No. That wasn’t right. The boy couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be.
“My Lord?” N’serric’s tone was perturbed as Jerek thrust him blade-first into the ground and rushed back to the temple steps, expression stony. “What in the world are you doing?”
Ignoring the carnage behind him, the scents of blood and flesh burnt by eldritch bolts, Jerek knelt and lifted Rathi’s small body from the stone. He was still warm but there was no light behind his eyes.
“Oh, Boss.” There was barely any volume to Grig’s words as the little creature landed nearby, extending one shaking hand towards Rathi’s head.
“Don’t you dare cry,” Jerek snapped, fixing the imp with his stare.
Grig snatched his hand back as if from a fire, eyes wide with wound and hurt. “But, but Boss, Rathi is—!”
“He’s no more dead than you are! You were just like him once!”
Jerek jerked back to his feet, old cloak swirling from the speed with which he carried the boy’s body to N’serric and laid him on the ground at the blade’s buried point. The knight thrust a finger, accusatory, at the one eye that could see him.
“You know that I know it! Our souls go to your Alter-Realm and become you!”
N’serric had no mouth, but in a hesitant pause, one could almost hear him swallow anyway. “My Lord, as true as that might be, we—”
“Bring him back.”
Silence. A faint snow began to fall, dusty white specks landing on the dark glove of Jerek’s outstretched hand.
“Gr… Grig will do it!” The imp hurried to stumble over, barely coordinating his large feet and awkward wings to do so. “Grig doesn’t want Rathi to be dead or a bodhi!”
“Are you mad, impling?” N’serric’s eye rolled in its engraved socket, trying to fix upon the smaller demon. “You couldn’t save your last master nor any of the others! What makes you think you can save him?”
“Because Grig will do it!” he exclaimed back, pulling back a foot and kicking the sword’s blade hard enough to scuff it with mud. Then he, too, pointed an accusing claw, though his own hand was much smaller than Jerek’s and he had to point far overhead to do so. “Nasty-Serric thinks he’s so powerful, he should do it too!”
N’serric’s eye widened, rolled in furious disbelief. “Of all the insults you have ever thrown my way! I am infinitely more capable than such a useless mite as you!”
“Then—”
“Then prove it,” Jerek snapped, voice booming over Grig’s smaller one. “If our souls are just a cycle, then reverse it, or force it faster!”
“My Lord, you say such a thing as if the imp or even I have any control over it! We’re as tied to the cycle as you are!”
“Then break it!”
Jerek asked, no, demanded the impossible. But hadn’t that been the glory of any quest? Impossible dreams, impossible deeds?
Snow fell on his hand, his shoulders, gathered in Grig’s mussed hair and on N’serric’s cold crossguard.
Then Grig began to move his hands in movements Jerek recognized: drawing thin the barrier between the human Realm and the bodhi Alter-Realm. The use of his little portals had seemed such an innocuous bit of magic, once, and the world at large surely would continue to think of it as such. The world did not know that humans became bodhi or that bodhi became human. Their souls were the same, forever passing over and over again. They weren’t even mirror images. They were each other.
N’serric stared, then spat as only the sword could, a thing all metallic sound and no spittle.
“You know perfectly well only you can pass through a door that small!” The demon-sword’s gaze snapped around again, fixing Jerek with ire and challenge as he announced: “My Lord, you are going to feel this.”
The stone at the end of N’serric’s pommel, the blood-stone that bound them together, flared with the crimson light of magic focus. Jerek spat a choice word or two of his own as the link between them wrenched, seizing painfully somewhere between his chest and his skull, but he reached across and gripped N’serric’s hilt tightly enough for the leather of his gloves to creak.
N’serric was always the one to draw the magic between them, but Jerek had always been the one in control. Now, for the first time, he found himself only the channel by which his Oathsworn partner poured their power into the portal Grig was opening. It felt like trying to plant his feet against the tumbling of a mighty river, the life-or-death struggle not to let it put his head under the water.
But it wasn’t his life that needed saving.
Grig’s little yellow portal spun with red, turning the falling snow around them into embers on the wind, casting its warm light onto Rathi’s cooling cheeks. Jerek could never have passed through it but it wove bigger and bigger still, larger than Grig’s usual needs.
Large enough to draw through a small boy, perhaps.
Grig leapt through and Jerek’s head spun with the whirl of energies that followed through after him. It was his essence, it was him, being spun out like a rope, a guideline from one point of existence to another.
This was what they had learned before they had died. His old adventuring friends: Axei, Ela, Jesari, Mecauluel, Nydatar. Only Vindur and Jerek had survived the collapse of the temple, of the god Itself reaching through to steal back what they had taken. The god Itself. The only one. The others were all fragments It had invented to keep Its world divided, their souls forever cycling between one form of existence and the other.
It didn’t matter that someday his friends would live again under new names and new faces. He wouldn’t know them. They wouldn’t know him. For him, they were gone.
But Jerek wasn’t thinking about that, about It. He was thinking only about a boy who had been right all along. It was Jerek’s fault that the Gilded Crown had burned. He had been better, once.
This would not make him better again, but the boy did not deserve to pass from a life he’d barely begun to live.
Just as Jerek thought he might snap in half, that the cord wrapped somewhere around his throat or his spine would fold him back on himself and drag him through a swirling aperture too small for him, he felt N’serric start to reel it back in. The weight at the far end of it, a thing immaterial but nevertheless impossibly heavy, felt like trying to drag a mountain down by a piece of thread. It resisted. The cycle wasn’t supposed to turn this direction.
Sweat stood out on Jerek’s brow. Snowflakes melting against his skin were indistinguishable from it.
Somewhere short of eternity, or so it felt, Grig reappeared. His tiny form was bowed under… Jerek couldn’t rightly tell. Something his eyes couldn’t fix on, something human eyes weren’t meant to see.
Perhaps it was the sight of a soul unformed, between two stages of being.
Whatever it was, Grig hauled it through, the tiny muscles in his thin arms strained and trembling as he heaved it onto Rathi’s cold chest.
“I gots him, Boss!” the imp exclaimed.
N’serric’s eye was wide and wild. “And it’s now or never, my Lord!”
The power pouring through him went molten. Jerek howled as the force of it veered away from the portal as it blinked out of existence, pouring into him instead. It sent him to one knee, hand still locked tight around N’serric’s grip, and he was sure it was only the sword’s doing that slammed his other hand to Rathi’s chest, forcing that indescribable shape back into the boy, back into the body it had worn for only moments ago.
Rathi’s eyes flew open as he was suddenly wheezing, choking, gasping for air.
The bruise of Jerek’s handprint across his chest would take weeks to fade.
The world was coated with crystalline white when they arrived at Mare’s Crossing the following week. Jerek could still see haunted shadows around the boy’s eyes on occasion, as if at the memory of a nightmare that had followed him into waking and was proving hard to shake, but he seemed to have little true awareness of what had happened to him.
His little hand clung to Jerek’s, seeking support that the man could not find it in him not to allow. Grig happily rode upon the boy’s shoulders, one gangly foot dangling to either side, arms folded in Rathi’s messy hair and pillowing the imp’s chin. N’serric pretended he was only a sword, even though his cutting remarks had been few and far between the last few days.
Together they looked up the well-paved road of Silver Hill, where somewhere at its peak stood Havres Manor, where Domovoi and Dovri’Nisi dwelled.
“It’s good to have a quest again,” Grig murmured happily, playing with the moss-green strands of Rathi’s hair. The sensation finally got some hoarse giggles from the child.
N’serric humphed quietly and Jerek said nothing at all, but for once, neither one of them corrected the little imp.
Rathi was supposed to get a dragon. The three of them would make certain he arrived safely.