Paul S. Kemp, Fictioneer

I’ve been posting lots of bits from Riptide, but none from Godborn, my next novel in the Erevis Cale saga.  I hereby remedy that with an extended scene introducing you to Cale’s son, Vasen.  I  hope you enjoy (as always this is not copyedited nor necessarily final).

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He had never known the father of his blood, but Erevis Cale haunted his dreams.  Vasen saw him as a dark man with a dark sword, a dark soul. In the dreams he never saw Cale’s face, and rarely heard his voice. They communed without truly seeing one another, in blindness, in quietude, and over the years through that sense-starved connection Vasen came to understand what Cale wished him to know — the depths of loss, the pain of regret.

Vasen could see only darkness in the dream but the frigid air felt like knives on his skin.  Cale spoke to him, the same words he always spoke, his deep voice pushing aside the silence of the dreamscape. “I am cold, Vasen.”

“Where are you?”

Vasen tried to move, but could not.  Something was holding him in place.

“Vasen, you must not fail.”

The words hung there for a time in the void of the dreamscape, even their echo portentous.

“At what?” Vasen asked.  “Do not fail at what?”

But Cale offered no answers and Vasen awoke shivering, his heart racing.

He opened his eyes and stared up at the vaulted ceiling.  The gauzy, dim gray of a newly birthed morning filtered through the single window of his quarters.  He sat up and recited the Dawn Greeting, though he could count on one hand the number of days he had seen more than an hour or two of sunlight in the past year.

“Dawn is Amaunator’s gift.  His light dispels darkness and renews the world.”

He rose and sat on the edge of his sleeping pallet for a time, the dream still echoing through his memory.  He examined his hands, his skin the color of tarnished silver, and watched shadows web the spaces between his fingers, spiral up his forearms.  He shook his hands and the darkness dissipated like mist.  If only he could shake the darkness in his blood just so.

The light of your faith is stronger than the darkness of your blood, Derreg had once told him and most of the time Vasen credited the words.  But sometimes, after awakening from a dream of Erevis Cale and sitting alone with his shadow, he thought otherwise. Erevis Cale haunted more than just his dreams.  His words, his warning, haunted Vasen’s life, hung over it like funeral shroud.

He inhaled and let his thoughts turn to brighter things, to his mother.  Derreg, his adoptive sire, the man he called and considered his father, had said that Vasen had seen his mother alive for only a few moments and could have remembered nothing of her.  But Vasen did remember, or thought he did: her soft voice, her dark hair.   He knew she had loved him.  He was certain of that.

And he was certain that Derreg had loved him, too, despite Vasen’s appearance, despite his sire.  The love of his mother and father, together with the light of his faith and his god, was enough to keep the shadows at bay.

Vasen stared down at his shadow, his constant companion, the occlusion of his heritage with his hopes.  He could not shake the feeling that he was living through a history written by someone else, unable to turn the page to get to his own life.

The rush of the cascades pouring down the cliff faces to fill the valley’s tarns carried through his window.  He had become so accustomed to the sound, the background noise of his existence, that he had to focus his attention to hear them.  Hard raps on his door startled him and summoned shadows from his skin.

“Hold a moment,” he said.

He slid out of his shadow and out of his bed.  The morning chill summoned goose pimples.  The fire in his small hearth had burned down to ash and embers, veins of glowing orange visible like cracks through the gray and black.  He pulled on his tunic, his holy symbol on its chain, and padded the few steps to the door of his small chambers.  He opened the door and blinked in the unexpected glow.

The Oracle stood in the doorway, his red and yellow robes glowing softly.  His unseeing eyes were the orange of a seeing trance.  He stared at a point just to Vasen’s left.  A shining, platinum sun, with a rose raised in relief, hung from a chain around his neck.   The Oracle’s guide, a large, tawny coated dog with intelligent eyes, stood beside the elderly seer, tongue lolling, tail wagging.  Vasen realized that he had never heard the dog bark.

“O-Oracle,” Vasen said, surprise making him stutter.  He had never heard of the Oracle entering a seeing trance outside the sanctum.

The Oracle smiled, showing toothless gums and deepening the web of grooves that lined his face.  Age spots dotted the skin of his pate, visible through the thin reeds of his gray hair.  His skin looked paper-thin and lit with a soft, inner glow.

“His light and warmth keep you, Vasen,” said the Oracle.  Despite his age, his voice was the steady, even tone of the valley’s cascades, so different from the voice he spoke in when not in a trance.

“And you, Oracle.”

“You may go,” the Oracle said to the dog.  The creature licked the Oracle’s hand, eyed Vasen, and disappeared in a blink.

Standing face to face with the Oracle, Vasen keenly felt the differences between them.  The Oracle’s pale skin, deprived of direct sunlight for a century, but illuminated by the inner glow of his trance, contrasted markedly with Vasen’s dark skin, dimmed as it was by the legacy of his bloodline.  The Oracle was lit with Amaunator’s light.  Vasen was dimmed by Erevis  Cale’s shadow.

“Do you…wish to come in, Oracle?” Vasen said.  He realized the words sounded foolish, but was not sure what else to say.

“Did you know that Abelar Corrinthal was my father?”

Taken aback by the abrupt conversational turn, Vasen managed a nod.  “My father told me.”

The Oracle’s eyes fixed on him, pinning Vasen in place.  “Which father?”

Vasen had trouble forming a reply.  “Derreg.  My adoptive father.  I never knew Erevis Cale. You know this, Oracle.”

“But you see Cale still.  Sometimes.  In your dreams.”

Vasen could not deny it.  “Yes.”

“So do I.”

Shadows leaked from Vasen’s skin and he swallowed.  “What do you see?”

“I see you,” the Oracle said.

“I…I don’t understand.”

“I do not either.  I met Erevis Cale.  Did you know that?”

“I wondered.”

“The first time, he was a man haunted.  The second time, he was not a man at all, though he was still haunted.”

“Haunted by what?”

“Doubt, I think,” the Oracle said, and smiled softly.  “Your father, your adoptive father, was the son of Regg, who rode with my father.  Did you know that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Vasen could not shake the impression that he and the Oracle were simply reciting words written out for them by someone else.

“You, like your father, and like his father before him, swore to remain here and protect this abbey, to protect me.”

Vasen did not answer.  He felt humbled by the Oracle’s acknowledgment.

“You have been here the longest with me, Vasen, and have done credit to the memory of Derreg and Regg.  But change comes to everything.”

“It does,” Vasen said, hesitatingly, not understanding.

“I’m one hundred and six years old, Vasen, son of Derreg and Erevis.  Where will you go when I die?  Already pilgrims come only rarely.  Traveling the realm of the Shadovar is too dangerous.  When I die, still fewer will come.”

“They’ll come to see your father’s tomb.”

“Perhaps some.”

“They’ll come to see yours, to honor your memory.”

The Oracle smiled and Vasen saw that  it was forced.  His lined face wrinkled with remembered pain.

“That, I fear, will not be.  I ask again: Where will you go?”

Vasen shook his head. He had dedicated his life to service and had never conceived a life for himself outside the valley.  “I do not know.  Perhaps I will remain here.”

The Oracle smiled, as if he knew better.  ”There’s something you must have.”

From the pocket of his robe, he withdrew a thick silver chain from which hung an exquisitely made charm of a rose.  Age had left the silver black with tarnish.

“This was my father’s….”

“Oracle, I cannot–”

“Abelar Corrinthal, the Saint of the Abbey, my father, would be pleased for you to have it.  This I know.”

Vasen felt himself flush, touched.

The Oracle reached out with the charm and Vasen bowed his head to allow the charm around his neck. The touch of the symbol, once worn by Saint Abelar, made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“It’s tarnished.  But scratch away the tarnish and there is silver and light beneath.”

Vasen took the Oracle’s point.  “I understand.”

“The darkness in you is not born of Erevis Cale.”

Vasen stiffened.  “Who then?”

The Oracle’s face slackened.

“Who, Oracle?”

The glow left the Oracle’s skin.  The orange light of Amaunator fled his eyes and they returned to the filmy, unseeing eyes of an old, blind man.  He sagged, his aged body unable to so suddenly bear his weight.  Vasen stepped forward and caught him to prevent a fall.  He felt like a bundle of sticks under his robes.

“It is Vasen, Oracle.”

“Vazn,” said the Oracle in his slow, awkward way.  “Where Bowny?”

“You sent Browny away,” Vasen said.  “I’m sure he is nearby.”

“Bowny!” the Oracle called.  “Bowny!”

Vasen found it difficult to reconcile the sure, powerful voice of the Oracle when he was in a trance, with the childlike voice of the mentally infirm Oracle when he was not.

A soft pop announced Browny’s return to the Oracle’s side.  The dog, a magical creature that could move instantly from place to place, nuzzled the Oracle’s hand.

“Bowny came!” the Oracle said, grinning.

“I’ll escort you back to your sanctum, Oracle.”

The Oracle shook his head.  “No, Vazn.  Have pilgims sent to me for Seeing.  I speak to them, then all leave this day.  You take them.”

The latest group of pilgrims — the first in months — had arrived less than a tenday earlier.  They would be disappointed to leave so soon.

“Yes, Oracle.”

The Oracle smiled at him.  “Bye bye, Vazn.”

“The light keep and warm you, Oracle.”

He watched the Oracle, one hand on Brownie, totter off down the corridor.

*   *   *   *   *

Vasen returned to his room, closed the door, and took the rose holy symbol from his neck.  Thin threads of shadow spiraled from his fingertips, around the rose.  He imagined Saint Abelar using the symbol to channel the power of Amaunator — in his dawn guise of Lathander — while facing the nightwalker.

He studied its petals, the stem, the two thorns.  It was so finely crafted it could have been an actual rose magically transformed into metal.  With his thumbnail, he scratched at the tarnish of one petal to reveal a line of shining silver, light under the darkness.

Smiling, he returned it to his neck.  He would try to be worthy of it.

His eyes fell on the dusty, locked chest he kept in one corner of his chamber and he lost his smile.  The chest contained only one thing: the dark, magical blade borne by Erevis Cale: Weaveshear.  Vasen had held its cool hilt only once, as a boy, when his father had first given it to him.  Shadows from the blade had mingled with the shadows of his flesh.  The weapon had felt an extension of him, but the familiarity had frightened him.  He had never touched it again.

After donning his padded shirt and mail, he slung his shield over his back, donned his weapon belt with its ordinary sword, and headed out.   As was his habit, he wished to commune with Amaunator at Highsun, ere he took the pilgrims back out into the dark.

*   *   *   *   *