The Last Ritual

The dark-robed man walked along a path that had almost grown over, his steps sure and even, the blue-glowing sphere in his hand. Over the years those steps had sunk deep into his memory. He avoided the roots and stones that crossed the path without looking at them, as though their positions were part of him.

Dense undergrowth grew on both sides and nearly swallowed the route whole. Tall pines rose toward the sky. The forest was full of life, but the man paid it no attention. His thoughts were on the task he was carrying out.

What shadowed his mind was that today something was different. He felt it in his spine, a cold seeping feeling that was not fear but a warning. The sphere in his hand weighed more than usual, too, and its blue glow was restless and uneven. Inside it a storm surged, trying to get out.

"Settle down," he whispered to it, almost tenderly. "We'll be there soon. Soon you can rest."

The sphere quivered in answer but did not settle.

The man stopped to study his surroundings. An instinct honed by decades of experience whispered that he was being followed. He turned his head slowly, scanned the shadows under the trees and listened to the sounds of the forest. Nothing. Or perhaps something after all.

He shook his head and went on. Maybe he was only imagining it. Maybe age was doing its work and his senses were beginning to fail him. But deep down he knew to be especially careful all the same.

After walking a while longer, the man came to a small cottage that stood in a clearing among the trees. Vegetable beds were laid out here and there in the clearing, and from them he got most of his food. Flowering herbs of many kinds grew among them. The scent of lavender, rosemary and sage hung faintly in the air. The vegetables were arranged in careful rows.

Closest to the cottage was a smaller flower bed, where rarer plants grew as well, the kind used in charms and medicines. Every plant had been placed with deliberate thought, not only for food but for protection. Set against the grim-looking cottage, the colorful plants might have come from another world.

Self-sufficiency was part of the man's solitary way of life, which also included keeping his distance from others and keeping a silence in which he could listen for the sort of things other people did not know how to hear.

The walls of the cottage were skillfully assembled from individual gray stones. The stones were not alike; each looked as though it had taken shape for the exact place it occupied. Moss grew here and there across their surfaces, giving the building its particular character. The cottage had stood in this place so long that it had become part of the forest, though it was clearly the work of human hands.

The high, irregular roof was grim, almost threatening, and made the cottage look like the dwelling of a wizard. The kind mothers used to frighten their children away from going too far into the woods. The dark gray tiles on it had been beaten by the weather, but every one of them was still perfectly in place.

At one end of the roof stood a tall chimney, and from it pale gray smoke rose calmly into the sky. The smoke rose as it always did, steady and straight, but this time the man looked at it a moment longer than usual.

Above the heavy door was a small canopy, meant as shelter from the rain. Between the door and the canopy sat a large eye-shaped window that kept ceaseless watch over the cottage and the clearing around it. In reality it had no magical powers whatsoever, but the man had never mentioned that to his occasional visitors.

The walls held a few more windows of different sizes and shapes, which no one could see through from a distance but which made it possible to watch the clearing from inside. Danger rarely threatened the cottage, but constant vigilance had its benefits when you lived in this region. Especially now, when rumors of strange things had begun to spread.

The man paused a moment on the porch and looked back toward the forest. He felt it again. Something was wrong. The air was too heavy, too quiet. The birds had stopped singing. He tightened his hand around the sphere and hurried to the door.

He wiped his feet on the straw-colored mat by the door and opened it with his free hand. It wasn't locked; the people of the area respected the cottage, or feared it, enough that there was no need. And locks would not have stopped stronger creatures in any case.

The hinges creaked audibly as the door swung open. The familiar sound was a welcome reminder of home.

The air inside was cool and smelled of dried herbs, old paper and smoke. Usually the smell steadied him, but today it failed to drive off his unease.

The cottage held three rooms, and the first one, the one that met you at the door, was the largest. It was filled with tables, bookshelves and writing materials stacked here and there in tidy piles. In the middle of the room stood a stand of black stone about a meter high, and at the top of it were four stone hands arranged in the shape of a clover leaf.

The shelves sagged under the weight of the books. There were old leather-spined volumes, brittle manuscripts and notebooks patched here and there, full of text written in a careful hand. Bunches of herbs hung drying on the walls, and strange symbols had been carved into the bare wooden beams. In one corner stood a small desk, where the man spent most of his time studying, writing and teaching.

He set the glowing sphere carefully onto the hands of the stand and said quietly, almost apologetically, "You wait there a moment, and I'll be right back."

The sphere gave a sharp crack and flashed a few times. The man let the answer pass, walked over to his desk and lowered his hood.

Beneath it was a bald man aged by many years, with a neatly trimmed gray beard of medium length. For all the menace of his clothing he looked kind, though something in his bearing was a reminder that it would be unwise to provoke him. In his eyes he carried a weight the years alone did not explain.

His face was deeply lined, and every wrinkle told a story from his life. Some had come from worry, some from grief, but some from smiles as well, shared with his few friends. His hands were strong, though the joints showed the marks of age. They were hands that had held on to both life and death, that had comforted and healed but had also brought an ending to those whose time had come.

He hummed to himself as he went through his things, clearly looking for something. The good cheer was performed, behavior dictated by old habits. Inside him the cold he had felt earlier was still moving, but it had grown now and coiled from his heart out to his fingertips.

When at last he found the glass bottle he was after, he went back to the blue-glowing sphere waiting in the middle of the room.

"All right, then. Let's begin," he said, and took the stopper out of the clear glass bottle.

He set the stopper carefully on the table behind him and tipped the contents of the bottle into his mouth in one swallow. The bitter taste made him purse his lips. It tasted of ash and iron and something buried deep in the earth. His expression was grave, and he had to steady himself on the stand in front of him, where the sphere waited.

I'm getting too old for this, he thought, as the burning the liquid had left began to ease. Far too old. Should I give it up already? Let someone younger carry this weight?

But he knew that was not an option. Not yet. Not before he had taught his successor everything she needed, not before he was certain the inheritance of the task was safe.

The man closed his eyes, straightened his back and placed his hands on either side of the sphere, a few centimeters above it. In a low voice he began to murmur a mantra in a language few could speak. His words sounded like a quiet song, one with the power to calm storming souls and bring order into chaos.

The words flowed from his lips without effort, the result of years of practice. They were words his master had taught him, which his master's master had taught before that, an inheritance reaching back hundreds of generations. Old, powerful words, not to be spoken lightly.

When he had kept the ritual up a while, the storm inside the sphere quieted and its color changed from deep blue to sky blue. When the tingling in his fingers stopped, he ended the mantra and opened his eyes. He fetched his notebook and pen from the table and went back to the settled sphere, more relaxed himself now.

He remembered the few times when the calming had not come easily. Those occasions had left him a handful of scars, which he kept hidden under his robe. Experience had developed in him a kind of sense that told him to leave the most dangerous cases alone. Those he let wander their time out and then fade away to nothing when their strength ran dry.

"Now, let's see what you are underneath," the man said, and laid one hand on the sphere's surface again.

He closed his eyes and began his examination. His brow furrowed with the effort of concentration. An oppressive silence filled the cottage.

For a while he simply stood there, hand on the sphere, a contemplative look on his face. His breathing slowed and deepened, and his awareness sank into the sphere, into the place where the soul lay waiting. He felt its presence, its purity and its potential. It was almost dazzlingly bright, and for a moment he only admired it.

"A first-class soul," he murmured at last, almost in surprise. "Well, that much is obvious. But why now? Why today of all days?"

He wrote his observation down in his notebook and went back to his examination.

"No inclination toward evil," he continued quietly. "Good. Good. Quite excellent, in fact!" His voice rose a little, excitement mixed with astonishment. Souls like this came rarely, very rarely.

"Only a few small flaws in the character," he said, glancing at the sphere. "But no matter! Those will fall away in time with refinement."

His concentration slipped for a moment when the door behind him banged open. A young girl came into the room out of breath, dark hair scattered across her face. Her cheeks were red from running.

Linnea was young, perhaps thirteen. There was a curiosity in her deep brown eyes that years of teaching had not diminished, and her face still held the innocence of childhood. She wore a simple brown dress, and from her waist hung a leather bag full of herbs and small glass bottles.

"You're late, Linnea," the man said without looking at her. "But never mind. I hadn't gotten very far yet."

"I'm sorry, Master Myrok," Linnea said apologetically. "I didn't sense the sign in time."

He gave a short laugh through his nose. He knew his apprentice had most likely been asleep under some nearby tree, but he said nothing about it. Sleeping was a skill too, one that took practice, and Linnea was excellent at it. He gestured absently at the notebook on the table. Linnea took it without asking and settled in to write.

"What a magnificent specimen," she said, studying the sphere. "Are they common, ones like that?"

"No," Myrok answered firmly. "But we can discuss that later."

"Right, of course," Linnea said, and shifted into a better position for taking notes.

The master closed his eyes again and set his hands above the sphere. Linnea prepared to write.

"As I had already observed, this is a first-class light soul with a few visible, if minor, flaws of character."

Linnea listened closely and nodded, waiting for her master to go on. A long silence filled the room. There was usually nothing remarkable about his pauses, but this time there was something odd in the air. It worried her.

Myrok's hands began to shake. Linnea saw it and went rigid.

"Is everything all right?" she asked carefully.

Outside, the sun went behind a cloud, and an oppressive gloom crept into the room. Linnea's body tensed with anticipation. She put her pen down on the table and rose slowly to her feet. Fear made it hard to breathe.

"Master?" she whispered, her voice trembling.

"Run," Myrok said at last. His voice was strange and sounded forced, as if it had come out of someone else's throat. "While you still can. Run, and don't come back."

A cold shiver went through her. She knew she should have done as her master said, knew that when Myrok told her to run it meant real danger. But she could not resist her own curiosity and her wish to help. She walked over to stand beside him and looked into his face.

Master Myrok's eyes were entirely black, like two holes into emptiness, and strange glowing marks moved across his face, under the skin.

The marks resembled ancient characters, symbols Linnea had seen only once, in her master's most dangerous books. They were never to be spoken aloud, never written and never called forth. They were forbidden, dangerous and ruinous.

"Fool," Myrok said in a low voice Linnea did not recognize as her master's. It was deeper and colder. It was a voice that did not belong here, not in this world and not in this time.

That was the last thing she heard. A burst of magic threw her against the cottage wall, and she lost consciousness. Her body slid slowly to the floor. Her breathing was shallow but steady.

In the silence that followed, Myrok stood alone in the middle of the room, his eyes black. The blue sphere glowed in front of him, cold and indifferent. The symbols in the cottage walls began to shine, and their light reflected in his empty eyes.

Shadow-Myrok reached a hand toward the sphere. Just before he touched it, something black flashed inside it, deeper than his own eyes, and his hand drew back as though burned. For a moment there were two darknesses in the room, taking each other's measure. Then the sphere rose from the stand, slipped outside through the door and vanished. Whatever Myrok had become did not go after it. Not yet.

Out in the forest the birds left the trees all at once. The wind died away completely. At the well, the blood-red leaves of the tree began to fall of their own accord.

Something had broken. A wordless agreement had been torn apart. At the same moment, somewhere far away in another world, a man who had just died lay on cold asphalt in the beating rain, not knowing that his soul was now part of something larger.

His soul, over which the old master had just performed what would turn out to be his final ritual. A soul that was pure and innocent. A soul that did not yet know what was coming.

Myrok, or what he had become, smiled coldly.