1667, Age of Creation, Early Spring
"There is no such thing as true regret-only the wistful wish for passed-over promises."
-Words of the Master of Sager, also called the Mad Mage, during what he claimed as the most sane and lucid moment in his lifetime.
"Burn the corpse."
I started, and turned to look at Lendir, who stood behind me. "But it will burn on its own," I said.
"Not this one." Lendir looked on the dead body of the viaquia we had killed together, and there was no pity in his sharp green eyes. "He has committed crimes so dark that no starfire will claim him. We must send him off."
I shivered and looked again at the viaquia, whose purple blood had run over and deeply stained all his clothes. Lendir had been responsible for the majority of those wounds, though I had slit his throat. "If that is true, should we not bury him? Let the worms have him, not the sky and the stars."
"We must burn him!"
I stared at Lendir. He stood like a whipcrack, every muscle trembling, his eyes so wide that I thought they would split open. His gaze was fixed on the body as if he could not turn it away, and it came to me in that moment that he was still frightened of his old enemy, though we had spent years preparing to face him, months hunting him down, and hours killing him to pay him back for the death of Lendir's family.
I looked again at the body. It was true that it just lay there, wind fluttering the cloth of its tunic, and not burning. But it wasn't moving.
Lendir came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to find his eyes calm and kind again, but full of an implacable determination.
"Burn it," he said, more gently this time. "We must burn him. Help me build a pyre, Kayendra."
I nodded, and went to begin gathering wood.
*****
I crouched beside the corpse with drawn sword, as Lendir bade me, and watched him construct the pyre. He had let me fetch wood, but he wouldn't suffer any hand but his own to construct the final bier for his enemy. That was typical, I thought, in so many ways.
Because I disliked seeing such tension in Lendir-it made me pity him-I turned and looked at the corpse instead. It should have burned in five minutes. Instead it only lay there, stinking like a corama. The viaquia had been tall and smooth-skinned once, clad as if in flowing purple light. His hair was still dark blue, though stained with the lavender blood, and his eyes, staring at the sky, would forever be a depthless green. Until we burned him, of course.
Lendir cursed softly. I started to rise and help him, but he shook his head. "Stay there, Kayendra."
I shrugged and crouched back down, once more studying the corpse. He had broken into Lendir's home twenty years ago, and murdered Lendir's parents and brother. Lendir's brother had been only three hundred at the time. I had never forgotten how he looked in Lendir's words, staring at the sky with many small fang-marks all over his body where the sunset Elwen had drained him of blood.
Perhaps that was why Lendir had been as violent as he had in killing the man.
A small noise came from Lendir. I looked up and saw him shaking, placing the pyre logs only with difficulty, tears running down his face before he clasped his hands across it.
At once I stood and came to him, wish or no wish, and wrapped my arms around his waist. He leaned into me, rested his head on my shoulder, and whispered, "Thank the stars for you, Kayendra. If not for you, I couldn't have survived. Your love gives me strength."
I held him more tightly.
"Strength to do what I must do..."
His hands tightened on me in turn.
"...even when it hurts."
He struck me on the back of the head then, and I fell into darkness.
*****
I opened my eyes, and smelled the oil, and knew what had happened even before I turned my head. I was bound on the pyre, on top of the viaquia's bloodied corpse, and Lendir stood just outside the wooden supports, preparing to call fire from his hands and light it.
"Lendir." My voice sounded so faint. I drew breath and called again. "Lendir!"
He looked up at me with the slightly crazed smile I knew so well and shook his head. "No," he whispered. "I had visions of you when my brother died. I know that you mean to betray me, that you think I shouldn't have killed the viaquia as bloodily as I did."
"Lendir, I helped. Of course I don't think that." It amazes me, now, how calm I was then. I should have been screaming as the man I loved prepared to kill me. But I wasn't. I simply spoke the words, and waited for him to acknowledge them, as he must.
"But you would," he said. "You would think that the vengeance was terrible, and you would begin to turn against me, and not love me. I can't live without that, Kayendra. I can live with you dead, but I can't live without you loving me." He called fire, burning on his skin but not harming him. "I will have to burn you, and hope that you forgive me when we meet again."
"Lendir."
He bowed his head. "Forgive me," he repeated.
"Lendir, don't do this." Still my mind was clear, and still my voice was calm. It was almost as though I watched, from a distance, the death of someone I didn't care a great deal for. Even when we killed the viaquia, Lendir's foe rather than mine, I had been more intimately involved.
"I have to."
"Lendir, you don't want to. Do you know what will happen?"
"Yes." His face was scribed with pain; that might be even stranger than my calmness. "I will see you again, Kayendra. Believe it."
He cast the fire on the oil.
In seconds, the wood roared up, and a screen of flames hid me from Lendir. The last mortal sight I had of him was of his tears, the last sound I heard from him his sobs.
I closed my eyes and found myself reaching out to the flame, even though my hands were securely bound and could scarcely move. In seconds, the fire licked along my skin, and I braced for pain. I didn't think that another Elwen's fire, fed with oil, could do anything but hurt me.
Nothing happened.
At least for a moment.
Then I felt the corpse beneath me stir.
"That was not wise," said a voice I had last heard begging for mercy. "Of course, he couldn't have known this would happen." A dry chuckle. "Spread your wings, my lady."
"I have no wings."
"Spread them, Kayendra."
I shifted, and the bonds were gone. Tingling with awareness, I surged off the pyre. Flames danced around me, burning from my shoulders, extending into golden wings. My body burned, and I felt fire char my skin, making it melt and flow, and then creep into and crisp my bones.
And then...
Ecstasy.
I warbled, and the song that burst forth from my throat was beautiful beyond anything I had ever heard. Phoenixes singing in the sunrise were like it, but lesser. I saw colors that I didn't know pinwheel across my eyes. I felt myself striving to capture a height I hadn't known could be reached. A voice whispered in my ear, "Ai, raliae camalloi erian," in such tones of joy that I didn't care I couldn't understand the language.
I turned, and before me was Lendir.
There was absolute wonder on his face as he reached out to me. I don't know what he saw, but he spoke my name, and for a moment that was enough, to hear him speaking that way, with delight but without understanding.
Then his face changed, and he screamed the name of his dead enemy, and he reached for the sword so lately bloodied in that enemy's demise.
I flung my arms wide and embraced him. My wings floated out to their fullest extent, and then curled in from the sides and enwrapped him.
Lendir apparently had no such immunity, as I did, to his own fire. He burst into flames at once, and fell shrieking into ash and bone.
I looked at him for a moment, and felt nothing save disinterest. He was past and done, and the matter of the debt he owed me or the dead one was long since put off. I turned and flew into the sky.
Higher and higher I went, until I brushed through the low-lying clouds and burst into full glory of the moons. The stars turned above me, as well, and I looked up and found that what I had never known was true, that they too were fire.
Fire was everywhere I looked.
Great shifting shades of it covered the ground, and here and there I could see curtains of red and orange and gold sweeping across each other, parting to let a shimmering glimpse of the ultimate reality beyond come through. The sun roared below the planet, and I knew that in a few moments it would arise and let the heat of its coming spill across the world. All life in the world lived by the sun, and the fire of the stars shed their beams likewise on distant worlds, and across the furthest reaches of the star-void still the fire shone. It was a realization such as would have wrecked the heart of an ordinary Elwen.
I was not an ordinary Elwen.
"What am I?" I asked, as I danced in the sky and looked up at the distant fires of the stars.
The dead viaquia's voice answered me, this time speaking inside my head. This is something that happens when a living Elwen is bound on top of an unburned body and burned.
"But why? What are the magical laws governing it?" I found that I wanted to know the reason, as eagerly as I had wanted to know the reason Lendir hunted the viaquia.
There are no magical laws governing it. It is something that happens, like a grass blade growing. There are consequences to the grass blade growing, and causes, but there is no reason that it should happen. It happens, that is all.
"Did Lendir know what he was doing?"
No.
"Then why-"
He did it, and it is past. The viaquia's voice was growing fainter. I have claimed the vengeance that was my due. I suggest you claim what you have, even though it was something Lendir never meant to give you. Go on, and live wherever you desire. You are something new.
"I can survive the star-void?"
Yes.
I flexed my wings, and knew that it was true. These could fly me anywhere, as long as I chose to let them bear me. If I did not choose to let them bear me, the flames would go out and I would crash in a moment to earth.
I spread my wings and soared upward.
For a moment, a great pressure seemed to hold me down. Then it was gone. The world fell behind me as I ascended higher and higher, blazing, still wrapped in the flames that were mine and born so unexpectedly of my body and the dead viaquia's. I passed close to the whirling, immense orbs of the moons, and then into the space beyond, glowing the brighter as I escaped the pull of our sun.
I went on.
*****
From the records of the star Elwens:
It is told that in the sixteen hundredth and sixty-seventh year since the discovery by the land Elwen Yubro Deerfriend of how to create life, a comet was seen in the Arcadian night sky. Very bright and very close, it appeared to describe only a rising arc, as if it had lifted from the ground. Its color was red-gold, the color of true flame. There were some who called it a phoenix, but it was clearly seen leaving the planet, which a phoenix cannot do.
Long have the Elwens on Arcadia speculated what it was-a sign of the golden age that followed, an omen of war, an announcement of flame that would consume and purify the excesses of the Age-but only we, after long study, have learned the true significance.
It was a portent meant for the birth of a child among us, a lovely one who shall lead us in the future and guide us past the prophecies' traps and snares. The red-gold color of it was meant for a sign of her brightness, and the upward path a sign that our lives shall only improve when she is born.
All hail the future that has seen fit to grant us such a merciful leader, and all hail the stars, who assuredly must have sent us such a sign.
