The Hour Before Dawn
"We dealt the final blow to the Meteor Parasite, and that's when we knew that Raem would wake. We ran away from our chalice—but the last thing I remember is that just as I started to feel the effects of the miasma, something hard struck me on the head," Anaїs Nin told Dah Yis and Hana Kohl after giving them an account of the Tipa caravan's great battle with the Meteor Parasite. "I guess I got knocked out and tumbled down the slope of the mountain…"
"Never to regain consciousness," murmured Hana Kohl, "until someone wielded a life-giving magicite stone to bring you back. You were fortunate to have no new scars."
Anaїs Nin said nothing; merely nodded slightly in assent as she drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head in her arms. Dah Yis sat down beside her in one corner of the ferry deck. "We'll be on Leuda's shore by high noon tomorrow," he promised, "and many of the townsfolk will be glad to see you as well, for it's a rare thing indeed when we bring a newcomer to our celebration."
Yet these words were of no comfort to the brooding Anaїs Nin, who thought of the friends she had left behind. She thought of Tipa, too—how long would its crystal hold if none of her friends returned with the myrrh, even with the miasma now standing still? What if, even now, her family believed her to be dead? She had to send them a letter to tell them and all the other townsfolk to flee Tipa while they could, or she would never hear from them again. And even if Dah Yis and Hana Kohl understood this much about why she felt out of sorts now, there was something else, something Anaїs Nin had never told anyone, that burdened her aching heart. She dared not tell the caravanners from Leuda; she had said nothing of it to her family, and probably the only other in the motley Tipa caravan who understood Anaїs Nin's cause for grief was Khetala.
She had no idea why, after her caravan's visit to Conall Curach, she kept the bolt of blue silk among her belongings now. She certainly had no use for it after finding that a stone sahagin that she killed there, or perhaps the many that jumped out of puddles where a behemoth roamed, had dashed all her hopes into oblivion…
"So full of sadness, and yet quieter even than a Clavat," said Dah Yis when he saw Anaїs Nin staring blankly at the water, her silver eyes clouded with sorrow. "Why?"
"I haven't the heart to tell you," she whispered.
Nor had Anaїs Nin the heart to speak of what Mio, Queen of Memories, had spoken to her before her soul had returned to Mount Vellenge and back into her body with the Life spell that revived her. "The hour before dawn is always the coldest, Anaїs Nin—but if your heart is true, it will guide you to that which above all else now desires your finding it, and when it is found, you will never be parted again." Oh, indeed she felt cold, bereft of her friends and her home, never to see them again. She dared not confide the many causes of her distress to these strangers that bore her to a town where she had no friends.
But the hour before dawn? If the "dawn" meant the thinning-out of the miasma, it would still take several long years, maybe many long decades. Would she thusly live all the rest of her life in grief? And if it meant meeting her lost fellow caravanners again, it would never happen; Khetala's plan depended on her and everyone else dying in the first place. Her being found by Leuda's caravan and brought back was merely a twist of fate.
And that which above all else now desired her finding it? Anaїs Nin had no idea what it was that could possibly want to be found by her alone, much less where to look. For all she knew, what the Queen of Memories would have her search for might be all the way in Alfitaria, or possibly in Shella, so far from the shores of Leuda to which the ferry now bore her.
Meanwhile, by the time that the ferry was but a day from Leuda's shore, the caravan from Tipa set a course eastward across the plains of Rebena.
"So our attack on the source of the miasma was successful," summed up David as the caravanners waded through the marshy road between the labyrinth of Rebena Te Ra and the moldering ruins of Conall Curach. "The great streams of miasma are all standing still now—and if I'm not mistaken, the crystal auras around towns should widen, slowly but surely. But it'll take a very long time, and we'll probably all be dead anyway by the time people can travel freely again. 'The hour before dawn is always the coldest,' or so I heard a voice that said."
Khetala stepped up. "I ought to tell you all something, something that I do not know who else remembers," she began to explain. "There is a prophecy in which I have always believed, ever since the crystal spoke it to me one night before the caravan departed, seventeen years ago. It says, 'An age of darkness and shadows engulfs this world in which we live, never to end until four and others find the true heart to forget their eternal conflicts and march upon the edge of darkness as one, for only with this unity will there be revival.' Those four, even without their conscious will, would stir others to unite also." Khetala, they all knew, was possessed of a gift that was rare even among the Yukes: by placing her hand on a town's crystal, she could hear it speak and glean information from forgotten memories that had become drops of myrrh to purify the crystals when gathered. She claimed to have learned many forgotten prophecies this way, which influenced her decisions of whom she wanted to join her aboard the caravan.
"Four and others…forget their eternal conflicts…" David repeated. "Maybe you're right, Khetala, maybe it did mean us all along, even though my sister Lydia and I are two Clavats instead of one, if the 'four' meant one person of every tribe. I mean, Tipa is the only town that sends a caravan of mixed-up…well, everyone. At least one of us had to know something nobody else did…"
"You're quite right on that score, David," answered Khetala serenely. "Of all the cities and villages in this world, Tipa is the town that has the greatest respect for the differences of race. I knew that the caravan from Tipa would be the one to fulfill the prophecy of the revival. It was for that reason that I joined the caravan—I swore that I would not leave the caravan until I had had the Yukes' hand in the revival of which the prophecy spoke."
"And to do that you needed to lead a motley caravan to Mount Vellenge," assessed Lydia. "You said that destroying the source of the miasma would cost all of us our lives—but thanks to Dimo Nor, it didn't end that way…"
She broke off, looking somehow confused and distressed—and then, without any warning save that wild look of confusion, Lydia fell to her knees and broke down crying. "Lydia!" David blurted out his sister's name in alarm at her sudden fit of distress. "Lydia, what's wrong?" But Lydia could not answer for sobbing, and the only clues anyone had to the direction of the distressing thoughts that provoked the fit of crying were the moments when the young Clavat woman would raise her tear-flooded brown eyes to the road that led to Conall Curach. "You're thinking of Anaїs Nin," said David at last, kneeling down beside Lydia and putting an arm around her shoulders. "I understand—you loved her like a sister. You and me both."
"And she may yet be alive," added Dimo Nor. "Remember what Khetala said? The miasma streams have no elements now that we cut it off at the source—some other curious caravanners could've crossed the stream leading there, found her, and taken her with them once they revived her. If that's what happened, my guess would be that it was Leuda's caravan…"
Lydia only sobbed harder. Here her caravan was after the assault on the Meteor Parasite—she and all her fellow caravanners were even back from a death that was necessary to save their souls from the memory-eater Raem…all except for the Selkie they all held dear. Was it only in death that her poor friend was able to find peace? Or if Khetala was right and Anaїs Nin had been found…would she have wanted to be brought back alone and bereft of all those she ever loved?
"The hour before dawn is always the coldest, Lydia," assured Khetala, "but the dawn will rise, no matter what else it brings, the dawn will rise."
A/N: So pass the bleakest days for the Tipa caravan, especially Anais Nin, who has become separated from her dear friends and (as far as she can tell) will never see them, or her home, again. But it may turn out that not all is lost--maybe even that a hope once buried is now unearthed. Only time will tell what lies ahead.