half-lich 02 - void weaver (15 page)

CHAPTER 14

The Cottage

Are you ready to die, Isaac?

The Good Doctor’s words rang inside Isaac’s mind like a church bell signaling the start of a new hour. For an instant he couldn’t believe his own Guardian had posed the question, but nothing about the place he was in was believable. There were no walls and no floors, yet his own voice echoed as if he were inside a cavern; no trees and no airflow, yet he could breathe. No light source, yet he could see his own arms and feet.

“No one is ever ready for change of that magnitude, Doctor,” Isaac said.

“You must be,” the Good Doctor said, “Change is coming, and you will either accept it or we shall both perish.”

“I’m sure I’m not ready to perish.”

“Then you must walk.”

He glanced over his shoulder. The portal was gone, only darkness remained.
Jim
, he thought, and a pang struck him hard in the stomach. He put his head down in reverence, and then looked straight ahead and started to walk. The ground beneath his feet was firm and flat, so much so that it felt almost like walking on marble. He could hear the sound of his own footsteps echoing back at him, but couldn’t see the walls the sounds were bouncing off.

When he looked up and around, there was only darkness. Until suddenly, there was light. A floaty, airy sensation gripped his chest. His heart started to beat hard and fast. He looked down at his hands and noticed his fingertips were glowing with soft blue light. For a moment he was mesmerized by this, his brain unable to comprehend what was happening, until his fingers began to turn to clouds of light and the Void slowly took them away.

He struggled with his own thoughts, with his voice.
Magic
, he thought,
use magic,
but he couldn’t concentrate hard enough to make a spell form in his mind.

“What’s h-happening?” he asked, trying to contain the panic.

“The Void,” the Good Doctor said. “You are witnessing what the Void does to those who enter it. I can protect you.”

“Then do it.”

“Understand that I am not meant to exist in this place. My power is limited, and temporary. The Void will take me as well in time.”

The glow was starting to race up his arms, and as it travelled along his body it turned more and more of him into this cloud of shimmering light.

“Do whatever you have to do,” Isaac said.

The Good Doctor nodded, put his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, and suddenly Isaac’s senses flooded with sound and feeling and smell. A booming wave crashed against a rock face nearby, sending a gush of salty spray into the air. Above, in a gray, bruised sky, ancient gods stirred and shook the heavens themselves.

Isaac turned around on the spot and beheld a vast, roiling ocean, magnificent in its ferocity and power. The waves were high enough to topple cruise liners, tips frothing like the mouths of rabid beasts. Bolts of lightning would occasionally strike the water, electrifying the surface in a bright display of sparks. And in the brief instants where the sea was calm, dark shapes showed themselves, lazily moving beneath the surface.

I have been brought to the Tempest,
he thought, and as he stared down at his feet and saw the cliff face he was standing on, he realized he had not only been brought to the Tempest; he was standing on the Precipice. This was the very place he had visited the day he became a mage and inherited the gift, and burden, of magic. The Precipice was the place, and the time, when a mage first enters the Tempest to claim their birthright.

But they only ever go once. He had never expected to see it again.

“Why have you brought me back here?” Isaac asked, shouting over the sound of the howling wind and the vicious ocean.

The Good Doctor swept up alongside Isaac. “We are in the Void,” the Good Doctor said, “I am simply protecting your mind from what it would be seeing and experiencing right now. The shock would be too great.”

Isaac took a step away from the ledge and brushed his hair out of his eyes. The wind was pulling it in all directions. “What happens now?”

“Now, as I said before, you walk.”

“Off the Precipice again? I have done that once.”

“No. When we entered this place, the Precipice lay behind you. Look forward, Isaac, and walk.”

Isaac turned around again and saw, across the rocky stretch of land, a single building standing defiantly beneath a sky which threatened to open and suck everything up at a moment’s notice. “There?” he asked.

The Good Doctor nodded. “You must hurry. We do not have much time.”

The wind pulled at Isaac’s hair and shirt as he walked into it, toward the only building on the island he was standing on. The crash of the waves, the flapping noise his shirt made as the wind tugged at it, and the smell of the salt and the earth made him feel real, but his stomach felt like it could upturn at any moment and his chest was aching. Still, he pushed through and picked his way over rocks and through a copse of trees until he reached the outside of the building.

It was a cottage.

In fact, it wasn’t just any cottage. “I recognize this place,” Isaac said, “from my childhood.”

His Guardian gave no reply.

“Doctor?” Isaac asked, and when he craned his neck around he saw the Good Doctor’s tall form hunched over and using the trees for support. Isaac rushed to help his Guardian, taking it under the arm and hoisting it up with his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“The Void saps my energy. You must hurry.”

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do in here.”

“Then you must learn, and in order to learn, you must become.”

The wind blew the cottage’s front door open. It banged hard against the interior of the house and the sound snapped Isaac’s mind back into clarity, and then into action. He helped the Good Doctor walk across the narrow dirt path toward the cabin’s front door and then escorted the Guardian inside. He shut the door and drew the big iron lock across it. This drowned out most of the noise save for the muted howling of the wind outside and the flapping of a shutter somewhere upstairs.

Isaac looked around and took the place in. This was the same cottage, alright. His grandparents had owned it a long time ago. When they passed, they had given the cottage to his father who would then use it during the cold months as a retreat from real life. He saw the fireplace on which many a stocking had hung during Christmas, noticed the cuckoo clock on the wooden support beam closest to the kitchen, and found the slippers his father used to wear next to his favorite arm chair.

It was all so real; a waking, lucid dream he didn’t want to snap out of.

“I remember this place well,” Isaac said. “I haven’t seen it in decades.”

“This place is a compilation of your most comforting memories. Your mind summoned them; I simply made them real to you.”

A door closed upstairs with a bang.

“Is someone here?” Isaac asked.

“I do not know. I have little control here.”

Isaac looked up at the ceiling, then at the stairs, and approached them. His Guardian followed, though slowly, one step at a time. The cottage was small and the stairs were tight and narrow—narrower still, now that Isaac was an adult and not a child. But this was of no consequence. Isaac climbed until he reached the next floor. Here there were three doors—one to the right, one to the left, and one directly ahead. The doors to either side of him were ajar, but the one ahead was closed.

That’s the one I heard
, he thought, and he approached.

As he went, he caught glimpses of each of the other rooms in his periphery. The room on the left was a bathroom, while the one on the right was his old cottage bedroom. Through the gap in the door he spotted a small red fire engine on the floor, blue sheets and drapes, and a ‘
nick nick’—
picnic
—
basket sitting on a table. This brought a smile to his face, but the pain in his chest seemed to get worse as if trying to compensate for the happiness he was feeling.

Finally, he got to the closed door. He placed one hand on the wooden surface and another one on the knob. Isaac pushed the door open, but what he saw sent him reeling. He sucked in a breath of air and grabbed the doorframe, frozen for a moment, before stepping into the room like a man who had drunk too many pints of beer.

His mother’s body lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, her wrists open and covered in crimson fluid which was pooling on the hardwood floor. She was slumped against the bed itself, her neck lolling, her hair covering her face. He approached, not because he thought she was alive—this woman had been dead more than twenty-five years—but because he couldn’t stop himself. Tears were welling up in his eyes as the memory of her smiling face collided with the horrifying sight he had seen as a child.

A sight he had locked away in the back of his mind since the day he found her like this, in this very spot.

“Why are you showing me this?” he asked, his voice wavering. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I am not,” the Good Doctor said. “This is not my doing.”

“Then whose is it?” Isaac asked, spinning around on the spot.

“Mine,” said a voice from behind.

Of all the people he had thought he might see in this memory space—his father, his mother—a doppelganger wasn’t one of them. His arms were folded above his chest and he was leaning against the wooden frame. He was dressed the same as Isaac, wore the same brass bangle on his right wrist, and had long hair slicked back over his head, but his eyes were dark, and black veins were expanding from the corners of his mouth.

“What figment of my subconscious are you meant to be?” Isaac asked.

“Oh, I’m not a figment of your subconscious—I’m the thing that’s killing you. It’s nice to meet in person, so to speak, even if you are about to die.”

“This isn’t the way I die.”

“You’ve said that before and it was true then, yes, but I’m not so sure it’s true now.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you are in my house, Isaac Moreau, and by coming here you have made me more powerful than I could have been out there, in your world.”

“I had to come. I had no choice.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. It was either stay in that cave and die like your friend, or come here and have a fighting chance. Only the fighting chance you thought you had was as much an illusion as this poor excuse for a shield that Guardian of yours has conjured. The only way you’re getting out of here is if you kill me, and since I’m a part of you, killing me will ultimately kill you, so I offer you a choice.”

Isaac’s eyes narrowed like a sniper staring down his scope, ready to take down his target. He couldn’t stop his hands from becoming fists, couldn’t stop them from pressing so tightly his knuckles turned white, but he kept his composure. Being angry, being afraid—neither of these things would help him here, he knew. In fact, they would not only contribute to his downfall, but almost guarantee it.

“What’s the choice?” Isaac asked.

“I let you live out the rest of your time here, in this comfortable house, with that girl of yours. When the time is up, you hand me your body and I take it away.”

“Do you really think I’m going to just surrender to you like this?”

“No, I suspected you would want to fight, but let none say I’m not a good sport.”

Outside, the howling wind made a long, drawn out wail of a sound like a dying cat. Thunder rumbled overhead, and the sky darkened.

“Now,” Isaac’s doppelganger said, “Shall we begin?”

CHAPTER 15

Cornered Cats

Alice awoke with a start, her heart hammering in her throat, her pillow wet and cold. She breathed deep, then exhaled long, and repeated the process two more times until finally some semblance of calm settled over her.

“Cameron?” she asked as she stepped out of the bed. One after the other, she slipped her boots back on before standing and stretching. “Are you in here?”

Must not be
, she thought, and she headed outside and into the sunny morning.

Sunny mornings in Ashwood were like Bigfoot; a myth. The entire city seemed to be perpetually covered in a never-ending blanket of clouds. Sometimes they were thinner and lighter than other days. Sometimes there were breaks in the clouds where full sunlight could pierce and touch the land for a couple of hours. But the nights in Ashwood were cold, and the mornings were gray. That was just the law of the land.

Today, somehow, was an exception, and Alice was treated not only to the sun, but to an entire garden of large, docile, content cats. Nuala, the Bengal, was there, lounging near a swimming pool and letting the sun caress her fur. Nearby were two tussling tiger cubs, a lion, a fully grown leopard, and more domestic cats than she had seen in one place in her whole life. But the queen of the garden was the Siberian white tiger strolling along the path.

This cat was the most beautiful thing Alice had ever seen, and Alice had laid eyes on the supposed goddess of the night. Its fur shone brilliant and white in the sun, its nose was pink and wide, and its eyes were the clear blue of the crystal clear water in some exotic place. Alice approached, careful not to touch any of the other cats and feeling much like a minesweeper as she navigated around animals she feared could at any moment
switch on
and decide they didn’t like her.

The white tiger settled down on a spot of grass clear of any other cat and began grooming itself, licking its big paw with its big pink tongue and running it across its own face. Alice, her hands trembling slightly, knelt beside the cat and slowly stretched out her hand. The cat paused, gave her its clear blue eyes, and wiggled its nose at her fingers, then went back to grooming.

“You’re a natural.”

Cameron’s voice almost made her jump right out of her skin. “Jesus,” she said, “You scared me half to death.”