The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  Iyana nearly turned to address the fourth member of their company that Shadow could only see in faint impressions. She now doubted if any of them were truly there—herself included—but the one Iyana had brought with her seemed less so. A strong anchor with which to bind her to her Valley home. Shadow smiled, delighting in the grimace that broke the woman’s face into something a little less serene than what it had been.

  “Fine, then,” Iyana said, turning her attention back to Valour, who waited, expectant. “What do you fear, if not a world of Night Lords and wraiths, Dark Kind and Corrupted?” He was leading her, but Shadow did not read anything sinister in the Sage’s intentions, nor threatening in his bearing. He wanted the girl to arrive at the same truth he had without prodding.

  “I fear what made it so,” Valour said, matter-of-fact. His tone was subdued, and the once-chaotic storm about them had quieted some. “I fear what drives it now.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Not a what, I know now,” Valour said. He parted his shadowy lips to say more, but hesitated. Iyana caught it and twitched her right hand, which hung down by her side. Some signal to her companion. A plea to make ready. Valour shook his head. “I do not lead you astray,” he said. “I do not mince words in an attempt to mislead. No,” he sighed. “I am not afraid of what lies at the heart of the World Apart, nor the mindless legions that make up its bogs, marshes and ashen deserts. I respect the Night Lords on their towering obsidian thrones, but I do not fear them. I fear the one they cast down. I fear the one who let them do it, if only to watch what would become of the world that was His before it was any other’s. One whose eye I drew. Me and mine.”

  It had the sound of a confession to Shadow, but Iyana did not seem satisfied. She fidgeted, looking less by the second like some wise Seer from afar and more like a child bereft of chances and the answers that might grant her more.

  “A Sage?” Iyana asked. “You speak of a great and powerful Sage, who commands the legions of the World Apart.”

  “No,” Valour said. He smiled, and now it didn’t seem so much insulting to Shadow as indulging. “No Sage could rival this one. No Landkist that I know, though they have surprised me before.”

  “You speak of him as if he is—”

  “A god,” Valour said, flat. Shadow had read him when Alistair, Myriel and the rest of those twisted denizens had told him of the Last God in the blue cave. He had not believed them. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps that was why she could not read him, because he did not want it to be true. Because he knew it was. “The Last God.”

  Iyana considered him for a time. Shadow knew little of the customs of the Landkist and their charges the world over. Their warring or peaceful kingdoms and their beliefs. She knew they worshipped the world itself, that those in the deserts prayed to the sun and the sand and called them Father and Mother. She had rarely—if ever—heard them worship gods. That was a term for a long-lost age, when charlatans had paraded silver-threaded books about on the backs of whipped mules. It was not a word for these folk, who had power all their own. It was not a word for those who wished to make their own destinies.

  What gave meaning to some brought despair to others. Such was the way with gods. Shadow had never believed in them, but doubting a thing meant less than little.

  “They told us he was defeated,” Shadow interjected, her impatience remembered. “The Last God. They told us the Night Lords threw him down.”

  “Whatever they did—”

  “If he was defeated once, and by those sorry souls, he can be again.” Shadow didn’t know why she cared either way. Whoever won in a contest between gods, Sages, Landkist and even men, surely she would lose.

  “’They,’” Iyana said, watching Shadow from the corners of her bright eyes, which flickered in time with the unnatural wind. The clouds had begun to close back in. It was darker, now, with the red sun retreating in the west. “You have new companions?” she asked Valour.

  He didn’t answer. Only extended his hand. She did well not to recoil, but Shadow could see the need dripping off her. She thought she could see something else, as well. A faint, glimmering thread that trailed behind her twitching hand. Her skin had gone from moon white to milky, almost translucent. Shadow smiled. This girl was using energy to be here. Using it and borrowing it. She could not linger long.

  “I have no desire to meet these—”

  “Not them,” Valour said, displaying his own halting form of impatience. “One last look into the void. One last look to know I’m right, and that Kole was right before me, albeit for the wrong reasons.”

  “Self-preservation is a more noble pursuit than vengeance, now?” Iyana scoffed.

  “Nothing more true. Nothing more like to make an enemy into a friend.” Valour splayed his dark fingers, fingers that looked much more like his own in this place of shifting mist than they did down below, where there was still so much of T’Alon to him.

  Much to Shadow’s surprise, Iyana reached out without hesitation and grasped Valour by the hand, white intermingling with black and gray. Shadow assumed the two would vanish. Instead, nothing happened for a space of time long or short enough to make her itch. Valour’s bright eyes slid toward her and froze her chest, and then moved to the shimmering, translucent form behind Iyana. Shadow thought she saw the man attempt to step back.

  It was too late. They were soon swept up into the same vision of chaos the Sage pulled Iyana into, and Shadow knew what it was to see the World Apart, and to fear it.

  The clouds swirled underfoot. No. Not the clouds, but the sky itself, and the world below. Shadow felt like retching and would have if she had been more corporeal. She wanted to scream but couldn’t find the voice to. She expected some rip to open. Some tear to herald the presence of that other realm. Instead, there was only the kaleidoscope of blue, white, gray, red and all the other colors of the world rushing by.

  She felt a pull, as if the ground far, far below was trying to bring her back. She worked to tear her gaze from the spinning and saw that Iyana and Valour were standing before her, hands interlocked and facing the other direction. There was nothing solid beneath their feet, and though Shadow was on her hands and knees, she couldn’t feel anything of substance beneath her. To the left of the too-serene pair was the fourth participant in their nightmare. He had gone from milky to starlit. His form was outlined in the brightest light, though it shimmered and shook. Shadow couldn’t make out his features clearly beneath the bright veil he seemed to wear as a shield, but she saw the ears and glowing green eyes that signaled one of the Valley Faey, as Iyana had said.

  His teeth were gritted against the strain, and Shadow struggled to think how strong one must be to endure such a shift in the real from so far away.

  She swallowed, closed her eyes and breathed, steadying her racing heart. When she stood and looked again, the world had stopped rushing by. They were in a void of almost-blackness, standing in the same position as before. The back of Iyana’s silver hair was lit by something behind. Shadow thought it could have been the stars—that they had moved up into the night curtain itself—but when she twisted her head to peer behind, her heart seized as she saw the dizzying sight.

  The world was there. A sheer wall of blue and white with lands beneath. Its continents seemed so small from here, the lands blending between mountain and desert, red and brown. She saw the green lands of Center, which appeared north to her now, though she knew it as west. And to its left, the black encircled cloister that was the southern Valley, and the sweeping deserts the world wore as a cloak, or a place to hide. There was a white ocean at her feet, frozen for untold leagues, and a blue, shimmering one above her head and without the Valley, stretching on past where she could see. She thought it was a singular picture, like a painting on a squared canvas, but as she craned and squinted to see the edges, she saw that they curved out of sight on all sides and in all directions.

 
How much was beyond the seas? How much beyond the red lands where they had defeated the Twins of Whiteash? Did the rotted lands to the south, where she and the Eastern Dark had been bonded in sin and ill company, stretch on forever?

  There was something else. A bright light that stung her eyes. Shadow focused on the void beneath her feet and saw the frozen wastes where their bodies truly were. She thought it was the crystal palace of the Witch at first, but then she followed its glowing path. It was like a silver river, or a spider’s web. It reached across the frozen sea and turned sharply upward, piercing the sky just as they had and shooting into the void in which they stood. It lit them like starlight, though it was colder, and as its tendrils passed below them, they grew darker as they met the fingers of another reaching thread.

  “There.”

  Shadow had never felt true awe before, but as she turned to follow the path of the silvered beam, she thought she knew it. Valour was pointing ahead. The beam continued on, changed, picking up black and red and dark purple, like poisoned blood. At the point of convergence, there was another world. Another canvas stretching beyond their sight.

  This one was black and red. It did not lack the details of the bright blue one behind them, but there was a feeling of sameness to it all. The clouds were gray, the lands beneath full of rivers that gave off little light, leaving them black as the rocks they ran over. The red was the work of the land itself. Shadow thought it might be molten rock at first, but she could not see the rivers of orange fire. It was like a rot on the surface of the World itself, and one she shuddered to look upon.

  “What is it?” Iyana asked.

  Shadow glanced at the Faeykin who had followed her, who was her only link to the lands she had come from. He was flickering like a candle. He looked like he might die, but his features showed no signs of fear. When he looked upon the red and black lands before them, his face hardened.

  “It is the World Apart,” Valour said.

  “I know—”

  “And that,” the Sage ignored her and pointed at the silver thread, “is the sin that will end our own.”

  Iyana pulled her hand away from his and stepped forward, walking across a flat surface of nothing. She looked like something out of a dream—a small woman dressed in traveling clothes, trailing a mane of hair beautiful enough for tales. She paused and turned from the vision to look back at Valour.

  “This is the work of the queen?” she asked. “The Sage of the North?”

  “It is,” Valour said. He spoke carefully.

  “I don’t understand,” Iyana said. She shook her head and followed the trail again. She even reached out, as if she could untangle it.

  “My once-sister in arms has quite lost her mind,” Valour said with a shrug. He sighed as if it pained him, and Shadow could not tell if it was an act or not. “I know you think me guiltiest when it comes to the sins that drew the worlds closer together, and I won’t argue that I had no part, nor even a small one. But when I realized the truth, when I saw the inevitability of the coming clash, I set to preparing.”

  “By attempting to ensnare the Embers.” Iyana said it in a flat monotone. She did not seem to have the anger fresh within her, so caught up was she in the strange moment between worlds.

  “Another argument for another day,” Valour said. “Some of the others agreed on the threat the World Apart presented. Balon Rael was strong and cunning, but also proud. He would not suffer an alliance with me, not after the things we had done to each other over the centuries—”

  “Spare me the history,” Iyana said.

  “A true mercy, that,” Shadow said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, as if it couldn’t find the path to her ears without effort.

  “What has the queen done?” Iyana asked. “Why does she call to the World Apart, draw it closer? And why does it matter if, as you claim, this war was inevitable?”

  “Perhaps I was wrong,” Valour said. “And even if the World Apart came on in full, our own would be spared during the Bright Days. The Dark Months are the work of a natural cycle. Our worlds are close, as you can see. Not in terms of sky and stars, but … in other ways I cannot describe. This world is like our shadow, or we theirs. It could be that we could survive the Dark Months, as you and your Embers have. It could be that, with the right guidance, the right leadership, and the right Landkist most of all, humanity could endure, no matter what happened to us.”

  Shadow did not know what he meant by the last, but guessed it to be the dwindling, warring Sages. He seemed melancholy and tragic, and Shadow hated that she allowed a drop of pity for the twisted beast into her poisoned heart. It was gone soon enough.

  “But now,” Valour continued, “Elanil has called to it. Called to Him, I know now.”

  “Who?” Iyana asked. Her voice quaked, and when she looked at the silver beam again, Shadow felt her fear keenly.

  “The Last God,” Valour said. “That is what my companions call him. He wants something from her, and I would guess it is as simple as it looks.”

  “Go on, then,” Iyana said. She had clenched her fists at her sides and did not turn.

  “Safe passage,” Valour said. “Whoever this man or would-be god is, he has struggled with the denizens of the World Apart. I would guess he has much to do with the Corruption that leaks from the place; that the Dark Kind, Night Lords and Shadow Kings are in some way related to what he wrought—that they are a vision of what our world could be, if she is allowed to live, and if he is allowed to enter.”

  “He’s fleeing, then,” Iyana said. “He’s fleeing powers that got away from him.”

  Now she did turn, and a wry smile crept across her face as she fixed a judging gaze on the Sage. “You two have much in common.”

  Valour did not respond, so Iyana continued.

  “You opened a door you shouldn’t have, yes,” Iyana said, indicating the black-and-red vision of dread behind her. “Well, as you and yours have no doubt learned, perhaps he is about to do the same.” She nodded behind them. “The Landkist are a force unto themselves. We are many. We are strong.”

  “You will all die in the face of this.”

  Iyana swallowed after searching him. The Eastern Dark believed what he said, and Shadow found that—much as she hated the fact—he was rarely wrong in matters of death.

  “Why does she call him?” Iyana asked again.

  “Love, most likely,” Valour said. “Love blinds more completely than hate ever could.”

  Iyana frowned. She seemed to flicker as she did, and she winced in apparent discomfort. Shadow glance back at the Faeykin, who seemed dimmer than he had been.

  “I saw,” Iyana said. Her voice had changed. She began to show the cracks beneath that calm visage. “I saw scars opening across the land. I saw the Lake on fire, and the mountains. I saw Center burning. I saw ash and dust for leagues … and bones.”

  “That can be stopped,” Valour said. He took a cautious step forward and held his hands out. “Together, we can stop it. The Dark Months will persist. They will get worse, perhaps. But we can stop this doom from befalling us completely. Let this Last God, this lord of darkness in all its forms, hurl his beasts from afar, make his rips and rifts when the worlds are closest.”

  “Why not kill him?” Iyana asked.

  Shadow looked at the Sage, curious as to his reaction. She marveled to see the look he had admitted to earlier. A look of fear.

  “You don’t believe we can.”

  “No.”

  “You underestimate—”

  “Iyana,” Valour sounded as if he were pleading, “we cannot defeat something like this. We must—”

  “You want Kole’s power,” Iyana said. Her tone had changed, growing more solid and more flat. She did not trust the Sage. She never would. “You want Linn’s. You want mine, and you want it aimed at one you have considered an enemy for centuries, if n
ot longer. You’ve pulled us into a family dispute.” She spat. It looked strange coming from her, and with a wall of burning world behind her. “The War of Sages is the greatest sin I’ve ever known, and we won’t be caught up in it on the wrong side.” She tossed her head toward the doom curtain behind her. “No matter what may come.”

  “That war is over,” Valour said through gritted teeth. “Iyana, this is the only way we all survive—”

  “A world in which you survive is one me and mine cannot abide,” Iyana said. “I do not believe in forgiveness for all, contrary to the teachings many of my ilk pass on. If you wish to atone for the hell you’ve put us through, I suggest you prepare for this one’s coming.” She pointed at the silver thread. “Maybe he’ll finish you off before Kole does. Maybe you can be our shadowed blade instead of us being your bright one. A tool. Nothing more.”

  “I sought out the World Apart out of fear,” Valour said. “Fear of my own power, and where it came from.”

  “It came from the world,” Iyana said. It seemed to pain her to say it. “Just as ours did.” She looked at Shadow as she said it, and Shadow frowned and cast about. What was the girl suggesting? Shadow’s power was born of darkness and made of it. It was forced upon her, though many others had died in the attempt, as Valour had crafted his weapons for the coming war. A war against his fellows. A war to prevent the last one from ever happening at all, if he was to be believed.

  “Not mine,” Valour said, his tone brooking no argument. “I was not Landkist by our world. I was not chosen.”

  Iyana frowned again.

  Valour seemed shaken. He was saying more than he had intended, but now the floodgates had opened, there was no stopping the deluge.

  “I was chosen by another.” He did not look toward that black-and-red curtain, but the others did, even the Faeykin who was now very dim indeed.