CHAPTER 24

As in the Beginning…

Marrill stared at the tiny path ahead of them leading into the depths of the forest. It was like a nightmare of every fairy tale she’d ever read put together; every scary one, anyway. She half expected hungry wolves or cackling witches to leap from the shadows.

But then, this was the Pirate Stream—wolves and witches were way too tame for whatever terrors lurked here.

Ardent stood at the edge of the tangled trees, hands on his hips as he surveyed their surroundings. “Only three rules you need to remember,” he said. He ticked each off on his fingers in turn. “First, stay on the path. Second, don’t get lost. And third…” He paused, brow furrowed. “I could have sworn there was a third. And come to think of it, maybe staying on the path and not getting lost are the same one.…” He shrugged. “Well, just don’t die, I guess. Anyway, on we go.”

With that, he straightened his cap and started down the dark path.

This was the point where Marrill would normally look to Fin for a wry joke to make her feel better. But Fin wasn’t here—he was back at the Kraken holding off the Rise and the Fade.

Marrill sucked in a deep breath. If he could face down an unbeatable army, with no hopes of success, she could take a walk in some scary-looking woods.

“No problem,” she whispered to herself. Then she plunged into the forest.

The temperature plummeted almost instantly. The very air felt weird: thicker in some spots, thinner in others. Every atom in her body vibrated at an odd pitch as she struggled to keep up with Ardent’s confident stride. At times, she felt like different parts of her were moving at different speeds.

On either side, the forest closed tightly around them. Branches leaned toward her with a creaking hiss, as though Marrill had some sort of magnetic pull. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw lights. But when she tried looking at them, they disappeared, blinking out of existence like fireflies.

Then there were the noises. She swore she could hear whispers, giggling even, layered with the calls of strange creatures and the slippery shifting of parting leaves. Underlying it all was a hum that changed pitch whenever she turned her head.

Disconcerting shadows danced at the edge of her vision. “Am I the only one seeing phantoms?” she asked.

Ahead, Ardent slapped his hand against his forehead. “Right, of course! How silly of me. That’s the third rule.” He spun back to her. “What you are seeing are not phantoms. They’re echoes. I’d avoid them if I were you.”

He turned and continued down the path. Marrill scrambled after him. “What do you mean by echoes? Echoes of what?”

“Oh, all sorts of things! Old magic, usually. Remember that a pirate stream is a river that flows away from another river. So if you think of the Pirate Stream as a branch out of the River of Creation, then Meres is an island in the juncture of that branch. Some would even say it is the branch.”

He turned to face her. “That’s what makes this place so magical! It’s the only world that touches both the River of Creation and the Pirate Stream at once. All the waters of the Stream flow through and out from here.”

A chill stole up Marrill’s back, like a cold finger tracing the ridge of her spine. And then she realized that there was a cold finger tracing the ridge of her spine. With a squeal she jumped to the middle of the path, spinning to see what had been touching her.

Nothing greeted her but the darkness of the forest. She was pretty sure she heard a tinkling of laughter hidden in the rustling of leaves. “That’s it,” she said, pressing a hand to her screaming heart. “I’m officially declaring this place worse than nightmares.”

“This?” Ardent waved a hand. “This is the safe path. All this is nothing but a ripple on the ocean that is Meres.”

Marrill swallowed. “It gets worse?”

Ardent threw his head back and laughed. “Oh my, yes. Much worse.” He started back down the path. Marrill was pretty sure she heard him chuckle to himself, “Much, much, much worse.”

From that point on, Marrill stuck close behind the wizard. Ardent droned on about various esoteric points, and though she wasn’t completely listening to him, she was grateful that his voice drowned out the strange noises of the forest. Eventually, though, a rushing sound began filling the air, making Ardent harder to hear. It started out low and soft, but the farther they moved along the path, the more insistent it became. Soon, it grew to a thunderous, almost physical presence.

Up ahead, the bitter blackness of the forest gave way to light and air. As Marrill cleared the edge of the trees, her stomach dropped to her toes. She gasped, clutching the wizard’s robe to keep her balance.

“The Font of Meres.” Ardent’s voice was reverent, his eyes shining as he took it in.

They stood at the precipice of a circular chasm so massive that the other side was almost lost to distance. It was completely ringed by the dark forest, the impenetrable mass of trees stretching right up to its edge. In the center, as though the chasm were a great moat around it, a spire stretched up to the sky.

Halfway up the spire’s height, golden water gushed from great maw-like arches on each side, the raw magic cascading into the depthless chasm. Clouds of shimmering mist wafted from the depths, exploding into colors, as if sunset itself had evaporated and hung in the air.

This was the source of the roaring hum; it was the sound of thundering water. This, Marrill realized, was the source of all magic. The spring from which the Pirate Stream flowed.

At the tip of the spire perched a building, looking as though it hadn’t been built so much as carved from the stone itself. Ardent gazed at it a moment before flipping the tip of his cap over his shoulder. “Now then, all we have to do is get to the Font itself, repair the Map, and re-cage the Lost Sun of Dzannin before it destroys all of creation.”

“So, you know,” Marrill muttered, “the usual.”

“Exactly,” Ardent said, apparently missing the sarcasm. “Now, to the Font!” Before she could stop him, the wizard stepped off the edge of the cliff and dropped out of sight.

“Ardent!” Marrill squeaked, lunging forward. She fell to her knees, scooting as close to the edge as she dared. A pair of blue eyes greeted her, scarcely a foot below her own. They crinkled with a smile.

“Oh, you should see your face,” Ardent chuckled. “That never gets old; it truly doesn’t. Anyway, come on, follow me. Mind your step now, it can get a bit tricky in the middle.” And with that, he strode out over the open chasm toward the spire.

Marrill realized suddenly that the glittering mist had congealed itself into an iridescent line just below the edge of the cliff—a shimmering rainbow bridging one side of the chasm to the other. It looked a bit slicker than she would have liked. Taking a deep breath, she slid a leg over the side, positioned herself as best she could, and dropped down onto the bridge made of sparkling dew.

The wind off the water buffeted them as they made their way closer to the spire, coating her skin with its glowing mist. It tingled and tickled at the same time, turning into little bubbles and occasionally causing a random hair to crawl down her arm. But thankfully it wasn’t enough to work any real magic.

Eventually the bridge morphed into stairs, and so she climbed. Ardent was so far ahead of her that he was nothing more than a purple smudge in the distance. Her legs burned, and her breath came in strained pants by the time she caught up to him.

“Couldn’t the wizards have built something more convenient?” she gasped.

Ardent shook his head. “One cannot approach the Font of Meres but through difficulty. If we tried, we would find it had simply moved farther away.”

“Wizard logic makes no sense,” she mumbled to herself.

He continued upward, hands cavorting through the air like birds as he lapsed back into his favorite activity: long-winded explanations of obscure magical concepts. “Indeed,” he declared, “some have speculated that space and time on the Pirate Stream are related to each other solely through the amount of effort expended to travel between them. That’s part of what makes the Master of the Iron Ship so fascinating!”

“The Master of the Iron Ship?” Marrill asked, her eyes on the sides of the barely visible staircase. With each step she struggled between hurrying to keep up and going slowly to keep from tumbling into oblivion. “Do you think we’ll see him here?”

Ardent paused, looking back over his shoulder at her. “My dear Marrill, I would almost be stunned if we didn’t. Recall that the Wiverwane showed me the Master meeting the Dawn Wizard, though the two should never have existed at the same time. And Tanea Hollow-Blood’s reported last words show he was interrogating her about means of time traversal. To do that would require more power than I have ever even heard of. Perhaps as much as only the Lost Sun itself could provide… but how that would work…”

He stroked his beard thoughtfully. “At any rate, the Master has gone to an unbelievable amount of effort to bring the Lost Sun into being. Whatever his reasoning, I cannot imagine he will absent himself from this confrontation.”

“Great.” Marrill shuddered at the thought. She was tense enough as it was; the last thing she needed was to add the Master to the equation.

At long last, they reached the base of the building. Marrill collapsed against the stone wall. If it took effort to reach the Font of Meres, she’d definitely earned her way in.

Ardent, on the other hand, barely appeared winded. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she felt warmth flow through her. “Ready?” he asked.

She nodded as he kicked aside the hem of his robe and stepped into a narrow sliver of an entranceway, so thin he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Marrill started to push her way after him, but as she did, she caught sight of the far side of the chasm. What she saw made her throat close and her gut clench.

On the other side of the island from the Kraken, out beyond the edge of the forest, the arc of the sky ended. Everything ended. The glowing waters of the Pirate Stream poured into the darkness in perverse mockery of the waterfalls flowing out from the Font all around her.

The void of nothingness. The wake of the Lost Sun, eating its way toward them like a black hole, consuming everything it touched. A figure in silver strode purposefully ahead of it, walking along the surface of the Stream as though it were a flat highway. From his footprints, the trail of emptiness spread.

The Lost Sun of Dzannin was nearly upon them.