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Exhaustion fell like bricks upon him. The long walk back to his father’s longhouse became daunting when he looked up the hill. Night enveloped him, the air cold and strangely close, even in the open beneath the unblemished sky. The lord of bone reached for him.
Felt it. A faint pressure at his healing wound. He staggered but not from pain. Was as if his body returned to the last time it felt this sensation, collapsing the last week into a single moment.
Trapped, he gasped for breath and leaned back against his aunt’s longhouse, attempting to catch his breath, to banish the memory, the tactile sensation of his flesh ripping open from no source.
Magic.
This was the power Fionnuala held, that she offered to him.
“You all right?”
His eyes clenched tight, he could not tell who it was. A woman’s voice. Her hand touched his shoulder, then held it tight. “You’re shaking.” Both hands took him firmly and helped lower him to a sitting position, his head lowering between his knees.
Folded there in the night, eyes closed, breath shallow, she rubbed his back and told him to breathe. To just breathe.
Even with his eyes closed, his focus contracted to a single point. The scar just above his hip. He needed to get there to stop it. To cull the pain from his body.
“Breathe.”
He did. Slow. Through his nose. Out his mouth.
It steadied him, kept the world from rocking, from collapsing, from cascading down around him. Too, it gave him a new way to consider the problem. His body became a landscape no different from Chalon. If he looked down from above, Chalon Forest was one single place. But inside Chalon, he knew there were paths and clearings, places like Black Goda’s home.
The same was true of his body.
While he breathed, while she rubbed his back telling him to breathe, he focused on his interior landscape. Not his thoughts and fears and feelings, not the tensions of the night, but the topography within him.
He used the lessons Fionnuala gave him. He sought for the spaces between, probing with his fingernail. Or so it seemed. His attention a tiny pin piercing the fabric of reality.
Except rather than find the holes in reality, he investigated himself. When he found a point to push through, he rotated the pin vigorously until the fabric began to part wide enough for a fingernail and then a finger. Probing the hole wider, he felt as if he entered a new place, an interior world.
Images rose behind his eyelids. Red discs flying through cylindrical tunnels. He latched onto one as it spun and flew past. A stream of infinite flux carrying him along through twists and turns and off the main flow to the branching tributaries until he slid once more between and stood on a firm surface. Wet and humid and dark.
Chalon, or so it seemed.
“Emrys. Emrys!”
He ignored it. Ignored the word that had no meaning here within him. Breathing, standing upon solid ground, he stepped towards the throbbing blackness. A gale of terror nearly knocked him back and out of his body but he rooted his feet.
He had mastery here. His roots digging deep enough to keep him standing, he could no longer walk towards that flowing darkness poisoning him even still, even after all that Fionnuala had done to preserve him, to save him.
Rather than walk, he slid down into the ground and swam through the wet flesh of the earth and resurfaced right before the pulsing wall of blackness.
No, not a wall.
A web. The strands thick and threaded tightly. A black vapor rose from the strands, blackening the walls of this place.
He had no weapon to cut through the web. Taking a breath, the sword appeared in his hands. A blade alive. Felt that. The green pulse of life. It glowed red and spoke within him. Nearly made it drop from his hands. This slight whisper brushing against the interior of his mind.
Kill it.
He stabbed forward, piercing the web. The blade laughed and the blackness screamed and he tore the blade up, severing thousands of blackened threads that all shrieked their death. It echoed in that place.
Slash after slash. Easy as cutting through grass. Easier, even, for the black threads held no resistance. They melted away from his cackling blade but the darkness pooled round his feet. And from the darkness rose a hairy skull with eight black eyes reflecting the bright shine of his sword.
Surprise caused him to fall backwards as the great black spider rose from the darkness or was built from the darkness itself. The splattered liquid of the black disappeared as the spider grew and took shape. The same black vapor rising from it.
The blade in his hands shrieked with laughter, compelling him to kill it, to kill it, to kill it.
The spider roared, revealing a mouth large enough to swallow Emrys. But rather than fear, he felt only the sword’s hunger, its desire. He stabbed forward into that gaping mouth and, once more, the darkness parted as if it had never been there.
The spider popped into liquid darkness once more. But there, at its center, a sliver of wood. Emrys reached for it but his sword told him to kill it too.
Didn’t listen. Touching it, he swooned, collapsing to both knees. A single word echoed in his head: Home.
Kill it!
He brought his sword to the sliver of wood. His vision slurring, his legs wobbling.
The lord of bone sneered on his throne of skulls. His growl shook through the entirety of this interior world. The weight of this terrible forest god’s attention. His fury. It wrapped round Emrys, squeezing him tightly, attempting to subdue him.
He bent all his fury upon Emrys. Filling this thin sliver of Home that had slipped inside him, as if deposited there. A seed of horror to consume Emrys from within.
Emrys breathed and swallowed. He was master of this place.
His body. His world.
Fire. He could make fire.
The thought caused the darkness round him to shiver, as if aware of his own thoughts. Summoning fire within himself, he held up his own swordless scorching hand wreathed in flame. The sliver in his palm writhed and shook and the lord of bone yelped and raged and darkness flooded him but the sword bloomed brighter.
As it burned, he brought his own blade to Home’s sliver.
“Emrys, wake up! Emrys!”
Shaking. No, being shaken. The sliver of home burned and shattered in his palm but he held on until only cinders and ash remained. Then he let go, allowed himself to be pulled from deep within himself. His attention bloomed, filling out the rest of his body, which seemed so large and clumsy. His chest hurt and his skin felt wrong, like he wore someone else’s clothes.
Cold sweat coated him.
He opened his eyes and stared at Aeronwen and Cerys, who relaxed.
“Emy, sweet god, you terrified us,” Aeronwen said. She held his right hand.
He swallowed but couldn’t find the right fit of his mouth.
“Are you back?”
He turned to her, Cerys. Her big eyes and lips, her wide nose. “I’d let you kill me.”
Her eyes opened wide and she raised them to Aeronwen for a moment before returning to Emrys. A slight smile. She tapped his cheek lightly with her other hand. “You’re a fool, little bird.”
At that tap, at her smile, his skin and body seemed to shift and all was right. His body whole and full. “Where am I?”
Aeronwen said, “About fifteen feet from my door.” She laughed. Brittle. A fragile humor.
“Was it,” Cerys bit her lip. “Was it the lord of bone?” There was terror there. They had escaped the forest but his sickness, his wound, collapsed the distance.
The lord of bone reached beyond the forest.
He forced a smile and though he was whole and back in his body, his mouth continued to speak as if without his input. “Don’t worry, dear heart. I’ve banished the immortal. I’ve cleansed myself.”
Her smile returned. A slight hold on her face. “You’re an idiot.”
He loved her. Knew it in that moment. Knew he would never love another quite the same way.
Aeronwen said, “Can you stand?”
Together, they helped him to his feet. After a few steps, he collapsed once more and they held him up. Cerys asked him if he was all right but he only laughed.
“Never felt better in my entire life. I can do magic.” Intoxicating. His head swam. The fear and pain and even the weakness of his legs felt so far away.
His beloved cousin and his beloved helped him walk back up the hill.
Aeronwen said, “We’ll take you to Ariana.”
“She loves me,” Emrys said.
“Well,” Aeronwen laughed, “yeah.”
“She’s been like a mother to me all this time. Didn’t understand that until I was back here, nearly dead. I wanted to run away and I never considered what that might mean for her.”
Cerys said, “Why would you run from your family?”
Aeronwen snorted like a Matauc. “We’re not all daughters of lairds.”
“Nor am I.”
“I am,” Emrys said. “Son of a laird, anyway.” He laughed the words but then the laughter took him, plunged him deep into waters that had always been hostile before. Memories of his childhood, of the distance between father and son, of the last days of his mother and how Owain never showed, never even sent a druid. In that moment, the lack of love between him and Owain became a joke, some cosmic humor that nearly made him believe in the god. He laughed and laughed until they had to hold him up, until they had to stop, ask him what was so funny, was he going mad, but finally Emrys said, “Always thought that was my curse. Being son to Owain.” Then the laughter gripped him once more and he giggled the rest of the way to Ariana’s door.
When she saw him, disheveled, sweating, carried by two women—one of them a stranger—she took him in an embrace.
“My boy,” she breathed the words. “What’s happened?”
Still giggling, he held her tightly and said, “I’m a wizard, auntie.”