by A. Attanasio
The magus had used his power to rearrange the heaped debris into a lovely, verdant city vaguely shaped as a flat-topped pyramid. If he could have, he would have restored the dead themselves. But his magic lacked that resurgent power. His Charm limited him to manipulating the physical stuff of the Bright Worlds.
Five hundred days earlier, Arwar Odawl had been a floating kingdom. It had cruised above the clouds, traveling among the dominions of Irth, wont to drift wherever trade invited and its ruler, Margrave Keon, commanded. Then came the Dark Lord...
The one road that Reece had built—a monolithic highway—connected the crash site in the jungles of Elvre to Moödrun, the skyport to the north. All imports and pilgrims bound for Arwar Odawl came by that efficient route, for there was no sky bund in the fallen kingdom. Jyoti, heir of slain Keon and margravine of Elvre, forbade dirigibles or flyers of any kind in the airspace above the restored ruins. As the city itself had forsaken its place in the sky, so would all travelers to this realm.
Along the sides of the long highway through the jungle, rest stops had been designed to preserve the gruesome history of the Dark Lord's invasion and the fall of Arwar Odawl. Sculpture gardens offered visitors statues of cacodemons, a safe perspective of the monsters that had ravaged Irth.
For now, little more than a hundred days since the defeat of the Dark Lord and his demons, memories remained vivid, and the gardens and museum galleries had few guests. In time, Reece knew, people would need to see again the reptilian hulks against whose talons and fangs Charm had been useless.
Reece built for the future. He felt responsible for what had happened to Irth when abominations from the Dark Shore had savaged the countryside. Inadvertently, he had left ajar the Door in the Air, the portal to the Dark Shore that the sorcerer Caval had revealed to him. If he had been a more humble man, he would have remained on the Dark Shore and the slaughter of innocents would never have occurred.
Instead, he had come to Irth searching for the lost soul of Lara. And, in his eagerness to find her, he had left the way open for the cacodemons. Lara had vanished—her murdered ghost delivered into the mystery of the Abiding Star.
Reece never found her. He did discover enormous magical strength in the charmful light of the Bright Shore. With that might, he had helped to destroy the evil he had brought with him. Since that triumph, his days belonged to making amends for his fatal trespass.
Oblivious of the Nameless Ones, Reece landscaped the world around him to suit his vision of beauty. He thought his work noble, wholly opposite the brutal magic of the Dark Lord.
At his insistent chant, the barren soil of Kazu's sand rivers bulged into dark mounds and sprouted desert trees thick as artichokes. And by this magic, he stood in the shade of these conjured trees and regarded the stucco cottage where he lived. At his whim, its yellow tile roof turned blue.
A youthful laugh chimed from inside the cottage, and the lithe figure of the margravine appeared in the round doorway. "You're giddy as a child!"
She wore an amulet-vest over a gray bodysuit tucked into cross-strapped boots. Tied in a topknot, her pale hair had been pulled back from a wide, freckled face. "Is that why you live so far from the city, so that you can play fickle games without anyone seeing you?"
They kissed and laughed. During the hundred days that they had been lovers, he had grown young again. The dead in their thousands still haunted him, the ritual dead left to the mercies of the Dark Lord, the blood sacrifices that had frenzied the cacodemons—and yet, when he was with Jyoti, that all seemed a bad dream.
Neither of them believed their love could be wrong. A woman of Irth, a man of the Dark Shore: they saw only their common humanity. Charm and Reece's magic had helped Jyoti with the desolation of her life after the Dark Lord. Of late, she preferred to be with Reece without amulets and free of his splendid power, just the two of them sharing their sorrows and getting to know each other as people from distant shores of humanity.
For his part, Reece had become wholly absorbed in his magic. Later, he would marvel at this foolishness. But at the time, he did not see his power to shape matter by his will as something terrible. This had long been the human dream. Mind over matter. He had attained the paragon of human aspiration.
At his command, the shuddering treetops flared into bloom, clouds scrawled messages, fountains spurted from the desert floor. Even so, he knew he was no god. His memory of the Dark Lord and his own culpability for those many deaths kept him humble. The statue gardens of cacodemons and the atrocity museums actually offered perpetual testimony at the roadside for him—so that he would never forget that his power was anything more than mortal. But he had yet to visit these sites.
Protected by his false modesty and his ignorance, the magus of Elvre dedicated himself to reshaping the face of Irth. He would begin here with Arwar Odawl and repair the damage that the cacodemons had inflicted on the dominions. It would take the remainder of his life to accomplish. After a hundred days of hard work, he was only a fraction of the way to restoring the fallen kingdom.
Magic exhausted him. The bulky trees he had sprouted along the sand rivers drained his strength for the moment and left him feeling torpid. He lay with Jyoti in a hammock on the patio of his cottage and confided in her, "I will never atone for the evil I've visited upon Irth."
She poked him sternly between the ribs. "Don’t blame yourself, Reece, for what you didn’t know. 'Does the stream own its water?' Time carries us and our mourning."
"Quoting again from the Gibbet Scrolls," Reece acknowledged. His arm tightened about her tenderly. "Is that how you overcame your grief—for your father, your brood?"
She turned in his embrace and lifted her head so that her brindled hair tented his face. "I haven't overcome my grief. But the Gibbet Scrolls have kept my grief from overcoming me."
He offered a frown. "You think my grief is mastering me?"
"Clearly." A kindly smile rayed across her freckles.
"Really?" Concern pinched the velvet space between his eyebrows. "I've tried so hard to be creative, to renew what was ruined..."
Jyoti laid her head on his chest and listened to the heart's ancient music. "That's how grief is using you, Reece. You never stop. Since you killed the Dark Lord, you've given all of yourself to trying to heal what he wounded. You lived for weeks in the jungle building the highway to Moödrun."
"Arwar Odawl needed a connection with the other dominions, to bring in supplies. It would take too long to use magic to make everything..."
"I'm not disputing that, silly." She nuzzled against his shoulder. "I just thought you'd rest after you finished the highway. Then you launched right into transforming the ruins of my city into our vision of the fallen kingdom."
"I would have rebuilt it exactly as it was before, for you, Jyo..."
Without looking at him, her fingers found his mouth and silenced him. "And you were caring enough to hear me when I told you then we must not go back. This is a new era. Entirely new. The terror of the cacodemons has unified the dominions more tightly than ever. And now, with your magic, an epoch of peace and prosperity can begin. This is the only way to honor those who died. My brood."
He kissed her fingertips. "Are we fools to believe this is possible?"
"If we live for nothing else—then, yes we are fools." Her sigh concentrated her frustration. "We are small. And fragile."
Reece nodded. "We are not gods. I've been reminding myself of that since we won our freedom."
"And yet—here you are creating trees out of sand!" She pushed upright and sat over him.
Unlike the Dark Lord, he did not use his magic to alter his appearance, and she could plainly see his fatigue: the inflamed capillaries in his flinty eyes and the gaunt hollows of his cheeks. "Look at you. You're completely exhausted."
He sat up on his elbows. "I'm just doing what has to be done."
"Like sprouting giant trees here in Kazu," she said, canting her head with skepticism.
"The skyline needed so
me green." He shrugged. "And there's a convenient aquifer not too far down."
"No, Reece. I know why you spent yourself to put these trees here." She stared past the fat trees and blue-tiled cottage with its upturned eaves and read the winding dry creek bed that furled among the hills. "It was on this granite bluff that my brother Poch and I were camping when the horror began. From here, we watched the city fall."
He shook his head, and his hair fell into his eyes. "That landscape is gone now, Jyo—like the water in the stream. It's moved on."
"You reshaped this land to purge it of that painful memory." She touched the back of her hand to his whiskery cheek. "It's a beautiful detail, and I can't deny that it helps. A beautiful detail. But you're draining yourself. If you're not careful, you're going to need amulets to keep from drifting off on the night tide."
"It's a new era, just as you say," he replied earnestly. "I want to give the future everything that I can."
"Hush now." She gently pushed him back so that he stared up through the blossom arbor at the cloud drift and floating hawks. "No more magic for a while. Just rest. Here in my arms, rest."
His sandy eyebrows bent wearily. "There is so much to do."
"We will do it all," she assured him, and closed his eyes with a pass of her hand.
"Mirdath—" he muttered. "The city under the falls was five times as large as Arwar. How will I ever draw enough magic to rebuild that? And Floating Stone—and Dorzen—"
"Be still now." From a pocket of her amulet-vest, she removed a theriacal opal and pressed it against his brow. He sighed at the touch of Charm and slipped into sleep.
Reece dreamed, and the city of his dream rose in steel-and-glass towers on the eastern banks of a spacious natural harbor. Darwin, the tropical port city where he had lived on the Dark Shore. His immediate forefathers had been among the founders of this settlement in the previous century, the entrepreneurs of Palmerston, who had made large fortunes in the Northern Territory.
In his dreams, the magus relived his memories of life in Darwin, where he had grown up and first learned magic. On his own at first, in the library stacks, he had read about the torn wedding veil of creation, the Big Bang of science, the Fall of legend, when light plunged into darkness, and consciousness mired itself in matter. If the books were to be believed, then mind and light were one, awareness partook of light's legacy of infinity, its origin in compact dimensions of immeasurable energy.
Reece became a lightworker at an early age and taught himself how to collect light in the niches of his body. He began simply, with breathing intonations and visualizations that pooled energy in his bones and organs. He studied with others who had collected enough light that they could circulate it not only inside their bodies but among themselves.
A lifetime of memories from the Dark Shore filled his dreams on Irth. He had trained with many masters, and all of them met him again in the dreamtime, the ancestral range where birdsong lifts the forests’ soul to the clouds, where clouds are gems polished by the wind to receive and hold light, and where night spreads black feathers and stars white quills.
Among the masters who met him in the dreamtime, the one he feared the most was Caval, the wizard from Irth who had lured him into the fern forests of the Snow Range on the large wilderness island northeast of Darwin. He traveled as an ethnologist, but he had been called there by an entity from a brighter order of reality.
In his dreams of Caval, Reece most often relived the death of their witch Lara. He returned to the sleek waters of the river where her soul had melted away—or so he had thought at the time. Caval had retrieved it downstream and carried it with him across the Gulf back to the Bright Worlds, the luminous reality of the Abiding Star...
Asleep in the hammock, Reece dreamed that he stood in the river and could not budge. The vacancies of Lara's soul held him there—vacancies filled with dark music that spoke of her. The stream lapped at his legs, urging him to walk along with it. He would not budge. He wanted to stay there listening to the floating echoes of her last cries.
And then, she appeared before him on the riverbank—Lara. Her face looked torn, as it had been in real life. But she stood as only this nightmare would allow, gory arms outstretched for him, face slashed open to reveal bone, and her nosehole a foam of blood bubbles...
Reece woke with a start.
"A dream," Jyoti consoled him before slipping out of the hammock.
"That's the problem." He sat up sequined with sweat. "I don't dream on Irth. I've never dreamt here before. I—I remember. That's all."
"So—what does this mean?" Jyoti brushed the sweaty hair from his furrowed brow. "I think it means you're depleted. You've used up so much of your magic that you are sleeping deeply enough to dream."
Reece agreed with her and promised to use no magic at all for the next few days. She had to leave at once to attend a city board meeting followed by a series of neighborhood conferences, and she promised to return later in the day. After softly admonishing him again for living so far from the city, she kissed him farewell, and flew off in her personal airfoil. Alone in the cottage, he returned to the hammock and stared at it.
"A dream—" he wondered aloud "—or not?" Perhaps she calls me—from the Abiding Star.
Sitting in a cane chair on the patio, the magus closed his eyes and strove to quiet himself to the dream level where he had met Lara's mangled wraith.
"Reece—beware!"
Reece jolted so violently to hear Lara's voice that he nearly toppled from the chair. "Lara!"
Silence heightened the thudding of his heart. He breathed to calm himself and sat still, this time with his gray eyes open and staring. He watched the afternoon light darken among the bulky trees. Evening's red knife cut day from night before he heard her again, softer, far, far away: "Reece—beware the Shadow Eater."
The fiery constellations of Irth rose like silent screams, and he sat listening for more. There was no more. Lara, illusion or telepathic cry, had withdrawn.
Reece paced the patio. Days would pass before his strength returned to work magic strong enough that he could listen deeper. Is it possible she has left the Abiding Star? he asked himself. Can that be?
"And why?" he went on aloud, feeling stupid with fatigue, wishing he had not drained all his magic but had left enough for the strong eye that could see from where Lara called—if she was calling.
The Shadow Eater—The name made him think of the Abiding Star, the first sun, devourer of shadows—but also the maker of shadows.
Reece slipped back into the hammock and pondered this until sleep found him again.
On the dreambank of the river, Lara waited. Her face had healed. She wore a cassock with the hood drawn back and her black hair flowing over her shoulders, aboriginal features stern with alarm. "Flee the Shadow Eater!"
"Who?" Reece called to her from where he stood in the satiny river. The soft current slipped around him. "Who is the Shadow Eater?"
But she had disappeared. And in her place, the weedy moonlit space of the dream offered her soul's dark music.
To the Ether Ship
Asofel shambled through the somber avenues of the swamp forest. Tremulous as a shaken bough, he dared not remain still for fear that he would dislodge his physical form—and he did not know what would happen then.
He wondered if he would wake from his mistress' dream and find himself again at his post at the bridge-gate above World's End. Or perhaps he would simply die and become nothing. That fate seemed most appealing as he suffered to keep walking through the forest that surrounded them, his fleshly body aching.
"I need light," he mumbled.
Old Ric, who ambled beside him, feather-light and painless within the Charm from the Necklace of Souls, pointed past hanging air plants and lianas to another corridor among the enormous tree trunks. "We go that way."
Asofel changed his direction to comply. His ponderous footfalls sank heavily into the soft ground. The dark compost of rotted leaves gave off a dense,
bitter smell. "I need the light of the dream."
Broydo, who had lagged several paces, hurried closer to hear what Asofel mumbled. "He's too weak to climb down the Wall of the World," the elf observed. Dismayed as he was at this cruel entity who had devoured an entire clan of elves, he knew that Asofel alone could save the worlds.
The skeletal body of the Radiant One looked as if about to collapse, and Broydo considered giving him the serpent sword to use as a crutch. The furtive shadows around them dissuaded him. Though daylight slashed through the trees, he feared the dwarves he knew hid in the swamp, sleeping, waiting for night.
"Be strong, Asofel," Old Ric encouraged. "Our lady has granted me the sense of our goal. I can feel our way to the shadow thing."
"I need light ..." Asofel staggered onward in zombie rhythm, mumbling.
"There will be no more taking of lives—" Old Ric insisted in a stern tone.
"I need the light of the dream ..." The Radiant One looked to neither side and kept his heavy gaze on the mulch underfoot.
"He must eat, gnome." Broydo bent over and peered into the Radiant One's haggard face with its sharp angles of bone. "He suffers."
Old Ric shot a harsh look at the elf. "Are you volunteering yourself as food?"
"Me?" Broydo flinched. "Not me. I have been commanded by my clan to accompany you."
"Then whose lives shall we sacrifice to the Radiant One, elf-counselor?" Old Ric asked with an annoyed scowl. "Shall we seek out other villages of elves?"
"Why can he not eat plants and animals as we do?"
Old Ric regarded his companion with incredulity. "He is not as we are."
"And if he dies?" the elf inquired. "You have the sense to find the shadow thing, but do you have the strength to drive him back to the Dark Shore?"
"I will not kill innocents." Old Ric's heavy eyebrows frowned so tightly they touched. "And you would, Broydo?"
"No, no, gnome, you mistake me." Broydo shook his head vigorously. "It is obvious that the Radiant One needs food—but I would prefer he devour the shadows of dwarves."