The Shadow Crucible

by T. M. Lakomy

  Mikhail’s reverie was broken by a gathering of falcons, unusual to that region, around his open window. Forsaking the diary momentarily, he went to close the window to prevent the chill from penetrating his spartan room. As he approached the window, a gust of wind blew in and he doubled over in pain, coughing blood mingled with saliva. Groaning, he fell back on his bed, holding his head in his hands and rocking gently.

  “What a figure you are cutting, great Templar amongst men,” came a lilting voice.

  Mikhail’s head snapped up. Antariel was leaning luxuriously against the window, admiring the gathered falcons. His dark hair was unbound and wavy, and his piercing eyes bore into Mikhail.

  “You are dying, as I’m sure you realize,” Antariel remarked. “Surely you are not so obtuse as to disagree with the obvious. But I have come to you with tidings.” Antariel detached himself with fluid grace from the window, and with extended wings magnanimously shielded Mikhail from the cold. His eyes were sparkling and fathomless like the depths of the ocean.

  “You are a liar and twister of minds!” Mikhail roared. “And perhaps also guilty of my plight, for had you not poisoned Estella’s mind against me and wrought the oblivion she dwelt in, she would never have forsaken me.” Mikhail’s will was strong but his strength was failing rapidly. “You have robbed me of love, and her of redemption, all for the sake of your own amorous games. And to what avail? Freak of nature that earth and heaven abhors, you shall never find peace, as you have denied it to me, and thus we both shall perish; me mortally, and you through years of emptiness. And for what end, capricious one?”

  Antariel observed him with a fiery glare in his distant eyes, then laughed mockingly. “Oh do not speak of liars and treacherous ones. I have seen her grow and blossom. It was my hand that shaped her into the instrument of desire that you covet, and the sharp wit that you cherish. Yet she is lost to me too, but only for a season, for I shall always hunt her steps like a hound that is bound to its master. Neither you nor the prince of chaos shall rob me of what’s mine!” Antariel’s grin was unfriendly and humorless.

  Mikhail rose to his feet, fury etched on his wasted features. “Get thee gone, you insolent devil!” he cried out.

  Antariel merely blinked nonchalantly. “The queen will give birth to that nameless fiend, and he will be the ruler of a new age of chaos. He will murder and pursue all those that see the truth, and plunge eternity into hell with all of you in it. Samael will return to earth, and the Son of man will never be born again to see the day. Listen to me, fool, die here, pass through, and in your death there shall be salvation. You will be reincarnated, and as a boy you will see and know all. Defy the craven king, then salvage what’s left of humanity.” He spoke slowly as if addressing someone with a mild mental impediment.

  “Wisdom from the crooked?” Mikhail gritted his teeth. “It’s like demanding eyesight from the blind. The rejects of heaven come to give me advice—what has the world come to?” Mikhail addressed the empty room incredulously, laughing without mirth. None of his nobility lingered in the angry coldness of his stricken soul. “Behold the masterpiece of Estella, who brought me low, stole my heart and mind, and left me to be mocked by my lessers. Behold how the mighty fall when they grasp at something that was not meant for them. I was deceived and cheated of hope, and I pay the price.” Mikhail clapped his hands mockingly.

  Antariel’s face darkened. “You were not worthy of her, Mikhail son of August. I know the innermost secrets of your heart as much as I know hers. You will not speak of her in my presence in such a way, or I’ll rip your broken soul from your body. You loved her in your own miserable way, though it was devoid of wisdom. But you sought to cage her, to break and remold her, and you sought to do it time and time again. To bring her against the iron law of your orders and make of her the icon of the Virgin Mary—or worse, the reformed harlot. All to placate the clamoring of your foolish men! It has been I who stalked your shadow since you arrived here and spared you humiliation from the whip. I lent you strength, my own strength, and have ensured you do not succumb yet to your sicknesses. Tonight there shall be a call to you. Go to it, fulfill the summons, and return with revelation.”

  Antariel turned his back on Mikhail dismissively and glided back to the window, looking out and shielding the wrath in his face. His magnificent opalescent wings cast a light of their own on the arid room, and his proud head bore the night in his gaze. Another man would have been enraptured with such an angelic being occupying their modest abode, but Mikhail was full of weary disinterest.

  “Nothing but pain to be reaped from you all,” he muttered vaguely, and Antariel cast him a pitying glance.

  “To be human is to endure pain; you come into the world through it, and by it you all die.”

  Mikhail went into a frenzy of coughing and gasping for breath, and when he recovered Antariel was gone. Nothing lingered of his presence but a few dispersed feathers here and there, and the clangor of memory pounding against his conscience.

  28

  POSTERITY’S LEGACY

  The human animal’s bonds shake, forever blind to their plight

  Never tasting the shame of their fall nor the failure of their blight

  As a spring that once promised wealth and prosperous growth divine

  Of enlightenment of the mind that as a tarnished lamp does shine

  As stalwart as Mikhail was, he could not help but feel the deep sorrow that welled within him and seek to ease it, directing his thoughts to other purposes. But the illness took over, plunging him into a feverish haze. Salient threads of reason, gossamer thin, were torn in the blizzard of raging hurt and fears, where hopes long gone were dashed against the hard rocks of disappointment.

  A grown man has no time to reminisce over futile failures of youth, nor the childhood dreams that evaporate with the cold steel of reality. But in sickness, the frail doors that hem in the subconscious mind from the conscious engine of thought weaken and leak into each other. As the dam breaks, the result is as fierce as the onslaught of darkness breaking past the gates of dawn. The clash is that of pure chaos, as the primordial energies whose collision created earth, obliterate its essence to engender a newer force. And in the pangs of its annihilation, it gives rise to a new life. Manhood is not so removed that age cannot be peeled back swiftly to infant fears and vulnerabilities, for the lifespan of man is nothing compared to the vast extent of time immortal beings endure, ageless as the matter that formed creation.

  Mikhail swam in that haze, lost within it, certain that death would ride in with its steed of shadow and fate. But neither came—not the grim reaper nor any devil to deliver him to the doors of death. His erring mind remembered his early days when his mother, a stern princess, first taught him pity of all things, the grand stillness in her eyes a reckoning of things that welled inside her. And he remembered his father’s voice, booming into the echoing halls, proclaiming a worthy inheritor to the throne. This was before he had given up everything to join the Templars and serve god. They were both custodians of an ancient legacy. Love he knew not, for it was a passing fancy that never took root within his immovable heart. For his heart was not the seat of his reason, it was given to the Templar’s oath, which brooked no weakness of the flesh or mind.

  When he was thirteen years old, he had once been to a fair during the early autumn months. The memory had stayed with him forever, a single imprint, golden bright amid the grey thoughts that rigidly dictated his heart. His pedagogue was a man of the East whose severe discipline had forged the keen minds of many monarchs, but whose love of fairs and wild animals was the only capriciousness he allowed himself to indulge in. He took the young Mikhail one day from his learning chambers into the crowded, joyous city, excited by the news of a rare traveling band of saltimbanques. They had set up camp on the outskirts of the city, and invited the crowds to come enjoy their talents.

  After meticulously losing his overbearing guardian, Mikhail wandered alone amid the crowds. He walked past tents
where men and women imbibed in honey-colored liquors, slipping into their tents unseen, using the stealth his blade master had taught him at a tender age. They were mundane to his eyes, and he kept moving through the tents, unmindful of his behavior.

  One of the last tents was pitched a slight distance from the others. It was a vivacious dark green with golden hems and a merry flag perched on top. It was roped shut tightly, and a man in a rickety chair watched over it, his hat over his face to shield him from the sun while he napped. Mikhail had crept up on him, seeking to open the tent behind the man, and had nearly been successful, but the hard hand of the man gripped his shoulders and spun him around. The man had the lightest brown eyes Mikhail had ever seen, almost the color of cider. They were reminiscent of a beast’s eyes, and though he adopted a harsh, reprimanding tone, his eyes twinkled with knowing indulgence.

  “You can’t go round here in the saltimbanque company’s tents trying to sneak in, now can you?” he said playfully, still gripping Mikhail’s shoulder firmly. Mikhail, with affronted pride, tried to shove him off, but the man’s grip only tightened.

  “Let go of me, brigand! You are in my father’s kingdom, and he merely suffers your presence here for the sake of the youngsters, not because he favors your frivolity.” Mikhail’s aim was to sting, and he expected to see the creeping hurt emerge in those cider brown eyes. But the man snorted and shrugged, understanding flooding into his strange eyes.

  “Your father is some nobleman here, my son? And whose progeny do I have the honor of meeting?” the man asked, his eyes remaining as placid and serene as ever.

  Mikhail, nonplussed, held his head up high, seeking refuge in authority. “My father is the king himself. Now let go before you are no longer deemed guests in our land.”

  The man raised a brow at the petulant response and gripped Mikhail’s shoulder harder, till it actually began to pain the boy. Marveling at the unassuming man’s strength, Mikhail decided to show off his newly learned combat skills on the saltimbanque. But the more he twisted, and though he brandished a small, sharp knife that could have easily cut the man to ribbons, he could not elicit any response from him. The man had released Mikhail’s arm and made gestures with his bare palms to block every assault from the boy as it came. He was merely defending and deflecting, exerting some pressure here and there, paralyzing the boy’s arm, then releasing him to allow him another attack. He hummed meditatively as he did it, his cider brown eyes impassive and detached, with barely a single superfluous gesture. His humming was grating on Mikhail’s nerves, shattering his mask of indifference. Rage began to well within him at being bested by an unarmed itinerant.

  “You are too hasty with your movements, son. Try harnessing your thoughts into a precise plan of action,” remarked the man, frowning for the first time.

  Mikhail, unused to a stranger’s rebuke, paused to withdraw a second dagger, then renewed his vitriolic attacks, seeking to humble the saltimbanque. The man’s sole reaction was to blink twice and resume his tactic of defense. While sweat poured over Mikhail, he never got close to the man, for the further he tried, the more he realized his misjudgment of the distance between them. Then, adding insult to injury, the man began to prod him each time he caught Mikhail in a vulnerable position, poking an undefended bicep or thigh, and once even poking his heart. Mikhail’s arrogance was beyond wounded. Then came the final blow when the saltimbanque slapped him squarely in the face. Stunned, Mikhail stopped to stare in disbelief at the trouper, who shook his head disapprovingly.

  “Don’t your people pride themselves on their composure and their ability to control their impulses and desires, not letting their whims steer them?” the man asked. “Is that not their source of pride? Stoicism and deprivation, to prove to the world that they are above it? And here you are, a nobleman of the bluest blood, attacking another man like a rabid beast because you wish to trespass on his property.” His scolding was level and calm. This infuriated Mikhail further.

  “You are guests in our kingdom, brigand. You are on my land, and I have a right to know what there is in every corner of it.” Despite his rash words, Mikhail knew deep down that the other man’s words were full of wisdom. Nonetheless, he refused to heed them. The man crossed his arms and looked Mikhail up and down, scowling for the first time.

  “Let me teach you manners that your books of philosophy may have omitted. A man’s house is his kingdom, be it a castle or a shack, a tent pitched in a desert, a cave among the seagulls, or a hole in the ground girt with moss. Decorum and common decency respects the sanctity of a man’s abode, and guests are sacred to all faiths and cultures, wherever they may be, and to violate that decree is to bring bad luck. A guest is inviolate when he is welcomed and he follows the laws of the land, and till now I am innocent.”

  Mikhail stilled to listen, and for the first time he deigned to look more closely at the man’s face. The man did not hold himself with the obsequious pose that lesser men adopted with their betters, nor display the baseness of character that cheaper people wore. He seemed solid and resilient, full of life and its lessons. The sun shone brightly behind him, and in that light he seemed old yet young, and almost noble.

  “Perhaps you were right, but you still had no right to grip me that way. I thought you were about to harm me in some fashion,” Mikhail said in a cold voice, though it was devoid of its usual sting.

  The man cracked a rewarding smile, nodding his head approvingly. “I gripped you because I did not want you to open the tent. It was for your own benefit, not mine.” His words were earnest, and slowly shame began to drift over Mikhail.

  “I do have control over myself,” Mikhail retorted, “and my forbearance has been marked by all, even my pedagogue, who has taught the finest royals born in his time.”

  “Be that as it may, you are still impetuous, full of the arrogance of youth, still unbitten by disappointment. When you are on top of the mountain it is a great view to study the heavens and what lives among its drapes, and you hold yourself alone among a small elect few who are easy to predict. But let me tell you something.” The man crouched down and dug his fingers into the soil, releasing the black mud and cupping it into his hand as if it were some precious gem.

  “From the mountaintop you cannot see the foothills, nor what lies below,” he said. “There in the gloom and shade lingers unknown dangers that do not heed the dictates of the lords of the sky. Always walk with your people, never above them. If they do not love you, the day you stumble and fall low they will shred you apart like ravenous beasts. Then they will consume you, seeing you as something as foreign and distant as the Milky Way.” The man looked up at Mikhail curiously.

  “Forgive me, wise man, for I have been sheltered from knowing many things, having everything at my disposal,” said Mikhail. “But my mother, wisest of all women, taught me much of humility that I have forsaken. And yet she told me that I cannot always be prescient as to where wisdom might be found, for even the miller may know secrets that the dawn has taught him, remunerating him for his labors.”

  The man smiled. “That is true, your mother was wise, then. There is something to learn from everything and everyone, and even the humblest man may have answers, so simple that the great thinkers are too blind to see them in their quest to reach transcendental heights.” His cider brown eyes darted fleetingly to his right, where the bushes were overgrown.

  “Life is a lesson and a trial, for everything is tributary to God’s glory in the end of all things,” prompted Mikhail, cutting across him. The man let the mud fall to the earth, dusting his hands with a grave expression.

  “But wisdom comes at the price of sorrow and pain,” he said, “and not all lessons are worth the knowledge. Some take much from you and give you nothing but the burning scar of loss and regret in return. Beware of those lessons and do not partake of their meal, for they are needless. Not all errors teach, some darken the spirit and rob you of time and youth.” He sighed, his face clouding over. “It takes much to transform
that scar that turned your blood black with regret and bitterness into something redeemable. Think of it as a poison.” Shaking his head, he passed his fingers through his short brown hair, then flashed an innocuous grin.

  Mikhail was frowning. “What kind of saltimbanque are you, and what is your name?” he asked. The man laughed heartily and clapped a hand on Mikhail’s shoulder.

  “I have had many names in different lands, and the name my mother gave me is long gone, caught in those scars I warned you about. But the name that men know me by is Bran. And what kind of saltimbanque am I? The type that wrestles with wild beasts—felines, to be more precise.” He winked as Mikhail’s eyes widened with excitement.

  “That is why they are hidden away! Is it to keep them from being overexcited by the crowds? When will you bring them out?” he asked.

  Bran shrugged, appraising Mikhail and enjoying his raw enthusiasm. “They have been irritated by the journey here. They must first rest and be fed, then I can create my magic over them. Tonight they should be ready, but if you promise the same stealth with which you tried to sneak in,” he added conspiratorially, “you may see them now in my presence.”

  “That is rewarding his impudence! Therefore the lesson you wished to impart upon this young man would have been completely lost.” The heavily accented voice was thick with disdain. It belonged not to the saltimbanque but Mikhail’s pedagogue, Turgen, who emerged from behind a small bush where he had been crouched listening. His dark blue silk robes were ruffled, and he had leaves caught in his wispy hair. His fighting knives were in his hands, curved and cruel, and his dour scowl was directed at Mikhail as sparks ricocheted from his black eyes. He had no doubt been listening to everything, patiently poised in case his aid was needed. But he had left the man the right to educate Mikhail on his shortcomings.