The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  Across from him, Ara locked the powers in place. The nether was still stirring, but it was heavily subdued. If it were a creature, he'd have thought it was falling asleep. She left it in this state for a minute, then withdrew. The nether awoke, stirring like grass in the wind.

  Drawing on the lesson of the Forest, Dante untethered his thoughts, letting them float wherever they wanted to go. Ara let another minute pass, then froze the shadows again. It made no sense: if she was manipulating the nether, or setting the two forces in opposition to each other such that neither would budge, he should be able to see the work she was doing with the shadows to produce this result.

  She unlocked them once more, letting them pulsate and sway. Acting on impulse, Dante threw himself into the nether, drinking it down, breathing it in, just as he'd let himself get lost in the half-dream of the Forest.

  Ara came for the nether again. Dante popped from the shadows like a seed shooting from a squeezed lemon. A layer of buttery light flashed between himself and the nether.

  Seated on his mat, he looked up. Ara was gazing at him. Not with her usual impatience and irritation, but thoughtfully.

  Each time she released her hold on the nether, Dante immersed himself in it anew. He didn't act further. Not yet. Before he'd learned anything further, Ara called a halt to Freeze and turned them to the third practice of trying to wield the light and shadows despite her efforts, which Dante had named the Struggle.

  Earlier, he'd focused his efforts on holding tight to the nether as she pulled it from them. This time, he plunged into it. During the Freeze, he'd learned to feel her presence as she approached. As Ara arrived, claiming the nether, Dante braced himself, tangling the shadows within himself with those around him. Rather than being squeezed out with a sudden pop, he was slowly pulled from it, like a man drawing a sledge full of firewood up a snowy slope.

  The next time, he not only entwined himself in the nether, but he sent it whirling about himself like hailstones caught in a storm. A handful of motes of light chased after the madly weaving shadows. The whits of nether dropped like dead bees to the ground, stricken from his control, but the effort took Ara twice as long as it ever had before.

  She dropped her hold over the dark and the light. Normally, Dante had taken this time to reflect on what he'd just tried and why it might have failed, but he found himself in a space where his ideas were assembling themselves without conscious work on his part.

  As Ara loomed forward to quash the nether, Dante drew on his own trace, extending it into many tendrils which he enmeshed with the nether around him. He sprayed this mixed nether out into a whirlwind of shadows. Ara's power fell on them like the boom of a closing door, yet the nether, tied to Dante's trace, which even the Odo Sein couldn't lock down, stood full against her assault, its motes dropping by twos and threes rather than in whole flocks.

  Across from him, Ara narrowed her eyes. Her skill swelled larger yet, battering against the maelstrom of nether. Pinpricks of light flickered from within the stormcloud. Rather than the stark silver-white of starlight, their color was the warm yellow glow of a fire.

  Dante's command of the surviving fragments quivered, then shook, then at last fell apart. The nether tumbled to the ground and lay there as if resting. Ara pulled back her power. Dante's heart was beating like it might never slow down, but his mind was clear.

  He bit his lip until he tasted blood. Shadows rose around him like strangers gathering just beyond the light of a campfire. He took up his trace again; part of it had been temporarily spent, but enough remained. He threaded it into the exterior nether once more. As Ara mustered the Odo Sein, Dante reached into the nether within her body. He expected to see it arranging itself against him, but it seemed utterly uninterested in events around it.

  He whipped some of his shadows into an erratic frenzy while splitting others into small pieces and burrowing them into the earth like black worms. Ara rumbled toward them. Next to him, Blays' nether crumbled like he wasn't even trying. Gladdic's wavered but was already starting to collapse on the edges. Dante's black worms held fast to their tunnels while his storming blots swerved and dodged. Beneath Ara's assault, the first of them dropped to the ground, dispersing into the soil.

  A thought sprung fully-formed to Dante's mind. He delved back into the nether in Ara's blood, withdrawing some and leaving the rest, spinning a connection between himself and her that might be comparable to a very crude loon or an excessively weak version of the link he formed between himself and a reanimated rat. Completely uncertain what it would do, or even whether it would do anything at all, he opened the connection.

  The air around him blazed with tiny golden fires, so many and so bright that Dante threw his hands up over his head, rocking back.

  The blots of fire whirled around him like little gobs of liquid sunlight. A few dozen harried Gladdic, with a handful of stragglers remaining around Blays, but the majority were looping around him, a swarm of miniature golden bees.

  He dropped the connection between himself and Ara. The gold motes blinked away, all except for the occasional minute wink that might have been no more than a passing reflection of sunlight. More and more of Dante's shadows withered and dissolved under Ara's onslaught.

  He tried to draw the nether out from her again, but the weight of the Odo Sein was far too heavy for him to push back. He watched as his shadows were dispersed. And he smiled.

  When all was still, Ara turned to him, dark eyebrows lifted at the outer corners. "What exactly are you trying to do?"

  "I didn't try. I did." Dante found that he was shaking. He took a long breath, but it did nothing to help. There was nothing to do but plow on. "You aren't turning the nether against us to wield the Odo Sein. You aren't using the ether, either."

  Speaking the words made him feel as though the world had fallen away from beneath his feet. "You're using a third power. Something none of us has ever seen before."

  9

  They all stared at each other. Ara lifted the weight of the Odo Sein from their shoulders. Dante plucked a thread of nether from her and bound it to himself. A few of the golden flecks spangled the air, but nearly all of them had already vanished.

  Gladdic beetled his brows. "What do you mean that she wields a third power?"

  Dante motioned to the air, although he doubted that any of them could see the specks there. "I mean that there's the nether. There's the ether. And there's whatever the hell the Odo Sein use."

  "That is impossible. That's—"

  "Heresy?"

  "People in your country would be hanged unto death for heresy like this. Yet heresy was not the word on my mind."

  "Then what?"

  "I'm not certain, as I was having a difficult time locating one that matched the depth of my contempt for your intelligence."

  Ara laughed, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes. "By rights, I should let you two argue amongst yourselves to reach a conclusion on your own. But given the exceptional times we live in, I'm going to relax our rules. Dante is right. The Odo Sein doesn't come from ether or nether. It is a third power."

  Gladdic scowled at her. "That cannot be possible. You must be wielding the abilities of the sorcerers the Odo Sein professes to hate, while disguising them under a different name in order to make it palatable to yourselves."

  "You've gone senile, old man. If the truth scares you, you're free to leave."

  "I have studied the ways of sorcery for longer than most people live. I have traveled as widely as a sea captain and read more volumes than a monastery. And I have never heard of any suggestion of a 'third power.'"

  "We like words here, as you can tell. We spend them like they're worthless. But sometimes, words aren't enough."

  Ara gazed into nothing. A point of light winked in the air, no more significant than a speck of dust caught in a beam of light. Then again, there were no beams of sunlight there in the shade of the trees. She lifted her finger, tracing a cryptic symbol before her.

  The air lit
up with a stream of golden light. It flowed more smoothly and cohesively than nether, but didn't shape itself into crisp lines and geometric patterns like ether was prone to do. No one could look away from it, the warm light shining from their faces.

  Gladdic batted at the air. "That proves nothing. I can make the ether any color I please."

  Ara rolled her eyes. "Then quit looking at its color and look at what it is."

  The old man took a hesitant step toward the river of gold, craning his head forward. He whispered under his breath, then fell silent. He stepped back, eyes darting back and forth.

  "You know how to use both the nether and the ether," Dante said. "So go ahead. Try to wield that."

  "I already tried." Gladdic's words caught in his throat. "I could not."

  Ara gave a small shrug, dismissing the golden band. "Too bad. Would have made my job a hell of a lot easier." She tossed her head at Dante. "Well done, incidentally. You're a quick learner."

  "You think that was fast? We've been at this for days."

  "Most trainees take months. I had one dullard who took a year and a half to see it."

  "Someone sat here imagining forests for eighteen months?" Blays said. "When they killed themselves, did you bury the body? Or were you so ashamed of what you'd done that you threw it down a ravine?"

  "Is it that hard to believe it would take so much effort?" Ara said. "Most normal people aren't filthy cheating warlocks."

  Blays started to chuckle, then broke into full-on laughter, pressing his hands to his face. "The two of you run entire religions dedicated to proving which power is superior, nether or ether. And neither of you had so much as a clue that there was a third power. Doesn't that make the last thousand years a little embarrassing!"

  "We are no different from any other priest," Gladdic said. "We are all liars, for none will admit to ourselves that we don't possess the full wisdom of the gods, or else we would have no authority to demand tribute from the peasants."

  Dante peered into the air, searching for hints of the golden light. "What do you call this third substance?"

  "That's pretty obvious," Blays said. "It's gold, right? So we should call it gether."

  "We should absolutely not do that."

  "You're right. Nethold is much better."

  "We already have a word for it." Ara seated herself on her mat, smoothing her robes over her legs. "But that word's for us. You hari trash should come up with your own."

  "I'm still voting for gether," Blays said.

  "Hang on." Dante eyed Ara. "The Voices were so concerned about the loss of Tanarian culture that you almost voted to kill us rather than see it diluted. We should use your word for it."

  She sucked her lower lip between her teeth. "Odo Sein. The Golden Stream."

  "Funny." Blays stroked his chin. "I once knew a fellow named that very thing. But his title referred to his liking to get prostitutes to stand over him and—"

  Dante punched him in the arm. "The Golden Stream it is."

  "That's its formal name," Ara said. "Among ourselves, we usually just refer to it as the stream."

  "All right, the stream. And what exactly can it be used for?"

  "Much less than ether or nether. But it has its uses. You'll learn them in time. Or not, because you are stupid."

  "Do you insult people so often that you don't even know you're doing it? If so, I'd love to bring you to the Gaskan court some time."

  "And maybe I would go, if I could. Or if I knew or cared what Gask was." Ara grew serious. "You shouldn't be worried about what you can do with the stream. You're a long way from being able to wield it. You should be concerned with helping your friends to see it. You'll all progress much faster if you can argue about it together rather than relying on your insight alone."

  "A few days ago, I would have complained that as the teacher, you should be the one to take the lead on that, but I know you'll just tell me to think it through. All right, then. At first, I tried to copy what Volo imagined. This got me precisely nowhere. But when I got lost in a world that was just as deep as hers, but was uniquely my own, that's when I first saw the gold in the air, although I didn't know it at the time. Then when Ara was wielding the Odo Sein, I kept seeing little flashes of it. But I wasn't sure what I was seeing until I used the nether to see what she was seeing."

  Gladdic tipped back his head. "How did you accomplish that?"

  "By drawing on the shadows within her and connecting myself to them."

  The priest grunted. "Ingenious."

  "From what I saw, the stream comes from inspiration. Maybe it is inspiration. Am I right?"

  Ara crossed her arms. "How would I know?"

  "Because you're the only one of us that knew about it until ten minutes ago! Because you do know!"

  "I know what I think is true," she said calmly. "But I might be wrong. If it is inspiration, the following of your own path to sudden knowledge, then won't following your own path to understanding it only make you a stronger wielder of it?"

  "That's an annoyingly tight logical loop." Dante seated himself across from her. The grass smelled good, especially after so long spent in the half-stagnant waters of the swamps. "Assuming the stream is real, and not a misunderstanding—or a bizarre stunt on your part—why doesn't anyone else know about it? If it comes from inspiration or thinking or what have you, why aren't other people seeing it all the time?"

  "Who says they aren't? Who says you haven't seen it before? How has it appeared to you so far?"

  "The first was in my vision. It was like a sunbeam, only more buttery and glittery than normal. After that, it showed up as flecks of golden light."

  "Which might have been sunlight. Or the little spots you see in your eyes all the time. What does the nether look like? Shadows?"

  "More or less."

  "And if nobody knew what the nether was, and someone caught a glimpse of it, just a little shadow, would they instantly jump to the conclusion that it was magic?"

  "Probably not."

  "Not probably not. Absolutely not. Because you'd be crazy to think that. The same reason applies to the stream." Ara motioned to the grove and the bleakness beyond. "Besides, this place makes it easier to perceive. There's more than one reason we founded the Spires here."

  Dante leaned forward, frowning. "This might sound like a silly question, but if knowledge of the stream is so obscure, how do you people even know about it?"

  "Because we invented it."

  "You can't invent sorcery! That's like claiming you invented air."

  "Well, we did. Where do you think your own powers arose from?"

  "The gods."

  "So it was invented—by your gods. Who, by the way, are not the same gods they have on the other side of the world, but who also certainly know about your ether and nether despite their lack of faith in the one true way." Her point was outrageous, but Ara looked pretty satisfied with it. "You get these beliefs from your holy books, don't you? Books so big and thick they could choke a swamp dragon. And what are they filled with? Old, dead ideas. That's why we're not so fond of books."

  "But you agreed that you wanted—"

  "Oh, shut up. Our hand has been forced into needing to use them for now, but if we battle off the White Lich and outlast the Monsoon, maybe we'll destroy them all again. My point is that books stop you from thinking the deeper questions. You should be asking yourself this: how long has this world been here? How long have we been in it?"

  "Over a thousand years, at the very least," Dante said. "I've read histories that run back nearly two thousand years. The Cycle of Arawn is vague on the matter, but two thousand years or so fits with its teachings as well."

  "Well, that feels like a very long time, doesn't it. Two thousand years. But what if it's much longer? What if we've lost the eight thousand—or eight hundred thousand—years of history that came before the tiny sliver we can still remember? In so much time, how many other figures as powerful as the White Lich might have arisen, to eventually be ca
st down in wars so great their memory echoes down in time even as the details are lost? Would they all have been evil? How many of them were neutral or even benevolent figures, and rather than ravaging humanity as the lich would, they helped it grow, until their eventual ascension into other realms? What if the echoes of these titans rang down through history until they become the names of your gods?"

  Dante was stunned. Gladdic looked like he didn't know whether to laugh or strike her.

  Blays whistled. "Now that's heresy!"

  "With that much time to work with," Ara said, "it's not hard to imagine that there was once a mortal individual who was the first to discover the nether. Just like we did with the stream."

  Dante swore. "At least I finally have proof that the gods are merciful, since they're allowing you to go on speaking rather than converting you into a pile of ash in a smoking crater. This line of talk obviously isn't going to go anywhere pleasant, so answer me this: if you invented the Golden Stream, how'd you do it? What's the story of the Odo Sein?"

  Ara shook her head. "Can't say."

  "Oh, come on. You're not about to tell me to just think it through. That might work on a logical problem, but it's not possible to reason your way through history."

  "I'll take a whack at it," Blays said. "Once upon a time, the Odo Sein got exceedingly pissed off at a group of not-Odo Sein, and so great was their anger that they were inspired to invent a totally new way of beating the shit out of their foes. Am I close?"

  Ara's cheek twitched, but there was no holding back her smile. "And Dante thought there was no way to think your way to history. I can't tell you how the stream was invented because that would taint your minds with our understanding of what it is. You need to explore it on your own. If and when you reach the point where you can wield it, I'll tell you what we think we know." She shot upright. "So why don't you get back to work?"