Lisa Smedman - Realms of Shadow

"That's all I ask."

At long last they glimpsed Phlan. It was just in time, by the man's reckoning. The creature had eaten and drunk little and appeared on the verge of starvation or dehydration. Its eyes had grown glassy, as if it found the world no longer worth seeing.

"Is your home near this side of the city?" the man asked.

Tart of it is," she said. Then she added, "We only have to get through this swamp."

They had been slogging through muck that only loosely fit the definition of land. Early on, the man had lost both boots to the squelching mud. The druid-wizard had removed her own boots long before, to give her druid aspect a little direct contact with the earth-before she must sequester it once more to the backwaters of her mind. The Plane of Shadow felt near, so very near. She wondered if the Shadovar were preparing to bring their enclave over even now.

The man and the druid-wizard finally reached the sewer pipe. The druid-wizard paused, gauging the man's expression. He glanced around, mildly interested in the new surroundings but anxious to reach their destination. The druid-wizard ducked into the pipe.

She glanced back at him. He looked surprised but did not question her, even when the smell of sewage rose to his nostrils. Perhaps he thought she was taking the back way to some sprawling mansion.

When they reached the museum and she stopped to deposit the new denizen into an empty cage, realization dawned.

"This is it?" the man cried. "This is your home? The sewers?"

"I couldn't bring myself to tell you before: people don't take well to magicians in this city," she lied. "I've been forced underground."

"Why'd you lock them in cages like this?" he continued, as though he had not heard her. "You could give them better treatment than this!" He gestured at a random cage, then gasped as he glimpsed the monstrosity inside. "What is this? What's wrong with this turtle?"

It was a giant tortoise, but it had four heads, spaced equally apart around the rim of its shell. The heads, each one independent of the others, could not agree upon the direction in which to travel. It must have managed occasionally to drag itself to a bowl of water near the front of its cage, or it would not have survived in the wizard's absence, but when the original head won out and made for one of the four food dishes in each corner of the cage, the turtle could not reach the food, as the dishes were enclosed behind wire mesh. When the original head made for a different bowl, a head on the side would discover the last bowl and make for it instead. The scene would have been ludicrous had the turtle not been straining so hard against itself, and for so long, that a couple of its legs had scraped themselves raw in its attempts to gain ground.

"I'm trying to cure it," she answered. "I found it like this-"

"Then why not bring its food to it?" The man sprang to do just that but couldn't find a door of any kind in the bars. "Open it!" he commanded.

She did so with a gesture, bemused. The man tore the wire mesh from the food dishes and slid them toward each of the tortoise's four heads. The tortoise choked down the morsels as the man squatted near it, watching.

"I know you can fix this," the man said over his shoulder. "I saw you turn an entire woman into a cow. Why can't you just wave away three of this turtle's… f He stopped. "Unless you did this to it," he whispered. He looked at her. "You didn't find the turtle like this, did you? It was fine when you found it, wasn't it? You took it…"

The druid-wizard didn't like the way this was going. The tortoise was nothing compared to some of her other tenants. She must keep him from seeing the others.

"I did what it's my nature to do," she finished for him, coaxing him to her chambers, holding his eyes with hers. "Surely you knew on some level. The things that give me joy-they aren't joyous things, but I can't help that they bring me joy."

"How could you…? Never mind. What did you really plan to do with the creature we captured? No, never mind that, either."

He paused to think. They had entered her bedchamber, and she eased him down into a chair.

"After your trick with the peddler, I thought…" He trailed off. "But this…"

She let him mull things over without interruption.

After a few moments, he said, "I guess maybe I did know on some level. Maybe that's one of the things that attracted me to you, but that doesn't mean I accept it! I mean, I can find joy in trees, birds, and flowers… Why can't you?"

He had meant the question rhetorically, but she answered anyway. "Because I can't deny what I am."

"But why resign yourself like that? Somehow you had to become what you are. You only need to backtrack to the point where things went wrong…"

She turned his face gently toward her. His eyes ceased wandering about the room and focused on hers.

"It doesn't work that way," she said tenderly.

He looked back into her eyes fully for a moment then wrenched his face from her grasp.

"I have to go," he choked.

He stumbled from the room.

The man fled whence he had come, his vision bleared by tears. When he passed the corridor of horrors, the faces all seemed to rise up in myriad yawning grimaces, crying and moaning, and sometimes screaming.

But the imprisoned creatures made no sound. Those sounds came from him.

He found himself back outside, pant legs splattered in sewage, the light of an overcast afternoon searing his dilated eyes. He jogged blindly, heedless of swamp mud and brambles, until he found himself in a small clearing. The clearing was dead. No water softened its ground, stagnant or otherwise. No grass grew. No swamp insects buzzed. Overhead, where branches protruded, green leaves gave way to bare, dead limbs, almost as if someone had drawn a line: life on one side, death on the other. The man found the absence of all life-all magic-comforting. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the clearing and let the nothing embrace him, soothe him. The emptiness would be complete if only…

He removed his backpack, which he had hoped to remove in a roomy suite in the wizard's nonexistent house. It carried his two treasures. He pulled out Chever's notes, traced the lines of the handwriting with his fingers, then crumpled them and sent them flying. A breeze lifted them, and a couple of pages caught on tree branches. A thin rain had begun to fall; it would mold that parchment to the trees soon enough.

It felt good to be rid of the magic; he hated it now. Magic meant lies and betrayal. Magic meant loving, then finding that you love a stranger, then discovering that you cannot stop loving even when nothing of the illusion remains.

He touched the rose, whose petals had begun to collect raindrops. It was crying-no. It was only a flower that had collected a little rain. With a tortured cry, he hurled it, too, as far as he could throw it, then broke into wracking sobs.

In her den, the druid-wizard looked up, sensing something amiss. The notes…? She closed her eyes and focused upon them. She saw the swamp… the man, weeping and trudging back toward the sewer… the notes sagging in a drizzle in a clearing he had left behind! She immediately teleported to the clearing and gathered the notes under her robe. As easy as that, they were hers.

As the druid-wizard dabbed the notes dry while waiting for the man's return, she could not help but consider his misery. In spite of herself, she wanted to alleviate it. How to accomplish that? Well, what had he loved before she had come along? His rose. Chever's notes. Those were all. The rose was gone, broken in the swamp, its crime its failure to convince the man that it was more than what it seemed. The notes, though…