Likewise, the Invia conversed amongst themselves. Messengers, news bearers? No! For none would break the Dragon’s laws and risk waking It from slumber, in wrath. At least, not blatantly. As luck had it, their talk outside the dragon-youth’s holds was sometimes overheard …
And when it came to interference in the world below, the Invia followed no orders. But they had a touch more discretion than the imprisoned dragon-youth …
The charm wrapped around her wrist had been made in the presence of Ksyn, just before the eight major personalities were banished. Was it possible he had even foreseen its use, uncounted centuries away? Time had surely dulled its power. It was hard to know how much: she and her sisters could only feel magic force ebb and flow through the air, not clearly see it in the way of mages. If enough power held, the charm would keep the old man hidden, even as he wandered the castle’s halls. If it had weakened too much, he would need some more of his luck. A very good deal more.
But no more of his kind would come through, not this time. More war mages would be back to guard the entry point, and soon the castle’s rulers would find a way to stabilise the accidentally fractured barrier, if that was their wish. When the entry point opened, it had been like a blow to an eggshell, making cracks in many places at once. And this had about it the beginnings of something greater than surrounding events suggested. Perhaps.
It was hard to know, looking at the feeble figure shuffling along below, with his sickly grey aura like a coat unable to keep out the cold; but huge floods start with raindrops, like her sister had said. As the Dragon wills.
The old man was peering at the distant tower, realising, it seemed, there was really nowhere else for him to go. He headed towards it. Good. She dived from the wall, plummeting fast, then spread her wings.
Case twisted the bottle’s lid back on, wanting to make the scotch last until the next goat-horned sonofabitch managed to set fire to him instead of itself. He walked in a staggered line. Careless cheer bloomed through him, to know the end was close, that soon he’d catch up with Eric, and Shelly bless her heart, and others he’d known and missed. It was really all about to be done and dusted! Why the fuck not? He’d spent a lifetime dreading his own death, at times certain actual Hellfire awaited, but now he felt light as a feather. If he was to burn, what could he do to change it at this late hour? Why worry? He sang a drunken song whose words he forgot, filling it instead with profanity.
The tall white cliff faces opened out and far below, the flat horizon spread as far as sight. That tower now stretching above him seemed part of some larger castle made of gleaming white marble, green in places with moss and lichen. A closer look showed veins of colour running through the white stone in webs.
The castle itself, if castle was even the right word, was so huge he saw only part of it, nesting among mountains of a similar stone, as though it had been chiselled down from them into its present shape, layer by layer. A mass of windows — round ones, square ones, some glass-covered, others not — dotted the colossal stone slabs of its flank.
Though the castle partly obscured the view of the land spread beyond, he could see that it was like a tabletop model of rolling hills: large plains of white or green, clusters of woodland. Other distant structures curved skywards, maybe lookout towers, maybe geographic features, bone-white like the land’s protruding sun-bleached ribs. A patch of the far horizon shimmered and gleamed like a sea. A vast paved road ran dead straight into the distance, dividing the landscape left and right almost perfectly into halves. Small as insects, things moved along it.
Just visible at the very end of sight were the high walls of a city, within it a cluster of red rooftops. But the castle kept commanding his attention back whenever he looked away. He squinted at the windows, fancying he could see people on the other side, but it was hard to be sure … perhaps a trick of the light. He felt very visible himself; surely from those windows someone could see him, if they looked his way.
Drunk as he was, grief and sadness burbling below his false cheer, Case had to stop and take in the dizzying sights, and admit to himself this would be a fitting last thing to see before clocking off to the next life, if this wasn’t the next life already. The castle itself, well, he could still only see part of it, even from his vantage point above and behind it. How it must look from ground level! You’d damn near fall to your knees and pray to it.
So he stood and gazed, and inside sighed deeply with relief; though he wasn’t sure how this sight, this other world spread out as real as the shoes on his feet, had eased some burden on his heart and mind which he hadn’t been aware of until now, despite having heaved it around all his long life. Was it the secret fear that the world he knew was all there was, in all its good and bad, banalities and miracles?
He didn’t know. He just gazed, and savoured the taste of every gulping breath, and said, ‘How about that, then. How about that.’
He didn’t know how long he stood and gazed, but the act was broken by the sound of beating wings, and air buffeting him. For a crazy second Case thought he was being swooped by a butcher bird, and he ducked to the ground, hands shielding his head, an instinct recalled from decades before: a boy doing a paper route, crying as birds swooped down at him from the power lines, to go home with streaks of tears on his cheeks and a beating from a father who needed his son tougher than that, and probably never got his wish.
Now, when he thought of how he’d marched right up close to that deathly beast to get his bottle, and that here he was ducking in terror from a potential bird, he burst out laughing, helpless with it, rolling around in tears on the soft grass.
Then he opened his eyes and saw her, one of the creatures that had appeared in his dreams. His heart leaped. She was here! She was real! And oh yes, she was beautiful, far more than the glimpses he’d caught of her in his sleep had shown. Her body was a naked woman’s, young and sleek, with an hourglass figure. Silky black hair blew and tossed about on her shoulders with the wind. Her eyes gleamed and flashed with colour. ‘You’re real,’ said Case with wonder, though he knew nothing of her, whether she were as dangerous as the thing with horns or not. In his dreams they had flown like flocks of birds, high up, now and then dropping down to peer at him with curiosity, speaking words he could not understand, then darting back to the sky so fast they left streaks of blurred motion behind them.
Two white feathery wings spread out behind her, soft-looking, and he wanted to run his hands over them like he’d wanted nothing else. He said, ‘You’re real, and you’re beautiful.’ Ah you old fool, he thought, don’t say things like that.
She did not smile, nor did she blink. She stared at him with hands on her hips, bright red lips slightly parted, her expression completely foreign to him. Was she displeased? Angry?
‘I am real,’ she said back, voice stilted as though she did not often use it. ‘You are real. Your friend is real. He lives.’
If Case had been spellbound, that broke him free. ‘Eric? Eric’s alive?’