Tad Williams: Shadowheart

“Come back,” the voice whispered. “Step out and join me, manchild. The light is good here.”

He did not know who he was or who spoke to him. He did not know where he was, or why the darkness that surrounded him felt so immense—a place where you could fall for a thousand years before you even realized you were falling…

“Come back.” A minute flicker of light, the faintest possible glimmer, appeared before him. “Come here. Come and run in these green fields with me, child. Where you were going is too cold.”

He opened his eyes, or at least that was how it seemed: the blur of light spread and deepened. Green and blue and white, the colors burst out, and he felt like he drank them down as a thirsty man gulps water. The clouds, the grass, the distant hills… and what was this new thing? Something white skimming toward him down the gray sky, a great bird with wings so wide they seemed as if they would brush a cloud with each tip: it was Saqri, of course, wearing a dream-form—or perhaps he was learning something deep and true about her that could only be experienced here.

“Run with me!” the swan called to him in the fairy queen’s gentle, musical voice. “Run! I will follow you.”

Fixed on the beautiful white bird, his senses swimming with delight, he spread his own wings to leap toward her, only to realize he was not a winged thing at all but a creature of hooves and strong legs and long strides. As he bolted out over the green meadows there seemed little difference between what he did now and what he would have done with wings. It was a wonderful freedom—it felt right .

“Where is this place?” he called.

“It is not a matter of ‘where’ but of something different… ‘how,’ perhaps ...”

He found he did not care. It was enough simply to run, to feel the wind making his mane and tail snap, to thrill to the thunder of his own hooves as they tore the grass beneath his feet into flying clods.

She skimmed past him and for a moment was content to fly just a little way ahead, matching his pace so that she seemed to float, rowing herself through the air with her vast pinions, black-beaked head on a neck long as a spear. “Are you weary, child?” she called. “Would you like to stop?”

“Never!” He laughed. “I could do this forever.” And it seemed like he had never said anything more true—that there would be no greater heaven than to run here forever, fit and strong and free of everything.

But what is this place? His stride faltered a little. Where am I? I was… I’m not… He felt his powerful body carrying him across the face of the world on four striding legs. But I’m not a horse… I’m a man… !

Heaven. Is this heaven? Does that mean I’m dead?

And suddenly he shuddered to a stop, the hills suddenly high and close, the sky darker, everything near and threatening. “Where am I?” he said again. “What have you done to me?”

The swan banked and circled. “Done to you? Those are hard words, Barrick Eddon. I brought you back when I could have let you go. I brought you back.”

“From where?”

“From what is next.”

“I was… dying?” A chill stabbed him deep in his center. Even through this fevered excitement, he could suddenly feel how close he had come.

“Do not fear it. It is a road all of us must tread one day… all of us except the gods, that is.”

“What do you mean?” He was trying to look down at his curious body but his head and neck were not well-shaped to do so. It felt unfamiliar—but also strangely familiar. “You mean everybody dies? But you don’t. You and the king and all your ancestors… you don’t.”

“We will see. If the Fireflower leads you to share our fate, you will be able to judge for yourself what kind of immortality our gift gives to us.”

The great bowl of meadow surrounded by hills seemed to grow darker still, as if a storm rushed in overhead, but in truth the mixed skies had not changed. “And this place? If I’m not dead, this isn’t Heaven.”

The swan stretched her beautiful neck. “It is not—although names are at best troublesome in these lands. It is another place. One that I could not be certain you would cross, or even reach, as you began to slip away from the places of the living—there is much I do not know about your people. But it was the only place I could have found you before it was too late, and the only place where I could be strong enough to hold you until you could make your own choice to return to the world or not.”

Suddenly, as if a door had been thrown open, letting light in, he remembered. “It was the voices—all the… the things I knew. The Fireflower. And it felt like I was knowing more every moment… !” He felt his four feet restless beneath him suddenly, his entire body tensed to run.

“Of course,” she said, and for the first time since he had first heard it he found her voice soothing. “Of course. It is difficult enough for one of our kind—how much stranger and more painful for one of your folk. That is why we are seeking help for you.” A flicker of spread wing, a sunbeam of white blazing before his eyes, and she was off again. “So follow! We will go where mortals do not venture, except for those rare few that can dream a path. Those travelers pay for their journey with their happiness and their rest. Who knows what those like us, we who have neither rest nor happiness, will be asked to pay?”

Up into the hills he ran, following the dim form of the swan as it darted low over the grass ahead of him. The trees snapped past him like arrows and his legs drove him tirelessly as he ran from twilight into true darkness.

He ran so fast he could not feel the air, but nevertheless the cold grew in him, crystals of ice forming in his blood as they might on the surface of a slow-moving river as winter settled in. And as the cold and darkness grew, he crossed into a land where the hills grew naked of grass and great piles of stones loomed, each one somber and alone despite the thousands of others that surrounded it. The light now was as pale as that which fell from a waning moon, but there was no moon, only a black sky and a glow that painted the standing heaps of stone as though they were not whole things with weight and breadth but only spirits of stones gleaming in an unending midnight.

And as they passed farther and farther into this quiet, disheartening realm, the swan flickering low on the horizon was the only thing that reminded him of what daylight had been. A little of who he was and what he was doing came back to him.

Barrick Eddon. Son of the king of Southmarch. Brother of Briony… and of Kendrick.

He had fought all the way to the heart of Faerie because Lady Yasammez had commanded it. He had carried a mirror containing part of a god’s essence all the way to Qul-na-Qar because Gyir the Storm Lantern, Yasammez’ servant, had begged him to. And now he was carrying within himself the painful gift of the Fireflower, the life and thought and memory of all the kings of the Qar since the god Kupilas had fathered the line.

My blood comes from a god’s blood. No surprise I have this dreadful storm in my head ...!

But he didn’t, and that was what finally struck him: since he had crossed over into this land, he had felt nothing in his head but his own thoughts: the Fireflower voices and memories had gone still. He had fallen back into the familiar glory of this solitude without even realizing how strange it now was.

“Saqri! Saqri, where have the voices gone?”

“If you mean the Fireflower ancestors, you cannot hear them now but you will again. Here you are no longer in your own land, where they can speak only into the ears of Crooked’s children. We have crossed over into lands you have only glimpsed in the deepest and strangest of dreams. We are with the dead… and the slumbering gods.”