That came to silence
Such beautiful lightning.”
~Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon
Daytripper
The Room
The room was not really a room, but a cavernous hall of pillars and shadows. The ceiling was lost to darkness, the floor, cloaked in mist. It was a place that resonated with the weight of countless ages, yet remained untouched by dust and decay. It was a place where time did not tread.
Between the pillars, shafts of pale light filtered down from the unseen ceiling, their sources as unknowable and distant as stars. There, in the room that was not really a room, was a space where the pillars, shadows and light all conspired to make a wide circle around a beam of light broader and brighter than any that surrounded it. At the edge of the circle, two brothers stood waiting.
They shared almost nothing in the way of resemblance. One had the look of a Tergish nomad. He was a fox-faced man with red-brown skin and scruffy black hair on his head and chin, gracile, but muscular. He was garbed in a cordovan overcoat with elaborate silver stitching along the cuffs and seams. Underneath it, he wore a tunic shirt of gray silk and black breeches, both of which had seen better days. He seemed an ordinary man in all respects, but for his ears, which had a distinctly tapered shape and his eyes, which were pitch black, showing only the barest traces of white near their corners.
The other bore likeness to a man only by virtue of the fact that he stood upon two legs and had a single head upon his shoulders. He had only one eye—the hollow for the other sealed shut with scar tissue—and it glowed bright red like a hot coal. He stood a full foot taller than his brother, but was half as wide, his skin as white as bleached bone. His fingers were twice as long as that of any man’s, as were his ears, jutting toward the back of his skull like knife blades.
The only similarity the two shared was their hair, ink-black and unruly, though the shorter’s was just long enough to cover his ears while the taller’s draped so long it seemed to become a part of the ragged black shroud he wore. They did not speak or spare each other so much as a glance, the shorter consumed with staring at the floor while the taller stared at nothing. Neither looked happy. Every so often, the shorter would lift his gaze to stare at the darkness overhead, sigh, and then return to studying the floor.
An untold length of time passed this way until the shorter brother threw his hands up in a gesture of contempt and stalked off. The taller made no attempt to stop him. Moments later, the shorter reappeared, approaching the circle from the opposite side. He drew to a halt and uttered a loud curse, breaking the silence.
“You’re being foolish,” the taller spoke at last, his voice a rasping cacophony of varying pitches, like crows trained to speak in unison. “You know there is no path from here unless she wills it.”
“I’m being foolish?” he returned, glaring at the other for the first time. His voice was spare by comparison, registering at one low pitch and laced with a faint Tergish brogue. “And whose foolishness was it that brought us here?”
“A fool acts without consideration of the consequences,” the other said calmly. “I have done no such thing.”
“Then you’re an even bigger fool for it!” the shorter hissed. “You could’ve left the Eye unblooded! You could’ve kept your oath—”
“She would have died, you know,” the taller interrupted. “Soldiers had her cornered when I came upon her. They were going to cut her head off. The Hiimori can recover from a great many things, but beheading is not one of them. Trust me in this.”
The shorter brother’s face turned stony, betraying nothing. “I suppose you’re going to tell me next that’s why you did it. That you broke your oath just to spare Rina’s life and then, what?” He gave a sharp, humorless laugh. “Just decided to keep going?”
“No. But that is the truth of it, regardless.” Clasping his hands behind his back, the taller walked over and stooped to stare the other directly in the eye. “Do you wish I had not broken with the Balance now?”
The shorter returned the stare unflinchingly. “You know what I wish? I wish to all the gods that bastard Reinhardt would’ve kept his end of the bargain and killed you from the outset. That’s what I wish.”
“Ah.” The taller’s scarred face broke into a distorted smile as he straightened. “Then we wish for the same thing.”
The other opened his mouth to reply when a faint rushing sound, like the whisper of wind passing through trees, made him fall silent. The brothers faced the center of the circle, their argument forgotten. The rushing sound grew louder and louder until it filled the endless hall and vast, billowing clouds came pouring out of the shadows.
Moving with uncanny, sinuous speed, the clouds converged in a tight spiral over the circle, their true nature revealed as they passed into light. They were butterflies. Thousands upon thousands of velvet wings danced in a whirlwind around the center of the circle, filling the air with dazzling, undulating color.
In the midst of the whirlwind, a face emerged, shaped by the color and movement of the butterflies. Wings fanned and fluttered in the semblance of eyes, nose and mouth so perfectly that before long, it was impossible to distinguish anything but a woman’s face, floating disembodied within the circle of pillars and light.
The taller inclined his head. “My queen.”
The shorter said nothing, refusing to acknowledge the floating face.
Come forward. Her voice was in everything; the rustle of butterfly wings, the cold silence of the stone pillars, the dry, lonely whistle of air. It surrounded them, filling their minds. Her mouth never moved.
The brothers walked into the circle. The face vanished, the swarm of butterflies breaking apart to engulf them.
Children, they whispered.
The butterflies retreated to the center of the circle, resolving into an elegant figure garbed in a trailing gown of butterflies. Her eyes—black ovals on the wings of a giant blue butterfly poised over the pale assemblage of her face—appeared thoughtful.
Seru. There was a sudden gust of wind, like a sigh. The queen regarded the shorter of the two with a tilted, unblinking gaze as she drifted closer. Still alive.
“So I am,” he replied, matter of fact. “I take it you still wish I was not.”
She came to a halt directly before him, her face inches from his. We seek only for what is best for the Balance. Tell us, has your hatred for us abated?
He stared at her coolly. “And if it hasn’t?”
All at once, the upper half of her body shattered into thousands upon thousands of tiny winged creatures. They latched onto him, arresting him in an unbreakable grip. Her head continued to float disembodied, her expression unchanged. Your forgiveness does not concern us. Your involvement in this matter does. It will complicate the Speakers’ judgment, as you will share in the fate cast for your brother. We ask of you no thing, child, but the truth. Do you still wish to see the Unseelie suffer for the life of your sire?
Seru shut his eyes, shuddering at the prickle of a million insect legs. His hands, locked at his sides, tightened into fists. “No,” he answered through clenched teeth.
We hope you speak truly. We will never know your heart. The butterflies assembled back into her upper torso as the Unseelie queen drifted away from him.
Her regard shifted to the taller of the two, her visage transfigured by sorrow. Imago. She reached out, brushing feather-light fingertips along the webwork of scars that seamed the right half of his face.
Our firstborn. They loved you best of all our children. Do you remember? When the world was young, mankind called you a lord among gods. They built temples for you, paid you tribute. Even after they ceased to call us gods, they still called for you.
“They did not love me,” he replied stiffly. “They loved the things they thought I could give them.”
Yet, you continued to answer them, long after war began and the Veil fell, in the face of all better judgment. After we told you it was folly to do so, after we showed you what a folly it was. She stared at him gravely. You cannot kill them because they love you no longer.
A howling wind ripped through the hall, throwing Seru to the floor and scattering butterflies in every direction. Only Imago remained as he was, untouched by the gale.
“I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THEIR LOVE!” he thundered above its roar, his single eye blazing like the heart of a bonfire. “I broke with the Balance because this is the only way to save it! If one of us—just one—had sacrificed their oath to the Balance and stamped out this zealotry when it first began to spread, the world would not be as it is now, with half the land already laid to waste and still more dying! We have been complacent for too long!”
The butterflies converged into a disembodied face as the wind ebbed, the eyes cold, vacant spaces, the mouth a grim slash. You forget yourself, child. One did sacrifice their oath. The Shaper of the South once believed as you do and it was his folly that laid waste to the southlands.
“It was his death that laid waste to the southlands! The Shaper of the West did not break her oath to the Balance—”
But of course she did, the queen interrupted, silencing him. She broke it the moment she involved herself in your shameful debacle, the moment you became more important than the Balance. Did you think we did not free her because we could not? We did not free her because she was already lost to us.
“Is that why I was left to suffer?” he demanded. “Because of my devotion to her, the Speakers judged my purpose lost?”
No, child. Your devotion to the Shaper of the West made your dedication to the Balance stronger, not weaker. You were lost to us when you entrusted your Name to one unworthy of knowing it. Her gaze drifted to Seru.
Imago bowed his head and the wind died. “Be that as it may, it does not make me wrong about this,” he insisted in a subdued voice. “The Order must be stopped.”
It will never be allowed. The eradication of so many will only upset the Balance further. We must maintain the Balance.
“The Balance will collapse if we do nothing!” he flared. “You know it as well as I do! Something must be done! They cannot be allowed to continue on this way!”
For half a heartbeat, uncertainty rendered the floating face into a fluttering chaos of color before regaining cohesion. We … agree. Something must be done. The Shaper of the East has become increasingly frail since the fall of her sister. If nothing is done, we fear she may soon succumb to dormancy like the Seelie queen or be devoured herself.
Distress twisted Imago’s scarred countenance. He looked at the queen imploringly. “You still know my heart. Tell them. Make them see!”
The face appeared to nod. It is for this reason we will cast our judgment in your favor. But our judgment alone cannot spare you if the rest of the Speakers do not believe you can serve this purpose. You have already given them great reason to doubt. Much, we fear, depends on her.
The queen’s gaze shifted to something beyond the circle of pillars. The brothers turned, following the direction of her stare. Their eyes widened as they came to rest squarely on—
Aod bolted upright in bed.
Gasping, she stared around her room, taking comfort in the shuttered window by her narrow cot, the wooden trunk in the corner, her grandmother’s simple loom propped against the wall. The familiar contours of her surroundings calmed her racing heart, allowing her to think.
Strange dream, she mused, settling back into the soft felted quilt that had been her mother’s. For as long as she could remember, her dreams had always been vivid, though it had not been until the advent of her fourteenth winter that they had taken on a frightening, violent edge. She was approaching her fifteenth now. This one, though …
So vivid. She raked her fingers through her sleep-damp hair, trying to process it all.
It made the here and now seem entirely unreal. The dream had been so layered, so detailed with people she had never seen before and places she had never been that a lifetime seemed to have passed within the course of one night.
She had dreamt of fleeing White Creek and embarking on a journey to the stronghold of the Order, the Eye of Tergel. Not one among her companions had been mortal. There had been a Hiimori woman, Ka-Rina, who could take the shape of any creature she saw. Then there was the Stormbringer, an Unseel spirit whose true name was a secret that dwelled behind her every thought. Imago. There had also been a changeling, Seru. Or had his name been Rakas?
Aod rolled over, trying to fall back asleep, but the last thing she remembered before waking—the cavernous hall of shadows and pillars, the woman made of butterflies—nagged at her, keeping her awake.
Had the brothers been allies in her dream, or enemies? The memory of it was all tangled in her head, like a snarl of brightly colored yarn. All she knew for certain was that it was the oddest dream she had ever—
Aod stiffened, her eyes bulging. There, standing by the door, was a little man—no taller than her waist—made of sticks and leaves, a riot of crabgrass growing from the top of his head in place of hair.
“Nanae, Nanae!” she screamed, backing into the far corner of her bed.
“We are sorry,” the spirit chirred in a halting, insectile voice. “But we are not your grandmother. This room is not what it appears. We are not in your house. Try to remember, if you can.”
“You.” Aod pointed a finger at him, thunderstruck. “Y-you can’t be real. You were in my—” She clapped a hand over her mouth as a most disturbing possibility occurred to her. She slumped against the wall. “Oh, gods … it's not a dream, is it?” Her focus returned to the man made of sticks, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Unless …”
The little spirit cocked his head to one side before leaping across the room. Aod suppressed the urge to screech as he landed on the end of her cot and reached out to rest a hand on top of her naked foot. She stared at it wordlessly. It looked more like a leafless bramble than a hand.
“Does this feel like a dream?” he inquired.
It did not. She could feel the scrape of his thorny fingers, just as she could feel the softness of the quilt beneath her and the subtle give of the straw-stuffed tick beneath that. But could this all truly be real, her dream that was not a dream, this room that was not her room, this man who was not a man?
She pulled her foot out from under his hand, tucking it beneath her. Shutting her eyes, she pressed the side of her face against the wall of her room, trying to reaffirm herself of its solidity. If the wall was real, then the room was real—
“Sprigg expected more from Dalei’s daughter,” the spirit remarked, somewhat dolefully.
Aod opened her eyes at the mention of her mother. “Sprigg … that’s you?” The name, like the sound of his voice, evoked memories, faded and dim. Memories from earliest childhood, of her mother standing in the sun-dappled orchard outside their house in White Creek, talking to someone she could hear, but could not quite make out. A diminutive, twiggy figure perched on the branch of a tree.
He nodded. “That is what Dalei called us. She was the first to give us a new name in many, many ages. The others just called us spriggan, for that is how our kind were called in the old tongue of your people.”
Aod sat quietly for a moment, absorbing Sprigg’s words. His way of speaking made understanding him something of an effort. He regarded her placidly, his eyes like embers smoldering in the bark of his face. Their color reminded her of Imago’s after he had broken with the Balance.
“You’re a fiend,” the girl said and Sprigg nodded a second time.
Aod was unsure of how to react to his admission. If spirits could be said to have laws, then fiends were outside those laws, adhering to no rule but their own. Of course, the same could be said of Eshu’s court, yet for all their anarchy, those spirits remained integral to the Balance.
Fiends on the other hand, were spirits that had abandoned the Balance to pursue their own interests; interests that were notoriously capricious and cruel. Even Imago, whose reasons spawned from an essentially noble purpose, had committed unmitigated slaughter after turning fiendish, as if regaining his autonomy had unleashed some latent reserve of malice within him. But, for the moment, Sprigg did not seem bent on viciousness or cruelty.
“My mother used to speak with you in the orchard,” she remarked, astounded that there had been a time when that had seemed perfectly reasonable to her. Too young to know any better.
“Sometimes she would speak to us through the hearth,” Sprigg replied. “Do you remember that? She would speak to Sprigg and Lady Fire both, especially in the winter, when it was cold. Those were the times we liked best. Dalei was a good friend to us.”
At the mention of Lady Fire, Aod reached up to clasp her pendant. It was a gift her mother had given her shortly before being seized by the High Guard; a teardrop of amber Aod had worn without fail for close to ten turns. Only recently had she found out it had been imbued with Lady Fire’s essence, encapsulating the last living fragment of the spirit. Yet as she ran her hands along her neck, seeking the leather cord from which it hung, her fingertips touched nothing but the surface of her skin.
Her pulse quickened as she remembered she had secreted the pendant inside her shoe while she had been imprisoned inside the Eye. But she was no longer wearing her shoes. Pressing her hand to the center of her breast, she groped for the book she had stashed in the bodice of her gown—a record she had kept while on the road to Tergel that was part herbal, part journal—and discovered it too was gone. It was then, as she began to wonder what else was missing, she recalled the iron sword adorned with Imago’s lost eye. Panic raced up her spine.
“Where are all my things?” she asked.
“You are here by the command of the Unseelie court,” Sprigg replied. “Your belongings will remain in their possession until the tribunal of Speakers has made its judgment.”
Aod’s eyebrows drew together in alarm. “Tribunal? What tribunal? What is this place?” She looked around again, hunting for some telling mark that would distinguish this place from the home she knew. She found none. It was just as she remembered it, down to the thin clapboard walls and the dusty grime that clung to the corners of the windows. “If this isn’t my room, then where are we?”
“The Palace of Labrys, a nexus between realms. The courts gather here to confer when the Speakers are summoned to make a judgment. The Speakers have been summoned to judge you, the Stormbringer, and the Lightless One for the havoc wreaked upon the mortal realm.”
A large knot began to form in the pit of Aod’s stomach. She remembered the devastation Imago had wrought; the dozens he had slaughtered in the Eye before turning his wrath on the structure itself and the city surrounding it. There was one thing she did not recall. “Lightless One?” It was not a name she had heard before.
“That abomination begat by the Unseel queen,” Sprigg replied.
He was speaking of the changeling, she realized; the one she had come to know as Rakas, though Imago had always persisted in calling him Seru. She tilted her head, her eyebrows contracting. “Why do you call him that?”
“Because that one casts no light,” he said in a way that implied this was both appalling and completely obvious, as though he was referring to someone born with no face.
She had heard Imago speak before of a light perceptible to spirits and those especially sensitive to the Other. She had yet to see it. “Do I cast light?” she asked, glancing down at herself.
“Of course. All living things are imbued with Other. Except for that one. And the soul-eaters.” The leafy little branches that jutted from the spriggan’s shoulders rustled with a shudder of disgust.
Aod accepted this without further remark, more concerned with piecing together her scattered recollection than Sprigg’s opinion of Rakas. So many things remained a mystery to her. The last thing she clearly remembered was standing in a snowy field outside Tergel, watching Imago rain lightning down upon the city from afar.
The Hiimori had been there, as had the changeling. She remembered Ka-Rina hunched over Rakas, lying in the snow. She recalled the dread she had felt for the changeling, who had seemed all but dead. After that, her memory became hazy and strange, like an object underwater, and what she could recall made no linear sense.
How had they gotten from that field outside Tergel into the heart of the Otherworld? How much damage had Imago wrought before the Unseelie had managed to stop him? How had they stopped him?
The endless hall of pillars and shadows surfaced in her mind once more, drawing her back to that murky, disjointed memory. Had she really met with the Unseel queen? And if she had, how had she gone from there to waking up here, in this room?
She suspected the bond linking her soul to Imago’s was to blame, but that only made the knot in her stomach tighten. It scared her to think she could no longer tell the difference between her own memories and the ones she gleaned from him. How long would it be before she forgot there was a difference?
“What became of Ka-Rina?” she asked, keeping her fears to herself. “Is she here? Are these Speakers going to judge her too?”
Sprigg shook his head. “She does not possess the Elder’s true Name. The Unseelie would not have brought her here at all, but she was adamant about being present during the tribunal. They could not dissuade her, so she resides here in Labrys as well.”
That sounded like Ka-Rina. Aod could easily envision the Hiimori barking demands at the spirits that had come to collect them, eyes flashing like polished steel. Perhaps it was something she had actually seen.
Or perhaps Imago had. She shook her head sharply, refusing to let herself dwell on that unsettling thought.
“You were there the night we—” she caught herself mimicking the pattern of Sprigg’s speech and stopped. “The night the Eye fell. You were there, attacking people in the streets. I remember. I suppose you are here to be judged as well?”
The spriggan made a sound like crickets trilling. “The lives we took are a paltry thing in the shadow of the Stormbringer. A few blades of grass, nothing more. We did not threaten to raze the whole field as you did.”
Scowling, Aod pointed to herself. “I did no such thing. I tried to stop him.”
He patted the top of her knee. An oddly human gesture, Aod thought absently. It betrayed his familiarity with them. Us, she corrected herself. Mankind. My kind. She wished it did not feel so much like she was trying to comfort herself with empty distinctions.
“You are young yet,” Sprigg said. “You still believe you are the body you wear and pretend the choice is not yours, but you know. You did not stop him because you did not want to.”
“That’s a lie!” she protested, jumping up from her bed. “You don’t know me! You have no idea what I want!”
Sprigg appraised her with an even stare. “We know that your mother named you Aodra, but most everyone calls you Aod. We know that you were born on a cold day under the Blood Moon, fifteen turns past, just before Lady Snow dressed the grounds that winter. We know that when you were very small, you liked to climb the trees in the orchard. We know that the pendant the Unseelie took from you was a gift to Dalei from our Lady Fire, a piece of herself to protect you and mark you for our eyes to see.”
“Then where were you?” she snapped, her eyes stinging with tears that welled up unbidden, triggered by the memories Sprigg had evoked with his words. She wiped them away angrily. “If you know so much and my mother was such a good friend to you, where were you when the High Guards came for her? Where were you when they shot my father dead? Where were you then?”
She was shocked by the vehemence of her own reaction—this was an old wound, one she had made peace with, or so she had thought—but she was even more shocked when Sprigg’s head dropped low, as if in shame. “We … we were not a good friend to Dalei. We did not wish her ill, but we could not …”
His thorn-bramble hands tightened into fists. “There was a man. He knew our ways. He knew our secrets. He taught others how to use them against us. If we had interfered, we would’ve had to forsake the Balance, and we dared not do that. But then …”
Sprigg lifted his head and Aod saw remorse etched across his face. “Then they captured the Lady … our Lady … and the Balance lost all meaning. We no longer heard the gods call to us. We no longer cared. But it was too late. We could not help them. We were not strong enough.
“So we stayed there, in the city of iron and stone, and we waited to see our Lady again. We knew she had not returned to the Other because her kin did not take up her duties, but we knew she was not free because she no longer came to dance when the winds called. We did not know all that remained of her was caught in your pendant.
“We should have returned to look after you. The Lady would have wanted it. We did not notice how many turns had passed until we saw you.” He paused to stare at her, marveling. “You kept our Lady safe, all this time. You breached the walls that we could not. You succeeded where the Shaper failed, you set the Stormbringer free.”
Aod sat back down on the edge of her bed and laced her fingers together, her anger usurped by guilt. Yes, she had done those things, but at what cost? She did not think wanton carnage was the greatness her mother had envisioned. “What if I recanted the Stormbringer’s Name? Would I still face the tribunal if I severed the bond between our souls?”
“No,” Sprigg answered reluctantly. “You would no longer share in the Speaker’s judgment, but we would ask—no, we would beg you not to do that.”
“What?” she sputtered, taken aback. “Why?”
“Because your involvement in this matter could sway the Speakers to spare the Stormbringer and we would see him live. We believe he is right. We can no longer only be concerned with our role in the Balance. We must act; we must forsake our impartiality or else watch the world we have created fall apart. And we are not the only one to think so.”