To be aware one is dreaming seems to be a sin. The body rejects it instinctively. The physical form lashes out and grabs hold of the mind, wresting it back from the existence of ideas. I do not envy the oracles and diviners who receive messages from those above, for it must be a frightening thing. One must grapple with their own memory of who they are in such a consuming manner that one can hardly think of anything else. It is little wonder that it is said a vision can change a man. That very reason is why some seek out miracle drugs to free the mind from the body, but I know there are more than gods in the world of ideas.
Even the gods may not be a blessing to encounter.
I was in a place after I died, though I cannot describe it. What I perceived was an impression of safety. The idea was familiar and it brought up forgotten memories, events that I could not have willingly recalled but shaped me nonetheless. I found myself standing with my bare feet upon hardened earth. I could feel a cookfire across my front, warming my cold flesh. How many times I had come in from the snow to my mother’s cooking, I could not say but my body remembered well the act of sitting upon the little wooden ledge that surrounded the ashen pit. Wind howled off the arched wood about me, beating at the enclave of warmth.
And she sat beside me.
Now, I’m no poet or romantic or anything like that. I looked straight at her, and I knew who she was though for the life of me I couldn’t say how or why, and I asked, “You’re it?”
She was just a woman. She was older, but in a way that only a rare specimen of the feminine form can achieve. There no sag to her body, no wrinkles, no stiffness, but her hair was grey and maybe it was her posture. I wonder if she’d be complimented to be called what I think is old, when I know she’s centuries older than anyone I’ve ever met save for the wizard.
She answered me. “I’m it, Leomund.”
A dozen ideas and memories swirled in my head. I don’t know why I was so distracted by the past when I should have been thinking about the moment, about the future. I guess that’s what happens when you die. I told her, “If your statues looked like half the woman you are, I don’t think we’d have any other religions.”
She laughed with a smile that reminded me of my mother, and of many other mothers I’d met in my time. “If Luna heard you say that, she’d rip your head off.”
I snorted. “And what would that do? I’m already dead.”
“For now,” she said, and I took her to mean I’d reincarnate. I think she knew what the wizard was up to. I think she knew she didn’t have much time. “Leomund, do you know how many men you’ve killed?”
With all the grace of a thug, I scratched my beard and pondered the flames as I searched my memories. I had a good number of years at war and many more hunting bounties, not to mention all the duels I fought as a youth. I had to add another nine as well. “Just shy of a hundred, I think.”
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“Seven thousand, three hundred and ninety-two,” she said.
I laughed at her. “Seventy-three lifetimes wouldn’t be enough for me to have done that.”
“It’s because you didn’t kill them directly. That’s why you don’t know how many.”
My humor was fading. Her words stank of the kind of cunning I didn’t like, as though I sat across from a fox haggling over gold. “A man can hardly be blamed for what other people do, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
She held up a hand and shook her head. “It’s the demons that I mean. You extinguished three directly and half a dozen in conjunction with others. Those creatures are masses of the dead. They are the compressed souls of those they’ve killed. Little wonder they are mad. Now, I ask you another question. How much magic can the wizard work with the mere life of a bird? And if he can extract that much power from a bird, what could he do with so many thousands upon thousands of human souls?”
That wasn’t the end of our conversation, but the words elude me now just as a dream escapes the waker. What I remember is feeling a warm knot in my chest as Vi got me back on my feet. True, I had been stabbed, but that was healed. My stigmata changed, but it wasn’t like new ink had been stabbed into my flesh with needles.
The Shepherd gave me something. Maybe something inside me, or maybe it was just a promise. I need to ask her what it was when I meet her again. I’m sure that when the boy and I grieve my brother I will get my moment with her again. Maybe she told me it would work that way, or maybe I’m a fool.
After writing this, I went to speak with Rodrick. What a pair we were, me who had met the god of death and he who fought for a dead god. Perhaps I should have asked her if it was she who reaped the soul of the god of the sun. That’s one theological point that I always wondered about.
Getting answers out of he man was nearly impossible. Both he was fevered and also the only thing he cared about was why he had been spared. How could I answer him? It wasn’t me that had spared his life. It had been the decision of the boy. As far as I can tell, even the wizard had no hand in it. From my years with that old hunter of demons, he would not have left such a naggling thread. He would have wrapped up the boy’s heroism and moved on. Vi views it as an unexpected gift. She says there’s no such thing as plans, only improvisations.
She also could not give him his arm back, cut off as it was. Not that regeneration was beyond her powers, but she said it was the property of another. I thought she meant the boy, but she meant Helios. To make him whole would be to change him and she did not wish to inflict that on him and he made no such request.
A quiet fellow. I find it hard to believe he would have chosen to kidnap a pregnant woman to achieve his aims. But, I do believe he would have done it on behalf of another. He has the determined set of a man who does what he is told to do. Rare where I come from, but I come from a comparatively desolate land. Just finding the next town over often means long treks through the wilderness. The central kingdoms are always knocking into one another for space. They have cut down nearly all their forests and carpeted the world with farms. They have made seas of grain for their merchants to sail across with canvas topped carts. In the central kingdoms they do not need trolls to stalk their nights, they make their own.
Thus, they need a certain cut of knight to keep the peace, much different from the hunters that shaped me.
Our travels head westward now, back toward Vassermark where I will reunite with the boy and we will drink the cemetery beer. I have but a few days and then I will meet the dead once more.