"If only it were that simple," Conan Doyle replied. "We now know why Morrigan has sought the power of Sweetblood. She wishes to free the Nimble Man."
He waited a moment, allowing them to digest the severity of the situation.
"Which, from your tone, I guess should have me shaking in my boots. And maybe I will when you tell me why," Eve said, obviously unfamiliar with the legends.
It always amazed him how a creature as ancient as Eve could sometimes be so oblivious.
Clay stepped closer to the rest of the group, red mist swirling around his malleable features. "A fallen angel," he said, his expression grim. "But not like Lucifer and the others. He escaped the Almighty's wrath but was trapped between Heaven and Hell. In my wanderings, I've encountered entire religions based upon him, with the ultimate goal of freeing him, but no one has ever had the level of power needed to accomplish this…"
"Until now," Eve finished, the situation becoming clearer.
Conan Doyle nodded. "With her own witchery and Sanguedolce's power, Morrigan has enough magick now to tear a hole in reality. If she knows what she is doing, she could free the Nimble Man."
Dr. Graves was a strange sight in that fog. His own ethereal form was a mist of its own, churning in upon itself, but a breeze blew the red fog so that it caressed him. He was a cloud standing still in a tempestuous sky as the rest of the storm moved on.
The ghost was troubled, and his form solidified a bit as he moved toward Conan Doyle. "You said that Morrigan needed the Eye of Eogain to focus Sweetblood's magick if she was going to try to leech it, to use it. And as you can see, we did not return empty handed. How can she release The Nimble Man now? Haven't we already won?"
"A fair assumption, Dr. Graves," Conan Doyle agreed, "but another wrinkle has been added to the cloth." The mage rubbed at his eyes, the continued exposure to the unnatural fog causing them to itch and burn. "Without the Eye, Morrigan will most certainly decide to forge ahead with a physical locus to channel Sweetblood's magickal energies. An ordinary human would wither almost instantly with such power coursing through them. We have kept the Eye from Morrigan. And because we have, I believe she will have no choice but to attempt to use Ceridwen herself to channel that power."
"Could that be done?" Graves asked.
Conan Doyle sighed, the consequences of this act of desperation on Morrigan's part too horrible for him to bear.
No sacrifice is too large, for it serves a greater good. The words reverberated through his thoughts.
"It will most likely kill Ceridwen, as well as release Sweetblood from his self-imposed imprisonment," Conan Doyle said. "But the answer is yes. With Ceridwen as the… well, as the circuit breaker if you will, Morrigan will be able to free the Nimble Man."
Ceridwen was back in Faerie, and her mind was at peace.
The warm winds caressed her face as she walked hand and hand with Arthur through the royal gardens. She noticed her mother sitting on a stone bench in the distance, and Ceridwen could not help but smile. Everything was as it should be, not a detail out of place.
Upon seeing them, her mother stood, waving in greeting. But Ceridwen's smile faltered when she saw that her mother's clothes were tattered and stained with blood. It was then that she remembered that her mother had been taken from her long, long ago. A shiver of grief went through her and she turned to Conan Doyle for comfort, for some explanation of the dread she now felt.
But it was no longer Arthur who held her hand, and the grip on her fingers had turned cold and constricting.
Morrigan smiled and pulled her close, teeth as sharp as a boggart's. "Fight all you like," she snarled, "but it will not alter the outcome."
Her fantasy shredded, Ceridwen returned to reality. Pain suffused every inch of her flesh and her eyes burned with unshed tears. And now she remembered what had happened, the confrontation in Conan Doyle's ballroom with her aunt, the savage Morrigan. She had sent Danny away on a traveling wind and turned to face Morrigan and her lackeys alone. The battle with had been swift and brutal, and she had been defeated.
Now she lay draped upon Sweetblood's chrysalis. A surge of the ancient mage's power rushed through her, and she cried out in excruciating pain. They had bound her atop that strange encasement, the sorcerous energies leaking from the cracks in its surface filtering through her body to be collected by the eagerly waiting Morrigan. Her cloak was in tatters, burned through, almost nothing left of it, and her tunic and trousers were smoldering.
"Do you see how wonderfully it comes together?" her aunt asked, manipulating the distilled power of the arch mage and sending it back into the sarcophagus, causing the size of cracks in its surface to increase. With each splinter of that amber glass, more of Sanguedolce's magickal potency tore through Ceridwen, more power at Morrigan's disposal.
"Fortune smiles upon me this day. It is unlikely that you will live long enough to witness my triumph, but let me assure you, it will be glorious."
The magick coursed through her, the pain continuing to grow. The mage's power was overwhelming. Ceridwen had heard tales of Sanguedolce's prowess, but never imagined a mortal might be able to wield such might.
Morrigan droned on and on about her plans, but Ceridwen was no longer listening. To escape the pain, she fled to the past, remembering what it was that defined her, what had shaped her. There was pain in the past as well, but it was that pain that had forged her, as though in a blacksmith's forge.
From her earliest days, sadness had been her companion. She could barely remember a day when it had not walked by her side. Her mother had been slain in the early days of the Twilight Wars, the victim of a Troll raid upon their forest home. She had been but a mere child, forced to watch her mother's fate from a hiding place within the draping bows of an ancient willow tree. In that moment, she had sworn never to be helpless again.
There were times when the night was deathly silent, and in those quiet snatches of darkness she could still hear her mother's screams. She would awaken filled with righteous fury only to find that there was absolutely nothing that she could do.
Ceridwen cried out now, agony wrenching her back to the present. Pain assaulted her as more fissures formed in the mage's sarcophagus, allowing the flow of magick through her to intensify.
Morrigan laughed, amused by Ceridwen's suffering, but this was nothing new; her aunt had always reveled in the torment of others.
Once more, to escape her anguish, she allowed her mind to drift into the past. Ceridwen recalled with perfect clarity that day, fifteen seasons after the murder of her mother, when the sorcerers of Faerie had taken her into their care, training her in the ways of elemental magick. They had sensed within her a certain fire, unaware that it was an inferno of rage and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. What an excellent pupil she had been, absorbing the intricate teachings as the forest drank the rain.
She saw the battlefield in her mind as it had been so very long ago, littered with the bodies of both friend and foe. The Twilight Wars were in full swing and a battalion of Corca Duibhne was continuing to advance on their position. That was when they had first set her loose, allowing her to use her fury over her mother's murder to conjure up the forces to destroy the enemies of the Fey.
Her magick had been fearsome.
Ceridwen had reveled in their suffering, as the spirits of the wind tossed the enemy about the battlefield like children's toys, stealing the breath from their lungs before the earth swelled up to swallow them whole. Those who did not meet their fate from earth or air were washed away on angry torrents of torrential rain, or burnt to cinders by lapping tongues of hungry fire.