Stumbling through a halflight of soaring, ancient woods lit faintly by the whirring beacons of fireflies, Blackbard paused at the base of a large Pample tree, dropped to his knees and heaved violently for a moment before vomiting into the ferns. Rising shakily to his feet he groaned, loping drunkenly forward through depths of shadow and pale strands of moonlight.Through the deep blue of the eveing air and black, broad silhouettes of trees he spied what appeared to be the lintels, gables and trefoils of a huge, crumbling stone facade, built, by the ruined look of it, in the time of N'Miridin. Once a grand and soaring structure, the trees had taken over, and the moss and lichen, too, softening every crumbling surface. His booted feet scraped across broken stone walkways overgrown with bramble and root, and he found his way to a broad set of crumbling steps which led up to a massive gothic arch entangled with branches and saplings. By its remnant hinges the arch had once housed a hulking set of wooden doors, and as he braced himself against the threshold, Blackbard found himself looking into the vast, airy darkness of a cathedral.Crossing into the transept and looking up he saw that the trees had taken over within as well, their trunks as broad as the bastions and columns that had once held up the skyward vaults. Remnants of the high roof and chunks of the gothic spires and pinnacles peppered the aisles and nave. Fallen columns of limestone and marble had heaped upon one another like wooden giants in a grove, their surfaces bursting with a living softness of green. Looking back over the rubble to the rear entrance of the cathedral, Blackbard saw that the massive rose window remained mostly intact, but through holes in the once glorious stained glass reached vaporous swords of moonbeam. The pews had long ago been ripped out for salvage and firewood, and the alter, littered with detritus from above and almost completely grown over in weeds, had been stripped of any valuable materials. Just above the alter, the faint shadow of a cross lingered on the wall, suggesting where a huge crucifix had once hung. With his drinking flask still clutched in one hand, Blackbard stared for a moment at the ghost of the cross. He jeered, raising both arms out straight to shoulder height and and clicking his ankles together. Dropping his feathered cheek to one shoulder, he stiffened his entire body and lolled out his tongue in a mocking Christ pose."Some God you are," he sneered in a whisper.It was the perfect place to steal away for the night, for Blackbard had, in his travels far and near, grown accustomed to the comfort of walls and rooms; though Man had been in many ways his enemy, his structures gave Blackbard and his dark habits ample place to disappear. As he picked through the ruins he found blackened, sooty places where travelers had made fires and placed grass bedding. He found a broken arrow lodged in a tree trunk, and then a second, intact, having glanced off into a corridor. He found places where deer and perhaps a bear had slept. He even passed a small empty nest resting in a pile of fractured marble, perhaps having fallen there from one of the high boughs above.Deep into the shadows he crept, stopping to wretch here and there with ths sounds of his sickness reverberating off the high, crumbling walls. At last he found a relatively dry corner, a mostly intact aisle near the alter where an alcove of stone roof had remained overhead. Though it was strewn with shattered stone and dirtied with leaves and broken columns, it seemed otherwise undisturbed.Tipping the flask back again, Blackbard sank onto his tail feathers, burped and waggled his knees. He looked at the flask in his hands, and then regarded his hands instead. At times he hated the apendages that linked him sp directly to the human race.Presently he began to hum, softly at first, to himself, sarcastically and comically. He stopped, chuckled at the desolate sound of his own voice. He hummed louder, and at last he broke into full song, with a menacing knife edge in his notes. “How great thou art,” he cackled, “how great thou art!”Feeling abruptly irreverent, he picked up a crumble of marble from the floor beside him and threw it into the vastness of the nave beyond as hard as he could. He heard it strike a tree trunk, and listened as it skittered down and across broken marble floor, but he did not see that it came to rest at the feet of a shrouded, mysterious bird creature nearly Blackbard's size, with a slender beak and glistening green eyes. Her feathers were deep brown and laced with gray, a member of the Zakurit tribe going back into the Deep Time. On her feet were delicate slippers, and her shawl, cape and hood were pale, diaphonous and clean. Blackbard's decadent, dead laughter echoed through the hollows of the cathedral as she bent to touch the stone he had cast away.The hooded figure moved deeper into the ruins, as quiet as wind through air. As she walked, she held up the palm of one hand, waist-high, and began to call the light to her from the immediate vicinity – there wasn't much to speak of, since it was well past sunset, but as she went the wooded room grew darker around her, and in her palm a concentration of brightness intensified.
Still singing haughtily, Blackbard tipped the flask back once more, unaware of the creature who had now stepped into the aisle where he languished in his torn, soiled clothes and in a true stench of alcohol intermingled with sickness. No longer was the place dark, however, for in her hand she had concentrated nearly all the available light. She shone like a living lantern, with a tiny, fiery swirling orb of brightness hovering just above her palm.
Opening his eyes, Blackbard saw the creatures standing before him, but took no great surprise. Rather, he scoffed, and then cackled. Still waggling his knees, he began to recite words aloud.
"Wisp and mist of nightmares wink where wake and sleep meet 'pon the brink
Of sliver-moon and star-which-fall,
be shattered, dream who 'pon me call..."
His voice grew darker and took on a severing edge as he continued. The figure stood motionless, a pure shimmering brightness in an otherwise dank, destroyed place.
"Mind who slumbers sees the past
what broken pieces out have cast
Where pains take shape and word be blade
where wound and game and fear replayed!”
The eyes of the shrouded figure reduced to a squint, and for an instant all the visible light crashed completely to black, pulled abruptly into the orb still swirling just above her hand. With only the slightest curl of her fingers beneath the orb, the collected light then slammed outward concentrically, shattering the air with a tremendous clap of thunder. In seconds, all settled just as it has been before, but the air seemed stunned and shimmering. Blackbard had pressed himself to the wall and shielded his eyes, now daring to squint over his upheld arm to take better stock in what had just taken place. The shrouded figure stepped forward, a beam of moonlight spilling across her tearful eyes.
"Belin?" Blackbard whispered.
"Aidan Barabas," she said, in a familiar voice. "Barabas the Black." Her tone was a white breath of wind over rolling gray waves.
Blackbard shrieked pitifully, and shrank against the wall. "No - no, it can't be!" He stumbled away and fell, his flask skittering off across the floor. He snarled, cried out, but couldn't raise himself from the floor again. He crawled instead, a stinking, ruined and terrible wretch, whimpering to himself in anguish and shame. Belin's gaze reached out to him, her eyes twinned lamps of resonance. "Leave me!" he raged. His eyes searched for her, and her feathered face was an an age of sorrow, worn and wet with tears. Unable to help himself, Blackbard heaved horribly and vomited again, then dragged himself away on his elbows and knees.
"Enchantress," he hissed, "spittle dribbling from his beak. "Borrower!" His eyes came around again, fierce and hateful. "Seer, Empath!" He slung the insults like arrows, but they all fell short, their ends blunt upon her gentle silence. "Witch," he seethed. Then he drew in a ragged breath, sank onto his side and hugged his knees to his chest, weeping bitterly. Daring to look up at the creature still standing nearby, he writhed in darkest anguish. Finally, in a tiny, broken voice that fell from him like a shard of glass, he whispered, "Wife."
Nothing moved for a moment, and the night made no sound. She went gracefully to her knees, arranging her breeze of garments around her. “Still,” she answered. She regarded the bird beside her on the floor for a moment, her eyes infinite, faintly luminous, but sorrowful. “And you, Husband... Why do you cower here?”
Blackbard wept for a moment, and then his eyes seemed to hollow as he found his answer. “I am made of shadows. I hide from you.” He laughed without mirth. “And yet your Eye finds me."
"It is from yourself that you hide," she said evenly. She reached for him, and he recoiled as much as he could, sniping “Don't touch me!”As her palms fell to his shoulder and arm he made effort to pull away, but as her touch sank deeper he acquiesced to it, reduced to a bout of bitter sobbing. They stayed there in the dimness in silence for a moment, and still his back was turned to her.
"Why will you not look at me?" Belin asked in a whisper. Blackbard coughed, sucked in a wet sob, and answered, “When I look at you, I see them.”She stroked his shoulder, and he could scarcely bear it. “Barabas,” she said, “they are only lost. They are not gone.”He wrenched away from her.
“Speak not of it!” he raged. He glared at her over his shoulder, his expression a viciousness and agony. “My children are dead!” he shouted, loudly enough that he saw her tremble. The last word he spoke tolled on the night air and ricocheted wildly off the cathedral walls. Belin took the blow, swallowed, centered herself, and drew in a deep breath as the quiet resumed.
“*Our* children,” she said, “are yet alive. My hearts still see them, even though my eyes cannot.”Blackbard growled. "You still have hope," she insisted. "This is why you helped the woman in the And'yoleken wood."
Blackbard's eyes swiveled back cold. “I don't know what you're talking about.”
Belin's stare fixed on him and bore in deeper, and Blackbard saw as their gazes met that she knew everything.
"You helped her because you are more than the Disconnections and the Destructions you have become," Belin offered.
"What did I do? We found the children only to lose them again to the trees!"
"You did not have to help her," Belin observed.
Blackbard sighed. "If you fancy having hope for me, but the light out of it, Belin," he said emptily. "I'm nothin'. I'm not Mirico. I'm not Iridia. I am not Ambassador, Blackbard or Barabas the Black. I'm naught but a ghost. A wraith who's perished somewhere between, walking the wilds between a spirit's death and the death of the flesh."
Belin persisted, calmly. “You are trapped in a place of your own making, a place of illusions and deceits, angers and fears.”Blackbard was quiet for a long time, and around them the night deepened in silence. Finally he asked her, “Why do you still keep to the endless with me?"
"Could it be called an Endlessness if it ended?" Belin asked, a hint of a smile passing through her expression. "What I feel could not be consumed, not by the passing of any time or distance."
"But what if it's I who've passed?" he asked.
Belin had heard this before. "Like Ey'bram and Obrayil, you are lost. Not gone."
Blackbard huffed. "But I am gone. The one you became love with... he doesn't exist anymore.""The one you became love with does not exist anymore either," Belin said gently. "She was much too flighty and selfish. I am stronger than she was, more understanding, and more patient."
"You're still... just as beautiful," Blackbard said, tears slipping into the dark feathers beneath this hollowed eyes. "It hurts me just t'look at y', as always and ever it did." He rolled onto his back and gazed at her sadly. His beak fell open but he struggled to speak for a moment. "Can things ever be as they once were?"Belin hardened subtly, through her jaw and around her eyes. “My arms will not hold you until once again you embrace yourself.”
His gaze fell away, and he sagged in sadness.
"Come with me to New Che-Uin," she implored. "The Summit will begin in days."
Blackbard gagged, and hissed.
"Come with me," Belin insisted, ignoring his childishness. "Hear the predicaments of the world you have been hiding from."
"I have predicaments of me'own thank you very much," Blackbard sneered. "Why would I care about such things?""You are an Ambassador. As the wing you are a certain power, an observer, but the Hand, it is what now moves the world."
His eyes swiveled to her, and his gaze was mocking, dark and sinister. He began to laugh, his chest and shoulders shaking as his fingers interlaced on the chest of his ratty, soiled kaftan. "Haven't you been listening? No. Obviously you haven't!"Belin recoiled from him slightly, her eyes glazing over. She knew what was coming."I do nothin' for others! Glynmarra's Wing, I scarce do anything for me'self, save findin' ways t'put me'self out'a me stinkin' misery. So far, nothing kills me but I'll find somethin' that does!"
He saw that at last his words had hit Belin in a tender spot, and her eyes winked with the wet jewels of tears. He reveled in it, which devastated her even more deeply. Her beak quivered, and for a moment she could say no words.
At last, she gathered herself and said, "You once gave to the natural realm, to the world, a great and powerful voice. And with your true words and your true music, you spoke for all of us, for each of nature's Ambassadors doing our best to protect, nurture and educate each other, to touch Man and Earth. Yours was a gift unlike any I have ever seen. But when the pain of losing Ey'bram and Obrayil stood shadow over your gift, a new voice, a hateful one, began to speak through you. It speaks now," she said, her voice wet, "and comes to me in a vengefulness I do not deserve."She rose, and a flicker of anguish went through Blackbard's expression. She was leaving. He clambered up to his elbow as though he might try to follow her, but in his altered state the trees and the cathedral around him spun like a pinwheel, and he collapsed.
"You must speak again," Belin said, taking a step back, and then two. "Not only for Mirico, but also for those who could help us. We are breaking apart, those of us in the Hidden world, and in the Withering Realm. You have been there. You know the value of those among Men who might also speak for us."
Blackbard answered in earnest, angry, but at the same time desperately grasping at threads. “Why would anybody listen to me, after all I've done?”Belin stopped, and stood rigidly, looking at him with a coldness he had not expected. “You cannot take back the words you have already spoken, but perhaps the next time you speak, you can find better words.” And with that she bent the dim light revealing her shrouded form, and in doing so, obliterated the direction in which she went, so he could not follow.
He collapsed on the cathedral floor, and at first he laughed, but the laughter quickly deteriorated to weeping, and as she fled into the forest, Blackbard's cries of her name rang out mournful and terrible in the night.
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