I felt exhausted, utterly drained, yet elated. To test the efficacy of my weaving, I dropped my shielding, and waited to see what the creatures of the Dark trapped within it would do.
Seeing me unguarded was too much of a temptation for them. A half-dozen wraiths, thin, filmy arms outstretched and claws grasping, flung themselves at the barrier, wailing. For the first time I saw some of what the magic barrier had held at bay, and despite that I had been expecting something of the kind, I shuddered inwardly.
If you have never seen a wraith, they are hardly impressive. They seem to be mist-shadows, attenuated, sexless man-forms of spiderweb and fog, with great gaping mouths and hollow eyes. If you know what they can do, however, you will fear them. They can tear the heart from the body with those flimsy-seeming claws, and devour it with that toothless mouth. When you know that—when you have seen that, as I have—you know them for the horrible creatures that they are, and know that they present a greater danger than many birthings of the Dark of a more solid form.
They struck the barrier, and rebounded, and fled back into the darkness beyond my witchlight.
I laughed in my pride, and left them.
But that night something began—
It was little more at first than a simple, vague dream, insubstantial as smoke, hardly more in the dawn than a distant recollection of something pleasant. But the next night, the dream was stronger, clearer, and more compelling. I am no virgin, I have known the loving touch of a man, but it was long, two years and more, since I had shared such pleasures, and until now I had thought I did not miss them.
But the dreams, as they became stronger, drew me more and more, until one night they were as full of reality and solidity as my daylit world.
I dreamed of a lover, gentle, considerate, a lover who took as much care for my pleasure as for his own. And we joined, not once, but many times, body to body, and soul to soul, as I had never joined with any other.
I woke late, with sun wanning the foot of the bed. I was tired, but I had been working late into the night, constructing a set-spell to keep vermin from the village granary. But—I was also curiously sated, as if the dream-loving had been real.
I rose and stretched lazily, and dressed. I entered my tiny kitchen to break my fast.
Beside the plate I had laid ready the night before lay a single fresh blossom of spring beauty.
This was autumn.
Still, I rationalized after my first surprise, many of the villagers had forcing frames. Some kind soul, or admiring child, perhaps, had left it there.
Thus even the wisest can delude themselves when they do not wish to face the truth.
I walked through the next two weeks in a waking dream—by day, doing my duty to the now-contented villagers. They were well pleased, for now not even the faintest hint of the creatures of the Dark reached to the lands they called their own. Their needs (those that I could tend to) were few, and simple, and quickly disposed of. In my free time, I studied in Keighvin's library. He had owned a treasure trove of wizardly lore, a cache of some three or four dozen books. Some I was familiar with, but some were entirely new.
I studied also those notes he had made on the nature of the "haunted forest." It seemed to him that there was a heart to the evil, a spawning ground, where the normal was taken in and perverted to evil. He referred often to the "heart of darkness," and reading between the lines, I surmised that he intended to confront this "heart," and attempt to defeat it. A worthy intention—if he could remain untouched by it. If—that was the operable word. Something so powerful might well corrupt all it touched, a mage included.
By night I dreamed those erotic dreams, in which I was possessed by my lover and possessed him in turn. Each night they were clearer; each night the murmuring of my lover came closer to understandable words. Each morning I woke a little later. And yet—and yet, I recovered quickly, nor was the heart of my magic touched in any way.
And each morning, there was another fresh blossom by my plate—now, invariably, a red rose, symbolic of desire.
It seemed to me that the autumnal light did strange things within this little house, for as I moved about it I was followed by a shadow, not quite a double of my own. And never could I see it when I looked straightly at it—only from the corner of my eye. It danced attendance on me from the moment I crossed the threshold to the moment I left.
I really don't know why it took me so long to realize the danger I was in. Perhaps—if I had been a man, this never could have happened. I was so lonely, and had denied my loneliness so long that I was, I suppose, doubly vulnerable. Nor, had I been less of a mage, could I have been so ensorceled, for a lesser mage would not have been able to merge with Keighvin's magic as I had been able to do.
For whatever reason there was, for whatever weakness lay in me, I had woken something in that place with my presence.
I ventured at last a second time into that haunted wood—this time by daylight, for I meant to cross the boundary.
I found the "heart of darkness" indeed, just as Keighvin had written of it.
It was a grove in the center of the haunted circle, a grove in which the noon sun did not even penetrate the unleaving branches of the trees. I did not venture into it, for there was a deadly cold about that place, and I took warning by it. I sensed something buried beneath the font of an ancient willow; something older than my art, something that hated with a passion like knives of ice. Something so utterly evil that my very soul was shaken to the roots.
Not death—that was not what it longed for—corruption, perversion of all that lived and grew was the goal it sought. It was bound—but only half-bound. The magics that held it were incomplete. And they were Keighvin's; I could sense this beyond doubting.
He had come here, then, but had left his work unfinished. Why? What had disturbed him? Had he fallen ill, or worse than ill? The orderly man I intuited from his work and writings would not so have left something incomplete, unless—
Unless he had no choice.
And I dared not try to complete it, not without knowing exactly what he had done, else I would loose what he had sought to bind.
But to leave it half-bound—that was dangerous, too. If this thing should break the half-bonds, and absorb them into itself, it would be powerful enough to pass the boundary of the circle so many had cast.
I left that place more awake than I had been since I came to my village, and returned, sobered and not a little frightened, to the home I had come to call my own. I sat, my thoughts chasing themselves around in circles, until the last light died and I lit a candle, placing it on the table in the sitting room. As I did so, I danced at the night-darkened glass of the window, looking not at the landscape beyond, but at the reflection.
And it was only then, only when I saw the shadow standing behind me in that reflection and recognized him for my dream lover, that I truly woke to what bad been happening to me in my own home.
How, why, I did not know, but I knew this—the shadow that courted me, the lover of my dreams, and the wizard Keighvin were one and the same. He was still earthbound—tied to me, feeding on me. A benign, harmless relationship—now. But unless I acted, and acted quickly, I could easily find myself being drained by the ghostly lovemaking. With every dream-tryst, he was growing stronger, and had been for some time. For the moment the relationship was harmless—but there was no guarantee that it would remain so. I stood in mortal danger of becoming exhausted, until I became another such wraith. Lake Keighvin, unliving, yet undying.