down the last road.

[Kavala]

Kavala floated weightless and by choice almost formless. She gave some light, some glow, to that which she was for Caelum’s sake so he could mark her and spot her motions and movements. But there was no real need for a form. Sometimes they related better that way, especially to other Dreamwalkers, just existing within Nysel’s grace. She admired Caelum’s Chavi and how her own wrapped around his, joining pathways slightly in the place she dubbed ‘present’. They spiraled away, divided though, back to the past and Kavala knew that they would touch again somewhere beyond. Today the Chavi seemed huge, enormous, and rotating slightly. Did that mean her form was diminished or was the glowing globe that was her essence only deciding to manifest as small?

When Caelum beckoned, she willed herself to follow, joining her light with his as they merged with the chavi and started remembering.

Kavala didn’t watch the scene as a casual observer. No… that was not the way Dreamwalking worked. While the scene revolved around her, she watched first hand from the planks of the ship, sprawled where her body was too weak to stand. Stripes ruined her strong back and the pain was so intense in Caelum’s memories that he had somehow moved past it to that space beyond where it mattered so much. The healer in her knew the Eth she was reliving was suffering more than one major injury. Ribs were broken. She was almost sure by the way his breath rattled in and out of his body that there was at least one issue with his lung, though she wasn’t sure if it was full collapse or just the onset of an illness resulting in major injuries prior to what might have been a good soaking through a storm. His skin burned, like it was coated with salt that worked as acid eating away at the multitude of cuts and scratches that littered his body. There were worse hurts as well, ones she could feel within his memories, but ones her mind did not want to dwell on.

Oddly his hair itched, and he longed to be clean. It was a feeling Kavala could understand and felt his hand twitch in response to the instinct to run his hand through his hair pensively like Caelum was prone to do. She shifted… no he did… groaning. His knee ached and there were several bruises on his hip from steel toes. Someone, in the not so distant past, had kneed him in the groan as well and that was a dull ache that made moving his thighs unthinkable.

Kavala watched with a broken heart as Caelum’s mind fought an inner fog that seemed to mirror the fog that surrounded the two vessels at parlay. While outside the two men decided his fate, inside the man was deciding who he was and if life was good enough to hold onto. There was something… something he was doing… trying to do.. trying to remember but it was like a floater in his eye. He couldn’t look directly at the thought without the blurry object darting away. And so he relaxed and let his mind drift, having no sudden interest in getting to his feet…. not like the bastard who repeatedly kicked him wanted.

But even then, there was something inside him, something alive. Kavala felt it, that spark, that willed this not be the end. There was too much at stake and when he dwelled so close between life and death, his other lives flooded in. He knew pain and suffering. He knew hardship. This was no different, nothing he could not push past. It was an easy thought to have when his mind was so carefully shut down because his nerves were so painfully overworked. And one had no idea if trading one ship captain for another would be a trade up or a trade down in circumstances. At sea, in the world they lived, there was no telling.

Hardship bred hard men. The stronger caught the weaker and took advantage. Caelum had been the weaker in that moment, the slower, the less intelligent or less aware. Kavala was standing in the ‘then’ of the memories, and longed to follow them further. She wanted to know how he got caught and why the men were exchanging coin over him.

But Caelum was in control of his own Dreamwalk and wanted her to see what he wanted her to see without her pushing further. She was too good of a friend to do so. It would be like him walking down her chavi to the spring of 507 when Windsong was taken down by a tripwire and she was captured and enslaved. Those first hours with the slavers were nothing she ever wanted to share with anyone, not even her friend. She understood powerlessness and the detachment that happened when something was happening to you that you had no control. Sometimes Dreamwalkers went back to weak moments in their lives and studied their mistakes.

But Kavala had never gone back to that day. She’d never traveled her Chavi in a smooth path but had hopped and skipped when she’d wanted to remember. Her first ride, her bonding with Windsong, being rocked by her mother as a child. When she’d wanted to feel her family all together around a pavilion fire, she’d skipped back and walked those memories so she could relive them.

But it was always the good ones, never the bad.

And so when Caelum retreated, Kavala respected that and retreated with him. She found herself sitting in the tall grass watching the bright blue sky and wondering. Her own conscious added tall dandelions to the grass, so she could pluck one and watch the fluffy seeds dance out across the wind. They spiraled away in a pattern that reflected Caelum’s chavi’s coiling essence. The sight brought a smile to her face.

She turned then, met his gaze, and offered him one in return. It was neutral, guarded, and undecided. “I’ve never seen someone so injured that Rak’keli hasn’t compelled me to heal. But you can’t heal the past can you? Not at least in the past. You can only heal the past through the future. I can’t help but think Caelum was moving from bad to worse. You were passed from one hand to the other in exchange for gold. Why?” The Konti said abruptly, not offering Caelum unwelcome sympathy or an apology for what happened to him. It wasn’t her fault nor could it be changed. Such sentiments were empty.

“And then assure me that every last man on that ship, The Crack of Noon, is dead. Because if they aren’t now, they really truly need to be.” Kavala said quietly, in a carefully dangerous voice. She dropped the spent dandelion flower and plucked another. This one she started tearing the seeds out one by one. Instead of letting them fly free, she crushed them between her thumb and forefinger intently.

[Caelum]

There was more shadows than gold in Caelum’s eyes as he watched the dandelion seeds float and swirl away. It was a slow growing darkness, the kind that crawled from the feet of trees and stretched arms shadow out from the shoreline. It was cast by his history and yet he did pull them free of dreaming, did not run and retreat. No. He stood his ground. He had fought and bled for every inch of it, after all. “I heard Bodei was dead,” he said finally, the words like metal slivers. He did not seem impassioned over this, but that was because he was staring into depths he had not plumbed in a long, long while. A strange smile pulled across his mouth, like that fact made him happy but maybe he wished it wouldn’t. “Diarmid Bodei and his mate Josh were murdered in Ravok shortly after I was taken. Bridget told me, I recall, and I confirmed it later. They ought to have fallen on their tongues with swords. It might have saved them. Delucia was never the sort to like loose ends. I’m sure it was his goon who took care of them. Bruin, well, I wager he’s still living. I ran into one of them in Zeltiva on my way here, a sailor named Owen.” He paused, then calmly added, “He’s dead now.” He held himself terribly still, and Kavala would know it for an unnatural habit. Caelum moved. He paced and moved his hands in grasslands signs, rocked backwards in chairs and orbited around people, taking care of a dozen different things while talking or listen or thinking. Here he sat near motionless save for the rise and fall of his breaths and the occasional nervous, rattle of noble fingers against the curve of his knee. He had learned this stillness there, back in the dark then, and it was at least half the reason he moved so much now. “Delucia had sent for me, or something like me,” he explained. “Bruin was more than just a sailor, he dealt in a particular type of merchandise. Reputation for scavenging. You might even call him a collector. People like Delucia need people like him. It takes all kinds. And he didn’t want me, not specifically, not even personally. What Delucia wanted was trapped inside my head, and he wasted no time trying to get it out.” The sky above them blackened, breathtaking blue rapidly blotted out as the memory came for them. Caelum raised an eyebrow in silent inquiry to Kavala while all the color was drained from his dreamscape like blood. “You don’t have to see this one,” he told her gently, offering her a way out before the black swallowed him. He knew she would follow him all the same. But he had to offer. He wouldn’t have been him if hadn’t. * * * Pain makes you fearless. In the lightning heat of its travel through you, it consumes, it obliterates. Caution dissolves beneath its blast, concern dissipates. There is only pain and pain does not care. Yet the moment its razor edge dulls to a bearable burn every ounce of courage it granted you dies, thrusting you through the floor of cowardice that bleeds the begging from your lips. It is the line between those two extremes that will break your mind. Like a trapeze artist, you try to balance upon it, the arms of your soul out-flung in reckless ignorance that this attempt will crucify you. You are ruined, however, by the driving need to be at once fearless and free of pain. Your heart thrusts itself into your throat as the first thin breath is managed through the agony and your tongue trembles on the verge of pleas and prayers. You try to hold onto it, to horde that moment, but it slips like hope away and you are begging by the time the next blow falls. The process of having one’s astral body fully detached is agonizing. This is a commonly held understanding by learned projectionists across Mizahar. To the last, they all had to have this procedure performed for them by an expert in the field, initiating them into the realm of a very personal school of magic. Alander Jin was one such sorcerer. The fighters could not have been more opposite in appearance. The larger of them was nearly a head over his opponent, ebony skin twisted by scars as old as his teeth which gleamed in the fading daylight from the windows. Massive shoulders and limbs made heavy with muscle created a shadow to yawn monstrous across the floor, cutting the second fighter near in half. It was that one, the smaller of the fighters, who drew Alander Jin's hungry stare. Syna's lost lover and these Ravokians' manifestation of ambitions, usually considered tall, looked shrunk beside Delucia's bodyman. Tapered horns curved back against his skull the color of iodized copper and jagged lengths of hair burned like blackened embers into a face that could have been stamped on an archaic coin. Violet shadows weighed beneath eyes that no darkness could find, sun-swallowed and steady; and being stripped the waist brought about the revelation of long, noble bones wrapped in skin sewn from a summer sun. Drops of sweat slid down, mingling with bruises young and old scattered like rioting flowers over his body. And when Caius said, "Go on," and the ethaefal turned reluctantly back to his teacher and torturer, Alander got a long look at the half healed cuts decorating his back in shifting patterns. They existed over what was already a neat sheet of scar tissue, leeched of all the color the sun's love of him had loaned. "Your artistry with glyphing has never been greater," Alander sighed to his partner as the spar began again before them. Watching the dark skinned man demonstrate a defensive stance moments before destroying the ethaefal's attempt to replicate it, the exile shook his head. The heavy braid twitched along his spine. "Gibran is eating him alive." "You should have seen Caelum a week ago," Caius pointed out. "He's learning." "He's cooperative?" Surprise lit sharp features. "Lay into anyone long enough, show them how to fight back. They'll learn." "And Cora?" "He fights harder for her." Caius looked at his partner as Gibran pushed Caelum to the wall for the second time. "He's somewhat of a physician. Fairly skilled and even better at it after dark." Alander snorted and rubbed a hand over his mouth. "You've really out done yourself this time." The light from the window was weakening almost in synchronization with the increasing combination of pain in fatigue of the ethaefal. Alander rolled up to the balls of his feet and back down again. "It's time." "Gibran, we're finished." Caius stepped backwards until his shoulder blades brushed the wall beside the door. An elegant slump found him, fingers catching in the pockets of his trousers and chin dropping though coal colored eyes remained hooked upon the scene before him. Gibran left his pupil bent over with his hands on his knees, sides moving with gulping breaths, to grab a scrap of worn linen from the table against the far wall and mop his face. Alander remained where he was, elbow caught in the opposing hand and fingers fanned across his thought. Caelum's eyes rolled up warily, starting at the toes of Alander's boots and working his way up. There was a narrowing in Alander's eyes, a glint to the one not washed white perhaps, that warned the ethaefal with just enough time left to suck in a breath. Alander's arms dropped boneless to his sides half a heartbeat before invisible hands caught Caelum in an unrelenting grip. They shoved him back through the glow of the sunset over Ravok's surrounding waters and slammed him against the thick, bubbled glass of the window pane. It rattled, sharp and threatening, while the massive Gibran pressed himself deep into the farther corner as if attempting to bleed out of sight. It was a matter of seconds before Caelum's head went back, burning hair splattering against the warped glass even while it began to drain of color in direct proportion with the gradual appearance of stars in the coming night. By the time his horns vanished, he had lost all control of his limbs as one joint after another was released with violent reverberations from the stranglehold of his soul. It was when the projectionist began to suck the very self out of his skeleton, ripping his astral body with the force of stronger, far more experienced djed from the tangle of his musculature that Caelum began to scream. The scream was cut off by the final fall of night, that too stolen from him while windmarks nonetheless walked themselves back into place upon his skin and what was left of him collapsed. Caelum knew nothing for a long while afterwards, though there were hands that lifted him and pain that fired through stinging joints. He was eventually left alone and he drifted in and out of consciousness until his legs twitched, and then his arms, nerves coming back to riotous life. It jolted him fully awake, but his eyes opened to nothing but a darkness so complete that he could not even see his hands before his face. He reached out blindly and came up against a wall that was no more than a foot above his face. The box stretched out no further than that from either side too, and was a mere three inches longer than he was tall. They had locked him up in darkness, and they left him there to rot for more time than had meaning to him anymore. There was panic and then struggle. Defeat and panic again. The cycle continued for hours, days, long and longer. After all, he was immortal. They didn’t even have to let him out to eat. Eventually his faith was ground to dust. I remember too, beloved, the night swarming over me and thinking that one should be free of pain once robbed of soul. I remember trying to maintain balance on that slippery edge between agony and oblivion, the arms of my soul out-flung. Yet despite all of my orisons, I slipped, Syna. I slipped and then I begged. I remember begging, screaming and You still did not hear me. I gave you all my lives and You left me in this one to the dark. * * * The darkness relinquished its grip upon the dreamers and in the far east the dawn was breaking. Caelum lay in the grass now, breathing heavily and willing his heart to be still. He turned his head toward Kavala, at once wanting to make sure she was okay and also searching her face for something, but for what he did not know. Now she knew he had been Forsaken, and also how it had begun. “By the time they let me out of the box, I would have sold the whole world to Rhysol. They wanted the impossible, though. They sought to harness the power of the celestial language. But asking me to try and say the unspeakable and write the unwritable was nothing. I didn’t care what they did with it. I just wanted to give it to them if I could. Give it to them and watch them choke on it.”