Chapter 4

  Derxis: three years BK

  The Great Tree, called Annunciation, lay long dead and half buried in the shifting sands. Mountainous dunes stacked themselves up against its sun-scorched and petrified bark. It rose like a still tsunami, miles wide, against the horizon. Among the upturned roots of Annunciation nestled Alaru, a holy sanctuary of the Color Priests. The devotees who dwelt there had built into the skyward-reaching roots, had carved and hacked and chiseled over the long centuries. Legend said that unexplored passageways, vast in scope, labyrinthine in complexity, and rife with mysteries, had been burrowed by unknown means throughout the entirety of the great tree. It was said that a secret way into these corridors lay in Alaru, guarded by the Elders Nuncio.

  Annunciation was holy, though now dead like the gods. But it retained its power, its mystery, its ability to stir the imagination. Alaru, owing to its position there among the roots of the Great Tree, was counted among the greatest of Color Priest sanctuaries.

  On one special morning, with vibrant ceremony, a young apprentice color priest set forth on a long and winding road carved into a root twining to the sandy desert floor. This young daimon wore nothing, not even a glove, and carried nothing with him save a leather pouch around his neck, not even a staff, not even a flask of water, not even a mask.

  The root down which he passed was called the Bridge of Blood, for such was its magic that no being who had willingly taken the life of another could pass. This Bridge of Blood constituted the first of many tests which an initiate must pass before coming into full priesthood; it was the first phase of the harsh and dangerous trial. No one as young as this had ever set forth on the trial and returned. If he returned alive, he would carry the distinction of being the youngest color priest of Alaru. He would carry this in addition to his distinction of being among the youngest daimon who would ever exist, for he was one of the last.

  Derxis descended to the great tumult of sandy rock at the base of the Bridge of Blood. He spared not a glance back at Alaru or the Great Tree before continuing on his way. He had far to go before starrise.

  His destination was Angalaland, the Bleeding Sands. None lived there save the mysterious foliots, for they were both blind and deaf, and thus immune to that which prevented daimon from long enduring in that place. Angalaland had been blighted by the weapons used by the Ephathites in their war of secession from the Shogunate long ago. These weapons had bruised the sky, burning holes in the ozone, the ionosphere, and the Hudson-Wallace atmospheric frame. Thus, the auroral sweeps of storm season were exceptionally severe in the Bleeding Sands.

  Derxis walked, at the height of storm season, into Angalaland to face his destiny. He trembled, and he laughed.

  The sun glared off of his pebbly skin and orange spines. The colors of his skin shifted from time to time as he walked in an effort to alleviate the heat. He shielded his eyes at first, but he stepped out upon his own shadow as the sun moved behind him. His shadow lengthened before him and rose at last to mount the rocky hill which marked the approximate border of the Bleeding Sands. The sun was setting when he reached that summit and saw before him the breathtaking spectacle of Angalaland: the painted hills, awash with vibrant colors that seemed to glow in the darkening twilight.

  He removed the leather pouch from his neck, dumped the pills into his hand, threw them into his mouth, and swallowed. He tossed the pouch aside. Then, as the light of day faded behind him, he proceeded into the Bleeding Sands.

  The drugs took hold of him subtly, weaving their soft influence into his perceptions so that even he could not recognize it, though he knew it came.

  The auroras descended with the darkness, like a rush of wind elsewhere on the world, but like a blast of tempest here in Angalaland. The lights frothed and raged. They sluiced down from the gaps in the sky above, slicing through Derxis, passing through his being. Physically it was a soft breath, the pressure of a candle flame, but the silently crashing lights swirled past in terrific gusts that made Derxis a candle and threatened to snuff him out, to steal the light from his arda, his life, his color, to leave him a pallid husk and bleed his soul away into the bleeding sands.

  Daylight fell upon the sands, though he did not sleep. All around: the bleeding hills, bleeding all colors: milk-white, honey-yellow, mercurial-grey, bile-green, ink-black. More colors, colors he had never seen before. The blotchy, bruised sky above showed stars even at the height of day, and the splotches shifted through the sky like clouds in reverse, crawling windows into the dizzying black abyss beyond.

  The air was thick and oily with light, heavy with the sweeps, and rainbows rippled in the heat like the iridescence of gasoline on water, like the bruise of metal burnt in welding. Derxis reached out a hand and passed it through the rainbows, left them dancing and spinning in its wake. And the greasy marbled colors bled from his own skin, and from his spines and from the very thoughts of his mind.

  Night came again, and with it the sweeps, and Derxis struggled to maintain himself in the chaos. His light flared out, orange and bright like molten copper. He was terrified, and he laughed. Exhilarated, and he laughed. Exhausted, confused, blinded within and without, and he laughed. Why did he laugh? Not in defiance. Certainly not in mirth. He did not know, and he laughed at this mystery too.

  The foliots came to observe—only observe, for that was all they ever did. They enjoyed watching the trials. Derxis sensed their satisfaction, like a row of candles in the dark, when the visions took him.

  Flower petals poured down dense as rain, obscuring the sky. They caressed his skin with a thousand tiny fingers, sliding around him in the darkness they made. He saw an echo of the past: a daimon ancient as the sands, near death, dark as the storm.

  “Despair,” said the echo. It shook its head, dislodging accumulated petals. “Such release! How beautiful it is to surrender to the inevitable. To say at last: ‘ah, no more! No more.’ Thus have gone the gods, the dragons, this world. All doom. All without hope. Ah, salvation! To release hope, that most painful of ephemera, that most exhausting of fantasies.”

  The echo dissolved in a flurry of petals.

  The lightstorm raged, tossing stars like foam in the night, grasping with bright fingers, to the young Derxis as a lamp at night to the moth. It wrenched with a soft touch. It whispered to him: let go. Release. Become one with the light.

  His flame guttered.

  An echo came, descending on glassy wings from seared lilac skies. She had lived, once. Was this truly her, Derxis wondered? Was this beautiful blue daimon the soul of one who had lived, torn from her body by the raging lights of the sweep? True or not, the thought was unbearably tragic, and so he laughed as ochre tears leaked from his eyes.

  With a beetle’s jeweled wings, she landed before him, small yet bright under a dying sky. This sky—was it the work of the Ephathites, burning madly, using weapons none had dared use before? Or was this a look at the future of a dying world?

  “Who are you?” he asked, not knowing until that moment that he truly stood there before her.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “You are strong in mind,” she said in a sweet, soft voice. “Look and see.” And she opened her mind to him like an unfolding flower.

  He loved her. With every drop of his blood, with every spine of his arda, with every stroke of his brush on the canvas of the mind, he loved her. To die for her: a privilege, a joy. To hear her laugh, to see her smile: his own glory. Their songs rang in perfect harmony, and they knew each other’s constellations. Though his left hand was bare, he felt no shame.

  “And yet,” said she with a heart-stopping smile, “I must die, or your mission will fail. Your duties as a Color Priest lay unfulfilled. Your duties to the friends you will make undone.

  “This is despair.”

  And despair it was, for there was no other way. Love or duty. The heart or the need. The echo dissolved; the dilemma remained. A question with no acceptable answer.

  The storm slackened; day had come. He gasped and coughed, inhaling sand, for he lay facedown on the sun-baked catastrophe of Angalaland. And he wondered: what would a color priest do?

  He flipped himself onto his back, gazed with blank, bleary eyes at the mottled cloudless sky, stirred with windows into the starry void. And he thought: the world is coming to an end. What does it matter? What does any of it—anything—matter? He laughed, though even the watchful foliots could not hear it.

  It went on, night after day: echoes, illusions, always a choice, always a test, always a problem with no solution, always a question with no answer. Always a game in which the winning move was to perish before the end. This was not responsibility; this was madness.

  Yet mad he must be, for a spark of faith burned within him, answering negation: no.

  No. It shall not be. This is not the end. Faith may be madness indeed, but despair is The End—and Derxis feared The End most of all, laughed at it most of all.

  What would a color priest do? He would paint, of course.

  So Derxis painted in the storm. As his blood weakened to thirst and hunger and exhaustion, and as his arda spines weakened to the assault of the auroral storm, and as his mind weakened to despair, he painted.

  He collected colors from the bleeding sands. He mixed the colors, the way that two daimon in love will mix, will intermingle, will become one. He felt it, and he loved the colors, and he painted on the surface of a broad white rock, angled up to face the heavens, many times as large as himself.

  Words came to him as he painted—his first prophecy of many, all of which came in the ecstatic throes of creation. Derxis, for the first time, sensed a light behind the light, a fearful radiance, a rainbow among rainbows. It whispered to him, its words quiet, indistinct, inexorable.

  No blindness but our sight

  No beginning but the end

  No darkness but the light

  No enemies but our friends

  He painted with his hands, smearing the oily sands on the rock, using the water from a tiny spring not to drink but to mix pigments. His strokes were crude, but that mattered not. He swept his hands; he scoured his fingertips on the rock. Color on color.

  Dissolution is our aim:

  To curse the Great Unknown,

  And bow before the same;

  To die and die again,

  Until darkness becomes light.

  Listen, and believe:

  All will be well

  Color on color. Ten colors. Ten dead gods. Ten stars. Ten of the Last. The last Daimon to ever fall. Derxis wondered: who were they? And where?

  The dragonmarked in ignorance

  The godmarked on the height

  The cursed one a burning fool

  The dying armed with cold resolve

  The doomed awaiting tomes so bright

  My beloved hemmed by storm and shield

  The great mind slave to itself alone

  The seer on the threshold of dreams

  The outcast shaken by light in the void

  And I, who would defy fate

  Derxis later could not remember what exactly he had painted. A rainbow, maybe, yet more than a rainbow. A white flame, burning too bright. Jewels like suns, like stars, like the light of the sweeps. And eyes. So many eyes.

  He had painted a promise: that all would be well. Though the world collapsed in fire and ice, all would be well. Though death come for them all, the Last, the ten he would seek out and find, yet even then somehow would all be well. He believed it, deep in his blood and bones. He believed that there was always a third way, always another chance, always a way to laugh in the face of destiny.

  He retraced his steps out of Angalaland uncounted days later, and he returned triumphantly to Alaru in the shadow of Annunciation. And when he came before the elders Nuncio, he amazed them by laughing until he collapsed.