Disclaimer: I don't own Esher. I just like to poke him with sticks every now and again. (And, okay, I don't own anybody or anything else, either; CyanWorlds does.)

Author's Note: This fic is mildly AU in the sense that it's a series of fic snippets set in a partially rewritten Myst V 'verse, done entirely to make Esher a more sympathetic, three-dimensional character. I really feel he got the short end of the stick in EoA (there's numerous hints about his character in the somewhat messy plot, but the game never does anything with them), and if I had all the time and energy in the world I would sit down and completely rewrite the game's story to give him a second chance. As it is, these small snippets will have to suffice. However, I believe that most of what's written is possible in the current canon, with the exception of the second to last scene.

Oh, and I apologize in advance for the Yeesha/Esher subtext. I can't seem to make it go away.

"Feel a shadow passing over me
And I could stay forevermore
Like a wave, I'm breaking far at sea
And there's no one to hear the roar.
And the days are drifting into seasons,
They're the hardest I have known.
A million spaces in the earth to fill but
There's no going home."
-- Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts, "Exile"

No Going Home

Like a sign from the Maker himself, the book had tumbled from the shelf and landed at his feet, spine upward. The spine crackled as he picked it up, mimicking the cracks rending the cavern floor, the walls.

There was something oddly comforting about holding this particular book in his hands. It was ancient, one of the books carried over from Garternay, and it spoke more of happier times than it did of the world whose name--Noloben--had been etched so painstakingly into its cover.

In happier times, Esher the archivist would never have thought to touch the book, let alone use it. It was not his place. But now...now the cavern was shaking as if in her death throes, and the great fans belched plague and poison. The city was dying. D'ni was dying. And this Linking Book, of all the many hundreds on the shelf, had come to him: an escape.

Esher turned to the first page just as another quake rocked the district. Someone nearby cried out in fear and pain; he placed his hand on the image--

The beach was empty. Lonely. Beautiful.

Noloben.

I have been on this Age for two weeks now. No other survivors have since arrived, and there is no sign of rescue. Still--there are so many Ages to search. I must have patience.

The way home to D'ni is shut; in my haste I did not think to bring... I am trapped.

It rains infrequently here. I have devised a crude water collection system which should be sufficient until rescue arrives. Food--there are fish, and possibly other game atop the plateau, although I have not yet scaled the cliff to see. The beach and the tunnel system have sufficed for now. I fear wandering too far, for what if rescue arrived while I was absent?

There is something else, however...some phantom that chases my dreams at night. I hear things in the deepest dark, see flickers of shadows in the moonlight. I have tried to dismiss it as nightmarish fantasy, but--this morning I found footprints by the water's edge that were not my own. They were too alien, too inhuman...

I am not alone.

When he found the woman, Esher didn't know what to think. She was sprawled like a dead fish on the beach, not far from the peculiar bubble formation that had appeared overnight. Esher had seen the moving, shining bubble from his own beach and taken the boat to investigate--it was morning; the Bahro would be sleeping and not notice his intrusion. He hadn't expected to find the woman.

She lay facedown in the sand, breathing only shallowly and bleeding from a wound in her side. Her garb was utterly foreign, and from her long auburn hair and tan skin, he hardly thought she was D'ni.

Still--if she didn't bleed out, the Bahro would find her. The compassion that had laid dormant in him for almost two centuries stirred and woke. Promising himself to come back and investigate the bubble later, Esher scooped the woman up from the sand and carried her back to the boat. She felt thin and frail, like an old woman, even though her face was young.

For days, she fever-dreamed. He kept vigil as she tossed and turned in his bed, changed her bandages when she tore the wound open again, and gave up hope of rationing the rainwater in order to keep her fever down.

Sometimes she talked in her sleep. Sometimes she spoke in D'ni--mostly nonsense, but it both startled him and caused him to hang onto her every feverish word. Hearing the language spoken again outside his own voice filled him with a peculiar, powerful longing. If he could have willed her fever to break, he would have.

Mostly, however, she spoke in unfamiliar tongues that he had no hope of deciphering. And she would cry out, in the worst of the dreaming, for someone named Calam (it was a D'ni name, but no one he had known). Usually the name was followed by words such as "dead" or "murder."

She frightened him.

"D'ni is..." Yeesha paused, swallowing a spoonful of stew before continuing. "The city is much changed."

"But there were survivors," Esher prompted eagerly.

She nodded. "Yes. But they've all gone now."

"Gone?"

"The city is dead, Esher. Except..." She turned away, looking out to the ocean--and to the other island, where the bubble twisted and moved and Bahro skittered around the plateau in the late evening sunlight, hunting for food. She had a preoccupation with the Bahro that Esher could never understand. More than once she had asked to take the boat and visit their settlement. Naturally, he refused; she had yet to regain her strength, and he feared losing the only intelligent company he'd had in centuries.

"Are you familiar with the prophecies of the Watcher?" she asked, turning back towards him. A faint, warm breeze stirred her auburn hair and, for a moment, obscured the strange tattoo that circled her right eye. "About the Grower?"

He chucked. "Everyone in the city knew about those, little bird. My mother used to tell them to my little sister as bedtime stories." He stared intently at the dirt floor. Suddenly, he'd lost his appetite.

"They're true," Yeesha said softly. The fading sunlight framed her face and gave her an almost ethereal glow. "I thought Calam might have been--" She broke off. Out of habit, he took her hand and squeezed it gently. One of the first stories she'd told him had been of Calam, the Master Writer, and how one of the Bahro had murdered him (that the creatures were somehow skulking about the city, his city, both frightened and disgusted him). That she didn't seem to hate the Bahro for what they'd done was what he couldn't understand.

"It was his death that shook me awake," she continued. He refrained from pointing out that his death had nearly been hers as well, considering the condition in which he'd found her. "And I tried to make the journey; you know, I've told you."

Esher nodded. "Half-dead, and still you stumbled blindly through the Ages. You're either very determined or very stupid."

She laughed--she had a beautiful richness to her voice. "Both, I think. And in the end I still threw away the only chance I had." After a pause, she locked eyes with him. "We did not meet by chance, Esher. The power of the Tablet brought me here because it knew--it will respond to you.

"As soon as my strength returns and I am ready, I want you to come back to the city with me."

He stared for a moment, utterly baffled--and scarce believing what she'd just said. "To D'ni...?"

"Oh--oh."

Esher's jaw worked silently, mouth snapping open and closed and open again, as he looked out into the cavern.

Most of the algae in the lake was dead, shrouding the city in perpetual gloom, for which he was oddly grateful. It hid most of the ruin, especially in the upper districts. But even still--all the buildings, the streets he knew from his childhood and beyond, they were either dust or crumbling into dust as he watched. There were no lights, no signs of life. Not even the scraping of a Bahro claw on stone. The air was utterly still, dead and suffocating. Nothing breathed. The tear in the cavern wall from which the poison gas had spewed was still there, looming like a gaping maw poised to swallow the city whole. Maybe it would be better if it did.

Two hundred years he had dreamed of seeing D'ni again, and this--this was what he was given?

He hadn't realized he'd sunk to his knees and begun to weep until Yeesha appeared, standing over him. She had left him at the top of the Great Shaft several days ago, after showing him the Tablet and its Keep, saying he needed to make this journey alone but promising to stay nearby. He had never caught so much as a glimpse of her--until now.

She knelt down in the dust beside him, face drawn taut and unsmiling. After a moment of hesitation, she drew him into her arms and held him there. "I'm sorry," she whispered, gently resting her chin on his head as she looked out at the cavern. "I'm sorry."

It had been in Todelmer that the thought had first struck him. Time had whirled and shifted around him, and he thought--my god; the power these creatures have...

He tested them. His two hundred years in Noloben had not been wasted, and he had picked up some of the creatures' elementary rock-scratchings. Now he drew them onto the malleable surface of the slates, delighting as he brought forth rain, sun, wind, snow. Entire mountains rose and fell at his command.

That the Bahro, those inhuman, predatory animals, could be possessed of such power amazed him. "Truly, it is an unjust universe," he breathed, looking on the ruins of the arena at Laki'ahn and remembering.

But--the thought that had struck him in Todelmer stayed with him, haunting his dreams and his nightmares until he had to give into it. Whoever controlled the Tablet controlled power unparalleled, and he had seen the Bahro do such amazing things at his behest...

"Perhaps," he whispered to the empty and crumbling arena seats, "perhaps you are not so dead after all."

When the Keep was finally opened, Yeesha stood beside it and spoke of freeing the Bahro (she called them "the Least," a title he found both ironic and fitting), of making right a wrong their people had committed long, long ago. Esher stood beside her and reached for the Tablet, thinking of making right so many, many wrongs.

"I thought you of all people would understand; you have lived with the Least for so long that you should know--"

"Yeesha...I thought only of bringing D'ni back to life! Is that not the role of the Grower? I know you wish to use--"

"Stop it! Go back to Noloben, Esher. Pray we do not cross paths again...you know I do not suffer fools."

He left D'ni only because he could not stand to see the ruins, nor watch Yeesha move through them like a mad queen, deposed years ago but still clinging to her crown.

He returned to Noloben only because the Bahro were there, and while the slates no longer yielded to his touch, he still had hope of coaxing out some small fraction of the creatures' power.

With spears and swords taken from Laki'ahn, and with a handful of snakes taken from the beach, he returned. "Perhaps a laboratory," he said once the task was done, looking around at the rock's empty inside. It stank of Bahro, but considering the work he needed to do, there was no helping that.

It took months to scavenge the proper equipment from D'ni, risking several confrontations with Yeesha (most of which ended with her hurling curses and any blunt, heavy object within reach at his head), but the final results made him proud. His mother's brother had been a celebrated analyst in his time, and Esher was careful to mimic the layout of his old laboratory as best he could.

Designed for maximum efficiency, maximum organization. "Maximum containment."

He started with the snakes, drawing the venom from their fangs--and upon finding it paralyzed but did not kill the Bahro, coating the tips of darts with it and using it to bring in the specimens he needed.

For years, he poked and prodded the Bahro. He peeled off their flesh, cracked open their bones, threatened them with snakes until they would respond to basic commands. In the end he gleaned only a basic understanding of how the creatures worked and their anatomy--and for himself, the ability to link without the trappings of a book or a sphere.

If he had earned the hatred of the Bahro and the woman who would style herself their master (even if she deluded herself with loftier, unachievable goals), he considered it a small price to pay.

From his perch near the top of the Keep stairs, he watched as Yeesha gave yet another cryptic speech to yet another baffled foreigner, another in a long string of her pawns--all of which had failed her.

"Begin."

A wave of her hand, and the stranger was gone. She immediately glanced up at Esher's hiding place with an arch of her thin brow. Time had not treated her well lately--then again, he supposed he could say the same about himself. "You," she muttered, turning away. "I thought you were warned never to return."

Esher stepped from the shadows with his best disarming smile. "I only wanted to see the latest pawn you've brought us. This one shows quite a bit of promise, don't you think?"

Yeesha whirled back around to face him so quickly a Bahro, watching their confrontation from a corner, screeched and linked away, startled. "Keep away!" She made as if to advance on him, but then her eyes fell on the bit of skincloth draped over his shoulder and she recoiled in disgust. "You have no right to meddle--"

"My dear, you're the one who sends them tramping through my Age--"

"--this journey is meant to be taken alone, without interference. The last three failed because of you."

He laughed. A tremor shook the earth, sending dust raining down on their heads and reminding both of them of the one thing they could agree on: if this foreigner failed, there would not be another.

"I only want to clear the air," he said into the silence that followed. "Tell them the truths you've left out, the things you won't say."

"How the Bahro are evil and deserve to be kept under your iron-fisted rule?" she asked. Despite it all, he still had to admire her quick, caustic tongue.

And despite knowing he was walking on very thin, unstable ground, he continued prodding her. "Will you be telling this one who murdered your friend Calam, then?"

In a fraction of a second, Yeesha had crossed the empty space between them and delivered a stinging slap to his face. "Get out of my sight," she growled, her lately worn and weather-beaten face practically aglow with fury.

Esher offered her a bow, paying no heed to the reddening mark on his cheek. "I think I shall," he said cheerfully. He slid his goggles on with a smile. "I have an appointment to keep."

He had prepared a speech of his own, after all, and he fully intended to give it.

"You have seen Yeesha. She was, I'm sure, not very hospitable..."

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten..."

Esher's heart sank further upon hearing Yeesha's voice. Bad enough that the creatures no longer feared him, had dared to lay their wretched claws on him, but they had brought him to her? "Oh, you idiot," he spat, half to himself and half to the still somewhat baffled-looking foreigner. "Moronic lump of--"

"Silence!" Esher went utterly still at Yeesha's shout. So did everyone else in attendance, including the Bahro holding him by his shoulders. "The Least have been made into the Great, Esher. They will not answer to you. This one--" with a vague motion towards the stranger-- "did what you could not."

Esher turned, wild-eyed, first to the stranger and then back towards Yeesha. "And the cavern?" he asked, tentatively at first, but with his voice gaining strength as he continued, "Now that you've let these...demons loose, how can D'ni possibly be restored? You call yourself the Grower; I would have--D'ni needed me!"

For the first time in many long years, Yeesha smiled at him. But it was not the sweet, half-cryptic smile he remembered. Instead, it was something more vindictive and cruel. Stepping forward, that smile never faltering, she seized the Bahro skincloth on his shoulder and ripped it off. "D'ni never needed you," she said coolly, and tossed it over the side of the cliff without ceremony.

Esher watched it drop, fluttering in the wind, until it was out of sight. Then his eyes focused on the settlement in the distance; the impossibly tall, gleaming spire and the hints of architecture that were both foreign and eerily familiar. "No...no, no!" His voice broke and was lost to the wind.

Then, turning back to Yeesha, "You knew?" She nodded, and he tried to lunge at her--only to be forcibly restrained by Bahro, their claws digging deep into his shoulders. "Why didn't you--" He struggled to break free again, with an equal amount of success as the last time. "My family could still be alive; I could have been reunited with them years ago, but you..."

He trailed off into defeated silence, shoulders slumping. Yeesha ignored him for the time being and stepped forward to address the Bahro. "This one was never your master," she said, inclining her head to each of the creatures in turn. "And I know he has done unspeakable things to you."

Esher knew she was glaring down at him just from the tone in her voice, but he refused to meet her eyes. Instead, he stared intently at the patterns carved into the stone at their feet. They were familiar, and they comforted him.

"I want nothing more to do with him, and am unworthy to give you counsel any longer. Do with him as you see fit."

One of the Bahro chirped quietly, as if in assent, and hauled him to his feet before linking away. For his part, Esher went calmly, resigned to his fate as Releeshahn faded away.

They say there is a man in the darkest depths of the ancestors' city, old and broken, toiling under the direction of the Bahro. He walks the shattered streets like a wraith, never weeping, though his eyes are haunted and sad. And though those few who have seen him say he looks as if he has so many stories to tell, he never speaks.

Rumor has it that the Bahro cut out his tongue.

They say he was once a proud man, and that he sought to subjugate the Bahro under his command and paid the resulting price. And as mothers tuck their children into bed at night, they warn them of becoming too proud, too greedy--for those who reach too far will become like ghosts, become like the man in the city.

And they say that only the Grower knows who he is, and if you ask her, she will merely smile and say, "Marvel at the mercy of those made Great."