The light of your faith is stronger than the darkness of your blood, Derreg had often told him, and most of the time Vasen credited the words. But sometimes, after awakening from a dream of Erevis and sitting alone with only his shadow for company, sharing time with the darkness he felt lurking around the edges of his life, he wasn’t so sure. Erevis’s life haunted Vasen’s; Vasen’s heritage occluded his hopes. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doomed to live a history written by someone else, unable to turn the page to get to his own life. The shadows that cloaked him, that he could not escape, were the story of his life.
Write the story.
What did that even mean?
Derreg had told him often that Vasen had to prepare himself, had drilled it into him with such fervor that Vasen’s childhood had been no childhood at all. It had been training of mind, body, and spirit since he’d been a boy. “Prepare for what?” Vasen had asked through the years.
“For whatever comes,” Derreg would answer softly, and the concern in his eyes spoke louder than his words. “And you must not fail.” And now Erevis echoed Derreg in Vasen’s dream. The voices of his two fathers, the one of his blood, the other of his heart, had merged into a single demand.
You must not fail.
He stared at the symbol inlaid into the wall over the hearth, a blazing sun over a blossoming red rose.
“I won’t,” he said. Whatever came, he would bear it. And he would not fail. Hard raps on his door startled him. As always when his emotions spiked, shadows leaked from his skin.
“Hold a moment,” he said.
He stood and the morning chill resurrected his goose pimples. The fire in his hearth had burned down to ash and embers. He pulled on his tunic, his holy symbol on its sturdy chain, splashed water from the washbasin on his face, and padded the few steps to the door of his small chamber. He opened the door and blinked in surprise.
The Oracle stood in the doorway, his red, orange, and yellow robes glowing softly. His eyes were the solid, otherworldly orange of a seeing trance. A shining platinum sun, with a rose raised in relief on the circle of its center, hung from a chain around his thin neck. He stared not at Vasen but at a point just to Vasen’s left.
The Oracle’s guide, a large, tawny-coated fey dog with intelligent eyes, stood beside the elderly seer, tongue lolling, tail upright and entirely still.
Vasen realized that he had never once heard the dog bark.
“O-Oracle,” Vasen said, shock summoning a stutter from his mouth and shadows from his flesh. He had never heard of the Oracle entering a seeing trance outside the sanctum.
The Oracle smiled, showing toothless gums and deepening the web of grooves that lined his hawkish face. Age spots dotted the skin of his scalp, visible through the thin fluff of his gray hair. His skin looked parchment thin and lit with a soft, inner glow.
“His light and warmth keep you, Vasen,” said the Oracle. Despite his age, his voice was the steady, even tone of the valley’s cascades, so different from the voice he used when not in a trance.
“And you, Oracle.”
“You may go, Browny,” the Oracle said to the dog. The creature licked the Oracle’s hand, eyed Vasen, and disappeared in a flash of pale light. Vasen always marveled at the dog’s ability to magically transport itself. Standing face to face with the Oracle, Vasen keenly felt the differences between them. The Oracle’s pale skin, deprived of direct sunlight for a century, but illuminated by the inner glow of his trance, contrasted markedly with Vasen’s dark skin, dimmed as it was by the legacy of his bloodline. The Oracle was lit with Amaunator’s light. Vasen was dimmed by Erevis Cale’s shadow.
“Do you. . wish to come in, Oracle?” Vasen said. He realized the words sounded foolish, but was not sure what else to say.
Again that toothless grin. “Vasen, did you know that Abelar Corrinthal was my father?”
The abrupt conversational turn took Vasen aback, but he managed a nod.
“My father told me.”
“Which father?”
Recalling the dream that had awakened him, Vasen had trouble forming a reply. “Derreg. My adoptive father. I’ve never known another. You know this, Oracle.”
“But you see Erevis. Sometimes. In your dreams.”
Vasen could not deny it. “Yes. But they’re just dreams, and he’s long dead.” “So it’s said.”
Shadows leaked from Vasen’s skin. Once more the goose pimples. “What do you mean?”
“I see him, too, Vasen son of Varra.”
Vasen swallowed the bulge in his throat. “And what do you see when you see him?”
“I see you,” the Oracle said.
“I. . I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. I met Erevis Cale. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t, but I wondered sometimes.”
“Why did you never ask?”
Vasen answered truthfully. “It seemed a betrayal of Derreg. And I was afraid. I didn’t want to. . know him.”
“He was hard to know, I think. I saw him twice when I was a boy. The first time he was a man haunted. The second time, he was no longer a man at all, but he was still haunted.”
“Haunted? By what?”
“Doubt, I think,” the Oracle said, then changed the subject. “Your father, your adoptive father, was the son of Regg, who rode with my father. Did you know that?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Vasen could not shake the impression that he and the Oracle were simply reciting words written out for them by someone else. He still did not understand the purpose of the Oracle’s visit.
“You, like your father, and like his father before him, swore to remain here and protect this abbey, to protect me. And you have done so.” Vasen did not answer. He felt humbled by the Oracle’s acknowledgment. “You have been here the longest with me and have done credit to the memory of Derreg and Regg. You have even become the first blade. But change comes to everything.”
“It does,” Vasen said haltingly. “But what’s to change?”
“The world. I see a swirl of events, Vasen, but I cannot make sense of it.
Gods, their Chosen, gods beyond gods, the rules of creation, the Tablets of Fate. Wars, Vasen. We see it already in the Dales. War is sweeping Toril. Something is changing. And in the midst of it all I see shadows and I see a growing darkness that threatens it all.”
Vasen’s head swam. He could make no sense of the Oracle’s words. “I am one hundred and six years old, Vasen,” the Oracle continued. “Where will you go when I die?”
The question startled Vasen. “What?”
“Already pilgrims come only rarely. Traveling the realm of the Shadovar is too dangerous. Monsters walk the plains and, where they do not, Sembian soldiers march. When I die, still fewer will come.”
“They will come to see your father’s tomb.”
“Perhaps some.”
“They will come to see your tomb, as well, to honor your memory, the work you’ve done here. A light in the darkness, Oracle.”
The Oracle smiled and Vasen saw that it was forced. His lined face wrinkled with remembered pain.
“That, I fear, will not be.”
“Are you. . dying?”
“We’re all dying,” the Oracle said. “So I ask again: Where will you go when I go to the Dawnfather?”
Vasen shook his head. He had dedicated his life to service and had never conceived a life for himself outside the valley. He had no family anymore, no real friends. The pilgrims and his comrades-in-arms respected him, but none were friends. His blood and appearance made him different. He lived his life in solitude.
“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remain here. This is my home.” The Oracle smiled, as if he knew better. “Indeed it is. Here, there is something you must have.”