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"Good-bye, Damien Vryce." The youth bowed ever so slightly, his eyes never leaving Vryce's own. "Good luck."
And then he turned with easy grace and began to walk back toward the pass, silken sleeves fluttering in the wind. Damien almost ran after him. There were things he needed to say, farewells and gratitudes and hopes for the future that he'd never had a chance to express in the Hunter's lifetime. But he didn't go after him. Nor did he call out the name that was on his lips, though it took all his self control not to. Because if what the youth said was true, then such words could prove fatal. Instead he watched the young man walk away in silence as if he were truly a stranger, feeling something inside himself twist into a knot as the distance between them grew.
(C.S. Friedman, Crown of Shadows, final page)
~*~
That night, he dreamed of the fae.
Earth-fae thick on the ground, here so close to an active volcano, the earth awash with its light. Heavy strands of pure, earth-born power sweeping across the surface, the currents coursing rapidly over the earth, taking strange meanings with them. A different flavour in the fae coming directly from Mount Shaitan, sulphurous and clinging, but with an undertone eerie and unearthly on the currents flowing from where the Mother of the Iezu dwelt.
The well of power that was the Forest: victory and defeat rushing out like a torrent from where the Hunter's domain had been, and a well of wild fae still was and would be. Even as the Forest itself burned, the whirlpool of wild fae that had given rise to it was not weakened at all. He marvelled that he could stand in the face of it, and See, and not be pulled in, even though he felt its power, its draw. The corruption that had been at the heart of it seemed fainter now, but the power was the same. No longer a dark sun eclipsing everything else fae-born here, it seemed to be becoming something else. What might it have been, he wondered, if that well of wild power hadn't been harnessed by the Hunter? What if another man, with more benign motives, had mastered it?
In his dream, Damien stood in the face of it and rejoiced in its beauty, in its potential.
But when he woke, he was fae-blind again.
~*~
Damien Vryce, K.G.F, C.E.A. (but no longer R.C.U.) had never been the type to dwell on the past. He merely moved on; he always had.
But he stayed at Black Ridge Tavern, moving among the tourists and the scientists and the opportunists, killing the occasional demonling, watching the Forest burn, and generally keeping to himself. It was surprisingly easy to avoid company among so many.
Surely Tarrant would have had something pithy to say about that.
Damien sighed.
Learning Tarrant's fate should have given him some sort of closure, and perhaps it had. But he still couldn't bring himself to move on.
In the evenings, he walked out onto the wooden deck again, watching the fire in the distance slowly burn itself out, day by day.
When the sun set and darkness began to rise around him, only a handful of lamps left to illuminate the deck under Casca's thin light, the crowd around him showed no signs of dissipating.
He didn't even notice at first.
When he did, he began to wonder when he'd stopped fearing the dark. He'd travelled with the Hunter for so long; darkness had been his constant companion, and the nature of the company he kept should have kept the dangers vivid in his mind.
Should.
With the Hunter by his side, the dangers of night had been no danger: what malevolent manifestations might have come to life, born of his own fears and memories, had been absorbed by the Hunter's far more evil essence before they could even form.
Darkness had been almost perfectly safe for him, for a long time.
Now, it had become nearly comfortable for everyone else, as well: the creatures that once sprang to life in it were fading. Even the dark fae, maliciously possessing the world at night, had lost its threat.
More safe with each day, as more and more of the fae-born demons were slain, with no new manifestations to take their place.
The fae, untouchable.
Was this the Church's dream, the Prophet's dream?
No.
Tarrant would never have wanted this, even if his own last-ditch effort at defeating Calesta was what had ultimately triggered the change.
The Patriarch might have wanted this, but not he.
Gerald Tarrant had known the fae, intimately, as only an adept could, and what he'd seen had been beautiful. Something full of potential: Something to make safe to handle, to shape humanity's future with, not something to destroy and banish from their lives. That had been the Prophet's true vision - and it had always remained Tarrant's, Damien realised, no matter how far he had strayed from that path. The original vision of his Church, not the denial the Eastern Autarchy preferred to practice.
And now? Now that that denial had won out?
Everything had faded - reality itself had dimmed.
Now, when darkness rose and his vision, unWorked, unWorkable, was limited to the small circle of light on the platform, he imagined them around every corner: creatures of the fae, springing from the air, the earth, spun from a moment's thought, an idle dream.
Damien had never thought he'd miss that, of all things. He shivered.
The new world was clear, predictable, and impervious to his thoughts.
The human mind no longer mattered; the world would not accommodate itself to it any more, would not force it to accommodate to it either. World and mind, untouching, forever.
He shouldn't want it back, the threat, the danger, but he couldn't help himself. He was a child of the fae-born world, a child of a time and a culture unthinkable without attention to the fae. His every thought had been shaped by it. Having it torn out by the roots ... hurt.
Not as much as something else, though.
Something else that had been torn out, that had had its roots deeper inside him than he'd ever have imagined.
Something he would never get back.
~*~
He kept dreaming of the fae. Every night since, he was Seeing in his dreams.
And more than Seeing.
He dreamed of earth-fae, swirling and flowing through the world, and the flavours and meanings it carried. He felt it pool around his feet, gathering like fog around him, and tasted its power, and knew it intimately. He followed its eddies and whorls with senses he couldn't name, knowing where they came from, where they went, and what they had touched along the way.
When he looked towards Shaitan, he felt the currents roaring, almost sweeping him away with their power. He saw threads of fae as fine as spun silk, slowly winding themselves around human-built structures, up into the air, beyond the ground. He could taste the life in the wood the houses were built of, all the way back to the trees that had been. His senses reeled, and he drew back from it, unable to process that much.
He dreamed of sunlight filtering through leaves, an unexpected beauty in its harmony, like raindrops falling gently from the sky. He dreamed of harsher rhythms, solar fae beating down in violent percussion on unprotected earth, a blinding, scorching heat that tasted like sand and crystal and purity.
Even tidal power, once, for a brief lingering moment - the sheer beauty of it overwhelming as much as the memories it brought: of Jenseny, of Hesseth, of companions lost and tales that could never be told.
Every night in his dreams, he saw what he would never again see.
Sometimes it felt as if someone was watching him. Not eyes on him in the dark, not like that - but as if something were brushing his mind, just a thin tendril of purpose stretching out towards him from somewhere, curling around him in curious exploration, invading his mind and body, turning him inside out: someone, with very little effort, Knowing him utterly.
And when True Night came, the dark fae taking over the world, for the first time since he'd been a boy he was asleep. The truth was, he'd forgotten. But he saw it in his dreams.
Darkness, the kind that wasn't dark at all: bright purple light, violet-black corruption welling up from the ground, flowing down the path leading along and over the mountain, winding around houses, curling up on the sides of buildings like dark fire licking at the wood, dousing everything with eerie illumination. Vile and slithering, clinging to everything it touched, corrupting it, seeping into it.
He saw it with a clarity he'd only experienced twice, when he'd briefly shared Tarrant's Vision, an adept's perception that went so far beyond what even Worked eyes could see.
And the music! So intoxicating, so darkly compelling, with a haunting chilling touch that sent shivers down Damien's spine. A music he'd never heard before, but oh! so beautiful, and he couldn't tear himself away.
The vision itself was familiar, at least, save for the small group of people out in the street in the dark, unaffected by the volatile power possessing the world. He watched as heavy purple tendrils caressed them with a sensuous embrace, snaking around human limbs, wrapping them into a malignant cloak. Enveloping the people who were slowly daring to reclaim the night. The taste of it was heavy on his tongue, purple and complex like strange spices his palate couldn't quite process.
It was a world he'd never quite known before, and he ached to embrace it, to touch what he could see and feel, but there was no part of him that could reach.
When he woke, he cursed his imagination, and his inability to let go.
The strange taste lingered on his tongue all day.
~*~
"Tell me what you dream of."
He flinched, turned.
Another night out on the long, narrow deck on the mountainside, watching the Forest burn - Damien had been lost in thought, but not that lost: the man's skill was still eerie. The dark-haired stranger had managed what few had, sneaked up on him unawares.
"Give me a heart attack, will you?" Damien grumbled while his brain tried to catch up with what his eyes were seeing. This wasn't supposed to be happening. It was supposed to be all over, whether he liked it or not - the terms of the sacrifice the young man had described to him were clear enough.
What, by all of Erna's now-deposed godlings, was he doing here?
"Tell me," the man repeated his demand.
The tone was familiar, cool and arrogant - as familiar as breathing, even if the voice was different.
And there was no Working now, but he was almost sure that if he could still See, the fae would be clinging heavily to the man's words, wrapping them around the listener's brain, impressing them, indelible. Irresistible.
He almost thought he could still feel it.
He blinked. The young man - he was careful not even to think a name - had asked, and with him, it would not be an idle question. So he answered.
"The fae," Damien admitted, helplessly. "Every night. I see the fae, I feel it - almost more than I could before. I can hear it and smell it, and it's everywhere. Every night."
"Did you dream last night?"
Damien blinked. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't recall. "I don't remember," he said. "I might have, but I don't remember dreaming at all."
The man nodded, thoughtfully. "As I thought," he commented. "Now, Vryce, let's attempt a bit of an experiment. I'll see you tomorrow."
And with that, he was gone. Before Damien could even get out a baffled, "Experiment?", the man had left again.
Damien sighed, exasperated. So like him.
But he didn't go after him.
And then he tried to forget he'd ever had that thought; that way lay danger. Even though he had come back, Damien wasn't about to take that chance.
~*~
That night, the dreams were different.
He was walking down a path, as if he was being led, as if he was following a powerful Calling, with the kind of purpose and single-minded determination only fae-born authority could instill.
He had no idea where he was going, but he went, going with the flow of the earth-fae at his feet, following the current, letting himself be swept along towards his unknown destination.
A Calling Worked against the current: powerful indeed.
He didn't stop to notice that there was no such thing as a Working now, with or against the current; he merely followed.
And then, with no transition, no warning, he was choking on air thick with the sickly sweet smell of rotting flesh, and there were hands reaching for him from all sides, gripping him.
The world was a sea of pale human bodies, innumerable, endless, dead women twitching and shivering in panicked flight even in death, terror imprinted on them so strongly that not even dying could still them.
They reached for him, touched him with their cold, lifeless hands, their terror seeping into him with every touch, invading, possessing, drowning out all rational thought, until there was nothing else left - -
- - hell - -
- - Tarrant's hell - -
- - and he woke with a strangled gasp, his heart racing, cold sweat gathering on his skin.
Damn you, Hunter.
~*~
"What did you dream?"
Damien had gone out to the sightseeing deck with a knot in his stomach that was half dread, half anticipation. And indeed: As suddenly and quietly as before, the young man had come.
Damien turned around, furious. "Will you tell me what the vulk this is about?" His glare would have had lesser men cowering. Not him, of course.
"Answer me." Implacable, determined. He remembered that cool voice, that utter determination. There was no denying it; there never had been.
"Hell," Damien hissed. "I saw hell. As you damn well know, even though I've no idea how you did it." He clenched his fists. Even though he'd never willingly admit it, his anger at the man was only surpassed by his relief at his presence.
The stranger - could he still be called a stranger, now that he'd turned up for the third time? - the young man tilted his head to the side, appraising Damien with a calculating expression.
"As I thought," he finally said. "I do apologise; I needed an image sufficiently intense and distinctive. One there could be no doubt about."
"I," said Damien with great feeling, "have thoroughly had it with your cryptic remarks." With one step, he was right in the other man's face, gripping his expensive embroidered vest. "I'll shake the answers out of you if I have to."
With a look of utter distaste on his face, the young man placed a hand on Damien's chest and pushed him back. Damien let him, for now.
"Very well," the man said coolly. "One must accept the evidence." He hesitated. A strange expression crossed his face. Strange, yet utterly familiar: pain, terror, and utter submission - Damien had seen that soul-chilling expression many times in the last few years. Every time he witnessed a shapechanging: Every time his companion had done the impossible, that which no human sorceror should be capable of. Trusting himself to the fae, giving himself over completely.
It only flickered over the young man's face for an instant, and then he continued, repeating: "The evidence is more than clear." He swallowed visibly. "And as I have said before, in the face of the impossible, even the most unlikely thing will become plausible."
Damien gasped.
The Prophet's words.
Those were the Prophet's words, well-documented, well-known. And the young man - the other man - he had just claimed them for his own. He'd claimed something he'd said he could never claim again. He'd drawn a connection, negating the terms of his own sacrifice, and ...
... and nothing was happening. The world wasn't ending, Tarrant wasn't ending, he was simply standing there on the deck, slightly apart from the tourists, a calculating expression on his face.
"You ..." Damien had no words.
Gerald Tarrant smiled, wryly. "Just so."
"I don't understand." He didn't. Not at all.
"Neither do I," Tarrant admitted. "Not fully. But the facts are indisputable."
Whatever the facts were, the risk had been unconscionable, thought Damien, and utterly unlike him. What was he doing, risking his life like that?
"The dreams rather gave it away, I'm afraid," Tarrant continued. The former Neocount of Merentha, the Prophet, the Hunter. "You dreamed of my Sight. You shared it, in your dreams. Fragments and memories. And not mere Sight, either - an adept's way of seeing the world. You do realise that while we may not be able to touch the fae any more, we still perceive it as we always did? That sense is part of my kind, as natural as sight or hearing for any other human being."
Seeing, but never touching. A terrible thing, if you thought about it. But he remembered Ciani's despair over the loss of her adeptitude, and he knew that it was more than seeing, more than touching; it was the way adepts lived in the world. It must be hard, not being able to Work, but oh so much better than being deprived of that as well, being essentially crippled as Ciani had been at the hands of the Dark Ones, what seemed like an eternity ago.
It had certainly been a different world then.
"What did you dream of?" Damien asked suddenly. "While I dreamed of the fae, what did you see?"
Tarrant smiled - a smile so faint it almost wasn't there, a minimal expression born out of several hundred years of absolute control. His new face, so young, so different, shouldn't have accommodated that expression so well, Damien thought, once again caught unawares by the echo of another face.
"Ah, you have grasped it, I believe," Tarrant said. "Yes, the channel between us has asserted itself once again. You reached out in your dreams, after I came here the first time - to the fae, and to me. And the connection came alive again." He hesitated. "I did warn you that such a channel could only be extinguished by death, and sometimes not even then. It's part of who we both are, and there is nothing to be done about it."
"I'm not complaining," Damien said, and meant it. "But how is this possible?"
"The channel is there. The fae still flows along it. That much, we can still touch." His voice was almost wistful. "And if my sacrifice didn't sever it, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that the sacrifice was not, in fact, what I imagined it to be."
"But what you said ..."
"I misunderstood. Misinterpreted." Tarrant's eyes, no longer pale but dark instead, nonetheless showed very clearly exactly how unhappy he was about that error. "It's not a compact, after all," he elaborated. "I'd lived under a compact too long - I forgot ... But this was a Sacrifice, powering a Working. I should have known what that meant."
"I don't understand."
"The fae requires sacrifice, yes. Sacrifice offered, Vryce - not sacrifice paid. You remember Healing my heart? Perhaps you noticed that nothing was taken from you in payment, despite your willingness. Or rather, because of it. I believe now - and the evidence utterly supports this - that when my Working was completed, my old identity visibly destroyed, it was done. Nothing that came after could undo it. Sacrifice doesn't work that way, as I should have known. If I was still able to reclaim my identity after that, then it stands to reason that I could do it safely. I only began to realise when I noticed the channel between us had come to life again."
Damien stared, dismayed almost as much as relieved. "You mean you got yourself out of paying the price. Again." Just like on Shaitan, when he'd given his life to defeat Calesta, and had been saved by the Mother of the Iezu.
Tarrant snorted. "If you want to call it that."
Silence descended.
For a long time, they were simply looking at each other.
Damien drank in a sight uncannily familiar despite the utter difference in appearance. The intensity burning in Tarrant's eyes was still the same. The man's bearing was still the same, his movements, his mannerisms - every inch, he was Gerald Tarrant. How could he ever have believed differently?
There was a lump in Damien's throat. He swallowed, heavily.
Something snapped inside him, and thrill and relief and hunger spilled hotly over him.
"Gerald," he rasped, and he reached out again, grabbing the man's vest, pulling him close. Closer. "Damn you, Gerald," he whispered, and pressed his lips against the other man's mouth.
Holding on, desperately, not letting go.
He didn't tell me what he saw through the channel while I dreamed of the fae, he thought, incongruously, annoyance briefly surging again. How typical of Tarrant to simply sidestep the question.
And then, he felt Tarrant's arms coming up around him, Tarrant's tongue brushing his lips, teasing its way into his mouth, and - -
It was like they'd closed a fae-circuit, the currents flowing freely between them now. He thought he could almost feel the fae wrap around them, cocooning them in finely spun power. An echo of Tarrant's perception?
Then, he had more important things to do.
When they finally parted, Tarrant's lips were red, swollen.
Human.
Damien felt laughter bubbling up inside him. He forced it down.
"What have you been doing?" he asked, quietly, his hands still on Tarrant's shoulders. He needed to touch, to know. He wasn't going to let go.
"Collecting information," came the answer. "Too much is going to be lost, without the fae - and people have not yet realised it. Someone needs to preserve the knowledge, while we still can." Tarrant's voice was soft, almost gentle. Intimate.
Damien closed his eyes in relief. When he opened them again, he smiled. "You know I'm not letting you leave here on your own, right? Who knows what trouble you could get yourself into." He nodded, decisively. "I'm never turning my back on you again."
It seemed to him that Tarrant was studying him thoughtfully.
"Just so," he finally said, "just so."
~THE BEGINNING~