by Ron Collins
You are stronger than I thought you would be, Hezarin whispered.
“Perhaps you could have learned that from Braxidane,” he replied despite himself.
Hezarin wasn’t alive anymore, was she?
He wouldn’t let her residual energy drive him insane.
She may have laughed then, or perhaps it was just the desert wind whipping through his hair.
Garrick sighed and lowered his head. He was tired of everything about planewalkers. Their constant meddling left him angry. No one could be truly free while any of these creatures held sway, and Garrick couldn’t see any way to keep them at bay. He was a marked man, too. It wouldn’t be long before the Lords of Existence would discover what he had done, and when that happened they would not leave him unpunished. There may be more to life than Braxidane’s precious actions and consequences, but he was certain to pay a price for destroying Hezarin regardless of her provocation.
He stood alone in the desert, gazing over the span of sand that he knew held the remains of a city below it.
Arderveer.
He recognized the feel of it.
Had it been nearly a year since he and Darien had made their trip to visit Takril? It seemed forever ago. He remembered Takril as a wild-eyed mage with a gemstone gaze and a bitter odor. He remembered slaves and desert knights. He remembered seeing mages of the two orders actually working together for the first time while in the city’s underground hallways.
He decided on Arderveer because he knew he would be alone here. He wanted to think. He wanted to recover. And he needed time.
In fact, now that he had this moment alone he felt …
He felt the whole of Adruin.
Yes.
Everything. All at once. The sensation was so strong it nearly choked him.
He felt Arderveer, of course. A few people still lived below in the fossilized shell of the city the orders had destroyed. Slaves who knew no other homes kept their places, and a pod of what remained of the desert knights appeared to be thriving. But there were gaps here, open places and caverns amid the city’s destruction where he could retreat and take shelter while he sorted through his life.
This was good.
But he felt more than just Arderveer.
Even across this distance, he could feel the raw pain that still coated Dorfort. He felt its panic and the fear caused by flames that were eating its streets and alleys. The power of this panic brought a deep guilt that made him hate the planewalkers even more. To be able to ease this suffering, yet be forced to flee for fear of the devastation he could cause was debilitating.
And he felt more—he felt people living, and scrounging, and working all across the plane, people taken with cold and fever, people growing strong. People tending bar, embracing, sleeping and dreaming. People in Whitestone, and Farvane. People in the farthest southern reaches.
Hezarin’s life force pulsed, and Garrick heard storms that pounded the Vapor Peaks. He sensed forests to the east as their trees dug roots against the winter, drawing nutrients through the soil and growing their footholds under the surface while—above—their bare branches seemed weak and brittle, and their trunks creaked under the pressures of a raving wind. He felt the moon above, rotating and raising the tide. He rode in ships on the oceans below that moon, their sails filling, their masts screaming against that same winter wind. The sailors were strong and firm against the salted cold, their heartbeats stout and bold. They were the best sailors, Garrick thought, the ones who worked this time of year—hearty and skilled, and able to look nature in the face and still sing their songs of joy despite ice so thick they would later pick it from their beards. He felt the owl that soared above the cliff faces to the south. He felt heat rise from the ground to create glassy waves of current others couldn’t see.
Was this what every planewalker could feel?
No wonder Braxidane could be everywhere at once.
They were talking about you, Hezarin said.
“The Lectodinians?” he replied. He felt the power of that order in sentries who stood on a ridge along the Vapor Peaks.
No.
“I don’t understand.”
Yes, you do. You felt the truth only a moment ago. Try.
And, having now heard that statement put so explicitly, Garrick knew it was true.
He had heard the conversation as he passed through All of Existence. It had been there, so nearby he could have joined in if he had recognized it. But the flow had burned against his face for just that instant, and he had missed it. He was still digesting it all, though. The energy of that conversation was still twisting in his thoughts.
Cut the ties, someone said. Leave all your champions alone … it seemed to come from the hairs that rose on the back of his hand.
It was not until he heard Braxidane’s response (and if I do that?) that he understood what was happening.
“The Lords of Existence are coming,” Garrick said.
That’s right, Hezarin replied. And your lord is giving you away.
“He won’t do that.”
But he felt the truth in the bones of the conversation, and he felt other truths, too. He felt worlds upon worlds, and he felt men and women, people just like himself—champions each, and each tied to Braxidane just as he was. They existed, he thought. These other champions were as close to brothers and sisters as any he could imagine. And at that very moment, Garrick understood Braxidane would indeed give them all up if it meant saving his own skin.
Braxidane’s voice echoed in his mind.
Yes, Agar. We have an agreement.
Inside him, Hezarin purred.
Chapter 5
Braxidane would have had to come to Adruin soon enough, anyway.
For all his bluster, Agar’s negotiations would almost certainly fail, and even if they didn’t Braxidane couldn’t stand to let Agar make a mess of something he had worked so long for. It was annoying, however, that his brother could use the pretense of protecting him to essentially banish him here in Adruin. It was more than annoying. It was embarrassing. Knowing Agar had played him as a dupe was a slap to the face. Such disrespect could not stand.
He thought these things as he dove into the gate that lead to Adruin.
Either the Lords of Existence would catch onto what Agar was doing early, in which case they would deal with him as they would, or Braxidane himself would have to go to Joint Authority to break Agar’s play. Either way, the Lords would eventually come to Braxidane to extract justice for his own aggressions.
And that meant that, regardless of which path the future took, he would have to discard one champion to save the rest.
As Garrick was the least predictable of his mages, the choice was an easy one.
There was, however, a better idea than the one Agar had suggested—rather than destroy the mage outright, he would give Garrick exactly what he had been asking for, then let him flounder with the ramifications. This would at least give Joint Authority a true sense of where the incompetence sat in this arrangement. In addition, it might slow down the progress of Agar’s Lectodinian partners. That possibility alone made the option worth pursuing.
So, however he looked at it, Adruin’s proximity was fortuitous.
Needing a target to focus his arrival on, Braxidane felt for his champion as he flowed through Adruin’s gate. He did not want to arrive directly in Dorfort, so he set himself down far enough away to take stock of the situation. Instead of being near Dorfort, though, Braxidane was surprised to find himself on the southern face of the mountain range that ringed the Desert of Dust.
He gazed out at the dusky horizon, seeing chromatic shades of heat that worked their way through the sands and misted into the atmosphere like dew over a morning swamp.
He wasn’t sure what to make of this, but thought it good news on the whole. Being in Arderveer meant fewer distractions and a simpler extraction. At the same time, it seemed strange that Garrick was not in Dorfort. It said something had happened. Something had ch
anged, and he didn’t know what to prepare for.
It was all very intriguing.
It made him anxious, though he couldn’t really tell why.
Chapter 6
Garrick worked his way into the underground chasms that had once been Arderveer. He descended broken stairways and traversed cracked passages, feeling ghosts of the city flirt with him as he took each step. The caverns were dry and gritty. They reeked of the essence of the people who had lived here. Occasionally, he came across the presence of those who still made their homes in these caves, but he took pains to avoid them and they seemed to be unaware of his existence.
He liked that.
There was comfort in working alone.
He came, eventually, to Takril’s central conjuring room, which he took as his own, sitting on the gem-encrusted throne the insane mage had placed at the center of the chamber. Garrick left the area dark because he liked the sense of isolation it lent. He liked it because the darkness helped him focus on the field of energy that bled out of him now, radiating like heat from the sun. It was sitting in the still of this darkness that gave him to realize that those rays were his senses, that they stretched across the plane and touched everything that lived in ways that were both cold and intimate at the same time. It was this bleeding of energy that let him feel the world as it was. And here in the darkness, he knew something else, too.
It was changing him.
The power had seeped into him. He thought differently now, reacted differently to everything around him. The combination of Braxidane’s curse and Hezarin’s power had made him into something new.
He thought about the planewalkers.
How did they go about their lives? Were they truly immortal? Did they have anything to do beyond toy with each other or play with the rest of the world around them? They were like children, he supposed. Like apprentices who were all grown-up with nowhere to go.
He sat on Takril’s cold throne and let himself relax.
His breathing slowed. His muscled seemed to go numb, and his senses rose.
His mind wandered.
As he sat on the edge of dream his senses warped and he felt more distant connections. He sensed images of things beyond Adruin. Scents. Textures. He lived a moment of Hezarin’s time with Neuma, then a moment of a distant plane. He followed an intense thread of current between the planes, and felt grace in the casual swirls of its eddy pools. An interconnected sense of oneness came over him. The Thousand Worlds were beautiful in their way. The whole of creation was a being in itself, an organism that breathed and thrived together. Damage one, harm the rest.
And, amid this learning, he found a thread, an interesting tie, a new truth about Braxidane.
The planewalker was ubiquitous. His print of power touched everything, everywhere. He had other champions.
Of course he did.
Garrick felt foolish at first. He should have known he was just one of many champions Braxidane would create. For a moment Garrick hated himself for having such hubris to think he might have been somehow special. But the simple fact was that Braxidane was using him, no differently than any other man of power used their subjects. And Braxidane was using the others, too.
He should have deduced that earlier.
His superior had always been an adroit liar.
He stirred from his rest, and opened his eyes in the dark quiet of the chamber.
Yes, he liked this sheltered pocket of air best of all. It was a place he could breathe, a place where he could draw strength from thinking, a place where he could plan.
That it also resembled a node in the middle of Existence did not occur to him.
Eventually, Garrick became aware of Braxidane’s presence as it passed through the dark passages.
He supposed he should have been surprised. Yet he was not.
Garrick followed his struggles from afar as the planewalker progressed over similar paths as Garrick himself had picked through earlier. He did nothing to help his superior.
When Braxidane finally arrived at the throne room, he came forward in the form of a dragonfly, its wings beating phosphorescent rings of color into the pitch darkness of the chamber.
“What do you want?” Garrick said as he cast dim light across the chamber.
“Greetings to you, too,” Braxidane replied as he took the human form Garrick had first seen him in—though he was perhaps taller this time, and thinner. Garrick found Braxidane’s appearance awkward now, more comical than mystical.
When it became obvious Garrick was not responding, Braxidane continued.
“I bring you good news, Garrick.”
Garrick raised a brow. “Tell on.”
“I’ve come to offer you your freedom.”
“Don’t pretend with me, Braxidane. It does not sit well on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know what you’re doing. It won’t work.”
“I am merely here to give you the opportunity to be free of your curse—the very thing you have been pleading for me to do since the day we met.”
“No, Braxidane. You are merely protecting your own arse is what you are merely doing. Unless I miss my mark, you merely intend to go back on your word once again. Rather than lay low to ride out the damage you’ve created, you merely intend to remove whatever trigger you placed inside me, and then hand me to your Joint Authority, thereby attempting to prove to them that you are worthy of continuing to draw breath.”
“That is not true,” Braxidane said.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if I was the only one you were trying to hang. But I’m of the expectation that you intend to provide this same opportunity to all of your champions across all the worlds—though perhaps you might just strip them of their power and hope the council will leave them alive. Of course, that means the others would merely be forced to live the rest of their lives without aid of the powers they’ve built their lives upon, lives that will then likely be short given the demands of the people around them.”
“I would attempt to save them,” Braxidane said, giving up any pretext. “Just as I would save you, if I could.”
“You disgust me,” Garrick said.
Braxidane’s magic rose.
Garrick braced himself and flowed thoughts toward the attack. Everything was so different now, so easy. Their magic clashed, and the chamber rang with an explosion that thrummed so deeply inside his chest that Garrick thought he might be sick.
Braxidane’s next attacks were swift. Multiple slashes of sharp beams, a sickle that flashed past as Garrick deflected it, and a final all-encompassing blast that Garrick dealt with by capturing in a shell of his own energy.
Then everything settled and Braxidane’s heavy breathing was the only sound in the cavern.
“Is that it?” Garrick said.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Braxidane replied.
“How kind of you to leave that to the Lords.”
“It is, isn’t it? Perhaps I’m wrong, though.” Braxidane smirked and stepped forward, readying a fresh barrage. “Perhaps the Lords would be just as happy with a corpse.”
Existence
Agar took his position by edging his node gently toward the gate. He tried to stay between it and Leaxis—the acting Lord Council of Joint Authority—who was most definitely on her way. He did not want Leaxis to destroy the worlds he was so near to controlling. But, accompanied by her entourage, the Lord Council was in no mind to debate procedure.
“Greetings, siblings,” Agar said to the collective as they halted before him.
“Where is Braxidane?” Leaxis replied.
The four others—Lar, Wadanti, Valpu-nof, and Idolfilane—stood beside her, each flaring power into over-bright shells they wove around themselves. Their tendrils trailed in the flow with charges that made it known that Leaxis was to be heard.
“He has been here,” Agar replied. “But that was some time ago.”
“You are aware he has killed.”
“Certainly
I am, Lord Council. But just as certainly you see the truth of the killing. It was not his fault.”
“Tell that to Hezarin.”
“Our sister was not without responsibility in this process. You cannot ignore that.
“Such details do not concern us.”
“And, yet, they should. To destroy Braxidane for this would be to destroy a part of ourselves. Even you must admit that hurting yourself for no good reason is not … prudent.”
“Braxidane is a cancer. He must be removed. This decision is made, Agar, and you would be wise to stay out of our path.”
“If our brother is such a cancer, why is it that, as we speak here in Existence, he is outside, toiling to bring his errant liege to justice?”
Leaxis hesitated.
“I’ll tell you why,” Agar continued. He stiffened his communication now, knowing it would be best to avoid deep inquiry at this time. “He wants to right this wrong. He wants to square events by being the one to bring his own champion to accountability. Which, I might say, sounds more than a little repentant to me.”
Leaxis and her entourage shared considerations, and for a moment Agar thought he might have won the day.
“These things Braxidane is working on should not have to be set right,” Leaxis finally said. “But we understand your position. It is not without merit. We will not destroy Braxidane as first planned. He will, instead, be banished.”
Agar considered one more protest, but the Lord Council’s demeanor was bold enough that he bit back on his words. While Joint Authority was slow and generally lenient toward the musings and conflicts of its constituents, it was also unyieldingly short-tempered when it came to dissent to its decisions.
“I see,” he said. “How can I help you, Lord Council?”
Leaxis’s aura faded to a golden red.
“Where is Braxidane?”
Agar drew on the flow. “He is in Adruin, Lord Council. As best I know, anyway.”
“How convenient,” Leaxis said.
She turned to her entourage.