The Gates of Night: The Dreaming Dark - Book 3 (22 page)

Consciousness returned. She was floating, falling.

She opened her eyes.
She opened her eyes
. After so much time as a bodiless presence, she was herself again! But where
was
she? There was pressure all around her, and she felt as if she were falling, slipping down through a still pool of water. But this water wasn’t pressing into her nose, mouth, or eyes. She breathed with no difficulty at all. And all around her, there was … nothing. White light.

Someone held her hand.

“You are in yourself,” a voice said. It was musical, inhumanly beautiful yet filled with terrible misery. The woman’s voice, the one she’d heard earlier. “You’ve seen the past. This is the now. Only you can decide what happens next.”

The air was like water, and Lei found she could push against it. She turned in place, and a woman came into view.

A woman made from wood.

The stranger’s skin was polished bark, dark as any night. Black leaves enshrouded her head, this inky foliage taking the place of hair, and cascading down to cover back and breasts. Even her eyes were wood, though they glittered with bright dew. She was beautiful, and though Lei have never seen her before, she was achingly familiar.

A woman of wood … a woman of
dark
wood …

“You’re the staff,” Lei breathed.

“Once I was much more,” the dryad said. “But now, the staff is all that remains of me.”

“Why haven’t you spoken to me before?”

“I have done all that I could. My spirit is bound deep within the wood, and song and whisper are all I have left. Yours is the only mind I can touch, and I can speak to you like this only because you have fallen so far within yourself.”

“Why me?” Lei said. “Why can you only speak to me?”

“I have no answers for you, but you drift through the river of knowledge. Have you learned nothing from what you have seen?”

The memories rushed back. Xen’drik. Blacklion. The blazing pain of the brand. “That wasn’t real,” she said.
It couldn’t have been
. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but this is a trick. You—you’re probably Lakashtai, trying to manipulate me the same way you did Daine.”

“This is no dream,” the dryad said. “And it is not my doing. I am here only because of the bond between us. The serpent is the Keeper of Secrets, and these are your secrets revealed.”

Lei’s head pounded. No ground lay beneath her feet, and she was still falling into the endless white. No escape from these terrible thoughts. “No. This can’t be real.”

“Of course it is. This is the answer to the questions growing within you. Why could you hear the voices trapped in the dream-chamber of Karul’tash? How did you escape death beneath Stormreach? How did you repair the shattered orb? And how can you speak to me? In any other hand, I would be cold wood. But you can reach within.”

“What am I?” Lei whispered.

“I do not know what you are,” the dryad said. “But you are not human.”

“No!” Lei reached back, placing her hand across her dragonmark. Memories tore at her mind.

She spoke of her desire for a daughter
, whispered the sahuagin Thaask.
It was a subject of sorrow for her, one of great difficulty
.

Everything is an experiment
, her father said.
All that is flesh must perish. We knew that from the start
.

Just remember, I always loved you
, her mother said, then her voice grew cold.
Do what you must
.

Lei’s dragonmark burned beneath her hand.
It will take time to synthesize a mark that will meet all tests, but for now the outline will do
. The pain grew sharper, brighter, until she tore her hand away from the mark.

“What am I?” she cried, howling her pain into the white void.

“You are Lei.” The dryad still held her left hand. “You are what you have always been. Nothing has changed but your knowledge.”

Tears seared in Lei’s eyes. “No. Everything. Everything I thought … my mark … do I even have parents? Am I even
alive?
”

The dryad slapped her.

It was a gentle blow, cushioned by the thick air or liquid that surrounded them. But it still came as a shock.

“You think you know loss? I have lost more than you can imagine. My world was torn from me. And when I thought I was at my lowest point, when I thought I had nothing more to lose, I was bound to this staff, a prisoner in the last fragment of my beautiful tree. Once my voice shaped the night, and now I am but a whisper. So your illusions have been stripped from you.
You have life
. You have love, if you have the courage to seize it. You have been given the gift of truth, and
the truth is a burden. So tell me, girl. Do you have the strength to rise, to pull yourself up? Or will you surrender and drift down into the darkness at the bottom of your mind?”

Lei gaped. “Who are you?”

The dryad smiled, but it was a grimace of pain. “I am the Heart of the Darkwood Grove, the last of the Darkwood Daughters. You stand in my hour of night, in a realm that once echoed with my song. I sought to escape my destiny, and I paid for that folly with all that I had.”

Curiosity warred with Lei’s self-pity. “What destiny?”

“I was to wed Torenas the Woodsman, youngest of the Nine Brothers of Night. The land beneath the Deepwood Moon was his as much as mine, and only in our union would he gain his true dominion. But I sought to escape this destiny. I wished to be more than a wood-wife, bound to live beneath a single moon. She promised to help me, and I, fool that I was, believed her words.”

“Who?” Lei said.

“She has many names, almost as many as she has faces. Thelania, the Queen of Dusk and Shadows. She is one of the mightiest spirits of this plane. I knew she would not act out of kindness, that she would help me only if it served her own goals. But I was impatient. She promised an escape, and I thought she might free me from my tree, give me the freedom my kind cannot have.”

“But she betrayed you.”

“She tore my tree from Thelanis, taking me from my beautiful night and binding me to your dry and colorless world. Worse yet, she gave me to Jura d’Cannith. I don’t know what dealings she had with him.” She
looked away. “And that is where I failed. Perhaps I could have found some way to escape my prison, some way to redeem myself. But I gave in to despair. I surrendered to anger, and I turned that hatred against Jura. Perhaps, if I’d done things differently, I could have found the light within him. Instead, I drew out the worst within him, his own dark heart. And it cost me all I had left. I underestimated him. I pushed too far. He felled my tree and bound me within the staff, with magic I still don’t understand. And I cannot help but wonder if this was Dusk’s plan all along.”

“I … I don’t know what to say,” Lei said.

“Say nothing. It is my folly, and I brought it upon myself. But now you must make your own decision. Look down.”

The white void was no longer eternal. A black spot grew beneath them.

“The decision is upon you,” Darkheart said. “Fight for the sky above. Fight to rise through the waters and break the surface. Or surrender and fall forever into the darkness below.”

“And you?”

“This is your battle, and I have done what I can. You must make your decision alone, and you will need both hands to swim. Farewell, Lei. I hope that one day I will hold your hand in truth, and we will gaze together on the moon above.”

The dryad released Lei’s hand, and the instant wood left flesh she was gone. Lei was alone, falling toward the spreading shadows. The visions flashed through her mind once more, and she felt a sick sense of loss and betrayal. But there were other memories.

Jode’s laughter.

Daine giving orders in the camp at Keldan Ridge.

Pierce carrying her through the streets of Sharn after she’d been driven from Hadran’s house.

Daine holding her as their boat was tossed about on the waters of the Thunder Sea.

Whatever she was, whatever these awful visions meant, her life lay above her. Daine. Pierce. She would not let them go.

Struggling at first, then with increasing strength, she began to swim upward, away from the darkness and moving up through the light.

D
aine was growing used to his nightmares. Ever since Lakashtai entered his life, sleep had become a battleground. Monan the changeling. Lakashtai and her trickery. The horrible visions of Kelden Ridge. He had come to expect terror in the night. It was strange to have normal dreams … a night where his visions drifted from place to place.

Daine was at a party. A masquerade, at the Metrol manor of Alina Lorridan Lyrris. Dressed as a bodyguard, he watched the revelers, trying to guess what lay under each mask. Huge windows of stained glass lined the hall. Beautiful work, but Daine knew that all was not as it seemed. The Karrns had launched a mystical assault on Metrol yesterday, and fire had destroyed a few of the windows. Now they were covered by wooden boards, but Alina couldn’t abide such an eyesore; she concealed the damage beneath illusion
.

The Karrnarthi attacks were designed to cause terror. Karrnath couldn’t bring serious firepower to bear so far within Cyre’s borders, but the firestrikes sent ripples of fear and uncertainty throughout the populace. And the damage was done. This morning, Daine had stepped over the charred body of a child on the way to the market. It wasn’t his concern. He had a duty to his family. He—

“Living in the past?”

For a moment the speaker was a child wearing a blue mask shaped like a dragon’s head, one of the many revelers around him. Then the party was gone the mask with it
.

Jode smiled. “Don’t you think it’s time to put it behind you?”

They were on an airship, one of the largest Daine had seen. The ocean below was a sea of clouds. “Where are we going?” he said
.

“Do we need to go anywhere?”

“I suppose not.”

They watched in silence, Daine simply basking in his friend’s company. The setting sun painted the clouds orange and gold, and as it slipped beneath the surface, three moons claimed possession of the sky
.

Jode took Daine’s hand. No … this hand was too large to be Jode, too small for Pierce
.

“Daine,” a voice whispered. It was Lei
.

He turned to her, and now he was on a tiny gray bed in a tiny gray room. She was stretched out before him, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her skin seemed to
glow
in the moonlight, and her hair was aflame
.

“Daine,” she said
.

He tried to speak and found that he had no voice. But the emotion demanded release. There was no time for thought as he kissed her. Her hand traced patterns of fire across the back of his neck, but she fell into his arms, warm and yielding
.

“Do you wish privacy for this act?”

Xu’sasar stood at the foot of the bed, watching them. Lei stiffened, pulled away
, and Daine realized that he wasn’t dreaming at all. Lei pulled the gray blanket up and around her, her pale skin flushed.

Daine sat up and snapped at Xu’sasar, anger mingling with his own embarrassment. At least, he tried to. No sound came from his mouth. Slowly the events of the night came back to him.

“Daine?” Lei said, clearly wondering why he hadn’t answered.

“He cannot speak,” Xu’sasar said. If she was uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. “I do understand your head motions. Do you wish me to leave?”

As angry as Daine was, he knew this wasn’t Xu’sasar’s fault. She’d been in the room to begin with, and he had no idea what the customs of her people were.
Damn it, she can see in the dark!
Then it occurred to him. It was still dark. How long had he been asleep?

The door opened, and Pierce entered. Lei leapt out of bed, a sound between laugh and sob escaping her lips. She wrapped her arms around the warforged, and he returned the embrace.

“It is good to see you well again, my lady,” he said, his low voice filling the room.

The darkness beyond the window, the curse of silence, the mysterious journey that still lay ahead—these things would sort themselves out in time. For now, they were together again, and that was all that mattered. Daine smiled like a fool, and he couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to. Xu’sasar watched him, waiting for an answer, and he looked at her and shook his head.