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When you started your journey as a druid, you remember sitting up late around campfires with your fellow trainees, Tevna and Isodel, learning the woods and the stones. Isodel thought every dream she ever had was a portent of something or other, some great change to come, and while you admit she was a pretty decent storyteller you never put much stock in the dreams themselves.
Dreams were what you made when you were awake. Love made visible by action, a future secured by doing the work.
It’s the only reason you’d been able to leave.
***
You need a moment, just a moment, where you don’t feel like you are walking on eggshells.
Julien Davinos is exhausting at the best of times. These are so far from the best of times that you couldn’t even see them on a clear day with a good telescope. After just three days' travel you can feel your nails elongating into claws the second he opens his mouth.
If he isn’t second guessing your decisions about the route, he’s muttering something poisonous just close enough to the edge of propriety that it would make you seem out of line for hauling off and punching him. Which is what he wants. He wants someone to hit him, and between you and Vaelus and Lady Aranessa Royce (because in no universe is Occtis going to take a swing at him), he knows you’re his best option and that makes your blood sing, your nose ring start to glow.
Aranessa is a boon for keeping the group on task, absolutely, but she’s far too good at smoothing over little hurts and stings, too quick to intercede. These injuries are going to fester under her hastily applied bandages, but you don’t know how to tell her they need to be aired out. You have no idea how she’s even keeping herself together and if this constant peacemaking is part of it. You can’t imagine that she’s going to manage this for another three months and you’re starting to wish she'd just break down already so you can see the shape of the damage and start dealing with the fallout.
Vaelus remains ever so calm, ever so steady, and you’ve been wanting to rip her throat out with your teeth ever since her little moment with Bolaire. She’s so patient and kind with Occtis, though. She keeps asking him questions about his studies and about the undead constructs he’s fascinated with, which seems to keep his focus off being one himself. It’s probably a good thing, even if it grates on your heart and on your spirit. He’s going to start picking himself apart to see how he works if you give him more than a minute alone with his thoughts and you can’t think about that. You can’t keep his attention like Vaelus can either, because you can’t talk about the different methods of preserving and reanimating corpses for seven hours a day. You wish you didn’t have to think about or hear Vaelus at all, not her soft voice, or her gentle encouragement, or her raging hypocrisy.
You finally, finally get a minute alone with her where you’re reasonably sure Occtis isn’t listening in (which is its own can of worms and eggshells to be navigated) and away from Aranessa and her instinct to appease. Away from Julien’s everything.
You’re both standing guard over your sleeping little band, looking out over dark trees under a dark sky. Vaelus’s night vision is, of course, better than yours, but she deigns to allow you to join her vigil. A perfect time to unwrap some hastily applied bandages and see the damage.
“Nice night.” Neutral. Not said through gritted teeth. Not even a little bit.
“Indeed.” As placid as an underground lake.
You breathe in. Out. A distant owl calls.
“So how is this my fault?”
Vaelus stiffens.
Good.
“Like, exactly how? Because from what I understand, you promised Thimble you’d protect him. That’s why she let him go with Julien in the first place. I hauled ass across the city to find him and when I got there you were hanging out in the gardens and he was six floors up and dead.”
Vaelus remains still, statuesque. She doesn’t cringe back, doesn’t waver. Her words are measured when she speaks and all this only makes you angrier, “You heard the nightingale song.”
“I’ve been hearing that damn birdsong since the Farrahm, what does that have to do with anything-”
“You felt it.”
A bridge, a howl, that moment of connection. You’ve lost your footing now, unsure where she’s going with this.
“The song told me to let you in. That I needed to keep a path open for you. So I did.”
“You left him alone to come find me?” There’s a lot there to unpack but you will not be doing that right now, you will stay focused on the matter at hand, “And that somehow makes this my fault? You promised to keep an eye on him!”
“I did. And then I did as I was bidden. You were meant to be there that night. I ensured you would be.” Vaelus finally looks at her, her scarred face impassive but you think you can hear the faintest trace of anger in her voice as well, “I thought you’d save him. You didn’t. Or maybe you fulfilled a different role and this was meant to be. Either way, I don’t trust you to keep him safe now.”
“There’s no meant to be anymore, don’t you get it?” Your words come out, unbidden as the howl but just as necessary, just as raw, “It’s just us, just our choices! How can you not trust me to keep him safe when you did jackall to even try and help him? You did nothing! You could have stopped Ethrand before he got away with his heart, or you could have helped Aranessa and she could have done something, or-or-or you know what, none of this is getting through is it?”
Vaelus just stares at you. Uncomprehending.
Unbelievable. This ancient elven warrior is more in denial than even you thought, but it’s fine. At least you have your answer. You sigh, “Sure. Fine. It’s my fault. Whatever makes you feel better.”
You turn to look back at the trees, the dark forest lit by no fireflies. You can let this go because what’s the point? The woman’s not even operating on the same plane of existence as reality. Except one word in all that garbage keeps niggling at you.
“Bidden. What do you even mean bidden?”
“You felt it. I know you did. That certainty. A power is working on the world.”
The desire to hurt, to bite and tear, comes back full force, “Not your goddess.”
Vaelus looks away. “Perhaps not. She’s…distant.”
“She’s dead.”
“So is Occtis.”
You whip around, words hissing between your teeth like steam, “He’s not your damn miracle, Vaelus. He’s a person. I swear, it’s like none of you can even see him, he’s just a relic or a talisman, or fresh bait to you people!”
Vaelus looks at you and you swear that you see pity in her iridescent eyes.
“I’m not saying he isn’t a person. But even you must admit he is more than just that now.”
The hell you do. “No one is more than just a person. Not anymore. Not ever.”
Vaelus looks away, back out over the trees. “Alright.”
You relax, breathe for half a second.
Vaelus shifts, her chainmail clinking in the night air.
“Whatever makes you feel better.”
***
You recognize these cliffs. They’re on a tricky section of the Dvalmar pass, one that you’ve traversed many times. There are chains bolted into the mountain side for travelers to cling to in high winds, wet and rusted with mist from the clouds that press up against the mountainsides. You remember a bear you met here once, a grand old shebear and her cubs who had taken command of the trail for a few hours while the travelers had cowered yards and yards back, uncertain of what to do.
You’d talked with the bear for a while and eventually she’d moved her little family further down, allowing the traffic to flow once more. Your fellow trekkers had given you hard candies and lemongrass in thanks.
It’s just you and Alogar walking it now.
It feels right, although you can't remember that you’ve ever walked it together before. There’d never been a reason to.
He’s listening as you point out the different strata on the cliff face across from you. You listen as he remarks on the outposts below, the landmarks of the more traveled cart road that winds along the river that cut this route through the Kavros. He’s in his full kit, sword and bow, the uniform of the Barrowguard. He’s older than you remember.
He’s always older than you remember.
He’s telling you about a watchtower, you think, but you can’t focus. His voice is being drowned out by birdsong, and then the birdsong is being drowned out by someone shouting your name.
It’s Julien. He’s halfway off the trail, clinging to the chain with his gauntleted hand and clinging to Aranessa with the other. Alogar rushes forward to help. No hesitation.
He grabs a hold of Julien just in time - the chains are starting to pull free of their bolts and if they come loose they’ll send Julien and Aranessa both tumbling to their deaths. You don’t think there is a world where Julien lets her go. You call out to the rusted metal in druidic, commanding the bolts to hold fast, the chains to wrap around your son, to keep him safe as he tries to pull Julien back from the brink.
You drop down onto the mud and gravel yourself, lie on your stomach to help pull Aranessa up.
The drop is steeper than it should be. You can’t see the river or the outposts anymore, the cartroad has vanished into mist and fog. Some part of you knows that if the four of you fall, there will be no surviving the drop.
Aranessa’s not looking up at Julien though, no matter how much he calls to her to climb back up. His grip on her hand is slipping in the rain and you worry that the chains are going to hurt Alogar. Your son strains to pull up Julien and Aranessa both. You’re trying to get a grip on her too, to help ease the burden, and you call to her to raise her other arm so you can help, but she won’t look up, won’t lift it.
You realize why as the wind picks up and you see she’s clinging to Occtis further down. Her noblewoman’s hand is raw and red from the wind, manicured nails dug deep into his shoulder. Occtis has a grip on her leg and he’s shouting something up at you but the gusts whip his words away before you can hear them.
She can't pull him up. He can't climb higher.
There are chains pulled taught across his chest, you realize, weaving around and through him. They are silvery and well maintained and of course Vaelus hangs below him, expression calm and assured despite the precariousness of her own situation. She’s got a firm grasp on her censer chain, like a climber on a lead. Her legs are braced against the cliff face and she gazes up, calculating.
Okay, you breathe. Okay. Ignore the body horror. That’s part and parcel of Occtis these days. Three people. It’s like that game with the little wooden monkeys that Shadia used to play with. Their little hands and feet were curved so they could dangle from each other and Shadia and Alogar would compete to see how many they could connect before the whole troop collapsed. You found them hanging on the edges of tables and doorknobs and scattered across the floor for weeks and the absurdity of that thought doesn’t make this situation less dire.
You have three people to drag up. You can do this. You, Julien, Alogar, plus the metal and rocks that heed your voice. You feel your muscles shift and change, you remember the power of the shebear, the strength in her. You have power, you have strength, you have allies. You growl and reach down and your reach becomes long enough to get a paw around Aranessa’s shoulder. You heave in tandem with Alogar and Julien and you feel hope bloom as your companions begin to slowly, ever so slowly, move upwards.
But then the chains pull taut.
It is only then you see the chains hanging down from Vaelus. Down, way down, into the mist and into the fog, wrapped around a form so massive that it might as well be the mountain and the valley both.
The monstrous shape stirs and you feel the entire cliffside stir with it. The bolts shriek as they pull free. Alogar cries out as the rusty chains cut into him. They’re going to tear him apart, you realize, and you are crying for them to let him go, to stop, but they can’t hear your voice through the growl of the bear, through the crumbling of the mountain. The ground below you is cracking apart, beginning to slide into the abyss. Aranessa shrieks. Julien’s gauntlet is clawing at Alogar now, at you, tearing out chunks of you and your son’s flesh as he tries to gain purchase.
Below Aranessa and Occtis, below Vaelus, the rotted corpse of a goddess opens her beautiful, dead eyes like twin moons in the fog.
“Pull me up too,” Sylandri commands, even as her voice destroys the mountain, the cliff, the trail, all of it.
You fall and fall and fall-
***
“Are you alright?”
Aranessa shivers next to you as you coax your campfire back to life. She’s bundled in a cloak, her borrowed boots unlaced so she can assess the blisters forming on her heels and toes. She hasn’t complained, (at least not within your hearing and you are the most likely person she’d complain to), but it’s obvious that trekking across mountain backroads is well outside her wheelhouse. Still, she peers at you with her green eyes, too perceptive by half.
What does she see when she looks at you?
“I mean, is anyone here alright?” You manage a laugh, and the sparks laugh with you. Good. Morning fire, breakfast, and another early start. You can do this.
“True.” Her smile is a ghastly, thin thing. “It’s so childish, but I keep thinking I’ll wake up. That this can’t be reality. You’d think that would have stopped after a few days.”
“You’d think.”
***
There is a place where all lost things-
No.
You’re at the Archanade, walking with Hal.
The Lloy wing is as it ever was, exhibits anchored by the Pariah blade on display. This place is a monument, a reminder. Your people freed themselves and freed the world. Your family created the weapons with which to do so. There are few formal places in this city you should feel more comfortable.
You don’t know why you still feel so tense, so ill at ease.
There is a place -
Bolaire, the curator, smiles wide. He’s fond of Hal, you know, and Hal smiles easily back. He has friends, whole swathes of life that you are not privy to, because you chose to leave. Because the world needed healing. But he loves you, and you love him, and you both know this truth deep in your bones and it is enough.
The two of you follow Bolaire past the Pariah Blade to a new section that you don’t recognize. The walls are the same smooth gray, stone shaped by druidic hands. It is the nature of dreams that the words on the walls and the exhibits are nonsense. You do not know the name of this place.
Your attention is drawn by an display of small insects, pinned and preserved behind glass. It’s a strange thing to see in the Archanade, and as you draw closer you see they are fireflies, wings spread with little inscriptions beneath each variety.
“We house the largest collection of these fireflies of anywhere on the continent,” Bolarie is saying, somewhere behind you, “It’s almost a complete set, although a few subspecies aren’t represented.”
Next to them someone has constructed a diorama of wood and paper leaves, a forest floor in miniature. The fireflies have been enchanted to glow a strange, familiar green. You’ve seen them before. These fireflies, these woods.
- a place where all lost things-
“If you come this way you’ll see we have one of the trees preserved as well. Difficult to come by, certainly but only the best for the Lloy wing.”
Hal gestures you forward, hand at the small of your back, and you see the ghost of a tree. The display is elegant, certainly. It’s constructed of several pieces of dead wood, artfully arranged around empty space to form the shape the tree likely had in life. So many parts are missing though, and you can see the trajectory of how the tree must have been blasted with some kind of blight to hasten its demise.
The pieces that do remain remind you of the fossilized wood of Sylandri’s wastes up north. There is nothing living left in them to call forth, not even for a druid.
“No leaves, of course,” Bolaire continues, voice lilting with its usual showmanship, “but we have some sketches we’d love for you to comment on so our artisans can do some recreations. There are so very few people who had the chance to see what they looked like before, well.”
You realize where you’ve seen this tree before, where you’ve seen these fireflies.
“I realize it’s not the same as being there, but since the woods themselves are gone our goal is to recreate them as accurately as we can in the space, to educate the masses about what was lost.”
You look around the exhibit and you finally see it. It’s the path. Your path. The Old Path preserved in pieces, pinned and displayed because the reality is that the true path, that dark forest your order has spent the history of the world lighting, is gone.
“And, hopefully,” Bolaire continues, “we can keep at least some part of it in remembrance for future generations.”
There is a place where all lost things are kept eternal.
“I’m sorry Thaisha,” Hal whispers, “But it’s all we could do.”
We’re going to scrub your path from the face of the beyond.
***
Julien looks just as gaunt and haunted as you feel. You rarely are alone together, by both of your designs, but it’s a long journey and things happen.
“How’ve you been sleeping?” you ask.
He laughs.
You can’t help but laugh with him.
***
You are standing at the head of Hal’s kitchen table.
For a moment you are disoriented but everything becomes clear when you understand your purpose in this place. You are at the Farrahm. You are fulfilling your most sacred calling. The room is full of hazy mourners, treasures and candles, cranberry rolls and Yargraz. Your family are warm shadows in warm light.
You have your hands pressed gently on either side of Thjazi’s temples and he looks simultaneously at peace and mischievous despite the bruising at his neck. You are giving him his rites. They are written in your heart and soul, these words that by now have become part of your very being. They flow from you like river water, like snow melt in spring. You are a druid of the Old Path, guide to the departed, especially this dearly departed.
You can see the path in your mind's eye - a dark forest, lit by fireflies. Your words are signposts, markers, cairns.
Until suddenly they are not.
You open your mouth to speak but nothing comes out. You try to cajole the druidic, let it stream around the boulders of your grief and worries, move the dam of sudden tightness in your chest, but the words won’t flow. They can’t.
You realize it’s not just the words that are trapped.
You can’t breathe.
Something’s trapped in your throat. You cough and cough and cough again, but no matter what you try nothing seems to dislodge it. You are clawing at your neck, pounding on your chest. The room begins to darken and swim. Loza Blade is looking at you, eyes tired, the weight of her years bearing down on you. She must know, right? Why is she just staring at you?
You are certain you are choking now but no one else can hear you wheezing for help. The murmurs are too loud, everyone is too far away. The only person looking at you was Loza but even she is gone now. You can’t find Hal in the sea of strange blank faces, can’t see Shadia or Alogar.
The table is suddenly too big or you are suddenly too small. It’s still Hal’s table and the body is still there, your hands at their temple, but there are place settings all around it. You recognize the dishes although you haven’t seen them in years. All the good crockery from when Hal and you would host late into the night and the colorful wooden plates from when Shadia and Alogar were too young for anything that could easily break but not too young for beauty. The settings are beautiful if mismatched, art pieces collected and gifted, as eclectic as the cutlery. The table is strewn with flowers now, replacing the coins and candies and treasures, and the candles have become candelabras, the ones you remember from the wedding feast at Castle Royce so many years ago. Gold finery surrounded by jasmine and peonies.
Lady Aranessa Royce herself sits to your left. Her posture is perfect, even if her lovely gown is bloody and shredded. She smiles warmly at you, her courtier’s face elegant as ever despite the dried tear tracks down her cheeks.
Her perfect manners remain intact as well. You watch as she delicately slices into a cut of liver with small, dainty movements. She takes an elegant bite and compliments you on the preparation.
Julien hunches forward in his chair next to her, ignoring you entirely. He is ravenous. A gauntleted hand scoops intestines onto his own plate, snatching them from where they are spilling out. You see them start to unspool from the corpse as tears into the pile with his teeth. Blood and viscera drips down his chin but he seems to relish in the violence, the carnage. He’s bitten his own tongue in his haste to consume as much as he can and the blood of it mixes with everything else until you can’t tell which is which. You’re struck by the thought that he might end up eating his own tongue if he isn’t careful, even as you are panicking, still struggling to breathe around the clump of feathers in your throat.
Aranessa tuts gently, but does nothing else to stop him. Does nothing to help you.
“Honestly, Aranessa, do something about your dog.”
Primus Tachonis sits to your right, expression just as distant and contemptuous as the only other time you’ve ever seen it. His hand is still covered in melted candle wax as he carves into a heart with one of the steak knives from Hal’s home, your home. You cannot say a word against him no matter how your blood boils, no matter how hot the metal on you grows. There are bones and tissue moving around in the feathers in your mouth now, in your lungs. Primus deftly flicks the piece to Ethrand, seated next to him, with a smooth, lazy movement. The eldest Tachonis child has been peckish and sullen all evening, what with only his father’s scraps to eat. Ethrand snatches up his morsel of heart, glaring daggers at the assembled guests.
Vaelus shakes her head, mourning veil glittering in the candlelight, “Such a shame.”
Her voice is barely more than a whisper but you hear it ringing in your soul all the same.
She reaches across the table, graceful but unyielding. Her glittering knives carve into the corpse’s chest. You want to protest, to balk, but you choke out a wing instead of words when you open your mouth to stop her. She isn’t even at this table to eat anything. She can’t without removing her veil and she hasn’t removed it for seventy years. You don’t think she’ll remove it for this.
But she digs in anyway, cracking the rib cage open to get the bird’s nest out. She’s making a mess of the chest and disturbing the eggs, trying to maintain the carefully woven together veins and capillaries at the cost of everything else. You know the eggs are going to spill out on the table and crack. The nightingale should be furious, should be flitting about in the air above the table. Where is it? You can hear it, you are always hearing it these days, but you never see it.
The eggs tumble out, just like you knew they would. You want to reach out, to catch them as they fall, but you need to keep your hands in place for the rites and the eggs smash against the tabletop. The little embryos are half formed things, too young to survive. Another cycle stopped prematurely.
Vaelus doesn’t seem to care for them though, just the nest. She loves this hollow thing emptied of its purpose. She tucks it away into her censer like a relic, like a talisman. She can fill it now with incense and prayers.
You feel hot tears running down your face and you still can’t speak, can’t say anything, can’t do anything. Everything about this is wrong and something is clawing its way up your throat and when you finally, finally, finally manage to choke the damn thing up it’s already dead. The mangled nightingale falls onto your own plate, feathers coated in saliva and blood, bones broken.
There’s nothing for it but to weep. To scream.
A gloved hand reaches up, brushes your cheek. Wipes away some of the tears.
You look down where your hands are resting at the temples of the deceased, this soul you are supposed to be guiding to new life and renewal, but it’s just Occtis looking up at you. His dead eyes glow in the dimness. You know in your heart there’s no soul left here for you to guide. It’s been lost, torn apart because the man to your right wanted to destroy the path through the woods and tie up a loose end and thought he might as well kill two birds with one gods-damned stone.
You are openly sobbing now. Your path, your world, the future you have dedicated your life to building is being clawed away chunk by bloody chunk. You can feel the grip of fear and grief like fingers in your chest, squeezing anything good and growing, and you see this distresses Occtis more than the vultures feasting on his viscera. He wants to help, to not be a problem. He’s always trying not to be a problem.
You feel the leather from his gloves on your cheek again, though your tears make it difficult to see anything clearly now. He’s a dark shape, red and black, twin green lights amidst the warm candles.
“It’s okay, Thaisha. Really. I’m fine. All this was just going to rot anyway. Better to not let things go to waste, yeah?”
You close your eyes and can finally, finally breathe but there’s no relief in it. You nod, though, because he’s trying so hard. You remember a lifetime ago how badly you hoped this necromancer would understand the natural cycle and everything’s role in it. You remember conversations on the road back from Venatus, about nutrient cycles and mother trees and the utility of the dead made animate.
You can see the throughline, see the logic, even as it breaks your heart.
So you nod. You say, “Yeah. Okay.”
You think he might smile at that. You hear it in his voice.
“See? It’s alright. Go ahead. Have some too.”
You think you are going to be sick.
You think you will never be more grateful to wake up, except that nothing will be all that different when you do.