The Night Voice

EPILOGUE

Chane stepped to the chasm’s edge beneath the mountain peak at the easternmost end of the Sky-Cutter Range. Wall-mounted lanterns with alchemically heated cold-lamp crystals lit the half cavern around him. Their light still could not reach the chasm’s far side as he stared numbly along the cable-suspended bridge that spanned the wide breach.

The stench of lamp oil filled the air around him.

On the chasm’s far side, along another hidden tunnel, was another cavern where grew a new child, or grandchild, of Chârmun among a skeleton of huge bones. The bridge was not the only transformation made beneath the mountain over the past thirty years. Other comforts had long ago been arranged for the two guardians who lived here—himself and Wynn.

Ore-Locks with his stonewalker brethren, Chuillyon and several more legitimate white sages, and a select few of the newer green order had all contributed. There were gifts and other support from the small number of allies who knew what had happened here.

Ore-Locks had also seen to safeguards for the way in and out of the peak, and there were now multiple, connected chambers nearby, cut into the mountain’s stone to serve as a home. The youngest stonewalker had been a good friend, the likes of which Chane never thought he would have.

Tonight he stood alone with Magiere’s falchion in hand, staring across the bridge. Since that long-past night when she had tossed this weapon at him, he had never drawn the blade that had once taken his head.

But he did so now and stepped out along the bridge, sword and sheath in his hands.

The rope cabling was inspected and repaired as needed each year. It swayed a little, and yet he did not need to grip the braided rope railings. The earliest nights beneath the mountain were still fresh in his memory, when he had escorted Wynn to check the sun-crystal staff.

On their first visit, she had felt her way onward without him. Without sight, she did not trust just touching the staff to know if the crystal was still lit. She draped her cloak over it and called out to him, and only then did he dare enter.

The sun crystal was still glowing—it was always still glowing.

Over time, they guessed this must have been the influence of Chârmun’s child, tree and sun crystal sustaining each other.

After that first visit, Chane remade some physical protections that he had once used—along with a potion to fight off dormancy—in protecting Wynn during daylight hours. With his body fully covered, he could accompany her to check on the crystal. Once they entered the cavern, she still threw a cloak over the top of the staff, as even his covering would not protect him for long. Although Chane knew they did not need to fully enter the cavern to see that the crystal glowed, Wynn insisted on making a full check of the staff and tree. Perhaps it helped her feel she was fulfilling her duty.

It was several years before Wynn willingly missed even one night’s visit to the tree.

Over time, the new grandchild of Chârmun grew more and more immense.

Chane could imagine it even now, as he walked the chasm’s bridge, though he would not go to see it this night or ever again.

Its branches nearly reached that cavern’s walls, though under the canopy it was difficult to tell if it had reached the ceiling higher above. Even while wearing the “ring of nothing,” Chane had always felt it prodding him, trying to uncover what he was. Through that tree, all but Ore-Locks and his kind visited this place, and others were brought by white sages of Chuillyon’s previous order.

Chane stepped off the bridge into the far half-cavern landing, but he went no farther. Instead, he leaned the falchion and its sheath against one of the bridge’s upright anchor posts. About to turn back, he hesitated, peering toward the landing’s rear. He barely made out the passage leading to the cavern of immense bones caught in the great tree’s spreading roots.

Two cold-lamp crystals were mounted in plain holders on the bridge posts. He took out the nearest above the falchion, rubbed it furiously for light, and replaced it before heading back.

He crossed the bridge again and paused upon reaching the other side, remembering.

In their early time here, going to the tree had always left Wynn somber. On several occasions she had resisted his help in the return and blindly felt for a grip on the braided railing.

Her frustration had grown worse—and dangerous—in that first year after so many visits to the staff. The sun crystal she never saw for herself was what had taken her sight. Perhaps in her blindness, she never knew how much of that he saw in her face.

Chane had not foreseen the lengths to which this would drive her.

Or at least he did not until one night when the white sages had come through the tree to deliver seasonal supplies. As always, they helped him move crates and baskets across the bridge, taking the previous empty containers with them. After a brief parting, he took a moment to assess the stores and discovered a pouch of roasted chestnuts crusted with cinnamon and nutmeg.

At the prospect of anything that might cheer Wynn, he left everything else and hurried off with the pouch.

A short ways up the passage, he had turned into an opening excavated by Ore-Locks and others. Therein were the chambers he shared with Wynn. They were filled with cushioned chairs, a few orange dwarven crystals for heat, a small scribe’s desk for himself and his journals, and shelves with odd things and many books that he read to himself or her. By the end of that first year, they had the comforts of a true home beneath the mountain.

But Wynn was nowhere to be seen that night. Though not exactly worrisome, it was odd. She always settled for the evenings in this outer chamber. He stepped onward toward the back of the room, and as he was about to open the heavy curtain within another opening, he heard the whispers.

Quietly, he pulled the curtain aside.

Wynn knelt on the stone floor at the bed’s foot, having pushed aside a thick rug. By her whispers, he knew what she was doing, but he hesitated at breaking her focus. He feared some worse mishap if he interrupted.

What had she been thinking?

Without true sight, how could her mantic sight ever show her even the Elements within all things? The taint in her from a thaumaturgical ritual gone wrong so long ago could do nothing for a blind woman. He had never felt so restrained in helplessness, waiting for her to fail.

Wynn stopped whispering.

She pitched forward, caught herself, hands braced on the floor, and gagged. Then Chane dropped the pouch as he charged for her.

He dropped to his knees, and she collapsed against him, breathing too fast and hard.

“What are you doing? Why?” he asked softly.

Her head toppled back, struck his shoulder, and her eyes opened wide. He watched those brown irises shift more than once, pause, and shift again about the chamber.

She slapped a hand over her mouth as her eyes clamped shut. Her other hand slammed down on his folded leg, and her small fingers ground into his thigh. He felt nothing in his worry—except shock.

In the brief moment Wynn’s eyes had opened, they had moved more than once about the chamber.

She had seen something.

Her eyes opened again, and he thought she might sicken again. Then she looked up at his face so near to hers.

“Chane?” Wynn whispered.

He should have made her stop then and there, but he could not.

Obviously she had been toying with this in secret whenever he went hunting lizards and desert rodents to supplement their supplies. Or when he was working to improve his meager conjuring, which eventually moved from fire to water for their additional use. Given her loss of sight, he had never thought she would try this, for how could mantic sight work if she could not see?

But it had, and more than this, she blinked twice. For an instant, her expression cleared of sickness, and she smiled at him. It was not the last time he would have that aching joy. So long as he wore the ring, there was one thing—one person—that did make her head ache in vertigo when she looked upon Spirit or any other elemental component of the world.

She would see him, only him, as he truly was.

Even so, he could not stop her from suffering in her tampering. Seeing elemental Spirit in her surroundings was all that she had. How could he deny her those brief moments of independence?

Now, standing at the near side of the chasm—and in that memory—Chane went numb again, and yet he could not stop remembering.

Wynn had found a way to see, now and then, and even for the price, she was much happier. She and Chane had a life together.

At night, they walked out under the moon and stars. In the seasons and years that followed, they studied languages, history, culture, and more from texts she or he requested from visiting sages. They drank tea brought from any corner of the world that sages could reach. They played board games and cards, ones they had always known and even a few new ones.

There were true visits as well—for more than just assistance in maintaining their vigilant existence.

Magiere, Chap, and Leesil came once a year, at least, with the aid of the white sages.

Chuillyon, likely with Leesil’s convincing, had planted his small sprout from Chârmun in the royal grounds of Bela in Belaski on the eastern continent. Both were rather discomforted when asked how, and neither was very forthcoming. It was a short journey up the coast from Miiska to Bela, but this would have to be planned for the right time when the white sages came to the new “branch” of the guild in that city. They were necessary to send anyone else through or send them back.

On those visits, Wynn was overjoyed to see her three friends. Chane made an effort to be civil, and Magiere reciprocated. Chap ignored him, and Leesil was occasionally sociable.

After a few years, Chap came less frequently.

Leesil said Chap—and Shade—had moved on to an’Cróan lands to live full-time with the one they called Lily. Both majay-hì had already been going there regularly before then, though Chap still returned to Miiska as often as he could arrange. Eventually, Chane heard that Osha and Wayfarer had followed that way as well, and on that particular visit, both Magiere and Leesil were distant, as if preoccupied.

This had left Chane wondering, considering that both Osha and Wayfarer had originally fled their homeland as traitors and outcasts.

Time changed even more things, though not always purely in partings. A few more years passed to another night that burned into Chane’s memories, never to be forgotten. It had started on the far side of the bridge.

Chane had been up and about that night while Wynn slept. He had come down to sit near the closest side of the bridge while working on a journal.

Another visitor came, though at first he had not noticed. He was distracted when one of the cold-lamp crystals on the bridge’s far posts suddenly lit up. It startled him, for it was not time for the seasonal supplies.

A lone figure stood there between the far bridge posts.

Likely female by its small stature, it was shrouded in a long robe with a full, draping hood—both a deep forest green. This was the first time he had seen that color of robe.

With one of his many journals in hand, he snapped it closed and rose to his feet. The figure did not move, even as strange noises echoed faintly out of the passage to the tree’s cavern.

Those noises quickly turned to a ruckus.

And still the green-robed figure did not move, even when a tiny furred form raced around it straight onto the bridge. And two more—and another—and another, five in all.

Chane stood staring.

The following pair of pups—brown and gray—pounced on and over the mottled one in the lead. He lurched forward a step, fearful that one or more might tumble over the bridge. They did not even slow their raucous, tumbling race until the first skidded onto the landing before him.

She barely pulled up short before ramming headlong into his boot.

Wide crystal-blues stared up him, but only for an instant. The second one rammed into and over the top of her, and that one did hit his boot. He was too shocked at the sight of them to even move, though he quickly curled the fingers of his left hand, checking with his thumb that he still wore the “ring of nothing.”

The rest of the tiny pack followed, including the last: a black male stalking slowly in on him. Its ears twitched, flattened briefly, twitched again, and tiny jowls pulled back in a hesitant growl.

Chane did not move, even as a cream-coated little female with bark-colored streaks clawed at his shin in sniffing him. A more distant but sharp bark drew his eyes instantly. Halfway across the bridge, a huge black form with crystal-blue eyes led the green-robed sage.

He would have known Shade anywhere, even for the darkness at the bridge’s center.

Shade came in growling at the little ones and trying to get them settled. It was hopeless, since she was outnumbered. And the green-robed sage, the first and last visitor among the others, stepped off the bridge, brushing back her hood.

It was Wayfarer.

Beneath her dark green robe, long but split down the front like Wynn’s old travel one, the girl was dressed even more like the wild woman, the Foirfeahkan, called Vreuvillä. Multiple tiny braids of hair to either side of her face had strange wooden charms woven into them. Though one-quarter human, she still physically looked the same, as if she had not aged at all since he had last seen her.

Later would come many questions about green sages—who were not just sages—and how they came to be among the an’Cróan. Part sage by Chuillyon’s outcast meddling, they also practiced what Wayfarer had learned from Leaf’s Heart. But there and then, Chane looked down at one of the few others he had missed for a long time.

Shade huffed at him and stood waiting.

With the noise of the five little ones, it was entirely unnecessary for anyone to go and awaken Wynn. This was not the last time Shade would come, and after that, green-robed sages were sometimes the ones to bring supplies. But of all memories in a life with Wynn, that night was forever lodged in Chane.

Shade had brought her children to meet her “sister” ... and Chane himself.

Where else might a mortal sage and a vampire find peace and contentment without judgment? He did not need to feed, with the orb nearby, and she had everything she required. They had each other most of all.

More years passed.

Chane had once imagined a life with Wynn in the Numan branch of the Guild of Sagecraft. This life was close enough—better—but as he now stood staring at the empty bridge, there were other nights he wished to tear out of memory.

The first had not registered upon him until too late.

He had paid no notice to small lines that grew on Wynn’s oval face or the few strands of gray that appeared in her wispy brown hair. He knew she would age while he would not, but she had barely passed the age of fifty, and there was so much time left for them.

One night, she did not eat.

When he asked, she told him she was not hungry. He should have listened to the way she said this. In the following nights—and days—she barely ate at all.

The look of discomfort, then pain, began to show on her face.

He wanted to take her to a coastal city for a physician. She was too weak for the long journey. He wanted to take her to the tree in the hope that she might be able to call to someone through it for help. She became too weak to walk that far, and then so fragile that he feared carrying her.

He grew desperate to find some help, and so he dressed to shield himself before entering that far cavern alone. Even protected, he felt himself begin to burn. He threw Wynn’s cloak over the crystal for more protection, and then realized he would still have to remove a glove to ...

When he and Wynn had gone among the Lhoin’na, he had not dared to touch Chârmun.

Would its offspring allow him to do so? Would it affect him like touching the white petals he once used in the healing potion that had stopped Magiere? And even if he could touch it, what then?

He was not a white sage, one of Chârmun’s chosen.

By his nature, he was its enemy. If it killed him, Wynn would have no one to care for her.

He stood there in growing discomfort and then in pain, until smoke began to seep out around his clothing. Finally he fled into the passage’s dark, out of reach of the sun crystal’s light. Frustrated panic drove him back to Wynn, and he desperately hoped that someone would soon come to them.

One night, Wynn could not sit up.

That this happened during another supply visit by white sages was pure chance. Even so, Chane knew it would take a long time to get a message to Magiere, Leesil, and especially Chap.

But he sent a message with the sages. He also begged them to send him a difficult-to-obtain ingredient called boar’s bell. They had hesitated to agree until he told them what it was for.

They left.

Chane waited.

Shortly thereafter, Chuillyon arrived and brought two healer sages of the Lhoin’na guild branch. They brought the boar’s bell and more Anamgiah blossoms, but the blossoms did nothing for Wynn, not this time. Chuillyon took the healers back to the tree and sent them home, though he remained awhile longer.

Chane used the boar’s bell to re-create the potion to stave off dormancy that he had once needed to guard over Wynn while they had searched for the orbs. In this way, he could care for her both day and night.

On the sixth following night, just before dawn, Chane lay beside Wynn, their heads on the same pillow. Her eyes were closed, and he thought she was asleep. Then her hand sought out his, though her eyes did not open.

“I would rather have lived my life here with you,” she whispered, “than with anyone, anywhere else, in this world.”

His throat tightened, and he was about to answer, when the bedchamber was suddenly too quiet. Afraid to even shake her, all he could do was whisper her name, over and over, louder and louder, until his rasping voice tore at his own ears.

The silence had come when Wynn stopped breathing.

He lay there all day and through the next night with his face pressed into Wynn’s shoulder. When he finally emerged, Chuillyon was still there in the outer room. The tall Lhoin’na said nothing and only nodded respectfully.

Rather than burn again, Chane let Chuillyon place her body in the cavern with the tree. He gathered stones from outside the peak for the elder sage to mound up her grave cairn. Chuillyon left after promising to look for Magiere and the others himself, though it was already too late for them to come.

Chane now often crossed the bridge to reignite the cold-lamp crystal on the far side—just in case someone arrived. Until tonight, he had not thought of the sword Magiere had thrown at him. Only tonight had he brought it and left it at the chasm’s far side.

It was a warning and an invitation.

He had a “life” because of Wynn, but that life was now over.

And yet he would—could—not die with her a third and final time.

All around him the stench of lamp oil was thick. He had spread so much of it that even the bottomless chasm’s air had not yet dissipated those fumes. It had taken most of the previous night to scavenge enough for his need. But it would not be enough to be certain.

The presence of the orb beneath the tree’s roots would still reach him. Yes, he could have fled the mountain and gotten far enough away that its constant feeding of him could no longer heal his wounds. Even then, he could not be certain that fire would finish him rather than leave him charred to rise yet again.

There was only one way to be certain of following Wynn.

How long did he wait there, sipping from the flask of potion to keep himself awake? How many times did he cross that bridge, now shivering from lack of dormancy, to relight that one cold-lamp crystal at the far side? Was it more than one night, another day, three or maybe four?

In the silence, he heard distant footsteps on stone.

When Chane looked, the cold-lamp crystal at the bridge’s far end had dimmed again, but not enough to hide someone standing near it. That someone finally reached down to grasp the falchion’s hilt and then strode slowly along the bridge.

She no longer wore the studded leather armor, for that had been lost—cut off her—the morning after all had ended outside the mountain. Instead, she wore a plain shirt beneath a dark brown cloak that she flipped back over away from her sword arm.

Magiere stepped off the bridge’s near end. She did not look a day older than the night when she had been struck down by an arrow. Then again, neither did he.

“Wynn is gone,” he said flatly in his rasp.

She had maimed his voice, when she had taken his head with that blade once before. And that was the only way to be certain of a final death. But all she did was look away toward the passage beyond him where his home—Wynn’s now-silent empty home—lay.

Magiere’s eyes turned back on him.

“You knew this would happen eventually,” he said. “So do it ... since this is what you have always wanted.”

She watched him with no emotion on her pale face framed in blood-black hair.

“No.”

Chane flinched at her one word, suddenly panic-stricken in grief. Where was the monster in her, now that he needed it for the monster in him?

“It’s not what Wynn would’ve wanted,” she said, “not for you, not for either of us.”

Chane began to shudder, either from too many nights without dormancy or just the despair of failing to follow Wynn.

“I won’t come back again,” she said. “I am leaving, and I suggest you do the same. That staff will never go out, and now that Wynn is gone ...”

Magiere dropped the falchion. It clattered on stone as she turned away. She was three steps onto the bridge before he lunged after her.

“You had a life because of her,” she said, pausing but not turning back. “Don’t waste whatever’s left. Don’t do that to her. I won’t do that to her ... for you.”

Chane stood there, watching her leave. He took up the falchion, prepared to go after her. She never broke stride and never looked back.

“I am nothing without her!” he shouted. “So let me be nothing!”

“And how’s that possible?” she said. “You came back—twice. Maybe a monster, and maybe something else, because of her. Would she want that wasted?”

He stood there so long after Magiere was gone. Someone had to be in there, waiting at the tree to take her away. Whoever that had been would be gone as well, unable to take an undead out of this place the same way. But Magiere’s words kept burning him.

Maybe a monster ... maybe something else ... because of ... her.

How was he to go on without the one person who had loved him? Yet how could he willfully end the life she had given him?

Chane stared down at Magiere’s falchion in his hand.

He threw it off the bridge, though he never heard it hit bottom. He would gather only a few things before leaving this empty place.

Magiere was numb when a white sage returned her to the royal grounds of Bela. Chuillyon had planted his sprout—now a tree—of Chârmun there when they had all returned after those final nights near the peak.

She was still numb at the end of the long ride to Miiska.

There was something that Chane hadn’t thought on in the years that had passed.

He had come back twice, but how could this be possible if there wasn’t something inside him that was able to come back? She was more than the monster she’d been made to be, so why not the same with him? It didn’t change any choice she’d made in hunting the undead or in what he’d done before Wynn, but now ...

But perhaps like her there was more than a monster—there was someone—in him.

Magiere reached the stable up the street from the Sea Lion tavern. She left the horse with the young attendant still there. But when she was nearly home—finally—she stalled, thinking of Wynn.

No one should’ve been out in the trees toward the shore behind her home, but that was where she heard voices she couldn’t quite make out. And upon getting closer ...

“She was your friend as well as Mother’s,” a woman’s voice insisted. “You should have gone. I would have, but I thought to come here first.”

“Your mother needed to go alone this time,” a man answered. “It’s the last time. And you don’t know everything ... about how it might end.”

Hearing the voices brought both relief and the grief that Magiere had held off. But she wasn’t going to cry for a lost friend—not yet—and she walked off into those trees. She didn’t care about being quiet and barely caught sight of a short woman in a long dark robe among the night-shadowed trees near the sea.

That one turned. “Mother?”

A man struggled up from beyond a tree nearer the shoreline, and moonlight across the water haloed him in a glimmer that caught hair once fully white-blond.

“It’s about time,” he said. “So, is he finally dead or not?”

Magiere closed quickly, right past Wayfarer, and threw her arms around Leesil.

“You know better than that,” she whispered, suddenly so weary.

“Still had to ask,” Leesil whispered back. “Sooner or later, you and Chane were going to have it out. I knew even I couldn’t hold that off.”

Magiere leaned back, looking into her husband’s beautiful amber eyes. She saw his fright at having let her go alone fade. She also saw the lines in his face, the locks of hair that were now more white-gray than white-blond, and the exhaustion of the wait that she felt herself.

“As long as you came back,” he said.

All she wanted then was to go home and stay there with him. There was no telling how long she would have him. Yes, she had grown older as well, but not as much as he.

In the end, how long would she have to live without him? That was too terrible a thought, and she had to look away. And there was Wayfarer, watching her with as much worry as Leesil had.

“Get over here,” Magiere said softly.

Wayfarer, still too small for one of her people, slipped in close and wrapped her arms around Magiere. It felt good to hold her again. No matter how often the girl returned now, it was never often enough for Magiere. She didn’t even care about those ridiculous little wooden trinkets braided into the girl’s dark hair or how much the girl—no, woman—had changed over the years.

“All right, girl,” Magiere growled. “Where is that husband of yours?”

Wayfarer hesitated and let out a long, slow sigh. “He ... could not ... face it.”

“So he’s off playing with his deer again?”

The girl’s eyes widened and scrunched in a scowl. This was followed by a sigh that was more of a scoff. How much she—all of them—had changed.

“Clhuassas—listeners—are not deer!” Wayfarer admonished. “And he is not playing with—”

“I don’t care!” Magiere released Leesil and grabbed the girl by both shoulders. “You tell Osha we’d better see him by solstice or—”

“Yes, Mother,” Wayfarer interrupted, with a roll of her green eyes.

“Here we go again,” Leesil grumbled.

Magiere ignored him, finishing, “Or I’ll go drag him back here by his hair!”

“Yes, Mother!”

There was silence for three breaths before Magiere straightened with a quick snort.

“Fine, good enough. Now let’s go home.”

She grabbed each of their hands and pulled them along as she headed toward the back door of the Sea Lion’s kitchen. The high-pitched squeal of a child rose somewhere upstairs in the tavern.

Magiere stopped in her tracks and let go of Wayfarer and Leesil as she stared up at the windows of the top floor.

A laugh, like from a boy, was followed by the crash of pottery shattering and furniture toppling. More squeals and laughter were cut short by a deep rolling growl—but only for an instant.

Magiere wheeled on Leesil in fury. “What did you do this time?”

Leesil quickly looked away.

“I warned you, Father,” Wayfarer chided under her breath.

At that, Magiere took a step. “How many this time?”

Leesil winced. “Just ... two.”

“Two!” Magiere snapped. “That makes six—again!”

Over the passing years, there had been no children for them. She knew that couldn’t have been because of him, but it was another sacrifice for the way she had been born.

Just the same, there had always been children. He saw to that a bit too often.

“Don’t spit flame and smoke at me, my dragon,” he shot back, though he wouldn’t look at her. “What was I supposed to do, leave them on the street to starve or pillage the local bakery?”

Another crash from above mixed with more and more growling and squealing and ...

“Chap can handle it,” Leesil added.

“He is getting too old,” Wayfarer cut in, now glaring at him as well. “He can barely get up those stairs when we come for a visit.”

“Well, then Shade can do it,” Leesil added with a shrug.

Wayfarer turned on him. “Father, do not dare to put this on her.”

“Oh, seven hells!” he countered. “I handle it year-round, so you two can help out a bit when—”

“Both of you, enough!” Magiere snarled. “Get into the tavern before they bring it down.”

She turned, slammed the back door open with her palm, and rushed inside.

This had been their life for the last thirty years, and no matter how much Magiere fumed, she wouldn’t have wished it any other way. Magiere simply made certain Leesil never knew this. It would be so much the worse if he did.