AMETHYST 5.1: THE WINTER DOOR
“We hereby abandon the search for Bookwyrm and Bladesedge. Yes, I’ll admit it openly to you all, to crier and news-writer alike: even I can’t find them. Yes, maybe they’re dead. I can only pray that they stand here with us again one day, champions and brothers-in-arms just as they were. And, let’s be honest – I’m no good at praying.”
– from ‘Memories of Everseer’, collected 996 NE
I had to admit, I was getting a bit greedy. Em was casting me the odd glance every now and then, as if she were feeling worried behind her mask – worried enough that she was able to pull her gaze from her surroundings. Even here, under the dusky, pinkish light bleeding through the dark grey clouds; here, in the glowing, pear-scented mists.
Zel, on the other hand, barely batted an eyelid. With few words she guided us from still, silent meres to glades full of giggling, possibly-drunk demi-toads, from meadows of sky-high flowers to great edifices of ancient stone. It was almost like she understood we were, at least to a certain degree, on a date, and didn’t want to ruin it with her running commentary. Perhaps I owed her a few more discretion points.
Or perhaps she was merely keeping her nose out of it for her own reasons. She wanted me to increase my power, the versatility of my retinue, almost as much as I did. But she definitely found the practise of binding free creatures to one’s will far less unsavoury than I did.
Either way, I was happy. For its size, her nose was surprisingly obstructive.
When I picked up a unicorn, Em quickly came around, suddenly less bothered by my hoarding of entities. The unicorn’s name was Gilaela. Gilaela wasn’t exactly thrilled to meet me – be enslaved by me – but she seemed to catch on pretty fast that there were worse sorcerers out there to be bound by. I didn’t even have to exert my authority to persuade her to let Em onto her back; in fact she seemed quite smitten with my girlfriend, and it wasn’t long before she was comparing her mane to Em’s hair. (They were, admittedly, almost the exact same shade of shining white-blonde.)
Gilaela, the unicorn, differed little from a beautiful white horse – sure, she was exceptionally clean-looking, but nothing in the otherworld seemed particularly dirty; and sure, she had the horn on her head, twelve inches of coiled, glittery goodness. But, outwardly at least, that was all. Zel had said she had the power to ‘burn impurities’, whatever the Twelve Hells that meant. She seemed surprisingly playful, for a unicorn – in most of the stories they were prudish and aloof, but the authors clearly hadn’t been doing their fey-research.
Xiatan, the dryad, was a small tree, perhaps thirteen, fourteen feet tall. He looked like an oak, but it was obvious to the eye that he had to be something else – no ordinary tree so small was so broad, so blessed with branches. The lower section of his ‘trunk’ cracked in two, allowing him to stride around with his feet-skirt of roots; on one side, near the top of the trunk where his branch-arms grew thickest, there were some vague approximations of eyeholes and a mouth, black cracks in the bark of his flesh. So he had working limbs, and he had a face – but there the distinction between dryad and small tree ended. He even spoke as rarely as your average tree. I’d been able to exert my influence, force him to say his name aloud, and watched as the mouth-crack rumbled in Etheric – but since he’d contributed nothing else I left him behind to enjoy his solitude.
Sarcamor and Sarminuid were satyrs: my height, with beetle-wing black eyes and skin like blue leather. They resembled Flood Boy more than anything else I’d seen so far, but instead of the legs and horns of a small goat, theirs were those of huge rams – their snow-white fur contrasted with the oily blue of their flesh. Their hair and unkempt beards were white too, shorn short and left tufted. Both were almost as well-muscled as Avaelar, and when I (well, Zel) found them, they were engaged in some kind of wrestling match in a pool of thick, sparkling sap. I thought they were trying to kill each other, but they quickly set me right – they were apparently sportsmen, of all things, training for a competition to be held soon at ‘the court of the King of Yellow Flowers’. I merely took their fealty and extracted promises not to do each other serious harm before wishing them well in their upcoming tournament and leaving the glade.
There were others too – a family of what seemed to be, well, dire squirrels, each the size of a lion, their eyes the size of my fists, their fur gold with bronze bellies and tails. A scorpion no bigger than my hand which I only bothered commanding to my service at Zel’s stubborn insistence – a few words later, he was roughly the size of three wagons standing wheel-to-wheel, his legs planted like six trees and his prodigious tail hovering overhead dropping ichor… I was left once more apologising to my faerie queen guide.
But more than once I must’ve been casting the same hidden glance back at Em. She was enjoying her time here, and it was weird.
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We are all broken, I reminded myself.
That she would come to the otherworld, to such a strange and dangerous place, and ride a unicorn… That I would go ahead and invite her here, as a romantic getaway no less… I mean, what was I thinking? Sometimes I thought I could hear something, a tinkling on the sweet breeze, and whenever I turned to look towards its source it had always emanated from the darkest shadows of the trees about me, the thickest tangles where the eaves were long and the glowing lights seemed leeched from the very air –
And then the feeling passed and I forgot how ominous, foreboding those tinkling sounds were – Zel didn’t seem to notice, which was impossible given her senses, so it was obviously just that they weren’t bothering her. I didn’t want to sound demented, ranting about dark tangles and shadowy sounds. So I kept my lips firmly sealed, my eyes open…
My shields active.
“I think you might want to head home now, Feychilde,” Zel advised, floating back towards us from the copse of sap-dripping trees she’d been investigating. “Time’s ticked by – I think it’s close to midnight back in Mund, and –”
“Midnight!” Em gasped. “Is zat possible?” She always tried to use her Mundian accent when garbed in her champion’s costume, but sometimes she let it slip. “Ve have been here only two, three hours at the most…”
“And for most of that time we’ve travelled in a straight line – you even went on your little jaunt, yet we’re still nowhere close to leaving Treetown’s borders,” Zel replied, a little churlishly. She definitely didn’t like being contradicted. “Explain that, mighty wizard.”
In spite of her tone, I thought I caught the glimmer of a grin on her miniscule features.
“I – I –” Em floundered.
“Space is a sticky thing,” Zel cut her off. “It doesn’t just stay where you leave it – it follows you, to a degree. Time’s the same – how do you think diviners do what they do? We can’t look across infinite time and space, you know. It’s the time that attends to us, and spreads outwards from us, like ripples on the surface of a pond…”
The lesson continued until I created a gate. Gilaela bade us a cheery farewell; Em’s hand in mine, we stepped back through to the mortal dimension.
Not that I’d had to hold her hand the whole time. I’d gotten the hang of creating my sorcerer’s mark after finishing the library book I’d been perusing the last week or more. It was simple, truth be told.
The seal of an arch-sorcerer had to be something personal, and it had to be scratched into the skin – it would last only for so long as the blood shone in the cuts. We’d had to stop a number of times, Em returning to my side with an apologetic look on her face, holding out her arm so I could use my knife on the back of her hand again, open the near-scabs and refresh the rune.
Hardly romantic, slicing into your girlfriend’s hand – but Em wanted the ability to fly free, and I couldn’t really blame her. Avaelar was the wrong kind of healer but the new druid in her band, Gherwen, would apparently be more than happy to fix her up later.
The seal I’d developed after a little trial-and-error was a stylised ‘F’, with branching appendages sprouting off the ends of the lines to connect the ley forces. Simple, and straightforward – something I could form in seconds, push my power inside without any inhibition.
It was strange, sometimes, archmagery. Why I could twist my force-lines to fit my ‘F’-rune far more easily than another shape, I had no idea. That’s just the way it was. I started with simple symbols, circles and crosses, but nothing had taken until it was personal.
“Tingles,” Em said, looking down at the back of her hand as we stood in the mundane, Mundian forests of Treetown, my dimensional gate sealing itself closed behind us. “It feels kind of funny.”
“That’s the planar connection,” Zel said, flying up at head-height in front of us. “The longer the seal is in place, the longer your stay, the stronger the bond. If you wandered in the otherworld for a few days, you might not be able to leave.”
Em shuddered with a weird smile on her face. “It doesn’t sound all that bad.” She pulled her body close to mine, put her head against my chest. “I could stay there…”
I put my arms around her, thinking of how it’d looked from above when we flew together. An ocean of treetops. An eerie sky.
No buildings in sight.
It was amazing and everything, but it was a little bit daunting, too, if I was being honest with myself.
“It is a pretty awesome place,” I said. “Don’t quite think I quite fancy living there, though.”
“You alone would retain your humanity, Feychilde,” my fairy reminded me. A few seconds later, after I didn’t reply, she muttered something to herself and disappeared in a green flash.
“I thought she’d never go,” Em murmured huskily, reaching up to remove her phoenix-mask.
“Leave it on, Stormsword,” I said, and kissed her.
We didn’t leave Treetown’s forests for quite some time – Em made a ring of carefully-controlled fire to warm us, scare off the beasts – and I never did get chance to properly test the powers of my new acquisitions before I left Em behind.
Before I left for Zadhal.
Em had said that I should already know that she really wished she could go – that such a thing should be obvious. I’d said in reply that I knew she could come along if she really wished: give up the mantle of magister; take up the mantle of champion full-time. But we’d left it at that. We didn’t let it come between us.
I knew she did want to go with me. To see the horrors of this distant grave-city from a shattered epoch. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she bit at her lower lip and looked aside when we stopped discussing it.
And I knew that, even if she said she was a champion, even if the gods accepted her at her word, there would always be part of her heart that would see Henthae as something more than her superior, her recruiter. The arch-enchanter was a mentor; a mother. The mother Emrelet could see as an equal.
I just had to hope she’d choose a side before she got torn in two.
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