DARKNESS.

Darkness and the sense of drifting in deep water.

There was nothing. I was nothing, less than a mote lost in blank eternity.

I knew nothing. No pain, no memory—I did not even know my own name. There were not even fragments, and all I was and had been and might become were hidden, veiled in some corner of that Dark I could not see. Nameless, shapeless and unshaped, I roiled, past things unseen and unremembered. Where was I? What was I? What had I become?

There were no gates of light nor gleaming city, no empyrean nor mountain crowned by seven walls. But there was something up ahead of me, and shapes I could not see or understand whorled past, moving like the slow drift of continents, such that I was tossed as the lonely plankton is by a passing whale.

How can I make you understand? I was nothing. There was nothing left of me, of Hadrian Marlowe. I had no sensation, no feelings, no words. Only the vague awareness of a light not wholly snuffed out. One light among many, gently pulled along by unseen tides in accordance with some pattern beyond comprehension. Was I dead? Or were these sensations the spasm of some fast-fading brain function? Was I perhaps still lying at the edge of the lake, lying at the feet of my enemy? Who knows what it is like to die—truly to die—or how long it takes?

Hadrian.

My name. That was my name, wasn’t it? It was a word, spoken by some soundless voice thundering in the night.

Hadrian.

I had a name again. Memories. The wind howling over the sea-wall at Devil’s Rest. Gibson seated in his high-backed chair in the scholiasts’ cloister. The raw scream of hunger as I cowered in a damp alley in Borosevo. The blood-cry of my fellow myrmidons. Cat’s laughter. Jinan moving beneath me and the scent of jasmine. Valka shivering against me in the cold of our cell. My headless body swaying before Prince Aranata. The last touch of the lake water as it soaked my bleeding head.

A wind came where there was no air, and I endured it. In all that howling Dark I was myself alone, borne upon its tide. The memory of that final lakeside flashed again across my awareness, and I saw it as an observer might, my head falling to the ground just as I had seen in the Quiet’s vision. I slipped past, watched the moment slide away, as though it stood upon the shores of a river and I was lost in its flood.

I knew I was going somewhere. Where that somewhere was, I cannot say, but it seemed to me almost that I walked, climbing level by level higher, toward some summit, some heart, some place within that darkness. There was the Truth. The answer. The end. Darkness within darkness, and light underneath.

A light in the black.

Almost I felt I crawled then, as though I strained against the flow. Higher. Deeper. On and on. At last I collapsed, and reached out with the right arm I had lost, willing that hand to be, straining for some identity in the darkness. Hadrian, I told myself, echoing the thunder. My name is Hadrian. My hand fluttered before me, little more than strips of skin shuddering against the blackness. It glowed before me, and straining I clenched my fist.

But my reach exceeded my grasp. My hand blew apart, pieces vanishing slow as cinders thrown into the night, and I was left alone. Whatever I was.

Hadrian.

A shadow fell across me, even in that absolute darkness, and looking up I beheld the figure of a man dressed all in black, his armor immaculately sculpted in the best Imperial fashion, breastplate shaped like a muscled torso. Stoic faces peered from the tops of his greaves and from his vambraces, framed by black laurels. The cape that flowed about his broad shoulders was black as the Dark itself, edged in a labyrinth pattern the color of fresh blood, and crimson beneath. The black coat he wore beneath his black armor was trimmed in red and red-lined and fine as the kit of any Emperor. And his face! Pale and palatine and carved as if from alabaster, violet eyes above the knife blade of a nose and twisting lips, the hair as dark as his clothing.

Hadrian.

It was me, more richly adorned than ever I had seen before, and the crest upon my breastplate was not the devil of Meidua, but the pitchfork and pentacle I had made for my Red Company, set amid a cartouche of laurels and raven rings. I reached up toward myself, tried desperately to grab hold, but my poor impression of an arm collapsed once more, shreds blowing away to naught.

That other me looked down upon me, and shook his head. I strained to pull my idea of a hand back together, to seize the hem of my cape if nothing else. My other self shook his head again, and pointed, raising an armored hand with fingers sharp as the talons of the Cielcin. I turned, and turning beheld a single, shining point of light, bright as any I had seen.

A star, white and infinitely remote.

My star.

A sudden warmth filled me like a fire—like a breath. The other Hadrian stepped forward, ceremonial spurs on his pointed boots clinking, ornamental black wings shining about his ankles. He never lowered his hand, one clawed finger eternally pointing. Forward. Back. The way forward is the way back. Back toward my life, my world, my purpose.

Yes, I thought, I’m ready to go. I turned again to look toward that gleaming star and reached out. My hand appeared again, garments of skin fluttering like battle standards on an abandoned field. I closed my fingers about that distant star, and found that it was no star at all. It was the piece of shell I had received in my vision on Vorgossos. Where I had plucked it I’d left a hole in the Dark, and light came rushing in, brighter than the star had been before it. It spilled in like clear water, and I was carried on its tide, swept past my other self where he stood, still pointing, in the darkness. I strained to keep sight of him, of his red and black cape waving, and of the divine darkness shining quiet behind him.

Light.

I had seen the rivers of light before, but here I swam their waters, brushing past memory and the lives I had not lived—the choices I had not made—a rush my merely mortal mind could scarcely comprehend. I felt myself round a sharp corner in that whorl of time and was thrown into empty air.

Falling.

Falling.

The sensation of being immersed in deep water returned. And weight. I had weight again. The back of my head was soaking—was I still in the lake? Floating on its surface?

A great pain lanced through me, and I sucked in a deep breath. I had lungs! My chest ached. My chest. I lay a long time upon the earth, appreciating each ache and terrible pain for the joy it represented: to be alive again. The boughs of trees hung over me, stooping like watchful medics at their task. Was I in the Garden? I turned my head, made sure by doing so that it was attached to a neck. I tried to sit up, and looking down beheld my scratched and dinted white armor. My body, down to my toes.

My arms . . .

My left arm was gone, severed above the elbow. My left arm. I had lost my right, had I not? Yet there it was, hand fast-holding the hilt of the sword Aranata had taken from me. Olorin’s sword. Jaddian silver and red leather. I held it up before my eyes, mouth open in wonderment. In confusion. Something had happened. Something had been done. I struggled to sit up, but the pain was more than I could bear, and I fell back into the stream. Far off, I could hear the sounds of fighting: the shouting of men and Cielcin, the cough of plasma fire and crack of burning trees.

Footsteps.

Not the tramp of boots nor the scrape of Cielcin claws, only the soft and shuffling tread of slippers. The voice—when it came—was like the gentle turn of pages in an old, familiar book. I should have expected it, and yet the sound of its familiar tones sent a thrill through me.

“You look comfortable,” it said, as if it had found me lying on the training mat before practice.

I turned my head sideways. Green slippers stood firmly planted on the surface of the waters beside my head, the hem of his viridian robe held with his cane in one hand to keep it from trailing in the stream. Tor Gibson smiled down at me, his eyes shining, a muted smile barely visible on his thin lips.

“Gibson?”

The apparition shook its head, and I knew.

The Quiet took another step nearer to me, gaze wandering the branches above our heads. It cast no shadow on the streambed, or over me. Still lying flat in the shallow water, my mutilated arm aching, I asked, “What happened to me?”

“You died.”

I shut my eyes and saw the blue glow of my own sword flash across my neck, saw my headless body wavering, saw the blood. “That isn’t what I mean.”

The light shone through that old, familiar face like sunlight through the branches of a tree. The Quiet stooped over me, careful to keep its robe from trailing in the river. It offered a hand. “We are not done with you.”

I narrowed my eyes, but clicked my sword back into my belt and took the hand offered me. There was nothing there, yet I was wrenched to my feet as though I’d been lifted by a freight crane and set on my feet. My head swam, vision stretched and blurry. How much blood had I lost? I might have fallen, but something very like an invisible hand steadied me, and I heard the shadow of my voice ask, “What do you mean, you’re not done with me? What do you want?”

To exist.

The words echoed through the clearing and over the clear stream; they echoed inside my mind. But Gibson—the Quiet—was gone.