The Schism
Part One
The hand-picked group of nobles crowded around the gilded double-wide cradle, cooing appreciatively at the pair of infants on display.
“Oohhhh… precious beyond words…”
The Regent smiled indulgently. Fawning weasels, with the empty minds of cattle. He had words to describe the infants’ worth. The phrase twenty years rang in his head day and night. Twenty years of power, of security. Perhaps more, if the silk-swaddled Djun could be kept as biddable as he was now.
A noblewoman pressed closer to the cradle, leaning over the babes. A guardsman seized her roughly and pulled her back before her breath could sully the royal twins. The disturbance startled the boy, who balled his fists and screwed up his face in annoyance. A red flush came to his fat cheeks as he summoned one imperious cry. Then, his point made, he settled back into slumber.
“Hah, a true Djun,” Regent Korik said proudly. “He knows his word is law, and one word is enough!”
“And so much bigger than his sister,” murmured an obese nobleman. “Look at that noble head of hair.”
Now Korik frowned. Was this fool mocking him? Did he suspect – would they all suspect when confronted with the contrast between the babes? Dark Angrif was thick-boned and already well-formed, large as a child who’d seen almost a month of life, looking larger still next to his pale, scrawny crib-mate.
“He favors his father, does he not?” Algifa spoke up out of turn. But Korik could not fault her performance as she smiled down at both infants with equal tenderness. “He took more from my blood than his sister… as is only right and proper for a male child. And while I nurse little Gifa myself, my milk is far too thin for a Djun. He is suckled by four wetnurses of the First Level, and their nobleborn milk will give him the strength I cannot.” She looked up at Korik as if daring him to contradict her.
“It’s true,” the Regent admitted with an easy smile. “Our young Djun is a child of enormous appetite. As is only right and proper.”
Now Algifa lifted her infant daughter out of the cradle and hugged her to her breast. Gifa let out a thin wail, and her pale face flushed dark red. Weak as a newborn kitten, Korik thought scornfully. Clearly the rude health Grohmul had enjoyed could not manifest itself in a female heir. Or perhaps Algifa had spoken true: despite her swollen breasts her milk was too thin to sustain an infant.
Not that it mattered. While Angrif would be raised by the finest nurses and tutors, Korik had promised Algifa the right to bring her up her daughter herself – so long as she played the doting mother towards Angrif as well. Gifa could thrive or sicken and it would make no difference to Korik’s plans. And while she did live, the mere threat of her removal would keep Algifa in line.
As if to forestall any criticism, Algifa turned back to the nobles. “I must share my son with the whole realm, for no mere woman can raise a Djun – however much she may wish it. But my daughter is mine alone, and I will bring her up to be an ornament to her brother’s throne. Angrif Djun will have no more loyal subject, save myself and the Regent.”
The nobles smiled and made approving clucks of their tongues. Korik gave Algifa a gracious tip of the head. She played her part well. None would doubt the boy’s paternity when the Djunsmother so eloquently spoke for him.
Twenty years, Korik thought again. To an army man, it was as good as immortality.
* * *
Time held no meaning for spirits. He might have passed a moment in the void, or a day, or a millennium. Free of the confines of his body, he floated in perfect serenity. He needed nothing, he wanted for nothing. He knew nothing, save a sense of contented stillness. If he felt any flickering of desire, it was only for this state to endure forever.
But the High One found him. She could always find him.
Her shape materialized on the astral plane, and as it took shape, he felt his own spirit-form coalescing. Her very presense forced him to remember himself. His soulname came to him first, then the memories… bright pinpoints of joy and brighter blazes of rage and sorrow, bound together by a long string of malaise. Memories led to understanding, to an awareness of time: the long road he had walked.
“Pool,” she murmured, and he remembered his tribe-name. A moment later, he remembered hers.
“Timmain.”
She was a glowing spectre, long and lean and gowned in her silver-white hair. Her golden eyes held – as always – a hollow sort of sadness. A great wisdom, hard-won, but ultimately unwanted.
“Why did you summon me? Has the Moment come?” He meant to join her in the Palace for the night of the Reappearance. His spirit would endure even if his body was erased from the fabric of reality. Part of him almost hoped it would be. It would free him his crippled shell without the trauma of death, let him float in an eternal dream… a transformation incurred without guilt, without fault.
“Come and gone,” Timmain said. “Nearly two months past.”
He felt an acute disappointment. “Then why have you sought me out?” Why could she not leave him in peace? Could she not see he had no desire to return to a life plagued with fear and regrets?
“Much has happened since the Moment passed us. Have you been watching?”
“No. You know the World of Two Moons holds little interest for me now.”
“Perhaps this will change your mind.” Timmain held out her spectral hand. After a brief hesitation, Pool reached out and took it. Memories rushed into him, a rapid summation of the events since the Reappearance. He saw Kahvi, deformed by starstone. He saw Rayek, losing control of his temper and his magic until something drove him to abandon magic all together. He saw the messenger sphere, first whole, then broken. He saw Melati, the daughter he had sired then abandoned, the healer who took life rather than restoring it.
He saw the abomination she had crafted from Yosha’s body. He watched the creature shatter Kahvi’s body like brittle clearstone. He saw the moment Yosha’s soul reawakened, and the moment he disappeared from the Scroll’s sight.
He caught a glimpse of two elves in bed together, both monstrous in different ways. And then Timmain severed the connection before he could see more.
“Kahvi is dead,” Timmain said. “Her spirit has moved on, cleansed of its pain. And the corrupted Palacestone has been destroyed. But the magic within it has not been cleansed, merely contained within a different shell.”
“Beast.”
“His restoration absorbed much of the energy, but enough lingers within him to render him invisible to the Scroll of Colors. His memories have returned, and he believes himself to be fully healed. But the extent of his transformation is as yet unknown. We may have merely deferred the battle to come.”
“You think it will corrupt him as it did Kahvi?”
“Him… or the child Melati will bear him.”
“Child?”
“It was a true Recognition. I sensed it, though I could not see its completion in the Scroll. I felt the gathering energies. A new soul conceived of unknown magic… demanding to be given flesh. But what sort of flesh could they make, those parents? A power-mad mother and a father with dead flesh and starstone blood.
“You must understand the risks. Compared to this, my union with the wolf was nothing: a minor variance in cellular bonding. And yet I remember, Pool. A bloody birthing den: a proud, wailing half-elf, an immortal wolf, and the broken bodies of stillborn litter mates. I licked their deformed flesh clean, then I consumed them, the failures of my body, and I vowed never again to allow my womb to craft such sorrow. Timmorn lived long… perhaps somewhere he lives still. My wolf-son guards young Skywise. Two survivors out of a litter of six: a success by this world’s harsh standards. But I think of those four dead children and my heart breaks anew, even now. At least they died before they could draw breath. I shudder to think what could have been. An elf with all a High One’s powers, and a wolf’s limited mind? Timmorn was tortured for years before he could reconcile wolf and elf. In the end he had to choose the smaller truth of the wolf, for the larger truth was killing him. Yet elf and wolf are but two different beasts, physical creatures, more alike than different. Elf and starstone – there is a bonding that has always led to madness and death. I had to make a choice, Pool!”
“A choice… what – what did you choose to do?”
“It would have been an easy matter to halt the Recognition before it could be fulfilled. Deny the soul a body.”
“Timmain! You did not!”
“Truth now: you would not welcome a child of Melati into this world any more eagerly than I.”
“No… but that is my failure, not the child’s. The new soul is innocent.”
“So was Melati’s, once.”
“Briefly.” Too briefly. He acknowledged that he bore much of the blame in his daughter’s own corruption. But his guilt did not alter Melati’s malevolence.
She was beyond healing. But this new life might not be.
“Timmain, tell me you did not kill the child?”
Timmain bristled. “It is not killing when no life has yet been created. And all life understands the necessity of sacrifice. Except perhaps you.”
“I have sacrificed much in my life.”
“Never willingly.”
“A willing sacrifice is no sacrifice at all. A willing predator does not make willing prey – whatever lies the hunter tells himself to sleep at night.”
Timmain looked away. They had had this debate far too many times, and always with the same outcome.
“In any case, you may rest easy. I did not halt Recognition’s completion. And we may all suffer for my restraint. There are now two holes in the great tapestry.” She began to turn away. “At least I have taken precautions,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Though I cannot yet know if my stratagem will succeed.”
“What do you mean? What precautions?”
Timmain ignored the question. “Haken is hastening his plan to colonize Homestead. Soon they will quit this world. Even the moderate check the Circle provided to Haken’s ambitions will be removed, as will the magic-dampening effect of this world’s soil. And if we do not share even the same soil, what is to keep them from viewing us as their natural rivals?”
Always the same fears. If he had less respect for her, he would call it paranoia born of a guilty conscience. Timmain had only to look at Haken’s missing arm to remember that he owed her a painful debt.
“Why did you summon me?” he asked instead. “To seek forgiveness for what you have or have not done?”
“To offer you a choice. Melati may leave this world within the year. And we both know the state of your body, once freed from its wrapstuff trance. Time is running out.”
“Time for what? A reconciliation?” he laughed humorlessly at the idea.
“A proper conclusion.”
That struck a nerve. Sometimes it seemed his life was nothing but a series of loose ends.
He had not seen Melati in over a hundred years, and that meeting had been like all the others: bitter accusations, encounters that left him heavy-hearted with shame and resentment. She had killed Ruffel. She had killed Yosha. She had nearly killed Cholla, in her mad pursuit of growing life where there could be none.
“Will you not be content until you have murdered everyone dear to you?” he had thrown at her, after Cholla had hemorrhaged in the birthing bed, at last miscarrying the sickly scrap of flesh that had been draining her life as surely as Melati had drained Ruffel’s.
And yet Cholla had survived. The infant had survived. And now he learned Yosha had survived as well. She had restored him to life, and in turn he had sired new life on her – the grandchild of Maleen and Ruffel both, the life they had always wanted to create together.
Perhaps it would be a girl who resembled Ruffel in a way Melati did not.
Or perhaps it would be a monster, as hideous and malformed as Timmain’s lost cubs.
Perhaps it would grow into beauty as Maize had… a pretty shell concealing an unknown soul.
Perhaps it would have purple eyes and a piece of starstone where its heart should be.
Timmain was right. One way or another, they had to know.
He had to know.
“Awaken me, then,” Pool told her.
Timmain’s image flickered, then disappeared. And Pool felt himself floating loose on the astral plane, untethered and free one last time before the first cuts to his cocoon jolted him back into his shell.
* * *
Husk-shock: it was a sort of death in reverse, but it was the only way Pool could return his spirit to his fragile body. The thread binding him to his shell had grown so thin, so long, that it took a sharp jolt to pull him back.
Feedbroth helped. And a moon-dance spent in meditation inside the inner shell of the Egg, drawing on the power of the stone to amplify his powers of regeneration. Slowly his body healed, as much as it could. Crippled by advanced cellular decay, Pool had at last reached the limits of his flesh.
The decay could be arrested, of course, but not without massive rescripting of his matrix.
Not without losing the blood that bound him to the World of Two Moons.
That was a price he was not prepared to pay. Others had surrendered their wolf-essence without shame, but to Pool it felt like a betrayal: of his heritage, of his father, of his own magic – for no one could convince him that his ability to feel the life-force of other beasts did not come from the wolf inside him.
Above all, a betrayal of life. To remove his wolfblood was to kill a part of himself. And if death was the greatest defeat, then seeking it out was the greatest of weakness.
Had he felt differently, he might have left his shell behind long ago. He might have given up the fight with mortality. But as old as the wolf in him was, it was still as stubborn as ever. Even as he cursed his failing body, his healing powers were always making minute repairs, coaxing another day of life out of his heart, then another, then another…
He spent another month in the outer spheres of the College, until he felt strong enough to make the journey to Oasis. He was loathe to call the Palace, but neither sea-ship nor air-ship was due to make a transit before winter, and he doubted he had the endurance to make the journey to the nearest port.
So the Palace then. Or at least one of its transport pods. Skywise arrived promptly following his sending, and deflected Pool’s attempts at apology.
“I was due in Oasis next month anyway. Haken and I are putting heads together for the first survey of Homestead.”
“Surely you’re not going with him?”
“Of course!” Skywise grinned. “Think I’d let him cut me out of something like this? A whole new world, Pool! I’ve visited more than my share in my time, but to help set up a colony on one….”
Pool shook his head. This world was more than enough trouble for him. He couldn’t imagine seeking out another.
The Palace-pod touched down in Oasis at midday. It was the height of the dry season, and despite the cool hooded robe he had remembered to bring, he felt himself beginning to dessicate in the thin mountain air. The Painted Mountains were nearly as tall, but the rich forests kept the air moist. He knew his brittle skin would need a long rubdown with oils come nightfall to keep from cracking and bleeding.
Cholla met him outside the pod, with her daughter in tow. Pool recoiled to see Maize all grown up, a taller, leaner version of her mother, with Klipspringer’s easy athletic grace.
He kept his hood up to spare them the worst, but Cholla’s face still registered shock at his most recent weight loss. “Oh, Pool…” she sighed wearily, mingling pity and exasperation. She steeled herself, and embraced him as gently as she could.
“Maizie, this is Pool,” she said, beckoning her daughter forward. “He was last here when you were born.”
“Mother’s told me all about you,” Maize said, with a bland smile. She cocked one eyebrow. “So has Aunt Melati.”
Pool winced to think of it. He could only imagine the malicious delight his spawn would have taken in repeating his words from that horrible night.
“You promised her a baby and this is all you can deliver – a wretched, malformed and cast-off construct! Look at it! Such a mockery of life that Cholla’s own flesh rejects it!”
This mockery of life now stood a head taller than he, vigorous and healthy, with eyes as bright and deep as any elf’s. But was there a real soul behind them?
**What did she tell you?** Pool sent, just to see if she would respond in kind.
**All of it,** Maize’s reply was sharp and unforgiving, and aimed for him alone. **Every little word.**
Her thoughts were like daggers in his mind. He accepted the pain with grace. Life had taught him that lesson well.
**And you believed her? She lies, you know. Even in sending. It’s a rare gift.**
Maize gave him a long unfriendly look, then turned to her mother. “Now I’ve met him. Can I go back to the fields, Mother?”
Cholla patted her shoulder. “Off you go. I’ll show our guest to his rooms.”
“I’ll be staying over with Tufts tonight,” Maize reminded her.
“Of course, love.”
**She won’t even stay under the same roof as me, will she?** Pool asked.
**Can you blame her?**
**I blame Melati.**
**For telling her, or for saving her life when you would not?**
**Please. You were the Snake’s pampered patient. She wouldn’t have let me so much as lay a hand on you or the infant. And even if she had, I doubt you would have allowed it.**
“Of course not,” Cholla continued conversationally. “You wanted to induce me to miscarry the moment you found out.”
“I wanted to spare you pain. The child wasn’t viable. I couldn’t even be certain it was a proper Recognition. The… things Melati had done to you… knowing you couldn’t carry a child to term. The very definition of torture.”
Cholla sighed and shook her head with a soft laugh. The arm that was looped through Pool’s tightened painfully around his elbow. “Oh, Pool! You just can’t admit you were wrong, even now!”
“I admit Melati’s talent proved equal to her boasting, this time. And I admit you might consider it worth the price–”
“She is,” Cholla said. “To have my Maizie I would have paid any price – eight times eight all over again. So would ’Springer. You’d understand if you had a child of your own.”
Pool jerked his head sharply at that. Cholla’s gaze was gently challenging. “No, you don’t,” she said softly, in answer to the objection he had planned to make.
“You’re right. And you needn’t fear – I’m not here to lay claim on an unborn grandchild.”
Again Cholla laughed softly. “Oh, Pool… trust me, I’ve no fear of that!”
* * *
She showed him to his guest room, a little cubicle inside her sizeable apartments. She suggested he might like a nap – it was the hour for daysleep, after all. In truth, he would have welcomed a chance to stretch out his aching limbs. But there was someone he needed to see, and no point in delaying any longer.
He had heard all about the uprising against Haken, and the decree of banishment against Melati. To his surprise, she was actually keeping her lord’s law, having installed herself and her Red Snakes in the ruins of her old spire, a short walk away through the Thorn Fields. He rode a zwoot and kept himself well wrapped in his robe, but he was still dizzy from heatstroke by the time he reached it.
In the old days, his mother had told him, Melati had erected a rock wall impassable save to rock shapers. But the old wall had crumbled in places, and someone had shaped an arched gate over the widest gap. Inside stood a newer, taller sandstone wall.
“Her door is always open,” Cholla had said, but he saw she was not welcoming enough to have inner and outer gates align. Instead he was forced into a narrow passageway. The outer and inner walls tapered towards each other, offering welcome shade, but also an easy way to entrap unwary visiters.
He reached the inner gate, likewise open and beckoning him into a wide rocky bowl. He steeled himself to enter, when a low serpent’s hiss came from somewhere above him.
He looked up and recoiled at the dark form perched atop the gate like some human-carved gargoyle. Light and shadows alike played off the creature’s varying skin textures, amplifying his otherworldy appearance. Silver-blue eyes narrowed in suspicion, and the spines at the creature’s shoulders flexed as he extended a long clawed finger to point at the intruder.
“You – should have sent,” he intoned threateningly. “It’s rude not to announce yourself.” Slowly he began to crawl down from the arch, moving with all the sinuous grace of a mountain lion. Pool wondered how he managed it, until he noticed the dextrous clawed toes and the long tail looped around a handhold.
“Unless you were trying to set an ambush,” the gatekeeper concluded in a low growl. He sprang down and landed on his clawed feet. He stood almost as tall as a High One, and he used that height to his advantage as he drew close to Pool.
“You’re not very good at it,” he concluded.
Pool swallowed. “Is it… are you… Yosha?”
“Beast.”
“Yes, forgive me. I – I don’t know if you remember me, but–”
“You’re Pool. I remember you.”
He said nothing more, and made no move to let Pool pass. The standoff continued in silence for a moment before Pool asked, humbly, “May I come in?”
“Why?”
“I… wish to speak with Melati.”
Beast snorted loudly, curling his lip and bearing his sharp eyeteeth. He had a Wolfrider’s fangs.
“Please?” Pool asked, pitching his tone and body language as submissive as he could manage. His left knee was beginning to lock and send shooting pains up his thighbone.
Beast’s gaze grew indistinct and his eyes glowed in that particular way that indicated a sending. Then he gave another angry snort and sprang away, letting Pool pass through the archway.
If he had any doubts about how Beast had anticipated his arrival, those doubts fled the moment he stepped into the central courtyard and saw the two Red Snakes perched atop the crumbling spire, weapons in hand. One of them must have been patrolling the skies. He couldn’t tell from the distance which ones they were. It didn’t much matter; he had met none of them save Feathersnake, and if the great-great-grandson of Door was willing to make himself a slave of Melati’s, then obviously he did not know Feathersnake as well as he’d once thought.
She emerged from the spire’s doorway some moments later, clad in a short white gown suited to an idle afternoon. But she held a thick woolen cloth which she was using to wipe her hands clean of some viscous liquid. His wolf’s nose could smell the copper of blood and the sourness of birthing fluids. When she threw the cloth down, it was streaked with red.
“Pool.” She wrinkled her nose. “You stink of death. You might want to do something about that, one way or the other.”
“You’ll be rid of me soon enough, child.”
“I have been rid of you for years. And don’t call me ‘child.’”
“As you wish. I almost didn’t recognize you in white. But I see you still have blood on your hands.”
“I’m working on a new Cradle. Bigger than the one I made for Maize. Have you seen Maize? She’s grown up well, hasn’t she?” She narrowed her gaze. “Though I wonder you can see anything with that mist over your eyes.”
“Dare I ask what sort of creature you’re growing now?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard? It’s Winnowill. I promised her a new shell in exchange for certain lessons she taught me,” Melati went on, ignoring Pool’s slack-jawed horror. “I’m surprised Weatherbird didn’t tell you. At any rate, it turns out her son kept her bones, so I needn’t worry about reconstructing her cellular matrix from her parents. I can grow her an exact replica of her original body.”
Pool swallowed tightly. “You would loose the Black Snake on this world once more?”
“Not this one. No, her body won’t be ready until we’re well settled on Homestead.” She touched her belly lightly. “This one will be out and starting to walk by then, I should think. Oh, but of course you heard about that,” she added with a cruel smile. “I can’t think of anything else that would bring you back here.”
“Now you know the joys of Recognition. Perhaps one day you’ll know the pains as well.”
Over his shoulder, he could hear Beast’s low growl. But Melati only blinked.
“I doubt it.”
“The child, then… is well?”
That unsettled Melati, if only for a moment. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Timmain has concerns…”
“Of course she does!” Melati scoffed. “Concerns she can’t keep it for herself! She’s already tried to invade my own mind–”
“Yes, she told me of your follies with the messenger sphere. But for my mother, you’d still be lost inside its memories–”
Melati only laughed lightly, touching the crystal pendant at her collarbone. “You have too little faith in me, Pool. You forget, I know my way well around starstone.”
“Mm. You healed that piece, I remember. And now you’re Recognized to a creature with starstone in its veins. One can only wonder what the pair of you have passed on to your child.”
“As if you would care.” But Melati’s tone had lost some of its bite. Unconsciously, her hand brushed her flat belly again.
“Not for you, but for the innocent in your womb.”
“Oh, your compassion for the unborn. You had none for Cholla’s.”
“Please. One healer to another, grant me this favor and set my mind at ease.” He raised a bony hand. Beast hissed a warning and Melati took a step back.
“You will not touch me!”
“Then look for yourself. Tell me your child is healthy – in head, hand and heart.”
Melati scowled at him. But he had planted enough doubt in her mind for her to lay her palm flat on her abdomen and extend her healing senses to their limit. Her eyes closed and her brow furrowed in deep thought. Then she smiled – a genuine smile of undisguised joy that crinkled her eyes and made her cheeks apple. The sight was a barb in Pool’s heart. It was Ruffel’s smile.
“She can already send,” Melati marvelled.
“She!” Beast exclaimed in delight.
Melati’s cool mask of composure fell into place. “An exceptionally well-developed embryo,” she told Pool. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess she was closer to four months along than two. Faster-than-normal neural development, especially in the sphere of the protobrain that governs magical ability. Roughly the size of a dreamberry. Head, hands – of a sort – and a tiny beating heart. The picture of health. Anything else you’d like to know?”
What will she look like? Pool wanted to ask.
“And it doesn’t disturb you: the speed with which it’s developing? You don’t think there’s anything unnatural in an unborn sender?”
“Well, if she could recite me all five verses of the Flight From Sorrows, I might worry,” Melati quipped. “But this… this is more a pleasant sort of hum…”
“A hum?” Pool felt a chill go down his spine. “It sings just like starstone, then?”
A flicker of doubt crossed Melati’s face before she set her jaw disapprovingly. “You’ll not make me fear my own child. I’m not you, Pool!”
Beast’s hand came down on Pool’s shoulder; not overly hard, but still enough to make him wince.
“You asked. She told you. Now go.”
“I would fear her coming, if I were you,” Pool said in parting. “For all we know, she’ll take after you, and kill her mother in the birthing bed.”
The jab struck home, for all Melati would try to deny it. He turned away, the wolf in him content.
But then Melati laughed. “Let her do her worst. Unlike you, I can keep both mother and child alive. Really, Pool, you must stop blaming me for your own failings as a healer.”
He swayed on his feet, but would not turn back. He would not give her the satisfaction.
He could almost smell the frustration coming off her, the sour reek of panic. He heard her sandals slap on the sand as she began to follow him.
“Now that I can make proper new shells in the Cradle, perhaps I’ll grow one for Ruffel,” she went on. “Do you think she’d want that?”
That stopped him in his tracks. He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached, fighting the urge to picture the future she offered. Ruffel, bound in flesh once more, Ruffel, smiling and reaching out to him. Ruffel, silently imploring him to abandon this slow dance with death and embrace life in all its glory and terror.
He would have done it for her… if only she had asked him.
“Frankly, I’m surpised you didn’t suggest it already,” Melati mused.
He had never dared dream. But if she could revive Yosha… if she could save Maize and grow a new shell for Winnowill from a scrap of bone…
“Hmm. On second thought… I can see why you didn’t. If I gave her a body, she’d only use it to run back to Maleen. At least this way you can keep pretending she loved you more.”
Such a precise, crippling strike to his deepest fears… the Black Snake herself could not have done better.
“There’s no sport in wounding a dying wolf, daughter.”
“Oh, I disagree.” That same maddening giggle. Malicious as a viper’s hiss. But when he closed his eyes, he could almost picture the same laugh coming from Ruffel’s lips.
She had Ruffel’s voice. Why had he never noticed that?
Or had he merely forgotten Ruffel’s voice, and transposed Melati’s over his memories.
Greedy serpent. She couldn’t content herself with eating his heart, she had to eat his memories too.
Ruffel had loved him more! She had! She had called him lifemate – hadn’t she? He could have sworn…
He leaned on his walking stick as he turned. She was smiling, reeking of insufferable smugness. A cat playing with a dying mouse.
“I don’t know who I pity more,” he rasped. “You or your child.” **But I know this: with you as its mother, it is already doomed. Your very soul is rotten, and just as you can only Recognize death, so you can only birth it. The question is how many will have to die. But for the sake of this whole world, and the world you mean to settle, I pray that child dies in your womb.**
In his sendings there was only truth. Melati’s face fell. Her eyes widened, and for a moment he read the pain and terror in their turquoise depths. Pool felt a grim sort of satisfaction just before Beast’s hand tightened on his shoulder and fresh pain shattered his awareness.
“That’s enough!” Beast boomed, dragging Pool towards the gate. He lost sight of Melati as he struggled to keep up, but he heard her parting cry.
“Yes, get him out of here! Then come back… please, Beast – hurry!”
He threw Pool out onto the sands outside, at the feet of his zwoot. Pool felt a crackle and a sharp pain shooting up his leg. He clasped a hand over the pain and let his healing magic do its work.
“If you come back, I will kill you!” Beast warned. “I’ve killed an elf before – it’s not hard for me. And you’re half-dead already.”
“Yes, I’ll die soon,” Pool rasped. “Death will defeat me at last, and I will return to the earth. But my blood will endure – blood of this world – however much your lifemate wishes it were otherwise.”
“No, it won’t,” Beast threw back. “She took out your blood long ago. She’s got Leetah in her, and Ruffel, and Ruffel’s parents. But nothing from you. She told me – she had poison in her, but she took it out. I thought she just meant the wolfblood. But I understand now.”
“Impossible.” But even as he said it, Pool knew nothing was impossible for Melati. What was a little rescripting of cells, compared to bringing the dead back to life? Again he cursed her inwardly for a lifetaker. Not content with taking his past, she had to destroy his future.
Beast laughed. “She’s Mel. She can do anything. When you’re dead, you’re dead forever! So do us all a favor and get on with it!”
* * *
He limped back to his zwoot, his bruised bone aching. He rode back to Oasis in a daze of sorrow, debating with himself. Perhaps Beast was right, perhaps he was poison. Perhaps all the blame for Melati could be laid at his feet.
No, the wolf within argued. No, Melati was always rotten meat. He had tried to mend things with her – he had tried to forgive her for Ruffel – and she had still goaded Yosha to his death. Corruption was in her bones. He could only imagine what horror she would bring forth.
It wouldn’t be his problem, at least. Let another, braver warrior face off against her child. He had never been made for fighting anyway.
It was late afternoon before he returned to Oasis. He made for Cholla’s rooms, weary to his bones. Whatever petty thrill it had given him to wound Melati had long since faded, leaving behind a yawning emptiness. He was aware of the shackles of his body as never before, and he realized he had no desire to return to wrapstuff.
Let it end here, where it began, he decided grimly. Melati could not come within the walls. He would never need see her again. He could simply lie down and wait for his heart to fail. It would not take long.
He entered Cholla’s chambers without knocking, as was the custom in Oasis. He opened the door and saw his mother standing before him.
“ –better prepare yourself–” Cholla was saying, but Leetah was already turning towards the door.
“My eyes see with joy,” Pool said, doffing his hood.
Leetah’s eyes grew round with horror, and her hand rose to cover her mouth. She stared at Pool as if he were one of Melati’s more gruesome experiments. He watched a violent tremor race up her frame, shaking her like a blade of grass.
He could not blame her. He knew what he looked like now: skin like cracked leather, pale as milk and peppered with age spots; hair thinned to colorless wisps on the crown of his head, the point of his chin. All the feedbroth in the world couldn’t put meat on his bones now. He looked just as his father had, before Scouter disappeared into the desert to die alone.
“Mother…” he took a step towards her, and she took a step back. Her hand rose up in a warding gesture.
“Why have you come back now? Like this?”
“I wanted to see you one last time.” He reached out with a hand and she recoiled in fear of his touch, though six wide paces separated them.
She shook her head violently. “No.... No, no no no… I can’t do this! You can’t make me do this again!”
“Mother, please–”
Leetah bolted for the door. He tried to stop her, but she pushed his hand away easily. She caught the doorframe for support and lingered there a moment, breathing deep to slow her pulse. He could hear it hammering from across the room. He could smell her terror.
At length Leetah was calm enough to lift her head, though she would not look. “I’m sorry, my child. But I have to tend to my own heart first, for once.”
Then she was gone down the corridor and out of his life.
“I’m sorry,” Cholla said, when the silence became unbearable. “Truly, Pool.”
“So am I,” Pool replied. “More than I have words to say.”
He was sick of words. Sick of thoughts. Sick of it all.
“Come.” Cholla took his arm with a gentleness she’d not shown before. “Let’s go lie down. You must be tired.”
* * *
But he did not sleep. It seemed he had lost the gift for it, after all those deep wrapstuff trances. Instead he meditated, journeying deep within his fractured shell, studying the many facets of his slow death.
The next day, he attempted a exploration of his old home. But life in Oasis was not as he remembered. There was an energy in the air he had never sensed before, portent of some great upheaval.
He did not need to look far to find it. The Ark perched on one side of Tallest Spire, growing a little larger every day. Cholla told him the upper stories of Tallest Spire had become uninhabitable as the seedrock within was being leeched away and converted to starstone. The rockshapers not actively at work on the Ark seemed to float through their days in a haze of euphoria from the starstone’s hum. Perhaps that was why he could not seem to sleep.
Haken held frequent meetings with Skywise in the Ark’s great hall. Out of curiosity, Pool joined one. From the table that had once been the Little Palace, Skywise projected an image of a great sphere, blue and white at the poles and marbled with yellow and green along the central latitudes. A faint halo wrapped around the planet, tilting across the equator.
“Homestead,” Haken said proudly. “Almost half again the size of Abode. Air twice the thickness of ours, which makes the almost planet as warm as Abode, though it is located further from the Daystar. Air traps the heat, you see. Moonless, but with an extensive ring system that suggests it once had at least one moon.”
“See how the lands all connect in one big circle around the planet?” Skywise prompted, showing him a band of gold and green that divided the two polar oceans from each other. Inside the band were a multitude of smaller seas, many with their own islands. Compared to Abode’s orderly layout of large continents and larger seas, this complexity of land and water confused Pool’s eyes.
“We call it the Belt,” Skywise explained. “Imagine it – an elf, if he wanted, could walk all the way around the planet! All those yellow patches that look like deserts – they aren’t! Those are plants – forests of plants that have gold leaves, like it’s always the death-sleep. Compared to Abode, almost all of Homestead is covered in plant-life. And the rocks are different too. Seedrock can only be found in the Painted Mountains here – but it’s everywhere on Homestead. We’re looking for a nice big deposit, somewhere near one of the seas, around the warmer part of the Belt.”
“Once we bury the Ark into the seedrock, we’ll be able to build cities of starstone,” Haken boasted. “Just as it was in the days of the Homestar.”
“Mm. And nothing bad has happened with starstone recently,” Pool quipped.
“That was damaged crystal, corrupted by a misfit of an elf. We know to manage it properly.”
Many elves were competing for places on the first quest to Homestead. Pool found to his horror that Maleen was one of them.
“You cannot seriously want to go there,” he accused, as they shared a cup of cider in her hut. “I heard from Cholla that you were leading the challenge with Arshel and Leetah. Now you’re pledging yourself to Haken – I know about the oath these ‘Homesteaders’ must take. What’s changed?”
“Do you have to ask? What choice do I have? Melati has my son. My kitling – I cannot lose him again!”
“He’s not the same Yosha you remember. He’s her creature now.”
“You think I can’t see that? But he’s alive, and he’s all I have left. This is my last chance, Pool. I’ve already nearly ruined things with him. I will not be parted from him again. Whatever the cost.”
“So Melati has won herself another conquest,” Pool said sadly as he rose to leave. “I wish you the best with your son.”
As she walked him to the door, Maleen flashed him a hopeful smile. “He made Carrun apologize to me,” she admitted. “The Daughter of Memory couldn’t do it, even Lord Haken couldn’t do it. But he showed up at my door with her at his side like a tame hound, and he glared at her until she said she was sorry for breaking down my door. She didn’t mean it, of course. But she still said the words.”
He heard the awe in her voice, that her meek little lad had grown into a lord. Pool privately thought she would do better to fear any elf who could make Carrun, of all Snakes, show throat. But he wished for them to part as friends.
He spent more and more time in bed, rising only to attend the minimum of bodily maintenance. He felt himself growing thinner, despite Cholla urging him to eat and drink. He drifted in a strange half-sleep, slowly coming to understand what his father had meant, about death being neither friend nor foe. There was a strange beauty in it, as the great clockwork of his body began to grind to a halt.
Stop fighting, he told himself. Just let it happen.
But the wolf in him would not lie down. And the healer in him would not be still.
So stubborn, he chided, as he felt the tears course down his cheeks. What do you have to live for now? His former friends viewed him with pity or contempt. His mother would not look at him. He had no legacy to leave behind. Timmain had spoken of a proper conclusion, but he knew he would not find it in Oasis.
Then where? Where must I go?
The answer came to him in a vision on the edge of a dream: a green-growing place, thrumming with life; a great tree made of many trunks and great wooden arches – the oldest living thing purely of this two-mooned world.
**Skywise,** he sent. **I need the pod again.**
* * *
The Evertree was everything he had dreamed – a massive magic-shaped oak made of eight separate trunks, all merging together into a green-growing Palace. Aurek spoke of starstone as living, but upon seeing the Evertree, Pool knew he would forever think of it as dead rock. This was a fitting Palace for true elves. This was life at its most basic, its most triumphant: ten thousand years old and still thriving, life that renewed itself on sunlight and soil, not on blood and death. He felt the wolf in him cease its growls at last. A great feeling on contentment swept over him, as it only did in the deepest wrapstuff trances.
“Father, I have come home,” he whispered, and he believed the soul of Scouter could hear him.
The nominal chief was a ruddy-haired elf named Sparkstone – a distinct cousin of Klipspringer. But Pool knew the real authority within the Evertree was the Waykeeper. He met with the elder in his tree-den and explained his request.
“I know I have little to offer. You have a healer already, and I doubt there is much I could teach him now. But in truth, you won’t have to put up with me for long. The death-sleep season is beginning; I doubt I will last until winter. I am ready to die, I no longer fear its coming. I only ask that I can live out my last days here, and that in death my shell can be given over to the Evertree, so that I may become part of the Holt.”
Littlefire did not disapprove, but he did seem skeptical. “You’re not a Wolfrider. You’ve spent your life among sand and rocks.”
“I have denied my father’s blood too long. But it runs true in my veins. In life we quarreled; in death I wish us to be reunited.” He had failed to pass on Scouter’s blood to a new generation of elves. But he could use it to feed the forest. It was a different sort of immortality.
It was enough for him.
* * *
The death-sleep season seemed to come to the forest all at once. Pool awoke from a daysleep to see the leaves outside his den turning shades of golden and red. Each night brought a deeper frost. The cold air seemed to reinvigorate him, and despite the heaviness that never left his bones, he greeted each new day with a lightness in his heart.
His advanced age fascinated the Holtbound, and even some members of the Hunt. So did his pedigree, and his memories of his pure-blooded Wolfrider sire. He endured a certain amount of mockery for his refusal to eat meat, but then he ate little of anything now. The last berries of the season and the roasted flesh of punkins and mushrooms was enough to keep the hunger pangs at bay. He continued to lose weight, but he did not mind anymore.
He spent his waking hours with his closest agemates – the enigmatic Waykeeper and the frail Sunstill, one-time chieftess of the Evertree Holt. He felt a special affinity to Sunstill: like him, the wolf in her had been dying for years, and like him, she refused to purge it from her veins. She was much younger, and her blood ran a little thinner. Still, her condition was obvious: hair that was once a molten silver had dulled to a brittle gray; a face that had once been round and full had withered to knife-edged cheekbones and a sharply pointed chin.
Like him, she hadn’t the ferocity needed to be a leader among Wolfriders: her chiefhood had not lasted long before a cousin had snatched the lock for himself. But she was held herself with a quiet pride, and all of the Holtbound deferred to her pronouncements.
There was talk of a great feud between her and Furrow, the leader of the Hunt. Littlefire would speak little of it, save to comment: “The Evertree is every bit as fractured as Oasis, you know. We just hide it better.”
“I can’t imagine how you can fight, when all around you is the peace of the Evertree. Living here, it’s like… being enfolded in a mother’s arms. All the spirits of the beloved dead… and the gentle love of the Tree itself… surrounded by such green-growing love, how can anyone’s heart have room for hatred?”
He meant it; since coming to the Evertree, he had not thought once of Melati, save with a distant sort of pity. But Littlefire – or was it Kit? – did not share his view of the Evertree.
“You think plants are gentle, Pool? It’s clear you were never a treeshaper.”
He had offended the Waykeeper somehow. He tried to make amends. “Well, perhaps the discontented ones need to join Haken on Homestead,” he quipped. “There’s more than enough room there, so I hear.”
Littlefire regarded him curiously. A nervous tic made his thin frame shake, and he began twisting a lock of his hair to soothe himself. Pool wondered at it, but pressed no further.
Instead, he looked deeper at the fault lines Littlefire had described. He started to see the problems: the relentless brutality of the Hunt, the haughty superiority of the Holtbound – two groups of wolves locked in a standoff. He was glad they were not his problems to solve. Already the physical world was losing its grip on him. He felt less hunger, and stopped even his meagre suppers. He felt fewer aches, fewer chills, despite the advancing season. As he watched the last leaves slowly turn, Pool felt a deep peace overcome him. He was ready. The proper conclusion Timmain had promised was within his grasp. As the sun began to rise on his tenth day in the Holt, he took to his bed of furs and resolved never to rise from them again.
A sharp shriek, like that of a hawk in a dive, echoed off the branches of the Evertree. Driven by adrenaline, Pool bolted upright in bed.
He struggled down from the den. He moved so slowly now, that the rest of the tribe had already gathered by the time he reached the source of the cry..
Old Sunstill, daughter of Mink and Wren, lay sprawled on the forest floor, surrounded by a halo of leaves and broken twigs. Slightless eyes stared up at the broken understory, and blood caught in the corners of her wrinkled lips.
Duskwind, her healer-lifemate, pushed his way through the ring of bystanders, but he knew when he reached her that she was beyond all help. He knelt down at her side, holding a limp hand in his, numb in his grief.
An auburn-haired elf-woman began to weep: Newgreen, their daughter. Sparkstone, their son, stared up into the trees in search of the cause. “Is anyone up there?” he called. “Did anyone see?”
Pool felt a movement next to him – one last elf coming to join the ring of observers. Pool turned – his peripheral vision was nearly gone now, and he still had difficulty identifying all of the new elves. But he quickly recognized this one by the stag horns he wore twisted in his chief’s knot, and the deep scar that ran down the side of his face.
“Did anyone see her fall?” Littlefire demanded of the tribe.
“Does it matter?” Furrow asked with a sneer. “She fell. That’s all that matters. She was too old to be tree-walking anyway.”
“Yes…” Duskwind looked up from his lifemate’s corpse. “Yes, she was. She never tree-walked anymore. Not above the den-level.” Pool could see the suspicions forming in his mind.
Furrow shrugged. “At least she died like a proper Wolfrider. Living life, not cowering in a den. Better she died now than before she became anymore of a burden.” His cold eyes flickered to Pool for a moment. “And now we have room for some new blood in the tribe.”
“You unfeeling–” Duskwind tried to charge him, but his own son Sparkstone stopped him.
“Truth, though harshly spoken, Furrow,” Sparkstone said loudly enough for all to hear. Then he lowered his voice and whispered something in Duskwind’s ear. But Duskwind shook off his hand.
“This is not the Way!” he protested. “Not when a young stag smiles to see his elder die!”
“Of course I smile,” Furrow said blandly. “And I’ll lead the Death Dance tonight. There is no grief in death – though I wouldn’t expect a healer to understand.”
“There’ll be no Death Dance,” Duskwind vowed. When Sparkstone began to protest, he turned on his son with a snarl. “You heard me, boy!”
He bent down and gathered Sunstill’s broken body in his arms. “She was a wolf, not a stag,” he vowed. “And she’ll have a proper howl!”
“Father–” Sparkstone began, as Duskwind bore her body away.
“Let him go,” Littlefire cautioned. He locked eyes with Pool across the circle. His sending was a strange mixture of masculine and feminine voices. **You wanted to give yourself to the Tree? You’ll see soon enough what that means.**
Elfquest copyright 2016 Warp Graphics, Inc. Elfquest, its logos, characters, situations, all related indicia, and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Some dialogue taken from Elfquest comics. All such dialogue copyright 2016 Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Alternaverse characters and insanity copyright 2016 Jane Senese and Erin Roberts.