Chapter 7 ILSEVEL #2
Suddenly the young woman raises a hand and swiftly wipes tears from her cheek beneath the long veil.
“Ilsevel!” she breathes, and the sound of her voice startles me.
I coil back, pulling my stardust essence into a defensive knot.
“Ilsevel, I’m so sorry. Sorry for what happened to you.
Sorry for what they’ve made me do . . .”
That remorse of hers sings through her blood, her bones, rippling out to strike my being.
I find my threaded parts snared and drawn more densely together once more in response to that mortal way of feeling.
I don’t understand it, but neither can I resist it.
My separated particles begin to reform, vibrating in harmony with her song.
And her name springs to my awareness: Faraine.
As though in response, she looks up. Her eyes sharpen as she peers into that dark corner of the chamber where I am beginning to gather. “Ilsevel?” she breathes. “Is that . . . you?”
The chamber door opens.
I whorl my threaded self, casting my awareness to that portal where a tall, shadow-wrapped figure stands.
A jolt of recognition electrifies every miniscule unit of my being.
Him. Him. Him. Terror drives me back into scattered parts, back out of this layer of reality.
I don’t remember who he is or why I fear him so.
But a name is there, echoing through my dread: the Shadow King.
My parts scatter, back into long strings of un-ness, melting through the stone walls, through layers of time and space, out into the Unformed Lands, where I drift in shuddering oblivion.
But I cannot quite lose those ideas, which spark through me in complex patterns, keeping me from full disintegration.
Sister.
Sorrow.
Loss.
Fear.
These are not the properties of stardust, which is what I wish to once more be.
I try to shake them out, but they cling.
Little anchors of selfhood, like hooks drawing my individual parts back into a whole.
I try to shake it away in flurries of twisting threads, but each shake only seems to make me gather more densely.
I can almost feel what it used to be—to have limbs.
To have bones, muscles, veins. To have weight and existence within a single linear progression of time.
Ilsevel.
That word—that name—it is like a cage. A cage of perception and individualization and limitation. One I do not want to inhabit. Not anymore.
Ilsevel.
No! I fight against the reforming of my threaded self.
But something in that name, echoing through the vast emptiness around me, acts like a summoning.
Pulls all my detached particles back together, thicker and denser, until I begin to perceive once-familiar oddities of being.
Limbs. Heartbeat. Breath. Ugh! I shiver, shudder, seeking to scatter once more.
Ilsevel.
I turn. A sense of choice moves through my thickened existence.
I could refuse to answer that call, could shake myself apart once more and drift away.
But now that I am gathered this far, I find I possess the capacity for curiosity.
Who is calling out that name? Who is moving and motivating my being into this form?
Why should I not follow it and discover what I may?
I am awkward, ungraceful, moving these strange, elongated limbs.
Like some multi-tentacled creature drifting through deep water, I float.
My awareness narrows down and down into a space of sight.
How strange it is to perceive the world through two eyes!
Why would anyone submit to such smallness?
And yet it is oddly comforting, even deep down here in this dark, watery, airless place.
Ilsevel.
I look up. Through ripples of dark water, I see a small circle of light. The edge of a porcelain bowl, a window from one reality into deeper realms of being. Curiosity moves in me once more. I propel my floating essence up and up toward that circle, rising from deeps unimaginable.
Ilsevel?
A face appears, floating above that window-circle and the reality of space-time it reveals to me.
Once more I am struck with a sense of recognition.
I know that particular assortment of particles strung together with simmering life-force energy.
I know those pinched brows, that lip curled with such determination.
Those blue eyes like Aurae, that fair hair like Faraine, that subtle arrangement of features that no one could mistake as belonging to anyone other than the offspring of Larongar Cyhorn.
Ideas burn through my being: Enemy. No, that isn’t right. Betrayer. No, not that either. Sister . . . yes. Yes, sister is right, but I hate that word when applied to that face. It feels wrong, sinful. And yet it fits better than the others.
Those sky-like eyes of hers narrow as she peers with more intensity down through her window into the formless beyond.
She shouldn’t gaze with those eyes into such a place, not for long at least. It will drive her mad, as it has driven others mad before her.
I rise up more swiftly, a half-formed intention of warning her propelling my spirit.
Her lips move. This time I hear her voice—not her soul, but spoken words, muffled through water. “Ilsevel?” Her breath stirs the surface of the liquid in her scrying bowl. “Ilsevel is that you?”
Simmering energy moves in the space around me.
Magic . . . that’s the word my mortality-thickened brain had for it.
But it seems too small a word here in this existence through which I move.
My limited vision perceives runes wrought in green fire, falling like rain all around me, sinking deeper into the void even as their pulsing propels me upward.
Witchcraft. Another word I apparently know, and one that makes my being recoil.
But everyone knows this young woman is a witch, don’t they?
Isn’t that a commonly-held secret in my father’s house, like the not-so-secret of her true parentage?
I feel the crushing confines of my mortal perspective closing in. Lyria. My half-sister. The bastard.
I am far more solid than I was mere moments ago, more aware of my selfhood in this dark space of almost-emptiness.
The pressure of water all around me becomes more present, more pressing, and I find myself striving toward that surface overhead, toward that world where I know air exists, just waiting to be breathed into dust-formed lungs.
I move my limbs—arms, legs—pull myself through the water, through the shining fall of runes.
The face above me screams. Lyria falls back away from her scrying bowl, disappearing from my view. Then she crawls forward, hands gripping the edge of porcelain as she stares down, directly at me. “Ilsevel!” she cries.
I reach for her.
My hand breaks the surface of the water, and I feel droplets on skin, feel air prickling fine hairs. I feel mortality, and it doesn’t frighten me so much as fill me with a painful longing for return, for renewal, for—
“Ilsevel!” Lyria screams again, her face suffused with mingled terror and wonder.
She lunges, clasps my hand, and that sensation of flesh-on-flesh shoots like a bolt of lightning through me, solidifying all my strange parts, collapsing all my broadened perspective back into its small containments of flesh and time.
“Lyria!” I cry, my voice bubbling up through scrying water. “Lyria, pull me up! Pull me out!”
My half-sister grabs my wrist with her other hand and pulls, pulls, pulls like she’s trying to draw me up from a well.
But the Unformed Lands aren’t ready to let me go.
I feel the fracturing of unreality take hold of my legs, pulling me apart, pulling me back down into its depths.
Still I don’t release Lyria’s hand, even as I drag it down into the scrying bowl with me, pulling her arm beyond the confines of the bowl, down through the floor, down into the darkness with me.
She grips the edge of porcelain, fighting to not let herself be hauled out of her own reality while still unwilling to let go of me.
“I’ll find you, Ilsevel!” she shouts, staring down through the water into my eyes. “I’ll find you again, I swear!”
Then she lets go. And I sink. Like a stone, back into the void. Little bubbles of air and time and sparks of green magic surround me, floating up to that shrinking window into the mortal world even as I fall farther and farther from it.
Perhaps this is better, I tell myself as existence begins to unravel into threads once more. Perhaps I was happier in this state. Mortal emotions are so unpleasant, all that fear and loathing and longing and . . . and what was that last one? The one which stabs so deep?
Love.
As the word floats through my disintegrating awareness, I become conscious suddenly of a single shining thread among my other many threads of unraveling selfhood.
It glitters with songlight, a searing fire of the soul, bright as the center of a star, but so thin, so delicate.
Stretching out across the vastness of the void.
Not part of the essential me and yet . .
. and yet vital somehow. A song, singing to my own multitudinous harmonies of being.
I cannot help but sing back. I am so unraveled, I have no mouth anymore, but I set all my particles humming and emit a pulse of soulfire, rippling along that searing-bright thread.
Diira.
An instant later—an eon—a heartbeat—a response resonates back.
Vellara.
Suddenly I find I am regaining solid mass once more.
My threaded particles re-gather, re-knit far more swiftly than ever before, and I don’t fight it.
In fact, I want it. I want it with a desperation I did not remember I knew how to feel.
As that song hits me, runs through me, pulling me back together faster and faster, I light up with all those terrible mortal feelings, every last one of them.
Hope, joy, despair, dread, and, most of all, love.
Love, love, love, singing back and forth, up and down that shining starlight song-cord.
Diira! Diira, I’m here! Diira, come find me!
She appears—manifesting out of the void, a vast being beyond all mortal comprehension. The size of a world, of a planet, burning and dreadful and overwhelming with song. Her eyes, like blazing suns, gaze down upon me.
Vellara, she sings through formless eternities. I am here.
I reach for her. Even as I do so, my threaded parts form something like a hand, shining with her starfire song. Though I am but a speck of dust before her vastness, she bows her head, becomes smaller, becomes comprehensible. She places her muzzle against my palm, and I know peace.
Diira, you found me. You found me! I pull her lovely head toward me, press my face against the licorneir’s cheek, and weep into her velvet-soft fur. My tears float away into the void, like flakes of shining ash and notes of song.
I will always find you, Vellara, she sings into my heart. For you are my heartbond. Wherever you go, I will follow.
I climb onto her back. It is strange to feel myself clad in a mortal-shaped frame once more, here in a space without physical form.
But the power of her song holds me together and, though a small part of me resents the confinement, I am glad.
I mount her fire-gleaming back, wrap my fingers in her mane, and let the song of my soul join with hers.
Carry me home, Diira, I sing. Carry me back to Taar.
She lowers her head. From the tip of her coiled horn, pure light streams forth, burning a path of silver through the emptiness.
With a triumphant cry, her powerful body breaks into a gallop, each hoofbeat glancing off worlds and realities, as she streaks through the formlessness like a shooting star, trailing song in her wake.