He needed help. For what, he did not know, only that he needed it He tried to call for that hel Then, piercing the stillness, a sound. A sound so sweet that it cut through the ice surrounding him, so pure it could only have come from the mouth of a goddess. The goddess called to him from across the ice, sounding in his mind from all directions.
She's singing to me, he thought with wonder, sud- denly recognizing the sound as song. Thoughts became a little clearer. Who is she?
He turned his attention inward, away from the room of crystals and into the light. The light sur- rounded him, then broke into a delicate snowfall, falling around him with muffled softness.
The snow cleared, parted, like the parting of a thin white curtain. The goddess stood at the edge of a large lake, beside a tree that, despite the season, bloomed with tiny, white flowers. She wore a gown of white that flowed over her body in gentle folds, like a frozen fountain, and she sang a song of sweetness and power, calling to the birds and animals, gentle commands to do her bidding. As she raised her hands, the beasts surrounded her, ready to obey. The birds opened their beaks and joined her song with a hundred songs of their own.
A shaft of light suddenly illuminated him from above. She turned to him, smiled, and began singing directly to him again, this time calling a name.
"Alaire, my son," she sang, and he became con- fused, disori Son?
Alaire?
The light spread from him to her; it illuminated her clearly, and he saw that this was no goddess, but a mortal woman, older than h Mother?
She smiled. With that identification came other memories. And recognition; she was performing some kind of magic. Anxiety for her overcame him. She should not do this, magic was dangerous!
Is this why I'm here?
"You see who I am. Remember who you are," she sang. "Remember what you are, and sing yourself into being!"
What I am? he thought. He had a name, Alair He had a mother. He must have had friends, com- panions. The Dark Elf. .. he was a teacher, he helped me become what I am. What am I?
"I will help you," she continued. "With music. With what brought you here. You will use your music to break free of this spell imprisoning you."
Imprisoning me? How was he imprisoned? He seemed free enough at the moment.
And yet, the dim memories that flitted just out of reach seemed to argue against that.
"I will help you," she repeated. "I will help you remember. When you were an infant, there was a creek that flowed near our summer cottage in the mountains. You used to sing with it, gurgling like any baby, except that your baby-sounds were music -- "
He saw the cottage, a rustic chalet on a ridge of hills, surrounded by fields of daisies and lavender. He wondered how the woman -- no, my mother -- was putting these things in his mind, and then saw these were memories, of things he actually experienced before, in another form. I wasn't like this, then, he thought I was a human, a baby barely able to walk.
"Then when you were six, we brought you a lute, and then a harp, and you began to play in the palace nursery -- "
He remembered more as the woman spoke. And as she talked to him, her story became a song, and then she was singing to him, about his past, his hopes, his aspirations.
"And then you met Gawaine, who told you about the magic that went with the music. And you began to learn what that magic could do."
He held tightly to the memories, the clear and per- fect slices of his life that now sprang free of the fight and cold that had stolen them. With every memory came the hints of more, and he used those hints to retrieve others, and his life began to take shap His mother's voice faltered, and she herself faded, until she was gone and her voice was a barely audible murmur, echoing in the distance.
Mother, no! Come back!
"Remember" she sang, a mere whisper of sound.
"Remember and sing...."
He struggled to retrieve the words and the music, and suddenly, he did remember singing. The song came from within him, vibrating against the prison of the crystal, surrounding him with light and warmth, and millions of memories. He sang as loud as he could, until the song roared against the walls that held him here. Cracks appeared, and then fissures; lancing through the cold light.
Pain lanced through him as well, pain such as he had never felt before. He knew he was destroying the crystal that held him -- but he also knew that this was not his body, his real body was elsewhere, and he sang a song that would make soul and body whole again, ignoring the pain, singing through it light and lightning vibrated around him, vibrated until he was all pain and sound, vibrating until his song reached a crescendo that was unbearabl And he shattered.
In that moment, he was aware of each of the mil- lions of shards of crystal that scattered through the room, their size, their shape, their velocity. It was as if his very soul had fragmented into all those pieces, each with a distinct set of eyes, and tiny chunks of himself were skittering hither and yon against rock, rafters and shelves containing other crystals.
Then, darkness.
Darkness, and a sense of weight, of being. Of arms and legs, of head and torso. The scent of wood and musty satin; the feeling of cloth beneath his fingertips.
He opened his eyes on darkness, and he knew he was back in the coffin again. But now he was no longer paralyzed, and he reached up with his hands and pushed the lid of the coffin up. The panel slid easily off, and clattered on the floor somewhere far beneath him.
Every muscle was stiff and sore, but he was per- fectly able to sit up. He looked around the darkened room, seeing the vague outline of what appeared to be other coffins lined up on shelves.
Suddenly the enormity of what he had just done flooded over him. He had broken the spell! He was free!
Filled with elation, he felt all over his body, making sure it was real and not some kind of illusion.
It was real, solid, and indisputably his. He was even wearing the same clothes he'd been captured in.
Now what? he thought, half-drunk on his joy, and half still in terror that he might be cast back into the crystal at any moment. Now -- I get out of here!
He crawled over the edge of the coffin and slowly let himself down to a cold, stone floor.
"Naitachal!" Lyam called over from his cell. "Can you move yet?
It had seemed like several candlemarks Soren's dart struck his leg, paralyzing him. The Elf had succumbed to sleep for part of that time on the cold dungeon floor, a shifting, semi-wakefulness that came and went. But now the drug seemed to be fading; after a bit of experimentation, as his legs and arms flopped in crude approximations of what he wanted them to do, he gained control over himself again.
Slowly, he moved from his sprawled position on the floor, and just as slowly got to his feet.
Lyam had been spared the dart. Naitachal sup- posed that the purpose of the drug was to prevent him from using magic, and not to physically incapacitate him. He reached deep for the energies of his magic, to create the most rudimentary shield But there was still a strange, black wall preventing him from doing anything magical. Whatever was pre- venting him from using his power was not the drug.