a A dying copse of trees barely hid the flickering of a small fire, making it fortunate that few people strayed into this area. The world did not yet know that a terrible monster roamed free, and as far as Corridan was concerned, there would be no need to tell them, and certainly no need to draw any attention to Lyahr and himself.
The few people in the area, brave or stupid enough to set up houses this close to the Blighted Lands, the ones that might have noticed their presence had been slain, leaving the path of gore and appendages which Lyahr and Corridan had followed.
"Your fire may well end up setting all these weeds ablaze, and let him know we're coming for him." Corridan eyed the brittle vegetation around him warily.
"If Sylvae doesn't already know we're coming -" Lyahr would have finished with an insult to the patchwork vampire's intelligence, but he loathed stating the obvious. "He has to know that someone would hunt him. If not us, then someone else would try to use him, as their toy, their weapon..."
"We don't know that he would become Acharya's weapon. He never specified that Sylvae should be brought back alive," Corridan reminded Lyahr, setting up an argument he didn't necessarily believe in. As he sat on the ground before the fire, he took his surroundings into consideration. Camp was set up for the night, his books were safely stowed away in his saddlebags, his horse was securely tethered to the rotting trunk of a tree, and he had nothing better to do than pick fights with the warrior who was only polite to him anyways.
"How else would the little bastard be of any use to our 'Great Leader?'"Lyahr sneered. He had no intention at all of returning Sylvae alive, he planned on severing each of the patchwork vampire's limbs and burying them as deep as he could. Any other course of action would be doing the dirty work of a man - not a man anymore, a thing - that was struggling to obliterate what Lyahr and countless others had died, and suffered, to keep whole.
Corridan lowered his head, hiding a grin. He understood the warrior's suspicions; whether he agreed with them was another matter entirely. "Even so, it would be safer if..."
"No." Lyahr spoke flatly, not bothering to meet Corridan's eyes. He knew that Magi Song would have been safer; natural fire can never, under any circumstances, be controlled. "I won't use Cair'leih ever again." Lyahr kept his hands busy, fashioning a makeshift spit. With the contraption planted firmly in the ground, he prodded the base of the flames absently with a thick, stripped branch.
"Alright," Corridan smirked openly, staring at the small pile of skinned animals next to Lyahr. The stocky man had always been a warrior above all, not unintelligent, only never quite concerned with how or why Magi Song worked as it did. Rather than trudging through the tedious explanations of counteractive sound waves and what Cair'leih actually did, he humored the man. "But refusing to wield Cair'leih again doesn't change what has been done and it is not exactly logical. Abstinence is not atonement, Lyahr." Corridan's voice turned flat. The fire did not catch or glitter in his still, black eyes.
"It's a start." Lyahr skewered one of the animals - there were only three, now that Corridan counted - and set it to cook over the fire.
"Then by your own logic, if Sylvae suddenly stopped leaving this trail of bodies we've been following, then he'd be well on his way to complete forgiveness." Corridan knew there was a distinction to be made, but he needed to make sure that Lyahr understood the same.
"That's completely different," Lyahr spoke after brief deliberation, causing Corridan to grin brightly. "He wouldn't stop because he felt bad about what he'd done. If he thought the wrong people were following him, there's a chance he'd stop taking people apart long enough to lay low. A creature like Sylvae does not suddenly reform."
"Of course not," Corridan agreed, still smiling. Now for the next push.
"He is a monster," Lyahr finished pointedly, but Corridan wasn't ready for it to end there.
"And we're not." There was a point he was trying to make, something Lyahr needed to see, but it was necessary for the man to arrive at the conclusion on his own.
"I'm not." Lyahr rubbed his left palm distractedly, making it clear that he wanted to drop the subject.
"But I am. I see. Lyahr, labeling me monster won't change anything. It will not give repair the things you've destroyed, and it will not give back the lives you've taken."
"You don't seem to regret the loss of life all that much," Lyahr countered bitterly.
"They would have met their end eventually, with or without our help." Corridan shrugged, reminding himself to hold close to the facade he'd been built. Some people still needed to play their parts, and may not if they knew all of the truth.
"And I haven't destroyed anything," the warrior spoke through clenched teeth, still rubbing his palm with the thumb of his right hand.
"No? Have you noticed how unfamiliar the maps of this world seem?" Gently, Corridan reminded himself. I wonder how he will react when - no, if - he realizes how thoroughly he's been manipulated.
"That means nothing. Some cataclysmic event melted glaciers, shook faultlines -"
"Lyahr," Corridan interrupted, catching the other's attention before he proceeded too far into his rant. "That cataclysmic event was us." So much for subtlety
Sapphire hair obscured Lyahr's eyes as he shook his head half-heartedly.
"Don't you remember your dreams? We slept all those centuries, surely you've got to remember one of them."
In all actuality, Lyahr remembered them all, though he'd done his best to forget. In his dreams he'd heard the wail of the world, something in the dark howling in frustration and his own voice, laughing triumphantly. In some, he'd stood outside of himself, watching himself sleep. He'd stared at his own shadowbound and dust-cloaked form, encased in stone in the caverns beneath Rehn'acet, above the Rift where Torankhayel made their hearts beat and their bodies sleep. Between Dalnek and Felanya, he had slept and now he remembered.
"They were only dreams." Lyahr spoke the lie, wanting so much to make it true.
Corridan cocked an eyebrow, shook his head, and said nothing.
"And how do you know they were anything more?" He wanted solid proof to tell him what he already knew.
"There's this great big rock in the world, with all these pretty, long, terribly-difficult-to-translate words on it," Corridan began.
"Cerdaiya," Lyahr rolled his eyes. "It doesn't exist."
"Well I wasn't staring at a bathroom wall for a year," Corridan laughed as he pondered the possibilities of a bathroom wall containing a prophecy about the fate of the world. It could happen... stranger things had happened throughout the history of this now dark and cold world.
"A year? Why-"
"My memory tells me that when I joined the Magi a mere four years ago..." he chuckled as if finding the whole situation terribly amusing. It was humorous, in a completely not humorous at all manner, that the memories he depended upon were riddles with inconsistencies, and he had trouble distinguising which memories were from his life as a Mage, and which were from over a millennium ago. "Acharya wanted me to study the big, pretty rock. So of course I did, agreeing with him wholeheartedly that he needed a Mage with a scholarlike knowledge of the stone and its contents, since the Svearin don't like to share their knowledge. It's full of prophecies and a great section of... gibberish." He fell silent as the animal cooking over the fire caught his attention. It was almost feline except for the two rows of tiny horns leading from the animal's brow behind its ears.
"And the prophecies..." Lyahr prompted Corridan. He personally had no interest in the animal. It was dead, it was food, and that was all.
"That it's our fault. All of it." Corridan murmured, still staring at the creature's skull. Those animals grew up to be ten feet long including a four foot tail, and got extremely upset if they found their young had been eaten. Corridan was unnerved not by the facts themselves, but because he knew all the facts. Of course, the thought of being disemboweled by an overgrown housecat didn't particularly appeal to him either. Housecat? Where had that memory come from?
"No," Lyahr said firmly while Corridan was still staring at the food. "I thought we'd died to save this plane. Then I wake up after the longest nap in the history of man, and realize who I am, what I've done, and that lucky me, my job is not over yet." Lyahr shook his head, continuing to grumble bitterly.
"We failed, Lyahr. Somewhere between there and here we fucked up, and even though we were all willing to die for this world it wasn't good enough. We're still here, the walls are still falling."
"And your big, pretty rock confirmed all this?" Lyahr scoffed.
"That big, pretty rock was the last good thing the Undead Houses did. A decade and a half after we stood over the Rift - and couldn't close it - those nutcases banded together and painted on this big... thing. They put charms on the ink, I don't know exactly how... That doesn't matter. It describes why we were picked, who else helped, why we failed, why we'll fail again if we don't get our acts together, what Torankhayel has done to us... lots of other things I can't remember..."
"Is there anything it doesn't say?" Lyahr demanded sarcastically.
"Actually, it doesn't say how to get the cooks in the Tower to make a decent burrito, but that is the price for saving the world." Corridan studied the blank look on Lyahr's face, ultimately deciding that the man had obviously forgotten both burritos and humor.
"And did your big, pretty rock tell you how to beat Acharya, and those idiots in the masses that support him, without knowing a thing about what he really is, too? Or did the authors not foresee him being absolutely insane?"
"You've got so much still to figure out, and I can't tell." Corridan was getting too tired to remind Lyahr that, as far as the middle circle of Magi knew, Acharya had always been insane, forging people into weapons to tear down the remnants of the interdimensional walls.
"That's very mature."
"Honestly, I can't tell. When I try to directly quote A'Cerdaiya, or explain it in detail to anyone, none of what I say makes any sense." A hint of frustration crept into Corridan's voice but Lyahr ignored it.
"Because you've always been so clearly concerned with making sense," Lyahr growled. He remembered Corridan randomly speaking about the strangest subjects, completely out of context.
"When people actually try to listen to me -" With that, Corridan realized how immature they sounded. They seemed nothing at all like the Cerdaiya made them out to be - steadfast and ingenius warriors of fate, older than every building in this world and twice as wise. They did not act as if they had survived more than a millennium, they acted like children. Corridan decided to change the subject. "Why do you keep rubbing your palm?"
Lyahr said nothing, watching the muscles of the animal in front of him bubble, ooze and blacken. The thought occurred to Corridan that performing a root canal on a Kael'adahn, or bathing one of the Eiral Sho'or would be so much easier than trying to hold a long, intelligent conversation with Lyahr.
"I could wait until you sleep, and just look at it then, if that's what you'd rather -"
Lyahr, still staring at the crackling flesh - for a lack of anywhere else to look - held his left palm up before the flames. Corridan had to lean close to see clearly, noting that Lyahr could have aided him by holding his hand closer.
A deep gouge had scabbed over, leaving the palm of Lyahr's left hand looking pitted and weeping. The bleeding had stopped by and large, and Corridan raised his eyes at this.
"Why cut the Jihann away?"
Lyahr pulled his hand back, letting it rest in his lap and shrugged. "Like I said, no more Magi Song."
"How long ago?"
"Does it matter?" Lyahr prodded at the flames before him once more, avoiding eye contact with Corridan.
"Lyahr ," Corridan spoke in a "don't-you-dare-ignore-me" sort of tone. "How long ago?"
"Five days," the man answered tersely. "Does it matter?"
Corridan began muttering to himself and Lyahr only caught snippets. "I'll... back to Acharya... Torankhayel... has to know..." This was followed by several angry sounding phrases in Kaer'melthek.
"Corridan! What does it matter? Are you going to run back to your master and tell him how bad I've been?"
To this Corridan only sneered, "I'm not telling." He began to walk away, but stepped back to the flame long enough mutter a few long explanations about the animals Lyahr planned to eat. "Call your shadow hounds, unless you plan on not waking in the morning."
If the black haired Mage hadn't been sticking around, Lyahr would have suspected him of making up the horned Whiptail cats. But one thing Lyahr had learned from his dreamsight into the world, and from watching the inhabitants of the Tower - and what his memories of vacations between missions - was that the desire to save their own skin was inherent in every Mage.
Before Lyahr could fall into anything resembling a peaceful sleep - as he had said, there was no rest for them anymore - he waited to hear the sounds of five of his voral'calev circling their camp, marching in tune to the wail of the world.