I

Peel off the napkin,

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?

- Lady Lazarus

I hated her the very moment I saw her. Everything I was not. Proud, bold, beautiful. She stood tall, skin like honey, dark hair a shimmering curtain down her back. A strong jaw, a simple white shift that both disguised and accentuated curves that were perfect. She wore no oils, powders or illusions, only three bold pieces of Aachan gold – torc, chain, bracelet – a perfect parody of asymmetrical Aachim design, powerful because she was so unmistakably Charon. She had come to oppose me, and I could see that radiant defiance in the burning carmine of her otherwise depthless eyes.

Yalkara.

Faelamor.

They told me she was the greatest threat to our kind, before they sent me through, and that I was the only one strong enough to fight against her. It was like being reborn, coming though the void, birthed into a new world, naked and shivering, waiting to be warmed by the sun.

The very moment I saw her, she awed me. Tiny, as only the Faellem can be, but radiating power. Her hair was not blonde or white, but something without a name, her skin so very translucent that every subtle colour played upon it like ink on parchment; her transparency the very thing that made her colourful. She seemed to electrify the air around her; that hair a halo – her illusions rendered her faultless. Her catlike movements were always measured, those feline eyes liquid and impossible to read. The greatest illusionist on Santhenar, they called her. I knew it to be true.

They measured it well. They knew we would be rivals, but I don't think even the Charon saw how deep the opposition would run. So deep, in fact, that our opposite ends were not so far away from each other at all.

We pretended at first. There were not always battles. Although there was a relentless hunt for Shuthdar, it was a time of peace, or at least of whispered deceits rather than outright ones, so we played the game. But we were opposed in our very natures. Faellem and Charon; water and fire. I was as enamoured with life as only those of my species can be, appreciating everything: the dawn, the dew on a flower petal, the very smell of the air. She was smouldering embers, watching, biding her time, enigmatic. She desired wealth and grandeur, I only wanted power, and to do my duty - keeping Tallallame safe. My power was of the mind, and I was strongest where nature was at its greenest and fiercest. She could move the very rocks themselves when she chose to, and, like all her kind, was most at home in places where the earth was close to splitting apart. I drank only the natural waters and nectars of nature; she rather enjoyed the potency of wine.

If the Aachim are overly proud, the Faellem noble to the point of folly and the Old Human excessively mediocre, then the Charon could be said to feel too deeply, love too strongly; be too passionate.

The void had stripped away all of our humanity. When we followed the Way back to Aachan, we gained power, a world, and the chance to rediscover our culture. I had a duty, to oppose Faelamor, to keep my people alive, for none of us could believe that the Faellem would resist a device as powerful as the golden flute if it meant survival or extinction for their species. That duty I would fulfil, whatever the cost. And the cost turned out to be great for both of us.

I could not stand it. Every moment of my existence, she was there. Always a step behind me or around the next corner, waiting. She learned my patterns fast, and she was a powerful scryer. She pierced through my illusions like soap bubbles; and I the most powerful illusionist on Santh, the leader of my kind. I was the best of them, and if the greatest of the Faellem could be so easily matched by one of the Charon, then our ancestors had been right, all those years ago.

She was a shadow, larger and statelier, but always there, always with fingers reaching for me. I could do nothing, not walk or eat or drink or sleep without shrouding myself in an illusion that she could break at any moment. I was hunted, and I hated it. I hated her. She knew that to take the freedom of the Faellem was to take everything from them.

It became something of a game, or perhaps a challenge. She would conceal herself in new ways, inventive ways – a truly magnificent illusionist, and I would scry for her. I would search for her patterns and her auras, however concealed they were, and I would probe at those shields until they collapsed in on themselves, and her frustration flared into my mind like the stab of a knife. I often wondered whether she felt my glee on the other end. It was seldom, very seldom that I managed to find an opponent who was so very equal to me. Sometimes she concealed herself for weeks, months at a time, but I always found her.

And then a chill winter's night in Tiksi, and we built our tower of illusions on the rift.

There were whispers of her on the wind as I travelled, traces of her heading back toward Mirrilladell, but I could not pinpoint her. It had been months since I had known for sure, and I was growing restless with it, determined. Shuthdar had vanished once again, more beast than man, and I followed her fading scent in the hope that both of them were somehow headed to that vast, wooded place.

Mirrilladell was on my horizon, the closest thing to a home I had on Santhenar. The Faellem are people of the forest. Our structures are basic, and rely upon the canopy of the trees, as our diet relies on what we can hunt and gather. Essentially, we are tribes-people, but we are not nomadic. I did what I had to do, followed the path of Shuthdar and his enemies, cloaking myself in such illusions that I was invisible. Sometimes I almost fooled myself that I didn't exist.

But I never fooled her. Everywhere I walked, pursued; every illusion I cast, shattered. When aftersickness took me as it inevitably did, and my defences collapsed, I felt her presence laughing at me, mocking my weakness.

I was euphoric on the return journey to Mirrilladell, having felt not a flicker of Yalkara's aura for two months, long enough that I felt almost free. I watched the sun set upon the hills from a tavern in Tiksi, having decided, just for a night, to take a bed and a bath – Old Human commodities that those of my kind usually do not bother with.

A dinner of roast meat and vegetables, a roaring fire in the hearth, a soft, high backed chair supporting my weight. The thought of home, of others of my kind, of being able to drop my defences, truly drop them, because there were others to do it, within the camp.

It was that thought that weakened me, I believe, in this place of warmth and comfort. I was so very close, and surely she could not be scrying for me right at that very moment. The last time I had felt her presence was on the other side of the country. My illusions and protection crumbled around my shoulders and fell from my form like a shed skin.

I was so close that I felt it. Her aura blazed like a candle, it lit up the night. My head turned. I laughed, and it rumbled through the air with my Art, and straight at her, to her. I could not see her, but I felt despair, quickly followed by fury. She erupted in a swirl from the tavern door, out into the night where I stood.

"Yalkara!" Her arm stretched toward me and a wind I could not feel whipped the hair about her face into a frenzy. Fire in her eyes, her Art growing around her in an ethereal swirl of the night.

"Illusions, Faelamor." And I reached out my hand and ripped them away from her. Just a woman, then, but still magnificent in her ire.

I wanted to kill her. Oh, I have never wanted anything more. I wanted to reach into her soul and rip out the part of it that mocked me so. I wanted to hurt her, and I wanted her to beg me to make it stop.

"Why must you do this!" I heard my voice break into a thousand pieces and attack her from all sides, saw her throw up her arms as though trying fight of a flock of attacking birds. Seeming to right herself against my onslaught, her face took up the strain of her Art, and she balled her hand into a fist and thrust it at me. I could not move. Pain clenched at my gut and I doubled over, illusions falling around me like so many flightless things. I fell to my knees, trying to draw a cloak of mist and darkness about myself, but she disbelieved it in an instant, lowering her balled fist as she stepped toward me, forcing me lower, down onto the hard ground.

When at last she had me on my back and staring up at her, she smiled and released the hold. I could feel the aftersickness of months dragging at the back of my mind, wanting to surface, but I would not let it. I had not the strength for any more illusions. But oh, I still wanted to hurt her.

"Do you relent, Faelamor?" There was a smirk upon her lips as she bent over me, stepping across my body with one heeled boot to stare down at my face. I could summon nothing, not force, not illusion, nothing to throw her, and she just stood there, mocking me with that enigmatic smile. My body ached with it, this desire to just knock her off her feet with something, wipe that smile from her face.

I reached up and grabbed the hem of her cloak.

She kissed me. Hot and hard and angry, and the smile fell from my face as the certainty fell from my mind. What Art was this, what illusion? Her hands were pulling me against her, and she was so warm and tiny and strong. When I pulled away from her, confused and hot in the cheeks, she wore my smirk as though her kiss had stolen it. That ethereal hair fanned out against the stones.

Ah, my equal in every way - clever, cunning and powerful. "Illusions, Faelamor. Always illusions." I brought my knee down between her knees, drew it up, pushing her thighs apart. Her eyes widened, and the smirk switched faces again. "Is anything you do real?"

Her voice came out strangely when she spoke. "Sometimes I forget what is real, and what is not."

I leant against her, pressing her into the cold ground, hands against her shoulders. Lowered my face to within a breath of hers, whispered in her ear. "Well, I'm real, Faelamor, and no matter what illusions you hide in, I'll find you. Whether you like it or not." My hair made a curtain over our faces, my eyelids brushed her cheek.

Her whisper was guttural. "I hate you." And then lips were together again, bodies twisting, and heat, fingers pulling at fabric, touching warm, soft skin.

"I'll show you how real illusion can be."

She reached up and her fingers touched my temples, but seemed to probe right into my mind. She was searching for something, sinking deep and catching something within me, linking not from the front of the mind but in the depths, somewhere where we were not a different species at all.

It was the strongest link I had ever felt, and she drew on my power quickly. I could feel her weakness through it, feel the aftersickness lurking beneath her surface, but she was drawing the strength from me, whispering words against my skin and weaving a world around us. I had not the strength to disbelieve it, and in truth I did not want to. The stony ground turned to soft moss underneath us, and a warm, humid air twined about our limbs. When I looked up, it was to trees spiking up into the sky all around us, and inky heavens dotted with foreign constellations directly over our head, for we seemed to be in a clearing, and those stars dancing for an audience of two. This was a Faellem place; Tallallame, or as close to it as I would ever come. With our minds locked in this heady spin, it felt like home.

I'd lost all power, given it over to her, but we were too far gone to turn back. Clothes were shed in that balmy rainforest air. The stars shone on her translucent skin, and it flushed under my touch. I could feel her veins pulse beneath my fingertips.

And so we wrapped ourselves about each other in this reality of illusion, and whispered words that had everything to do with rivalry and nothing to do with hate.