The World to Come
by Eildon Rhymer
What if the Dark had won at the end of Silver on the Tree? The world is sliding into darkness, and only tattered remnants of the Light remain. Will, Bran and the Drews grow to adulthood, and each to their own destiny in this World to Come.
Part three: chapter four
Go gentle into the night
It did not feel as if Merriman was gone.
That was the strangest thing. For the whole of Will's awakened life, Merriman had been there. Sometimes he had been a voice in Will's mind, and sometimes just a distant presence, impossible to pin down, but always there. Sometimes they had gone for years without seeing each other, and sometimes they had lived in the same room. They had stood side by side, and they had disagreed.
They had been master and pupil; mentor and disciple. They had been father and son, and then friends. They had argued and disputed, but they had always been allies, always fighting for the same cause. They were of the Light, and they could not do anything else, or be anything else.
They were of the Light, and now Merriman was gone. Will was the only one left, and the Dark reigned supreme.
He ought to feel more bereft than he did. Will stood at the broken window, hand pressed into the dust. The rain fell down in a grey mist, and a stray cat sat sulkily beneath the shelter of an overhanging wall. It ought to hurt, a wrenching pain of absence, like James dying in his arms, or the first time he had seen his family after his first death. It ought to be terrible, impossible, dreadful. Instead, all he felt was numb.
Merriman was gone. Sometimes he had to say it out loud to believe it. "Merriman…" He could not say the rest of it. It was too absurd, too ridiculous. Merriman was the oldest of them all. He had watched man crawl up from the age of dust and stone, and create civilisations of beauty and gold. He had seen heroes rise and fall, and had lived through wars and battles and the death of kings. He should have been there at the end of it all, as he had been at the beginning.
Will had often wondered what it would be like to face the end, to be defeated, captured, blasted out of Time forever. Every other Old One in existence had met that fate, many of them in the original shock of the Dark's victory, and the rest over the years, and alone.
Most of Will's dreams were still of the past, but he dreamed, too, of capture. Brought in chains before the lords of the Dark. Kicked to the ground, head bowed. Cold laughter and eyes like ice, but then a figure, approaching from behind. Pale skin, pale hair, and eyes the colour of amber. "Hello, Will." And then a hand reaching out, and after that, nothing.
He shivered. Rain drifted through the broken window, falling on the back of his hand in a fine mist. He expected all Old Ones had such dreams, though none of them ever spoke about it. Every single one of them had faced their end alone. One by one, they had all fallen, until only Will and Merriman had remained.
Had Merriman, too, dreamed of his end? Had he feared it? Had he known? Will had dreamed of his own end, but never of Merriman's. He had never doubted that he would go first, and that Merriman would remain, last as he was first.
"It's wrong," he said aloud, but he said it only as a quiet murmur. He was numb inside and out, frozen by the unreality of the thing. He is not gone, his mind protested. He cannot be.
"What do we do now?" Anthony said softly, close behind him. Will had not sensed his approach. This numbness affected more than just his heart.
Will swallowed. "I'm the only one left."
"They don't know that." Anthony was still behind him, unseen, but close enough for Will to feel his warmth. There was no comfort in it. "They think Merriman was the last one. They think they've won. They don't know we've still got you."
Will closed his eyes. "It does no good. Before, when I did things, they thought it was Merriman. Now, the minute I act, they'll know they were wrong, and that there is still an Old One in the world. It… cripples me."
"Does it matter?" Anthony persisted. "Let them know that they're wrong. Make them afraid. There they are, gloating over their victory, and suddenly they realise that their enemies aren't all dead after all. Someone's still out there. If there's one, there might be more. Maybe they haven't won after all."
But they have, Will thought. They had all along.
The Dark had won on a hillside at midsummer, twenty-four years ago. The Light had fought, and had encouraged mankind to fight, too. Hundreds of thousands of people had died who might not have died, because they had joined the Resistance and fought. And, one by one, the Old Ones had been defeated, and the Dark's grip on the world grew steadily tighter and tighter.
There's no point, he thought. If Merriman could be defeated, then Will had no chance. The best he could hope was a few more years of enduring, ending in defeat. It would make no difference to the world. It would not dent the power of the Dark entirely.
"Will?" Anthony touched him on the back of his shoulder. "Will?"
Will opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. Rain fell from a polluted sky, and winter would come and would reign forever. Merriman was gone. The Circle had ended, and now there was nothing but endless Dark.
"There's nothing I can do," he whispered.
He heard Merriman's voice then, as clear in his mind as if Merriman was standing beside him. This voice, though, spoke only in memory. Long ago, it had been, when Will was just a boy – though he had not really been a boy since the summer he was twelve. Side by side, they had sat, on a green hill above a plain, watching the winter stars, and speaking of past and future. "Never seek out Bran," Merriman had said, "while I am in the world."
Merriman was gone now. Will was alone, but Bran remained.
Nothing I can do, he thought, but perhaps this…
He could not save the world, but perhaps he could save one man, who had once been his friend. Then, after that, whether he succeeded or failed, he would face the end in peace. He would go gentle into the night, because he had at least tried.
"No," he said, moving away from the window. "I know what to do." He turned to Anthony at last. "But alone. I need to do it alone."
He did not say goodbye, and he did not look back, but he knew what he was doing. He knew that this was, in a way, a kind of suicide.
He only whispered it afterwards, when he was out in the dusk. "Goodbye." He meant it to Anthony, to his friends, to those who followed him. He meant it to the people in their locked houses, and those scurrying home in the streets, and people in farms and hillsides that he had never seen. He meant it to the world, to the Old Ones, to the Light.
"And, "Goodbye," he said, at the very end of it, pausing to look up at the sliver of the moon. "Goodbye, Merriman. I will see you soon, one way or another."
End of part three: chapter four