Eventually they came to Vasen’s destination: a large tarn of still, dark water. Tall pines, the oldest in the vale, ringed the water, standing silent, dignified sentinels. One of the tall pines bordering the tarn had fallen over years earlier, blown down in a storm, perhaps. Half of its roots lay exposed, and a portion of it extended out into the tarn. Weather had stripped it of much of its bark, but still it lived.
When they stepped within the circle of the trees, sound seemed to fall away. The distant rush of the cascade, the stirring of birds, the hum of the wind, all diminished. Near the tarn there was only stillness, silence, shadows.
Orsin spoke softly. “This place is waiting.”
Vasen nodded. “That’s always been my feeling, also. I come here to meditate and commune with the Dawnfather. Although. .”
He did not say that the tarn pulled at the part of him he owed to Erevis Cale, the dark part, the shadow.
“Although?” Orsin prodded.
“For other reasons, too.”
Orsin looked at the earth, the trees, the tarn. “I don’t think this is the Dawnfather’s place. None come here but you?”
“None but me for a very long time,” Vasen acknowledged. “What do you mean, this isn’t the Dawnfather’s place?”
Orsin did not answer. He glided forward, his pale eyes fixed on the dark water. Vasen followed, his skin inexplicably goose pimpled.
“Who are you, Orsin?” Vasen asked. He felt as if much hung on the answer. He wondered why he had brought the man with him to his place of solitude. They’d only just met. He’d been walking with the man for half an hour and Vasen knew essentially nothing of him. “I think I should take you back to the abbey, explain matters to the Oracle-”
“I’m a walker,” Orsin said over his shoulder. He reached under his tunic to remove something, a disc of some kind, a symbol. “A hopeful wanderer. And a congregation of one.”
“Is that-?”
Orsin was nodding. “This is the symbol of my faith. This place doesn’t belong to the Dawnfather, but it’s holy still. And now I know why my path brought me here, why you brought me here.”
Kneeling at the water’s edge, Orsin held the symbol-a black disc bordered with a thin red line-over the water.
Vasen did not recognize the symbol but felt as if he knew it. He froze when shadows flowed up from the surface of the water to enwrap the symbol, twisted around Orsin’s hands. Orsin murmured words, a prayer, that Vasen could not hear.
Vasen looked at his own hands, also leaking shadows. His entire body was swimming in them, wrapped in them. Once more, he felt as if he were living life in a story written for him by another.
Write the story.
Orsin stood and turned to face Vasen. His white eyes widened slightly when he saw the mass of shadows swirling around Vasen.
“This place was left here. For me, maybe, but I think more likely for you. You’re connected to it. So I’ll ask you the same question you asked me. Who are you?” Vasen looked at his hands, leaking shadows.
“You’re a shade but not a Shadovar. How? Tell me.”
Vasen cleared his throat. He tried to pull the shadows back into his form but they would not diminish. “My. . father.”
Orsin took a step toward him, his fingers white around the disc of his holy symbol.
“Who was your father?”
Vasen looked past Orsin to the tarn, its deep, black water. “His name was Erevis Cale.”
Orsin’s hands fell slack to his side. “That. . can’t be.”
“You’ve heard his name? I thought you came from the east.”
Orsin took his symbol in both hands, held it to his chest. “Erevis Cale died more than a hundred years ago. You’re too young to be his son. It’s not possible, is it? How can it be?”
“Magic sent my mother here while I was still in the womb.” Vasen took a step toward Orsin, toward the tarn. “How do you know my father’s name?”
Vasen’s hand went to the hilt of his blade. Suspicion lodged in him, grew. Orsin seemed not to notice, or not to care if he did.
“Erevis Cale was the First of the Shadowlord.” Orsin brandished the symbol, held it out for Vasen to see. “The First of Mask.” Orsin was shaking his head, pacing now along the edge of the tarn. “I was led here to see this, to meet you, but why? I don’t see it. I don’t see it.”
Vasen said nothing, could say nothing, just stood in the midst of the shadows gathering around them. He let his hand fall from the hilt.
Orsin stopped suddenly, looked over at Vasen.
“This is their place, Vasen. Mask. Your father. This is their place.”
For a moment Vasen could not speak. His dreams of Erevis Cale reared up in his mind, dark visions of a cold place. “No. Mask is dead. Erevis Cale is dead. This can’t be their place.”
“I keep the faith alive, Vasen,” Orsin said. He gestured at the fallen tree. “It’s like that tree. Uprooted by a storm, broken on the rocks, but still it hangs onto life. So, too, does the Shadowlord’s faith. In me and maybe a few others.”
“You. . worship a dead god?”
“Not quite dead,” Orsin said. He pointed at the tarn as if it signified something. “This tarn is different from all of the others in the vale, yes?”
Vasen stepped to Orsin’s side, his eyes on the water. “It is. Deeper. No one has touched its bottom.”
The faint light of the dying, shrouded day cast their darkened reflection on the water, faceless and black, only half formed.
“You’ve tried?”
“Once. The water gets too cold and the depth is too great. It’s like. . a hole.”
Orsin inhaled deeply, put a hand on his hip, and looked up at the mountains. “I think I’ve stood on this ground before.”
Vasen shook his head. “You’ve never been to the abbey before. I’d remember if you had.”
Orsin smiled, no teeth, just a faint rise at the corners of his mouth. “There was no abbey here, then.”
Vasen could not control the swirl of shadows around him. “The abbey has been here since before you were born.”
“The spirit is eternal, Vasen,” Orsin said, nodding at some truth only he understood. “The body is not. Before going to its final rest, a spirit is often reborn into a new body. Sometimes this happens many times.” His white eyes looked distant as he fixed them on the dark water of the tarn. “But the essence of the spirit, its core, is the line that tethers its lives to one another through time. A thread that connects them all.”
Vasen thought he better understood the tattoos on Orsin, the grooves in his staff. “And you. .?”
“Have been reborn many times.” He smiled. “It seems I have a disquieted spirit.”
“Are you-? I don’t-”
“I’m not human, Vasen, at least not fully. The essence of the planes runs in my veins. In the Dalelands they called me a deva. But I’ve been called other things in other places, in other lives. Aasimar. Celestial. But deva suits me well enough. And Orsin suits me best.”
Vasen tried to process everything he was learning, to make sense of it. “And you came here-?”
Orsin shrugged. “Following the thread of previous lives. I told you the truth. I follow my feet where they lead.” His gesture took in the tarn, the vale. “I’m here now to see this. To see you, I think.”
Vasen felt the threads of his life being drawn into a knot, his dreams of Erevis, the Oracle’s words, Derreg’s admonition to be prepared, the appearance of Orsin.
“Why? To what purpose?”
Orsin disappointed him with a shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just walking a path that allows me to meet those I’ve known before. That’d be pleasant, I think.”
The hairs on Vasen’s neck stood on end. “Us? Then you think we’ve known each other before?”
Orsin smiled. “I believe so.”
Vasen had no words. He didn’t know if he believed Orsin, but he could not deny the connection he felt with the deva. He’d felt it the moment he’d seen him, like reuniting with an old friend. That was why he had brought him to the tarn. That was why he had tolerated the questioning.