After a time, Lor asks, “Daidí?”
Iohmar sobs. On his knees, he presses the back of his arm to his lips, trying to stifle the sound, to not do these things before his child. It doesn’t help. Lor’s fingers brush his hair. Tugging on Iohmar’s arm, he pushes himself onto his lap and curls there, petting both Iohmar’s cheeks with his tiny hands.
“I’m sorry you don’t have your daidí and mhamaí anymore,” he whispers. His eyes are red, and Iohmar is unsure when the boy began crying. He puts his forehead against Lor’s shoulder, trying not to choke on his breath. Speaking seems impossible.
“But you have me, so it’s okay, right?” Lor’s voice is small.
Iohmar crushes him to his chest, pressing his face into the boy’s neck. Animals nuzzle him, circling the two in concern. Iohmar rocks Lor in the pile of moss, kissing him along his ear and cheek and silken hair.
“Yes,” he says when he can breathe enough to speak. “Yes, I have you, so everything is beautiful.”
“Love you, Daidí.”
Iohmar believes him. “Mmm, I love you, Wisp.”
“I know.”
Iohmar nearly laughs, but his throat is closed, and his body aches from magic and strain and weeping. He holds Lor so tight he wonders if the boy can breathe and watches the rippling border, empty until he can return and coax life from the ground.
“Daidí?” Lor’s voice is a whisper, conspiratorial, eager.
“Hmm?”
“The shadow girl is here.”
Hope presses against his rib cage. Raising his head, Iohmar finds the trees to his left full of moving shadows. The featureless shape of a child is among them, hidden behind the trunk of a tall, fat tree.
“Thank you,” he says, partially to Lor, and partially to the shadow for showing him the other creatures of these lands needing help. “I believe I know who you are,” he murmurs, brushing at the midnight moths swarming their king and prince. He reaches out, fingers still stained with their magic from so many years ago. “But I need you to show me. Somehow. Do you understand?”
For a moment, they continue their sinuous dance among the trees and ferns. When she slips to his side, Iohmar feels the bird-quick pulse of a heartbeat before she’s near enough to touch. She stands outside his grasp. Lor wriggles higher in Iohmar’s lap to get a better look.
“Iohmar?” she asks in a voice soft as spring earth, cocking her head to her shoulder.
“Yes,” he says and isn’t sure he knows how to believe.
A hand of shadow rests in his, not large enough even to cover his palm.
He closes his fingers and asks, “Ascia?”
She shatters into a thousand shadows, and Iohmar’s world disappears under the weight of a mountain.
28
Down among Dragon Bones
Iohmar remembers in bits and pieces those days he’s become so practiced at forgetting. How it felt to be buried within the mountain, the force of the earth upon him, not crushing his small body yet trapping him nonetheless.
Cold and warmth in the air. A strange passing of time. The sensation of his father’s magic nearby before he was found. His mother next. And Galen. And many of his other folk who came to the aid of their prince.
How strange it was to bask in sunlight once more. The sight of the collapsed boulders at the base of the fair mountain which would one day be overgrown in ruin.
How it felt to wake again as if for the first time.
Wake again. Wake again.
Wakes again.
Iohmar is falling. Lor’s sharp cry is nearby, and he is gone from Iohmar’s arms. No balance exists to the falling. No up or down. The earth itself is about him.
Shadows swirl, hands and fingers grasping and tugging, pulling him every which way. Fabric tears. They grip his fingers and horns and hair. He can’t push them away.
Separated from Lor, there is no light, no direction. Soil fills his eyes and mouth. He needs to breathe, needs a moment of calm long enough to call to his own magic, but it is scrambled as his thoughts.
He coughs, spits, and says, “Stop,” in a voice too garbled and full of grit to sound his own.
Lor is calling to him, falling alongside him somewhere close and far.
Catching as much breath as he can, he calls, “Ascia, stop!”
The world falls still.
Coughing, he shoves at the soil suffocating his face, ears ringing as the roar of the falling earth is silenced. Blinking and wiping dirt from his eyes, he finds this place—still surrounded by stone and ground—dark as ever.
“Lor?” he calls, then louder, “Lor!”
“Daidí?” comes the meek response, the boy’s voice thick with tears. Relief is too strong for Iohmar to be worried. He presses his hand through the soil in the direction of the voice. It is soft here, not as the tunnels full of hard-packed stone, almost warm as loam baking in the midday sun.
