C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

The trooper was still torn between his enemies, clearly wanting to choose Dafydd as the comprehensible one, but too afraid of the conglomerated nightwings to ignore them. A black mass slid up behind him, threatening to end his dilemma permanently. Lara screamed and Dafydd lifted his hands, the staff held high in one and his other palm forward.

Power surged from the staff. Lightning arced around the trooper and exploded into the roiling creature of darkness. The trooper fired wildly, terrified by the lightning, then realized he hadn’t been hit. He whipped around as nightwings erupted from the section of monster Dafydd attacked, and chose his side: gunfire blazed repeatedly, every shot counting as bullets buried themselves in the monster.

Dafydd dropped to one knee, visibly fading, even with the staff’s support. Lara’s heart caught. There was no time, not to fight the creature the way they’d been doing. The Seelie prince would die before they triumphed, and bitterly, they would likely not triumph at all should he die. For an instant that held her in place, staring fearfully at Dafydd, and then the nightwing came again in a surge of darkness and rage.

She didn’t think it out clearly; didn’t think it out at all, in truth, and truth was her talent, so she ought to heed it. She was surrounded, like the nightwing wanted her drawn in, and so in a spate of madness she dove forward, taking the fight to it. The truth could build a way of its own. Lara had followed such paths three times now, those stark roads of white light and irresistible power.

There had to be a spark of that brilliance buried somewhere in the nightwings’ makeup: they were creatures of dark, perhaps, but dark couldn’t exist without the light.

That thought wobbled fearfully, bringing with it the image of a starlit sky, brilliant diamonds scattered through velvet night. She could imagine each of those diamonds winking out, leaving nothing but darkness behind. Terror squeezed her chest, leaving her hands clammy. There was no telling what lay in the dark, no way to protect herself when the world was only black. Perhaps it was light that couldn’t exist without dark.

That thought twisted, too, turning her inner vision to nothing but blazing, pure light. It was as meaningless as the blackness: no contrast, no shadows, no color, only brilliant pain that matched the fear of darkness.

They wound together, pain and fear twining to make a world of shadows and color. Gold painted the edges of her vision, reminder of the sunrise. As if it were a guide, that soft shade made her grasp that pain and fear were part of the truth that might destroy the nightwings. She was reluctant to embrace them, but the music pounding in her ears soured as she shied away. Jaw tight, she nodded acceptance, and felt her limbs go thick and numb as ugly emotion rooted inside her. They weren’t comfortable, she realized abruptly, but they were necessary. Without pain, without fear, humans had little way to gauge danger; personal experience could be too deadly a cost. Somehow that made them easier to endure, and they lost a degree of their paralyzing power.

Suddenly bold, Lara thrust crescendos, pieces of who she was, of the magic she commanded, out of herself, like they were a weapon themselves. Music rushed out of her, throwing a challenge to the dark Seelie creatures that had crossed into her world.

The world roared back, an entity of its own, alive .

Put that way, into simple and obvious terms, it rang with such truth that Lara blushed to have never noticed it before. Of course it was alive; it supported all the things that lived. But she had never imagined it to have a voice of its own, a presence and a power that threatened to overwhelm everything that she was.

It was the sound of earthquakes and waterfalls, thunder so profound she felt, more than heard, it. If it had music, it was lost to her. She staggered under its weight, then dropped to her knees and put her hands against the asphalt, trying to gather support from the same ground that threatened to drag her under.

Pain reached a crescendo, then drained away as the world searched and found her magic, the thing that had garnered its unfathomable attention. For a brief eternity Lara felt she was a mote under a microscope, turned and twisted for examination. Urgency fled as the earth’s vibrations reached into her marrow, shaking it loose. It seemed to her that she belonged where she was, all but mindless, a single beacon of song and light so small as to be obliterated by the earth-storm all around her. Her sense of self was lost, a speck in the maelstrom of life, and she drifted forever.

Forever , a speck that was still Lara Jansen whispered, forever is a very long time, to immortals .

And the world, in so much as it could, laughed. Ease and recognition rolled through thunder, not reducing her awe, but at least making it a more comfortable thing to hold inside her. She belonged to this world; her strange magic was born of it, and it accepted her, though welcome was still far removed. Satisfied, it released its hold on her. Lara, trembling, bent all the way to the ground and rested her forehead there in thankful relief.

As it retreated from her awareness, she caught a glimpse of music so old, so vast, that she understood she had been on the edge of a chord for all the time she’d been in communion with the planet. It belonged to a song so impossibly huge she could barely grasp that it was played at all, and she knew with a sudden, aching breathlessness that the very earth itself was no more than a single instrument in an orchestra spanning the stars.

Her hands made claws, trying to snatch the endless concerto back; trying to reach beyond the earth to grasp the melody of the moon, the sun, the planets.

It was cold, the space between notes. Cold and endless, with no promise of warmth or forgiveness. The moon, dead world that it was, had a refrain of its own, but it was lost to her, lost long before she could understand it, long before she reached so far as the music of the sun. Through despair she wondered if that was perhaps for the best: surely any fraction of sound she could capture from a star would incinerate her, and yet she would have taken the risk if she could have stretched so far.

She fell back inside herself, bereft of the solar system’s song; bereft of everything but the thin tune that was her own sense of truth, and which now seemed puny in the face of what she’d seen. She turned blind eyes toward the sky, aware of the heat of tears on her cheeks, and saw nothing, only felt the loss of a symphony she would never be large enough to hear. That, that was a truth of terrible proportion, and it cut her apart, releasing all the music inside her. Notes shattered outward, their edges like knives, and they lanced the darkness around her.

It came apart with a scream, with a hundred screams, as nightwings were torn asunder from one another. Lara caught her breath, a single tiny retraction of the power flooding from her.

The nightwings saw it as weakness, and struck.

Lara felt them like the earth hadn’t let her go. Wounds opened up across her skin, great bloodless slashes that rent her to the bone, for all that her eyes saw no such scours. Cramps seized her kidneys and fluttered with agonizing intent, as if her body was trying to reject a wrongness it had no understanding of. Every instinct said to curl down around her own pain, to wait it out, but the part of her that still held a fumbling grasp on intellect remembered what the nightwings were, and how to fight them. Breathless with hurt, she forced her eyes open and staggered to her feet.

New sunlight cut through the distant mountains, illuminating their hollow until it became a cup of fire. Nightwings flooded it, marring its brilliance, but even their numbers were unable to disguise how it sliced apart the world. Lara stood bathed in brilliance, and knew that the handful of men and women who fought with her looked like warriors of legend in its light.