The High Priest of Shorth raised his face to the TaiGethen leader. The rims of his eyes were bright red, bloodshot in the whites. His pupils were tiny despite the gloom.
'What I have seen,' he whispered. 'She is dead but she is returning. The mana fires burn our resting place.'
'You may not place the living on the altar of Shorth,' said Auum. 'You must remove her.'
Ryish showed no sign that he had either heard or understood. He was a very tall elf, looming over both Rebraal and Auum from his elevated position on the dais. His large, oval face was partly turned away from them now but Auum could not fail to see the confusion written there.
'She will attempt travel again. I must prepare.'
'Ryish.' Auum's tone was sharp, cutting through the priest's rambling and startling him. 'She will travel nowhere. She is not dead. Remove her from the altar or we will be forced to do it for you.'
Ryish stared at him once again. 'Do not let her movement fool you.'
'You are our friend,' said Rebraal. 'Trust us. Trust Shorth who will not turn away from you. You are the High Priest of Shorth. What you are doing cannot be allowed.'
'Shorth is already hidden from us,' whispered Ryish. 'Before you denounce me, behold my torment.'
The priest stooped, grabbed the woman's legs and swung them onto the altar. Before Auum could move to stop the sacrilege, the smell of burning magic flooded the temple. Deep green flames engulfed the altar. The two warrior elves backed away, leaving Ryish bathed in the fire, chanting prayers and exhorting Shorth to hear him. His skin was beginning to blacken where the burning mana breached his natural defences. His robes were ablaze. Yet he did not flinch nor cry his pain. Ryish's agony ran deeper than fire.
'Hear me, Shorth. Find a path for your daughter. Let her rest; do not-'
The priestess sat bolt upright. Green flame writhed and twisted about her body. Her clothing ignited yet her skin was untouched. Pale and delicate as the morning to which she had awoken. Her eyes opened slowly, revealing orbs black as night, destroyed by mana fire. She turned to face Ryish. Her mouth opened and she uttered a wail that shattered glass in the roof of the dome and shivered through Auum's body like a plunge into an icy pool.
'O Shorth, find a path for your servant. Ease her passing to your embrace.'
Ryish's cries boomed into the temple above the priestess's wail. The stench of mana fire, burning cloth and scorched flesh grew stronger. Smoke billowed up around the beams supporting the dome. The heat compressed the chests of the elves and brought sweat to their brows.
The priestess fell back, body contorting, hands reaching towards the sky. The flames deepened in colour, gained intensity and then were gone, leaving nothing but a flare in Auum's eyes when he blinked. Still, the priestess trembled. Her mouth closed, opened once more and a single word was whispered.
Ryish slumped to the floor. Auum and Rebraal ran to his side, Rebraal dragging him into his arms, trying to comfort him.
'Rest, my priest,' said the Al-Arynaar. 'We will tend to you.'
'Nyluun!' shouted Auum. 'Healer mage inside now. No one else.'
Ryish's burns were extensive but he would live. Though when he turned his eyes to Auum, the TaiGethen wondered if living would be a mercy.
'Now you see,' Ryish said, croaking through a cracked throat. 'We are lost.'
'I don't know what I saw,' said Auum.
'There is no path for the dead to travel,' said Ryish. 'Nowhere for the soul to rest. Shorth deserts us.'
Auum glanced at the priestess, whose body was quivering on the altar.
'She is . . . ?'
Ryish was nodding. He grabbed Auum's arm. His fingers, red raw and black from the flames, gripped hard, smearing the TaiGethen's ritual camouflage.
'She cannot walk the rainforest yet she cannot rest with Shorth. Her doom is the doom of any who now die. Neither dead nor alive. No end to pain. Only fear.'
Ryish broke down and Rebraal rocked him in his arms as if he were a child in distress.
'Her soul will find rest.'
'It will not,' sobbed Ryish. 'It cannot stay within her body and it cannot find a path to the embrace of Shorth. It will be cast adrift. Lost for eternity, never to know the Communion with the living, never to feel the strength of the dead.'
'That cannot be,' said Auum. 'We cannot exist if we fear to die. There must still be a path to the dead.'
All three were silent for a while. Ryish composed himself and sat up again, nodding his gratitude, wincing his physical pain.
'And what of the dead?' asked Rebraal.
Ryish shook his head. 'My mind is a desert, my soul a dry ocean bed, my will a forest blackened and destroyed. I cannot feel them. I cannot speak with them. The heart of Calaius is rotting away.'
Rebraal wanted to ask more but Auum stopped him.
'Ryish, what did she say? What was the word she uttered?'
Ryish took a deep breath and swallowed before he spoke. The word was jagged glass dragged through flesh.
'Garonin.'
Auum and Rebraal shared a glance. Garonin. A word that denied hope.
'I have not saved my people from the Arakhe merely to lose them to this evil,' said Auum. 'We must call a Harkening.'
'There is no salvation if they have truly seen our hiding places,' said Ryish. 'All we can prepare for is extinction.'
'If there is a way, I will find it. If there is not, then we must seek a new place for our people. A new home.' Auum turned to Rebraal. 'Summon the ClawBound.'
Chapter 2.
But it was a shifting grey and an indistinct horizon this time. Not like any other time. Yet the same. The abject helplessness still ripped at his soul and the cries for aid speared his head like needles driven into his brain. And the hands reached for him and the faces were of those he loved drawn into pictures of torment. Their desperation bit deep inside him.
He reached out for them as he always did, to help as he always had done and always would. Though when he did he could not reach them. A barrier he could neither see nor sense kept him from them, kept their fingers from locking together. And the more he strained and grasped, the further they were from him. He shouted for them to come back but the smoke engulfed them once more.
Sol was bolt upright in bed. The sweat was slick on his face, on his shaven head and across the powerful chest on which grey hairs had begun to dominate. He knew his eyes were wide, sucking at the half-light, desperate to see. He tried to drag in his breath quietly. Failed.
'Sol?'
Sol looked down at the shape next to him in the bed. Earlier that afternoon, they had been as close as he had remembered for a very long time. Like a memory of a decade past. Now, the veil of disappointment had risen once more. One word was all she had said. And it carried so much frustration.
'I'm sorry, Diera.'
'Same dream, huh?'
'What would you have me say?' he asked.
'That you believe it is a dream. It's all I ever want you to say.' Diera whispered the words.
Sol reached out a hand to her, touched her bare shoulder where the sheet had fallen from her soft skin.
'I won't lie to you,' he said.
Diera shrugged off his hand, threw the covers aside and stood up, her back to him. He watched her take in a deep, relaxing breath before she reached for her shirt and skirt. There was nothing more to be said. There never was. But he couldn't let her leave the bedroom like this. It was a mistake too often repeated.
'I've tried to tell you how real the vision is. How intricate the detail is that I have seen and, Gods drowning, I have seen it so many times. How can it be a dream?'
'How can it be anything else?'
She wouldn't face him.
'It's a message.'
Now she did and on her face, still beautiful and framed in fair hair streaked with grey, was the contempt that had become depressingly familiar.
'And one day you'll be able to tell me what it says, right? And when will that be? Right now? Tomorrow?' She picked up a shoe and threw it at him. 'Never?'
Sol caught the shoe and dropped it onto the bed. He pushed back his covers and stood. They stared at each other for a time from opposite sides of the mattress. Diera snatched her shoe back off the bed and rammed a foot into it.
'The visions have been more vivid of late,' he said into the void. 'But I still don't understand it all.'
'Don't say it,' said Diera, expression a warning, the bed an inadequate barricade. 'Just don't.'
'They're in trouble. I cannot ignore it.'
'Trouble? How can they be in trouble?' Diera jumped onto the bed. She raised her fists to beat him but he snared them easily enough. 'They're all dead, Sol! Dead. Their troubles are over.'
Sol caught her gaze and held it. He could see the pain within her. The desperation for him to be other than he was. As for the love, that was fading. He let go her fists and her arms dropped to her sides.
'Death is no guarantee of peace,' he whispered. 'The demons taught us that.'
Diera sobbed. Her face crumpled and she held the sides of his head in the palms of her hands.
'But the demons are gone,' she said. 'You of all people know that. The threat is finished. It's over.'
'I want nothing more than to believe that is true,' said Sol. 'But I don't.'
Diera slumped to the bed and buried her head in her hands. 'Why are you doing this to me?'
'Doing what?'
'Five years, Sol. Five years of this and you've been getting worse and worse. The Raven is gone a decade past. We are your life now, me and the boys.' She raised her face to him and the tears spilling from her eyes drew some to his own. 'Please, Sol, this obsession is killing us. Let the dead be. Come back to me. I need you. We all need you.'
'And I am here,' he said. 'But I must find out what is happening. I cannot rest until I am sure they are at peace.'
'How can you ever know? They're dead!' Diera shouted the word into his face, levered herself from the bed and strode towards the door.
'There-'
'I won't hear this any more, Sol. I won't.' Diera smoothed her skirt and faced him, forcing herself to relax. 'I can't deal with it. When you were hunting the demons I understood. Because I wanted a future free of those things for our boys just as you did. But this? This is chasing shadows. It will always be unfinished and I am sorry for that. But you have to accept it. Open your eyes to what is in front of you now, don't keep them on the distant past.'
Sol sat on the bed and massaged his hip. It was beginning to ache. The spell was wearing off again.
'It doesn't feel distant. Not to me.' He looked up at Diera. She was studying him but wouldn't meet his gaze. 'I stood in that doorway and watched Hirad die. I could have done something. I could have saved him.'
'And that's what all this is about, isn't it?'
'What?'
'Redemption for you, for your imagined failings.' She shook her head. 'I'll never understand why you torture yourself. None of the other survivors are. They know what they did and they know what you did. You're the living embodiment of a hero, Sol. Why can't you see that?'
'Because heroism didn't save Hirad or Erienne, or Ark or Thraun, did it?'
'No, but it saved Balaia and me and Jonas and young Hirad. Those of The Raven died doing what they always did. Be proud, not desolate.'
'I am proud. And that's why I have to know if there's trouble.'
Diera shook her head. 'You hear but you do not listen. And you are blind to what you are doing to me and the boys.'
'No, I'm not,' said Sol, moving around the bed towards her. 'It is as much to protect you as it is to help my friends if I can.'
Diera gave a short laugh. 'Don't try and justify your obsessions using us, Sol. At least be honest with yourself even if you can't be anything else. I'm asking you one last time. Think, really think about this. Then come down and join your family or don't come down at all.'
There was a hammering on the door downstairs. Diera cracked.
'Can they not give us a moment's peace?' she shrieked. 'We're not open for three hours!'
Sol was in front of her in a moment, taking her by the shoulders and sitting her back down on the bed.
'I'll go,' he said quietly.
He pulled on his clothes and left the bedroom without saying more though his mind was drenched with words. His heart was beating hard and he was aware of a growing confusion. Sol shivered and tied his shirt tight at the neck. On the stairs, pain flared in his leg, an old memory resurfacing. The docks at Arlen. The sweep of a sword. Hirad saving his life. Again. The imagery was so intense it was within a ghost of being real. Sol leaned against the wall and descended more slowly, letting his shoulder slide along the age-smoothed dark timbers.
The hammering on the door was repeated.
'Patience!' roared Sol. 'I'm coming. The Gods save me from the curse of the impatient drunk.'
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Sol could feel the heat from the ovens in the kitchens to his right. A clatter of pans told him at least one of the staff was already in. Evenings at The Raven's Rest were always busy. It helped that so many of the city's influential people were regular customers but Sol liked to think that both the food and the wine cellar were worthy of those he served.
Ahead of Sol, a short passage led out to a fenced yard where he could hear at least one of his sons, Jonas probably, playing a loud game with friends. And to his left, his pride and joy, if he could be said to experience joy these days. His bar. No. Their bar. A place of laughter, memory and reminiscence. The place where he always retreated when he tired of the attentions of state. When he was allowed to.