7

"It's inside the walls. It's behind every door until you open it. It's under everything, but, if you look inside everything, you can't see it, because you're always seeing it."

– Chever's last notes

The man fled whence he had come, his vision bleared by tears. When he passed the corridor of horrors, the faces all seemed to rise up in myriad yawning grimaces, crying and moaning, and sometimes screaming.

But the imprisoned creatures made no sound. Those sounds came from him.

He found himself back outside, pant legs splattered in sewage, the light of an overcast afternoon searing his dilated eyes. He jogged blindly, heedless of swamp mud and brambles, until he found himself in a small clearing. The clearing was dead. No water softened its ground, stagnant or otherwise. No grass grew. No swamp insects buzzed. Overhead, where branches protruded, green leaves gave way to bare, dead limbs, almost as if someone had drawn a line: life on one side, death on the other. The man found the absence of all life-all magic-comforting. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the clearing and let the nothing embrace him, soothe him. The emptiness would be complete if only…

He removed his backpack, which he had hoped to remove in a roomy suite in the wizard's nonexistent house. It carried his two treasures. He pulled out Chever's notes, traced the lines of the handwriting with his fingers, then crumpled them and sent them flying. A breeze lifted them, and a couple of pages caught on tree branches. A thin rain had begun to fall; it would mold that parchment to the trees soon enough.

It felt good to be rid of the magic; he hated it now. Magic meant lies and betrayal. Magic meant loving, then finding that you love a stranger, then discovering that you cannot stop loving even when nothing of the illusion remains.

He touched the rose, whose petals had begun to collect raindrops. It was crying-no. It was only a flower that had collected a little rain. With a tortured cry, he hurled it, too, as far as he could throw it, then broke into wracking sobs.

In her den, the druid-wizard looked up, sensing something amiss. The notes…? She closed her eyes and focused upon them. She saw the swamp… the man, weeping and trudging back toward the sewer… the notes sagging in a drizzle in a clearing he had left behind! She immediately teleported to the clearing and gathered the notes under her robe. As easy as that, they were hers.

8

"We make it little by little, until it's too big and overwhelms… us… then goes away aging."

– Chever's last notes

As the druid-wizard dabbed the notes dry while waiting for the man's return, she could not help but consider his misery. In spite of herself, she wanted to alleviate it. How to accomplish that? Well, what had he loved before she had come along? His rose. Chever's notes. Those were all. The rose was gone, broken in the swamp, its crime its failure to convince the man that it was more than what it seemed. The notes, though…

Perhaps if the man had the time to study them more, he would find the answers he sought, the answers he had felt were just beyond his reach back when he first showed her the notes at his cabin.

Maybe she didn't need the notes for her own purposes just yet. Maybe she would have him study them a while longer. In fact, if he reached a breakthrough, that knowledge might prove invaluable to the Shadovar, put the citizens of Shade Enclave in the druid-wizard's debt. Yes…

She couldn't wait long, though. During the last few days, she had begun to hear the Shadovar's call, and it grew louder with each day.

When the man returned, he first paused at the cage of the creature they had brought back from the Deserts-mouth Mountains. He held his hand up to the bars, and the creature mirrored the gesture. Their gazes locked for a moment, then the man tore his away and made his way to the woman's chambers.

She looked up when he entered, and he nodded as though nothing had happened; indeed, as though he had been entering just this way for many years, coming home after a hard day's work. She seemed a little damp, as if she had been out in a mist or sweating over a difficult spell.

She reached out her hand, and in it were Chever's notes. "You shouldn't leave such valuable things lying around," she said.

A few days ago, he might have railed at her, accused her of spying. Instead he just stared dully, waiting for her direction.

"You should keep studying these," she continued. "They may help you find completion."

Back in the world of magic and lies, he could not refuse. He took the notes to the nearest table and began to read over the familiar words for the first time in what seemed like months. The woman left him to his thoughts.

When the druid-wizard peeked in later, she thought that perhaps the intermission had done the man good. He was poring over the notes avidly, as though he had never thrown them away.

The days passed.

The druid-wizard rarely went out. She had skipped the last few archwizard moots.

The man ventured out to obtain food or to wipe his mind clean in one dead clearing or another. Each time he returned, he paused at the same creature's cage, took what silent wisdom he could glean from it, and pushed on.

The man did not know of the floating city. The druid-wizard would not stand for him to accompany her to it. She had watched him grow paler each day, watched his hair turn grayer and lose its luster, watched the dark circles grow under his eyes and his shoulders slump. He would not live long in the darkest catacombs of the city of darkness.

But she would not allow him to live without her, either.

One windy, magic-strewn evening, the woman approached the man.

"I have something to show you," she said.

She clasped his wrist, and they teleported to the edge of a cliff.

Stars sang their distant song, and the waxing moon was bright. The man stood at the edge, cloak whipping about him. He could feel her presence slightly behind him; possibly she had taken on her wolf form, which had become a familiar event to him. When he turned, she was human.

"Why did you bring me here?"

"Have you by chance made any breakthroughs with Chever's notes?"

"What?… Oh. No, nothing significant. Why do you ask?"

"No reason." She sighed and moved up beside him. "I wanted to show you that, because of you, I can take joy in more than pain. The stars…"

She gestured, then turned to him.

"I was a druid once, you know. I still am, in many ways, but I'm a wizard more. When I was only a druid, I loved the stars, but they didn't give me joy as they do now. It's a gift 111 treasure."

She flowed to him, and she kissed him long and hard.

The kiss tasted like poison, and the man quailed, sensing his life spinning out of his control. He broke the kiss with a small cry.

The woman held him at arm's length for a moment, looking into his eyes.

And she was gone.

The man's heart wrenched, grieved and painful. Power left him-something sucked it out. Loss overwhelmed his senses, and he fell to the ground.