Benjamin Tate - Well of Sorrows

Then he ran across the knife.

He paused, setting the bolt of cloth that had covered the blade aside distractedly. He reached for the knife, hesitated a moment, then picked it up. It was meant for eating, its blade no longer than his fingers, although the edge was sharp and would cut flesh easily. He knew. After he’d awakened in the forest, near the Well-after he came to realize that he’d been saved but that everyone else had perished-he hadn’t wanted to live. So he’d slid the knife into his heart, had felt the warmth of his heart’s blood spill over his hands when he pulled it free with a shuddering gasp and then collapsed. He’d heard Osserin cry out in shock, had smiled as the Faelehgre’s light hovered over him, the Faelehgre yelling, You fool! You utter fool! He’d gathered the encroaching darkness to him willingly, succumbing to it with a grateful sigh.

And then he’d woken up, leaves blowing into his face, the bloody knife half fallen out of his grasp. The ground around him had been saturated with his blood. His shirt had been matted to his body, a rent in the fabric above his heart where he’d shoved the knife through it. Blood had coated the inside of his mouth and he’d rolled to spit it out To discover that his chest hurt. A pain so deep he’d gagged, then curled up into a fetal position and shuddered with its intensity. There wasn’t a mark on his skin, but he could feel the wound deep inside, a wound that hadn’t completely healed yet, a wound that should have been fatal.

It’s the Lifeblood, Osserin had explained as he healed. When you drank from the Well, the Lifeblood saved you from the Shadow’s touch and in the process it… changed you.

Colin turned the blade over in his hands in his room, then slid it into his pack as well. He hadn’t tried to kill himself since that day, didn’t intend to try again. That had been a dark moment, not even two weeks after he’d drunk from the Well. A moment of utter despair.

And it had been the first sign that the Lifeblood hadn’t simply saved him from the Shadows. It had altered him in some fundamental way.

He thought of the black mark on his wrist and grimaced. “And it’s changing me still.”

Slinging the pack over his shoulder, he scanned the room, but he saw nothing else he needed, nothing he wanted. Grabbing an empty flask and the lantern, he turned and left without looking back.

There was still one more item left to collect.

He passed through the darkness of a few other interior rooms before stepping into the dawn. The air was crisp, sharp with autumn, the pervasive smell of pine and cedar underneath. Mist hung between the trees and what remained of the rounded grayish-white buildings that had once formed Terra’nor, the central city of the Faelehgre when they had ruled the forest depths, when they had been flesh and blood beings. The ruins were surprisingly intact-a consequence of the proximity of the Well-but there were signs that the abandoned buildings were crumbling here and there. Colin could see where a pedestal that had once supported a statue was now half subsumed by the earth. Drifts of leaves and pine needles had mostly covered the paved white roadways between the buildings, and here and there one of the balustrades of a balcony in one of the myriad towers had shattered. Few of the glass windows or doorways remained intact, although in his explorations over the years he had found one or two, the glass itself nearly flawless, without the typical bubbles and imperfections he’d seen in Portstown and Trent Colin stilled, his earlier troubled frown returning. He hadn’t thought about Portstown, let alone Trent, in ages. He’d tried hard to forget Portstown-Sartori and Walter and all the rest-had succeeded for years on end. Yet now he woke from an age- old dream, one he hadn’t had in a long time, one that he wished he could forget. And he saw Portstown in the ruins he’d called home for decades.

Uneasiness crawled across his skin, and the muscles in his shoulders tightened. He drew the staff closer, his eyes darting around the sunken plaza before him, searching the mist tinged with the first signs of sunlight, the shadows of the open doorways and windows of the buildings.

Trees rustled in the breeze, and the mist began to lift.

His uneasiness grew. He suddenly wanted to talk to one of the Faelehgre-Osserin or Tessera. Now.

As if he’d reached out and called to him, Osserin’s voice exploded in his mind.

Colin! The sukrael! They’re at the Well!

Colin was moving before Osserin had finished, uneasiness transformed into motion. The mask of age-a physical affectation-sloughed away. Wrinkled skin tightened, slack muscles firmed. A slight limp in his right leg straightened, and the tweaks and twinges of old muscles dissipated. The weariness brought on by the weight of years was shrugged aside, shed like bothersome clothing. In the space of a heartbeat, he grew young, at least twenty years younger, if not more, a nearly unconscious transformation. A reflex.

Where are they coming from? And where are the rest of the Faelehgre? He couldn’t stop the anger from entering his voice, the acidic bite that always appeared when he thought of the Shadows.

The south. We went to investigate a disturbance at the edge of the forest.

And you left the Well unguarded?

Colin felt Osserin’s annoyance. We can’t guard the Well at all times. There aren’t enough of us. You know this. We’ve had this argument before.

Colin snorted. So there’s no one at the Well right now? No one at all?

It’s unprotected.

Colin growled and picked up his pace.

His room wasn’t far from the Well, but far enough. He sprinted down pathways lined with dirt and needles, past standing stone columns, past a wide-based, cracked fountain in the center of an oval plaza. He dodged through the rounded door of a low building, through its empty inner rooms and out the far side, satchel jouncing against his back, then raced down gentle steps to what had once been a marketplace. Sunlight burst through the layer of fog and lit the main roadway through the city a gleaming, vibrant white as he sped down its length, the buildings on either side growing taller, the spires more intricate and magnificent. Then the buildings fell away, abruptly, the roadway opening out into an oval amphitheater, gentle white steps sloping downward toward the rough stone edges of the Well itself.

He sucked in a sharp breath and drew up short at the edge of the highest step, using his staff to steady himself. He could sense the Well now, a physical force pressing against every layer of his skin, tingling there. It pulsed in his blood, shivered through his gut, tickled his lungs with every breath he took. A cool sensation, smooth and fluid, smelling of dried leaves and dark earth.

His stomach cramped in reaction, in anticipation. The breath he’d drawn hissed out at the pain, but he shoved the ache aside while repressing an ecstatic shudder, surveyed the theater, the trees to either side, the boundaries of the Well beneath. The wide stone steps-ones he’d barely seen so many years before when the Faelehgre had led him here, ones he’d stumbled down, at the edge of asphyxiation-descended gradually, narrowing until they reached the lip of the Well and terminated. There, the waters of the Well stretched outward in a wide, placid circle, the surface perfectly smooth and untroubled, the depths clear. Over a hundred hands across, the Well seized Colin’s attention, and he involuntarily took a step down. The hand holding the lantern spasmed and lifted, reached toward the water, and for a moment he literally felt the grit of the ancient stone that held its waters on his fingers.

But he caught himself, his outstretched hand tightening into a white-knuckled fist. He forced it back to his side. He wasn’t here to drink. He never intended to drink from the Well again. He was here to protect.