He stayed off the roads and skirted wide around villages, although many appeared abandoned, their fields fallow and weedy. Possibly they’d fled as Sembian forces had marched east or possibly something worse had happened to them.
Monsters prowled the plains. From time to time Magadon heard growls and roars in the distance, occasionally caught motion out of the corner of his eye. Often he nocked an energized arrow into his bow, but he never had to fire. The creatures that stalked the darkness left him unmolested. The pull of the Source grew stronger as he covered the leagues. And as he grew closer, he sensed an undercurrent to its pull, a sadness. The Source’s mind seemed dulled and melancholy. He didn’t understand it. As he neared it, as he sensed the full scope of its power, he grew nervous. He feared he could lose himself in it again. But by the time he actually spotted Sakkors in the distance, a dark star hanging in the lightning lit sky of Sembia’s night, he knew for certain he could resist its pull. He could use the Source and still keep himself. He’d been broken once before by using it, shattered, really, but his reassembled self was stronger than the original.
Small, dark figures flitted around the floating mountain on which Sakkors stood. They looked tiny from afar, but Magadon knew them to be Shadovar cavalry mounted on scaly-winged veserabs. The Source seemed finally to sense him fully, and its pull grew plaintive. It wanted him to come closer, to deepen their connection.
He eyed a stand of pine directly under the floating mountain and drew on his reserve of power. A dim orange glow haloed his head, and a mirror of the glow shone in the spot he’d mentally chosen under Sakkors. He activated the mind magic and it moved him instantly to the wooded spot under Sakkors. The mountain floated over him, huge and ominous. And somewhere within its center was the Source.
Magadon opened his mind and let the Source’s touch wash through him, let part of its power, its ancient consciousness, become part of his own. He sensed right away that it had lost no power, but it had lost acuity, and in an instant Magadon understood.
The Source had been calling to him, for a hundred years it had been sending mental energy out into the world in a desperate effort to reach out to him. It missed him. It wanted him near.
Why? He projected, but knew the answer before the Source offered it. The Source was dying, its sentience slowly fading away. Worse, it was aware of its impending demise, the slow erosion of its self-awareness. It was afraid. And it was alone, surrounded by beings that didn’t understand it and could not connect with it.
I’m so sorry, he projected.
The Source’s fear and sadness tightened his chest, caught him up in its swirl, and swept through him. He sank to the bed of pine needles, weeping, and wrapped his arms around his knees.
It had wanted him to come to it, for a century, and he had not answered.
He’d failed it.
Forgive me, he projected.
It did. In fact, it had nothing for him but affection, and his connection with it, and his sympathy, mitigated its sadness and alleviated its fear. It welcomed his companionship the way a thirsty man welcomed a drink, another mind to keep it company as it faded. It had simply not wanted to die alone. I’ll stay with you throughout, he promised. When the city moves, I’ll move with it. I won’t leave you.
He felt its gratitude. He made a place for himself under the city, hidden by his mind magic and the pine trees, and kept company with the oldest consciousness he’d ever encountered. Shadovar patrols came and went, sometimes cavalry on veserabs, sometimes soldiers afoot, but none ever noticed him. Over the days and nights, the Source showed him many things, events from its past, possible futures, jumbles of nonsequential nonsensical things that he could not follow. Time passed oddly for him as he walked in the Source’s dying thoughts. Its consciousness took odd turns, made strange connections, moved from things extraordinary to things mundane. He came to understand that he’d lost himself in the Source the first time not because of the Source’s malice but because of its loneliness. It was a consciousness with no body, and it had wanted mental and emotional companionship so much that its over exuberant consciousness had simply overwhelmed his. He’d been unready then. But one hundred years had passed since, and he was ready now. Magadon experienced months and years in moments, lived lives in hours, laughed and cried and raged. But always he kept a firm hold on himself, on his purpose.
There may come a time when I need your help, he said. Will you help me? The Source answered, in its way, that it would if it still could. Magadon broke his connection with the Source only once, to send a message to Riven through their mind link. He didn’t know if Riven would receive it, but he wanted to try.
I’m ready, he projected, and nothing more.
Then he waited, keeping deathwatch on the Source, his thoughts often turning back to Riven’s words.
Erevis is alive. And he has a son. And his son is the key to everything.
Vasen had never known the father whose blood ran in his veins, but Erevis Cale lived on in him somehow, haunting his dreams. Vasen always saw him as a dark man with a dark sword, a dark soul. In the dreams he never saw his father’s face, and rarely heard his voice. They somehow communed without truly seeing one another, in blindness, in quietude, and over the years through the sense-starved dream connection Vasen believed he’d come to understand what Erevis would’ve wished for him to know-the depths of loss, the pain of regret. Everything he’d learned of his father seemed to circle around regret.
Vasen was dreaming now, he knew. He saw only darkness before him, deep and impenetrable. Frigid air stirred his hair, felt like knives on his skin.
Erevis spoke to him, each word a treasure, his deep voice pushing aside the silence of the dreamscape.
“I am cold, Vasen. It’s dark. I’m alone.”
Vasen knew solitude all too well. He’d spent his life among others, but always apart from them. Vasen tried to move but could not. Something was holding him in place. The cold was growing worse. He was shivering, going numb, paralyzed.
“Where are you?” he called.
“Vasen, you must not fail.”
The words hung there for a time, heavy, portentous, filling the darkness. “Must not fail at what?”
“Find me. Write the story.”
“How? How can I find you? You’re dead!”
Vasen felt colder. He wanted to ask more questions, wanted to see his father’s face at long last, but the darkness receded.
“Wait! Wait!”
Vasen caught a flash of glowing red sky, rivers of fire. He heard the screams of millions in torment.
He awoke on his pallet, shivering, heart racing. He stared up at the cracked, vaulted ceiling of his quarters in the abbey. The gauzy, dim gray of a newly birthed morning filtered through the single window of his quarters. He could count on one hand the number of days he had seen more than an hour or two of sunlight in the past year. He’d gotten used to Sembia’s perpetual shroud long ago, the same way he’d gotten used to many things.
Letting the dream slip from the forefront of his mind, he sat up, his flesh still goose pimpled, and recited the Dawn Greeting, the words softly defiant in the ever-dim light.
“Dawn is Amaunator’s gift. His light dispels darkness and renews the world.” He sat on the edge of his sleeping pallet for a time, bent over his knees, his head in his hands, thinking of Erevis, the legacy he could not escape even when asleep. He’d been dreaming of his father more and more in recent months. He examined his calloused hands, his skin the color of tarnished silver, his veins a deep purple. Shadows webbed the spaces between his fingers and spiraled up his forearms, gauntlets of night. He stared at them a long while, the curves and whorls and spirals, the script of his blood. When he shook his hands, the darkness dissipated like mist.