Flowlight: Sun - Echoes of Pride: Part Five

     There was only one piece of furniture here, an ornate chair that might have been someone's throne. A single faerie sat in it, a flame-fay, her wings burning with the unnatural light that had showed through the skeletons of the windows. The merely observant might notice something dead in her eyes, as if she saw nothing through them worth caring for. The more magically adept might see the dark that expressed itself boldly through those eyes, revelling in the knowledge that it could observe, and in the sheer power that it had. That which had been the faerie herself was almost gone, that same dark having laid rampant waste to her mind. The sharp shadows that were cast by that fearsome light were absolute; their inky blackness allowed nothing into them, and they were as sharp as if they were real.

     The ceiling crashed and crumbled, and two figures fell through. The first, a white Xweetok, landed adroitly, pulling a whip from the ring on her finger. The white cord lashed out like a living thing, hungry for magic, but Solana's sharp command held it back. Her very fur shone with power, as the whip struggled against it like an invisible rein.

     Alex flapped rather clumsily to the ground, and stood there, panting quite heavily in the silence. Solana glanced at him. “Your task begins here.”

     A blast of power seemed to punctuate her words, dissipating against an invisible barrier. The fire faerie's strange flame hissed and leapt all over her body.

     Solana turned to her. “This one was just like Zerie, wasn't she? But it's too late for her – you've eaten her soul.” Solana clenched the hand that was holding the whip. “This time I was too late, but you still cannot have this world, this universe. You cannot – I forbid it.”

     She snapped her fingers, and the faerie's head jerked up with an audible crack. “You don't fool me.” Again, and the room around them wavered at the blow, like the wind rippling a sheet of canvas. “Give in. I am superior in this.”

     The faerie howled, a sound of eternal pain and regret. Behind the wretched sound, a voice fashioned from the difference between darkness and light said, NO.

     “Yes.” Solana swung the whip, wrapping it around the faerie's wings. “I will take this body from you. Illinehtar All-Slayer!” she cried, and ripped them from the faerie's back.

     All colour drained from the faerie. For one of the fair folk to lose their magic is something unimaginable. Only a privileged few among pet-kind know what a euphoria it is to have flowlight running through one's veins and power crackling at the tips of their fingers, and for that to be taken away when one has had it for all her life – no, not grey! they would cry in their dreams, hoping against hope that it is all some horrible nightmare. To be grey is to be nothing. Grey is the dullest colour in the world.

     The dullest colour in the world. Perhaps that is why it was chosen, when the other, outer grey ones had no better option than to make their presence manifest; perhaps it shows how they wished to walk unhindered and hindering nothing.

     But as the faerie fell to the ground, lifeless as a puppet, something else lifted from her form, ripping itself away. No longer able to use her arts, the dark tendrils that had gripped the last remaining shreds of her soul were forced to release the illusion. The old, creaking mansion vanished. In its place was – something alive, but only in the meanest form of the word. It was dark embodied, living, screeching, growling dark, with misshapen, half-formed figures bubbling out of it like mud, and the like of some rudimentary eye squinting gleefully down at them from what should have been the ceiling.

     This, Alex realised then, through the sensation that he was going ever so completely mad, should not be. It should never have been.

     And it declared, I AM ALL THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF LIGHT. I WAS, I AM, I WILL BE. I WILL CONSUME, I WILL DESTROY. DESPAIR YOU, ALL LIFE, FOR I AM THE TERROR AND THE BANE, THE CHILD OF EVIL, THE DARK SUPREME!

     “You should no longer be. I annihilated your life. You should be as you once were; vanished.” Solana's voice sounded small and inconsequential against the vastness of the voice:

     WHAT A FRAIL, PITIFUL LIGHT YOU ARE. I AM THE SHADOW AND FEAR OF INNUMERABLE WORLDS, AND YOU ARE OF ONE; NOW I AM GATHERED AS THE GREAT OBLIVION, AND YOU ARE LESS THAN YOU WERE.

     From some recess, driven fast and iron-strong into the soil of his memory, Alex recalled a faint whisper of a rhyme more ancient and hallowed than he could have imagined; useless and irrelevant, he thought: Once bane, twice again; once bane, thrice slain.

     “Run. Now. You have never faced anything like this before.” Solana's voice was a whisper, but at that moment she turned and unleashed a pulse of light at the bulging, liquefying wall. It exploded outwards, and in moments both of them were through it, Alex's feet running on pure adrenaline.

     Behind them, the dark solidified yet further. It exploded into the air as if to blanket the sky, unleashing a mushrooming cloud of ghastly terror over Neopia. Children cried, and mothers had no words to comfort them; the sick shivered, the faint collapsed. In the wake of the outburst, grey wisps burrowed into the earth, turning it pure black.

     I AM STRONG, INFINITELY STRONGER THAN YOU.

     Solana sank to the ground, clutching her head; Alex felt as if he had been turned to jelly. It was impossible to be brave in the face of this. They were going to be obliterated, and that was that.

     But Solana was chanting, the same words that Alex had heard in the timeless land, except now he could hear them, words nearly sobbed out.

     He didn't know what they meant; but as the darkness in the soil gathered, pulsing hideously, and began to rise into the air again, while the fear rushed against him – he felt some great uplifting strength from them, and he stood from where he had collapsed, barely knowing what he was doing, focusing his mind entirely on one goal.

     That towering thing of madness and hate, rising above him, the sheer weight of its humongous bulk crushing the earth, grew and grew, as if it would never stop. I AM FOREVER, it exulted. THOSE YOU CALL TO HAVE NO POWER HERE, AND LEAST OF ALL AUTHORITY OVER ME.

     Barely standing, terrified out of his wits, against all reason and against the endless chasm that opened up before him, as the ancestors who bore the hypocritical stupidity know as sentience have always done before in some universal sense of denial, Alex shouted – his voice but a whisper on the breeze in comparison to the roaring that filled his ears – “I'm not afraid of you!”

     Solana laughed, then, while the monstrous entity cried its wrath like a maelstrom. At first, Alex wondered if she might have gone insane, so sudden and out-of-place was the noise; but that laugh was neither senseless nor gleeful, but bitter and pitying rather – even amused, perhaps – and after, she turned to him and said, “Thank you.”

     Then she raised the whip again. “Illinehtar, you are released.”

     Freed! Freed at long last from the iron grip of a wielder, the All-Slayer struck, a single white thread shooting out and piercing the great behemoth. The thread began to glow, and then widened into a cord, a rope, sucking hungrily. The Xweetok stood fully, and Alex saw the golden vial in her other hand. She uncorked it, placing the mouth against the glowing cord, and a thin stream of gold began to trickle into it, filling it at an almost visible rate.

     Superimposed over the whip, Alex could almost see another figure, not quite that of any living being he knew, shrouded in a white cloak and holding a tall staff.

     WHAT IS THIS?

     “It is that which you do not know,” Solana said. “Here, you are not known. This world rejects you, because you refused to become a part of it. I knew this universe at its beginning. I am the power that be here. I, not you.”

     NO! I AM THE DARK SUPREME! THIS IS NOT ALL. THIS CANNOT BE, SHALL NOT BE! WHEN YOU ARE WEAK AND UNWARY, WHEN THE STARS HAVE ENDED THEIR FEEBLE STRUGGLE AGAINST ME, I SHALL RETURN, AND THEN SHALL I BE VICTORIOUS. I SHALL NOT DIE!

     Then, whatever it was, it faded and was gone.

     ***

     The Xweetok and the Shoyru stood there for a long time. They were silent, merely watching the brilliance that had returned to the world. They watched until the sun had begun to set, and the clouds had begun to pull back, revealing a rare glimpse of the sky's true radiance.

     “It's gone now,” said the Xweetok at last. “I don't think you'll ever see it again, either. It would be best if you forgot all about it – but no; that is impossible. Rather, at the least, try and put it out of your head.”

     “I'll try, then. Where's the wraith?”

     “He has gone already. All kings have duties.”

     “I didn't see him arrive.”

     “You'd be surprised.” Solana smiled. “There are thousands upon thousands of things that can be done unnoticed. Daniel Harrier knew all of them. Do you believe that, having assimilated a name and taken on that name's solid form, he would be the same as before? I think that he only came to observe, and to remember.”

     “How about the faerie?”

     “Something evil was done to her. She was gone before we came.”

     “By gone, do you mean dead?”

     “Worse – perished into deep oblivion. Death is not final, you know. There is something after, a further path to walk, for the immortal soul. But it is not wise to speak of such things, for they are deep and profound secrets, and ones which even I do not know – yet I am sure that something must lie beyond the gate which the Seventh King guards.”

     “So, where will we be going now?”

     “I thought we would be separating. No doubt you, having more than the barest hint of common sense, will find your way back to the town from which you came, where it is safe.” Solana glanced at the forbidding silhouette of the trees. “Relatively.”

     “Absolutely not. You've yet to finish with me. I can hear it in your voice.”

     Solana looked at him in mild shock. “You appear to have grown more observant than most pets. But this could be the last chance you have to choose that happiness that pets so untiringly seek. I don't rest much, you know.”

     “My last chance? A shame.” Alex shrugged, and looked up at the sky again. The sun was setting, and through the gradually widening gap in the clouds it was a deep, pure, hypnotic blue. In dusk, the clouds were not black, but a beautiful midnight shade, and the sun gave some of them a brilliant golden halo of dancing light.

     “We will go to Faerieland next,” said Solana. “The Queen will require our aid. We'll go now.”

     “Yes, but not yet. I've one more thing to do.” He looked down at the strange imprint that the enemy had left behind, where he had noticed something glittering in the loose, sandy soil. Climbing quickly down into the huge crater, he found it – a small silver flute, with intricate symbols engraved along its length. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he raised it to his lips and began to play.

     It was a short, simple tune, but his fingertips glowed bright, and trails of white and gold light danced in the air as he played, whirling through complex patterns, expressing the song in a beautiful light display.

     It was only when he finished that he turned around and noticed Solana watching him curiously. “What? That bad?”

     “Quite the opposite,” she replied, breaking off her stare, “and as for what, I don't know, which is what disturbs me. But you just played a faerie tune on a faerie flute, and neither mortal nor mage has ever managed to do so, not even at the highest peak of visionary revelation. The magical intensity in the flute alone should have burned your fingers. In Neopian myth, that music is called the song of evening; evensong. You're a curious one.”

     Then she turned. “There is a lot of residual magic left over here. Something on the other side might find it if too many people come close.” She extended her arms to either side and closed her eyes. Almost immediately, stones began to bounce along the ground, gathering at the centre of the hollow. After a few minutes of this, she murmured, “Meld,” and the rocks glowed white-hot, fusing and forming seven crude pillars, each standing taller than she, and of a brown-red hue.

     “Marker stones,” Solana explained. “I raise them on occasion, to ward people away from places of danger – places like this. The message is quite direct. May I borrow that flute?”

     Alex gave it to her, curiosity piqued. She examined it for a few seconds, then began to play it.

     The tune was a strange one, with echoes to each note that suggested there were parts he couldn't hear. Sometimes it alternated rapidly from low to high to low, and then suddenly slowed and began to steadily rise, and many strange little variations and riffs were mixed in. It made his skin crawl and his fingers twitch, and his feet feel as if they wanted to dance. And as he watched, the stones did just that.

     It was quite abrupt; all of a sudden they lifted into the air, moved outwards, and dropped down again with a thud. Then they began to spin, slowly clockwise, then pin-wheeling anticlockwise. Thud. Two moved forward while the one in between stayed still. Thud. Then another pair moved backwards, and just as quickly another one moved to the centre of the circle, and the other six spun around it: Thud-thud-thud, thud. And it went on, so that the sound of the stones hitting the ground beat out an accompaniment to the tune, moving according to some inexplicable pattern. A second one moved to the centre now, and later a third, then a fourth, and when all seven were clustered together Solana stopped. There was a shift of perspective for Alex, and he realised they were in the same position as they had been in when they began. He felt quite dizzy from watching.

     “So they will dance, every time someone comes close; until they have learned to avoid this place and its magic, and until, perhaps, it is safe again.”

     Alex didn't see what she had done with the flute, but in any case, they left, rising into the air, one floating as if carried by the wind, the other flying happily ahead of her, over the gold-lined clouds and the setting sun, into the future, never looking back.

     At least, the Shoyru did not, but the Xweetok was wiser; and as she meditated on the elaborate expanses of immeasurable past, she heard a faint, pervading note sing out, like the ringing of a tiny glass bell...

The End