C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

“But I didn’t. Will the memorial still be there? Will I find Dafydd and Hafgan there, or did I have to go through the right door to find them?”

“The city is the same, dark or light. What is in one is in the other. But you may see and feel and face things here that you might not have had to there.”

“More trials,” Lara said, and Llyr tipped his head in acknowledgment. Lara nodded, then turned her attention back to the city, trying as best she could to memorize the overlapping streets and curving walls. She couldn’t use a truthseeker’s path, but a study of the byways now might allow her to test them as she came to them, to get a sense of their trueness or falsity with regards to her destination. Eventually she nodded again, as confident as she could be of her bearings. “How will I get past the front door?”

“There are other entrances to the towers. That, at least, I can help you with.” Llyr offered his hand, guiding Lara from the parapets back into the tumbledown towers.

Shadows flickered at the corners of her eyes as they left the towers, monsters like and unlike the chimera. None of them came for her, though, not with Llyr walking beside her. Some even swam closer, like they were curious about the watery god. Pain flooded his face time and again, suggesting he lacked the power to set the amalgamated creatures to rights.

No, not the power, Lara decided, when one monstrous fish with a jaw like a coelacanth’s swam up to them. Nothing else about it resembled prehistoric fish; it was sleek-bodied, delicately finned, and of bright clashing colors worsened by the black light. Llyr lifted a hand, a slow sympathetic gesture, and almost touched the thing, but recoiled at the last instant. The fish twitched as if it had been shocked and darted away with a few quick beats of its tail.

“I tried for a very long time,” Llyr murmured a few steps later. “I tried to turn them back to the things they had begun as. It worked. It was only as the new creatures became more grotesque and deformed that I realized that each new burst of power I released in healing them corrupted and twisted another beast even more profoundly. The deformities only reach as far as the shallow fishing waters that were once these lands’ shores. Beyond that barrier I can correct for the things magic has done here, but very little passes through it safely. These waters were once my heart, and are long since my heartbreak. I do not come here, Lara Jansen. Not if I can help it.”

“I’m sorry for the pain coming for me must have caused,” Lara said carefully. “But I’m not sorry you came. Thank you.”

“Perhaps something bright will finally be born of the darkness here.” Llyr stopped in front of a shell-ridden wall looming before them. Arches filled with black light showed the extravagance of carved doors that had once stood in them, even giving hints of the colored windows that must have dominated the doors and hall. “The city walls are very near here. Strike out on your companion’s path and you will, with luck, find your way to the … memorials.”

“And without luck I’ll die,” Lara said quietly. Llyr shrugged and stepped back as she put a hand on one of the light-filled doors and pushed. It moved easily, but barely: even built of light, it had the mass of stone carved ten feet high. “Llyr?”

“Truthseeker?”

Lara looked back at him. “Do you know what happened in Annwn? Can you tell me how the lands were drowned?”

A shudder ran through the sea god, washing away the edges of his elfin shape. The wild foam that was his hair stretched, dissipating into water, and when he answered it was as if the ocean surrounding her spoke. “I was there, as was my daughter’s mother Caillech, and all the old gods of the land and sky and sea. But we cannot tell you what came to pass. Rhiannon was our daughter, and her blood binds us as she is bound. Seek. Do your duty, and may worlds come changed at end of day.”

Electric recognition shot down Lara’s spine. She pushed off the door, snatching at Llyr’s vanishing form, but there was nothing left to hold. “Wait! Wait! That’s what Oisín said in his prophecy! Did you send it to him? Did you … did you …?”

The questions, even if she could generate them, would get no answers. Llyr was gone, the only reminder of his presence her continuing ability to breathe. Lara clutched the straps of her pack, heartbeat hard enough to feel in the hand curled over her chest. Prophecy came from God, or the gods; she’d known that, but to hear the poet’s words echoed from Llyr’s lips still shocked her. She said “I’m just me” to the empty city, not meaning it as an excuse, but as an expression of astonishment.

Unexpectedly, Dafydd’s voice echoed in her thoughts: I’ve been searching for you for a hundred years . Being herself was extraordinary enough, it seemed. Extraordinary enough to have truck with gods and elfin immortals, and to command a power worth prophesizing.

The staff warmed against her spine, bringing a mix of heightened conceit and rueful banality to the moment. “I’m not that impressed with myself yet. Stop trying to tempt me.”

A distinct sense of churlishness rose from the staff, but it quieted again, leaving Lara with a grin as she exited the city’s tower structure. Power corrupted—she had little doubt of that. Still, as long as the staff’s tendency was the combination of destruction, blatant cajoling, and sulking, she thought she could withstand it. And she had a destination now, which was more than she’d expected to be granted. All she had to do was survive the city and reach that destination.

She knew it for a treacherous thought even before Aerin rose up out of the sand in a full-on attack.

The Seelie woman’s white hair ran to blue, the same way it had the night Lara met her. But then it had been moonlight; now it was the city’s sickly color twisting what was natural. Her eyes trailed yellow fire, their usual green distorted as well, and her elegantly boned face was pulled in a grimace of hatred. Even the armor she wore was corrupted, moonlight silver corroded and blackened as if it had been buried in the sea for decades. Only her sword still shone bright, its edge unblemished as it swung down toward Lara.

Lara ducked, knowing it wasn’t enough even as she did so. A spurt of panic lent her strength and she turned the duck into a dive, flattening herself on the ocean floor. The sword passed over her head in a hail of grit and sand that matched the one floating up from Lara’s dive. She slithered forward, not quite daring to get as high as hands and knees, and grabbed Aerin’s ankle to yank as hard as she could.

Aerin stabbed down with the sword rather than fall over. The blade caught the thick shoulder padding of Lara’s doublet and drove into the ground, pinning her, but tangling the sword as well. Its cold pressure through the shirt beneath the doublet warned her of how close Aerin had come, and how easily she might sever her own muscles by moving too much. Aerin clearly had the same idea, wrenching the sword down rather than pulling it free.

Pain splintered Lara’s thoughts. Her right arm stopped responding properly, trapezius cut so deeply she feared the collarbone was in pieces as well. Blood welled up, tasting sharp and bitter in the air. Turning her head to see the damage was agony. And useless: Aerin’s blade remained in the way, angled dangerously into Lara’s shoulder, though it was a matter of seconds before Aerin withdrew the sword to strike again.

Without the sword’s presence to block it, blood swam free, billowing into Lara’s eyes. Dizziness ate her in waves, making her thoughts soft and unfocused. She could turn her head. That probably meant that despite sharp deep pain, the muscle wasn’t cut as badly as she feared. But there was a significant vein somewhere in there, one that fed from the jugular; she was almost certain of it. Terror pulsed through her, vivid fear that it was a vein large enough to bleed her out in seconds, unable to save herself.