“The vision changes, sometimes she finds it, sometimes she doesn’t. I suspect the blind woman saw the need to give destiny a small nudge. I journeyed back to the city after my time on the ice, finding long-rotted corpses and destruction, a scene my gift had never revealed to me for it has always cast my sight far into the future. The black stone had gone and the memory stone lay shattered, though I was able to pull enough knowledge from the fragments to divine who had done this thing. I spent years amidst the ruins, lost in grief, diverting myself with learning the language and lore revealed by my gift. One day it brought a vision of the Eorhil woman holding a perfectly square stone fashioned from the same material as the memory stone, except such an artifact did not exist in this fallen city, so I made it. I recrafted the memory stone, chiselling away for the better part of a year until it was just a small cube, and into it I poured all the knowledge revealed by my gift. I hope it made her happy.”
“It made her . . . of great use to her people, and mine. For which I thank you.”
Lionen gave an affable shrug and returned to his meal. “What were you looking for ?” Vaelin asked him as the silence grew long. “Out on the ice where you took your sister’s body.”
“A legend. I know to you my people are little more than myth, but in this time we have our own tales, old songs from the days when the earth was young. I’ve seen much that would suggest this world is far more ancient than we could ever comprehend, a mother to countless wonders. I went in search of one, a being the people of your time would term a god, said to have the power to return the dead.”
His gaze grew distant and he resumed his meal, eating in silence. Vaelin wondered if this meeting was so familiar to Lionen he had become wearied with the repetition. It occurred to him that his gift was truly a curse, filling his mind with visions of a future so distant and removed from this time but holding a terrible truth, robbing his own age of meaning.
Another tremor shook the ground, stronger this time, causing the shutters on the windows to rattle and shaking Lionen from his silence. He scraped the last of his stew from the bowl and rose, taking it outside. Vaelin followed, finding him tying it to a length of rope strung between two dwellings. “It’s a long climb down to the river,” he said. “The wind will scour it clean. An empty gesture, but I’ve always found habits hard to break.”
“Did you find it?” Vaelin prompted. “This god of legend?”
Lionen’s gaze shifted to something beyond Vaelin’s shoulder. “I think you know what I found, oh Shadow of Ravens.”
He knew what he would see, even though it had made no growl this time, and its approach had been silent. It was not so large as before, its shoulders level with Vaelin’s waist, though he had long suspected it could assume whatever size it chose.
The wolf trotted closer, nose close the ground as it sniffed the stone around Vaelin’s feet, reminding him of how Scratch would search for a scent. “He can smell you, though you are but an echo cast back from times to come,” Lionen said. “It would seem he wants to be able to find you again.”
The wolf sat back on its haunches, long pink tongue sliding over its lips as it yawned, green eyes regarding Vaelin with placid affection. “He followed you from the ice?” he asked Lionen.
“Yes. I found him so far north I suspect I stood atop the entire world. He was bigger then, every inch the god I expected to find. He came close, sniffed at Essara’s body, used his teeth to pull away the shroud covering her face. For one mad second I thought he was going to eat her, but instead he licked her face, just once . . . And I heard her voice.”
Lionen’s face clouded and he started back to the memory stone, Vaelin following with the wolf padding alongside. “You have more questions for me,” Lionen said. “Please make them quick. Time grows short.”
“The black stone,” Vaelin said. “What is it? Why did he take it?”
“I told you, it’s a box. One we opened together, and this world is the result.”
“You said Erlin would touch it, but not be him when he did. What did you mean?”
“The ancient man told you he was nearly taken before, when he came close to death and touched the Beyond. You know the Ally uses others to wreak his havoc in the world, souls captured and twisted to his purpose. Why do you suppose he didn’t send one of them to steal Erlin’s body?”
Lionen halted before the stone, smiling faintly. “The last one ever to be carved, by my own hand. The stone itself comes from but one mine, deep in the mountains found in the place you call the Northern Reaches. We also found the black stone there, just one huge nugget of it with very singular properties. It was his idea to carve it, of course, though my sister argued against it. ‘Such power should not be placed in human hands,’ she said. He laughed and held her close, saying, ‘All power should be in human hands, my love. For how else can we transcend humanity?’”
