Corvis Eralith
—I sank.
The water closed over my head, and I was drowning.
No, not drowning. Impossible liquid filled my lungs, cold and heavy and wrong, but it didn't choke me. It didn't burn. It simply was, and I was in it, and the world above had already become a memory.
My body was wrong. Not the small, fragile body of a nine-year-old prince, not the limbs that had failed me against the bear's fury.
This was something else—something that felt like it belonged to a young elf in the prime of his years, muscles coiled with power I had never earned, limbs that moved with a strength I had never possessed.
But that power was a lie wrapped in a wound.
Phantom pain traced every nerve: my leg burning where claws had torn it, my neck screaming with each imagined movement, needles of agony driving into my brain with every thought.
It was all in my head. I was fine. I was dead, but I was fine.
This river. This impossible, endless river.
I thrashed against the current, arms that were not mine clawing at water that refused to part.
My legs—those same impossible legs, the legs of someone I might have become in another life, another world, another chance—pumped frantically, trying to find purchase where there was none.
The water moved around me, through me, in me, and I was nothing more than a leaf caught in a storm.
I fought. I fought because I had to. Because if I stopped fighting, I would sink, and if I sank, I would stay, and if I stayed—
The Red Gorge. I had done this before. I had died, and I had returned. I had clawed my way back from the dark, had opened my eyes to a morning that should not have existed, had breathed air that should have been forever beyond my reach.
It wasn't the dungeon!
It wasn't some Djinnic relic buried in ancient stone. It was me!
I knew it now. Deep in my bones, deeper than bones, deeper than blood or flesh or any of the fragile architecture that held my soul together.
The knowledge erupted through me like a wave—the same wave that was rattling me like a wooden house in a hurricane, tossing me through currents that had no bottom and no shore.
REtrocurrent.
The word was a key turning in a lock that had been waiting for me my entire existence. I swam. I swam as I had never swum in this life, in any life. I swam with the desperation of someone who understood that death was not an end but a door, and I refused to walk through it.
Not yet. Not now. Not when there was still so much to do, so much to save, so much to prevent.
My head broke the surface.
Air. Sweet, impossible, alive air filled my lungs, and I gasped, and I breathed, and I lived. But the world around me was not the world I had left.
I floated in a body of water so vast, so wrong, that the seas of Dicathen were puddles in comparison.
Waves rose around me like mountains, their peaks lost in a sky that wasn't a sky, their troughs plunging into depths that swallowed light, meaning and time.
Whirlpools spun in lazy, hypnotic spirals, each one large enough to devour Asyphin and Zestier whole, their centers darker than any night, their edges frothing with foam that glowed with colors I had no names for.
Beneath me, currents moved with the slow, terrible power of tectonic plates shifting, strong enough to uproot the Elshire Forest like a child pulling weeds from a garden.
This was no ocean. This was no sea. This was the river that ran beneath reality, the current that carried all things toward their ends, the flood that had been flowing since before the first star kindled and would flow until the last light guttered and died.
And above me—
I saw them.
Not with my eyes—I had no eyes here, not really, not eyes that could see what I was seeing. I saw them with something deeper, something that had been sleeping in me since the moment I first opened my eyes in this world and would never sleep again.
Golden threads. Thousands. Millions. Billions. Trillions.
They stretched across the vault of that not-sky, reaching to infinity in every direction, their numbers beyond counting, their complexity beyond comprehension.
They wove around each other in skeins so impossibly tangled that my mind—the part of me that was still Corvis, still a boy who had once believed the world made sense—screamed and fractured and broke trying to understand.
They moved. They moved so fast that they blurred into solid light, and so slow that I could trace the arc of a single thread across eons.
They circled themselves in patterns that folded back on themselves, loops within loops within loops, turning and turning and turning into themselves for eternity, and there were infinite of them, infinite patterns, infinite futures, infinite pasts and presents.
And I knew them, I knew them intimately.
They were Fate.
The word was a whisper in a language older than speech, a concept that had no business being contained in something as small as a thought.
This was not the tidy, comprehensible fate of stories, not the gentle guidance of benevolent gods. This was the machinery of existence itself, laid bare, and it was wrong.
It was beautiful and terrible and utterly, completely wrong. The threads did not care about the lives they wove. The patterns did not care about the souls they bound. They simply were, turning and turning, weaving and unweaving, creating and destroying with every motion, and I was nothing, nothing, nothing in the face of them.
I was a speck of dust before a galaxy. I was a mayfly before the turning of the stars. I was less than that—I was an echo, a ghost, a possibility that had somehow become aware of the machinery that had spawned it, and the awareness was killing me.
The threads moved faster, slower, faster, faster, and I could not look away, could not close eyes I did not have, could not stop seeing—
Then I was back.
The world snapped into focus with the violence of a slammed door. Snow. Trees. Cold.
I blinked. Once. Twice.
A rough tongue scraped against my hand.
The Forest Hound—the one I had bandaged, the one I had helped—stood over me, its amber eyes fixed on my face. Its pack surrounded us, a living wall of fur and warmth and presence.
I tried to speak. My throat made a sound like stones grinding together. The hound whined softly and pressed closer, and I felt its warmth seep into my frozen bones.
The river had let me go—again.
It had reached for me, had wrapped its currents around me, had shown me the machinery of existence itself and then it had released me, spitting me back into the world like a fish too small to keep.
My left hand flew to my neck, fingers scrabbling against skin that should have been torn, should have been broken, should have been the gateway through which my life had poured out onto the snow.
My right hand found my leg, pressing, probing, but there was nothing. No gash, no blood, no ruined flesh that would never knit. I was whole.
My storage ring was still on my finger. The wand-cane was still at my hip. The bandages I had used on the Forest Hound were gone, but that was all. That was the only difference between now and—
The roar came.
It tore through the forest like the same sound that had shattered trees and splintered trunks and ended my life in a darkness I was only beginning to understand.
My eyes went wide. My heart seized. Flashes of excruciating pain coursed through my body—phantom memories of teeth closing around my throat, of bone snapping, of consciousness fraying like a rope pulled past its breaking point.
Panic rose in my throat, hot and sour, and I wanted to run. I wanted to run. Every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to flee, to hide, to do anything—anything—to avoid feeling those jaws close around me again.
I forced it down. I forced it down with every shred of will I had left after dying and returning, after drowning and surfacing, after seeing things that had no right to exist in any sane universe.
Why here? Why now? I had just clawed my way back from the river, had just opened my eyes to snow and sky and the rough tongue of a Forest Hound against my cold fingers.
I had just lived. And now death was already reaching for me again, its breath already hot on my neck.
But I had no right to complain. I was back. I was back. That was more than I deserved, more than anyone deserved, and I would not waste it.
The Forest Hounds were gone. Smart creatures, sensible creatures. They knew what was coming. They knew the monster that stalked these woods, and they had done the only thing that made sense.
I envied them. Because I could not run.
Even if I fled, even if I found Master Kamiel, even if I brought back every mage in Vaelmora—what then?
The corruption was already there, already festering, already turning something that might once have been a guardian of this forest into a weapon against everything it had ever protected.
If I ran, the beast would run too, or it would stay, or it would do what corrupted beasts always did: kill. Kill until something stronger ended it. Kill until there was nothing left to kill.
I didn't know if Master Kamiel could defeat it. I didn't know if anyone in Vaelmora could defeat it. The bear was not an ordinary mana beast—I could feel it in the way it moved, in the way it resisted the corruption.
I had never read of a corrupted beast fighting its own corruption in the novel. I had never read of anything so wrong still trying to be right.
But it was. Whatever that bear had been, whatever soul lived beneath the poison the Vritra had pumped into its veins, it was still there. Still fighting. Still trying.
I had to help it. I didn't know how. I didn't know if it was even possible. But I had to try.
I vaulted onto a branch, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. The bark was rough beneath my fingers, slick with frost, and for a moment I thought I would slip, would fall, would be caught again—
No. Focus.
In the novel, the Alacryans controlled their corrupted beasts with artifacts. They also had a way to make themselves invisible to the frenzy—some kind of powder.
I had none of those things. But I had something else: I had seen this bear. I had seen it cry. I had seen it tear at its own flesh, trying to claw out the corruption that was eating it alive.
I had seen something in there, something that was not the poison, something that might—if I was very lucky, if the world was very kind—respond to the right stimulus.
Who had done this? Somewhere in the Beast Glades, I knew a Retainer was lurking—Retainer Uto of Vechor, maybe, or one of his lackeys, doing what Alacryans did best: preparing the battlefield before the war even began. It didn't matter. Not now. Only the bear mattered.
A tree fell in the distance. The sound crashed through the forest like thunder, and the ground trembled beneath it.
I thought of what I had. My wand-cane. My bow. Bandages, dried fruits, nuts, honey—the supplies I always carried on my hunts, the food that was supposed to sustain me through hours in the wilderness.
And the balm. The balm I had made with herbs gathered from the forest that this bear had once protected.
Honey. Bears loved honey. They craved it, sought it out, risked everything for the sweetness of it. And I had honey in my storage ring—the best honey Zestier could offer, rich with sugars, the kind of free energy that any creature would kill to taste.
The steps were closer now. Heavier. The bear was coming, and I had seconds, maybe less, to decide if my plan was brilliant or suicidal.
I didn't have time to decide. I acted.
I jumped from my branch just as the tree began to fall, the trunk splitting with a sound like the world ending.
My wand-cane was in my hand before I hit the air, the wood singing with mana, and I pushed—a burst of wind that sent me hurtling away from the collapsing tree, away from the ground, away from the jaws that were already closing on empty air.
I could not fight this thing. I had already tried, in a time that had never been, and I had died for my arrogance.
I could not fight it, could not hurt it, could not do anything that might tip the balance further toward the corruption that was devouring it from within.
All I could do was run, hope, and work.
The bear charged again. Another tree fell. I leaped, and the wind caught me, and I was a leaf in a hurricane, a ghost in a forest that had become a battlefield.
Behind me, the bear roared, and I heard the exhaustion in it. The pain. The struggle. It was still fighting—still trying to control the thing that had been done to it.
Honey. Nuts. Dried fruits. The balm, with its herbs and its honey and its slow, gentle healing. I pulled them from my storage ring as I ran, my fingers slick with sweat, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
Ars Aquamorph formed a sphere of water, clean and pure, and Ars Ariamorph caught the ingredients I threw into it, mixing them into something thick, sweet, and hopeful.
Bears were omnivores. They ate meat, yes, but they also ate berries, roots, honey: anything that gave them energy, anything that helped them survive the long, cold winters.
And this bear was starving—starving for life.
I ran until I couldn't run anymore. My foot caught on something or maybe just the weight of my own exhaustion, and then I was falling, rolling through branches and snow that had no business being so cold when my blood was so hot.
I turned mid-air, my body remembering the last time I had fallen, the last time I had seen those jaws opening beneath me—
The bear was there. Its fauces gaped, saliva dripping from teeth that had already killed me once, and in its eyes I saw the red of corruption fighting the green of what it had been, and I had one chance.
"Please work!"
The sphere left my hand. It arced through the air, a bubble of sweetness and hope and it disappeared into the bear's jaws just as they began to close around me.
I hit the ground running. My feet found purchase, my legs carried me forward, and behind me I heard the bear roar—but the roar was different. Diminished. Confused.
I glanced back, just for a moment, and I saw it.
The bear was still coming. It was still chasing, but there was something in its movement now that hadn't been there before, something that might have been hesitation, might have been awareness, might have been the faintest glimmer of the creature it had once been.
I needed to do it again. I needed to do it again, and again, and again, until the corruption lost its hold or until I ran out of honey, until I ran out of time, until the bear remembered that it was more than the poison in its veins.
I ran through snow that tried to swallow my feet. I dodged roots that reached for my ankles. I used the forest that was my home and I used it well—but I could feel myself slowing.
The adrenaline was fading. The mana was running thin. My arms were heavy, my lungs were burning, and the bear was still behind me, still chasing, still hungry.
A shadow fell across me, the shadow of something massive, something that had already killed me once and was ready to do it again.
I rolled. Claws ripped through my furs, through the clothes beneath, through the air where my spine had been a moment before.
I rolled again, Ars Ariamorph catching me, steadying me, keeping me alive for one more second, two more seconds, three—
The balm. I still had balm. I still had honey. I still had one more chance.
The bear reared up, its massive front paws raised, and for a moment it was silhouetted against the grey winter sky, and I saw the green in its eyes, brighter now, pushing back the red, fighting.
I threw the sphere. It flew true, and the bear's jaws opened, and I thought: please, please, please—
I hit the ground, fell, rolled, tried to breathe, tried to live—
The bear drank. The sphere burst, and the concoction coated its throat. The green in its eyes flared like sunlight through leaves, like the first day of spring.
The bear trembled. Its whole body shook, a shudder that started in its chest and rippled outward. Yet I couldn't run, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but close my eyes and wait for the river to claim me one last time.
The paw fell.