Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Limned in condensation and grue, the voice announced, Her,as if it had heard Jeremiah. Of course. How should it be otherwise?

Distinctly she heard tentacles curl and shift; saw them pronounce, The others are perilous. They have power. They exert themselves.And they responded to themselves, Yet hers is as great, and she does not. Within her she holds the devastation of the Earth, yet she permits the others to have their will.

It is unseemly,the same voice said or answered. It is a mystery.And again, or differently: Our lore does not account for this.

With the nerves of her skin, Linden felt Covenant raging. “ Hellfire , Linden! Give me my ring! Just throw it. I’ll catch it. I can’t protect you without my ring !”

Viles, she thought dimly. Sensory distortion made a writhen vapour of her mind. She could not think consecutively. Covenant wanted his ring. The beings around her were Viles, the makers of the Demondim: absent in her proper time, but present here. He had always wanted his ring, ever since he had first ridden into Revelstone with Masters and Jeremiah.

Spectres and ghouls. Tormented spirits.

Esmer had tried to warn her. Instead of answering her most necessary questions, he had described the history of the Viles and Demondim.

Her former lover hungered for wild magic: he craved it to repay some of this pain , although he had not said so.

Fragments of the One Forest’s lost soul. Creatures of miasma, evanescent and dire.

Do you not know, Esmer had asked her, that the Viles were once a lofty and admirable race?

It must be extinguished.The voices spoke to themselves, wisps and tendrils of elusive, impermeable darkness, using words which Linden could see but not hear, feel but not smell or taste.

It does not concern us.In the swirl of shadow, she recognised hebetude, condescension, disdain. It does not interest us.

New possibilities are coming to life. Old powers are changing.

It interests us intimately, an image or sensation argued. She is a lover of trees.

She is. Still she does not concern us.

Deliracy possessed her, a whirl of memory and confusion as lurid as fever, gravid as nightmare. Eidolons spoke so vividly that she winced. I can’t do it without you. At the same time, Esmer continued his remembered impatient peroration. For an age of the Earth, they spurned the heinous evils buried among the roots of Gravin Threndor-

“Damnation, Linden!” Covenant’s fury crawled down her spine. I can’t help you unless you find me. “Give me my ring!”

— and even in the time of Berek Lord-Fatherer no ill was known of them.

Ravers did this, she thought disjointedly. Esmer had told her so. Sounds danced around the desperate fingers of stone. Just be wary of me. Remember that I’m dead. She could not escape the rampant blurring discontinuity in her nerves, the disorder of her mind. The Ravers began cunningly to twist the hearts of the sovereign and isolate Viles.

Still words effloresced in the hollow. She does. She must be extinguished. Her power must be extinguished.

With whispers and subtle blandishments, and by slow increments, the Ravers obliquely taught the Viles to loathe their own forms.

Other shapes and images agreed. We will not survive her presence.

Their transformation had begun with mistrust and contempt toward the surviving mind of the One Forest, and toward the Forestals.

Somewhere beyond or beneath perception, Jeremiah replied, “She can’t hear you. They’ve overwhelmed her. She’s lost.”

Linden, find me.

Lost, she echoed. Oh, yes. Nothing in her life had equipped her to disentangle such chaos. If she could have lifted her fingers to the ring hanging from its chain around her neck, she might have drawn it over her head and tossed it aside, abdicating its indelible responsibility. But even that effort surpassed her. Her grasp on the Staff of Law was all that preserved her from tentacles of twilight, and she clung to it with both hands.

Survive her presence-? That made no sense. She posed no threat to such creatures. Even Covenant’s plans would not affect the fate of the Viles. Heeding the Ravers, they had decided their own doom.

Is that cause for regret?multifarious voices countered in visions, pictographs, as ultimate as ebony. It is not. We are not what we were.

And she is a lover of trees.Another Vile-or the same Vile in another avatar. Let her destroy them as she does us. She will reproach herself hereafter. We will be spared.

Spared?Linden saw indignation. Do you name extinction “spared”?

We do. Existence is tedium. Naught signifies. What are we, that we should seek to prolong it?

— a lover of trees. In spite of her fragmentation, the reiteration of that accusation touched something deep within her, some delitescent capacity for passion and choice. She was Linden Avery, a lover of trees in all sooth. Long ago, her health-sense had opened her to the vital loveliness of the woods and blooms and greenswards of Andelain. Their beauty had exalted her when she had taken hold of Vain and Findail with wild magic in order to fashion a new Staff of Law. Now she grasped that Staff in her mortal hands.

Because she was who she was, and did not mean to fail, she opened her mouth so that a shape could emerge into the swirling, interwoven gloom. It formed a yellow moire, oneiric and tenuous.

“Why?”

In response, she smelled surprise. As it bled across her senses, its tang was unmistakable.

She speaks,one or all of the Viles displayed across her vision. And one or several replied, What of it? It is not lore.And again: Ignorance and falsehood guide her kind.Their boredom reeked. It was ever so. They are a pestilence which the Earth endures solely because their lives are brief.

Were the Viles lofty and admirable? Perhaps they had once been. Perhaps they remained so. In the texture and hue of their voices, however, Linden discerned the black urgings of moksha, turiya, and samadhi .

They also do not concern us.

Under other circumstances, she might have been appalled. Now she was not. She had uttered a single word-and the Viles had heard her.

“Why?” she repeated. Her voice was fulvous in the imposed twilight; tinged with brimstone. “Why are you here?

Why do you care? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Another scend of surprise stung her nose, her eyes. Tears ran like stridulation down her cheeks.

She does not merely speak. She speaks to us. She desires to be heard.

What of it?they answered themselves in knots and coils of darkness. She holds great powers without lore. No word of hers has meaning here.

Have done with this,several Viles urged at once. Extinguish her. Her life does not profit us.

Others disagreed. She saw their severity as they answered, When power speaks, it is wisdom to give heed.

And still others: When have we ever done otherwise?And others, contemptuously: In what fashion does unexercised power imply wisdom?

Their debate made her stronger. She held the Staff of Law. And they were divided in their desires. They were Viles, on the cusp of learning to despise themselves.