SONG of EMBER

64

TO WALK IN DREAMS

PART II

🙜

He felt as if the trees were living things, the craggy limbs their reaching arms, the whorls and burls their watching eyes, the rustling of the leaves their arboreal voices, and he shivered.

Before he could think overmuch about it, a wavering glow bloomed across a landscape of leaves and frost, like the reflection of a candle in a window-pane. Isabel stood before him suddenly, arrayed in her prettiest brown winter dress with her hair done up in braids. She held aloft a lantern, the flame flickering wildly in the autumn winds.

Suddenly he found there was a basket in his hands, laden with the fresh blackberries which grew near the river’s edge. Had he been holding it all along? No, it didn’t matter.

“Isabel,” he said fumblingly, half-reliving that wistful day and half lost in a waking dream. “W-will you come to the solstice dance with me?”

She looked down her nose at him.

“With you,” she repeated, more statement than question.

He blushed and shoved the basket into her arms. She blinked rapidly as the lantern clinked and swayed. For a moment she stood quietly, looking down at his lopsided weaving and the offering of wild fruits as if she could not understand why he had given them to her.

“Won’t you… this once?” he pressed, though he already knew. “I’ve no one else to go with… and I thought, maybe…”

Her mouth set in an expression of prim disregard, and she turned away without another word, dissolving into the darkness of the woods. This time, instead of chasing after, he stood where she had left him, shoulders slumped and head bowed.

“I thought…”

He let the words drift away on the rustling breeze as brown leaves rustled around him. On impulse, he picked up a handful of leaves and scattered them through the gloaming woods. As they fluttered out of sight, he saw the candle flame again, wavering just ahead.

Isabel?

He crept forward, half-hoping, half afraid to hope.

It was a tiny flame, but it was not housed within a lantern.

Instead, a single candle sat on a flat stone step among the decaying leaves, where a little brook went babbling by. Entranced, he reached out to touch it, and was surprised to find that the flame was cool to the touch. When he glanced up, three more candles were flickering to life on the opposite side of the brook…

A translucent woman stood in their midst, clad in a trailing gown of silvery threads and clasping a scroll to her breast. Golden hair spilled across her form like flowing water, and her bloodless face curled into the faintest of smiles.

Ember took a splashing step forward, caught in a spell of memory.

“Is it… you?”

He took another step, and suddenly she solidified before him, a corporeal figure keeping watch beside the brook. She let the scroll fall from her slender hands. It unfurled, fleetingly revealing itself to be the map he had taken from the sanctuary; it was carried away like a twirling boat as she reached for him with both hands, which he grasped without hesitation.

Her touch was cool and soft.

“So you are real,” he breathed.

“I was real to you,” said the lady, folding his hands in her own, and his chest swelled with a sudden courage for reasons beyond his grasp. “And that is enough: the time of oracles is past, our sanctuary has fallen into darkness, and now my purpose is fulfilled. Perhaps your coming was the reason for my existence, after all.”

Tears rolled down Ember’s cheeks—he couldn’t understand why.

It was only a dream.

“Thank you for everything.” He gripped her hands, pulling her close. “Please stay…”

“Our hopes live on in you,” she said serenely, “Ember of the Lost.”

Ember reached out to embrace her and she glanced away, disappearing in a scattering of sparks that slipped through his fingers. He sobbed desolately, and could not shake the feeling that he had lost a faithful friend—what had she been in her past life, if not mortal? A woven spell, an impression of a soul, the echo of a thousand oracles?

Did it matter anymore?

The candles extinguished around him, one by one, as another breath of wind touched his hair.

He walked on less steadily than before, weeping softly and too tired to feel ashamed. He was a lonely child again, lost and wandering far from home, dismally wishing someone would appear to comfort him. At first the flicker which remained seemed far away, but the nearer he got, the farther it seemed.

“Hullo?” he sighed miserably, holding out his hand as the glow wavered and drew nearer.

A frosted breath touched his face.

He gasped as he stared into the cracked visage of a hunched figure which loomed directly before him, its black mouth peeled back in a wicked grin. The glimmer which had seemed so far away revealed itself as a lingering glint of magic in the lonely siren's hollow eye socket.

“What right has a foolish mortal to extinguish the light of a thousand summers?” it guttered, tenderly clasping his face in bejeweled undead hands. “You fancy yourself to be better than I? You who crave what I crave, lust after what I lusted for…”

The words were followed by a gush of liquid laughter.

Ember yelped and wrenched the withered fingers from his face, and as he turned he fell into another pair of icy arms. Strings of damp red hair veiled his cheek, and he looked up to see the black eyes of Ky's elder sister glowering down at him imperiously over her crooked nose.

A sickly green wisp floated above her head.

She smiled, a fragment of metal still lodged in her throat, and drew him into an embrace too soft and lush for the twisting words that scratched his ear: “You think this will endear you to my sister, boy? She is well beyond your reach.”

He cried out, struggling free of her sensual grasp and throwing himself away. The loamy earth welcomed him, threatening to swallow him up in its sifting soil. He glanced up as she crushed the wisp in her caged fingers, her smile contorting into an eager snarl.

Twin spectres of death encroached upon him.

Even as they reached for his eyes with coal-dark claws, he took a deep breath and allowed the rush of panic to drain from his limbs.

“I’ve run too far,” declared Ember, very softly, “and I’m tired now. I’m finished chasing after people…”

As he pulled himself to his feet, he found suddenly that Fishbiter was clasped in his hand. He tightened his grip, turning the blade. It appeared to him as shattered glass, the ghost of a sword, and a thin blue glow rippled along each craze and crevice where once it had been sundered.

“...and I’m finished running from them, too.”

Cracks appeared along the fuller, furiously alighting each rune which spelled its name.

“Farewell,” he whispered.

The sister and the nameless horror howled and sprang for his throat. A strange calm settled into his soul, for he knew it was a dream, yet also more than a dream, and somehow it wouldn’t have mattered if it was real. He planted his stance in the shifting soil—which had swallowed him nearly to the knees—pulling in an aching breath, and sent Fishbiter whistling through the air.

The fear fled him.

As the spectre of Fishbiter shattered in his hands, luminous fragments scattering into the woods, the snarling ghouls vanished from his sight… and in their absence, he saw clearly what had seemed a fleeting wisp of light.

A golden ephemeral thread.

It glowed with the light of a perfect sunrise, wafting gently before him in the breeze like a bit of fraying rope. He glanced down and saw that it was spun from a luminosity beneath his own breast, above which he could see the gentle outline of his ribs, and he wondered that he had never noticed it before.

Ember took it easily in his hand, and resolved to follow wherever it might lead. The forest pressed in around him, watching, breathless. His footsteps crunched through a darkness of shuffling leaves, over the crackle of ice and snow, through the swishing grass and brambles. At last the gloaming woodlands faded behind him, and he found he had come to a flourishing meadow, a field of nodding daisies, and an endless morning sky streaked with dusky pink and gold.

Another figure stood in the middle of the field, half lost in a sea of waving grass. Long black hair fluttered around her like a cloak. She was clad in a grey woolen shift which rippled gently in the breeze, chin lifted as she stared across the field into the trees on the distant horizon.

Her back was turned to him.

He opened his mouth to call out, but couldn't speak.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Her lips parted in soft delight, and he sprinted headlong across the waving grass and nodding flowers. He moved with the swiftness of a dream, heedless of the field beneath his flying feet, paying no mind to the brilliant summer sun, his heart pounding and his breaths frantic.

Before either of them could say a single word, he caught her in a tumbling embrace.

She fell on top of him, and then was suddenly beneath him, rolling over and over, and for a moment all he could understand were the scents of river water and spring crocuses and the touch of her scratchy woolen dress, her oily hair, and her damp face in his hands.

His shoulder struck the dirt.