by Warren Fahy
He looked into her eyes that were like green whirlpools. “How could I not?”
She smiled wider, then, as she climbed the stairs to stand before him. “Tonight you are initiated into a high order, an inner circle. In the last age, many Cirilen won passage here through their mighty deeds. Most Cirilen today have never reached this place. But in the past they became heroes of the world, every one. Your grandfather, Elwyn, was the last Cirilen to walk here. And now his grandson, so young, has crossed into greatness with the rare feat performed on Hala this day!”
“I have only heard rumors of this world,” Trevin said. “Why would my teachers hide it from me if such a thing were true?”
“My lord,” the shimmering woman bowed down at his feet. “Your teachers were afraid of many things. Not least that the greatness of Elwyn had passed to you. And those who told you that the Wynder World was a myth have never been here. This is not a dream! I am real as you can see. You are real. This world is perhaps more real than the other. It is your second life, Trevin. And now, at last, you are seeing fully with your second eyes. All great Cirilen have two lives: one is their dream-life, which for them is twice the waking world. There is nothing you could want that this world and I cannot give you. If it is love or lust you require, I will give you enough to fulfill your wildest fancy the instant it crosses your mind. Nothing shall be denied! This is the reward of greatness, my lord. Indeed—you are the greatest Cirilen in all of Hala, the most potent mage since Arnarus, greater, even, than your grandfather. You shine, my most wonderful lord…”
“Who are you, then?” Trevin asked.
“I am the gift of the Gairanor, the most high council of your ancestors who convene in the nethers of heaven. I am justice. I am your reward. And they have given me to you and unlocked the door of paradise that you have opened. I am to assure you that this second life of pleasure will only grow like a garden with every wonder you allow into the Hala World of mortal men.”
“I wish to speak to the Gairanor!” said Trevin, thrilling as he gripped the crystal arms of his throne.
“I cannot summon them. Nothing can do that.”
“Rise and look at me. What is your name?”
“My name is Zexethia, my most splendid lord.” She rose to her feet and presented herself.
He stared at her form that glistened like cinnabar beneath gold fabric, and he breathed her spiced fragrance. This was real. She was real. More than real. Her eyes and face shone with a luster that mixed art into truth, her lips brush strokes of pleasure. He touched her hand and she squeezed his warmly.
“Yes, lord. Flesh. Sweat!”
He smelled her hand. It smelled of green apples and cinnamon.
“The finest perfume,” she smiled, her slatted eyes now purple as a tropical dusk. “You see now that you never needed her.” She knelt and kissed his hand and he swooned at the touch as though his palm were a tongue and her lips were honey. “She could never understand your power and magnificence,” Zexethia breathed. “How could she know the importance of granting your lightest whim without hesitation? She had no concept of her duty, as a mortal, to kneel down before you and serve you completely, as will I, my lord on high and master most supreme.” She closed her eyes and lay down upon the dais at his feet.
“Neuvia,” he sighed, reminded of her.
Zexethia rose swiftly to her feet. “Behold your Queen now!” She presented Neuvia to him then, for she had been sitting silently on her throne next to him the whole time.
He recoiled. Neuvia seemed craven and small. Her face was pale, her beauty blunted before the spectacle of Zexethia, and Trevin could see an envious gleam in her mean eyes.
“Stand up, Bondairtlen woman!” Zexethia said, and Neuvia rose at her command. Zexethia then pushed her to her knees again and slapped her across the cheek, startling Trevin. “This kitchen wench wishes only to pull down your greatness to wed with mediocrity. She dreads seeing you soar for wishes you bound to the muddy earth by her side.” Zexethia slapped her face again, and Neuvia only sobbed on her knees, accepting Zexethia’s punishment. “She clings to you like guilt weakening your resolve, even as you fight for your very life on Hala. She tries to draw you away from your power to prepare you for your doom. She is your father’s prophecy, my lord.”
As the shining Zexethia shook Neuvia by the shoulders Neuvia’s hair fell down over her face. Blood sparkled on her lip as she averted Trevin’s eyes. He was horrified with incredulity to see her grovel as though guilty of all this golden lioness charged.
“Look on her!” Zexethia cried. “There is nothing she can do that I will not do a thousand times better, rewarding in kind the magnificent deeds of your days with nocturnal splendors equally transcendent. Neuvia is as worthless to you now as I am worthy. You ascend, but she holds your ankle like a weight. Let her go, Lord. Rise!”
Neuvia only bowed her head.
“Let me cut your bonds to that other world’s shrunken limits and set your wild spirit free in both realms, as you deserve, my King!” Zexethia produced a glass dagger from her boot and in a flash pulled Neuvia’s face back by her hair and slipped the crystal point to the hilt in her throat.
Neuvia’s eyes glazed over as Trevin gasped. Part of him was stricken and seemed to die, too, with that sudden stroke.
Zexethia withdrew the dagger before his dumbfounded eyes as a brooch of blood gleamed in the gorge of Neuvia’s neck. She fell and Zexethia pushed her body from the dais with her foot, and it slid limply down the stairs, rolling onto the aisle below.
Zexethia raised the dripping dagger in her hand. “Long live the Queen.”
She tossed the knife away and knelt before Trevin, kissing the palm of his hand.
And he gasped as his hand filled with a venomous pleasure, hearing her whispered words as though his palm were his ear: “Long live the King.”
Neuvia chewed a bite of pear as she read a passage by Queen Conilair about Cirilen husbands, a passage that was addressed to the future Queen of the Tintilisair and so commanded her full attention.
Toy whispered in her ear, “Sleep! The King is in danger!”
Neuvia frowned. “Sleep?”
“The Crimson has left the Scepter. Nothing guards the gate of the King’s dreams. He’s in the Wynder World! The Crimson is there with him! I can speak to the diamond. I can get you in to see the King.”
“How can I sleep? I’m wide-awake, Toy! What danger is the King in?”
“He has followed him through the Cronus Star. You must sleep! I will worm a way for you to follow!”
“But… how?”
“Lie down!”
“I can’t just go to sleep as though going into battle!”
“Yes, you can.”
She lay down on the bed and Toy began coiling, reweaving his braid around her throat. “Close your eyes!” he said into her ear. His slender lengths loosened and tightened, sliding silken around her neck, pressing and releasing the veins in an intricate caress of his complicated knot that sent Neuvia drifting deeper from wakefulness until, with a sigh, she passed from this world.
She stood on a polished stone floor in darkness. She saw a simple wooden chair nearby—and that was all.
She ran past the chair and eventually, through a haze of distance, she somehow saw the ashwood doors of the Lightstone Tower. They seemed quite real, hanging in the unreal nothingness.
She kept running toward them and felt her bare feet on the cold invisible floor. Her heart and lungs heaved as she smelled the ancient breath of the unstirred air. This was more than a dream, Neuvia thought.
She felt a wild energy charge her body as though her every urge was poised on the verge of action. This was more than wakefulness, too.
She pressed her hands on the ancient wooden doors and pushed.
Zexethia smiled as she rubbed oil on Trevin’s feet. “So young and yet so mighty!” she crooned. “What greater deeds will you accomplish? Will you shine like Arnarus, my god? Or blaze like Elwyn? Can your star be
as bright as theirs? I should be immolated by joy if your triumphs were half as bright! Yet I can tell you are twice as great.”
Trevin gripped the throne as he stared at the brazen goddess who soothed, emboldened, and burnished his manhood to ever greater vindication, lifting the burden of doubt while stoking the fire of all his ambitions.
The bronze bolt of the ashwood doors burst into flaming splinters as shards of sky appeared and sun flooded into the throne room.
Zexethia turned on her knees and scowled, squinting at the figure standing in the sunlit arch.
Only then Trevin felt a separate purpose here. Before now, only his will had seemed present, influencing everything, perhaps even the beauty of Zexethia. Another will that was not his own now colored the world with a different palette, and for a moment he felt dread until he recognized Neuvia’s soul.
Haloed in rainbow circlets and shafted sunbeams, Neuvia pointed at Zexethia.
She clutched his arm desperately. “Now is the time, Lord!” Zexethia hissed. “Send her away!”
Neuvia strode down the aisle in her green dress, black tights and leather sandals as her black hair rippled from her brow. Her visage was splendid, terrible, carved by an angry muse and crowned by righteous sunrays. She stepped over the body that had doubled for hers below the dais and it turned to pearly mist as she climbed the stairs.
“Neuvia?” Trevin whispered, and he shook his head, bewildered. “I know not what to believe here!”
“Then let me show you.” Neuvia pulled Zexethia to her feet by her flaxen hair, and, indeed, Neuvia seemed on fire with colors and motion that made Zexethia look gray and weak as a shade. Toy, who appeared iridescent blue with a white belly and sapphire eyes, unraveled from Neuvia’s throat and coiled round her arm, slipping his head over her extended finger as Neuvia pointed at Zexethia’s breast and Toy bit her nipple through the gossamer.
Zexethia’s teeth turned crimson in her mouth as she screamed a curdling agony that shattered in echoes against the walls. All at once life left her body, and she dropped like a charred doll with a loud crack as her flesh peeled away like ashes.
Neuvia kicked her remains from the dais, where they turned to smoke and vanished. “She was a lie, but I am real, even if this place is not!”
He rose. “Neuvia, let me touch you again before you slip away from me!”
She embraced him and he squeezed her against him in his arms. She combed her fingers through his hair as he kissed her eyes. He felt the warmth of her ears and smelled her hair. “Are we all that is real here?” he said. “How did you come to me?”
“I am the Queen of a Cirilen, lord. There are powers that accompany my office.”
Trevin laughed. He held her by her shoulders at arm’s length. “Let me look! I thought I had lost you forever—yet you find your way to me against all odds! Alas, even the Scepter could not guard my heart from you.”
“The Scepter could not, my lord. But something has taken your Scepter and does guard your heart from me and from the whole waking world.”
“What do you mean? Tell me, Neuvia! I have little memory of that place here.”
She sighed in tearful relief. “In Hala the Cronus Star compels you. Do you not know it? It uses your power more and more against you even as your power grows. I am your queen. I never wish you harm. Nor do I believe that you, my husband, could wish mine. I have read Selwyn’s writings. You are the last of the great Cirilen, the last of Hala’s guardians. If you do not guard the entrance to Hala from this Wynder World, wicked nightmares will invade it. Trevin, I have read the histories of your family. You have enemies older than you by ages hatching plots in this Wynder World so they might hide them from the Gairanor. You cannot bring the Scepter here. And here, at least, it cannot sway you.”
He closed his eyes and lost himself in her midnight hair, smelling her beautiful scent that was not perfume. “The other world is a nightmare.”
“Yes, Trevin.” She bit back tears.
“Let us spend this day together then,” he said. “I think I was here when I was a boy, but only when I dreamed. We can go anywhere, Neuvia. Anywhere on the Dimrok or anywhere in the world! Let this be the honeymoon we never had. Let us ride horses across the sea and soar over mountains. And when we go tonight together into the Lightstone Tower, we will kiss long for courage before we sleep lest we wake in that other world alone again. And if it is by my own hand that this door can be opened, surely we will meet again here soon! How can the nightmare of the other world be too high a price for the next dream that we have here together?”
“Our day is night. Our night is day,” she said, dismayed.
“Our sweetest dreams are real! Our bitter fate is but a dream. Come, my wife. Let us be eagles.”
Trevin took her hand, and they were eagles—with feathers painted white and royal blue. And they soared from the dais of the throne over the aisle and glided through the shattered doors, rising on the wind over the Dimrok.
They dipped over the forest as the flowers in the trees pulsed colors, for it seemed a heart of rainbows beat inside the world. The birds were brighter, wilder and wiser. The sea was a vat of colors intermingling. They smelled salt in the air, citrusy and crisp, and felt the golden sun as they wove through breezes, warm and chill. They careened over the Dimrok, learning to fly and loop and pirouette through the air until he pointed at the sea with his wing and they plunged over the beach, hooking over the Eye of Simairon. And there Trevin changed into an orange eel and slipped into the water. She followed and they streamed around each other like silken ribbons in the pool.
At midnight, after making love as eels in the sea and hummingbirds in the forest and mustangs on the beach and tigers in the grass, they went to sleep in fresh linens, wrapped in each other’s arms, and made love as man and woman, their hair entangled on orange pillows of Wynderne silk.
She heard the melody of wind chimes and felt a cotton pillowcase against one cheek, the hot sun on the other.
“You’re awake,” Toy said.
“Oh,” she moaned. As soothing as his whisper was, it startled her sometimes. “Is this… real, now?”
“Yes.”
Stark sunlight spattered the forest in the windows. She rose and stretched her other body—for that is what it seemed like now after feeling her magical body in the dream world. She remembered everything she had done in that world that was made of pure will, where the laws of nature bent to any idea or desire. This world seemed pale, remote, and stubborn by comparison now.
As she sat up, she recalled the limits of gravity and the stricter rules of Hala. She washed and went down to the kitchen to fix some tea. Before long, she could hardly remember the sensation of the Wynderne World, at all. “Talk, Toy,” she said as she sat in the outer dining room with a fresh-brewed pot.
“The Crimson is ancient and very strong,” the serpent said. “Yet even he did not know about Toy. He killed my sisters.”
“He?”
“Yes,” Toy hissed. “Or she. It doesn’t matter.”
“Then the woman?”
“His shape. Or hers.”
“You did not kill the Crimson?”
“Only that shape. If he stayed in Wynder he would have died in that shape. But now he will not let us pass. He dwells in the Cronus Star, not here or there. He will not dare leave it. He’s almost as old as Toy.”
“Can you hunt him, Toy? Can you stop him?”
“He is too much for Toy. Only the King can reckon with him, perhaps.”
“Only the King?” She hung her head.
“But he is too young. The Queen must be with him in the Wynder World. Bend his ear there. Sweeten his heart.”
“How, Toy?”
“Counsel him in that world to caution in this one. We may pass through Gieron’s scepter. Next time.”
“Next time?” Neuvia stroked Toy’s cool curve against her throat.
“Yes!”
Chapter 11
Escape
Trevin
woke and felt a strange and welcome peace. The sun was hot in the lightstone around him. He threw the blankets off and breathed heavily as he looked through the ceiling at the clean blue sky. He felt an exultant bliss in his veins. He had the strongest feeling that he’d had a wonderful dream, though he could not remember it. He half-expected to find Neuvia next to him, but when he reached out, she wasn’t there and he touched the cold scepter instead. The Cronus Star blushed on the sheets and stained the world like a fresh wound again, erasing all hope from his heart.
The weight of truth crashed down and he lay flattened on the bed, desolate as his shame dripped from the walls and ceiling. “Neuvia,” he whispered. “Why couldn’t this be a nightmare so I might wake up beside you each morning with myself innocent and the world fair? But this is the true world. And dreams of you will only add a doubt that could be fatal. Forever missed and missing from my life, you could drive me mad.”
He climbed out of bed and looked out the northern window at the island he had created, which was visible on the horizon through the silver spyglass he had rummaged from one of the rooms below. He seemed to have lost his father’s golden spyglass, which was crafted on Damay, and he regretted it. He focused the inferior instrument and, finally, after his Cirilen eyes corrected the imperfections of its lenses, he saw the smooth black slopes of his new island.
Foam frothed around the mouth of a lagoon facing south. Inside it, the fearsome Gyre now resided. Occasionally, the starfish would swim out to hunt for black nautilus. But it would find the black nautilus much too small to satisfy its hunger. So it would feed on whales and other great sea beasts it could snatch from the sea or corner in its lagoon. And, if the Ameulintians did not heed his warning and ventured too close to the Dimrok, it would leave its harbor to hunt them, instead.
As he looked in vain for a glimpse of the monster, part of his dream came back. He remembered someone telling him there was another world, a winding world or a windy world? Someone said that Elwyn had been there, too…