The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  To them it was a moment of pure abandon. Finally the masks they had worn in the past few months dropped. They exulted in that liberating moment when at last they held nothing back of who they were from the other. In that tender and demanding embrace they met as one more truly than ever before. They kissed oblivious to all but one another.

  In that instant, Cassien did not feel the presence that slithered toward him from a dark corner of the alley. Aria did not feel the subtle pull rising at her center and stretching malicious ties in the most secret corners of her being. So absorbed into one another were they that neither of them noticed the space around them bend out of shape, the walls curving inward without a sound as if punched in by gargantuan, fists. Neither did they notice the debris and junk that littered the ground of the alley shiver silently and then tumble away from them in a rough silent circle.

  Only when Aria was taken by a faint trembling did Cassien open his eyes. Something about her had changed; something that he could not place. Confused, he searched her delicate features for an explanation but they only reflected his puzzlement. He was about to voice his concern when she stiffened. Fear and confusion splashed across her face and she started turning translucent. She riled backward through Cassien’s arms and slowly rose through the air. His name died in her throat as she extended a vanishing arm toward him. He reached for her too, but his hands went through her as if she were made of smoke. Her eyes grew wider and fainter. Her stare, desperately locked into his, mutedly pled for help as she quickly paled into the faded glow of the moonlight. She struggled to reach for him and her stretched fingers brushed against the stone she had clasped around his neck only moments before. They seemed to sink into the stone for the briefest of moments and then she vanished.

  A shout came from behind Aria and through the disappearing shape of his love Cassien saw Master Baccus erupt from between the drapes closing off the alley. When he blinked back to where Aria had been an instant before he stared into empty space. Horror carved deep lines of disbelief in his face as the world around him snapped back into place. The walls lost their abnormal curvature and litter showered in a wide circle around him. Cassien tried to say something, but the nervous tension that engulfed his throat forbade it. Stunned, he looked at his master who was rushing as fast as he could toward him. As the old man approached, he shot a glance over Cassien’s shoulder and waved a dismissive hand in a gesture Cassien did not comprehend.

  “I don’t…” Cassien started to say, “she was here… and then… It’s not…”

  “There is no time!” Master Baccus cut in, a blend of horror and anger contracting his face. “If we are to save her you have to come with me immediately.”

  “I don’t…” Cassien repeated numbly.

  “Now!” the temple runner urged him.

  When Cassien did not move, he grabbed his pupil by the arm and pulled him toward the back of the alley.

  “Follow me quickly,” he ordered. “I might be able to track her, but there is not much time.”

  Master Baccus steered him away from the ruckus of the festival, through back alleys and dark passageways that would lead them to the backside of the Great Temple.

  Cassien felt numb and slow as he tried to wrap his mind around what he had just witnessed. His stare vacant, he mindlessly followed the temple runner, his shock such that No was the only word that came to him, as if the only thing is mind was capable of doing was negate what it did not comprehend.

  They soon emerged from the alley and came into view of the temple. The night sky was cloudless and the white stones of the tall wall glowed in a way that was eerily reminiscent of the accents Aria’s eyes had taken before she vanished.

  At the temple’s sight, Cassien finally snapped out of his stupor. He stopped in his track and the temple runner was jerked to a stop along with him.

  “Aria,” he cried. “She vanished! She disappeared as if she were nothing more than mist. You saw it. You saw it too, didn’t you?”

  Master Baccus turned to him. In the moonlight the wrinkles of his face were shivering shadows and when he looked up at his pupil, all Cassien saw in those lines were defeat and fear.

  “Cassien, my child, I’m afraid your eyes did not betray you,” he said. “Something terrible has happened. I sensed it. I never thought I would experience it again. People I thought long gone have come back; terrible, wicked people. We thought we killed them all, so many years ago, with King Rhegard, before your time. Yet, it was them, the perturbation of the layers do not lie.”

  His eyes flashed a flat light that Cassien could only construe as guilt.

  “There is so much I have kept from all of you. The world is profound and deep in its mysteries, Cassien. What I taught you is so little and what I told others in the past was but a fragment of what I know. I thought I was protecting Alymphia, maybe I was wrong. But now there is no more time.”

  He shook his head and looked down at the ground between them. When he looked back up there was shame on his face; shame and raw determination.

  “It is my fault, all of it. My coming here started it all. But I can do one last thing. I will give you the means to find her. Will you look for Princess Aria?”

  “To the end of the world!” Cassien said.

  The words flew from his lips of their own accord, their weight a tight knot in his throat, and in that instant he knew he had never spoken truer words.

  “Then come. Time is short.”

  They followed a narrow path that snaked along the hillside behind the Great Temple. To their right the hill sloped down in an expanse of thorny bushes and dense brush, and beyond it, alight with bonfires, the city spread into the distance. After a few minutes the path weaved toward the temple and then coursed along the temple’s back wall. Shortly after, Master Baccus stopped and probed the wall with his hands. He seemed to find what he was looking for. He held his right hand onto one of the stones while his left hand kept sweeping against the façade of the wall. It too soon found its mark. The temple runner pushed against the stones and they sank some into the wall. There was a loud click and a six foot panel of wall reluctantly rotated open before them.

  “I have not used this entrance in ages,” the temple runner said tiredly.

  They ventured inside the dark, musty passage, leaving the soft glow of the moonlight behind them. Within a few yards they came upon stairs which led them to a wall where Master Baccus repeated the stone-pushing ritual. Once more a panel of wall creaked open and they walked into the muted light of the meditation room’s torches.

  “I never knew…”

  “Few do. Come this way.”

  They exited the room and hastily walked the familiar corridors. They passed the sculptures of Hethens and Cythra on the walls without paying attention to them, crossed the Hall of Grace and entered the inner sanctum.

  Not being an inductee, Cassien was not allowed in that most sacred of rooms. Even of the Brothers very few ever entered it. It was the temple runner’s place of communion with Hethens.

  A sense of awe, diluted only by the urgency of the situation, dawned onto Cassien as he entered the inner sanctum and found himself in front of a larger than life sculpture of Hethens. It was not the biggest he had ever seen but it exuded an ethereal quality that so strongly contradicted its imposing physicality that the mind’s first reaction was one of confused reverence. The statue’s uncanny similarity to Aria right before she disappeared sent pangs of anguish down Cassien’s torso. He stopped in his tracks, almost expecting the statue to vanish before him. But it did not. It remained where it was, seemingly equally anchored in this world and in another he was not privy to.

  Master Baccus walked over the central dais, past the statue, and into the lightless arcade by the back wall. After a bit Cassien followed him. The temple runner lit the candles on a stone altar. Then he turned to Cassien and sat cross-legged on the bare floor.

  “Sit with me,” he said, pointing at the space before him.

  Cassien sat cross-legg
ed as well, leaving a few feet between them. They had sat in this fashion many times over the years; especially early on, when Master Baccus had patiently taught him how to get to know and then tame the impulses and emotions which in his youth ran through him like wildfire. Although they had not in some time, the simple fact of sitting with his master instilled a degree of calmness in Cassien. It immediately eased some of the tension Aria’s disappearance had tied in his stomach.

  “Cassien,” the temple runner said, a note of sadness in his voice, “I will give you the means to find Princess Aria. It is the least I can do now. I will tie you to the ripples left by her passage through the layers and once I am done, you will know of her location. Not insomuch that you will know where she is, per se, but you will intuit the right path to follow when you find yourself in need of guidance. I wish I had time to tell you more of the underlying principles and the intricate facets of our world. But we are almost out of time. I do not know what will come. But you are a good man, Cassien, with a good heart and a good head.”

  The old man gave him a small smile.

  “Follow yourself, always.”

  He lifted his left hand, bending his fingers in a strange, almost alien fashion. The light around them seemed to recede. The old master took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  “When we are done, you must go at once. Leave Syndjya. I have an inkling that you will be sought after. You are Princess Aria’s only chance, never forget that. Find her and do not rest until you do.”

  Around the inner sanctum the flames shimmered although no draft was to be felt. In the corner of his eyes Cassien thought he saw the candles’ light on the altar take green accents. But when he looked at them they were a normal, pale yellow hue.

  “And do not mind me,” the temple runner continued. “When we are done I will be of another world. Worry not; it is as it should be.”

  “But, master…” Cassien started.

  The old master did another series of gestures, exhaled deeply and appeared to sink onto himself.

  “Whatever you do, follow yourself,” he repeated.

  A faint smile graced his rumpled lips.

  “It has been a privilege seeing you grow up.”

  He paused for an instant and then added:

  “Hethens’s Breath upon you my child. Close your eyes, now, will you?”

  Cassien did and before he got a chance to get used to the quiet twilight of his eyelids, a loud whoosh engulfed him. Not one that he physically heard, but one that rose from the unknown depths of his mind and spun a green thread of energy through the calm recesses of his being. It came and then was gone, leaving him disoriented. Tints of emerald shortly tainted the dark shadows of his vision before fading away. The smell of Aria overwhelmed his senses and for a brief moment it was as if she were by his side. But no sooner had it come into existence than it vanished. Then there was nothing more than darkness, the damp coolness of the inner sanctum, and the regular flow of his breathing. He waited, attentive to the movements of his mind and the sensations of his body. When nothing else arose, he hesitantly opened his eyes. Master Baccus sat before him in perfect immobility. His hands rested rigidly on his knees, his head slumped slightly to one side. Although his features displayed calmness, there was a hollowness to them that scared Cassien. He went to him and knelt by his side. When he placed a hand by his nose, he did not feel the soft caress of his breath. A thin line of blood ran down the side of his head, pearled alongside his jaw and dropped onto his lap.

  “Another world,” Cassien thought sadly.

  His heart heavy, he bowed his head and gave his master’s hand a hard squeeze.

  Today, he had lost the two most important people in his life; both to things he did not understand, things unfair and beyond his control. Emotions he had thought long gone resurfaced. The bitterness they arose in him was so strong that he could taste it in the back of his mouth. An intense feeling of loneliness swelled in his chest. He stood up and turned away from the rigid body of his master.

  “I am alone, again,” he thought as his throat tightened achingly.

  Alone

  He fought the tears that pooled behind his eyes.

  Again

  His shoulders slumped, his fists shook at his side against the pain and injustice of it all. For a moment he felt like the child he had been long ago, parentless, lost and scared; a lonely point of light in a pitiless ocean of darkness.

  Aria and Master Baccus had been his islands, his anchors. How could he face what he had to without them, when the storms of life could so easily swipe him under and drown him? He fought to repress the sobs growing in him. How could he do what he had to do all alone? The inner sanctum seemed to shrink oppressively around him and as his breath became labored and a petrifying hopelessness threatened to topple him, his hand instinctively rose to the stone at his neck, the stone given to him by his love. His fingers touched its smooth surface and that simple gesture steadied him beyond reason. It breathed a renewed sense of strength and purpose in him and chased away his old demons. It told him that he had a place in this world, and that it was by Aria’s side. He would find her, for she was his princess, his love, his home. Cassien turned to the body of his master, joined his hands and bowed deeply.

  “Master,” he whispered, his voice hard with certainty, “I will find her.”

  “I promise.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  The beams are low.

  They angle toward him.

  They are large, blocky things that protrude from the walls.

  The old man finds them oppressive.

  “They’re malicious,” he thinks.

  The window is open. There are sounds coming from the outside. Voices reach him. He should be outside, he thinks. The man he follows is there. He senses his presence. Or does he simply hear his voice?

  The room is small.

  There’s a door.

  It’s small too.

  That would make sense, he thinks.

  There’s a crack running along the beam above him. It’s narrow and long. The pillow is comfortable but the bed is not. The crack is not either. It’s ominous in a distant kind of way. Birds are chirping in the background, behind the voices.

  “He’s anxious,” he thinks.

  He’s not sure why.

  The other voice, the healer’s, that one is… He closes his eyes to pay closer attention.

  “It’s contrived, maybe confused,” he decides.

  He wishes the beams would not be so close.

  There’s a murky taint to his thoughts that he is vaguely aware of. Maybe it’s the beams’ fault. That would make sense, right? Or maybe not.

  He thinks he should be able to turn his head, but he can’t.

  He changes his mind again, it is the beams. They’re heavy on his chest. They run the wrong way. They’re too low. They…

  “We should go,” he suddenly thinks. “We haven’t found it yet. There’s no time for rest. I don’t like it. Those beams…”

  The room is bright, unnaturally bright. Should it not be darker? The world has blanched. It’s not right.

  There’s a sheet covering him; a thick, heavy sheet. It’s rough on his skin. His legs look thin under it. There’s light coming from the window; the way it comes in, it bathes his legs. It’s all so vertical. It’s all running the wrong way. Even the small door feels out of place. It should face him, he thinks. It didn’t use to be like that. It looks different. There are more edges, more contrast to the world. It’s not right.

  He hears his companion’s voice again. He should come get him. They need to go. He should sit up at least. Look out the window maybe. But the beams are wrong. The way they stretch around him. He feels trapped.

  “I’m in a cell!” he realizes.

  He wishes his friend by his side.

  “It’s not my legs,” he thinks. “It’s the shadows of bars at the window.”

  The voices come to him again, from further.

  “It’s a s
trange cell,” he thinks.

  The space feels contrived. He wants to kick the sheet off himself so that he can stand up. But his legs don’t move.

  “They’re bars,” he reminds himself. “Where are my legs?”

  The pillow is comfortable. That’s one good thing, at least.

  He smiles, he thinks.

  “We’ve come a long way.”

  Long like those beams.

  Why did he follow him again?

  “It’s a secret!”

  But it’s not, not really. He had to, that’s all. He was like him, at least a little.

  The green mountains full of clouds and the seas of emerald, they crossed them so many times. The seas, he remembers them clearly. They’re wide, empty, and grand. He smiles to the seas; they smell of his friend.

  His toes move, or maybe it’s the leaves of a branch. It’s all shadow games now.

  There were temples and castles, caves and fishermen. He remembers some of it. It all smells of him. He walked and he followed.

  He smiles again; he thinks. His friend taught him how to smile. It always made him feel better when he did, he thinks.

  The room comes back into focus. The beams are still there.