Blog Post #3 and a New Segment of Silver/Gold

Well'p, here you go!


A Lantern in the Dark

There was a stream flowing on the far side of town. The hard pack thoroughfare running past the Stag bisected it, running north. The road faded in the woods. No one had had reason to travel north of Fulkton Gardens in a long time. The bridge which had crossed the river where the road traveled was collapsed, a ruin, and the river had worn it into rounded stones. Some of the stones still stuck out from the water. They were gray in the night while the river was black to Taim. He could not see its bottom. It was the first thing like that he'd found.

Lili was a caster, a mage, and she had discovered herself to him and now he had to kill her. He had loved her perfumes and never guessed that she was hiding her scent from his wolf nostrils. He had not known why she'd scorned his ardor for so long. Now he understood.

He could feel himself sobering. He had stuck his boots in the stream. The spring had been warm so far, but the water of the stream was still only a few weeks clear of ice and snow.

Tell me, Lilika, did you want me to go against fate? Desert my duty?

He wanted to. He had already revealed her secret to someone higher than himself. He could not abandon the things he owed.

"I should go, now," he said to himself.

Still, he sat there. His feet had gone cold through his drunken haze. They felt clearer than any part of him had felt today. Time passed. Now, he could barely feel his feet at all. He tried to sense his pulse in them. He could not. That bothered him.

He could turn into a wolf and his feet would be back to themselves again. He would sober up quickly, as well. Doing that would terrify him. He pulled his feet out from the stream and crossed them under his legs and they began throbbing after a minute of waiting. That was good enough.

They could run, he thought: go against it. Try to break. They'd take Reah as well. But the young Lord Jasper Fulke would kill Taim's family. He wouldn't want to. Fulke was a good man. He'd have them slaughtered, anyway: Regid, Taim's father, and Joyce, his mother, and Tordric, Joyce, Kit, his older brother and young sisters. Tordric's surviving children would die as well. Taim's blood would die, and for what? No one had run from The King before. Not with a caster: not and lived.

He looked at his boots. They were muddy and the mud was on the back of his pressed black pants.

Someone was coming up behind him.

"I don't want to worry you, Taim..."

"You couldn't."

Taim turned around to look at Hellory. She had slipped on shoes and come out to look for him.

"Lord Fulke sent me to get you."

Taim got on his throbbing feet and started to walk back to The Stag. There was a brightness over the horizon, flickering, like the wick of a lamp. He was walking with his most even strides but his heart was beating in different tempos with every step. There was a smell of smoke. He thought that he was walking. He could hear Hellory running to keep up with him. She was falling behind.

The Hoary Stag was on fire. The inkeep and his beautiful son and his ugly wife and their four surviving servants were standing outside of it as it burned. Jasper Fulke was watching it, as well, his face pink. He turned and looked at Taim, steady.

You would not do it. I had to do it myself. To protect us from them.

That is what Lord Fulke would say, if he wanted to. He said nothing as Taim passed him and went into the burning inn.

"Wait!"

A woman's voice, somewhere behind him in the night. Taim ignored it.

There was no fire in the bar room yet, but it was hot and Taim could barely breathe the air. It was being sucked through the rafters to feed the conflagration on the floorboards above and there was a breeze running through the door, whistling.

He ran. The stairs to the rooms above were in the far corner of the barroom, by the counter. The stairs ran four ways up to get to the second floor and the fire had not yet traveled down them, but he could see the light it was casting on their farthest visible wall. His boots steamed as they flicked on and off the stairs and then Taim burst into the hallway and all the walls were orange and red and moving like a swarm of living things. The bright organisms had just started to creep across the floor.

Taim was a soldier in The King's army. His senses were not human. The sight of fire was nearly blinding when it was so close. And there was so much of it as well. The ceiling was being devoured by an oily cloud of smoke and his eyes were driven to pick out the patterns in the drifting ash.

The heat was unbearable but it did not bother him. He was frozen, looking, and the hair on his arms and his face and his close-shaved scalp was shriveling away. He could feel the grease in his skin prickling a moment later. The fire was trying to bake him alive. It did not bother him. To him this was not something he could not bear. His body was an object and he had treated it as such most of his life, trading it away in beatings and the things that followed. To him there was one thing unbearable in the heat of the burning hallway.

His ears were not human anymore and they tortured him with a sound, a murmur, dashing through the roar of flames. It was a babble, like a brook. It was a toddler's whisper.

Each jerk Taim forced from his legs was painful. He was baking alive. He did not care. He kept moving. The whispers were in his lover's chambers.

"Ma-ma?; Ma-ma?; Ma-ma!--Mama!--Mama!"

The fire was licking at his boot heels and the smoke was now at the level of his eyes. He had to stoop. The murmur was a whisper, now, and the roar of the fire made it feel as if it was trying to dive into his ears. Reah was screaming in child talk past the edge of reason. It might have been in pain. How could she possibly still be living? There was a thing in Taim that was breaking.

The door had warped. It was on fire, but thick and still intact. He was almost to it. He could see it. How could he open it? If he grabbed the handle it might melt through the flesh of his hands. He was running, now. When had he started doing that? His right shoulder felt stabbed. It shattered itself against the door to the room of his lover and the door fell to pieces.

All of the room was on fire. The floor was an inferno and all of the walls were an inferno. There was no smoke rising to the ceiling. Impossible. The ceiling was an inferno as well. Nothing remained of Lili's life but the bed in one corner where she and her daughter had slept. Everything was devoured but that.

Taim stopped. The heat split hairs on the back of his neck shivered: a response to mage-craft. It must have been hers. Lili. Alive? The thing inside of Taim broke completely: Lili was dead.

The edges of her bedsheets were on fire. The rest of them were slick and red. There she was. Lili's body stole the focus of his senses. He could smell her perfume and her inert blood and the cold sweat of a struggle. Her neck must have been snapped to kill her. Hung? Her head perched loose on her neck. Her neck was swollen and black. Her daughter must have positioned her mother's head on the pillow after Jasper Fulke had departed. Had she hidden? Lili's head did not look like it wanted to stay where it was. There was a drastic protrusion in the swelling on one side of her neck and he could see a gaping O in her skin there, breached by the column of her spine. He felt numb. How close was he to--when he had loved her each of her movements had been a music he could pick up with his ears, but there was no music now, just the murmur...

Of a child.

Reah had stopped screaming. She must have exhausted herself with it. Small. She was wearing a white dress. Her night dress. Oversized. She had her mother's skin and dark brown hair and what must have been her father's odd brown eyes. Taim had teased the girl that her mother had fashioned her from an otter's pelt and that that was what made her all one color. She had asked him what an otter was.

Lili's room was a fire sinking forward to devour her daughter. The girl had her head pressed to her mother's chest.

Taim stepped forward. He could not think, now. His boots were not steaming, now. They were burning. His feet were burning inside them. He did not notice them. His eyes were on the bed with the fire and the blood and the baking corpse of the love of his life and the living body of her daughter. There was an updraft from the heat and the girl's long hair was blowing upwards in it in coils.

The floor was sinking beneath the weight of Taim's feet. Was he really walking through fire? Was this what it felt like when you could feel no pain? There was finally smoke rising from the floor and the bed to the ceiling and Taim could see that the girl's hair was about to ignite. The bed was sinking into the floor. Just like Taim was sinking into the floor. Taim could not smell anymore.

But he heard as the floorboards stopped groaning beneath the weight of the bed. Reah looked up and Taim could not see if there was anything in the little girl's eyes as the floor collapsed beneath her. He was in the air now, leaping. In the air he exploded and he was terrified because he knew that his organs were about to come out of his mouth as he reached for the girl who was falling into fire.

You can't break fate. You can't break fate. You can't...

His hands were in front of his eyes:

They were turning to claws.