing into a mirror or any other kind of reflector. There was a quality of three-dimensionality to the face that gazed back at her, and more intriguing, a solidity that almost convinced her she was looking at a vision of Elora that was just as tangible and real as she was herself.
She saw another step, shimmering at ankle depth beyond the jetty platform, which she realized would place it below the level of the real floor. Before Thorn or the others could voice any opposition, she took that step, and then the one beyond, and so forth, in a steady gait…
…only to find herself ascending a circular stairway to emerge from a pool identical to the one she thought she was immersing herself in. She looked about herself in sudden startlement, catching a glimpse of her reflection looking up from the steps below, and wondered if the pair of them had simply switched places, in violation of every natural law she knew.
She waited what she hoped was a decent interval but none of the others emerged to follow her. She considered going back but desired first to see what stood atop the steps.
There was quite a difference. Where Daikini worked in wood and stone, the architects of this most ancient of physical Realms used crystal in their construction. As drab as the other side of the Gate had been, these walls were composed of the most gloriously intricate mosaic, a multitude of tiles, none larger than a fingernail, as meticulously cut as they must have been richly colored when first emplaced. There was a quality to the air that made all her physical senses register things far more intensely. She beheld more shades to every hue than she had names for, yet she could perceive each with a clarity that was almost painful. Sadly, that only made the diminution of the tiles all the more poignant. Time had worked on them as it does on all things, weathering them away, stealing their intensity, until they remained as no more than shadows of the splendor that once had been.
This chamber was open to the air, though she wasn’t sure if that was the original intention as she beheld fluted crystalline columns rising in graceful arches to form a twelve-paneled dome above her head. She assumed the pillars were carved, as they would be in a Daikini construction, but as she drew closer she wondered if they had grown instead, to be shaped and pruned into this shape as an arborist might design a tree.
Most, she saw from the first, were broken, leaving chunks of stone in jumbled heaps around the pool.
Elora emerged from the top of the spiral staircase into a realm of perpetual twilight, a ghostly radiance that struck her as light that was gradually losing the ability to glow, forgetting this fundamental essence of its nature as people of a certain age begin to misplace the details of their lives. The landscape thus illuminated was barren in the same disturbing way, chockablock with the shapes and forms of existence yet marked everywhere she looked by a transcendent weariness, as if the very act of maintaining physical coherence was more trouble than it was worth.
Once upon a time this might have been a site of angular cliffs and dynamic vistas, but weather and sheer age had worn away most of the sharp edges. Daunting it may have been, but now the dominant impression was surprisingly tame. There wasn’t much in the way of open ground, either, as though someone had swept through here long ago and smashed every imaginable promontory, natural or otherwise, wholly to rubble. Or perhaps they’d simply collapsed of their own accord.
There was age here, in the stones and earth and air, a quietude that had existed for longer than any of the races they had known could possibly remember.
“My-oh-my,” she said as softly as she dared, comforted by the sound of her own voice, disturbed by the fact that it had no resonance. Sound traveled as weakly through this ancient air as did light, and she suspected a full-throated roar would go unheard beyond a handspan’s distance.
“Ancient beyond our comprehension,” she murmured to herself, “and incredibly weary of all that history, but not yet done. Dreamers seeking the source of dreams. Is this the world that’s forgotten how, or simply run out?” Her voice was tinged with a gentle sadness. “Have they nothing more to dream?”
Hardly.
The new voice made her jump, her startlement coming from the eerie flat quality of those tonalities as much as from the fact of them being here at all.
At first she feared she might have imagined this, because none of her senses, not MageSight nor InSight, revealed a sign of the speaker. Then, in a way that trickled rime ice the length of her spine, a form seemed to disengage itself from a standing stone. Without apparent motion of any kind it glided from stone to stone toward her.
Thou ask’t too much of senses.
“What else have I to go on?”
What, indeed? Thou art the Danan.
Statement, not question.
“I’m Elora Danan.”
The Danan, yes. Thou hast come.
“I’m here, yes. Tell me, is this the fourth station on the Circle of the Flesh? Are you the firstborn race of elves that have gone wholly beyond the Veil?”
We are Malevoiy.
“In honor and, I hope, friendship, I bid you greeting.” She meant what she said, every word, yet something about the moment, something about the man, wouldn’t allow her to relax her guard.
The shape ghosted a smile, revealing a gleaming flash of predatory teeth that set her heart to pounding.
“I’ve come to ask your help.”
That is known to Us.
“So you’re not as far from the world as people believe.”
We care little for such belief. That We exist is sufficient.
Only it wasn’t, that she saw plain as daylight, and sensed as well that dreams in this realm might not be as tired and lackluster as she had presumed.
Thou art the first to find the way to Us, in an age.
“You use the royal plural, have I the honor of addressing the liege of this Realm?”
We are Malevoiy.
“Is that—”
We are. We were. We shall ever be. Thou art the Danan. Thou dost come before Us as supplicant, beseeching Our aid.
“The Realms are in danger.”
How can the pieces hold fast, without a center to anchor them?
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Ah. And for this boon, what price? Wilt set thy kind, the Daikini, beneath Our yoke, to do with as We will and serve Us as We please, in perpetuity?
She rose, in no way matching the ethereal stillness of the Malevoiy’s movements but with a grace and power uniquely her own.
“That’s the bargain I’d expect from a minor Domain of elves,” she said, sensing that the creature had been serious about his terms, and yet at the same time the whole exchange was a source of considerable amusement.
Such were We, once, though Our Domain was in no way minor.
This, she decided, is going bloody nowhere. In that same thought, she decided to call it quits.
“I thank thee for thy hospitality, dread lord,” she said. “I’ll find my own way home.”
Twelve rings affixed on three, to be bound entire by one, that is the scheme and riddle of things, Da
nan. To thee falls that task of binding, if thou hast heart and skill and daring. To tame the world is nothing, for We have done so. To tame the flesh, the same, for We have done that also. But to transcend, to reach to the Realm of spirit and beyond…
“You’ve done that, too.”
When the world began, We were. When the rock of Creation split asunder to cast forth its multitudes, We were. Much have We seen, much more would We see.
“Then why don’t you?”
There must be a balance. It must be restored. Thou art the key.
“So I gather.”
We hold forth thy destiny, Danan. Wouldst claim it? Wouldst embrace Us?
There was ice throughout her body, in every particle of her being, as though her nerves had just been sluiced down with a bucket from an arctic mountain stream. She didn’t understand how her heart could manage such a beat and not explode from the effort, or how one portion of her being could be so terribly cold while her blood generated such heat that her entire body was sheened with perspiration. She felt stretched, worse than on any rack, each tendon articulated, yet in absolute paradox she had never felt more at one with a place or a moment.
She would die here. She would kill.
It would be good.
Elora descended to the pool and, once again, without the slightest quirk of dislocation found herself climbing an identical set of steps, as if she and her mirror image had instantly exchanged places to continue on their way.
Thorn and Khory and Duguay were waiting.
“Elora Danan,” Thorn called as he reached out to snatch her to clear of the pool and onto the jetty, “what have you done? Thank the blessed you were only gone an instant.”
“It was longer than that, Thorn.”
“Drumheller,” Khory noted, “look at the pool. Your sigil’s changed.”
“A gift,” Elora told them all. “A token. Of…respect. A favor granted, against a future favor in return.” She took a deep breath and was a little surprised to find she didn’t tremble. Quite the opposite, in fact, she felt unnaturally calm. “I’ve met the Malevoiy.”
Duguay, she noted, had no overt reaction to her news.
“You asked their aid?” Thorn demanded of her.
Khory kept her distance, quietly gauging Elora’s stance, as though she alone knew what had been offered and was waiting to learn Elora’s response.
She shook her head. “It assumed I would. It offered me my destiny. I got the impression I was as important to its survival as to the other Realms.”
“Of a Realm, of a circle, all are bound, little Princess.”
She nodded to Khory. “So it said.”
“Was there a reply?” from Thorn.
“It made none. Yet.” She didn’t like the Nelwyn’s tone.
“And his price?”
“If it was serious, the price is too high.”
“We may need that help, Elora, to fight the Deceiver and Greater Faery both.”
She shook her head and let that slightest of movements stir her into a modest pirouette on the ball of one foot.
“All the stories—the tales and the legends used to terrify the children of every known race—they’re all true,” she told them. “The Malevoiy are predators, in the fullest sense of that word. The Wild Hunt we faced tonight, my friends, that’s but the palest echo of what the Malevoiy did. Hard as it may be to see now, in their prime they were the embodiment of passion, driven by a hunger as red and raw as the world they made their home.”
She looked from Khory to Thorn to Duguay, to see in their eyes a pale reflection of the part of her soul the Malevoiy had touched.
“They want those days again,” she said. From Khory, she drew a steady, assessing gaze that carried with it a resonance of what she’d felt from the Malevoiy. Strangely, it reminded Elora of Luc-Jon’s wolfhound, and with a start she realized that she was perceiving a vestige of the woman whose body Khory’s spirit inhabited. Like the wolfhounds, this ancient warrior had been a foe of the Malevoiy, as implacable, as dedicated, as formidable. She had fought them, she had shed their blood and brought an end to lives that otherwise were immortal. And herself been betrayed and murdered for it, by one she loved.
“They want me to bring them to pass,” she said. From Thorn, a sense of shock and horror that was almost physical as the moral center of his being caught up with the moment and he came to realize all that had transpired. So easy, she thought wryly, to mark a set of circles on a tabletop and check off each of the Realms in turn, like running down a shopping list. We imagined physical risks and physical dangers galore, old duffer, we never took the leap, to consider the consequences of our encounters with the Realms of the Spirit. Or the price.
And this is only the gateway! Who knows what we’ll find beyond?
Without warning, Duguay snapped out his hand to catch Elora’s by the wrist and draw her into a pair of sweeping circles.
“This place is death, pet,” he told her. “You don’t belong.”
“Where would you prefer?” she responded with a sultry smile, her manner suddenly a match for his, as though a spark had just been struck to bone-dry tinder.
“Master Faralorn,” snapped Thorn, “release Elora, at once!”
Lazily, with supreme self-confidence, Duguay swung her through a last pirouette and looked over his shoulder toward Thorn with a gesture and expression of studied disrespect.
“You don’t get it, do you, peck?” For the first time he used the insulting diminutive for Nelwyns, and he meant it to hurt. “Malevoiy have no claim on her, nor do you. She’s mine. Always has been, always will. This is destiny.”
He never released his hold on Elora, though the grip was no more than fingertip to fingertip, and continued to guide her through those empty turns, a piece of vacuous choreography meant solely to demonstrate his control of her.
“I lead, she follows, we dance. There’s the end of it.”
“You can’t do this,” Thorn cried out.
“It’s done.”
“Wrong,” she said, the quiet strength of her voice leaving the troubadour suddenly dumbstruck.
They faced each other, unmoving, and then, with a discreet shimmy of the hips and no sense whatsoever of how she accomplished it, Elora’s belt and traveling pouches plopped to the stone. A similar flick of the shoulders divested her of her tartan cloak, leaving her dressed as she’d been for her performance in Kinshire. She flashed a hint of teeth in a predator’s smile that brought an answer in kind from her partner.
“It’s barely begun,” Elora said.
With a snap of the wrist, she spun herself into his arms, her body pressed against his, and it was plain right then and there how much difference half a year had made. When they’d first met, for all her hardiness, she was small and a lot more tentative than she would ever admit. Height had come to her since, and breadth of spirit to match that of her powerful shoulders. She had a swimmer’s build, but her strength was disguised by the sleek and elegant line of her body.
The girl had been no match for him, she took her lead from him.
In Duguay’s arms, she was a woman, who faced him as an equal.
She set the dance and in a twinkling the pair of them had spun down the steps to disappear into the pool.
With a cry of mingled grief and rage the like of which he hadn’t uttered since he beheld the shattered, scarred landscape that had once held the proud fortress of Tir Asleen and more beloved friends than he could easily number, Thorn snatched up belt and pouches and plunged after her, uncaring of risk or destination. Khory followed a quickstep behind, and her sword was ready.
* * *
—
They came too late—the Princess, the Mage, the Demon, the Dancer—to the summit of Creation, the Realm of the Dragons.
In size, the caldera of this ancient mountain dwarfed even the
Wall, and small wonder, considering the bulk and dimensions of the beings who called it home. The four of them emerged from the line of steps to find themselves facing a veritable ocean of soft sand that would have stretched farther than the eye could see were it not for the jagged escarpments that loomed on every side, as though all the world you could see on a normal day was in truth but a minor part of some other world that was unimaginably greater.
In this place of wonder, they beheld desolation.
All was ice. The sand glittered with shiny crystals of frozen water, the rock was coated with hoarfrost, the air so cold each breath seared the lungs. The assault had come so suddenly, so savagely, the dragons had no chance to defend themselves or even to escape. About the four of them loomed the most monstrous statues, the entire community of these great and noble creatures, caught asleep or awake, in moments of relaxation or activity, hurled in that awful instant from vibrant life to frozen oblivion.
Thorn didn’t need to ask who was responsible. This sacred place had been defiled by the same foul enchantment that had claimed Angwyn and destroyed Tir Asleen.
Elora didn’t seem to care.
She was off the rock in a wild leap, Duguay following, the pair of them swirling like dervishes across the trackless miles of sand without a care as to how inappropriate they looked. They danced to music none but they could hear, and while Thorn had to acknowledge the evident passion of their performance, it was as nothing compared with the abyssal cold that had claimed the dragons.
Whatever Duguay had done, whatever choice Elora had made, he had to take a stand.
He called Elora’s name, but the young woman ignored him as she and her partner joyously described apparently random patterns together across the sand.
There was poetry to their motion, for anyone with wit to look and grace to care. She would lead, then yield to him. He would cast her like a spinning blade into the air and use the momentum of the catch to send them off in a totally new direction. She would twist in and out of his grasp with the unbridled sinuosity of an eel.
While Thorn watched, appalled, these two unleashed the fullest measure of passion. They were fast, they were slow, they took pleasure in the abundance of a touch and the total absence of it. In this single dance, they held forth to one another the cherished intimacy of a lifetime together.
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