She has left me and stolen half of my journal. What should I have done? Grappled with her and torn the pages back before she could leave? Perhaps I should have tied her up and kept her with me, rather than watch her go into that dark world beyond ours. She took Rodrick with her and denied me. I would have been ten times the protection a left-armed swordsman could be, but she denied me.
I sit now in Eastern Vassermark, waiting for the boy to arrive. I have a heavy purse of coin, a sword, and my memories. I could sit here and write down every embarrassing detail I know of her now. The things she likes, how to touch her, the kinds of events that make her stop wistfully. Many of these trivial things were in my writings and that was why she took them for herself.
She didn’t want me to share them with others. I suppose I won’t. Not at this time, and not like this.
Our parting isn’t forever, but it may be for a long time. She made no promises of how long she would be gone because she did not know herself. She has the same wish as another angel I know, to confront her mother. This is something that she cannot do from within the world, no angel can.
This has been a quiet truth for centuries. I know that she isn’t the first to attempt the journey, for it must be done physically. The direct paths have all been lost, broken in ways I do not understand. However, none have ever returned. It is something even the wizard refuses to attempt. Had she asked me to join her, I would have. No matter what monsters or trials awaited, I would have faced them for her.
But, she closed the gate behind her and told me to wait. I wonder if I will be an old man by the time she returns. Will I even be alive? I’ve already died once and I doubt I will cheat it twice.
It is a strange thing to think that she wouldn’t care about my age. She is far older than I am, or ever will be, but she never treated me like a child. The wizard didn’t treat me as one either, and it seems I won’t be seeing him again for years either.
The city I sit in now has a trio of names, one stamped across it on the map by the king, another older, and one older still. Those of old families who still remember their pride call it Forum, harkening back to the original school where the holy texts were broken apart and reconstructed, where written language itself was created and thought could begin. They are envious that despite birthing wisdom, according to them, they did not prosper the way the port cities did.
The place reminds me of the acropolis in the north, but it is overrun by nobility rather than by trolls. They seem equally destructive. One throws about fire and stone, the other throws silver and gold. Bit by bit, the dignity of the locals is purchased and they kowtow to the whims of brats.
The boy was nearly trapped here for a time, escaping to the Misty Isles because the Feugards thought it would be his undoing. Now, I think it is only a matter of time before our motley crew of allies must make a home of it. For now, it is a good place for me to wait. There are few men of the north, for we are treated with distrust. The university prepares the Vassish for war and much is remembered about the wars. I will be easy to find, and there will be no escaping the rumors of the boy’s arrival.
He comes now at the head of an army. The southern Vassish will pass through here on their way back to their homes and his tribe of wastelanders will go where he goes. Funding has already been arranged for them, done before the wizard vanished. They are to be split up across the central kingdoms like mercenaries, to hunt down highwaymen and bandits, the scavengers that come after war. The nobles think this will diminish the boy’s power and make him less of a rising threat, but they think of the wastelanders like any other army. They think loyalty can only come from breeding, and they will not rally around him should he summon them.
I was correct to wait here. The doctor and his beloved have already found me. They say the boy is but a few days before arrival. Aisha is safe.
It’s good to see them again. Strange too. I never realized Lynnfield was such a woman of trust. She knows so little of what she’s involved in, and yet she doesn’t pry. Samuel knows his role is transactional. The wizard gave him half a library of knowledge and charged him with expediting the boy’s recovery as necessary. I’ve never met a surgeon with more confidence who wasn’t drunk. He’s not callous either. No matter how many times he’s had to rip into the boy’s regenerating body, he doesn’t bring that carelessness to the soldiers. Perhaps no one else in the world has been able to so dissect a living cadaver to learn how it works, and serving in the war has brought him a stream of dying men that he has fought to keep from the embrace of the goddess of death.
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Perhaps he might have been able to save me properly, the human way, from my death. He says he has done it for others, and now he has no desire at all to drink of the cemetery beer with us. He and Nikolai had only a fleeting time together, I asked him more in jest than in seriousness, but I think I would have liked to see a doctor confront her.
Soon the boy will be here.
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She did not come.
Neither of us knew properly how to use the tincture, the draught of magic given to the boy by the demon of the sands. Lupa did her best to play the role of wise woman and shaman, for she knew the drink as something her god partook of. She herself had never drunk it. It was a thing to call up the dead, but her people were hardly more than machines. There had never been anything to call back from the dead.
In our simple imitation, the two of us drank and we spoke. If the magic would not work, we would at least grieve in the way of my people. He needed a distraction from the war, from the hundreds of men he led to their deaths or those he ordered slain. There had only been so much he could do to limit the casualties.
The war against Rodrick had not been such an easy thing to avoid. The man had called upon national pride, on the indignation of a conquered people against their tax-hungry suzerain. The two of them had stood at the helm of ships in a storm. Both had turned the ships as best they could, but the waves were beyond their control. For now, there will be peace, but different winds are blowing in and new storms will come.
It’s one thing for a man to throw himself to the sea and swim, but such a man can bring nothing with him. As a younger man, that is what I would have done, but now I know what it is to cling on to something precious. How does this young boy, one I practically raised, know this better than I do? If he lets go of the wheel, someone else will seize it and then what can he do against the storm but watch as everything is smashed asunder?
Look at me, a man of the north, a land of ice and hills, speaking in allegories of the sea. My people would hardly recognize me. But I have perhaps changed a mere fraction compared to my brother.
The drink did work. It did not bring the Shepherd to us, but it brought him. We drank, we spoke, we laughed and cried, and there were four of us together. We had been in the little basement of a brewery, ignorant of the stars above and indifferent to the people of the city. The whole world vanished as though darkness had devoured it and Nikolai was with us once more.
The boy begged forgiveness and it was given. Nikolai did not blame him for the tides of war. The relief I saw on his face was sublime. It broke through stress like steel that had clutched his body and soon he was naught but the boy I had first met again. When a moment of peace came to him, strength left and Lupa took him in her arms as he slept.
For a time, whether it was minutes or hours I do not know, I spoke with my brother. We relived our lives, our triumphs and our blunders and I could at last understand how he had been enraptured by that falsely labeled witch Rodrick had saved so many years ago.
I could understand because Vi had done the same thing to me, and I too would have charged at a thousand enemies to protect her. Surely, to live together and grow as old as the jarls of the north and surrounded by generations of kin would have been better, but to have run away from such a fight would have been unthinkable.
Not all can take the helm of a ship, but it is no bad thing to throw oneself at the rigging and to play one’s part. A captain without a crew is no captain at all, just a wailing child as the world crashes down.
I must live with faith, must act here and have faith that she will come back to me. There are many battles to be fought.
I should end this journal here. Nothing more needs be put down about me, only a doubt. As sleep had begun to claim me and the world returned, the boy spoke. He still laid in the girl’s embrace, but his eyes had opened with a deep clarity and he asked me if I remembered by Ezra had left. The wizard’s earlier apprentice. The first one he had taken as a pupil and tutored in all the ways of the world. That girl who had hated to see him throw his life away to chase strength.
The wizard had called her a failure, a waste of his time and efforts. A broken creation no better than a sculpture smashed upon the ground. Her loss had fazed him no more than Nikolai’s death.
I don’t even know if she still lives. I had never thought to go look for her, not while the wizard had work for me to do. What a foul man I had been that she had been unable to look to me for help. I wish I could go back and change that, but no magic in all the world can fix the past. That was one thing the wizard was always clear about. What has been done has been done. There is only the future.