Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  Spikes of alarm and confusion breasted the torrents of fear inside Rhiannon, and it must have showed on her face because her Darkling twin laughed again.

  “Yes, Naimh and her conspirators weren’t the first Pyski rulers to decide they had no choice but to do what was best for themselves.” Her mirror sneered. “Did you think we came to this plane as benevolent explorers? That’s certainly what I was always led to believe. Another lie. We came as conquerors.”

  Rhiannon shook her head vigorously, unable to give voice to the negation she wanted to scream.

  Lies! He lies. It’s not true.

  Her mirror moved forward, and Rhiannon skipped back, circling away.

  “The native Fae had nothing like the sophistication of their Pyski rivals when it came to battle strategy, and no experience countering the weapons of the Light. The battles were short, grisly affairs. In less than a handful of decades the populations of ‘Darklings’ on planes where the Pyski held sway were decimated, pushed to the fringes, demonized and denigrated. That was when the Pyski myth of righteous service was born, and our histories carefully scrubbed.”

  “It’s . . . a lie,” Rhiannon croaked, weakly, afraid that it wasn’t. “A trick. It has to be. You’re insane. Blinded by Darkness. You want to destroy the Light . . . to unmake everything.” She threw herself at the polluted copy, slashing wildly with her blade.

  The Darkling flowed around the attack easily. “Dark blinded,” Rhiannon’s dark mirror mused, genuinely taken aback. “Ironic that you would use such words. They said that about one of the multitudes inside you, pronounced her corrupted, cut her off from her bond and cast her out into the wilds, alone and half mad. All because she argued for equal treatment of the Darklings in Pyski lands.”

  Something stirred in Rhiannon at those words, something small, fractured, and deeply buried, a whisper of memory that felt . . . true. She wailed and attacked again with an imprecise and rabid flurry of strikes that her enemy slapped aside effortlessly.

  “Who . . . ?” Rhiannon asked, panting with the exertion of her attacks and her continued fight against the Bwgan’s fear charms.

  “You know.”

  Rhiannon shook her head, still gasping for air.

  “They made her, as surely as she made me,” Rhiannon’s shadowy twin said, sliding warily around her. “Remember, remember what you were before. Stop hiding from it, Mistress.”

  “No!” Rhiannon screamed. “Maeve was . . .”

  “Evil?” the Bwgan asked. “Corrupted? Mad? All the curses you laid at my feet. Aye, she was, and who knows better than I? But she wasn’t always, just as I wasn’t always. We are symptoms of the disease. But we are not the disease itself. The Dark Fae, the Spriggan, the Bwgan. The pattern is always the same. The Pyski throw up an enemy and then declare that only they can save everyone from the enemy they made. The Pyski and their zealous righteousness are the real enemy!”

  Rhiannon screamed, and the Twilight Sword struck again and again, weaving in complex patterns of cuts, slashes, cross cuts and stabs. Anger blended with the fear that swirled inside and she lashed out, desperate to do something. Anything.

  The heart of the sword gloried at being loosed in truth. Slowly Rhiannon’s movements grew stronger, her attacks more precise, until her limbs no longer quivered and her stomach no longer threatened to heave up her guts at every turn. She pivoted on her right foot, spun slightly, and struck.

  The Bwgan reacted a blink too slowly and the Twilight Sword’s tip scraped his jaw. Black blood splattered on the floor and the Twilight Sword exulted. A wave of strength and brittle confidence rocketed through Rhiannon, burning away fear like morning fog before the sun. And as the fear burned away, the image of herself as the Bwgan shimmered into nothingness. He was revealed in all of his gangle-limbed monstrosity, crouched and bleeding, warily watching the edge of her blade.

  It’s a lie!” Rhiannon cried, “Admit it!” thrusting the sword at his throat. “Admit it!” There were tears in her eyes and her heart was racing.

  “You know it’s true,” the Bwgan said, looking up at her with that strange eyeless gaze. “You’ve felt it yourself. That single-minded drive to win, the all-encompassing conviction that yours is the only right?” A pale-white hand wiped the black blood from the slash on his jawline. “The predilection for violence?”

  Rhiannon winced. How often had she told herself that she had no choice but to take drastic action? How many times had she justified her course as ‘for the greater good’?

  * * *

  The Bwgan brought himself to his full height carefully, slowly. The worst thing he could do now was provoke her. She was teetering. He could see it. She didn’t want to believe it, but part of her did.

  “Come, see the cost of Pyski stewardship,” he said softly. With a wave of his hand he commanded the Strief and rigid stalks armored with heavy bark groaned and creaked as they shifted away from the true heart of the monstrous growth.

  He heard Rhiannon gasp and turned to face her. Her face was slack with shock and deathly white as she looked into the hollow in the heart of the Strief. The Bwgan held in the mournful sigh he felt rising in his chest and made himself look up from the floor, made himself see what he’d done.

  The Pyski girl muttered something, a bare whisper that he thought might have been, “The old man . . . ?”

  “Meical,” he said softly, and then louder. “Meical O’Broin, the lord of these lands.”

  He felt her gaze on his back and his wide, skeletal shoulders shrugged as though trying to draw away from it.

  “Meical?” she whispered disbelievingly. “The focus boy . . . your charge? What have you done?”

  The horror and disgust in her voice rubbed at the Bwgan like a rasp and he whirled on her.

  “What have I done?” he demanded. He made to move forward but froze as that damnable sword came up between them. “I’ve cared for him, maintained him, protected him after the Court abandoned him, after his family mutilated and shunned him. I remembered my charge!”

  He turned his back on the Pyski and stroked the slack-wrinkled cheek of his boy; as ever, the only response to his presence was a tremble of dread and a long string of drool that leaked from dead lips.

  “After I disappeared,” the Bwgan said, smoothing the wild fringe of gray hair on Meical’s old, liver-spotted skull, “the Court shored up the Glyph Net around these lands and promptly forgot about the Focus who lived here. Their Net was flawed, things of the Dark found their way inside. Without a Guardian . . .”

  “He was helpless,” the Pyski said.

  The Bwgan felt her drawing closer, like an itch between his shoulder blades. It took every ounce of self-control he could muster not to tense or turn. “Aye, helpless. They tortured him day and night,” the Bwgan continued. “Teasing, prodding, whispering. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bare to be alone, and of course his parents didn’t understand—they thought he was sick—and when he tried to explain they thought him mad. They subjected him to the barbarity of human medicine. They bled him, fed him potions and brews of various herbs, and when none of that worked . . .” He paused, swallowing at the very real lump that had formed in his throat before he turned to face Rhiannon. “When that failed, they drove a spike into his skull.” He waved toward the empty-eyed, slack-jawed old husk that was Meical O’Broin now. “They made this of him.”

  The Bwgan tested the air and found the dread pouring off of the cages lagging. He turned away from Meical and the Pyski and stalked toward the closest set of cages. Reaching down inside himself he took hold of his power and stoked the terror in the room. Each of the scores of hapless creatures lined in those cages saw him in the form of their deepest most visceral fear, just as the Pyski woman had, though he sensed that she’d overcome the worst of it somehow or other.

  He ran a finger along the plaited vines that made up one of the cages and grinned a sharky grin as the boy inside, a dark-skinned creature called Hugo, leapt backward with a high scream. The Bwgan turned
back toward the Strief core.

  “NOOOOOO!”

  * * *

  Tears streaked down Rhiannon’s face as she looked at the ragged remains of Meical O’Broin, emaciated, his body punctured by thorny tendrils in a dozen places, his slack face dead save for bright dancing eyes that screamed a tale of torment which the Pyski champion knew she’d never fathom. The story the Bwgan told tore at her guts. The job of the Guardians, their sacred duty, had been to safeguard the Foci. To maintain their wellbeing at all costs. They had failed this one, and in spectacular fashion.

  The Bwgan stopped speaking, but Rhiannon hardly noticed; all of her focus, all of her attention, was held by those eyes, those bright, terribly expressive eyes. She inched forward, and for some reason she moved as quietly as she could, as though not wanting to disturb the man. It was foolish, but it felt right. This place felt like a tomb, and it seemed only right to treat it as one. She didn’t realize she was reaching out until her fingers brushed the thin, dry, paper-like flesh of his cheek.

  “I’m sorry Meical,” she whispered.

  The shard of Strief in her chest hummed, constricting around her organs. The twin powers of Light and Dark fused in her for the first time since the Bwgan’s blast of dread crippled her, though Rhiannon hadn’t reached for either. A minute thread of Power leaked from her, twisting and twining itself into a complex knot. A rough but intricate weave blossomed of its own accord, stretching from the Pyski into the shell of the old man’s shriveled chest, and Rhiannon bit down on a gasp.

  It was him, Meical, manipulating her power, using their connection through the Strief. She looked up at the old man’s face and was met but a sharp gaze of intense concentration. Whatever was happening, he was doing it, and he knew exactly what it was. A cascade of confused images blasted into Rhiannon, drowning out wonder, confusion and fear, blasting away Rhiannon. She saw every second of his long years of agony. Ages filled with dread and loneliness, ages where that sad, broken little boy became a petrified bitter man, and finally a hollowed, tired old man.

  Every nightmare, every degradation swirled before her mind’s eye and Rhiannon fought to keep from sobbing on the man’s behalf. And then Meical showed her the Bwgan. She saw him feeding, drawing Meical’s dread from him with strange courteous care, even as he stoked the boy’s fear with his very presence. She saw the gentle caressing way the monster spoke to his lost friend, and she felt Meical’s conflict. The old man was consumed with dread for the monster that imprisoned him, and disgust at the creature’s scheme, but he was also wracked by sorrow at what had become of the friend he’d loved more than anything in his youth.

  The images flashed by in a blur, and when they slowed again Rhiannon bit down on an exclamation that threatened to burst free. She saw the Bwgan working, plotting, devising his grand scheme. A flash of insight struck her and she understood. Through the connection to Meical, Rhiannon soaked in an understanding of the mechanism of this device she stood inside, but what’s more she understood her real purpose here. She wasn’t a witness, the Bwgan hadn’t brought her here to show her the perfidy of her people, no matter what he thought.

  Looking at the pathetic husk before her it was easy to think of him as no more than a hapless victim, but she understood now that there was much more to this shrivelled, quaking old man.

  While the Bwgan had been feeding off of Meical’s fear for long decades, Meical had been working through that bond as well. He was a Focus after all, an innately powerful practitioner, and for ages he’d worked carefully, patiently nudging, hinting, and cajoling. Year after agonizing year he worked, tended tiny seeds of his own inside his captor’s mind. It wasn’t the Bwgan who’d brought her here. It was Meical. And he’d done it for a single reason. He didn’t want the Pyski to die. Meical knew his old friend’s aims. All of this, everything that had been done, and everything that the Bwgan planned had one aim: A world without the Pyski’s influence, a world where Meical O’Broin, remade and reborn, could have the childhood, the life which he’d been denied. And the old man was horrified by all of it. He didn’t want to be the catalyst of a genocide. So he’d made a plan of his own. He’d engineered her presence here, and he’d done so for one reason. So that she could kill him. Rhiannon was to be his executioner.

  Painfully articulate eyes looked to the side, toward where the Bwgan was fiddling with one of the cages, and then back at Rhiannon.

  Please . . . please hurry.

  The impression didn’t come as words, but she understood nonetheless. If she was going to do it . . .

  Am I? Can I?

  Her sword trembled in her hand as though trying to work the arm of its own accord. CUT! it demanded, and Meical’s eloquent eyes screamed agreement. CUT!

  A swirl of memories all her own washed to the forefront, and Rhiannon saw the path she’d walked to this moment. Hers was a road of hollow convictions painted in blood and pain. So much blood, so much misery, and for what? To defend something that never was? To avenge a people she’d never really known?

  You can make it mean something.

  She didn’t know if the thought was her own or Meical’s. Did it matter? The Focus was at the heart of Bwgan’s device, it hinged around him, stoked by his fear and Power. Without Meical there would be no spell, no great working, no new Sundering. The twilight Sword flashed up between the Pyski Guardian and the human Focus, and both let out a long shuddering breath. Rhiannon stepped forward, braced herself, and pushed, pressing herself into an embrace as the dun blade slid through Meical O’Broin’s breastbone, heart and spine. The blade slid through the rail-thin old man as though he were made of smoke, and buried itself into the heart of the Strief behind. The black tree screamed; the chamber twisted and shook like a wounded beast and Rhiannon clutched the hilt of her sword pressed into Meical’s chest.

  “NOOOOOO!” The Bwgan’s scream shook the chamber. The screams and cries of the trapped Focus children took on a fever pitch as the air charged with a crackling, snapping force and split. A rift in the fabric of the plane tore open, pouring a motley, sickly green light into the room.

  Rhiannon gave none of it any heed. Her eyes were locked on Meical’s, as his were on her.

  “Rest, child,” she heaved in a whispered sob. She kissed his sagging wrinkled cheek, bushed back his thin grey hair and laid her head against his thin chest. Through their bond she felt the boy inside the withered man smile as a thin wavering voice echoed her sentiment back.

  Rest, Guardian.

  IV

  EPILOGUE

  Weave and Woof

  The essence of the Source slammed through the rift in a wave of sickly greenish-yellow ichor and life itself shivered with dread. The Pattern shrieked, writhing like a trapped animal before a flood. Where the raw magic flowed, Reality fractured and twisted; what had been was scoured away, undone, remade.

  The primeval power slammed into the Strief, charging the hateful Focus even as it burned it away. Pure probability raced along the roots and vines of the black tree, outpacing its destruction and spreading out through all of existence. Reality crumpled and flexed. Stars darkened in millions and the void grew brilliant as riots of new galaxies spun into being. History contorted, whole lives flashed by in an instant, while others played out over the span of ages. Whole races, whole worlds ceased to be, and many more lived and died in the flash of a single moment. Still, others blended and changed, becoming something new. Time and distance, direction and orientation, all lost meaning and depth in the frenzy of creation that ripped through the infinite span of totality.

  A frenzy of birth, death, creation and change tore through all that was and all that ever could be, filling it until it seemed as though it must burst, leaving only emptiness.

  And then it stopped. A power so vast that it threatened to sunder everything with the simple weight of its presence simply retreated, drawing away from the new Pattern it had wrought as if it must. As though there were no choice.

  Existence heaved a relieved, mournful sigh
, and set about the work of binding its wounds. On innumerable worlds, those with eyes to see offered prayers of thanksgiving for their continued survival, even as they lamented the destruction and madness of their new reality.

  On the fringes of the Pattern, in the riotous possibility between present and future, something stirred and stretched. Something old before existence was ever born, something discordant and hungry reached out across time, space and probability to lay its hand upon the new Pattern it had helped to form, and where it touched, Reality heaved and shuddered.

  And on diverse worlds in disparate planes, mothers and fathers checked under beds for a threat they didn’t recall but couldn’t fully forget. They made rhymes. They told stories. And they set silver coins beneath pillows as talismans to a protector they hoped was there, a creature of Light, an unseen Guardian.

  THE END.

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