Welcome Home: A Starsea Cycle Short Story

Daffo felt as if he had been rehearsing this speech for almost his entire one hundred and twenty years, and now that he was so close to his destination, he could not remember a word of it.

He had come all the way from Hadri. When he’d settled that world, he had been one of only a few thousand people living there; now it held tens of millions and was still considered something of a backwater, which suited him and had suited him for a long time. Ever since he’d heard the news about the completion of the Psyche Mage Tower, he had been traveling. He had taken about a year to do so, because one did not jump across nine star systems at his age, at least, not without frequent breaks. He had stopped at the old places along the way. Most were so changed that they might as well have been unrecognizable. He had walked their streets remembering ghosts, coming away each time with the growing suspicion that he was the last living relic of the time before the war.

At last, he had arrived on Psyche. The name had once been enough to terrorize mages into subservience; now it had been reimagined as their glory, and Daffo did not know whether to find that a triumph or a very expensive joke.

The Tower could be seen all the way from the Daran spaceport, rising above the city itself, nestled in the foothills of the towering Mountains of Madness, with a base of white marble as broad as a city block, and above it, the Aspect tiers ascended in their seven colors.

No—eight colors, Daffo corrected himself. There was an Eighth Aspect now. Every magical theorist of his day had argued over whether such a thing could even exist, and here it stood in fact, a band of black on a building, as though the matter had never been in question at all. The galaxy had yet to see Space-Time Magic develop to its full potential, whether the old technology of the gates could be improved upon, whether travel between important worlds might take days rather than weeks. He supposed this tower had been built to solve exactly that sort of problem.

But that was a problem for a future generation. Daffo had a problem of his own, and only the Sorcerer-Ascendant of Magekind could perhaps remedy it.

✦ ✦ ✦

He was early, so he sat in the front courtyard of the Tower for quite a while, enjoying the way the lower gravity felt on old bones.

He watched two young novices walk past him in brown robes, joking about something that had happened to a third novice who was not present to defend himself. A League Delegation arrived some minutes later and entered the wide-open front doors self-importantly, and Daffo felt his hackles rise at the sight. Nearly sixty years after the war, he still could not trust how they’d handled matters.

He let his thoughts drift to older days, to days when there had been well over a dozen schools and not merely one. It would not take long, he mused, for something like that to happen again. After all, people, even mages, always found something to quibble about, until quibbles became splinters and splinters turned into rifts. In Daffo’s experience, such matters took a decade, perhaps two, to fully become obvious. But so soon after the Orbs had been returned, there was still only the one school, as one had been the dream of the Academicians of his youth, before the Fraying and the competing ideologies had split everyone apart. It seemed to him a very strange thing, that a dream should arrive this late and to an audience that did not know it had been dreamed.

He admired the Tower’s height, its prismatic bands, all two kilometers of it, built to accommodate thousands of mages and support staff. But even that paled against the Mountains of Madness behind it, impossibly tall, less mountains than a wall of rock bisecting the moon’s surface north to south.

The sight took him back much further. To the Western Escarpment of Olympus Mons. To the dinners in Two Moons Hall among faces long gone from the stars, among them old friends, old enemies, old ambitions which had seemed so important at the time, now dust before the concerns of a galaxy moved on. And he remembered her from those days, Vivienne Desai herself, still a young Talent who had not yet become Transcend White, when no one could have guessed the heights she would ascend or the role she would play. It was because of her life, her choices, that there even was a League at all.

And it was her name, written in Daffo’s missive to the Sorcerer-Ascendant, that had bought him this audience, as Daffo had known it would. He was not proud of using her name in that way, but he knew she would have understood his need.

He looked up at the impressive architecture one last time before going in. Upon entering the cavernous entry hall, the newness struck him. Everything gleamed. The floor was polished black marble, a massive fountain of Eight Orbs shooting colored water did a mesmerizing dance that defied gravity.

Then the color. Talents in the Tower now had the right to wear the full colors of their chosen Aspect—violets and greens and reds and blues, and despite the massive space of the entry hall, there were plenty of people to fill it, their voices a din that never quite reached a cacophony. And more than the Talents, there were the brown-robed Novices, more numerous, scurrying on errands or from class to class and door to door. Aides and instructors moved among them with slates.

Off to one side, on a green lawn bedecked with trees and flowers that somehow grew inside, a novice girl of maybe nineteen sat cross-legged and streamed a lattice of blue light between her palms, clearly trying to master an exercise from her Binding course. She had long dark hair and eyes that reminded him of an old friend, though at his age nearly everyone reminded him of someone, and all of those someones were certainly dead.

Daffo smiled at the noise of it, the life of it. He was watching people whose worries went no further than a failed examination, and it was his sincere hope that they would never have to worry over anything worse, as he so tragically had.

Nobody looked at him twice. Old men were not interesting. Old men were furniture that walked.

He wondered what they would make of him if they knew exactly who and what he was—and then wondered whether it would likely not register at all, with a generation that had the luxury of looking forward with optimism rather than backward with dread. He judged that was as it should be.

He walked across the floor for the elevator on the other side. It was Gravitonic, of course, and the ascent was so smooth that he had to watch the atrium fall away beneath him to be sure it was happening at all: the gardens down there, the fountains, the water going up and coming down in the low gravity. It looked like something out of his dreams. Daffo had to wonder if the Sorcerer-Ascendant’s foray into the Light Realm had inspired something in this place.

At last, the doors opened silently onto a tastefully appointed waiting room, and a waiting aide.

She was perhaps thirty, tall, with her hair cropped close and a stylus tucked behind one ear, dressed in the white robes of the Sorcerer-Ascendant’s office and bearing its insignia at the collar: Seven Colored Orbs, with the Eighth one in the center, lines interconnecting.

From the aide’s expression, she was trying to decide if Daffo was in the right place, if he would get in.

“Daffo?” she asked. “Just... Daffo? No surname?”

He nodded. “Just Daffo.”

The aide checked something, and frowned at what she found there, and checked it again. Daffo, clearly, was not the sort of personage Lucian Abrantes normally saw, or he was not who she had been expecting.

“The League Delegation has already cleared,” she said. “The Sorcerer-Ascendant will see you now.”

She escorted Daffo to the door, which opened at her approach. He walked in.

The office was not what he expected either. In his day, the leaders of the mage academies had usually opted for thrones—thrones wrought from pure gemstone or rare metals, atomically perfect creations that could only be made by magic.

Instead, there was a wide desk with several sleek monitors, stacks of paper, framed photos, and a panoramic window that went from the floor to somewhere far above eye level. Beyond it lay the curve of the moon, and below that the banded farms and villages of the Golden Vale beyond the rebuilt city of Dara. Even with his eyes as they were, Daffo could make out a dozen or so great birds wheeling on the heights. Not birds, he realized. Wyverns. Had he more time, more years, he would have liked to study them; as he understood it, they could communicate Psionically, after a fashion.

Lucian Abrantes stood up when he came in.

A handsome man, Daffo noted, with dark brown hair and eyes and a solid face that seemed chiseled from stone, broad-shouldered, in the uniform of his office. Not the Sorcerer-Ascendant’s robes—those, as Daffo understood it, were reserved for ceremonial purposes. He wore white, with the emblem of his office sewn at the breast, and a white cape that was the only thing on him to suggest his standing was anything above the Talents and Psions and Transcends who worked beneath him.

He came around the desk and pulled out a chair.

And Daffo—who had fought in the Mage War, who had gone into exile to avoid the fate of the Mad Moon, who had once been counted among the top five Psions of his generation—found that his eyes were stinging, because it had been a very long time since anyone had pulled out a chair for him.

“Sit,” Lucian said. “Please. You’ve come a long way.”

Daffo sat gratefully. The chair, he was pleased to note, was quite comfortable. He put his bag on the floor beside him and folded his ruined old hands in his lap to keep them still, and he looked at the man they were calling the Sorcerer-Ascendant, and thought, with a strange pity: You’re a child. You’re barely half-made. And you’ve already done wonders far beyond any of those from my day who considered themselves so great—so great that they destroyed everything we were trying to build, just so they could rebuild it in their image. All dust, now.

“You wanted an audience,” Lucian said. “You mentioned Transcend White’s name. You said you knew her and left it at that.” He smiled somewhat ironically. “You knew that alone would get you in the door.”

Daffo returned the smile. “You might have said no otherwise. And I could not afford the risk.”

“Maybe. But this is a meeting I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.”

Lucian’s eyes went to the desk, to a picture of a beautiful young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, holding a young child in her arms. He adjusted it tenderly and then sat down on the edge of the desk rather than behind it.

“I have to know. What was she like, back then? Not the whole thing, of course. Just whatever you’re willing to say.”

So Daffo told it. He was aware the whole time that he was telling it in the way the young begrudge the old for telling things—mumbling, stumbling, taking byways rather than highways—but from Lucian’s expression, he judged the wandering had made the picture more colorful rather than less. What he had rehearsed as a speech for the whole of the journey came out as something with no real shape at all.

Daffo had been born in 2250, in a time when magic was believed to do the impossible with no ill effect and no fraying, less than three decades after the Dawn of Magic itself. He told what had come of the promise of his life and his future when the Testers found that he held the spark. He told Lucian dark secrets he had not spoken aloud to a living soul in decades, things from a childhood he would have rather stayed buried, and Lucian listened gravely and did not once interrupt.

Daffo went on about the rest of it—what he had been doing at Lucian’s age, the theories he had written, the arguments he had started, the deeds he had done. Of the Mage War he gave only a few sentences: as inevitable as it was tragic; a war not only about the Prophecy of the Orbs and the fraying and Xara Mallis’s ambition and the League’s inflexibility. The war was just as much about ego and hubris and the ugliest things in humanity, of institutions holding onto power long after it served anyone. It had been different living it, of course. The history taught today was not the real history, painted over by the League with a broad brush so that people could stand, sixty years later, and lie to themselves that it had meant anything at all.

Daffo had fought the first half of the war on Xara’s side without shame, when it seemed she had the right of it. But she changed toward the end, twisted by her own power, and a shadow Daffo could sense but not quite name. He sat upon the Council of the Wise, and true to its name, defected when the wisest course was to leave and work against Xara before she could do a worse evil than the League was working toward.

It was during the war’s final five years that he best got to know Vivienne, though they had met several times before that, through various conferences and coincidences.

“We trusted each other implicitly,” Daffo said. “We first met at the Olympus Mons Academy, and then later. She knew I could be trusted.” He looked at his hands. “It was a dark time, all the more, for a friendship to be forged by such fire.”

By some happenstance of the peace negotiations, Daffo was no longer permitted to be part of the magical community. He could not bring himself to agree with the harshness of the terms. Not the penalties imposed upon magekind itself, for those, as tragic as they were, had been necessary. He had protested, rather, the complete destruction of decades of knowledge accumulated by the old schools, deemed the Forbidden Archives. The theories of Old Volsung, Olympus Mons, Chiron, Cassini, Seven Oceans, Endymion, and more. Hundreds of thousands of documents and files, all judged too dangerous to exist in an age where the Fraying was accepted as a matter of fact, judged too dangerous to live even in a sealed vault and only studied by approved personnel.

When Daffo had vehemently argued against such destruction, Vivienne had tried to convince him that it was the price, that the League would never allow it. Something in Daffo did not allow him to relent. So, Vivienne had given him one day to disappear, out of respect for their partnership, and had stuck her neck out for him by doing so. He’d had no choice but to accept the ultimatum.

He had spent the next sixty-odd years on a farm on Hadri, settling into a quiet life, going by a different name—something easy to do in the aftermath of the war that had destroyed so much. As time marched on, he used his magic when his community needed it, when it made sense, when he could solve things without being caught, and otherwise he tried to blend in and not to be noticed.

And he had succeeded when so many rogue mages had not.

“It was the best life I could have hoped for,” he said. “Many of my comrades, who had good reasons, were on the wrong side. And they went to...“ He smiled ironically. “Well. Here.”

Lucian frowned in thought, processing the enormity of it. “You did the best you could.”

A long silence stretched, as Daffo considered the best way to approach the subject he’d come for. He’d been waiting decades for this moment, so it was important to get it right.

“Of course, I knew the secret Vivienne held,” Daffo said.

Lucian’s head came up.

“She told me one day, in confidence, during the war. A rare lapse on her part—to the point where I think it was less a lapse than a moving of the Manifold.” Daffo watched him closely. “She held that prophecy for years, against enormous pressure to give it up to the woman who would have used it to summon the Ancient One and start a new reign of terror. Vivienne waited her entire life for you. Words cannot describe the trials she went through to ensure magic was made whole again.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Lucian said. “And I realized that her job must have been harder than even mine.”

“In a different way, yes, her path was harder. Transcend White is misunderstood, more than anything, and that misunderstanding was the price she paid. She was misunderstood in her day even more. Where others see Transcend White—the one who made the cold decisions that killed millions in order to save billions—I saw a woman who had been handed an unfair burden and lived her whole life beneath the weight of doubt.” Daffo nodded, knowing what he knew. “But she stayed the course when no other could have. Arian chose her perfectly for the role. Not fair to her, but life rarely asks us what’s fair. It simply... happens to us.”

The silence stretched a long while. Lucian looked at the picture on his desk and did not adjust it this time.

At last, he cleared his throat. “So, Daffo. I suspect you didn’t come nine star systems just to reminisce. What is it that you want?”

Here it was. Daffo had imagined this moment so many times that saying it aloud felt like stepping off a roof he had been standing on for a century.

“My life has been a practice of holding on,” he said, “to a dream that would not let go of me. I shared it with Vivienne, once. I have not spoken of it to anyone since.” He drew a breath. “I want to go through the First Gate.”

Lucian’s face seemed torn. Clearly, the request was the last thing he could have predicted, as Daffo had known it would be.

The First Gate, of course, was the bridge between the Realms of Light and Shadow, so far distant from League space that no mage could hope to reach it in a lifetime—not without knowing the way, not without powerful magic that most could never sustain. Not without having seen it.

Lucian had seen it. Had been through it. Was powerful enough.

Lucian was the only one who could get him there.

“How do you know about that?” Lucian asked.

“I’ve had the visions since I was six,” Daffo said, before the objection could form. “Every night of my life.” He found he had to stop and start again. “The First Gate, and beyond it a forest. Silver trunks. Leaves the color of the rainbow. And moving through it, always at the edge, always just past where I can see—“ His voice had grown unreliable. “Creatures. With light coming off them in prismatic refractions. Antlers like glass with the sun behind them.”

“Prismharts,” Lucian said quietly.

“Prismharts.” Daffo tasted the word. He had waited a hundred and fourteen years for someone to hand it to him. “I never knew the name. I drew them when I was a child on Earth.”

He reached into his coat and took out a square of folded paper, soft as cloth from being folded and unfolded ten thousand times, and set it on the desk between them. He did not open it.

“I’m not a good artist. I want to be clear that I’m not claiming to be a good artist.”

Lucian unfolded and looked at the paper for a moment. From the confirmation in those brown eyes, Daffo knew it was a perfect match.

“I’ve never asked this of anyone,” Daffo went on, “because before the events of the last few years, there was no one to ask. The location of the First Gate is still a secret—yours, and your friends’. I understand that. You do not want just anyone entering to defile the Light Realm. And even if the journey is impossible for any human to make in a lifetime, you still fear a future in which it becomes possible, long after you’re gone.”

Lucian nodded.

“That is my purpose.” Daffo felt himself growing bolder. “Not only to live among the Prismharts and seek the healing from my childhood, from the years of war, from the years of exile—but to become the Warden of the First Gate. I will live on its other side and see to its safety. Not for this age, but for a future one.” He smiled. “I gain my healing. You rest all the easier.”

“Healing,” Lucian echoed.

“I’ve outlived everyone. Do you understand what that does? Not the grief—grief is survivable, grief is normal. I mean the arithmetic of it. The laughter of my friends, Vivienne’s included, is in my head and nowhere else in the universe.”

Lucian smiled. “On this side of it, yes. Vivienne is still alive, in a way.”

“The Manifold. Yes. And I would go there on life’s final journey, if not for the visions that speak to me so. If I go to the Manifold in death, then my vision, my life’s purpose, cannot be fulfilled.” He leaned forward over his ruined hands. “I still have some purpose, Sorcerer-Ascendant, old man that I am. I most humbly ask you to let me fulfill it.”

The light had moved across the floor while he talked. Neither of them had noticed.

“I have to tell you something,” Lucian said, “and I need you to hear all of it before you answer.”

Daffo nodded.

“The First Gate is closed. That’s to protect it, like you said. I don’t want people going into the Light Realm. You know how we humans are. We have the capacity to destroy everything we touch. I couldn’t close the Gate all the way, and that was so ether could still cycle in and out of it. This was the one concession I made, because the alternative—magic ended and the Gates not working anymore—would have been a far worse fate.”

“I understand.”

“But you touched on something I’ve thought of often. Right now, the Gate is open. The Prismharts are near it for now, yes. But the First Gate itself moves. Not on this side of the Shadow Realm, but on the other side. It might move someplace where there is no one to defend it.”

“You would have me.”

Lucian watched him closely. “Daffo, if you do this, you would not be able to leave again. Though I think you already know that.”

“I know.”

“You will never see the Shadow Realm again. If you change your mind six steps in, you stay. There is no message you can send back, and there is nobody who can come and get you. Nothing on the other side of it but the cold, dark void of the Shadow Realm.” He held Daffo’s eyes. “I want to be sure you understand that fully. You’re walking through a door that has no handle on the other side.”

Daffo listened. Then he said:

“Sorcerer-Ascendant. I’ve lived in a room with no handle on the far side for my entire life. At least this one has a forest in it.”

Lucian smiled, and seemed to consider, but not for as long as Daffo feared. Lucian was a man who, once his mind was made up, it was made up. “All right. We’ll make it happen.”

Daffo closed his eyes in gratitude, and let himself have the moment, and then—as though remembering something—lifted his old leather bag into his lap and opened it. Inside, wrapped in cloth, was a data stick the length of his thumb.

Lucian watched, curious.

“This isn’t payment,” Daffo clarified. “I want that understood. You already said yes. If you’d said no, I’d have left it on your desk anyway. It’s only that I’m not going to need it where I’m going, and I’ve been holding it for most of my life.”

“What is it?”

“The Forbidden Archives.” He smiled somewhat mischievously. “Vivienne gave me a day, and I think she knew how I’d make use of it. I couldn’t save everything, but as it stands, this still holds tens of thousands of files. Decades of magical research.”

Lucian’s eyes widened. “You saved it?”

Daffo nodded. “There are theories expounded in here at length that rotted mages, mind and body, in a time when the fraying was a very real threat. Though the fraying itself is no more, magic can still be streamed in excess. A mage can still draw too much and burn their Focus to a crisp.” He let that sit a moment. “Of course, magic must always be practiced responsibly. But with these files, you can at last rebuild what was lost. You can rebuild what magic promised us, before the fraying stole the hope of three generations.” He looked at Lucian solemnly. “With this, you can at least get a head start on a New Golden Age of Magic. The kind of age we were promised to begin with.” Daffo held it out in both hands. “Take it. My hands aren’t reliable, and I’d hate to drop it now.”

Lucian took it. He held it in both palms like a chick fallen from a nest.

“How do we even start with this?”

“I’ve organized it,” Daffo said. “You may not agree with my taxonomy, but it’s a jumping-off point. Color-coded by perceived danger and by how advanced a practitioner would need to be.” He shrugged the shoulder that still cooperated. “Applied to current theory, I expect it fills in a good many of the gaps your own researchers are working around.”

“Emma will flip when she sees this,” Lucian said, before returning his attention to Daffo. “Thank you, Daffo. Truly. Would it be too much to make a statue in your honor?”

Daffo was horrified at the thought. “I would prefer not, Sorcerer-Ascendant. My theories are among the Forbidden Texts, and that should be enough. Please note that some of that research is indeed, very dangerous.”

“We will handle it with care,” Lucian said.

Daffo moved to stand, and hated how much stiffness had settled into his bones in the hour he had sat there.

Lucian stood with him. “I need time to assemble my crew. Hard to say how long — we’ve all gone different directions since. Best case, a week. Worst case, a month.” He set the data stick down on the desk with more care than he had used on anything else in the room. “Until then, stay here in the Tower. I’ll give you the Hegemon’s suite.”

“I thank you for the generosity, but your smallest, meanest room would serve me better.” Daffo smiled. “Less walking.”

“Talia will set you up. I’ll send for you when we’re ready to launch. In the meantime, you’ll want for nothing.”

Daffo gave a short bow, as much of one as his body could manage. “Thank you, Sorcerer-Ascendant.”

He was nearly at the door when Lucian said, “You’ve forgotten this.”

The folded square of paper lay where he had set it, soft and gray with a hundred years of handling.

“No,” Daffo said. “I’ve had it a long time. I won’t need it where it’s real.” He looked at it a moment longer. “Besides, somebody on this side should have a picture of them.”

Lucian did not answer that. He only picked the paper up carefully, and did not unfold it while Daffo was still in the room.

Two weeks later, Blood Wyvern was waiting for them in the Tower’s lower hangar.

She sat small and sleek and silver, and Daffo judged she could crew ten at the outside. Obviously built for speed.

He had been introduced to all of them when they arrived—had put faces to the roles he knew from the histories of what was now being called the Third Swarmer War, even if that moniker paled to the true events as they actually transpired—and then he had drifted off to the edge of the group to be alone with his thoughts, and to prepare himself for what would happen in a matter of hours.

The crew were catching up, in some cases after months or even years apart. He was content to watch. It reminded him of the old academic conferences that came but once every few years, where he would get to correspond face-to-face with researchers he usually only corresponded with by light-message.

There were seven of them, plus Lucian. He worked at the names.

Emma stood at Lucian’s shoulder with the familiarity of an old friend: a beautiful woman with a look of intelligence in her brown eyes, in black robes that marked her as Transcend of the Space-Time Aspect. She glanced over at Daffo more than once, curious. Based on Lucian’s comment in their first meeting, he wanted to get the measure of the woman who was most excited about his research. He shuffled over, and Emma leapt into the conversation.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “I’ve already read through the summary files you provided and...” She seemed at a loss for words. “I can’t even describe to you how much this will help. It’s become obvious that we have only been scratching at the surface of what’s possible.” She looked at him almost reverently. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay for another year? Walk me through some things, tell me stories of the old days?”

That was an offer that almost tempted Daffo, but in the end, he smiled and shook his head. “This appointment I’ve put off for too long, Ms. Almaty. Something gives me the feeling that you are more than up to the task.”

“Of course,” Emma said. “You’ve given us a great gift, Daffo.”

“You have much to look forward to. Much. Use that knowledge well, and be careful of it.”

“We will,” Emma promised.

Fergus stood beside Mira, and Daffo did not need his Psionic senses to feel the depth of what was between them. Mira, he knew, was Lucian’s mother.

Jagar had come, too. He was the only one of them Daffo actually knew from the War—Jagar, who had been on the wrong side, like him—and had somehow found his way home again, as Daffo had. Jagar kept his distance, arms folded, offering nothing but a gruff nod. Daffo remembered him as a brash young man, forever leaping into things, and had judged him harshly as never deserving his seat on the Council of the Wise.

Strangely, none of that tension appeared to have left him in all the years since. It had only... marinated, Daffo decided. The two of them had walked much the same road into exile, for opposite reasons. There could be a peculiar tension in that sort of familiarity—an uncomfortable reflection that neither man wanted to look at directly.

Khairu was there, now a Transcend of the Tower for the Dynamistic Aspect. She stood near Daffo, almost protectively, and it was easy enough to see why: as the one most responsible for marshaling the resources of the Worlds toward the building of the Tower, she was perhaps just as grateful as Emma for the knowledge he had put in Lucian’s hands.

And red-haired Cleon was telling a story, jocular, working the group for laughs—something about how he had never forgiven Lucian for pushing him off that cliff into the lake in the Darkrift. Serah rolled her eyes at it. She was pretty, blonde, blue-eyed, and Daffo had seen her face before, in a picture on a desk two kilometers overhead.

“I did ask if you could swim first,” Lucian said, and the rest of them laughed.

Then a silence came over the group, and it told Daffo they were done talking and ready to get on with it.

Cleon looked at Lucian. “For the record, I still think making a portal is a bad idea. You don’t have the Orbs anymore.”

“You’re right,” Lucian agreed. “But something of them is still in me. Almost like an echo. As long as I’m leading the stream and the rest of you do your jobs, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“That’s one of us,” Cleon muttered.

“It’ll take all of us believing it’s possible,” Lucian said. He let his eyes go around the circle. “And remember, this isn’t only for Daffo. It’s for a question that’s bothered me ever since the Heart of Creation, the one thing I couldn’t change even with all the power in the universe. The First Gate has to remain open for magic to cycle through. Which means anyone can walk in and out. Maybe not in the next few decades. But in a future where we’re all dead and gone.” He nodded across at Daffo. “That’s his job. He’s told me everything, and I’ve passed all of it on to you. He’ll see to it no bad sorts come through the First Gate.”

The others nodded.

“Everyone stays with their Aspect for the confluent stream,” Lucian went on. “Khairu, Dynamism. Mira, Thermalism. Cleon—can you handle Atomicism? It’s your secondary.”

“Can I handle it,” Cleon said, offended. “Atomicism is almost as strong as my primary.”

“Good. Serah on Gravitonics. Jagar, Psionics. Fergus, Radiance. Emma, Space-Time.” Lucian rolled his shoulders. “That leaves Binding for me.”

Daffo cleared his throat. “With your permission, I will join the stream myself. It has been decades since I was part of a proper confluence, and it was never for a peaceful purpose. I’ll add only where my strength is needed. No more than that.”

The others were quiet as they considered it.

Jagar unfolded his arms, looked at him for a long moment, then gave the same gruff nod he had given in greeting. It was not warmth. It was not refusal, either.

“Of course,” Lucian said, and turned to the group at large. “Questions?”

There was only silence.

They filed aboard and Daffo took his seat, and within minutes they were lifting, Khairu and Emma at the controls. Faster than he would have believed, the hangar, the Golden Vale, and the Mountains of Madness were gone beneath them, and Blood Wyvern was drifting in open space with the moon below.

They gathered on the deck. Nobody spoke. It was almost solemn.

They arranged themselves without discussion, instruments finding one another before the first note of a symphony. Daffo took his place among them, and if nobody looked at him it was only because every one of them was watching Lucian. He had the mental map. The stream was his to start.

“On my mark,” Lucian said.

He closed his eyes and collected himself. Then the Sorcerer-Ascendant streamed, and with that streaming, the others joined him—and Daffo with them.

He had not joined a confluence since the Battle of Archea, and that had been to kill tens of thousands of people in about four seconds. He had already been sixty years old. That was the battle that stopped Xara Mallis’s advance, and Vivienne—Transcend White—had all but begged for Daffo’s aid, saying it would be the battle that turned the war.

She had been right. The lives lost still echoed in his memory in a way he had not expected. Another wound atop the many he already bore.

Archea had begun the slow push back, and in the sixty-odd years since, every time Daffo touched his magic he had touched it alone. He had expected to be rusty. He had expected, honestly, to be humiliated, and had decided that a moment of humiliation was an acceptable price for fulfilling his destiny.

He was not rusty. The stream was like a window opening in a room he had not known was airless. And it felt clean—purified of everything about magic that had felt wrong and warped before Lucian gathered the Orbs and returned them. Daffo still was not used to that. He still did not trust it.

What came out the other side of him was clean as meltwater. He reinforced each of their streams in turn, the way a man spots for someone lifting a heavy weight—the smallest touch, correctly placed, and it seemed mountains could be moved.

Somewhere very far away, in a body he was not currently paying attention to, Fergus said, “Who’s doing that?”

And Serah, delighted: “It’s the old man!”

“Strong as rotting hell,” Cleon said. “He patched up my Atomicism like it was nothing.”

Only Emma showed true strain—Emma, who worked alone at Space-Time, the Aspect about which Daffo knew nothing at all. From the way her Focus burned in his mind, she was without question the second strongest mage in the Worlds, behind only Lucian Abrantes, and what she was doing now, alone, was approaching true sorcery.

He did not answer any of them. He was busy, and magic demanded attention. Multi-streaming in reinforcements this small and precise was a lost art, taught in no school since before the Mage War.

They would learn it again, eventually.

And at last, once the streams had been laid, the nine of them reached out together and the portal opened, and Blood Wyvern sliced through.

Lucian did not let go. Holding all of it together, he branded the configuration—an act of such immense power that even Daffo widened his eyes. That would allow the portal to hold for a time. Time enough, perhaps, for Daffo to make his transition through the First Gate, and for the rest of them to get home again without needing his support.

Somehow Khairu and Mira had him under the arms. He had fallen at some point. His nose was bleeding freely down his chin and onto his good coat, and for some reason he was smiling like a lunatic.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine. Let go, I’m—how was that? Was that all right?”

Jagar watched him closely. “I haven’t seen anyone stream magic the old way since before I had gray hairs.”

“A long time, then,” Serah said helpfully.

Jagar cast her an annoyed glance.

Once Daffo had recovered somewhat, he sat and took the measure of the system. They held orbit above a world of barren rock and ice. Airaruma, Lucian had called it. Ten million years ago it had been the birthplace of an empire—not the Starsea of a million years past, but something ten times older than that.

Already Blood Wyvern was under way. Lucian and Emma streamed in concert to drive her: a warping field, Daffo gathered, a dualstream of Dynamistic and Space-Time magic. He noted, with a small professional envy he had not felt in decades, that Dynamism was not Lucian’s Aspect and that it made no apparent difference to him.

Within five minutes a new light appeared ahead, almost like a second star. Lucian and Emma’s streaming slowed until the brightness resolved.

Two pylons, hanging in the black. And between them, a plane of white.

Daffo stood, his eyes wide. It was the same as in his dreams—the Gate of White, not the field of stars that stood in the plane of any ordinary interstellar gate.

There was no question in his mind. This was it.

Around it, space was wrong, as though the higher reality of the Light Realm exerted a gravitational pull on the lower. Threads of something drifted there, came apart, re-formed. The ship groaned once, gently.

“As close as I can get,” Khairu said. “Any closer and I don’t guarantee the hull.”

They gathered at the escape pod. It had been aimed at the Gate with pure mathematical precision, down to the smallest fraction of a degree; Daffo would launch toward it, and for good measure Lucian would guide the pod in with Binding, should anything unexpected occur.

Lucian wove a protective bubble around the pod, over and above its own shielding. The layers went on as though they had always belonged there. The Old Masters could not have done that. Lucian did it as easily as drawing breath.

Daffo turned to the others while Lucian worked. “I’d like to say something. I’ll keep it short, because I’m an old man and bad at sticking to the point.” He looked at each of them. “Thank you for not making me ask twice.”

Mira stepped forward. Lucian’s mother had not asked him a single question the whole trip. Now she took his ruined hand in both of hers and held it.

“I’ve been there. Everyone on this ship has.” Her thumb moved across his swollen knuckles. “Whatever you’ve been dreaming, it’s better than that. I dream of it too, sometimes. Everything there—it feels like home in a way that words can’t describe. You’ll find your healing there. I’m sure of it.”

Daffo discovered he could not speak. Fergus stood at her shoulder, calm and solid.

Lucian finished at last. When he faced Daffo he put both hands on his shoulders.

“In there, you’ll be closer to the Manifold. You should be able to speak to her more easily. When you do, tell her everything’s going well. And tell her thank you. For everything she went through before I was a thought in anyone’s head. Tell her it was all worth it, in the end.”

“I will,” said Daffo. “Though I’m certain she already knows.”

“Good luck, Daffo,” Serah said, her blue eyes misty.

He closed his eyes. “Thank you, all. For everything.”

He entered the pod with the bubble shimmering around it, strapped himself in, and closed his eyes. Even if something went wrong now, there was a certain peace in it: an end was coming, and a beginning with it.

Then the pod delatched and shot off into the black toward the Gate.

The universe went silent all at once, like a hand laid over a bell. On the small viewscreen before him, Blood Wyvern fell away, running lights burning.

And here it was—the moment he had braced for his entire life. The actual falling away of everything. The whole enormous, ruined, lovely wreck of the Shadow Realm, receding. Memories flashed through his brain, almost like his life flashing before his eyes.

He waited to be afraid, but that fear never came. What he felt was that he had come at last to the top of his mountain and been given permission to walk down the other side.

Daffo turned the viewscreen toward the Gate.

It filled everything. The Ether ran so thick here that he could see its prismatic colors without holding his Focus at all. The pylons slid out of his field of view, and then there was only the pearl, coming up under him like a floor.

All right, he thought. All right, I’m finally coming. I’m sorry it took so long —

And the white took him.

Daffo heard the trill of birdsong. He felt cool air kissing his skin. Flowers, resin, and leaves, all carried on a gentle breeze.

In a hundred and fourteen years of visions, he had never once smelled the place. It was green and sweet and deep, wet bark and cold water and something beneath that like crushed stems, realer than anything he had ever experienced.

There was something soft under him. He was lying on his side in moss.

He opened his eyes at last and got up, and for the first time in decades, his knees did not hurt.

Daffo looked at his hands. They were someone else’s hands. No—not someone else’s. They were unmistakably his: long and pale and unmarked. He closed them into twin fists, and there was no ache and no pain.

He turned them over. He turned them over again. He put them to his own face and felt a sharp jaw with no slackness in it, and hair fallen loose across his forehead, dark as it had been in his youth and streaked with the silver that had come to him in his late twenties. There was no ache behind his left eye.

His coat was gone, replaced with shimmering robes.

The trees rose around him like poured silver, many of the trunks spiraling as they climbed, their leaves breaking the light into every color at once. Through the spirals, he could see a sky so blue that it made a poor imitation of every sky he had ever stood beneath.

Everything was more than it should have been. That was the only way he could describe it. He had spent his life in a world where things were slightly less than themselves—where every color was a color with some of it worn off, every sound a sound with a little missing at both ends. He had assumed that was simply what color was.

Standing in the Prismwood, Daffo understood that he had lived his whole life in the copy. And now he stood in the reality.

He laughed, something deep and real, until his ribs ached with it. He had not laughed like that since before the war. It was not that the tragedies had been erased. It was that they had been answered, and so satisfyingly that he could look back down the whole length of his life and understand: yes. This is why I had to live through them.

Because now I can stay here as long as I like.

He sat down and watched the trees and the leaves and felt the breeze move over him and turned his head once toward the Gate, standing open behind him still there, still ready, still willing to take him back into the dark and the dying if he asked it to.

He did not ask.

Yes. This was the place. There was that particular rise of ground twenty meters off to his left, and the natural path leading deeper, and the silver-blue moss along its edges, and creatures that were something between birds and butterflies turning in vortices of color.

He was walking and had somehow missed the fact of starting. The sun was already lowering. And he felt no fear at all when the clomp of hooves settled behind him.

Daffo stopped and turned.

It had come out from between two trunks without any sound at all, and it was enormous—a stag, or something like a stag in the way that a cathedral is something like a building. Its shoulders stood higher than the top of his head. Its body was heavy with muscle.

Its coat was the most magnificent thing of all. It shifted as he watched: cobalt sliding into gold, gold breaking into green, the whole surface turning like oil on water.

Its antlers were translucent, and the light of the sunset came through them and broke, throwing rainbows across the forest, across Daffo’s new unmarked hands and his face.

It was the creature that had stood at the edge of every vision of his life, always just past the place where he could see, for a hundred and fourteen years.

And now he could look at it, and it did not recede.

“Hello,” Daffo finally managed. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

The Prismhart regarded him.

And then Daffo felt warmth, like gentle sunlight on skin.

I am the Eldarhart, it said, and Daffo understood that this meant the eldest, the first, the one the herd had come from. I lead here.

“I know,” said Daffo. “I’ve sensed that my entire life.”

You are the Dreamer who has finally stepped into reality.

“I have.”

The warmth in his mind moved, and it felt like amusement.

Old friend, said the Eldarhart, how strange you are. All that time, you believed you were dreaming alone.

Daffo could not remember ever having been so moved. “I did believe that.”

We have been dreaming of you too, Daffo. We have been dreaming of you for longer than you have been alive. It is for this reason that I have come—that we have come—to welcome the new Warden of the Gate.

And now the others came out of the wood. First a few. Then a dozen. Then what Daffo suspected were hundreds, in all their rainbow colors, the young and the old, male and female, every one of them with intelligent eyes, and every one of them facing him. The collective warmth of it was too much to hold, and Daffo felt his heart grow larger to hold it anyway, and felt it healing as it grew.

The Eldarhart bent one foreleg and bowed its head in greeting.

Welcome home, Warden.