When dawn came, he feared the light. In the light the things stalking in the recesses of his imagination could see him. There would be nowhere to hide. He found himself sitting in the middle of his cot, knees pulled up to his chest shivering in fear when he remembered that he had to face the trial to overcome it. But this time he already knew of a place where he could find shelter. He knew there was a refuge of stillness somewhere within him where he could stand apart from the stalking, formless fright that lurked on the edge of his awareness.
It took him quite some time to find it. He kept retreating away from it and, spooked by his own imagination, stumbling into a new and yet darker corner of his own mind. When he finally rediscovered the place of stillness where his own personal witness lived, he found the fear was distant there and no longer clouded his mind and corrupted his reason. He could watch it without feeling it. Gradually, slowly, he pushed the place of detachment from the little corner of his mind out into the rest of his consciousness. He almost felt foolish when the fear abruptly evaporated like darkness before the dawn. It had no substance except what he gave it. It had no power except what he permitted it to have. He had passed the trial of fear.
He drank the fifth vial at dusk and tried to sleep. To his surprise he slept quite well. He woke on the sixth day expecting that the final trial would accost him at any moment, but it didn’t. He spent the whole day meditating. At dusk he drank the sixth vial and lay down on his cot. He started to doze off when it happened.
It felt like his awareness was ripped from his body and cast into the firmament itself. He saw the flow of time, space, and matter differently than he had ever imagined it before. It was one all-encompassing, living, breathing thing. It flowed inexorably forward. He could see all things as they came to be, but from behind the curtain, so to speak. He watched reality form like a wave in the firmament and crest in the moment of now, always moving, always in flux.
Then the wave of time sped up and he could see the future, or at least one possible future. Phane had conquered the whole of the Seven Isles. Alexander saw his parents, his sister, Lucky, Anatoly, and Isabel being tortured by Phane. The Reishi Prince cast powerful spells on them to keep them alive while he took perverse delight in their suffering.
Alexander was aghast at the magnitude of Phane’s depravity. He was repulsed by the horror of what was being done to the ones he loved. He saw Phane cutting into Isabel and heard her call his name, beseeching his help, crying out in forlorn despair. As Phane maimed her, she lost that spark in her eye that so captivated Alexander. She lost hope and became despondent, no longer even interested in screaming at the ruinous things Phane did to her. Her will to live dimmed. The vibrancy of her spirit failed. She begged for death, pleaded for a quick end, but Phane pressed on. He took her past the limits of sanity and brought her to a place of total, abject, desperate anguish.
Alexander thought his soul would surely fail him. He wanted to cast himself into the infinity of the firmament itself and allow it to consume every trace of his being to escape the impossible horror of watching Isabel be so totally destroyed. When he thought it could get no worse, when he had seen every gruesome detail of each of his loved one’s brutal and ruinous torture, Phane looked right at him as if he knew he was watching and giggled madly before he cast their souls into the pits of the netherworld.
Alexander followed into the darkness and watched helplessly while each of those he loved most was savaged in ways that made Phane’s torture seem amateurish. The netherworld was a timeless place, so there was no end to their suffering. His loved ones were already dead, so they couldn’t escape the unrelenting torture except by surrendering their sanity and all vestiges of their mind and will, leaving nothing that Alexander even recognized.
He witnessed these horrors and was powerless to stop them. He felt the despair threaten to overtake his reason and begin to insinuate its dark tendrils into the cracks in his sanity. He was to blame for their suffering. He had failed. Phane had cast the world into a thousand years of darkness and it was his fault.
He began to let go. He saw no point in remaining himself. The essence of his being was already adrift on the waves of the firmament, beneath reality itself. All he had to do was let go and he would cease to exist. The very fabric of his being would unravel and scatter into the stuff from which it was made. The despair would end. The knowledge of his loved ones suffering would be unmade and he would be no more.
But then he thought of Isabel. He couldn’t let go of her. Her smile and the intelligence sparkling in her piercing green eyes were worth holding onto. He felt himself slipping away even as he clung to the memory of her.
Alexander suddenly felt a desperate need to live. Isabel would want him to fight. She would want him to live and he couldn’t let her memory die. If she was truly gone, then she deserved to have someone remember her. As the raw despair began to fade with his determination to hold on, he remembered, ever so faintly at first, that he was facing the test of despair. He seized on that tiny scrap of reason in an ocean of hopelessness and nurtured it, fed it, and breathed life into it until it became a beacon he could see the truth by. He couldn’t trust anything. Nothing in this place could be believed and so he resolved to believe in hope, whether his senses told him it made sense or not.
He pictured his family, his friends, and Isabel all alive and well. He focused on those thoughts even as wave after wave of horror from a very dark possible future crashed over him. He stood his ground and weathered the storm.
In the face of despair, he chose hope.
As abruptly as it had come, the despair receded.
Chapter 35
Alexander opened his eyes to see light streaming through the little window. He sat up carefully and looked around the room. He had passed each of the three tests and he still had one vial left. Mason had told him to drink all seven vials. He told Alexander that he would come on the morning of the eighth day to release the spell that kept him confined within the magic circle. Alexander drank the seventh and final vial of Wizard’s Dust.
He spent the rest of the day in meditation. Just before dusk he felt his awareness slip from the confines of his body and flood out into the whole of the world, but this time there was no despair. He was detached and watched time unfold from the perspective of the whole of reality itself while still maintaining a distant awareness of his immediate surroundings. It only lasted for a moment before he came snapping back to his limited awareness delivered to him through his conventional senses, but in that moment he glimpsed the potential of magic. The firmament was everywhere all at once. To touch it was to touch the essence of reality. He spent the rest of the evening meditating on the possibilities that now lay before him.
When the next morning came and Mason opened the door, Alexander was dressed and sitting on the edge of his little cot. Mason entered the circular tower room and dispelled the magic circle with a word, walked to him and placed a hand on his forehead. He murmured arcane words under his breath and closed his eyes. A few moments later his eyes snapped open with a look of confusion and slight alarm. He flipped the lid of the case holding seven, now empty, crystal vials. He looked back to Alexander with a frown.
“You drank them all?” There was worry bordering on alarm in Mason’s voice.
“Yes, one a day like you said I should,” Alexander replied.
Mason’s brow drew down even further and he looked deep in thought. He shook his head. “Did you experience pain, fear, and despair?”
Alexander nodded soberly, “More than I believed a person could, on all three counts.”
Mason looked more perplexed now than worried. “That just doesn’t make sense. Do you feel any different?”
“No, but I can see your colors now without shifting my vision. It’s like my second sight has merged with my normal vision.”
“Huh.” Mason looked back and forth slowly as if he was searching for the answer to a question that he couldn’t quite frame correctly. “Well, I guess it can wait. I’m sure you’re hungry.”
Alexander nodded emphatically, “Now that you mention it, I’m starving.”
“I thought you would be. Hanlon’s had a brunch prepared for you in the family dining room.” Mason turned to lead him out of the tower but then turned back with a little grin. “Oh, and there’s a surprise waiting for you down there.” Mason walked out of the room with Alexander trailing behind.
“What kind of surprise?” he asked.
“The good kind, but I promised I wouldn’t spoil it,” was all Mason would say.
They made a detour by his room so he could wash up and change into some clean clothes, then hurried to the Alaric family dining room. Everyone was waiting there for him. All were anxious to see that he’d survived the mana fast. The surprise Mason had spoken of brought a lump to his throat.
His mom and dad were there.
They beamed at their son as he rushed into his mom’s arms. His dad put a hand on his shoulder. For a long moment he just held his mother and struggled to keep from crying.
“I was so afraid you were dead,” Alexander said. “The last thing I saw was the manor burning.”
“We’re fine, Son. We fled in the direction of Highlands Reach to throw any pursuers off your trail. That’s why it took us so long to get here,” Duncan said while Bella held her son out at arm’s length and looked him up and down as if to make sure he wasn’t broken.
She sniffed back tears and wiped her cheeks clean. “Come on, have something to eat. You look like you’ve lost some weight.”
Alexander stopped and found Isabel with his eyes. She was looking at him but had been quiet. “There’s something I have to do first.”
He walked over to her and held out his hand. She took it and stood, looking a little confused but happy for his attentions just the same.
He looked at her with a sense of confidence and certainty that he’d never felt about anything in his whole life.
“Isabel Alaric, I love you. Will you marry me?”
She blinked, then her face flushed and she smiled radiantly as she threw herself into his arms and the room burst into applause.
He held her for a long moment. “You saved me again,” he whispered for her ears alone.
“Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet Isabel,” he introduced his fiancé with an unabashed smile of pure joy.
They ate and then talked and then ate some more. Duncan and Bella recounted how they’d gone east away from Valentine Manor in an effort to lure the enemy after them. Their ploy worked almost too well. They’d been attacked and chased by something that prowled in the night. They hadn’t even been able to identify the thing but they knew it was out there from the inhuman sounds it made. Bella kept it away with her magical light. When they discovered that it didn’t like water, they were able to escape it by crossing a series of streams.
They made their way along the southern edge of the forest and encountered a squad of Rangers when they came to the forest road. They arrived a few days ago and had been worrying about Alexander since they learned what he was doing. Both Bella and Duncan had been through the mana fast. Both knew the dangers and the difficulties of the trials. Both were relieved to see him safely through the ordeal and both were proud of his accomplishment.
Erik reported that the Rangers from the fortress gate had scattered the Reishi hunting party. Most had been killed but both Wizard Rangle and Truss escaped. Alexander silently hoped that wolves had found them lost in the forest and had their way with them.
Alexander felt like he spent the bulk of the day eating. He hadn’t eaten anything for a week and now he was making up for it. No sooner did he finish a meal and relax for a few minutes than he started to feel hungry again. The kitchen was more than happy to oblige him. His friends and family took the opportunity to tell stories of their recent experiences and generally enjoy each other’s company. Alexander knew it would all end soon enough. He meant to set out for Blackstone Keep by way of New Ruatha within the week. He knew the journey would open him up to attack by Phane and his minions but it was a necessary risk. He’d accomplished most of what he could here in Glen Morillian. It was time to move on to the next challenge.
Late in the afternoon Mason handed him a slip of paper. It read: “Bloodvault one of three belongs to the one who is marked in service to Old Reishi Law. You have a right to your life because you are alive. You have a right to your liberty because you have free will. You have a right to your property because it is the product of your labor. You forfeit these rights when you take them from another.”
Alexander read it and then read it again. “This is the writing on the Bloodvault?”
Mason nodded.
“It says ‘Bloodvault one of three.’ That means there are two more out there somewhere.” He handed Isabel the piece of paper.
Mason nodded again with a knowing smile.
“There’s another one at Blackstone Keep,” Alexander whispered.
Even as he said it, he knew it had to be the truth. He felt a sense of urgency well up in the pit of his stomach. After reading the skillbook, he was nearly certain that the Thinblade was in one of the other two Bloodvaults. It only made sense. Why would Mage Cedric give him a skillbook that taught him how to wield the Thinblade if he hadn’t preserved the ancient sword for him as well? When he looked at the heavy gold ring on his finger, he felt even more certain that he had to get to Blackstone Keep sooner rather than later.