The Chaos Balance

CXVIII

The two angels sat on the grass before the bushes that screened the front door. The clouds had broken the day before, and the unfamiliar stars glittered brightly in the early night.

Weryl snored inside, and the faint odor of some form of vegetable soup being undertaken by Sylenia seeped from the house, mixing with the damp and subtle fragrances drifting from the forest.

“Pleasant,” Nylan said. “First time in I don’t know how long that we haven’t been running or fighting or-”

“Peaceful.” Ayrlyn leaned her head against his, her hair still damp from washing.

“Almost like we’re under the shelter of a huge unseen mountain.”

“A growing mountain. There are shoots in the back now, all around the house and shed.”

“It’s been waiting a long time,” he pointed out.

“Either that or sleeping.”

Nylan yawned, as a dreaminess passed across him, and he could feel that Ayrlyn experienced it, too.

“Just feel it,” she whispered.

He took a slow and deep breath, then another, and could feel…he would have been hard-pressed to describe the sensation, although the images carried by the flows of that unseen power were clear.

Vivid images…almost rising before them, yet ancient images, images of a distant past…that also was somehow obvious. A history?

A green spark, a living spark, with light and dark entwined, grew within a forest, and from that came other sparks, all linked, and the sparks spread, ever so slowly, until they carried flows, flows of light and darkness, order and chaos, that held the forest, that were the forest, as ever so slowly all the trees took on the sparks, the light and the darkness.

The rain fell, and under the green-blue sky, the trees grew, and died, and the deer roamed, and grew and died, and so did the tawny cats, and the tree rats, and the wide purple blossoms, and the ugly-snouted lizards.

The dark flows of blackness and the white chaos were mixed and twisted-and balanced. The trees grew and grew, and some died and fell, but always for all the changes, the white and darkness turned in and out, but balanced…until the heavens shivered, and the ground trembled.

Then…lines of fire flickered, white lines, force fluxes like a chaotic power net, firebolts white-infused and red-shaded like those thrown by the wizards who had tried to storm Westwind…and the white unbalanced forces lashed across the forest, across the grasslands to the north and west, across the stony hills beyond the grasslands.

White lines of fire, fire that reflected light and darkness, burned through the forest, and the gray ashes fell like rain.

The forest struggled, and sent forth new shoots, and the white fires slashed across the shoots, twisting the flows, sending shudders through the ground itself, creating heat and tangled fires deep beneath Candar.

The rivers heaved themselves out of their banks, and the white mirror fires turned their waters into steam. Metal mountains grumbled across the water-polished stone hills and smoothed them, ground them, and suffocated them beneath strange new soil, and grasses that had never been.

Green shoots struggled through the ashes, and were turned into more ashes, and the ground heaved and trembled.

Lines of white stone slammed down like walls, pinning the trees behind lines of force that burned…and burned, burned somehow because the force of the ordered chaos that prisoned the trees was backward, because chaos bound order.

A sense of timelessness followed, inaction behind white stone walls, until the heavens shivered again, and the white walls cracked, and crumbled, and lines of white fire and darkness cascaded from ice-tipped peaks.

And the balanced flow of light and darkness resumed, with a sense of something like purpose and joy-except it was neither-and the dark presence of the forest mountain loomed.

Nylan shivered and wiped his suddenly damp forehead. A tree…or a clone group of trees, like the ancient aspens of pre-Heaven…had that been the beginning of the forest? The forest did not know; it only felt and sensed. Yet it had a vague concept of self, a concept that…

“How would you translate that,” he asked.

“I wouldn’t. Just call it Nados or Naclos or Nasclos…something phonetic like that. It won’t mind.”

“Naclos,” the engineer decided. “Not that it means much.”

“It means ‘Great Forest’ or something like it.”

“It is great.”

“So much power,” murmured Ayrlyn.

“It wasn’t very effective against the Old Rats.”

“It wasn’t? How do we know? Also, it has a longer perspective. The old barriers, whatever they were, have failed, and the forest seems to be well on the way to regaining its former position.”

“Unless those white wizards return with something stronger.”

“Maybe they left to do something else?” she suggested.

“Like fight Lornth? Why would they do that?”

Ayrlyn shrugged. “We’re missing a lot of pieces. That’s just what I feel, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

Although the night was warm, Nylan felt cold, almost alone under the looming yet unseen shadow of the forest. “I’m too tired to think.”

Ayrlyn slipped to her feet. “So am I. Maybe sleeping on it will help.”

Nylan wasn’t certain about that, either, but he rose, slowly, inhaling the half-familiar smell of the vegetable soup as they walked back to the small house under the glittering light-points of the still-strange stars.