II
Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.
- Conversation Among The Ruins
"You are not interested in the Golden Flute." It was more a challenge than a question, for nothing she said was spoken softly. Yalkara was imperious, demanding, and these verbal duels characterised our meetings as much as did the furious union of lips, skin, fingers and wills.
"Of course not." Months of the game, and she had found me again that night. It had become harder and harder to resist my desire for her, at the same time as it seemed to matter so much more that I triumph and elude her for long enough to make her quake and burn. I had given into to her Charon desire for decadence this time, and lay, tiny, in an opulent bed large enough for six of her kind. My hair fanned across her legs, head rested against her thigh, but our words were not the quiet kind. "I am Faellem, what need would I have for such a device?"
"Then why are you here?" I wasn't sure whether she meant here on Santhenar, or here with her.
I pushed my head back against her leg to look up and catch her eye, a smile twitching at my lips. "Do you wish I wasn't?"
She snorted, and there was laughter in it, but did not reply. No simple yes or no, for that one. I felt her fingers lift my head away from her, prompting me to sit, and she twisted and reached across to where her cloak lay discarded over a chair. Something metallic and cylindrical came out of the pocket, and with a few whispered words it opened in her palm. Instinctively, I shifted away. Flickers of colour lit her features, and caught the line of her chin and the curve of her cheek when she glanced up to pierce me with those dark eyes.
"What is it?" A quaver in my voice.
"The Mirror of Aachan, a powerful seeing device. I use this to pierce your illusions, and you are not even curious?" An elegant brow arched up toward her hairline. Something inside me froze. My eyes fell upon the tiny reflective sheet in her palm, and I saw in it a power that she had and I did not. There must have been a ravenous hunger in my eyes, for whatever she saw gave her cause to smirk triumphantly.
"Noble Faellem, too powerful to need devices." Her voice dripped with sarcastic venom.
Only moments ago I had been smiling, but that benign contentment turned to ice with her words. How quickly warmth heated into anger. My voice was glacial. "If the need arose, I would do anything for my people, use any tool available, betray anyone. I am a leader. I cannot afford to be afraid."
Her eyes remained impassive, but the glass in her hand flickered blue against her cheek then went dark. For a moment she did not speak.
"Well, I'm pleased we see it the same way."
The Mirror coiled in my hand like a dead leaf. How naive I had been. Ridiculously silly. We would always be rivals, but I had been prepared to trust her, to give myself up to this fierce, knife edged love that had taken hold of me, this thing of vicious words and biting teeth and pure, undiluted animal. There was nothing to tame the Faellem, no pretence at organised society, no lofty Aachim arrogance, no sullenness at mediocrity. Her heart was fierce and ruthless, and something in me had thought I had a place in it, but that died right then. Somehow, knowing I could never have it just made me want her more, so that I might take it from her when she was off her guard.
I let the mirror roll onto the table beside the bed, and moved against her once again. I claimed her lips in a brutal, dominant kiss, forcing her down against the soft quilts, and sought to claim a part of that heart for my own.
What did any of it matter, right then and there, as her fingers twined in my hair and I kissed her back with a passion I did not even know I possessed, when tongues warred together and loyalties were pledged and destroyed with caresses?
When people think of the events that will change their life, they think of gradual transformation, walking a path and enjoying the scenery as it blends progressively from forest to scrub to desert. Such fantasies are illusion. When things changed for me, it was not at all smooth. I tripped over myself and fell into a spiral that drew me down through forest and desert and into the frozen depths of the void before I had even become aware of what had happened.
In a way, everything changed when I met him.
My mood was black. I had no idea where she was, not when I scryed with the Mirror, or in other, more traditional ways. It was as if she had fled through the void to Tallallame. Nothing, not even a scent on the wind to follow. No traces if the aura of her art.
I scowled, sinking deeper into my seat and tapped my bracelet against the table moodily. I must have looked formidable, but he has told me since that he thought me beautiful even then. A large hand laid a goblet of wine on the table before me, and it was a moment before I looked up and realised he had seated himself at my table.
"They call you the Mistress of Deceits."
Old Human, but tall, with strong hands and jet black hair that hung around his shoulders in waves. He was clean-shaven, and his lips curled into a benign smile. His eyes were dark green, and his gaze intense.
"Do they? I can't imagine why." I heard something musical in my voice, flirtatious, and realised that the black mood was quite gone.
"Well, they call me the Recorder. That's not nearly as interesting." I felt myself smile, and a breath of laughter escaped my lips. "But my name is Gyllias, and the drink is for you." He gestured to it with his eyebrows, and I lifted the heavy pewter goblet and took a sip.
"Yalkara." I replied.
He smirked. "Well, now, they wouldn't call me the Recorder if I didn't know who I was looking at when I saw the only Charon woman on Santhenar, would they?"
"I suppose they wouldn't."
That was the first spin, and it was heady and sweet and as potent as the wine in my hand. I forgot all about her, and in my Charon way, I think I fell in love with him that night.
I coughed, and the aftersickness rose up my throat like a tidal wave. I forced it down again. Oh, this had cost me, and for what?
She found me with a seeing device, pierced my illusions because I was really there, whole and unchanged beneath them, waiting to be found. So I used my Art in a different way, felt the air and the night around me, the grass under my bare feet, and became them. Only a Faellem could have done it, and I was the best of them. I did not just cloak myself, I became physically invisible. My body ceased to be anything but something that existed in a strange sort of way in my mind. I could not even feel it. I simply was, and merely with the force of my will I directed this strange, all-seeing mind about the place.
I remained in that state for about two days before I could do it no longer. I fell back into that body like a stone, smashing my knees against rock and aching all over with the force of the Art I had worked, and fought back the aftersickness until even the repressing of it made me feel ill. I would find somewhere rich and green, somewhere naturally in tune with me, and there I would cast but the most basic of illusions and charms before I let it take me. I did not know if aftersickness could kill me, but I hoped not, because if so, this certainly would.
When I found such a place, I was shaking with the repression, shaking to my very bones. I felt brittle and weak, almost liquid. I stumbled drunkenly, made a pillow of the grass and leaves, then splashed upon the ground in a messy heap and let it wash over me.
I did not even search for her. Her dreams pierced my own. She writhed in agony inside my very mind. I had no idea how far away from each other we were, but she caught me in it, trapped me in her dream, twined me in that terrible thrall, and the aftersickness wrapped around my brain like tendrils from her own as if it were too much for her, and I felt myself writhe in my bed even though I could not wake, felt sheets sticking to me as I sweated coldly, but not even such a sensation could pull me from that iron grip in which she held me.
This was too much. Too much for my tiny body, too much for a mind as sensitive as mine. I did not know I even had the remnants of that link within me, but my feverish mental fingers gripped it like a lifeline and drew it taut between us.
Images were flitting through my mind like wraiths, feeble figures that barely lasted a second. Between these ghosts I caught glimpses of more solid entities, felt flickers of coherent but alien sensations and emotions – greenery, forest and a tiny frail body upon a thick bed of leaves; night and lifting a hand that wasn't there, that wasn't even a hand; panoramic vision that no eyes could see. Dizzying.
Colours and thoughts poured across the link as I opened it wider, needing to rid myself this toxin, needing to share it, and too ill to care what else was flowing across it. Hunting and scrying, that mirror in a large bronzed hand, flickers of a landscape arid and barren but that someone thought beautiful – not me, I hoped. Warmth, a goblet of wine, and a man, and something hot and sweet and heady that wasn't the wine. The man, it was the man, he had put something hot in her heart and she was gazing at him with something growing in her chest, and oh! I could not claw the vision away. She was laughing, and smiling, and his eyes twinkled, and something in my own chest smashed apart in that body that felt so very far away yet so acutely there, and I flung and flailed and burned, hot and white and more painful than a thousand aftersicknesses. Across the link I hurtled the only thing I knew that would hurt her more.
Mariem. It whipped across my mind like something venomous, searing me and burning that realisation into my very flesh. I saw the void, and that beautiful green land covered in cities, Faellem in a circle, and my people falling away into that teeming darkness. I screamed, though I'm sure it was only in my mind; recoiled violently. Mariem. Faellem. It burned me. I fought her viciously, tearing at the link, but she held on with all the force that was her will to live, and we twisted and pulled against each other, even then unable to let go.
It took me a long time to recover. Even when the aftersickness had gone I did not move. This was more than the repercussions of such a powerful Art, this was a Faellem in despair, and nothing could be more debilitating to one of us than a failure of mind and will.
There was something hideous in what I had seen in her heart – it was stronger and more fierce than anything I possessed, and I knew without question that it was unbreakable, that it would only grow. Tears, hot and salty and hideously degrading stung at my cheeks, and I clawed them away with weak hands, hating myself for it, no, hating her, for how dare she fall in love with him. How dare she focus that Charon mind heart on someone else when she had pretended to give it to me. How dare she melt my icy Faellem heart with her Charon fire and then leave it lukewarm and weakened and wanting her, while she went off to love another.
It froze my insides to ice. The Mariem. The Faellem had betrayed us, cast us into the void to die for their own selfish gain, and our species had lost every scrap of what they once were in that vicious place, knowing only what we had once been called, and that we had somehow been betrayed. All the noble art we had once possessed, those vast glassy cities throbbing with creativity and life, shattered to pieces by their acts, reduced to beasts by that animalistic place. She had betrayed me by even daring to mock me with that tranquil rainforest under the stars. She had known, she was one of them, the greatest of the species that only became great by murdering our people, and she pulled me against her and made my fierce Charon heart beat in time with hers. She had presumed to own what her people had once so cruelly cast aside, and I hated her for it with an ice in my veins that she put there herself.
Shuthdar was found, cornered. And when I made the Forbidding I did it with all the anger and hatred I could muster for Faelamor, and all the love for my people back on Aachan. The fire and the ice that had once been that cloak and dagger love of ours was what sealed the world from all these follies. We would have our world, and damn the all. No one would ever force us into the void again.
I took absolutely no pleasure from it, though I suppose I thought I would. Nothing was the same; everything was tainted by my bitterness. How dare she love him and not allow me to forget her. This one that now held me in his arms and tried to warm my heart of ice was failing miserably, and how could he not, for you cannot melt ice with coolness, and that is the warmest the Faellem will ever be. Only her Charon fire melted that frozen armour I wore, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Nothing warmed me, not even what we created. Faellem pregnancies are blissfully short.
Too late I realised what a terrible mistake this Forbidding was. Too late I realised it for something brought on by anger, something unstable, something that had destroyed the balance between the worlds and would eventually threaten the existence of all three. It needed to be undone, but I did not know how.
I told him none of it, but he was there anyway, and I grew to love him more than life itself. He did not ask for answers I could not give, and I demanded of him nothing he could not do. His hands were large, strong, and he held me tightly and there was no rivalry in it at all, only devotion.
The Charon know everything about breeding. I felt myself conceive. I walked to the window, wrapping a robe about myself, and stared up through the glass at the full moon, peering back at me with its red and blotched dark side. I lay my hand against my belly and refused to allow myself to believe their superstitions.
"Laugh! I know what you left behind. I found it and I broke it, and all your hopes and dreams with it."
A/N: The poetry at the beginning of each chapter is Sylvia Plath. The last line of the fic is of course from 'The Tower On The Rift'