“I thank Adonais for every moment I’ve shared with you,” she said. “You’ve been carved into my heart, every moment of you. How your eyes soften when you laugh, rare as that is. How your voice sparks when you become inspired with an unexpected idea. How your head droops when you wander in thought. Most of all, I love seeing you forget yourself when faced with a thing of beauty—a wildcat leaping from a boulder or an eagle soaring above the summits. How did I come to be tied to you, Voran?”

“Sabíana, what do you desire most?”

The final traces of her pain were expunged, and she shone from within. It only made the reality of their parting twist deeper into him.

“We are living in such an uncertain time. I hope for safety, permanence, not only for Vasyllia. I feel a need to find a place and root into it. Our future is dark, I know, but I have strength. I can use it if I know your heart is mine, though you are far away from me.”

“I am with you always,” he said, and thought of Lyna. “When this is all done, I will come back for you, my love.”

They remained still for a long time, entwined in each other, content.

A pounding on the door jolted them both.

“Could they not have allowed us at least this evening?” Voran ground his teeth so hard his jaw flared in pain. “I’ll teach them…”

Before he reached the door, it flew open. The hallway on the other side bristled with spears. Mirnían stood at the head.

“Sabíana! You and Voran must come now. The flames on the aspen sapling are going out. Otar Kalún has called for the Summoning of Fire to be performed today.”

Usually, the many-hued dusk was the most beautiful part of the day. But now the silence of the evening fog oppressed Voran. The orchards were black and white parodies of trees, looking more like sinister old men reaching up with knobby fingers, as though enraged at the gathering gloom. They seemed unnaturally still, almost bewitched into nightmarish sleep. The sight clashed with Sabíana’s gentle warmth next to him.

Down the road from the central square in the second reach, their company entered through a rounded archway into the oblong Temple Plain—a clearing in a grove of ancient red-bark pines that ended in a sheer drop thousands of feet deep. At the far end of the Temple, a small circle of aspens, glowing in orange-yellow vesture, stood guard over the altar stone.

A sense of presence inundated Voran, a barely-evident energy, something between sound and light. It was stronger than usual, fed by the tense expectation of the crowd, many of whom were openly weeping. This is like a funeral, he thought, not a supplication.

Voran and Sabíana took their place at the front, near the quivering aspens. Voran turned back to see two files of longhaired youths robed in black, carrying square banners with embroidered images of Dars, Sirin, and High Beings whose names had long ago faded into legend. Passing through the Temple, they cleared a path to the grove of aspens, then stood in two lines with their backs to the crowd on either side. The clerics followed, robed in deep burgundy, the color of recent sorrow. They chanted an ancient lament.

The melody haunted Voran; for a moment, it seemed that the mountain itself sang. The voices weaved into the melody and out of it in an increasingly complex pattern. One moment the rich tenors predominated, then the dark-toned basses, and finally the middle voices rang out, lush as stringed instruments. The voices united in harmony, then fought each other in unexpected dissonance, only to resolve in chords that echoed over the tops of the red-barks. Images flashed through Voran’s mind—falling water, shaking branch, and whispering fields of wheat.

Torchlight flickered beyond the stone archway. Ten warriors in mail and crimson robes preceded Dar Antomír. They approached the altar table, solemnly bowed before it, and stood on their knees encircling the aspens, swords drawn and placed into the ground point-down. Dar Antomír met Otar Kalún inside the circle and kissed him three times on the cheeks. Both then bowed to the altar.

The tenors wailed over a drone in the basses, massive as a full spring torrent. The words of the ancient hymn echoed crisply in the cold air.

“O, gentle light of Adonais and his numberless hosts, radiant and glorious. From the rising to the setting of the sun, you illumine the mountains and valleys. Shine out for us wandering in darkness, show us the merciful gaze of morning. O Lord Adonais, we praise and glorify you until the Endless Age.”

The crowd joined in with a rumbling noise at once dissonant and moving. Voran felt no longer merely himself, as though the minuscule creature he called “himself” was nothing but a stone in a much larger edifice, a tower reaching with song and flesh and bone to the Heights. He felt small, but also part of something majestic and glorious, a note in a complex harmony that rose to the ears of Adonais himself.

The hymn was twice repeated, ending in a long, groaning note of lamentation. Silence prevailed as Kalún chanted alone in his watery voice. The words were completely unintelligible. Voran’s ecstasy crashed to earth. Why must the chief cleric of Vasyllia always be such a terrible celebrant of the mysteries?

When Kalún’s mumbling ceased, he turned around to face the people.

“People of Vasyllia,” he said. “It is not the day for the Summoning. But our beloved sapling is already fading. Let us all come together in prayer so that we, your priests, may find the inner strength to call down fire from the Heights, as our forefathers did in the days of Lassar the Blessed.”

Voran’s stomach soured. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t the priests who had summoned the first fire. Not according to the Old Tales. It was the Harbinger. What was Otar Kalún up to?

The priest led the procession back through the middle of the Temple and out into the main square. In the evening darkness, the mansions of Vasyllia’s third reach—all lit with lanterns—were like jewels lit on fire. Above them, the twin waterfalls fell in perfect lines framing the palace, which from this vantage point looked like it floated in the air directly above the sapling. The sapling! Its upper leaves were no longer aflame. The flames that remained in the lower part of the tree were bluish, barely moving.

One gust of winter wind, and the whole tree would go out. Voran was sure of it.

The procession arrived at the tree, and everyone fell silently to their knees. Only Otar Kalún stood, visible to all in the center of the square.

“As you visited our fathers in their darkest time,” he intoned, “so heed our request on this day, Adonais, though it is not the day allotted for your grace. Send down fire. Let it illumine our hearts and give life to the eternal tree of Covenant.”

The chanting rose again, bleak and stark in the night. Kalún circled the tree, mumbling to himself with arms raised.

A huge gust of wind lashed the Temple from the summit, as if Vasyllia Mountain had opened its maw and begun to blow with all its might. The remaining fire on the tree sputtered and died, as did most of the lanterns in the city. Darkness seemed to pour over the assembled crowd.

Another omen, thought Voran, his hands shaking with more than mere cold.

“People of Vasyllia!” roared a voice in the half-darkness. “Your hearts are nothing but stone. Do you think you can buy the Heights’ favor by forcing the hand of the Most High?”

The Pilgrim stood to the right of the aspen, impossibly tall, arms held high. He glowed with a golden light.

“It is not too late, Vasyllia. You can win back the regard of the Heights. Behold! All Nebesta sprawls at your feet, but you do not give her entry. Take her children’s care into your hands.”

Many moaned with fear, and many more cried out in agreement. But an angry throng surged at the Pilgrim—mostly young men. They dragged him, screaming, stomping, spitting on him as they dragged him back into the Temple, to try to throw him off the edge of the Temple Plain. Voran rushed forward, but there were too many of them. The mass surged, pushing down whatever was in its way, closer and closer to the far end of the Temple.

Two ranks of warriors appeared and rammed the crowd from either side of the Temple, coming into the open space from the darkness of the red-barks, where they had been silently standing guard. Swords drawn, they beat down the mob. They surrounded the bloody Pilgrim and carried him back toward the square. A wall of people surged to block their way, and only when the priests with their oak staffs joined the warriors did the wave crest and fall back toward the archway. The warriors rushed to the third reach, leaving trampled humanity in their wake.

Vasyllia is fallen, thought Voran. It is too late.

Know this, my dears. Our realm is full of doorways. Doorways into other realms. You may have seen them sometimes. A curtain of water falling where there is no waterfall. A metal gate standing in the middle of a field. A pool of water in the middle of a desert. Do not enter them. If you do, you will be taken to a perilous place, the Lows of Aer. If you ever come out again, it will be to a different place entirely! Many are the children who have entered the Lows. Few have come back…

From “A Child’s Retelling of the Sirin’s Tale”

(Old Tales, Book VI)

Chapter 11

The Changer

The day that Voran and his companions left Vasyllia, it began to rain—a steady, insistent kind of rain that chilled deeper than snow. It never stopped long enough for the three travelers to dry their clothes, and soon they gave up altogether. Saddle sores became an ever-present reality, despite the cold. Voran forgot to take the necessary precautions, for which he silently cursed himself in language he never used in public. Judging by Mirnían’s stiffness, Voran was not the only one. Dubían merely sulked. In their mutual discomfort, all remained silent.

Mirnían’s guard of ten warriors traveled with them for the entire first day. But they were not trained woodsmen. They were slowing Voran down, and their racket could be heard for miles. After conferring with Dubían and Voran, Mirnían ordered them to return to Vasyllia. Voran knew what Dar Antomír would think about Mirnían’s decision. He also knew how little Mirnían cared about that.

It took them three days to reach the place where Voran bonded with Lyna. Voran hoped that he would see her again, though his rational mind told him that was unlikely. There was no change in his inner flame, no surge in his yearning as they approached. If anything, the closer they came, the less he felt anything, as though something were dulling his emotions from without.

“Why can’t it make up its mind?” roared Dubían, face red as his beard. “I can understand rain; I can understand fog. I hate both of them, but at least I can understand them. This…this is like sweat. It’s not raining, it’s sweating!”

Voran pushed his exhausted charger up through a cleft between two tree-crowned hills. When he came to the other side, he hoped to see clear indications of the pilgrims’ passage through that region.

“Voran, what is it?” asked Mirnían.

Voran could not understand. There was no sign of the pilgrims. Nothing. Until that moment, their trail—old food-scraps, strips of torn fabric hanging on black hawthorn, trampled earth—was unmistakable. But here, in the place where he last saw them, their trail veered off the road toward a wood, where it vanished.

Mirnían laughed. Dubían looked near to tears. Voran wanted to vent his frustration by hacking down the nearest tree with his sword.