“Are they effective over far distances?”
“I do not know their maximum range, or if they even have one. Still, do you want to find out while we’re swimming down river or involved in a survival situation with barbarian tribesman?”
“I need to find a way out of here.” Elias balled up his fists. “I need to find the Wandering Isle so I can put things back the way they were.” He sensed a change in Teah’s demeanor, and as he turned his attention to her, it was she who looked away. “You don’t know if they’ll let me leave. You’re not sure if they ever will, even if they determine I’m not a threat.”
“Time magic was outlawed long ago. While no one here knows your true story or where you came from, Mordum may very well be able to read the ether, examine the clues, and come to that conclusion. If the truth comes out, there are many who would see to it that you were never freed for fear that you might create a paradox or corrupt the timeline, despite that Leosis thought we ought to help you.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that the only hope you have is to be rid of the desmene. For that we need to convince the Arbiter that you are innocent of willful wrongdoing.”
“Shiny.”
“Now, tell me your story, before anyone notices you’re missing, so that we can begin preparing your defense.”
Elias closed his eyes. He saw Bryn as she was on her sickbed, grey and clammy, as far away as his father and mother, as Asa. She lay within arm’s length, yet she was out of reach. Talinus had said that he would pay a great price to save her, but was any price too high? Elias supposed before this ended, he would have his answer.
“Someone close to me had been poisoned. It was a slow and withering toxin. She took sick and was not herself. Within a week she was bedridden. When I received word of her malady, I enlisted the help of my sister and a doctor and long-time family friend and we traveled to her. By the time we arrived she was delirious, passing in and out of consciousness. Despite all of our research, and all the medicine and Arcanum we brought to bear, her condition worsened. A week after our arrival she was in a coma and on the brink of death.”
“She was your woman?” Teah asked, her voice soft. To Elias she sounded far away, as he was caught in the web of memories from another world.
“Something like that. I researched any and all magic and medicine that might save her, but found nothing that worked. Eventually I found an old ritual deep in the vaults of Arcalum. It couldn’t save her, but would at least stave off the inevitable. It was a stasis spell that would suspend her, buy us time to find a solution. The magic was foreign, dangerous, my friends said. None of the wizards knew where it came from. They said it must have been planted by our enemies, it was a trap. But I was insistent. I used it, and it worked.”
“What happened next?”
“The days turned into weeks, and still I couldn’t find an antitoxin or lore that would revive her. My friends said that it was time to lift the stasis and let her fight the poison off naturally, or else die. She wouldn’t want to live like this, they said.”
“You disagreed?”
Elias turned from Teah and approached the window. He looked out on the sleeping town, lit only by oil burning street lamps. He decided Bryn would like it here. “No, I knew they were right, but I was certain that I could find a way if given enough time. Still, I had no right to go against her kin’s wishes.”
“So what changed?”
“The night I dispelled the stasis, an old friend of sorts came to me. A Dark Fey, as it were. I didn’t trust him, but he had helped me in the past, and I felt I didn’t have a choice.” Elias paused, waiting for Teah’s incrimination, but when none came he continued. “He said he had access to a power that could save her, and that it would work, but I may not like the price. Unforeseen consequences, he had said. He gave me the Grimoire Infinitum and taught me how to understand the sigils and scripts, how to tap its power.”
When Teah spoke her voice quavered. “The Book of Time?”
“The very same. I read that thing front to back the night he gave it to me, though I didn’t understand the majority of it. He taught me the necessary spellforms, scripts, and the techniques to use them over the next week, as she approached death. The strange thing is, despite all the hours I spent studying it, rewriting the scripts and symbols, working the energy during those sleepless nights, I can’t remember a lick of it now. My memory has grown hazy.”
“You went back in time.”
“Yes. I used a temporal gate, as Talinus called it. I made the gate, using Bryn herself as the focus. I constructed the spell to take me back to moments preceding her poisoning, so that I could stop it from happening. Then I would return back through the gate to my own time and Bryn would be safe.”
“Did you not fear changing the past?”
“I did, but I vowed to change but this one thing, and I would be gating but weeks into the past, what harm could come?”
“What happened in the past?”
“The gate deposited me on the edge of a wood. This wood, as it was in the past. An assassin crouched in trees with an exotic weapon—some kind of reed that he held to his lips.”
“A blow-dart.”
“You know of it?”
“Yes, the reed or pipe contains a small dart, which is propelled by blowing forcefully into one end. The dart is usually poisoned. It is a coward’s weapon employed by many of the barbarian tribes of this day.”
Elias grunted. “I didn’t wait around to find out. I charged him. He sensed my presence, perhaps he heard or felt the gate, but I was on him even as he drew his dagger. We struggled, but I was able to sweep him to the ground, on top of his own blade. Moments later Bryn rode by on her horse.”
“Then what?”
Elias turned from the window and went to Teah. He sat beside her. A blinding, stabbing pain shot through his head in a searing white flash. He pressed a finger between his eyes and it disappeared as suddenly as it had come.
“Wayfarer?”
“That’s all I remember. I began to turn, to return to the gate, but I don’t recall what happened next. The next thing I remember is opening my eyes to find Nyla looking down at me.”
Teah grabbed him by his wrist. “Wayfarer, don’t you see? You’ve created a temporal paradox. You prevented your woman from being poisoned, but in doing so you negated the very reason that would have caused you to go back in time. You altered the timeline. Since she was never poisoned, you never went back in time. That’s why you can’t remember the spells you learned—you never had a reason to open the book, and so you never learned them.”
Elias sank in on himself. “The Grimoire’s magic was supposed to protect me. There was a spell that was supposed to protect me. I think it was called a temporal shield, but I can’t...I can’t seem to remember.”
Teah’s grip tightened. “Wayfarer, you were deceived.”
“That much is evident. The question is why have I ended up here, in this time? If I negated the impetus for my going back in time should I not have phased back home to my present, none the wiser?”
“I don’t know, Wayfarer. I know little of the application of time magic, beyond the philosophical arguments. It is a forbidden art. What I do know is that we must learn the answer, and soon, before your memory erodes further. The key to both our fates, and perhaps those of a great many other souls, if not the stability of both our realms, is at stake.”
Chapter 14
Haven
“Now, you need to create a safe haven, a secret place all your own. Only you can enter this place,” Phinneas said. “It could be a pastoral scene, a deep wood, a mountaintop, a cottage by the sea, a castle. It matters not. What is important is that you feel comfortable there, and safe. Begin by furnishing small details upon which you can build. For example, focus on a single tree. What kind of tree is it? Poplar? Oak? What is the texture of the bark like?”
Danica sat in a cozy armchair in Ogden’s study, but she was unaware of
her surroundings. Blindfolded, she floated in a kind of dark void where the occasional burst of color bloomed before fading away.
Phinneas had called on her early, wearing his exuberant crow’s smile, and told her that her training in the divinatory arts was to begin that very morning while Ogden ran some experiments in Bryn’s room. Bryn, for her part, elected not to join the Archmagus. She said that she needed some exercise, and to that end was going to join Lar and Blackwell in the Whiteshields’ training hall.
When Danica arrived at Ogden’s study, Phinneas sat her down and explained that he was going to begin with trying to teach her how to enter into a light trance. First he said he would make a connection between them, so that he could guide her and pull her back if needed. He said this necessitated the creation of a kind of etheric rope that he would tether to her and use to monitor her trance. As he did this Danica fancied she saw a pale, silver-white ribbon of energy corkscrew from the center of his forehead and affix to her own, but when she blinked it was gone.
The doctor took her through a series of relaxation and visualization exercises. The comforting monotone of his voice lulled her into a deeper, quieter state of mind than she usually enjoyed, but she had difficulty dropping fully into the trance.
She tried to focus on Phinneas’s disembodied voice, but her attention pulsed with the coming and going of colors and she drifted through images of loved ones faces and scenes from the past. She pushed back at the surface thoughts and disenfranchised memories.
“Don’t struggle with the chatter in your mind,” Phinneas said. “Let it move through you. If you don’t engage your thoughts they will dissolve.”
Danica ignored the driftwood in the black of her mind. Instead, she directed her energy toward creating a haven like Phinneas described. As she bent her mind to that end her thoughts were drawn to the forest glade and the circle of stones she had dreamed of during her coma in the Renwood.
She at once found herself standing in the circle of stones, as if she had stepped through an invisible door. The glade was constructed as she had remembered, and as she examined the details, the full memory of the place, which had dulled during the passage of time, came back to her with a pristine clarity. She counted the seven stones. Each stood knee-high and was wide around as a whiskey barrel. She noted the foreign, fluid symbols etched into their faces. The sigils emitted a pale emerald light, and Danica wondered if they had been drawn in a green fire that refused to burn out.
“Danica? Danica, are you still there?”
“Yes, Phinneas,” she said, though she suspected she was not inhabiting the same here as he.
“Your mind went so quiet, I thought you might’ve fallen asleep.”
Danica walked to the pool situated in the center of the circle, which was set within a single wheel of granite and hardly larger around than a birdbath. An exotic script was etched into the stone in which the letters of each word ran together.
“Describe the place you are imagining, I can’t feel your thoughts.”
Danica knelt and peered into the placid, silver water. It didn’t reflect her image, or the canopy of the towering wood. “I think I’m a little beyond imagining.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m in a forest. It’s as real as anything, I suppose. I can’t feel my body in the chair. It feels as if I’m only here.”
“How can that be? I haven’t taught you how to fully construct such a place yet.”
“I’ve been here before, when I was in the coma. I thought it a kind of dream, but I always wondered. The memory faded, and I thought it might have been nothing more than delirium. But here I am again.”
“Are you alone?”
Danica looked around. She opened up her senses. “Yes. Just me.”
Danica wasn’t sure if curiosity or concern heightened the tone of Phinneas’s voice. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “Leave out no detail, however minor.”
Danica described the scene in which she found herself, paying careful attention to the stone circle and the pool. The forest itself was unremarkable, save for the sky—a layered gauze of purple and pink hues unlike any tones found in the natural world.
“Tell me more about the pool.”
“It’s still as death. It looks like a silver-backed mirror, but shows no reflection. I can’t see through the water.” Danica ran a hand inches above its surface, transfixed by the deep well of energy she sensed in its depths. “It seems almost phosphorescent, but not quite.” On a whim, Danica pressed her fingertips into the water. Her fingers tingled with a sensation somewhere between warmth and the static charge from bringing two magnets together. The liquid had a viscous quality, unlike water, but she couldn’t compare it to any liquid she had ever encountered, except blood, perhaps. “It’s warm to the touch, in a way. It’s definitely not water, at least not as we know it.”
“I’m not sure you should be interacting with it,” Phinneas’s voice said, echoing in her mind as if having crossed a vast distance instead of the two feet of physical space between them. Despite the admonishment of his words, she heard the hunger in his voice. “Is it sticky to the touch? Does it leave a residue?”
Danica rubbed her fingers together. “Not in the least.”
“So it’s not etherplasm. Focus your will on it. Try to feed some of your magic into it—but be careful.”
Danica sat back on her haunches and cleared her mind. She felt her focus slide within, but her mind already inhabited a relaxed domain, a peculiar state of detachment, but one in which she retained full awareness and cognition. Indeed, she felt almost hyper-aware, as if her thoughts and sense of self had withdrawn so far that it allowed her to interact with her environment and the energies around her to an exponentially heightened degree. She funneled a trickle of her magic into the pool. The effect was instantaneous. An involuntary gasp escaped her lips.
“What is it?” Phinneas asked, his voice tight. “Are you well?”
“Yes, yes, sorry.”
The exotic, flowing script etched into the granite rim of the pool emitted a sliver light, which bathed her in a tremendous surge of energy that left her hair standing on end. Accompanying the light was a peculiar, reverberating hum, not unlike the effect of a wineglass rung with a spoon but with a deeper tone. Danica described her observations to Phinneas.
“Fascinating,” said Phinneas, “but what is its function? I wonder, could it be a scrying pool? Some myths of the Fey describe such mystical wells being found within fairy circles or fairy mounds.”
A faint memory stirred in the back of Danica’s mind. She had looked into this pool before, and it had shown her things, from far and wide. Could it show her things beyond distance, she wondered? Phinneas had told Bryn that the wizards of old had been able to use scrying mirrors to look as far as the future, or the past.
“Show to me when I healed Elias in the Renwood.”
Without rippling or even the smallest disturbance of the water, an image formed, as fast and spontaneous as a memory, or a dream. She saw herself as she knelt at Elias’s side, the grey pallor of death upon his countenance. A nimbus of green light cocooned them, and standing at Elias’s crown was her mother, haloed in a violet aura edged in white. As real and tangible as anything she had ever seen, there stood the spectre of Edora Duana. “It was real. It all actually happened.”
Danica was aware of Phinneas’s voice, indistinct in the distance. She decided to press her experiments further, but first a more mundane test. “Show to me Lar Fletcher.” At once the image changed, and she saw Lar squared off against Captain Blackwell in the Whiteshields’ training hall. Sweat slicked his hair and poured down his brow and his mouth was pressed into a thin line.
“Now, show me my brother at this very moment.” This time the pool’s transition was not seamless. It reverted back to its original state and its glow intensified. After a few, long-felt beats, the pool showed her a white, almost colorless, energy vortex of flickering mist.
Danica Duana
went cold to her marrow. Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “Take me from this place.”
She opened her eyes and found herself back in Ogden’s chamber. Phinneas knelt before her and had her grasped by both arms, a horrified look on his face. “Be at peace, I am fine,” she said.
“I thought I lost you to...to I don’t know what.”
Danica gave Phinneas a tight smile. “Here now, get up so that I can stand.” The doctor complied, but, as evidenced by his expression, grudgingly. Danica stood and stretched her neck. “I don’t think we need to fear the place I found. I’ve been there before. I think it was created for us, Elias and I, or at least by persons friendly to us.”
“That’s all well and good,” said Phinneas, whose tone and posture suggested he remained unconvinced. “But what is it and where? Based on the connection we maintained, the glade exists within the domain of your mind, achieved through self-hypnosis, but given a pseudo-reality by your magic. Yet, how is that possible, you’ve never learned the art.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Which point?”
Danica looked her mentor in the eye. “Both.”
“Danica, that makes little sense.”
A sardonic laugh escaped Danica’s lips. “Don’t I know it. I believe this place likely exists outside my mind, as I’ve been there before.”
“In your delirium, you say, but is it really the same?”
Danica laughed again, but this time in good humor, if not a tad exasperated. “Quiet now and I’ll tell you!” Phinneas appeared sufficiently chastised and she continued. “It is the same place. Although the memory faded, and seemed unreal after Elias expelled Slade, this was as real as anything I’ve ever known, and being there again seemed so familiar. It awakened memories I had forgotten. I know now that I’ve been there many times before in the past, but I just can’t remember when, or the details of my experiences.”
“I can see you’re convinced,” Phinneas said, “and I trust your intellect as much as anyone I’ve ever known, but I don’t understand how what you say can be true. It defies logic.”
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 12