Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

The rock under her fingers was wet. Dampness filled the air: already a spray as fine as mist moistened her cheeks, her hands. She felt inestimable masses crowding around her, basalt and obsidian, schist and granite on all sides; league after league of the Land’s most ancient stone.

Jeremiah had transported her into the depths of the mountain.

The surface on which she knelt had been worn smooth by eons of water. Yet it was warm rather than cold; palpably heated by the energies within the Skyweir. The droplets on her face felt like sweat.

The imminent tremors which had disturbed her on the plateau were stronger here. Underground, she was closer to the pressures which would one day split Melenkurion Skyweir to its foundations: But that upheaval would not happen now. More force would be required to bring about the inevitable crisis.

Those sensations were small things, however; effectively trivial. The unexplained moisture in the air and the nearly audible groaning among the mountain’s roots were dwarfed as soon as she recognised them, swept away like the plateau and the open heavens by raw power.

She was surrounded by Earthpower, immersed in it. Its primeval might seemed as immense as the Skyweir itself, and as unanswerable. By comparison, the healing potency of Glimmermere and the mind-blending waters of the horserite tarn were minor instances of the Earth’s true life, and everything that Linden had done since she had returned to the Land paled into insignificance. Here was the uncompromised fount of the Land’s vitality and loveliness. If it had not been natural and clean, as necessary as sunlight to every aspect of the living world, its simple proximity would have undone her.

And yet-

As soon as she recognised the concentrated presence of Earthpower, she realised that she had not yet reached its source. The vast strength flowing around her had been attenuated by other waters. The spray that beaded on her forehead, trickled into her eyes, ran down her cheeks, arose from less eldritch springs. They were rich with minerals, squeezed from the mountain gutrock to nourish the world. If she had submerged herself in them, they might have washed the weariness from her abused flesh. But they were not the Blood of the Earth.

Now she shivered, not because she was cold, but because she was afraid. The crux of her intentions was near, and she might fail.

“Jeremiah?” she croaked. “Honey? Covenant?” But no sound answered her. Silence entombed the space around her. Earthpower stilled the spray and the stone and the damp air.

Panic clutched at her chest. She jerked up her head, closed her fingers around the Staff. Then she stopped.

The wood of the construct had begun to shine. Or perhaps it had been shining all along, and her senses had failed to register the truth. Every bit of deadwood from the smallest twig to the heaviest bough emitted a murky phosphorescence. Each detail of the cage was limned in nacre, defined by moonlight. Yet the glow shed no illumination. She could not see the stone on which she knelt, or the Staff clutched in her hand. The portal’s luminescence referred only to itself.

Nevertheless the white outlines enabled her to discern the black silhouettes of her companions. Covenant still crouched in one corner of the box. Jeremiah remained near the place where he had sealed his construct.

Linden’s pulse drummed in her ears. Around her, the lightless phosphorescence of the wood intensified. Covenant and Jeremiah sank deeper into darkness as the nacre mounted. Briefly the cage resembled a contorted meshwork woven of sterile wild magic, affectless, its purpose exhausted.

A heartbeat later, the entire construct flared soundlessly and vanished as every scrap and splinter of deadwood was consumed by the aftereffects of Jeremiah’s theurgy.

She expected unilluminable midnight. Instead, however, a warm reddish glow opened around her as if the last deflagration of Jeremiah’s door had set fire to her surroundings.

The light was not bright enough to hurt her eyes. She blinked rapidly, not because she had been dazzled, but because the sudden disappearance of the box exposed her to the full impact of Earthpower. Ineffable puissance stung her eyes and nose: tears joined the spray on her cheeks as if she were weeping. Through the blur, she saw Covenant stand upright, arch his back as if he had been crouching for hours. She saw her son look at Covenant and grin like the blade of a scimitar.

Then her nerves began to adjust. Slowly her vision cleared.

She and her companions were on a stone shelf at the edge of a stream nearly broad enough to be called a river. Jeremiah’s construct had brought them to a cavern as high and wide as the forehall of Revelstone. The arching rock was crude, unfashioned: clearly the cavern was a natural formation. But all of its facets had been worn smooth by millennia of spray and Earthpower.

And they radiated a ruddy illumination that filled the cave. The particular hue of the glow-soft crimson with a fulvous undertone-made the rushing current look black and dangerous, more like ichor than water. The stone seemed to contemplate lava, imagine magma. It remained gently warm, stubbornly solid. Nevertheless it implied the possibility that it might one day flow and burn.

Linden had seen illumination like this before, in the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder. Covenant had called it “rocklight,” and it was inherent to certain combinations of stone and Earthpower. It had not been caused by Jeremiah’s theurgy. Instead his portal had temporarily blinded her to the lambent stone, the tumbling stream. Spray and warmth and Earthpower had entered through the gaps among the branches: light had not.

In spite of the water’s speed and turbulence, it was utterly silent. It raced along its course without the slightest gurgle or slap. She might have believed that she had been stricken deaf; that the concentration of Earthpower was too acute for her ears. But then she heard Covenant speak.

“Good,” he announced for the third time. “We’re almost there.”

Only the water had been silenced by the weight of Earthpower.

Involuntarily Linden’s gaze followed them current as it spilled into a crevice at the end of the cavern. But when she turned her head in the other direction, she felt a rush of astonishment. The source of the stream-and the fine spray-was a high waterfall that spewed from the cave’s ceiling and pounded in turmoil down onto a pile of slick stones and boulders at the head of the watercourse. Every plume and spatter of the torrent caught the fiery light in a profuse scattering of reflections: the waterfall resembled a downpour of rubies and carbuncles, incarnadine gemstones; profligate instances of Earthpower. Yet the towering spectacle was entirely soundless. The bedizened tumult of spume and collision had no voice.

“How-?” Linden breathed the question aloud simply to confirm that she could still hear. “How is it possible’?”

She did not expect an answer. But Covenant muttered, “Beats the hell out of me. I’ve never understood it. There’s probably just too much Earthpower here for our senses to handle.”

Like the waterfall, the spray on his face sparkled redly. His features were webbed with droplets of light and eagerness.

“That’s just water,” he said, dismissing the lit implications of the falls. “When it finds its way out of the mountain, it’ll be the Black River. But the Blood of the Earth comes in here. It leaks out through those rocks.” He indicated the foot of the waterfall. “That’s what causes all this rocklight. Earthpower has soaked into the stone. But it’s too thin for what we need. We have to get to the source.”

Linden could see no obvious way in or out of the cavern. But Covenant pointed at the waterfall. “Through there.”