Seven Sorcerers(98)

I ask myself what Sharadza would want me to say.

“You need not fear,” I tell D’zan. “Your son will be fine. As will any other children you sire. This aspect of your manhood was not affected by our spells.”

The lie comforts him.

“Iardu!” Alua calls my name. Sharadza wakes, and D’zan moves to embrace her.

Vireon’s body trembles, wracked with spasms. The gaping wound has reopened. Alua’s power–Alua’s love–is not enough.

I rush to the bedside. Alua moves away, one hand covering her mouth. At last, she weeps.

Sharadza and D’zan draw near to me.

“What is happening?” she asks.

“He is dying,” I say. “His wounded spirit seeks to leave this flesh behind.”

Vireon does not realize that the choice of living or dying is his own. I must show this to him. “There is one last chance,” I say. “Only Vireon can save Vireon. The power of Vod’s blood slumbers inside him. He must awaken it.”

I lie upon the cot Sharadza was using.

“Watch over my body,” I tell her. “Let none enter this room.”

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“The only thing left to do,” I say. “I will enter the realm of Vireon’s spirit.”

Sharadza is terrified. D’zan clutches her shoulders as if she is still his lover.

“What can we do?” she asks.

“Hold my hand.” She does this. My heart leaps, and my head falls back upon the pillow.

My eyes close, and I gaze inward. As my spirit-self emerged from my body days ago to seek the heart of the world, so now it rises to seek the depths of Vireon’s soul.

Time to embrace your true heritage, Son of Vod.

You must learn or die.

I float above the Giant-King’s body and dive into the red wound, a swimmer leaping from high precipice to deep ocean.





15


Seven Sorcerers


At first there is only the void.

A vast abyss gleaming with constellations, a mirror of the greater void that lies outside the earth. As above, so below.

I am a racing meteor of awareness, painted indigo by the Flame of Intellect that accompanies me into the astral. Each guttering star is a mote of thought, spiraling in multitudes. Innumer able gas giants of sentience orbit the pathways of wisdom, exhaling luminous clouds of insight. None of these are physical entities, yet each is a facet of Vireon’s living soul, which is indescribable in all but the corporeal language of analogy and symbol. The starfields of Vireon’s inner being are the manifestations of his unbounded consciousness.

I sink deeper. The void takes on shape and form. There is no actual substance, no confining matter here. There is only a vast matrix of ideas, concepts, and perceptions.

A sky of sapphire swallows my intruding spirit-self. Trees great as mountains rush up to meet me. Each leaf is a jade magnificence, each mighty trunk the ideal of arboreal perfection. A sea of red-barked titans accepts me into the olive shadows of its canopy. Starlight follows me down in lambent beams, and my spirit-self manifests the image of my physical body.

The mosses of the forest floor are silver and golden, gleaming with their own phosphorescence. Motes of sentience flit between the great boles like butterflies, their wings bright with nameless and ever-changing colors.

I have reached the floor of Vireon’s soul. I am not surprised to see it as a forest, for his love of the wild places sits at the core of his being. About me spreads no true wilderness, but the ideal version of nature itself, a flawless imitation of the woodlands where Vireon’s young heart ran free in decades past. The rare splendors of childhood have a way of sculpting the eternal soul.

A stream of diamond waters cascades through the wood, laughing among the green stones. I follow it toward the lip of a great waterfall, where the torrent spills into a lake far below. I leap above the cataract as a white owl, gliding downward. The lake’s waters are silver and emerald beyond the thundering falls. Groves of willows and massive Uygas stand about its shore, and wild chromatic flowers blossom among the trees.

A boy swims in the lake, splashing and diving among the sun-scaled fish. His head rises from the water, tossing back a long mane, slinging droplets like tiny jewels across the surface. He watches me perch on a moss-draped log as big as the pillar of a fallen palace. About the lowland, scattered among the roots of the gargantuan trees, the ruins of such a palace lie smothered in curtains of vine and wildweed. They are the remnants of a life that has crumbled. Already the boy has forgotten their importance, and the secrets of their history.

My wings fade and I sit upon the log in Man shape, realizing that it is indeed a column of toppled marble. The Flame of Intellect burns brightly on my chest, shedding cobalt light upon the lake.