For several long minutes after emerging from the lake, we lay on the pebbled shore, staring up at that bright azure sky, as the sounds of the land around us began to resume in earnest and our hearts fell to a normal pace.
After a time and as if by mutual accord, Oros and I both rose to a seated position, our eyes for the verdant landscape all around us. We had emerged from snow-swept, rocky Beluslan into the heart of a jungle in spring, and such trees as I saw in that place have never been matched, before or since; no oaks or pines, these, but ancient, unknowable behemoths whose mossy trunks could not have been circled at the base by the joined hands of a half-dozen Daevas. They rose to tower over the distant earth, their green boughs thick with leaves and life, the very air at the bottom tinted green where the sunlight needs must pass through that emerald canopy to reach it. Such a cover had only been broken by the presence of the lake into which we had fallen, and even then, the uppermost reaches crowded over the water, seeking to blot out the sky entirely, yet unable to span the breadth of the lake.
Birds of brilliant, flashing color frolicked in the upper reaches of the branches; below, there were no more obvious signs of life, as larger creatures yet kept us a wide berth, but where before I had been mortal, I could now feel the flow of life writhing underneath my skin, the natural roil and eddy of aether as it seeped into and fed the very land, so palpable that I almost felt I could cup it in my hands like water to drink. Everywhere I looked were new purities of hue, each plant a hundred shades of variegated green, perfect art-pieces set into the larger work that was the jungle. I had not had the chance to appreciate my newly-gifted senses on the hard-fought journey to Synedell, passing through the mountains at the most inopportune time, with little to look at and less time still to study it; now, however, safely out of the Dragon's reach and thrust into some of the most ostentatious beauty that Elysea had ever produced, I marveled, wide-eyed, at Aion's work.
Oros, however, seemed less impressed. I imagine his thoughts ran upon a wholly different track than mine; I confess, presented so suddenly with the jungle teeming with life, I had become caught up on the intricacies of the natural world all around us. It felt as if Jareth and the Academe, and the Dragon chasing behind us, had been a lifetime ago.
"Welcome to Heiron, unless I am severely mistaken," said Oros, sweeping water and hair back from his face with both hands as he rose, ever-graceful, to his feet; I followed shortly after, and if we were both a touch unsteady, from exhaustion and the bodily rigors of having been flung hundreds of thousands of miles in an instant through the rift, then neither of us made mention of it. "Though I've no idea wherein yet, of course. Aion's love, that was the dumbest thing I've done in years." This last was muttered under his breath, and I, of course, could hardly resist the opening.
"What, specifically, gyre?" I began to pick my way across the green carpet of the jungle floor and into the thick cover of the trees, as the lake had sheltered us all it could, and I was in no mood to encounter a predator at its watering hole. "Coming to Carcarron? Attacking the castle, filled to the brim with the Dragon's forces? Fleeing into the mountains?"
"Putting our lives in your brother's hands," he spat back, but his voice held none of the venom that might usually accompany such a denouncement; he had hardly the energy to spare, and what little rest we had garnered in Jareth's rooms had not much replenished his strength. "You neglected to inform me, when I agreed to this crazed plan of yours, that he was a madman as well as a mage."
"I'd no idea at the time; the madness is a recent development." I eyed him over one shoulder, tracking his slow approach, his attempts to shake water from his leathers without actually removing them; such involved a lot of tugging at the material and grimacing. "You did say that rare is the Daeva that goes completely insane upon Ascension."
"Tempting Fate, I suppose." He made another lip-curled face, opened his leathers at the neck, and stepped up next to where I walked, that he could match my pace at last. "At any rate, it's over and done with, and we're faced with no less difficult circumstances than the ones we just left."
What do we do now? The words hung in the air as surely as if one of us had spoken them, yet even I hesitated to put our plight in such bald terms. We crept along the mossy earth in silence, stepping over exposed roots and fallen branches, putting distance between ourselves and the lake. We had been hunted and on the move for so long now that it seemed almost a comforting familiarity, to continue forward even with no clear goal in mind.
Returning to Sanctum in as timely a manner as possible was, of course, the end result desired - however, the steps involved to accomplish such a goal seemed rather a puzzle. I, who had scarce been allowed out from under the Furiae's monitoring gaze previous, had little clue where Heiron was on the overall map of Elysea; I could perhaps posit that it was relatively remote, based upon the gyre's discouraging attitude and how easily Jareth's rift had brought us here, but I could not begin to theorize in which direction lay Sanctum, nor how far it was, nor where to find shelter or food, nor the location of anything more complicated than a source of water, and that freshly at my back. I knew somewhat of how to survive in a winter wilderness – for what child of Carcarron has never found themselves lost in the snow, even when only playacting it? - and, with fire now at my fingertips in the form of my own divinity, I need never again fear freezing to death; but the prospect of crossing hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles of territory in order to return to Sanctum was daunting, especially so fresh from a four-day journey without sufficient rest.
It also occurred to me, then, that we would be doing so while eluding Elyos eyes, rather than Asmodian ones. As much as Oros's grey wings would have betrayed his origin enroute to Synedell, so too would mine own announce to the world as to the nature of my Ascension, now that we were in Ariel's realm.
A thorny problem, no matter at what angle it was examined from. I opened my mouth to comment upon it, seeking the gyre's opinion, when Oros stopped sharply in his tracks and snatched at my sleeve, without preamble; I eyed him sternly, hardly content to be so roughly handled, but his gaze was not on me, instead fixed at some point in distant foliage as he strained his senses to their limit. I heard what had given him pause a moment later, felt the tremor of the aether and the trembling in the ground; some massive creature lumbered nearby, a steady rhythm of the rise and fall of hefty limbs. Our remove from the lakeside looked more and more prudent with every passing second.
"Up the tree. Go!" Oros hissed, releasing my arm and turning adroitly to the nearest of the jungle titans, which he then began to climb, the tips of his gloved fingers finding handholds as easily as if they had been carved out especially for him. I had time to make a strangled noise of protest in my throat before he was a dozen feet vertical and still climbing; the tremble of the earth grew stronger, and the air thinner, and on the highest mountain peaks; my options in the moment were few, but the gyre had yet to truly steer me wrong on this dangerous course we had taken. Cursing beneath my breath, I scrambled up the moss-riddled bark after him, off the forest floor and into the canopy proper. My shoulder screamed under the abuse, and my leg pulsed in time with my heartbeat, but did not give way as I feared they might. I shudder to think what might have happened, had not sheer stubbornness seen me into the upper reaches.
The gyre waited for me at a broad place in the trunk, where the tree had diverged in three separate directions and formed a relatively flat hollow, in which two Daevas might be persuaded to hide, if they were not unfond of one another; I grumbled and growled beneath my breath at the sight of it, but when I hove into the gyre's reach, I did not refuse his aid when he locked his hands around my wrists and pulled me upwards the last few feet of the journey. I tried my very best not to linger on the thought of how idiotic this was, as we sat hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder in that tiny shelter. The canopy must have been riddled with hundreds of boltholes like it, crowded in on all sides by abundant flowering plant life, and as we waited we were chattered at by one very upset scarlet-feathered bird perched some short distance away, whom Oros had likely disturbed in order to usurp its nesting site. How foolish I felt sitting there, being given the business by an ornamental bird.
I felt rather more contrite in my attitude only a moment later, however, as no sooner was I settled and still next to the twisted-tense gyre than I saw the creature lumber along below.
Descendants of the monster, augmented yet further by aether and the wishes of madmen, still roam the forests in Heiron, or so I am told; I have not since returned, and in the face of such reports, I can only hope that such behemoths arise infrequently at worst, and once in a Daeva's lifetime at best. The earth shook with every step; the tree we sat in convulsed, leaves shaking, branches swaying, and the bird that had taken exception to us spread its wings in startled reflex of balance and shushed its endless screeching. The treetops became of a sudden as silent as the grave. Beside me, Oros's hand shifted to the hilt of the Word, every line of him drawn taut; our chances of discovery by the creature below were somewhat lower than the patrol at Rivenstone, but from his stark features and shallow breath, Oros held our ability to defend ourselves from this menace rather lower as well; neither of us had the strength left to run. I glimpsed through the foliage a patch of russet fur, slow, deliberate movement, and then the thing passed directly below our perch – a monkey-king the height of a half-dozen Daevas standing upon one another's shoulders, its elongated face bloodied from some recent kill, eyes moon-yellow and near pupilless, with a pale underbelly and a scanty ruff that ran near the length of its spine. It walked on blackened knuckles, a swinging, arrogant gait; in mere steps it had passed from below us and emerged into the open air around the lake, whereupon by tipping my head I could just barely sight the beast bending its massive skull to the water to drink.
We did not move, scarce dared to breathe, until by the shaking of the trees, and a thickening of the air, we knew that the fiend had wandered away, deeper into the jungle. The bird alighted from its perch and fled in the opposite direction, and seeing it move broke my own paralysis. Both fear and breath left me all at once in a great rush, and I lifted my hands to scrub idly at my bloodless cheeks. Oros leaned hard against one of the upright stalks of the trunk, head tipped back to the bark, and let his eyes fall shut a moment as he slowly released a held breath. "Yes. Definitely Heiron."
"How did you know it was coming?" I asked, when my heart had returned to a pace approaching normality; the gyre drew in the muggy jungle air to speak, exhaled it as he reconsidered his words, and began again on the second intake.
"Creatures such as that feed upon the aether. Nature would never support their size without it - their weight should crush their bones inside their own bodies." He shrugged, carding his hair back away from his face, where rebel strands had fallen across his forehead; with the white mane plastered to his skull and rakes back from his sharp features, he seemed much younger, much less the ghost of his father and more like himself. "You can feel the aether thin when they approach. Taion thinks it rather like Daeva wings, part flesh, part aether. Personally, I'm in no hurry to find out."
"Not without a sizable army at our backs, at any rate," I sighed in agreement. "Are they common here? Such prodigiously-grown beasts."
"Not common, no," and here he arched one white brow, "but I daresay there are more of them in this part of Elysea than anywhere else. Aether runs wild in Heiron." A dark (or was it pale?) mirror of Beluslan, then; little wonder we had ended up in such a locale, and I wondered still if rifts were as common here as in the land of my birth. Where Carcarron and its surrounds were as inhospitable a landscape as could be conceived, Heiron was instead impossibly green, in polar opposition to my homeland – yet, it seemed, no less dangerous than those more familiar surrounds. Where in Carcarron the very land might kill you, however, it seemed the denizens of this one were more than happy to appropriate the role.
"This complicates matters," I said, mimicking the gyre in finding a trunk-split to lean myself upon, gathering what little strength and wit I yet possessed. There was hardly enough room for true separation from him, but I hoarded what little distance I could, in order that I could return to myself with some dignity. "How are we to recover strength enough to reach safety if we can hardly risk the dangers aground? I've no strength for flight."
"We'll borrow what we must, then," said Oros, with a slim tracery of a smile about the corners of his mouth. "And solve two problems at once."
"There is another problem?" I said, exasperated; dilemmas seemed to arise with the frequency of breeding rabbits, whence concerned the gyre and I, and I was beginning to tire of them.
"Your aether," he nodded, unperturbed. "There's not a chance of disguise, but if you draw upon enough of the Elysean stuff, at a distance you won't cause a panic. By the time anyone gets close enough to recognize your energy signature, it'll be far too late for deception, at any rate."
I goggled at him a moment, then dropped my tone into scorn, certain I was being toyed with. "Pretend that I am not a privileged newborn Daeva raised in the heart of immortality, gyre."
He flashed a sardonic grin, there and gone before I could truly register its presence. "You can feel the aetherflow now, can't you? Close your eyes and look at me."
I fret my brows with him, unimpressed with how he had seemingly diverted the subject and the strangeness of his orders, but I did as he asked, bracing myself first with both hands upon the tree that I might not fall out of it. I know now that young mages perceive the flow of aether almost as easily as any Daeva, and that as a child of divinity I had likely interacted with it on some level all unknowingly, but to those of you who read this and have not felt Aion's kiss, I say to you, I weep for what you cannot know; with my other senses set aside, I could sense the web of life as simply as if the gyre had sketched me a map of it. It flowed and undulated and leapt from point to point, pooling in the shade of trees like water, dancing along every leaf and blade of grass – but now that I was looking for him, I could sense the gyre also, the bright white vortex that was his life's energy, the hint of his grey wings, the desert-wind taste of his divinity, separate from that web yet somehow still a part of it. Where our knees yet touched, I could see my own aether set against to his, and though it flowed with no less fury and frenetic life, it was as dark as the murky waters of the lake in comparison.
I had always wondered how two disparate Daevas knew each other for the enemy, when our peoples can so strongly resemble one another with hardly an effort. Now, I understood. Their own divinities betray them more surely than their bloodlines ever attempt to.
"Like I said. There's no hope of hiding who you truly are," spoke the gyre into that green quietude, "not even with Terekai's gifts. But, like his spells, we can cover it over for a while."
I felt his hand gloved hand cover mine where it was braced against the trunk partition between us, and my eyes flew open in irritation at the liberty taken; but before I could raise a righteous objection, I noticed the flow of aether around and beneath us began, quietly, to shift course. Some phantom tracery of the bright track of the flow remained to my senses once I restored my sight, and I saw beneath us as the deep well of energy the tree sheltered began to run flow vertically up the trunk, seeking where our hands were placed against the bark with unerring accuracy. When it reached us, I felt its coolness against the tissues of my hand as plainly as if I had thrust my palm into a stream of water, and then the aether flowed through my hand and up into the gyre's, where it joined with his own. Furthermore, when I narrowed my gaze at the hand that aether had touched, the darkness of my aether where the tree's energy had touched it was now lightened, a cloudy, indeterminate grey, no longer expressly Elyos or Asmodian, but something in between.
Further study revealed the method with which Oros called the latent aether of the earth to join with his own; it was not unlike the mechanism that allowed me to unfold my wings, a thing part mental, part physical and part spiritual. A fumbling attempt of my own saw both the tree's aether summoned to my hand, and the gyre's own life force; he started, cursed sharply as if stung, and when he yanked both his knee and his hand away from mine, aether stretched visibly in the air between us, harpstring-fine threads strung of tiny beads composed of pure light, before the threads broke and the excess aether dispersed into a fine mist that soon disappeared completely into the humid air.
"What in hell did you just do?" said Oros, bewildered, his pale brows knit over his dark eyes. Such an expression, in all the years I have known the gyre, I have never again seen; as extraordinary as it is to catch him by surprise, I expect that I shall never see its duplicate. In the moment, I had not the wit to commit that rarity to my memory.
"I - don't know." I snatched my hand away from the trunk, examined my own aether with my new senses, but I could find no cause for such thievery; the tree's aether continued for some moments to seek an entryway into my frame, but once no longer called, soon resettled into its deep pool among the behemoth's roots far below. "Is that not supposed to happen?"
"No. No, it isn't." He stared at me as if he had reached for a silken flower and been blooded by a hidden dagger within for his troubles, all puzzled hurt and courageous rallies towards equilibrium. "I suppose you have the grasp of it now, at least."
Oros took his abused hand in the palm of the other, rubbing the tendons therein as if to reassure himself that nothing permanent had been inflicted upon his clever fingers, which were his livelihood; of a surety, neither of us wished to immediately address the strangeness of the way the aether acted, for we had myriad other concerns more to the forefront of our minds, and so I prodded gently, "You were saying, about aether?"
He shifted where he sat, as if he wished to relax, but hesitated to allow our limbs to come into even the slightest contact once more; whatever it was he had felt when his aether began to abandon him, it must have been quite painful to provoke such a reaction in him. "Any Daeva can be sustained by aether alone, if they have to be. If you absorb enough of it, phoenix, your aura will be muddled enough that you can't be positively identified until another Daeva gets close." A roll of his shoulders, to loosen the tension that lurked there still. "But if they're that near, they can probably see your wings, and we're for a fight after that no matter what."
I nodded, then inclined my head to sent my eyes towards the canopy; the golden-green light shining through the upper reaches was more intense there in the grasp of that ancient behemoth, but the change of angle also allowed for a few patchy glimpses of sky through the totality of the undergrowth. "Night flights for us, then, I suppose."
"After this one, at the least," he said with agreeing tone, but before I could inquire as to his meaning he reached above him and clasped a branch along the main spar of the trunk, and using that, pulled himself upwards enough that his feet could be braced below him. Crouched atop his own heels, the gyre tilted his head to appraise me, his mouth a thin flat line in his pale face, the crossbars of the nameless silver sword grasped loosely in his other hand. "Draw as much energy from the earth as you can. The trees aren't safe enough to rest in for extended periods," and here he drew that nameless blade with a backhanded grip, and offered it to me pommel-first with a twist of his wrist, "so I won't be gone long, but you ought to be armed while I am."
I took the sword almost without thinking, tested its balance against my palm even as I studied the gyre. How good it felt to hold a blade once more! My calluses had softened in the intervening months since last I had been at practice, but the way of the sword was etched upon my very bones; my musculature knew the movements, the way to set my fingers against the leather-wrapped grip. The gyre's offhand weapon was of fine make, a masterwork for any smithy I could hope to name – it was a glittering silver from tip to pommel, the blade slender and exquisitely balanced, with water-marks running the length of the cutting edge that reflected the trees surrounding us as if in a mirror. It was a beautiful piece of killing craftsmanship, bespoke for the gyre's own hand and no other.
And the gyre now so blithely handed it to me, when never before had he risked my genuine armament. Oh, how far we had come in a handful of days, and not all the distance traveled done in miles.
"What threat is there so dire in the treetops, then?" spoke I into that greenness, and Oros ticked one white brow up over his eyes, impossibly dark amidst all that brightness. "And where are you going, to arm me so? Are there Daevas abroad here?"
"In Heiron? Hardly, but a jaguar is a match for a Daeva, if that Daeva is both unarmed and unawares," said he in frank, blunt tones, pushing himself to his full height in the hollow of the tree. Leaves mantled his shoulders and crowned his white hair, for the space was not meant to easily admit a man standing. "This place teems with life, but as you've seen, not all of it is benign. As for where I'm going, of the two of us, only one is suited to try and ascertain our location, or which direction to head."
I gaped up at him, wondering that so short a rest, and so little aether taken from the tree, should have replenished his internal stores so easily. "And how do you propose to find me again, once you have left?"
"Oh, that's easy, phoenix," and this time the mischievous grin that dawned upon his handsome face was wide and boyish, so much so that for a moment he was not his father's son at all, but merely himself, "I'll simply look for the burning branches."
The sidelong insult left me bristling, and my spluttering curses chased him as he jumped like a diver out the way we had entered that high bower. Mid-motion the gyre's grey wings unfolded with a snap and a flaring of his desert-wind aether, every feather stormcloud-perfect and distinct in that humid air; for a few moments, I was treated to the sight of his narrow wings weaving expertly through the crowded canopy as he strove for altitude, for gyrfalcons were forest-birds at heart and crafted for the purpose, but then he broke through the upper reaches with a mighty downward thrust of his reaching wings, and he left my line of sight.
Shaking my head, I laid the silver sword acrost my knees and pressed my palms once more to the bark of the ancient tree, calling its aether to join to mine. The presence of that sword was a comforting weight, the blade cool despite the hot air, a symbol both of the danger we were in and the gyre's seeming trust. I had never seen a jaguar, only read of them in books; even in those days, they were rare beasts in Heiron, predators of shadow and ambush, and I thought it unlikely that one would reveal itself to test its claws against divinity's strength; but true also, that that moment in the green treetops was the first that Oros had dared to leave me for more than a moment's peace to my own devices.
The gyre's motives were ever unfathomable, in even the smallest of his actions, and the unraveling of them would progress us little, in any wise.
I resolved to think no more upon it, and when the aether rose from the roots of the tree to call to my hand, I tried to duplicate the oddness of its actions, that I might collect more data on the bizarre phenomenon that had so obviously rattled the companion of my travels. Yet, when the flow reached me, no matter how I twisted and turned my thoughts and will, I could not make the strange strings of aether reappear. I succeeded quite handily, at least, in absorbing as much aether as my abused frame could withstand, and suffused with it the world seemed to take on a different shade. The light seemed not nearly so bright, though to my discerning eye nothing about my environment had changed; colors seemed more saturated, more real, and the shadows deeper and less easily plumbed; I wondered then, and have wondered since, if the quality of the aether in the regions of Atreia have as much to do with the changes in our disparate peoples as does time and advantage; there is some evidence for it to be so, though much of it is anecdotal and strange-writ at best. I have wished betimes for the opportunity to study the phenomenon, but I fear such an ideal never to be, for as long as the peoples of Atreia are at war with one another, then ever shall the borders of one side or the other be closed to me, when such a study might only be completed with the cooperation of both.
For half a candle I sat in the quiet of the canopy and listened to life return to its full flourish around me; birds called, insects chirped, and once I hear a rumbling call that might have been the famed jaguar of which I had been warned; at such point I took up the sword and waited for the cat itself to appear, the tree's aether still pouring through my frame; but the predator never appeared.
I had just begun to relax once more into the tree's embrace when the edifice as a whole trembled as if struck. Alarmed, I glanced for the forest floor below, fearing the monkey-king had returned on his patrol and sought to shake me from the branches as if a ripened fruit; but a sharp whistle drew my eye upward instead, and in the higher reaches of the tree in which I sat was perched the gyre, his wings folded neatly along his back and already vanishing into the aether. He did not climb down, but instead secured himself with his back to the spar, somewhat thinned and less sturdy the higher up one went in the arbor. His booted feet dangled with distressing bonelessness.
I could not begrudge him his contented smile, however; the gyre seemed a man freed at last from a burden long held, his hair dried in wind-blown tufts and dandelion-spikes away from his face, and for the first time in our acquaintance I saw in him no worries nor concerns, nor tensions of any kind. In those handful of minutes, the gyre was untroubled by what the future might bring us.
And looking at him, just for a moment or three, neither was I.
"There's an old temple a little ways from here," and he pointed off in the distance, though for the treeline I could not see where he indicated. "I couldn't spare the time to land, but a quick flyover makes it look uninhabited. If it proves to be so, we can rest there for the day, gather our strength for nightfall." He folded his arms acrost his chest, leaned forward and down so that I might more clearly see his face, and he mine; much of his mirth had drained away. "Verteron lies beyond the mountains north of the ruins, and will be well-populated compared to Heiron. But, Verteron is decidedly not the most dangerous stretch of the journey."
"Then what is?" I asked, and wondered if I should truly wish to know the answer.
The gyre hesitated, but seemed to feel he owed to me the truth of the matter, and thus he slumped his shoulders and said, "There's an open stretch of water, between Verteron and Poeta. A Daeva fully-rested ought to have no issue in crossing it, but there will be no cover of trees or earth, and on a good day a man standing on one coast can wave across to another. If we can reach Poeta, I've confidence of our success -"
"But reaching Poeta without discovery is the problem," I finished for him, and he nodded, grim and frowning, white brows fret.
"I've some small hope of chartering a boat, but even that is reliant on the hope that no Daeva comes within sniffing distance of us, and obtaining the money besides; I've hardly the kinah on me just to send a message ahead of us, to let Taion and the others know we're alive. If Aion is truly with us on this crazed venture, perhaps a fog will roll in and we need not concern ourselves with visibility after all." He shrugged and leaned back against the tree, his face once again hidden from my sight. "But all that comes later. For the nonce, I intend to rest a bit before we scout the ruins. Keep the watch, would you?"
"I will," I said, and after a moment's pause, spoke also, "Gyre?"
"Yes, phoenix?"
"Thank you." I meant it, with every inch of my tattered and much-abused heart; just as surely as he had no hope of escape in Beluslan without me, I had no chance of survival in Heiron without him, much less the vast realm of Elysea beyond it.
Oros did not answer for long moments, such that I thought he had fallen asleep, until finally through the quiet, he said, "You're welcome."
Hello, old friends. Been a while, hasn't it?
For the unaware, the Lay now has an official Tumblr askblog - the link is in my profile. Anonymous questions are allowed, and I would ask that any questions be directed there from now on so that I can publish your asks and avoid having to answer the same six questions over and over. ;3 Additional content is also posted there relatively regularly, such as worldbuilding infodumps, fanart of the Lay, and the incoherent ramblings of yours truly.
As for those of you who have patiently waited for this update, believing it would never come: it is to you whom I dedicate this chapter, which is shorter than I wanted it to be, but without your encouragement and kind words, would never have been written.