Samhain
Chapter Thirty
SAMHAIN
Leo
O n the morning of , Leo found an unexpected visitor lurking among the trees.
He had seen the shadow of it for several days, but the fairy villagers kept scaring it off. From what they had shown them in paintings they had done on their huts, there were a number of fearsome beasts stalking about in the woods, many of them incredibly dangerous judging by the violence of the images.
And this visitor was unquestionably one of those, or it had been once.
It was the tarasque. Leo had no idea how it had gotten there. Had it followed him through all of his journey? Was it bonded to him somehow? He didn’t even know if it was real or just some strange remnant of magic that only existed in this place because of whatever was keeping him there.
But he was happy to see it, nonetheless.
The villagers flew down with their spears in hand as Leo approached it.
“ Tak,” he said to them. It meant “no.” He held his hand up. “Friend,” he said.
“Friend?” asked the grey-haired matriarch. She was their leader and the person who had been the most interested in learning Loegrian.
“Yes, friend,” said Leo. He reached out a hand to the tarasque. It licked him with its lion tongue, which felt a bit like it was taking the flesh off his hand.
The matriarch gestured to the others and spoke some words Leo had learned related to food.
They brought out a slab of deep red meat: the hind-quarters of an aurochs, a fine cut that honored Leo’s declaration of the beast as a friend.
Leo bent his head in gratitude at their offering. He had learned that many of their interactions involved subtle gestures of the head and wings, and while he couldn’t replicate the wing movements, he mimicked the head movements as closely as he could.
The tarasque took a sniff of the meat, looking at it skeptically.
Then it devoured the entire thing, a slab roughly the size of a goat, in a single bite.
The fairies murmured in their language.
“Friend?” asked the matriarch again.
“Friend,” Leo reassured her. Truthfully, he wasn’t certain that the tarasque posed no threat to them, but he seriously doubted their ability to defeat it even if it did, so he saw more promise in diplomacy.
Leo led the tarasque back to his hut and reread the description of the ritual he’d written into the journal. It had taken a great deal of convincing to get the matriarch to divulge the ritual in advance. They had been happy to have him watch, but they weren’t as keen on having him participate. But insisting that he really wanted to had been the only way to get the matriarch talking, and in the end, their culture respected the wishes of guests too much to refuse him.
Leo had been tasked with beating a certain drum, a task that he suspected was generally given to children due to their laughter when they saw him practicing with it, but either way, his hands wouldn’t be free to use his magimeter.
Once, the missed opportunity to take measurements would have filled him with anxiety and pre-emptive regret.
But he’d found that the more he tried to explain this place, the more he tried to pin it down like a butterfly to a corkboard, the more it eluded him.
Before he dressed, he set about writing what he desperately hoped was his final note to Ceri:
As I prepare to (hopefully) say goodbye to this place, I must take a moment to acknowledge the wonder of it and the privilege it has been to experience something with my own eyes that no one living has ever known. While my journey began in fear, these past few weeks have been incredible in the literal sense: an experience beyond belief. I have done my best to document it, to measure it, to understand it, but I have realized that perhaps there is something more to it beyond that which can be readily explained or understood.
Do not misunderstand me: I do not now think the pursuit of knowledge is a fool’s errand. I still believe in the incredible power of science to transform our understanding of both the natural and supernatural worlds, and I believe that the never-ending quest for knowledge will be forever our best weapon against the forces which would consume us. There is no surer path to violence, hatred, and despair than ignorance.
And yet, perhaps, there is a beauty in the unknown. There is something to be said for not having all the answers. There is something to be said for the humble acknowledgment that although the pursuit of knowledge is pure and should never be abandoned, some things may simply be beyond our comprehension. I don’t know why I’ve come here, but I know that it has forever changed me. And maybe that’s enough.
Another thing I know is that I could not have done this alone. I will forever be indebted to everyone who has helped me in this journey, and there have been so many. I hope to be there to give them each my thanks in person soon.
But of all the people who have helped me, none of them helped me more than you, Ceri.
You, who believed in me.
You, who were my life raft while I was lost at sea.
No matter what happens tonight, you saved me.
And I will never, ever forget it.
Je t’adore. à bient?t, mon miracle étoilé.
The bonfires had been lit in the same spot in two different worlds and countless others across time and space.
As the sky turned to dusk, the fairies gathered, each of them wearing a special mask honoring a forest spirit or a soul of the dead. The masks had been crafted from dried vegetables and animal skins, and their appearance in the flickering light of the bonfire was lifelike enough to startle Leo. The children found this great fun, taking turns sneaking up on him and screeching with their little crow faces.
At the beginning of the ceremony, a goat was slaughtered. This had been the most difficult part of the entire ritual to replicate back in Leo’s home world because, unsurprisingly, the thoroughly modern faculty of Winwold objected to the ritual sacrifice of a live animal in their courtyard. They settled for the pouring of pig’s blood onto the altar by Professor Marin, who was a regular enough customer of the butcher shop in town that it didn’t seem too much of a strange request.
Following the sacrifice, the fairies made offerings to a nearby altar for the dead. They presented gifts of fruit and grain, crafts and wreaths made from straw and dried summer flowers, and painted portraits and written messages to those who had passed on. Leo understood that a similar altar had been crafted in the High House courtyard, and that students had come by all week leaving portraits and letters to lost loved ones.
Finally, the matriarch had placed the heart bone of an aurochs on the altar, beginning the chant. Dean Whittaker had called the zoological department at King’s College and managed to obtain a similar ossified structure of an ox heart used in anatomy lessons, the aurochs having gone extinct some centuries earlier.
The chant began with a low single note sung by the matriarch’s partner. Then the matriarch joined in, singing a simple lilting melody in their language. Her voice was layered in harmony by the others, and then finally the drums began. Leo had been unable to fully transcribe the words of the chant, but he’d learned enough in his time there to guess at the meaning: “forest,” “dead,” “spirit,” “bread.” The song explained the significance of the ritual and begged the spirits to take their offerings and walk among them once more. Alison had taken the general ideas and created a simple verse and melody for them to sing:
O come ye spirits to this night,
Among the trees in pale moonlight,
To join us here in feast and fire,
Now lift the veil and leap the pyre.
As the chanting continued, the dancing began. Some of the fairies took flight, circling the bonfire like moths, while others danced with their drums on the ground. Leo joined them, doing his best to mimic their movements. As he danced, he began to hear strange sounds. Whispers in the fairy language and in Loegrian. Laughter and shrieks from far away.
And out of the corner of his eye, strange images appeared. Glimpses into other versions of this world, places he had come from and some beyond his comprehension, pasts and futures colliding.
The sounds and images were overwhelming. It was as if a million points of time had collapsed into one, and Leo had no idea how he was meant to use this chaos to get home. Had this all been a mistake? What if he followed the wrong path and ended up somewhere far worse?
And then he heard her voice.
Ceri, her voice sweet and clear, if a little out of tune. She was singing the song Alison wrote. But as she sang, the tune began to change. The songs merged, joining together into a harmony that was neither past nor present but somehow a blend of both.
Leo called to her. His wasn’t the only voice calling a name in the din, and he worried she wouldn’t hear it.
But she answered. “Leo!” she shouted from a thousand miles away.
And then he saw her through the fire. It was the Ceri from the mirror, the image of her reversed and shimmering in the flames.
He knew it would be insane to step into the fire to reach her.
But he also knew that he must. He could not explain how he knew it. It went against every bit of logic and reason that he possessed. It went against his instincts, his most primal fears. It was a great leap into the unknown.
Leo made the leap.
He felt a blaze of heat. Fear clutched at his heart as he doubted his decision. Could he have been wrong? Had he gone this far to fail at the final test?
And then there was nothing. An inky black void, a space between worlds.
Silence.
Above him, a thousand million stars. They spread across the sky, shooting like meteors, exploding like fireworks, filling the darkness with their twinkling light, surrounding him.
He spun around to look at them all. How could there be so many? He felt the infinite vastness of it. He was adrift in a sea of stars, tiny and alone.
But he wasn’t alone.
Ceri was there. The stars had come together and made her. She burnt with their fire. He could see them flicker in her movements, could see the trails of them spinning as she reached out for him.
He took her hand.
She pulled, and he followed. She pulled him closer to her, moving galaxies in her wake. She held his face. He could see a nebula reflected in her blue eyes, worlds being born and collapsing into dust over and over in an endless cycle.
She kissed him, and the worlds collided.
He felt the same lurch as before, but forward, not back. He fell with her through the darkness, tumbling and turning, on and on and on, and then in the final moments, drifting like the floating of a feather onto the ground.
When he opened his eyes, he was home.