Lisa Smedman - Realms of Shadow

Perhaps if the man had the time to study them more, he would find the answers he sought, the answers he had felt were just beyond his reach back when he first showed her the notes at his cabin.

Maybe she didn't need the notes for her own purposes just yet. Maybe she would have him study them a while longer. In fact, if he reached a breakthrough, that knowledge might prove invaluable to the Shadovar, put the citizens of Shade Enclave in the druid-wizard's debt. Yes…

She couldn't wait long, though. During the last few days, she had begun to hear the Shadovar's call, and it grew louder with each day.

When the man returned, he first paused at the cage of the creature they had brought back from the Deserts-mouth Mountains. He held his hand up to the bars, and the creature mirrored the gesture. Their gazes locked for a moment, then the man tore his away and made his way to the woman's chambers.

She looked up when he entered, and he nodded as though nothing had happened; indeed, as though he had been entering just this way for many years, coming home after a hard day's work. She seemed a little damp, as if she had been out in a mist or sweating over a difficult spell.

She reached out her hand, and in it were Chever's notes. "You shouldn't leave such valuable things lying around," she said.

A few days ago, he might have railed at her, accused her of spying. Instead he just stared dully, waiting for her direction.

"You should keep studying these," she continued. "They may help you find completion."

Back in the world of magic and lies, he could not refuse. He took the notes to the nearest table and began to read over the familiar words for the first time in what seemed like months. The woman left him to his thoughts.

When the druid-wizard peeked in later, she thought that perhaps the intermission had done the man good. He was poring over the notes avidly, as though he had never thrown them away.

The days passed.

The druid-wizard rarely went out. She had skipped the last few archwizard moots.

The man ventured out to obtain food or to wipe his mind clean in one dead clearing or another. Each time he returned, he paused at the same creature's cage, took what silent wisdom he could glean from it, and pushed on.

The man did not know of the floating city. The druid-wizard would not stand for him to accompany her to it. She had watched him grow paler each day, watched his hair turn grayer and lose its luster, watched the dark circles grow under his eyes and his shoulders slump. He would not live long in the darkest catacombs of the city of darkness.

But she would not allow him to live without her, either.

One windy, magic-strewn evening, the woman approached the man.

"I have something to show you," she said.

She clasped his wrist, and they teleported to the edge of a cliff.

Stars sang their distant song, and the waxing moon was bright. The man stood at the edge, cloak whipping about him. He could feel her presence slightly behind him; possibly she had taken on her wolf form, which had become a familiar event to him. When he turned, she was human.

"Why did you bring me here?"

"Have you by chance made any breakthroughs with Chever's notes?"

"What?… Oh. No, nothing significant. Why do you ask?"

"No reason." She sighed and moved up beside him. "I wanted to show you that, because of you, I can take joy in more than pain. The stars…"

She gestured, then turned to him.

"I was a druid once, you know. I still am, in many ways, but I'm a wizard more. When I was only a druid, I loved the stars, but they didn't give me joy as they do now. It's a gift 111 treasure."

She flowed to him, and she kissed him long and hard.

The kiss tasted like poison, and the man quailed, sensing his life spinning out of his control. He broke the kiss with a small cry.

The woman held him at arm's length for a moment, looking into his eyes.

And she was gone.

The man's heart wrenched, grieved and painful. Power left him-something sucked it out. Loss overwhelmed his senses, and he fell to the ground.

The man awoke on the cliff top and picked his long way back to the sewers in a daze. The sewers had become home to him so easily…

In the days that followed, the woman did not return. Perhaps her evil deeds had finally caught up with her, or perhaps she had found a more suitable mate. The man made some perfunctory inquires about her in the town, but rarely did anyone know of her. Those who had heard of her grimaced as at a bad taste and would not speak to him. She had wanted to leave, in any case, and who was he to come upon her unwanted? He thought of the peddler-turned-cow and shuddered.

Days poured one into the next with nothing to distinguish them from those gone before or those come after, except that, on some days, he imagined he could sense the woman from whatever place she had gone to. What was he to do now?

He could not open the cages of her museum, since only magic could open them. Rather than leave the prisoners to wither, he slipped all but the newest member of their congregation poison purchased from a street vendor with gold coins he had found in one of the woman's robes. He told himself it was mercy-killing.

He attended to the newest creature's needs better than he attended to his own. He took violently ill, leaving trails of coughed-up blood on the cold floors. His disinterest in his own life might be conspiring to bring about his demise, or perhaps something in her final kiss…

As the lackluster days continued to drag, the stench of the dead in their cells grew thick, until the man thought sometimes that he must have fallen into the Nine Hells in error, the sole living being among the Hordes. Only his creature companion kept him from being alone-and one day it, too, died.

The day the last creature died, the man climbed from the sewers into the city. Twice along the way, he encountered sickly plants that seemed to move of their own accord. He wondered whether they were endowed with sentience as he had once thought his rose was, or if they had once been people who had found themselves on the wrong end of a wizard's spell.

He wandered into a tavern, oblivious of the wrinkled noses and the patrons who got up to move or leave when he sat near them. He stared blankly into a mug of mead for a while, and, following sudden dizziness, the world became blank and utterly white.

When he came to-when the white dimmed to the colors of earth-the man lay curled up in swamp mud. The first thing he saw was the rose-a hallucination. An illusion.

He reached out, palm up. The illusion's head rested softly upon his fingers. He wept.

When the tears ceased, the rose was still there.

He felt something hard beneath his ribs, lodged in the mud, and shifted to push it aside. A rock. A light touch brushed his cheek. When he had shifted, he had come nearer to the rose, and now it touched its face to his.

He pushed himself to a sitting position and cupped the bloom between his palms. It had taken root at a slant; it had fallen on its side when he had thrust it from himself in a time that seemed so long ago. Its stem had curved to enable it to capture what rays of sun it could through the swamp's mossy ceiling.

He gradually became aware of his hands; something about them had nagged at the back of his mind ever since he had awakened.