Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

The void was gray and featureless, sheathed in ghostly, clinging mist. Anvar hesitated, momentarily at a loss as to which way to proceed. Behind him, he heard the comforting tones of Hellorin’s voice. “Take three steps forward, Anvar—and do not look back. You’ll find that the way will become clear to you.”

Anvar shuddered at the thought of stepping out into that formless nothingness, yet ... The Forest Lord must know what he was doing. He had opened the way into this Place Between the Worlds, cleaving the fabric of reality with an outstretched hand to produce this eerie doorway.

“Take courage, young Mage—this is a safer road than the one you traveled with the Moldan—which admittedly is saying very little.”

The rueful humor that lurked behind the Forest Lord’s words heartened Anvar. Besides, the Mage reminded himself, this was the only way back to his own world—and Aurian. He had already said his farewells to Eilin and Hellorin, so there was no reason to linger. Anvar swallowed hard, and stepped forward into the gray mists. The glimmer of warm light from the Forest Lord’s chamber was cut off abruptly as the Door Between the Worlds closed behind him, destroying all hope of returning or retreat.

From somewhere, Anvar found his courage and marshaled his racing thoughts. Three steps, had the Herd-lord said? Well, so be it. The ground, if ground it could be called—certainly it was not earth—had a soft, clinging resilience beneath his feet. Counting, Anvar began to pace . . .

At the third step, the gray mist vanished. The uncertain surface beneath his feet took on the reassuring solidity of stone. Anvar, startled, raised a hand to his face, and saw his fingers, as he had seen them once before, wreathed in a ghostly glimmer of blue Magelight, as though his magic had taken on a physical form of its own, to cover his earthly flesh. He experienced a fleeting flash of memory—a vision of a carven gray door—and then the thought was gone. Grimly practical once more, Anvar lifted the glimmering hand to illuminate his surroundings.

He was in a tunnel: a narrow corridor roughly hacked from some hard, gleaming, faceted black rock. To his astonishment, it was scored along its length, at roughly eye level, with strange, indecipherable runes and angular pictures. Anvar, moving slowly along the length of the tunnel, gasped. There, outlined in the gleam of his Magelight, was the entire history of the Cataclysm!

Marveling, the Mage followed the tale to its end, where Avithan, once the son of the Chief Wizard but now called Father of the Gods, had led his followers, the six surviving Wizards, to seek sanctuary Between the Worlds, by the Timeless Lake. And in the final picture . . .

The depiction was in a different style from all the rest. It showed a face—female—surrounded by a swirling mane of hair, cunningly carved so that it caught up Anvar’s Magelight and glowed back at him with a frosty gleam. The face, hawkish and high-cheekboned, reminded the Mage of Aurian, but it was older, somehow, and different, in a way he could not place. The great, fierce round eyes were not the eyes of a human, but an eagle. They seemed to hold Anvar’s gaze, piercing deep into his mind, uncovering his innermost thoughts . . .

The Mage had no idea how long he stood there, spellbound and entranced. He looked up at last to see a different light before him, framed in a yawning maw of blackest stone. A sky of deepest indigo, sprinkled with bright stars. With a gasp of relief, Anvar left the unnerving carving and hastened outside.

Another shred of memory, vivid and brief, flicked through Anvar’s mind. The black, curving backs of hills, shouldering one another, outlined against a starry sky . . . But this time, it was mountains. A peaceful valley, its swelling flanks clothed in a fragrant patchwork of bracken and pine, and cupped like a jewel, a calm and starlit lake. As he reached the tunnel mouth, some sense of circumspection returned to Anvar. He crept cautiously out, looking about him and listening hard, to emerge upon a narrow beach, all covered with smoothly rounded stones about the size of his clenched fist, sloping down to a strip of shingle that fringed a deep-cut bay at the head of the lake. There was not a sound, except the murmurous lapping of wavelets and the rhythmic rasp of rolling shingle at the water’s edge.

At first, the Mage felt horribly exposed upon the open beach, yet as the peaceful stillness of this place seeped gradually into his soul, he felt his spirits lighten, filling him with a calm confidence and sense of certainty. Hark lake seemed to draw him, washing away all the pain and anxiety that had been his constant companions over these last months, and replacing them with a lulling sense of warmth and welcome.

Anvar walked down to the edge of the mere and looked into the still, dark waters. For a moment he experienced a giddy sense of disorientation. Stars, he saw—depth upon depth filled with endless stars, as though, instead of looking down, he looked up and up into the infinite night sky. Just stars, reflected in a lake—and yet ...

It took a moment for Anvar to identify that nagging sense of wrongness. With a gasp, he looked wildly up at the sky, then down into the lake again. Then cursing, he scrambled back, away from those waters as though they had been deadly poison. The stars! The stars were wrong! The sky that was reflected in those obsidian depths was not the clear night sky above!

The wind was rising. A clump of reeds at the lake edge began to rattle and whisper, hissing with wild laughter. The lake’s reflected stars were lost as the waters grew choppy. Small waves, growing larger, charged the strip of beach like cavalry, white tossing manes at their crests. Anvar, still backing, turned and ran/or the secure shelter of the tunnel—only to fetch up against a blank, black wall of stone.

A grating rumble, growing to a thunderous roar, made the Mage turn back again, toward the lake. In the center, the waters were boiling, bubbling, rising up in a sleek and twisting hump. A great black fang broke through the tortured surface, flinging the waves aside in a vast white blossom of foam. Huge arcs of spray glittered skyward, clawing at the stars with silver fingers before crashing back, spent, into the lake.

Up from the wind-tossed waters of the mere, an island rose. A towering black crag like a decayed and jagged tooth. Lake waters, churned from black to vibrant white, cascaded from its rising flanks.

Anvar, flattened against the sheer cliff at his back, shrank away as great waves thundered up the beach toward him. His old fear of water, of drowning, almost swamped his senses—until, after a moment’s choking terror, he realized that though the waves were crashing at his very feet and spray and spume leapt up around his head, his skin and clothes were still dry, as though protected by some invisible barrier beyond which the waters dared not go. The breakers stopped just short of him, like ill-used curs that darted in to snap at his boots, but were afraid to come any closer. Was he being warned? Gritting his teeth, the Mage reminded himself why he had come here. Only the Cailleach, the Lady of the Mists, could send him back to his own world. Only through her grace could he win the Harp of Winds. He could only accomplish these things by meeting with her—and now, it seemed, he had attracted her attention.

Well and good ... or so Anvar tried to convince himself. But the Lady of the Mists was one of the Guardians: far above those that Magefolk legend had named as gods. Her powers transcended even those of Hellorin, for the Phaerie merely wielded the powers of the Old Magic. The Cailleach was one of those powers incarnate—and she had the Wild Magic, most dangerous of all, at her call besides.

By this time the island had emerged completely, and the waters were beginning to settle. Anvar’s strip of shingle was slowly appearing, oddly reconfigured, as the lake grew calm. The valley became still once more—but without its former sense of peace. Now the atmosphere was tense with brooding anticipation.