Chapter Thirteen

The next morning began with a sense of weightlessness. I was alone in the labyrinthine house and I knew that, for better or for worse, I would end the day knowing more than I had in the beginning. Outside my window, I spotted a golem patrolling the grounds. Whether keeping me safe or keeping me in, it came to the same thing. I would not be leaving without permission, not out the front door anyway.

On my way to the kitchen I avoided glancing at the featureless white door on the second landing. I steeled myself against the trill of fear in my belly as I passed it. I would soon be trying to use that door, and fear would send me into a nightmare. Timothy had answered a few questions about how it worked. The commands were entirely mental and they would only respond to sorcerers. Other than that, they took you wherever you intended to go as long as there was a door on the other end of your desire. The system was extensive, but most of its apertures were not strictly of this world, which was why you had to be careful. If you asked it to take you somewhere it wasn’t connected, it would open onto an approximation. It might not be exactly my nightmare on the other side, but someone else’s would be bad enough.

First things first though. I poured myself a bowl of Lucky Charms. They weren’t my favorite, but for some reason it was the only brand Timothy kept in stock. I made do.

In the fridge, I found less than a glass of Soma remaining. I couldn’t be sure what dabbing it on my eyes was supposed to accomplish, but I didn’t want to try it until I was actually in the garden. That had been the instruction, and even if it hadn’t been, I didn’t want to try using the door under any foreign influences. Soma could help me think clearly, but sometimes it made me feel like I was two people, one always watching the other.

I dampened a washcloth with the Soma, so it would be easy to take with me and use, but not tempting to drink. Soon after, I was staring at the door, white on white, gathering my courage like a queen ant summoning her children. Speck by speck my determination overmatched my anxiety until I felt the metal knob under my fingers cooler than it had any right to be.

I shivered, bringing to mind all the images I had retained from my single venture into the garden. It was not difficult. Those sights and smells had impressed themselves on me so strongly that they came flooding up in an untamable deluge, eager to return to the surface.

A single picture mastered them all, a nine-petalled flower with a core of light, the orange blossom floating without wind, landing with the grace of a dancer on my knee. Another memory surfaced. I had held that blossom once, not in the garden. Where, when? Only the light remained.

Ivory hinges opened soundlessly as a long, dim corridor was revealed. It was carpeted in thick red moss and culminated in two great slabs of iron joined seamlessly by a nine-pointed star.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Li had been honest with me. I could tell the doors to go wherever I wished within their own limits. Timothy seemed to have exaggerated the danger, perhaps to prevent me from doing what I now intended.

I wasn’t surprised when the door shut behind me of its own accord. These things had a pattern to follow, just like everything else. It was dramatically appropriate.

My first steps down the hall were bold, but my confidence quickly transformed into consternation. The gate! How did it open? There was no latch or lock or hinge or hap. There was only that smooth, dark star, three triangles all in one piece. What had Timothy done?

Unwillingly, my hand crept up to touch a fingertip against the heart of the star. Almost immediately I felt a prick like a bee sting, drawing my hand back at the sudden shock. A crimson bead welled up at the site of an invisible puncture.

In seconds, the dark star glowed like it was fresh from the forge. Heat rolled off it in weighty billows as a line of white radiance sliced down the center of the iron slabs.

This time, I didn’t close my eyes, but walked fearlessly through. The red moss path followed a cavalcade of alien beauty. The flowers were too large, the colors too numerous. The petals themselves were often banded with ribbons and curls of complementary hues, as if each had been detailed by a master painter of infinite patience. In size the blossoms ranged from dollop to dinner plate, supported by a framework of grounding green shrubbery. Each exuded its own distinct scent, adding to the incalculable mixture of perfume that blended in the air.

Only after I had wandered untold minutes along the red path did I remember the meadow beyond it--the rushing brook, and the forest at the center of the immense glass dome. The washcloth hung wet and limp in my right hand. I was there for a purpose, and I had nearly forgotten.

The primrose path was a trap, I realized, a diversion for those who weren’t invited to the inner garden and its secrets. The heady perfumes that hung so heavenly in the air seemed suddenly sinister.

I would have to be more careful.

Recalled to myself and my reason for being there, I squeezed a section of the Soma soaked cloth so that the liquid glistened on my fingers. Then, as instructed, I dabbed it on my eyelids. The washcloth fell from my fingers just as my eyes came open. The garden had burst afire.

I understood then what the book Wyrm had meant when its spidery script spoke of a “flame within a flame”. The garden, the whole world was aflame, a heatless, limitless bonfire. I was half-blinded, and it was a full minute before I could move and longer before my eyes adjusted enough for me to make sense of my surroundings.

The flame was everywhere, but it was not everything.

Beneath its layers, behind its tangled coils of color, was the same physical reality as before. It was auras that overlaid the garden, for all that lived had their own. I could have been standing inside the aurora borealis, or walking on top of a rainbow, but there was still solid ground for me to tread on.

If this was what they had kept hidden from me it certainly didn’t appear evil. It wasn’t proof of anything other than that I was ignorant of it.

Once I felt fully adjusted, I left the red moss way, ducking under the braches of what looked like Japanese cherry blossom trees bred willowy and wide-armed. The processional pulled at me as I left it, almost painful in its splendor. It was with much effort that I resisted the impulse to continue down the path and forget about my purpose, forget everything but beauty.

Rubbing my eyes, I stepped into the meadow, not seeing the brook; it was likely hidden among the many flowing, glowing bands of light. There might have been a whole river and I wouldn’t have noticed it. I could barely see the forest itself through the scintillate haze.

Before long I began to spy patterns in the bands and waves. Sometimes they looked like faces or silhouettes of men and women dancing on the crests and falls. The tall grasses waved without wind, and the auras flowed in inscrutable weaves above them. I almost didn’t feel the tugging on my shirt as I stood in the field, transfixed by all I saw.

There was a girl beside me, a cherubic child no higher than my waist, with red gold curls and huge grey eyes. She hovered on the edge of solidity, almost transparent. Having no aura herself, I imagined she was a spirit who belonged to the garden, but I was not startled to see her; a little girl in a radiant nightgown in the middle of the wizards’ garden.

She belonged here more than I did.

Obviously pleased to have gotten my attention, she put her small hand in mine. It was softer than fleece and I imagined if I squeezed, I would squeeze right through it. Her lips moved as if to form sound, but there was none. When she set off, tugging me forward.

The ground passed swiftly under our feet. The going was easy, as if we rode on the waves of visible energy that tumbled around us. I was vaguely disappointed as the trees loomed large and sturdy ahead of me, a cliff of finely laced vegetation. It was darker there, the colors dampened, and I remembered with trepidation the dark impressions that had assaulted me during my last passage through.

The trees swept aside. As mobile as massive insects, their roots churned the earth. If not for the spirit’s hand in mine I would not have entered so readily. Once inside, the wall of foliage cemented behind us, yet I felt none of my previous terror. The trees did not project the anger of before or the bitterness.

They seemed sad, as if mourning.

When the dark canopy gave way to a perpetual blue sky, the girl slipped away from my grip and went skipping to the great oak tree. The meadow had changed from when I saw it last, or I was seeing it more clearly. The orange blossoms lazily whirling in the air were not blossoms at all. They were faeries.

Red haired and pale and exquisitely beautiful, the men and women both could have stood comfortably in my hands. Their eyes were not eyes, but pinpricks of blazing light, pinholes to the sun. Wingless, yet weightless, they seemed to swim as much as fly. I could see them laughing but they, like the girl, were images without sound.

Waves of color and power, I sensed, converged on this meadow from every sector of the garden. Bands of light flowed in from every direction, some so small they were barely visible against the background, others taller than myself. But the oak was not the heart.

It was the mistletoe, bronzed by a feigned death, which blazed with the collective energies of the entire garden. Its vines embraced the colossal oak, pulsing with the light of a thousand lives, and I felt myself being drawn forward with every beat of that mystic heart.

The girl, the image of a girl, reached the foot of the oak and burst, erupting into a cascade of fluttering moths like a million fragments of the moon. The cloud spiraled up the bole of the oak, so pale that I quickly lost sight of them against the backdrop of crystal blue sky.

I think it must always be day here.

The blaze of the mistletoe changed, spreading outward, filling the meadow with a pink liquid light. I felt the barest of pressures, a butterfly’s wings tapping on the window to my mind. None of them could speak, these faeries, but they communicated well enough without it.

“Yes,” I thought. “It’s ok.” I felt the butterfly tapping on the window and then passing through as if there was no barrier at all. It wasn’t the words they understood, it was my acceptance. They could have entered at any time, even if I had resisted. Their hesitance had been a courtesy.

The meadow, the oak, the faeries and their brilliant eyes, all of it disappeared in an instant. Their memory became my memory. Their mind was my mind. I was theirs.

Blackness, blindness, and utter stillness, but there was sight in sightlessness. The trees spoke for eons before there was such a thing as words. Feelings, knowings, understandings, these are what the lights meant, what they really were. The color and the brilliance were only side effects, only shadows and glimmers of the original sensations.

There was a time without time, and then a change.

Hands grasping, tearing, planting. Makers hands and molders hands, they came. But these men were not the men of today. They were the first and truest of their kind. They called and worlds came and went.

The skies were ultraviolet.

Men gave faeries human shapes to please themselves, and we danced in our new forms with our new limbs, laughing with our new movements. The men laughed with us.

Sun death, sun birth. Day kills night a thousand, thousand times. Live and die, but trees remember. Trees wither as the flower blossoms fall, and as quickly, but the Fae have no need of death. We take it when it is given, but we never seek it.

Gates of Twilight larger than the greatest vale and smaller than the least of seeds, the Gates are always open, since the beginning. But the men’s laughter has grown sick. They have changed.

World shakes, sky quakes, violet shattered with stained lightning. The songs we sang in silence falter. The Gates are sick. The men’s sickness spreads. Sun death, sun birth. Trees fall like lonely titans, without the will to stand.

Hurting, hurting. We feel the world soul hurting. The sickness is its source, its life, its death. The Gates that are open must close. The power dies, the song dies. New trees grow in place of old.

Soulless, empty, neverness.

But we live on. We take death only when it is given.

Sun death, sun birth. We are sad but free, free. Men are still sick. But the power is gone. They speak no more, see no more, blinder than we ever were or ever will be.

Until the end.

Sun death, sun birth. Brother trees are cut but we cannot sing for them. They were the empty ones. When men come we move, dancing ahead. We can still laugh at clumsiness.

New men, old men but new, the burning ones come. Webs and weaves. Cold iron burns, cold iron binds, in the desert there are no brother trees. We cannot hide. They catch us one by one.

Pain, such pain--better that the world broke than this. Even then we would be free; we would be free until the end. Cold iron burns, cold iron binds. Bright ones, burning ones, they twist and shape like men of old, to please themselves.

We cannot run. We are not free.

Unborn. Unborn! Help us free! Cold iron burns, cold iron binds. Dark horn brings the song of breaking, song of healing.

Petals ground and burned, pounded into powder, eyes of light go dark.

Petals ground and burned, boiled and steamed. Blood, our blood, faerie blood to drink.

The Gates that were open are closed. No new power in the world soul. No new spirits born. No children. Faerie blood to drink, to drink the spirits dry.

Sick men, laughing men, like hungry wyrms are eating.

Unborn! Dark horn brings the song of breaking, song of healing. We cannot run. We are not free. Better that the world broke than this.

Help us.

They released me, and for a moment I thought there was nothing left, that all had been used up in so much knowing and feeling. When I finally found myself, I felt as if I had lived a hundred lives, all of them terrible. The colors and the magic were all gone. The flowers were only flowers again, the oak was just a tree, and the mistletoe was dead.

Worse than dead.

A slave.

I collapsed to my knees without the strength to be sick, without the strength to cry. Every spark and drop of my energy had been drained. I was as empty as the brother trees that had no souls.

I felt the Fae gathering around me, comforting. Comforting me! When they were the ones bound and slaughtered like cattle. They had shown me memories of being crushed and powdered. Faeries are resilient, they had kept sending, kept sharing their last thoughts with the others of their kind until the last grains of their consciousness had boiled away.

The Soma; how many of their spirits had I drunk? And they were comforting me?!

They called me Unborn. They asked me to save them. They said Dark Horn would set them free. As they said it, I had seen an image of Li holding a black blade. Of course they never actually said anything. Dark Horn and Unborn were the words my mind created to describe the feelings they impressed in me, their knowing.

Milton and Timothy were the Burning Ones.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

They pressed around me then, like an embrace. They understood. After all, they had seen every inch of my soul when they were inside me, or I them. Fae could not keep secrets. It wasn’t in their natures. Fae could not lie.

Sorcerers always lie.

Timothy, how could you be part of this? Were you out catching more Fae now? Replenishing your stock?

I would free them, whatever it took. Li would know the way. The Fae trusted him, knew him somehow. Whatever he was didn’t matter as long as he could help.

‎