Chapter 63 #2
Life and death stood in equal measure, weighed on a set of glimmering scales.
Ordes balanced on the precipice between the two, in the gleaming white of the space between the worlds.
Light was all around him, flowing like a river.
It filled his consciousness, spiralled through his veins and wrapped around his body, like a fine dewy mist. Only it wasn’t damp. Or cold or warm.
He thought he could hear waves on a distant shore, a push and pull he was so familiar with.
Born on the edge of a lake.
Half in one world, half in another.
Now not in either.
Time was suspended, neither moving forward or back. Ordes was floating, his mind spinning. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do, why he was here, except… there was thunder in his chest. His heart.
And Jenyfer’s.
The doors. He remembered. He needed to close the doors to the realms. From the nothingness surrounding him, walls took shape and form. No. Not walls. A bulkhead. The space beneath his feet became solid timber. He was in a passageway on a ship, a place Ordes knew with his eyes closed.
He was on The Excalibur. The Grail was gone, his hands empty.
Swallowing, he began to walk down the passageway, pausing at an open door to his left and peering inside, not to find a bed or a dresser, but swirling mist and apple-scented air.
Ordes took a deep breath and waved his hand.
The mist cleared and Avalon lay before him, as if he was floating somewhere above the place of his birth, the island wreathed in clouds.
Close the door. Ordes stared at The Isle of Mists until his eyes blurred, his father’s face in his mind.
Close the door. He reached out, trembling fingers curling around a brass doorknob.
As he closed the door to the cabin, to his mother’s realm, Avalon had already begun to fade, swallowed by mist and shadow.
The sound of a lock clicking echoed through the strangeness of the space around him.
Ordes rested his hand on the firm timber of the door – it was warm, but the longer his hand remained there, it became cooler, crystals of ice forming around the doorknob.
Ordes turned around. The door on the other side of the passageway was open and beyond it was a world of water and darkness. Music floated through the air. Melodias’ realm. Ordes reached for the doorknob and paused.
The Bag Noz needed to pass through Lyonesse on its way to the Otherworld.
The black river flowed nowhere else. All his life, Ordes had seen the night boat.
He had watched its passage across the water, bound for Lyonesse and the Otherworld beyond it.
No other man alive had seen it, and he suddenly understood.
Ordes closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was sitting in the Bag Noz, but there was no helmsman.
The water around him was still, as smooth as glass.
Everything was silent. He was alone, a solitary passenger in the boat of the dead.
‘This isn’t right,’ he murmured, looking at the place where the helmsman – where Ophine – should be.
Was this what would happen if the Bag Noz was unable to continue its eternal journey?
Would the souls of the dead remain in the world of the living?
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Ankou had spoken about balance.
Merlin had stressed the importance of a balanced world.
Shutting off the only path of the night boat would create chaos, not balance.
The world tipped sideways and Ordes was back in the passageway on the ship, hand hovering near the door to Melodias’ realm. Only a crack, he thought. This door needed to stay open, but only a little, enough to allow the Bag Noz to pass through.
Ordes eased the door closed but did not let the lock click.
He stepped back.
The world dissolved around him and he was thrust into—
Nothingness.
His heart beat, and it hurt. The heartfire raged, screamed, beat against the cage of his ribs with flaming hands as he realised this was not him, not his agony, not his despair, but hers.
Jenyfer, left behind. He rubbed furiously at his chest and his heart rebelled and fought, trying to devour what was left of him.
He could smell smoke. Taste ashes, feel them coating his tongue and filling his throat until he was choking on them, pulling air into dead lungs.
I refuse to die.
The world was blank and white. Nothing else surrounded him.
‘Where am I?’ he wondered aloud. He could hear those waves again.
‘In my realm. Well, yours, I suppose.’
Ordes spun around to find his father, looking exactly as Ordes had seen him last. ‘You’re not really here,’ he said. His voice echoed oddly.
‘Your mother doesn’t know about this place.
I made it when I realised what would happen to you,’ Merlin said.
‘You’re my son, regardless of what else you might be.
Regardless of why you were given life in the first place.
You mean more to me than anything in this world and if you couldn’t remain in the world, I thought I’d make you a new one. ’
Ordes swallowed. ‘Am I dead?’
‘No. You’re too stubborn to die. I was kind of counting on that.’
‘Is this where I’ll be forever then?’
Merlin didn’t answer.
‘I see,’ Ordes said. He sighed, rubbing at his burning chest. ‘Can I at least get you to magic me some furniture?’
‘You can do that yourself,’ his father answered. ‘This is your realm.’
‘Wait – how can you be here? I shut the door to Avalon,’ Ordes said.
‘Because part of me is part of you,’ Merlin said. ‘Wherever you are, I can also be there.’
‘You told her you’d stay with her until the end of time,’ Ordes said.
‘And I will,’ his father answered. ‘But not yet. This time is yours.’