Aichlan peered around the corner to see the mage’s grey gaze fixed upon him, and an unamused curve to her lips. With a sheepish grin more from drink than real embarrassment at being found out, Aichlan stepped out from hiding and approached. Senka leaned against the doorway, blocking his path with her body, she took a long pull from the pipe. The sickly sweet and musky aroma of the opium smoke clung to the walls and hung thick in the air, making Aichlan slightly nauseous.
“Before you ask,” She looked up at him, her cold grey eyes quite serious, “I don’t share my client’s information.”
“What were you and Captain Miroshnik talking about?” Aichlan said with an oblivious nod towards the stairwell.
Senka rolled her eyes and angrily toked on the pipe. “You’re pissed drunk aren’t you?”
“And you're high.” Aichlan retorted. “What was that about? Someone dead?”
“Someone is always dead,” The mage dumped her pipe and motioned for Aichlan to follow her inside, “but as I said, I don’t gossip.”
Aichlan stumbled into the darkened chambers, unwilling to let the subject go. “She said something about a brother, was it Séverin, or the other one?”
Senka drew a simple sigil of fire and casually dropped it in passing. In an instant, all of the candles in the room, numbering in the dozens, simultaneously lit; accompanied by a sinister growling sound, akin to a frightened cat that’s been cornered. Having a coveted corner room, she had a fireplace, but it was unlit, a caldron hung over the hearth. While not a small room, it was still cluttered with bookcases and chests stacked on chests, creating a cozy if not claustrophobic environment. The smell was less sickening than he remembered, though still a noticeable stench of decay lay under the flowery smoke of opium and incense. A small bed with a thin and lumpy mattress was tucked away in the corner, stuffed between stacks of animal cages and a rickety bookshelf filled to bursting, under the single paned window with tattered black curtains.
“No means no general.” Senka smirked as she summoned a chaise lounge from across the room and sprawled herself upon it. “Would you like some tea?”
Aichlan took a seat at the small table, pushing aside a stack of bowls and cups containing the remnants of either a meal or some nefarious experiment. He politely held up his hand and shook his head, the last drink she had given him nearly killed him. Senka sighed and rolled over onto her back and packed a new pipe, her eyes were red and the lids droopy, in conjunction with her colorless and clammy flesh, she looked half dead. Aichlan was impressed by how lucid the woman was, as opium was a well known tranquilizer, often leaving its users in immobile states of catatonic bliss.
“So why have you come general?” She rolled her head in Aichlan’s general direction. “I can do many forms fortune telling, séances, and aura readings.”
Aichlan leaned back in the chair, tipping it onto its back legs. He had not really thought of the reason, and had forgotten the conversation that sparked his invitation. Of course, there was the war and how to proceed, but there was not much he felt she could do to help him in that regard. He certainly had not come for her touch. He sighed and wondered what his father would say of him, being so weak and rudderless.
“Actually…” Aichlan said as he removed a necklace from his doublet. “You said you speak to the dead, right?”
Senka nodded as she conjured a flame to light the pipe, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. “Yes, though not as good as Osric or Master Drogo.”
Aichlan had no idea who the second name mentioned was, but did not really care, so long as she could make contact. He fingered the ring of silver, emerald, and a tiny white stone, before tossing it to the mage. The ring clattered to the ground as the woman reached out to grab it a full second after the fact. Aichlan’s shoulders sagged as she bent over to pick it up, swearing as she spilled several embers on the floor.
“It’s my ancestry,” Aichlan explained as Senka picked up the ring, “I want you to find my father, G—”
“Let me guess,” Senka said with a smirk as she tossed back the necklace, “Garrick, right?”
Aichlan caught the necklace and nodded slowly, unsure of how she knew that information. He was a well-known figure in most courts west of Tear, and of course in his own kingdom, but even then, it was name only recognition. As far as he knew, Garrick was not a household name anywhere else, least of all in Rhodarcium, where his legacy was one of infamy rather than celebrity.
“Siegrun came in asking for the same not too long ago.” Senka quickly clamped her hand over her mouth. “Shit, forget I said that.”
“I think not.” Aichlan said as he stood. “Why was that Rhodarcian woman seeking to meet my father?”
The mage waved her hand at Aichlan as she took another hit from the pipe. “Nothing sinister, I assure you.”
Aichlan took his seat again, though not entirely convinced. Siegrun was purportedly the bastard daughter of Ulrica Wolf-mother, the very same that killed Garrick in some perverse idea of an honor duel. Outside of some morbid desire to see the face of he that slew her mother, Aichlan could think of no reason for Siegrun to make such a request.
“In any case,” Senka said through a cloud of pungent smoke, “he’s not there, wherever there happens to be.”
“What do you mean he’s not there?” Aichlan demanded as he searched the cluttered table for a clean cup. “I just saw—” Aichlan stopped mid-sentence, suddenly aware of the curious look she was giving him. “He’s there, I’m sure of it.”
Upon finding a cup, he poured himself the tea and took a long drink of the tepid liquid. Despite being a pale golden color, it had no scent or flavor, It tasted like warm water.
“I wonder…” Senka held out her hand and a small velvet pouch fell into her open palm. “What exactly is your relationship with this realm Aichlan?”
The walls began to bend and contract, as if breathing in time with the eerily enchanting mage shrouded in smoke before him. In her hand, the bag disintegrated into violet flames, leaving several smooth stones and carved bones in its stead. Several of the stones, polished into perfect spheres, hit the floor and began to roll towards him. As Aichlan looked down, the balls slowed as if rolling uphill, and he was overcome with a severe case of vertigo. His feet were suddenly miles away, and the room was the size of a cavern. Startled, and confused by this sudden change in perception, Aichlan inadvertently tipped the chair over and he came crashing down on the floor. An experience that should have been over in an instant dragged on for what felt like minutes. By the time Aichlan had hit the floor, he was not entirely certain if he had fallen in the first place.
Aichlan pushed himself up off the floor, but felt as if he were sinking in sand under the surf. While not an unpleasant feeling, it was disorienting; and he could not be sure if he had simply drunk too much at the pub or something else, more sinister, was at play. He looked up to Senka and recoiled in terror, for her cold grey eyes had filled the entirety of the room. Her looming, impassive mien was that of a giant scrutinizing a worm. The sickly-sweet smoke from her pipe swirled around her head in a perverse halo of vice and sin, Aichlan gagged as the walls breathed her in around him.
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“Why are you still on the floor Aichlan?” She exhaled a cloud of noxious smoke. “More tea?”
Aichlan clutched the chair leg like a sailor holding the last timbers of his sunken vessel. His arms felt like lead weights and each breath was a gasping, retching exercise. He tried to pull his hand up, but saw it melt into the undulating floorboards, dripping like wax from the dozens of candles that burned like tiny suns around him. He collapsed again, feeling as hopeless and rudderless as a grain of sand in an hourglass. With the thought, he became sand, collapsing into a pile of nothingness as more grains piled up on him. The crushing weight was at once comforting and terrifying, eliciting contradictory feelings of a warm embrace and violent suffocation.
“What did you do to me?” Aichlan croaked, his voice was weak and not entirely his own.
Senka, as if sensing his difficulty drawing breath, waved her hand like a blade to cut through the smoke. In an instant, the chamber's solitary window flung open, and the pungent smoke was largely replaced by chill, winter air. Aichlan rolled over with a gasp, as if a great weight had been lifted from his chest. The wind carried him and he felt himself rising up to the ceiling on its currents like a feather on a stiff summer breeze. From his vantage on the ceiling, circling himself still prone on the floor, miles above the city, he could almost see his home shores. As he opened his arms turned wings to let the currents carry him home, the eyes of the mage opened and halted him like the walls of a city to would be invaders.
Senka juggled the bones and marbles in her hand as she toked on her pipe with the other. “It would have been best if you were sober, but I suppose it can’t be helped.”
In an instant, he was thrown back to his mortal form, the suit of flesh and bone being far more cumbersome and confining than he recalled. He glanced about with a furtive eye as the candles cast shadows that became wraiths and demons that circled the room. Aichlan with his legs crossed, in a fashion he had not taken since he was a child, his teeth chattering as a cold sweat ran down his brow. All manner of ghoulish wailings and moans of indistinguishable pleasure or pain swam about his head with the macabre dance of demons that filled the tiny room. The demons brought with them song, a haunting melody played on strings and a piano, with a chorus of the dead. All the while the eyes of the mage were upon him as her body grew and shrank a hundred-fold between each breath she took.
“More tea?” Senka asked in a voice equally sweet and portentous.
Aichlan looked down to his trembling hands and saw a teacup he did not remember having, half filled with steaming golden liquid. It bubbled and roiled in his cup like a tiny sea during a squall, the leaves floundering like drowned men. He raised a trembling hand, certain he would rattle the cup apart at any second, and watched as the mage refilled it with a stream of liquid carried from a pot on the far side of the room upon an invisible chute. He dropped the cup in shock and watched it shatter a hundred times forwards and reversed, quickly and slowly, in vibrant color and as a monochromatic blur. He recoiled, fearing a rebuke from the all-seeing eyes of the mage, but was instead greeted by a warm hand upon his own. Rather than the supple hands of a woman, these were rough, and calloused. The mitts of a warrior.
Aichlan felt himself dragged to his feet, but could only see the flickering light of the candles creating fractals of color more resplendent than seven rainbows at dawn following a sun shower. His vision began to close and narrow like light at the end of a long tunnel. From that pinprick of light, a hand reached through and pulled him by the collar. Gently at first, almost as if encouraging, then with increasing vigor and aggression at his reluctance to follow. Aichlan heard a primal scream as he was torn inside out through the hole which was his own pupil, by the hand he now realized was his own.
“Stop that.” Senka scolded as she exhaled a cloud of thick violet smoke. “Now, if you are quite done flailing about on the ground,” she flicked her finger and a bell chimed softly in the distance, “focus.”
Aichlan could not be certain if she simply repeated the word a dozen times or if the room held some strange acoustic properties. The chorus of the dead continued as the music reached a fevered pitch, a pounding drumbeat and bassline caused his heart to race. Around him the candles seemed to flare and dim, pulsing like stars. Soon, the flashes of candlelight became indistinguishable from the heavens. The room had become a star field with the great white scar of creation upon the stellar horizon. The floor had become a spring meadow in central Aes Sidhe,undulating and shining like an emerald sea, slick with morning dew. Beside him lay a shadowy figure, more statue than man, clad in gleaming silver and flowing cape of épinglé velvet. Aichlan reached up with hands not his own to touch the face of the god beside him, but found it forever just out of reach.
The bell chimed again, deep and resonating to his very soul. His heart ceased its racing and Aichlan found himself at home, or rather, what felt like home. The walls breathed and he was once again in the tiny apartment of Senka. Aichlan clutched his head as he tried to get a sense of when and where he was, only for the walls to sigh once more, filling his lungs with the saccharine smoke. When he opened his eyes, he was actually home, as a boy of no more than twelve. Aichlan looked around in confusion; he sat at a great oak table set in the kitchen of his childhood home in Westfaire.
The curtains his mother had sewn hung above the sink, overlooking the alley that ran parallel their town-home. A pot steamed above an open flame in the hearth, as if someone were in the midst of cooking; the whole scene was eerily similar to his encounter with the Eloi in Rhode. The spice rack hung nearby, full and cluttered just as he re-membered it, the scent of jugged hare caused him to salivate unconsciously as he struggled to determine if it were a dream or not.
He saw a woman, rather short with a youthful look that belied her actual age by a factor of ten. Her eyes were a vibrant green, and her long brown hair was as wild as her heart. She was a full fey, born and raised in a kingdom within a kingdom under the hills. Aichlan reached out with his tiny hands and touched the face of his mother, who smiled and mirrored the gesture. The bell chimed again, and the image began to blur and fade. Aichlan cried out and clutched at her now ephemeral form. The walls melted around him, and once again he was in the mages room, faint rays of approaching dawn breaking the gloom as the candles sputtered at the ends of their wicks.
“Focus.” The mage sang in an omnipotent contralto. “Why have you come here?”
The floor gave way beneath him, and Aichlan fell into the empty abyss, flailing wildly. His stomach was in his throat, but he felt no sensation of movement, and uttered no scream. Before him, the figure in silver armor walked slowly towards a point of light. The armor and crest upon the man’s fluttering cape were known to him, though Aichlan dared not speak his name, fearing he would disappear. Aichlan willed himself forward, pumping his legs against the void in a half running, half swimming motion. However, no matter how hard he tried or how fast he kicked his legs, the man only got further and further away.
“Father!” Aichlan shouted breathlessly. “Wait!”
The figure stopped, and despite being at a full sprint, Aichlan could not close the distance between them. Like before, the figure was more statue than flesh, and his face was obscured by shadow. The bell chimed again and Aichlan was face to face with the man, its features now clear. Where there should have been flesh, there was unpainted marble, the upper half of the man was a bust, the same bust on display at Coheed hall in Briartach. Aichlan touched the cold stone of his father’s image with trembling hands and teary eyes.
“Why? Why have you forsaken me?” Aichlan leaned his head against the silver breastplate. “Why won’t you speak to me? Why send me on this quest and abandon me half way through?”
The statue did not speak; it did not move. Aichlan slammed his fist against its shoulder in frustration, and the statue crumbled into a pile of ash, bone and the tattered fabric of an Aes Sidhe banner. From the debris rose a boy of no more than six, he had olive skin and curly black hair, an Elysian. The boy meant nothing to Aichlan, he had never seen him before, yet his eyes held a spark of something familiar. As Aichlan reached out to touch the child, the bell chimed again and his image fell to nothingness.
Aichlan awoke to the mages vacant yet cunning stare, though he did not recall sleeping or even having closed his eyes. Bright morning light filtered into the hazy room, as smoke rose from the spent candles around them. Senka placed the pipe to her lips and took a final pull, not breaking eye contact with Aichlan. The birdsong outside had an artificial quality to it, and he doubted if anything was real at all. On the floor between them was a singing stone, an empty teacup, and a wet rag. For all Aichlan knew, he could have been sitting on the mages floor for a day or a year.
“Sometimes,” Senka paused to dump the pipe into a nearby can. “the dead stay put, at least for a while. Most of the time however, they disappear, going off to lead new lives. It’s a strange phenomenon that many scholars debate to this day. Some claim these souls become guardians of some sort, others believe the souls sneak into the wombs of expectant mothers for a chance at second life.
“Who was that?” Aichlan asked meekly. “The boy.
Senka shrugged and stretched out on the chaise. “Who can say?”
Aichlan shook his head as he clutched the fabric of his breeches. “I saw him, spoke to him…why…?”
He had seen his father, spoken to him, and he had been exactly as Aichlan remembered. It had only been a few months since their last meeting, there was no way he could disappear in so short a time. Senka tapped her pipe against the chaise in time with the ticking clock. Aichlan looked up, confused and uncertain of what had just occurred or why.
“Are you sure it was really him?” Senka asked, her words leaving an opaque silence in their wake.