“Alban Korund.” Eldred’s voice was as deep and rich in his mortal form as it had been the night before. “Welcome home.”
What had been a trickle of mental touch suddenly became a flood, emotion ranging from reserved to angry and, as Grace had said, to curious. Unprepared, Alban shuddered under the onslaught, the round walls and concrete seating around him disappearing and staggering mountains replacing them.
There was vitality in these mountains, unlike the memories he’d slipped through over the last months. Those peaks had been worn with time, too many lives lost to grow them taller. They had been his family, his closest friends, and they had reflected a dying race.
No longer. Now mountaintops were jagged with change, snow patches glowing blue in moonlight beneath clear skies. The tree line burst with the promise of spring, hints of green in the night, and echoes of voices rang the stone, shivering loose rock into short slides.
Stunned, Alban turned, taking it all in, and when he’d completed a full circle, he faced a campfire, the half-dozen gargoyles in the room with him seated around it. Beyond them rippled hundreds of others, faces and minds joined in the gestalt but not physically present. Challenge was written on those faces; challenge and interest, anger and hope.
“What has happened?” Astonishment pushed his question out before he knew he intended to form it. “We live. We…live.”
Biali thundered in, door clapping shut behind him in the real world and carrying ricochets of sound into the mind of memory. He muttered, “You happened,” and sat down at the fire, making himself comfortable in a way that seemed beyond Alban to accomplish himself. “You and that lawyer of yours,” Biali added, clearly not expecting Alban to put it together himself. “You and that quorum.”
“You sat for the gargoyles at the quorum,” Alban protested. “Not I.”
“Pah. You started it, Korund. Talking to the lawyer. Telling her what you were. Deep quakes send waves across the world.” Biali shoved a thick hand into the fire, rearranging branches, and Eldred, looking wry, picked up where he left off.
“We have been dying, all these centuries. You know this.” You encompassed far more than just Alban: a shift of agreement ran through a thousand faces, swirling back through crowded memories until it had touched them all. “We are slow to change, and have always chosen the safety of tradition over the risk of innovation.”
At that, Margrit’s image, rife with exasperation, swam before Alban’s eyes and made him chuff laughter. That thought splashed through the linked gargoyle minds, making Eldred lift a heavy eyebrow. Alban ducked his head in apology, finding a smile still stretching his face. “I’ve always held that we were right to stand by our traditions.”
“And yet you have disregarded them broadly through your entire life.”
Fresh astonishment burned away Alban’s humor and he straightened again, agape as he met Eldred’s gaze. The elder gargoyle’s expression was cool, though beneath it lay a pool of warmth, even admiration, welcoming enough to startle Alban anew. Eldred’s sense of self carried a hint of envy, memories shifting and exploring the choices he might have made, all of those thoughts visible to the gargoyle overmind. Hundreds of years earlier he might have embraced the selkies and their decision to save themselves by breeding with humans. Instead he had been repulsed, holding tight to tradition. Now, for all that gargoyles were not creatures in the habit of second-guessing themselves, it was clear that Eldred wondered what changes might have been wrought in the world if he had admired the selkie daring and accepted their choice rather than turned his back on a man who had been his friend for centuries.
“You left our mountains before your hundredth year,” Eldred said. “You went to live among humans, to explore the world that they were creating. To try to understand it. Only one of us was bold enough to join you.”
“And she paid for that choice with her life,” Biali snapped. For an instant tension sang through the gargoyles, Hajnal’s loss fresh and painful through the intimacy of memory.
Alban, softly, said, “We’ve all paid,” and after long moments Biali settled back, no longer pressing the point.
Eldred continued as though the brief fracas hadn’t happened, his gray eyes turning blue as moonlight spilled over his face. “That in itself was a break with tradition. More so was the friendship you built with Eliseo Daisani and the dragonlord Janx. Dragons and vampires,” he said with a shake of his head. “No one befriends vampires. But even that, extraordinary as it might have been, was nothing to the choice you made on their behalf. To separate your memories from all of ours, to make yourself a breach amongst our people, in order to hide half-human children? What—” and he sounded as though he truly wanted to know “—were you thinking?”
“That the sins of the fathers need not be visited on the children.” Alban turned a palm up, knowing he borrowed human concepts and hoping to placate all his people with the gesture. “They were condemned by their heritage, but innocent in their birth. Their mother loved two men of the Old Races and would have never betrayed the truth of them to the world. I saw no risk in helping them all to live.”
“And that,” Eldred said, voice filled with granite, “is why you are the Breach, Alban of the clan Korund. Your life has not been that of a gargoyle, not in any way that we recognize. You have lived separately from our memories. You’ve told humans about our existence more than once. You’ve chosen to allow forbidden children a chance to survive. You have taken the lives of our brethren, and you have made no apology for these choices and decisions.”
“I—” Words were useless in the gestalt, memory and emotion riding faster and farther than any vocal construct could, even if Alban could muster them. Eldred was right: there was no apology in him for the deaths he’d caused. Sorrow, yes, and guilt, and regret, but a lifetime, even one as long as a gargoyle’s, would not change the fact that he would act again as he had in the heat of the moment. He would choose Margrit over Ausra; he would, in any way that mattered, choose Janx over Malik. Ausra’s madness would always be a point of agony, a thing he would never find a way to cease mourning, but Malik had intended to take Janx’s life, and for all his horror at causing the djinn’s death, Alban knew it had been accidental. He had not done the deliberate murder Malik had intended, and whether the Old Races, whether the gargoyles, whether anyone at all understood that, it was the fine point of difference that mattered to Alban himself.
And that sentiment rocked back through centuries of time. He believed the choices he had made were the right ones, whether they were supported by Old Races law or gargoyle tradition. Sarah Hopkins had not deserved to die for having loved Janx or Daisani; her children had deserved a chance to live, for all that their fathers’ people said they were aberrations which should not exist.
“You are right,” Alban whispered. “I am not like you at all.” Shock made him cold, unusual for a gargoyle, and he stared across the shifting faces within the overmind in a disbelief so deep it was stained with humor. “All this time spent in defense of our traditions, and it seems I have had very little sense of them at all.”
“Biali once said you might have led us.” Eldred’s eyes went to the stark, white gargoyle, and the weight of a thousand more gazes joined him before they all returned to Alban. Even Biali looked up, mouth flattened with irritation. “I believe you have done so,” Eldred continued. “Whether deliberately or not, you have led us to this place and time, and to these schisms in what we were and what we must become.”
The urge to apologize rose in Alban, but that intent was drowned beneath the weight of Eldred’s words. “We have discussed this amongst ourselves, amongst all the clans who are left.” Power lifted his words, a tide of tears and fear and joy so profound that it tore through Alban’s chest, ripping away the breath there and leaving nothing in its wake. Anticipation: the gestalt tasted of it, and his heart began a too-fast beat of uncertainty, as though understanding lay just beyond his grasp.