10, Age of Magic, Early Spring
"Did you really think that ending the world would change Elwen nature?"
-Ending of the Amalda Selkendal.
Jyeron scowled at the shimmering barrier ahead of him, and stuffed another piece of bread into his mouth. He didn't want to cross it. He didn't want to think about crossing it. He wanted to turn around and go back down the Mountain.
Did you really think that the way over the summit of the Mountain would be clear? The wild magic loves strewing obstacles in our path. Why should this be different?
Jyeron glared at the sword that lay a short distance from him, sheathed, on the short and spiky silver grass. "Why do you speak of the wild magic as if it were separate from you?" he asked aloud. He refused to speak mentally with this companion he hadn't chosen unless he had no other choice. "It created you."
How do you know that?
"I woke after-" Jyeron swallowed, and looked the other way. The sword was beginning to glow white, and he couldn't talk about the explosion of wild magic when it was doing that. It reminded him too much of the white fire that he had called all the strength of his will in the last moments to ride. "The Change, and you were there at my side. I didn't have you before. Of course I am going to assume that the wild magic created you. And you have never told me differently."
It was two years before you would talk to me at all. How was I supposed to tell you anything?
Jyeron stood up and stepped away.
At once the bond between him and the damn sword grew tight. Jyeron turned back, slit-eyed and panting. It had been like that ever since he had awakened with the blade at his side. He couldn't move much further than about ten feet from it, and even less than that if it was feeling in a pushy mood.
Ella. My name is Ella. And I have a spirit that you would call female. Huffiness invaded the mental voice.
"I should just kill myself here and now," muttered Jyeron.
You won't do that.
The damn sword was right, Jyeron thought as he walked back to it and picked it up, sheathing it. He hadn't survived the Change out of sheer strength of will only to commit suicide now. He would live with this, and someday he would find a way to get rid of the sword.
Yes. At the same moment you find the way to restore the world to what it was before the Change. The mental voice smirked, and Jyeron was glad that the sword was sheathed. He didn't want to look at it, and see the eyes of the strange beast on the pommel glowing with amusement.
Jyeron looked back at the shimmering barrier and straightened his shoulders. He had to cross, damn it. He wasn't going to cross standing here, and he didn't want to go back down the Mountain and around to the other sides. There wasn't a path around the sides, only sheer stone that melted into the remains of other mountain ranges damaged by the blast of wild magic. He would have to walk for thousands of miles before he found another way to the country that had once been the province of Sweptoria, where he had heard some of the survivors of the Change were beginning to rebuild.
That was the worst thing, he thought as he walked forward. The damned loneliness. The wild magic had killed uncounted millions in seconds, and he hadn't met very many people who didn't drive him off with bared weapons and strange new powers the moment he appeared. Stars, he hadn't met very many he would characterize as people anymore. The wild magic had been at work on their bodies, and often their minds.
He was lucky- he thought. He still looked outwardly the same, a young male curalli just past the crux of his third millennium, dark silver skin unmarred, dark green hair and golden eyes unaltered. He still had the same number of arms and legs, as well, something that couldn't be taken for granted anymore in the Changed World.
But sometimes he felt strange currents stirring in him. A few days ago he had accidentally slashed his hand on a stone, and had seen the blood stop flowing after a few drops, the skin pulling together and scabbing in seconds. The scab had dropped off a minute later, and his hand now looked completely healed.
Jyeron didn't have healing magic, and he was pretty sure they was no healing magic in the rock.
You didn't have healing magic, said the sword in his head. You might now. You might have many wonderful things available to you now, if you would only look into your soul and see them.
"Listen to me, sword," said Jyeron through gritted teeth as he neared the shimmering white barrier. "I am going through. If I hear another word from you before we're out the other side, then I am going to throw you as hard as I can in the opposite direction, and damned be to the pain. Do you hear me?"
Silence.
Jyeron smiled, a little, unamused flex of his lips, and then stepped through the barrier.
He passed out.
*****
"Eeli sopli?"
Jyeron opened his eyes, and then scrambled backward with a shove of his elbows and an incoherent shout. The creature above him tumbled back just as quickly, white skin stretching and folding like parchment, mouth open to bare teeth that weren't quite fangs but certainly didn't look Elwen.
Jyeron recovered himself, panting shallowly, and stared at the creature. It looked Elwen; at least, it stood on two legs, and there weren't many creatures, Changed World or Old, that did that. But its skin was starkly pale without any hint of a kinship to ice or snow, its hair hung long and white and flowing to the shoulders, and the angles of the face were inflexible and all wrong to be Elwen. Jyeron bared his own teeth. He wasn't sure what it was, but he knew that it didn't wish him good.
Slowly he stood, the sword at his side radiating hunger. Jyeron ignored that. It could damn well wait. And if it had something truly important to tell him, then that could wait too. For once, he wanted to speak to the creature before him instead of letting the wild magic mediate for him. It wasn't running from him, but stood and watched, slightly hunched forward like a great grasshopper.
"Who are you?" he asked.
For a moment, a spasm crossed the creature's face, and Jyeron had to look away. The spasm wasn't like something that might cross an Elwen face, affecting only some muscles. This convulsed the whole thing, so that the thing's features billowed like cloth in the wind.
When he looked back, the great green eyes that dominated the white face had a spark of intelligence and curiosity in them he hadn't seen before, and the high-pitched voice spoke in words he could understand.
"You are different."
"In what way?" asked Jyeron. "From you, yes. I don't know what you are, but I am curalli." He ignored the burning loneliness that urged him to go closer. The wild magic and its creatures ranged from playful to hostile, but he had never encountered one that was simply friendly. The chance that he had found someone whom he could truly share confidences with was small.
The sword trembled at his side as if it would like to say something, but luckily said nothing. Jyeron was glad. He didn't want to feel as if his heart was being torn out of his chest right at the moment, which was what it would have cost him to keep his promise.
"Different from those who cross the barrier," said the creature, drawing his attention back to it. "Do you know what this place is?"
"No," said Jyeron.
"Faerie," said the creature. "And I am one of the folk of Faerie. You have never heard of us?"
Jyeron shook his head.
"There were none of our kind in your world before- ten years agone?" asked the creature, and Jyeron had the strangest feeling it had had to pause and think a moment before it gave the length of time.
"No," said Jyeron. "There were corame, who looked a little like you, but weren't as pale."
"Not of Faerie," said the creature at once. "I have met them, and they are not us."
Jyeron nodded. "And there were the alfari."
The creature flinched like grass touched by brushfire. "Not us," it said.
"And humans."
"We have seen them. We are not afraid of them."
"And my kin. Elwens."
"Ah," said the creature, its voice so low that Jyeron almost could not make the words out. Its breath seemed to be sweet; at least, he caught the scent of flowers just as it spoke the words. "We have heard of them, but the ones we saw were different. What breed are you?"
"Curalli. Shadowed Elwen." Jyeron resisted the impulse to ask where they had seen other Elwens. There were other Elwens alive in the world- but they might be dead, or in a place he could not reach, or unwelcoming to him.
"We have seen them," said the creature at once, and now a faint frown polluted its shattering voice. "You do not look like them."
Jyeron jerked his head up. Could he have Changed and not known it? Had some illusion hidden his real body from his own gaze? He would have laughed at such things in the Old World, but this was not the Old World.
"How can you tell?" he asked.
"They did not shine," said the creature, and moved one long, thin arm in a complicated gesture. Colored fire, shimmering madly from one hue to the next, traced the movement.
Jyeron thought that it was trying to describe the outline of something in the air, and squinted obediently, trying to make the design out. He couldn't, though; it was a random mass of squiggles. He looked back at the Faerie creature. "I'm sorry; I don't understand. Could you-"
The thing hissed at him and sprang back. The large, green eyes shimmered like crazed glass, and watched him almost fearfully.
"What is it?" asked Jyeron, glancing around, wondering if the creature had seen another enemy. He knew that wasn't it, though. Old, slow disappointment woke in his heart. It doesn't want me here. It's afraid of me. I have to leave again, he thought.
"You did not collapse."
Jyeron snapped his gaze back around. "Should I have?" he asked, his voice dropping into the deep drawl he knew all too well. It was the voice he used when he went into battle. That at least had not changed, and that was a good thing; he had fought more than one battle in this Changed World.
"Yes," said the Faerie creature, and made another complicated pattern. This time, green fire trailed the arm, and Jyeron squinted, wondering if perhaps it formed a hypnotic design.
But he couldn't see any meaning in it at all, and once again he looked to the Faerie creature in wariness. The creature stared back at him, and then it stepped back and vanished behind another shimmering barrier.
Jyeron took a deep breath. He could turn around and go back through the first barrier, assuming that it would let him out, or he could go forward.
He wanted to go forward, despite the danger he was undoubtedly walking into. He wanted to look at the creatures, and, if possible, shake the answers out of them. What did they mean, he didn't look like the other curalli they had known?
But it would be dangerous.
Jyeron grimaced at the bitter taste of his pride and drew the sword.
At once, the eyes carved in the pommel flared, and the beast's head vibrated. The voice in his mind said, I assume that I am allowed to speak now?
"Yes," said Jyeron. "I suspect that I will need your help."
The sword's glow dimmed for some reason that he didn't understand. And that is the only reason that you are taking me out of my sheath?
"What other reason would there be?"
For a moment, the sword gleamed with a white radiance, and he wondered if it was pondering what to tell him. Then it said softly, The wild magic did not create me, any more than it allowed you to ride its waves and escape unharmed of its own free will. I was created by your will, which wanted to survive so badly that it took a route that would allow it to survive. It created the path. And I am part of that path. I don't know why. But my existence is necessary to yours. Perhaps it is only to make sure that you would not die of loneliness.
"Why did you never tell me this before?"
You didn't ask.
Jyeron sighed. There were many things that he could say, but when they were about to face danger and he knew that he needed the sword's trust, they would have to wait. "I trust you," he said quietly. "I trust that you are telling the truth, at least about this. And I don't know yet what it will mean if we survive this. Come with me, then, and help me fight the Faerie." He paused, then added, "Do you know why its magic didn't work on me?"
I suspect it was because you have become- whatever you have become.
"I have power over the wild magic?"
You had enough to survive. There are many steps, you know, between having enough power to Change the world back and having none at all.
Jyeron nodded, then recalled the barrier and came back to himself. "We will have to speak more of this later," he told the sword, and stepped through the barrier.
So softly that even the tuned corner of his mind almost could not hear it, the sword said, My name is Ella.
*****
It was like nothing he had expected.
The palace ahead of him reminded him of solidified light, except that it wasn't really solid. Jyeron jogged nearer, squinting, trying to make the shifting white sides form into bricks or stones or slabs of metal, like the ones that some of the land Elwens had built with in the world before the Change. But they wouldn't. They continued shifting, and sometimes they reminded him of water and sometimes of desert sunlight and sometimes of rose petals.
So did he know that it was meant to be a palace and not something else?
Jyeron didn't know. And as he saw one of the Faerie creatures come forth, moving in a blinding whirl of silver blades towards him, he didn't care either. He set his feet and met it.
The thing danced around him, snapping and snarling with mouths that seemed to sprout for a moment out of the whirl, taking swords as teeth, using them to score long marks in his arms. Jyeron was no match for its speed at first, but slowly, he became better. The slashes hurt, and did not close as the cut in his hand had, but they didn't hurt as much as he knew they should have. He wondered if this was part of the Change that had taken place in him, and was wondering so deeply that he missed one strike and let it go home.
The strike scored across his chest, and Jyeron thought he felt it touch his heart.
He gasped.
Blood, clear and pale, sprang from the creature's blades to the wound in his chest even as his own blood poured out. Jyeron gasped and shook his head, and abruptly could see the palace more clearly. It stood so solid above him that he wondered he could ever have thought of it as shifting. He turned back to the battle, and found that Ella had grown light in his hands.
The sword-creature retreated before him, though, even as the slash in his chest closed up, and no tempting hole that Jyeron could leave in his defenses would convince it to come closer. He lowered Ella and said, "Do you think that it accomplished its purpose?
It wanted to introduce the blood of Faerie into your veins, I think.
"That is exactly right," said a clear and calm voice from behind him. "I am glad that you met the bloodletter before you met us. You might not have understood us as well."
Jyeron turned. The woman behind him had a dark face, and a pale. He could see that her hair tumbled in shining white waves to her feet, and also that it was the color of gold and cut very close to her pale skull. Her fingers wove around each other, and they hung slim and limp at her sides. She was smiling at him and frowning as if she would loose her magic to consume him in a moment. She looked as regal as a queen, and merry as a child. She had shimmering blue eyes, and eyes as silver as the grass outside Faerie, and green as the eyes of her subject who had already confronted him.
"I rule here," she said. "And once I had another form. Once I walked as you did, unchanged and untouched in body, though carrying great power inside."
"What are you talking about?" Jyeron lowered his blade and stared at her mistrustfully. It wasn't merely the effect of the countless simultaneous impressions of her. There was something in her voice that he didn't trust, something that he remembered from the Old World. Greed hadn't died when the world Changed.
"I was julaludara," she said, and translated the word before Jyeron could. "Steel-willed. Just as you are. That is what we call those who managed to survive the Change by the strength of their wills alone."
Jyeron felt himself smile almost against his better judgment. "There are more of us?" he asked. "We are not alone? Can you tell me-"
"You don't understand," said the woman. "I was like you. I gave it up, and Changed into what the magic wanted me to be. I didn't want what I had when I was like you."
"Why not?"
"You don't know the consequences of being julaludara, do you?"
"I know that I heal quickly-"
"It is more than that," said the woman. "Long will you live. I can see no death for you, in fact. And you have a strong will, and control over the wild magic, and you walk with a companion at your side. Mine was a leopard. I got rid of him when I Changed."
"Did he do something terrible?"
"He was not part of what I wanted," said the woman. "That was the heart of it, you see. What I had become was not what I wanted to be."
"And that is?"
"A queen." The woman smiled, or frowned, or laughed while skipping in circles and clapping her hands. "It would have been wrong in the Old World, but here it is not wrong. I have created my people from rocks and trees and birds, and I rule over them. Faerie is a place of such magic that it allows things like that. I can have everything I wanted in the Old World, with no one to gainsay me."
Jyeron shrugged. "I suppose that you can do that," he said. "But I don't want that. If you will let me leave, now-"
"With the blood of Faerie in you, you can't leave," said the woman. "I have been longing for someone to talk to. My subjects are very pleasant on the matters I want them to be, but they can't reflect anything back to me but what I put into them- or the simple thoughts of the creatures they once were. So I think that I will keep you here, and transform you when I am tired of you."
Jyeron felt a strange stillness settle within him. He blinked, and shifted his weight.
"No, you won't," he said, and even the voice flowing from his lips didn't sound like his own. He had become used to sounding cringing. "I won't yield to you, and I won't be Changed."
"I can feel your thoughts," whispered the woman, or shouted in a voice like a chorus of trumpets. "Before you crossed the barrier into Faerie, you were wondering if perhaps it was worth it, to survive. Who is there to take you in? Why did you fight the Change that the wild magic wanted to impose on you? What friends will you have, when you are outside their kinds and you cannot see the Changed for the glories that they are? Here, you can have many things- conversations with me, and peace when you want it, and forgetting when you want it, and finally transformation so that you join with those who are like you. What else is there? You cannot bring back the Old World. What lies outside the barriers for you?"
"I don't know," said Jyeron. "But I know that I don't want what you're offering."
"What do you want, instead?" The woman smiled, and held up one long, gleaming hand, pointed like an icicle. "I think you underestimate my power. Anything you imagine can be yours, anything at all."
"I don't know what I want," said Jyeron. "But I know that you aren't it."
"You can't know that."
"I do know it."
And for the first time in ten years, certainty of some kind- an emotion that didn't have its focus in regret and sullenness- was surging in him. He knew what this woman was. He had faced her kind, when the land Elwens came to kill his people, so determined to destroy the curalli completely that his Lord Selkendal released the wild magic in desperation. Jyeron had been the only one of his kind who had survived, and he had spent years in mourning.
No longer.
He had changed, but not that much. He wouldn't take what she was offering. She could not rule him, and she would not.
Ella glowed in his hands, and Jyeron wondered briefly why the damned sword should be happy. But he was too busy wondering about the damned creature in front of him to think of it for long.
The woman looked at him sadly. "I am offering you companionship," she said softly. "A home after long wandering. You've never met anyone else like you, have you?"
"By your own admission, you are no longer like me," said Jyeron. "You have surrendered to the wild magic."
The woman made an impatient movement, a gesture with one arm and a shoulder that looked like it might have been a shrug in another place and world. "What is surrender, and what is accommodation? I have done as I had to do, in order to survive and become what the wild magic wanted me to become."
"Yes, you have."
The woman sighed. "Will you fight the wild magic for the rest of your life? Especially when your life will be such a long one?"
"If need be." Jyeron felt another shimmer of delight from Ella, and inside himself the settled certainty sank deeper. He shook his head a little in annoyance. Was it really that great a deal, that he had refused? He could not think of what would have persuaded him to accept the woman's offer, once he had heard the terms.
The woman lowered her eyes. "It is too bad. We could have made each other happy. Now I fear that you will make no one happy except yourself." She gestured at him, a gesture that sent flashing blue sparks spinning through the air. Jyeron braced himself, expecting the wild magic to wash over him and Change him in spite of his refusal. After all, the woman had said that she had unimaginable power in this land.
But, again, nothing happened. The woman blinked, and for the first time the conflicting impressions washed away from her face, so that she stared at him with green eyes that could still hold something of Elwen wonderment in them.
Jyeron took a single smooth step forward, and plunged Ella to the hilt in her body.
Her scream blurred past his ears at high speed. The world warped around him, and he heard voices chanting, voices wailing, singing birds dying, and felt the touch of long, sharp, strange hands.
Then he stood in normal grass, and, looking around, saw nothing but a shining white barrier behind him.
He had crossed Faerie.
*****
You can't avoid the conversation that we need to have forever.
"I could try," said Jyeron. He lay in the grass with his hands folded behind his head, studying the sword- Ella. She lay out of the sheath, but for the first time, it wasn't because he had tossed her there or because he couldn't bear to have her close to him for one second more. Instead, it was because she had asked to lie on the grass, and have the strange eyes of the beast in her pommel look up to him.
You are immortal. And as long as you live, I will be with you. Do you really think that you could avoid me for that long?
Jyeron sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I don't think it's hit me yet," he said. "I can't comprehend living forever. A long time, but not forever. And there still could be things in the world that could kill me, you know. The bloodletter came very close."
And you may discover that you have magic that could stop all of them.
Jyeron tilted his head to the side as he studied her. "That's the thing that puzzles me most of all," he said. "That you don't know so much about me." Some of the things Ella hadn't told him, he knew, because he hadn't asked or because he had refused to let her tell him, but there were other things that she simply had no knowledge of. "You were created by the wild magic. You must know some things-"
I was not created by the wild magic. That is what the woman in Faerie tried to tell you, and what I tried to tell you, said Ella sharply. You created me. The explosion of your will, the same thing that let you survive unaltered in body and gave you this long life, gave me to you.
"But I didn't consciously will it. I always thought that will changed into magic had to be directed at a specific purpose in order to work."
Perhaps it combined with the Change in some way. Or perhaps you are something entirely new, and the old rules no longer apply.
Jyeron took a shaky breath. He stood on the edge of an abyss, as he had during the first days after the Change, when he began to fully realize how much had altered. "You are saying that the fundamental laws of magic aren't the same anymore."
I had thought you understood that long since.
"Not fully, I suppose." Jyeron stared at his hands. "I am something new," he said.
Is there any way that you can understand this, can accept this?
Jyeron looked up at her. "Why are you so concerned that I do?"
I am with you. I will always be with you. I didn't ask to be created, and I didn't ask to be tied to you like this, but I can accept it. Your glory is that you don't give in. My glory is my power over the wild magic. I would like our days together to be happy.
Jyeron closed his eyes and fell within his own mind. Ella left him alone, and Jyeron hovered there, in the aching privacy of his thoughts.
He had not lived since the Change. He had only wandered, looking for some home that would accept him, for sanctuary in one of the numerous tiny fortresses that had sprung up. He had not sought to learn anything new about himself, or about the world around him. He had wanted to go back to the way things were.
He had not lived.
Could he?
Not by accepting the wild magic in the way that the woman in Faerie had. Jyeron knew that he couldn't break down the will that had kept him alive and master of his own body. It was that certainty that had sunk into his heart when the Faerie woman had said that she would transform him. She couldn't. And that knowledge had been the first thing in ten years that he recognized, the first thing that was a constant in his wandering life.
But by accepting that he might make a new life for himself- in many ways, he might do better than those who cowered, Changed, in bodies that answered to the wild magic or in fortresses that tried to shut out the world. He could control himself. He could master the wild magic. He could master others, though his heart shuddered back from that ambition.
And he was not alone.
Jyeron opened his eyes, looked at Ella, and smiled. Even to you I do not yield because I have no other choice, he said, speaking to her mentally for the first time, enjoying the sharp scrape of her mind. To you, I choose yielding.
I would accept nothing less, Jyeron.
Jyeron took a deep breath and reached out, clasping her hilt. It clasped him back, like a hand, and he gloried in the rush of her thoughts through his, in the touch of a companion.
*****
You should go down to them.
Jyeron rose to his feet. "I had planned on it," he said, and then sauntered down the hill, letting them see him openly.
The small group on the Mountain's slope below him paused, staring upward apprehensively. They also listened to the sound of his steps, and sniffed for his scent; as he drew closer, Jyeron could see that they were sprouting noses and eyes and ears out of their dark purple skin. They had the same numbers of arms and legs as Elwens, but they were very different.
Changed.
He made himself not care, and halted before them, and bowed his head. "Greetings," he said in Primal, the old tongue that had once bound the races. "I do not know if you will accept me, but I come to help. My name is Jyeron Silkshadow."
They exchanged a myriad of glances, and then one of the women- well, she had a few small mounds that might have been breasts- came forward and answered in Primal, "How can you help us?"
Jyeron raised a hand. The plants they were gathering, slowly, laboriously, floated into the air, and then baskets coalesced beneath them. Jyeron smiled at their gasps.
"You have not been able to weave baskets since the Change, have you?" he asked gently.
"None of us can remember how," said the woman, and her nearest pair of eyes melted back into her face.
Jyeron nodded. "The wild magic stole much from us. But I can bring back some of it."
"What are you?" asked another, in low, breathy tones that were not so far from an Elwen voice.
"A julaludara," Jyeron said firmly, and with no regrets. "I mastered the wild magic. It did not master me. I can help you."
Their distrust all but shimmered around him, but Jyeron smiled. He could endure it.
He had time.
And me.
