“And perhaps Lhean with her,” Telagioth added.
“Elsewhere?” Lynx asked.
“If what I surmise is correct,” Ealdaen said, “she could be almost anywhere, anywhen. But I think it is no mistake the trickster allowed her to handle the mask. Whether he expected her to destroy it in such a fashion?” He shrugged.
“Yates said Karigan wounded Mornhavon.”
“We believe it is so,” Telagioth replied. “We heard the Dark One’s lingering cry of pain even as we found ourselves here.”
“The rupture was a terrible, powerful force,” Ealdaen added. “And it was directed at Mornhavon.”
During the night, neither of their missing friends appeared at their fireside, so in the morning Lynx and the Eletians went their separate ways, the Eletians bearing south toward Eletia, and Lynx, after paying final respects at Yates’ cairn, began his long trek eastward. He’d come to the grasslands without his supplies, only what he’d had on him when he awoke in the chamber of the tree: his clothes, a cloak, and his knife. Telagioth gave him his longbow and what remained of his quiver of arrows, as well as his water skin. Both Eletians shared out some food. With these items and his knowledge of the wild, Lynx believed he would have no trouble making it to civilization.
Over his shoulder he carried Yates’ satchel with his journal inside, as well as his winged horse brooch. Yates’ brooch would return home into Captain Mapstone’s hands to wait until some new Rider was called into the messenger service and claimed it. It had always been this way.
Lynx carried inside himself Yates’ loss, a terrible, yawning pit opening up before him. He shook his head and kept walking.
She tumbled through an abyss of no dimension, of no known depth; falling, falling through the unending midnight well of the universe. Light streaked by her in searing hairline strands, and in great beams humming with energy that punched through the blackness, driving relentlessly forward, but doing nothing to illuminate the void.
They were the threads of lives and worlds, of time and place as she’d seen through the faceplate of the looking mask, but now she was among them, as if she’d fallen into the mask, insignificant, nothing more than a grain of sand in the desert. Much less than even that.
Some threads intersected, wove into a grid, weft and warp drawn tightly into luminous tapestries, while others came glancing close but bypassed one another, destined never to meet.
Stars and celestial bodies shone around her, and shards of silver glass glimmering with their far-off light trailed in her wake like the tail of a comet.
Realm of the gods. Her own inner voice came to her from a far off vestige of consciousness.
Consciousness? Was she even alive? Or was she an incorporeal spirit traversing the heavens?
But even as her plummet increased in velocity, she felt mortal fear, a fear that in this infinite dive, all that she was, all that she had been, and all that she might become, would slip away until she was nothing but dust, dust mingling with the shards of silver glass, falling forever.
Nothing, nothing . . .
Her mind ripping; her inner voice screaming.
Then great wings filled her awareness, their beating the rhythm of a heart. They matched the speed of her fall and the arms of no earthly being reached out and caught her. He drew her to his chest, a giant’s chest of alabaster. He hurtled downward with her, his vast wings gradually slowing their descent.
She looked upon the visage of a raptor, stars shining in eyes that reflected the heavens, and there was no mistaking Westrion, the god of death.
The Birdman has come for me. I must be dead.
All grew still and black, and became nothing.
All was still and black. When Karigan opened her eyes, she could tell no difference.
Do you have eyes in the afterlife? she wondered. Artists depicted the souls of the dead with eyes, but how did they know?
Other sensations came to her: she lay on smooth, cool stone. The space felt close, the air thin and poor. Her body hurt, in some places worse than others.
Not dead, she thought with rising hope. Just a bad dream. She had only imagined Westrion’s wings, of being borne in the death god’s arms.
She patted herself to make sure and felt flesh and warmth and more pain. She sliced her palm on a shard of glass jutting from her thigh. She yanked it out with a cry. Definitely not dead.
She tried to sit up but bumped her head on stone. She explored around herself with her hands. Smooth, cold stone all around her. She was enclosed in a rectangular box.
Seized by panic she screamed, kicking and hitting the sides of her prison despite her broken wrist. Warm blood trickled down her forearms from shredded knuckles. No one responded to her cries for help. She tried to force herself to calm down, her breathing ragged.
She would suffocate, expire in some unknown tomb. No one would ever know what happened to her, or where to look. Was she still in Blackveil? Elsewhere? What had the shattering of the looking mask done with her?
Taking another shuddering breath, she realized she probably would never find out.