Yhalen stepped out into the hall. There was an oil lamp burning low some way down the hall, but its light was muted and only served to heighten the shadows along the rest of the passage. The awareness of the presence came from the darker end of the hall. No sense of danger came with it, though, or he might have turned and retreated back into his room and the relative safety that Bloodraven’s presence offered. Instead he moved down the passage into deeper shadow, having no recollection of his passage here at all, and no earthly notion of where this hall led.
But he followed it, regardless, drawn by a sense of something remotely familiar and uniquely curious. There was a great arched doorway at the end of the hall, doorless and broad, opening into a broad veranda of sorts that overlooked a wide, shadow-flooded chamber. An elegantly twisted, wrought-iron railing stood guard at the edge of the marble landing, leading in either direction to gently curving stairs that swept down into the darkness below.
He hesitated on the landing, not willing to descend and find himself helplessly lost in this night-shrouded place. He couldn’t help but wonder why he‘d ventured so far alone in the dark to begin with.
It had been foolish not to have procured a lamp or even a candle to light his way.
“Does the darkness frighten you?”
A soft voice slid out of the shadows to his right. Yhalen stiffened, flexing his fingers and catching his breath. He forced himself not to whirl and scamper backwards like a startled child, turning towards the source of the question with casual curiosity instead. A blatant bodily lie, but it soothed his sense of
pride to mimic placidity in the face of throbbing unease.
“No,” he said. “The darkness holds no dangers, only the predators it hides.”
“Oh. Spoken like a true child of the forest.”
Lord Elvardo stepped out of the shadows, or melted out of them like a whisper of the night breeze.
He wore a cloak of deepest black that made no sound as he moved, nor seemed to reflect even the merest scrap of light. There were intricate runic patterns cut like lace along the edges that gave hints of pale flesh beneath. It made the creamy pallor of his face all the more striking. His features held an aesthetic that was familiar. The bones held the hint of home, finer and more sculpted than the features more common to the men outside the great forest.
“You’re Ydregi?”
Yhalen wasn’t entirely certain, for though the root of the presence he felt was familiar, earthy and solid like the feel of his grandfather’s arts, there was something else there that was entirely unfamiliar.
Entirely foreign and dark, as Ydregi magic was not.
“Do you think so?” Lord Elvardo asked, coming closer still, so that he stood a hand's breadth away from Yhalen, close enough for him to catch the smell of the fragrance he’d used in his bath and the musk of his own personal scent. His eyes were not quite the pale blue Yhalen had first thought upon seeing him in the entrance hall of this keep, but an icy, moon-kissed silver that gleamed as if from a light of their own, even in the shadows of this hall.
Yhalen swallowed and took a shifting step backwards. Lord Elvardo ignored the retreat, instead turning his gaze down upon the dark chamber below.
“Walk with me and tell me how fare the People in the sweet shelter of the Goddess’ great forest.”
There was some hint of mockery in his voice, but Yhalen chose not to contest it, being a guest in this dwelling, and most certainly at a disadvantage here. Already Lord Elvardo had casually proven his power, and Yhalen had no wish to test it again.
But still, he had to know for sure. “You are, then?”
“Ydregi?” Elvardo moved towards the stairs, trailing dark cloak in his wake. “I suppose. Once upon a time. I don’t image they would lay claim to me now, being set in the ways of their ‘
faith
’. But then, that’s something you would know about now, isn’t it?”
Yhalen blinked, heart fluttering in his chest. Elvardo was halfway down the stairs when he forced his feet to move and began to follow.
“How would you know...?”
Elvardo laughed. “It clings to you, you know? The scent of...magic, if you will. Once you’ve used it—really used it—it gathers about you like a storm, waiting to release its fury. You have a storm about you, Yhalen, where most of the fine Goddess-fearing people of the forest have managed, through an effort of will and fear and self-righteousness, to chase the clouds away. They let only the merest hint of rain in now and then to perform the little tasks that they think the Goddess will approve of.”
There was most definitely derision in his voice, a scorn for the Ydregi and the Goddess. Yhalen was appalled. Lord Elvardo’s very existence threw his world out of kilter. Ydregi did not leave the great forest to live in the outside world. He knew of none other, beside himself, that had strayed so far and so long. And yet he felt, with the deepest part of him, that Lord Elvardo had once been of the great forest. He could have been any number of young Ydregi men that Yhalen knew.
But familiar as the mold of his features were, Yhalen had never laid eyes upon him before. There were certainly clans that lived apart from his own, but they were still tightly knit and came together seasonally to celebrate the Goddess and her works, and he knew each and every member of their brother clans by name and face.
Estalan Elvardo was no Ydregi name.
Yhalen hesitated on the stairs, wondering what he was blindly walking into in the darkness below, following the predator that danced in its shadows.
“Are you afraid of me?” Elvardo asked lightly, voice drifting out of those shadows.
Yhalen drew breath, hand clutching the rail until his fingers were white.
“Yes,” he finally answered, all honesty.
Elvardo glanced over his shoulder with a curious lift of the brow. “Wise,” he murmured. “Very wise.
But at the moment, I think, my curiosity grants you safe passage.”
A flame flickered to life at the tip of a candle in a sconce on the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
Yhalen blinked at it, startled by the sudden birth of light.
Then another flared to life, and another, and another, until the reflections of a dozen small wavering points of light were cast off the lead-paned windows of a great glass wall. The chamber they were in held a stone lipped pool that butted against and seemed to run under an iron girded wall that was faced with glass. Behind the glass there seemed to be the shadows of foliage. Elvardo walked towards it. When he opened the door, a welter of forest-born smells wafted out. The perfume of a hundred flowers, the scent of rich mulch and sweet sap all mingled and closely contained. It was like breathing home.
The lighting of the candles suddenly forgotten, Yhalen walked towards the glass-encased garden, passing Elvardo who stood courteously holding the door and into the lush greenness of a sleeping wilderness. But not so much uncultivated. There was subtle method to the madness of this small forest.
A selective arrangement of species, an artful pruning of the greater denizens, so they might not entirely overshadow the lesser, or outgrow the boundaries of this limited space. There were plants here that Yhalen had only ever seen within the most protected grottos of the great forest.
“My weakness,” Elvardo admitted, slowly strolling behind Yhalen down the path that wound through this private garden. “I might have gone a lifetime—or two, even—without seeing another Ydregi, but I do sometimes lament the sweetness of the secret places.”
Yhalen stopped by a night-blooming flower, fingers hovering under the drooping blossom as he inhaled the scent of home. He shivered, the tremor going bone deep and threatening his composure. He missed such things. He longed for the invasive quiet of the great forest in the depths of the night. The all-encompassing feeling of vast peace. The incomprehensible richness of all the forest had to offer to her chosen people. He missed his family and dreaded that they might never accept him back, after what he’d done. If a stranger could tell, the wise ones of the Ydregi surely would know how he’d blackened the gifts the goddess had granted him.
“Elvardo is not a Ydregi name,” he said. Anything to divert his attention from the longing for home.
“Names are like lies. They come easily to the tongue.”
“Ydregi don’t leave the forest.” Yhalen turned on him, some bit of anger sparking. “Yet you claim to be one. I’d have heard if someone had left not to return.”
“And you being the wise old age of what...twenty? Would know so much of tribal gossip?”
Yhalen lifted his chin. Elvardo chuckled. “You’re one to speak. About not leaving the forest, that is.
Young. So very young. Who is your father, or his father, or his?”
“My father is Yhandor, son of Yhalor, son of Yheg.”
“Yhalor?” Elvardo’s brows went up. He repeated the name with something akin to amazement, then started to laugh. “How utterly...ironic,” he gasped when he’d regained some composure. Yhalen scowled at him, not sure if some slight had been given his grandfather.
“I knew a young man named Yhalor, a long time ago.”
“Did you?” Yhalen said coldly. “It’s not an uncommon name.”
Which was true only in the sense that his grandfather had been named after his own grandfather. He knew of none other in the clans who held the name now, other than his father’s father. But certainly Elvardo was too young to have been an acquaintance. Even though the Ydregi lived long lives and held the appearance of youth for many years, none that seemed as youthful as Lord Elvardo could have known Grandfather in his youth. As the man said, lies came easily.
“What do you want of me?” he demanded, offense making him short-tempered.
Elvardo waved a hand. “Like this garden...you remind me of things bygone. You come from a sheltered place in company most strange. You have a unique and powerful ally, and the nature of that alliance has pricked my curiosity. That’s why I have opened my home to you, not because the sworn knight of the son of a man I once made a foolish pact with demanded it.”
“He’s not my ally,” Yhalen whispered.
“Who, the halfling? He acted it. When you fell in my hall, he was most...assertive...in his protectiveness. Assertive in other things, as well, no? His scent lays strong upon you, little brother.
You’ve found a strong lover.”
“I’m not a brother of yours,” Yhalen said. “And he’s not my lover. I was his captive until he fell prey to the lord of the lands he and his ravaged.”
“Hmm. You seem to fare well enough for a captive.”
“I’m not...anymore.”
“Oh, then you share his bed from simple desire?”
“It’s not that simple!” Yhalen cried. “I was given little choice in the matter.”
“I think you have great choice,” Elvardo said softly. “I think you know this and choose not to use the tools you have at hand. Shall I show you the way? Shall I share the secrets that the frightened, wise old men of the Ydregi wish to bury beneath the mulch of the forest? They hide the true nature of power from those to whom power comes naturally, then condemn the inadvertent and ignorant use of it when happenstance arises. Is that what happened to you, Yhalen? Did you grasp at what was so readily at hand without the true knowledge of how to craft it? Is it your fault that all they ever told you was what not to do, was what offended the Goddess, what was a sin to perpetrate, so that when the power came, it came in a flood that was uncontrollable?”
Yhalen stared at him, aghast. It was just so. Just so. And yet never, never would he had allowed himself the reprieve of blaming Grandfather and the wise-men of the clans for their lack of tutelage, for they worked the will of the Goddess. It came so easily to Elvardo, those poisonous words. Lies. Lies.
And yet...if only he’d had a better grasp....
“It’s not a sin to use the power.” Elvardo leaned towards him as if in conspiracy. “If it weren’t meant for us...for those few that breathe it as the very air...it wouldn’t lie so easily within our grasp. It’s only to what use we put it that determines
sin
.”
Yhalen was aware of a pit yawning before his feet. Elvardo’s fine mouth turned up in a smile.
“Oh, yes, I’ve sinned. I’ve had so much to make up for, to balance out the piousness of my people.”
It was no small relief to find himself back within the relative safety of Bloodraven’s company.
Yhalen had fled the lord Elvardo’s presence with a sense of unease that still lingered. In great part, that was because Elvardo’s words clung to him, stubbornly refusing to let go. He’d spoken more about the nature of magic and of the blindness of the Ydregi. Yhalen might have defended the honor of his people more vehemently if there hadn’t been a spark of truth in the accusations. A truth that appealed to him bone deep, when he dwelled upon it.
“Healing isn’t the easiest use of the power,” Elvardo had said, some small bit of appreciation in his tone. “The simplest are the elemental.”
Yhalen hadn’t wanted to hear. But his eyes had been drawn magnetically to Elvardo’s palm as he held it up and flame sprang to life inches above the skin of his hand.
“Fire came to me first.”
“Fire is an evil magic.”
Elvardo laughed. “Yes, I imagine they would teach you that. I tell you that there’s nothing evil about it. It simply is. The only evil is not teaching the ways of controlling it. Like any tool, if you handle it by the sharp end, you’ll shed blood. Feel its boundaries—I know you can. Feel the heart of it. What it wants—how it hungers. And control it. Direct its energy on a path of your own choosing, even if that path is self consumption.”