Carefully he tried to avoid plucking the dark strings of energy, grasping only for the bright threads he'd used with impunity before. But as he seized the wind's sighing breath in his mind, he also gathered the anger of the coming storm. When he used the living energy of his mind to shape the spell, the darkness and doubt followed. Aeron struggled to disentangle them, but it was useless; light and shadow were intertwined, and the effort to part them was exhausting him. His heart thundered in his chest, and he gasped for breath, caught on the cusp of a spell that was indiscriminately drawing its power from his own body.
"Aeron! Finish it!" Fineghal shouted from a great distance. "You cannot power the spell without the Weave!"
In desperation, Aeron seized the dark with the light.
Shivering with fear at the power he touched, he wove the invisibility spell and vanished from view. Shaking with fright, he held his head in his hands, trying to understand what had happened.
"Aeron? Are you well?" Fineghal asked the night.
"I ... I think so," he answered. "Did it work?"
"You wove the spell well. I cannot see you."
"This is not so pleasant an experience as weaving a spell from nothing but the Weave," he said carefully. "It's like . . . grasping a rose that cuts with its thorns."
"Did you feel the stone's influence?"
"In a sense, yes, but I suspect the Shadow Stone merely opened my eyes to something present all along. Maybe under the stone's influence a wizard is forced to accept only the dark forces of decay and corruption." Aeron felt his voice shaking. He was maintaining the spell, but it was not an unconscious effort.
"So you did not tap any power directly from the Shadow Stone," Fineghal observed. "You simply used magical energy, both dark and bright, that exists all around us. I never suspected I stood so close to the shadow."
Aeron ended the spell and took stock of himself. He seemed unhurt, although his hands ached with cold and his muscles were weak and watery. "So the stone is not the sole source of shadow magic. It serves as a magnet, a lens of some kind, blinding you to the living Weave of our world." He leaned back, staring up into the sky. "I can't imagine what I would have seen in the world around me if I'd been fully caught by the stone's curse. All the world would have been an open grave in my eyes."
"What will you do?" asked Fineghal.
"I think I will resume my studies," Aeron said. "But more carefully this time."
* * * * *
The summer passed, lazy and golden, as Aeron worked out the forms and rules of the magic he now wielded. Fineghal helped where he could, but the noble elf was blind to half of what Aeron wrought. Aeron had to devise a new method for recording his spells, a new symbology and logic for casting them, and he had to learn how to use his power all over again.
Two summers came and went. Aeron painstakingly defined the structure of his sorcery, the medium by which he could record and speak his spells, the techniques with which he could wield both the Weave and the shadow magic from the endless dusk. He moved carefully, setting aside his studies for weeks at a time to roam the forest with Fineghal or to visit with Kestrel and Eriale, spending days helping Kestrel with his woodcutting, trapping, and hunting.
In his third summer with Fineghal, war swept through Chessenta. Cimbar and Akanax spent months battling in the rugged lands along the Akanamere, while their allies and supporters fought to a standstill elsewhere. Soorenar stood neutral, still husbanding its strength for the future. But the tide of conflict never ran as far south as Oslin, and the Maerchwood was undisturbed. Aeron wondered if Oriseus or Dalrioc had anything to do with the strife, but there was no way he could find out without returning to Cimbar, and he was not ready for that. He doubted if he ever would be.
In the winter that followed the temporary waning of the war in the north, Aeron translated all the old spells he had once known by heart, rephrasing them so that they made sense to his symbology. He spent long, lonely weeks in the paneled libraries of the Storm Tower, transcribing his old notes. He'd been forced to abandon the glyphwoods; the old elven spell tokens could not encompass the magic he worked to master. Instead, he used written spellbooks after the style of the college, but he phrased the spells in his own cipher.
Within the year, he mastered all the spells he had formerly learned from Fineghal and even worked out transcriptions of several spells he'd been taught at the college. Fineghal studied his writings intensely but could not make the leap to Aeron's unique symbology. "Your cipher seems meaningless to me," he told Aeron on one occasion. "Yet the structure seems familiar."
"Elven magic accounts for the Weave, and so the glyphs and runes you've taught me work for recording part of my spells," Aeron explained. "But it does not account for the shadow magic, the powers of darkness and entropy that exist in the planes alongside our own."
"You've found an answer, I trust."
"That's what I've been trying to work out," Aeron said. "I've found that the notations and the logic behind magic as it's taught at the college are useful. The forms of human magic work, regardless of which powers are manipulated."
"That is why your work seems familiar," Fineghal said. "It is derived from human magic. But if human sorcery is capable of wielding power from beyond our world, how do human wizards resist the corrupting influence of shadow magic and similar forces?"
"Many do not," Aeron replied. "I believe a great portion of the magical lore that has become rite and rote for human wizards is shielding, protection against the darker influences that might otherwise swallow a mage. Sorcerers who are unwilling or unable to take these steps are devoured by their work. That is a road I don't want to walk."
"You seem to have survived so far."
"I don't think I'm the same person I used to be." Aeron closed his book and rose, pacing over to the window. "Everything is ambivalent now. I used to be able to tell the difference between strength and decay, between growth and sickness, but now I can't sense one without sensing the other. I can't find beauty anymore, Fineghal. There's always a flaw, a cancer in the rose."
The elf lord was silent for a long time. "I had no idea you'd have to pay such a price," he said quietly. He set his hand on Aeron's shoulder and left him to his work.
Late in the following spring, Aeron visited Saden for several weeks, helping Kestrel to clear some land and raise a sturdy new house to replace the simple cabin the forester had first built when he settled in the freehold. It cheered him to see how happy Kestrel and Eriale were, although it saddened him, too. He was reminded again of the loneliness of his chosen life. Aeron made up for it by throwing himself into the work, chasing the cobwebs and unsettled fears from his mind with hard physical labor.
On the last night of his stay, they all enjoyed a fine dinner in the newly finished cabin with a handful of their neighbors. After the cider and ale were passed around, Aeron went outside and sat on the porch, gazing out into the woods. The door creaked open behind him, and he glanced up as Eriale joined him. "You don't care for company?"