Chapter 22
Stella was sitting on her rock by the stream, waiting for Darin to return. The sun rose and started its daily ascent of the heavens, but still he did not come. She began to grow restless.
The water chattered on. So often, it seemed to give voice to her thoughts; now it was calling her to follow the course of the stream back up to the tarn from which it flowed. She rose and commenced her light-footed way uphill. Before long, the path beside the stream grew steeper. With every step, she climbed higher and higher above the forest and out onto the open mountainside.
Over the centuries, this narrow mountain torrent had become a part of her soul. The Elders had been right: some kind of attachment was still necessary. When she and her brethren had first come to this world after their own had been destroyed by a fiery comet, they were advised to choose some place in it to call their own, something to watch over down the ages. Even among her own generation, the final generation of faerie, nostalgia for the home planet still burned strong, so they sought out the things they had missed most during the vast stretch of time their ships had taken to cross the galaxies—forests, lakes, rivers and springs. She had chosen this stream and it pleased her greatly that, although its waters were never the same from second to second and the creatures that lived beside it were renewed almost as quickly, it had become the one constant concern running through her life.
This is what is left to us of love, she thought, now that we no longer need each other. For it was true: since her people had achieved near immortality, they relied on each other for less and less. Oberon was not alone in believing the faerie race to be ready for the final step. Now there was no longer any need for them to reproduce or to provide sustenance for themselves, the usefulness of community was gone, and each individual was free to wander undisturbed, meditating on the ultimate riddle.
What had Oberon said? He had spoken of an equation. Solve it, and the necessity of being is cancelled. He must expect his meditations to lead him ultimately to a state somehow prior to existence itself. Everything—the galaxies we traversed, the worlds we have inhabited—would be shown to be illusion. We shall simply cease to exist—indeed, we shall never have been.
Stella had almost reached the little tarn. It lay below her in a dip in the mountain, just beneath the final slope to the summit. As always, she felt her thoughts and senses growing sharper the nearer she approached the birthplace of her stream.
No, she told herself, we have lessons to learn from the world we find ourselves in. It is not our destiny to meditate ourselves into nothingness, one by one. The time is approaching when we must come together again to decide our fate—and mine is bound up with Karman’s and with that of his son who has come to me for help against a common enemy.
Quickly and easily, she climbed the last slope to the summit of the hill, one of the foothills of the great mountain range that lay ahead of her. From here, she commanded a view of the road that ran through the pine forest at the foot of the mountains, coming from the west on her right, crossing over the pass between the hill she stood on and the main body of the range and then continuing east on her left. Eventually, she knew, the road would pass the entrance to the rocky ravine and the cavern where Karman had been imprisoned. She wondered if Morgan was there now and what she was plotting. Should she go there and confront her, or should she return downstream to see if Darin had come back after all?
As she stood there debating with herself, her eye was caught by a flash of light coming from the road to her right. On a stretch of path that was clearly visible to her through the pines, she could make out two human figures, a horse and the shine of armour. Even at that distance, to her clear-sighted faerie eyes, the armed man looked very like Darin. The person with him, who was lying slumped over the saddle almost as if unconscious, was a woman in a long green gown. Stella’s interest quickened; Darin’s strange story had convinced her that she was about to be drawn into Karman’s life once more.
Although she had long ago renounced the desire to hold the knight she had fallen in love with by the stream, he was always in her thoughts and in her heart. She had witnessed that same desire for possession in Morgan and had been repelled by it. She had also witnessed with what steadfastness Karman had remained true to his love, even when tempted with beauty that would have conquered most men. Here was a reality that went far beyond the names and forms of love, a reality Stella’s people had lost touch with long ago.
Looking down on the tiny figures below her, she silently renewed her commitment to Karman and to those he loved. Her reward was a suddenly sharpened awareness of the beauty that surrounded her. She started down the tree-covered hillside towards the road, rapturously breathing in the sharp, resinous smell of a pinewood in the morning sun. In the profound stillness, her light footfall on the carpet of dry needles was unexpectedly loud and a brittle pinecone rolling down the slope in front of her sent sudden echoes rattling through the woods. Golden sunlight glowed on the rough, fissured bark of the trees and flooded her soul. No, the transcendence Oberon was seeking was not for her.
Once out of the trees and onto the road at the western end of the pass, Stella stood listening for a moment. There was nothing to hear, but she knew the travellers could not be far away, so she set off down the path. After some minutes, as she was approaching a bend in the road, she heard the sound of galloping hooves and Darin’s voice calling out. Another voice, low and indistinct, reached her ears, and she quickened her step. Making herself invisible, she rounded the corner and saw before her a beautiful woman with long auburn hair, standing by a big black horse. A little way down the path stood Darin, petrified. Another man, his double, was about to strike him with his sword.
I used my abilities to trick and torment this young man once, thought Stella, and now I must use them to show him the truth. She raised her arms and held them out before her, framing Darin and his double between outstretched hands. Then she trained the full power of her gaze upon them. Letting her own shield of invisibility drop, she instantly detected the distortions radiating from the body housing the spirit Morgan had conjured from the dead and neutralized them.