Smoke and Mirrors
Caelith stared into the roaring fire. He had been absently tossing pieces of wood onto it for some time and he barely noticed that the heat from the resulting blaze was becoming uncomfortable even in the chill of the deepening night. The stars overhead were a brilliant dome over the clear sky, but he took little notice before the fire obliterated them from his vision. Bright, hot light played and danced across the scattered stones of the ruins about him.
“You’ve grown quiet lately,” Eryn said, choosing a spot near the fire which, Caelith noted, was carefully gauged so that they might speak without being too close. “That’s a new approach for you—usually you try to talk your companions into the ground.”
Caelith smiled absently, his mind elsewhere. “You’re right.”
“Well, that’s a change!” Eryn laughed ruefully.
“Isn’t it.” Caelith nodded, tossing another long stick onto the fire. It knocked embers into the air, then cracked, igniting at once. “There was a time when I thought everyone was waiting to hear the next word falling from my lips. Caelith, son of Galen the Great! Then I realized I was just talking to myself—and I didn’t find me that interesting.”
They both lapsed into silence, watching the flames dance feverishly in the gaps between and through the logs. It was true, he realized. Back when they had first known each other, he thought he not only had all the answers but believed he was all the answers. How could he explain to Eryn what happened to him when he barely understood it himself. The pep talks in preparation for raids, the speeches about the nobility of their wandering, the need of sacrifice—it had all crumbled to tasteless dust in his mouth. He wondered if there really was something more to life—some purpose—in all this suffering. There had to be something beyond the service and study of a magic that most of the known world decried as a vile and blasphemous evil.
Anji’s words came back to him once more. The prize does not make us strong—but the winning does.
Caelith looked away from the fire to the crumbling, overgrown foundations around them. He spoke as much to himself as to Eryn. “Just think about it; we supposedly sit in the ruins of the greatest human empire history ever knew. This was a street once. Merchants must have walked down it; maybe children played here without a care in the shadow of walls that they thought would last for eternity. What happened to them, Eryn? Where were the miracles of the Rhamasian gods when they needed them? Where was their divine power when humanity cried out to them and these stones fell for the last time?”
Caelith drew in a long breath as he turned back to the fire. The long tongues of flame danced above, the smoke from the damp wood rolling upward into the clear night.
“I don’t know,” Eryn replied quietly, her gaze also fixed contemplatively on the flames. “But I do know that our clans need a rest. They all hope for Calsandria, and we can give them that hope right here.”
“What if it’s a false hope,” Caelith said, shaking his head.
“Then it will be a hope nevertheless,” the woman replied. “It is more than they have now—more than any of us have.”
“You may be right.” Caelith sighed.
Eryn gave him an amused look. “Another first!”
“Maybe this place is an answer,” Caelith said huskily, “but . . .”
“But?” Eryn coaxed.
“But the wind is still blowing in my dreams,” Caelith said into the fire. “It still carries my soul with it, calling me to another place.”
“Toward Calsandria or peace?”
“Both, I thought. There is a voice in it that calls to me. I hoped this would be it—the place where I could get the answers to my own questions—but we’ve come to the end of this road and I don’t know which way to go.”
The flames of the fire danced and shifted, suddenly twisting over the glowing embers. They drew together, curling inward, taking the form of a winged woman created out of the flames. She danced across the top of the logs.
Caelith and Eryn both stared, transfixed.
“What is it?” Eryn asked.
“It’s me,” Caelith replied in hushed tones. “It’s the Deep Magic—I can feel it welling up from inside me—but I’ve never seen this before. Are you seeing this, too?”
“She’s beautiful,” Eryn whispered in awe.
The flames roared upward, reaching out with graceful arms, the long curves of its body spinning in a dance. Violet sheets of light flickered backward into translucent wings. The delicate woman of flame spun in her dance, her arms held out as if pleading.
“I know her,” Caelith said with a smile. “I’ve seen her in the dream.”
“She wants something,” Eryn shook her head, puzzled. “What is it?”
“She wants—quickly! Where are the water skins?”
“There, behind you, but . . .”
Caelith spun on his heels, falling on the full skins. “Not enough! Where’s the bucket?”
Eryn glanced back at the beautiful woman in flame. “Down the slope—I left it next to the river, but . . .”
Caelith was already charging down the embankment, a mad grin on his face. He stumbled over one of the foundation stones, rolling partway down the hill before regaining his feet. Giddily, he hurtled into the water, after snatching a bucket from the bank. He plunged it into the drifting waters under the starlit sky, dragging it back to shore and racing back up the slope.
“Help me,” Caelith yelled to Eryn. “You use the water skins.”
“Help you do what?” She was peering at him oddly. He realized he must look like a lunatic.
“What is all this about, old man?” Lucian said, struggling toward them, “and it had better be worth my waking up.”
“Good, you’re here. Help us put out the fire!” he shouted, setting the sloshing bucket quickly on the ground. He started tossing water skins at his astonished companions.
“No!” Eryn said pointing at the flame-woman still dancing above the embers. “You’ll kill her!”
“I say,” Lucian said, blinking at the flames, “are you developing a new form of amusement, Caelith?”
“Just do as I say,” Caelith instructed, picking up the bucket. “When I signal, douse the fire. Ready? Now!”
The water arced through the air. The fiery woman reached upward in its approach as it engulfed her, and she collapsed with it into the embers. Thick smoke billowed upward from the flames, engulfing them all at once.
“That was pointless,” Eryn said, coughing.
“Wait,” Caelith rasped. “Look!”
The smoke churned around them, then twisted under the bright stars. It lay flat against the ground, its contours forming the perfect pattern of the cobblestone street that once paved the wide avenue here. Its translucent tendrils rose upward from the foundation stones, forming into the smoky images of storefronts, shops, and tall homes that once lined the streets. The ash from the fire fitted itself to the ghostly form of the city now long lost. The smoke continued to pour from the doused fire, flowing constantly down the facades and walkways, reincarnating farther and farther down the path the images of vanished ruins as they once stood in their prime.
Caelith carefully approached the gray, almost transparent storefront to their right. “Look,” he said almost reverently as he pointed. “You can even make out the marking on the building.”
“‘Indro’s Bakery,’” Lucian read from the etching in the barely undulating smoke. He raised his eyebrow. “Not terribly original of old Indro, was it?”
“Oh, no!” Eryn breathed. “Caelith?”
Caelith turned, following Eryn’s wide-eyed gaze down the street. The smoke continued to flow, re-creating more buildings as it went. He could even see the faint form of incredible towers toward the center of the city—but something else immediately drew his attention back to the street.
“People,” Eryn said and shuddered.
They were more like outlines in the smoke—clear spaces where the haze of the smoke was somehow absent. Here, the details were mercifully missing entirely. The street was teeming with them. A couple—the figure of a tall man and a shorter woman—walked past them down the walkway, the outline of their arms entwined, their heads cocked toward each other. Vacant forms of children scampered about one another in a game that remained unfinished for four centuries. The outline of a group of hollow men moved down the street in great animation, their voices unheard and the subject of their argument now moot.
“Is this what becomes of us,” Caelith whispered, “when our time is done?”
“It’s so—oh, please, Caelith, make it stop,” Eryn choked out.
“Wait, Eryn,” Caelith said in wonder. “Look.”
The outline of a woman walked down the center of the street directly toward them. For a moment, Caelith was certain she would pass directly through him, but the figure stopped in front of him. She seemed to be staring directly at him and she raised her hand and gestured for him to follow her. She then turned and walked back down the ethereal street.
Caelith cleared his throat. “Let’s go.”
“In there?” Eryn croaked.
“The smoke is already starting to thin here,” Caelith said, pointing to the walls of the street. They were already nearly transparent. “This—phantom or whatever it is—wants to show us something and I, for one, want to see what it is. I only wish we had more than starlight.”
“I wonder,” Lucian said, raising his hand in the air. Almost at once, the pale light from a glowing sphere awoke in his upheld palm. It lit the gray smoke street more clearly, but did nothing to dissipate it. Still the outlines moved fluidly around them.
Caelith nodded, his voice not as sure as he would have liked when he spoke. “Thank you, Lucian—and in the famous words of our intrepid Jorgan: ‘This way.’”
They quickly moved in pursuit of the spectral woman, following her outline down the broad avenue that drifted about them. Unsure of themselves, they stepped to the side whenever the outline of someone stood in their path, not wishing to disturb what seemed like an imprint of a soul. They passed down through towering edifices whose grandeur spoke of power and wealth—now gone from the memory of man.
“I say,” Lucian spoke sotto voce, “where is the rest of our valiant party? We appear to be short several humans and a dwarf.”
“You nervous?” Caelith asked anxiously.
“Not at all, old boy,” Lucian lied smoothly. “I just thought that since we’ve all come this far together, it would be nice to die together as well.”
“But then who would bury us?”
“Well, it hasn’t seemed to bother these people.” Lucian gestured around them at the hollow specters walking past.
“Will you both shut up!” came Eryn’s tense voice.
Their shadowy guide brought them into an enormous circular garden in the center of the city. The trees, down to their leaves in each detail, were re-created in the smoke from Caelith’s fire. The spectral woman led them to the center of the park, the blades of its grass re-created in gray, where she stopped to gaze up at a monument, now lost entirely to time.
Lucian brought his light closer to the markings on its surface, reading them aloud. “‘I am Shushankh, Tribune of Segathlas City and all of Nharuthenia. Behold the power and the might of our works to the greater glory of Rhamas.’” He reached forward with his hand to touch the plaque but it passed through the smoke, dissolving the inscription into swirls of smoke, only to re-form once more when he withdrew his hand. Lucian looked around at the buildings that once were and now were no more. “Well, old Shushankh, your power and glory seem a bit faded, old boy.”
“Caelith, can we move on?” Eryn said quietly. She was staring at the hollow form of a woman lifting the silent outline of an infant into the air nearby.
“Our guide—she’s moving again,” Caelith said, pointing across the square toward a building with towering smoke columns. They hurried to follow her through the main doorway, framed in ghostlike gray. Beyond was a hallway, perfectly rendered. They stepped cautiously into the dark space, close together under the radiance of Lucian’s light.
“By the gods,” Caelith muttered in admiration, stepping into the large space beyond.
The rotunda vaulted overhead, six courses of columns rising a full hundred feet over their heads. The dome at the top was incomplete, the smoke swirling in wisps with the bright stars shining down through it. Huge stones, once cornices on the concourses high above, lay strewn around the broken slabs of the floor, sticking up incongruously through the perfect smoke depiction of the building as it once existed. The spectral woman moved across this floor and stopped, her head bowed.
“What is she doing?” Eryn whispered.
“I think she’s looking at something,” Lucian offered.
“Come on,” Caelith said. They stepped forward across the broken and shattered slabs of the floor, their feet disturbing the smoke rendering for only a moment before it re-formed around them. At last, they stood before the smoky apparition. Caelith looked down under the light of Lucian’s mystic ball.
“It—it’s a map,” Eryn breathed. “The whole floor is a map!”
“Look! Over here!” Lucian moved off, taking his light with him. “Right here! This is Segathlas—this is where we are! It’s all marked—this whole valley was known as Nharuthenia—and look over there!” Lucian moved a few steps farther on, his light traveling with him. “Here is Mount Hrudan and the pass we came through! There’s the Aramun Valley! Caelith, old boy! What a find! Caelith?”
Caelith continued to look down, his breathing heavy. “Quickly! The smoke won’t last and we’ve got to mark everything! Get stones—anything—and mark everything!”
“What is it, old boy?”
“I’ve found it.” He could barely speak. “I’ve found Calsandria.”