He’d been made for more than this. With his natural gifts, Dazen could have been more. Should have been more.
He’d secretly dared to be a god? He’d not even been a man! Alone, isolated by his own secrets and shame, he’d become a monster.
I have nothing to give you, Dulcina Dulceana had said at the Freeing, but my time. Take my five minutes, and rest. She’d been so quiet, so still yet welcoming, her presence had been an enveloping peace, like the warmth of hot springs on a chill night.
He’d taken her five minutes. Her action: her offer, her sacrifice, and her love, had been beautiful, pure. Where time was the measure of wealth, he, the rich man with many flocks, had taken a poor woman’s last beloved lamb—and devoured it before her eyes.
And then he’d slaughtered her. He’d cast from this world that young woman whose very presence was healing. He’d cost the whole world all she could have done.
He regarded the broken thing in the Great Mirror. Here was ‘Gavin’ Guile. Any accusation he could level against his father, any sin of which he could accuse the Spectrum, any cupidity and vice he hated in others, all that he despised, lay living and breathing and strong in him.
The climb up the tower was supposed to purge his sins? It had only revealed them. He’d held on to a core of himself, an ambition, a pride. He’d held on to the sword, thinking: Judge me, O God? You dare? I am broken, but I will rise in bitter triumph. I submit to the truth of Your every accusation, but soon . . . I will be God!
He looked at the mighty blade in his maimed left hand and transferred it to his thorny, strong right. He felt a gathering darkness in the blade that echoed the gathering darkness of the night and within him. Gavin was not a holy man; he was a man wholly dark. The black sheathing the blade was the same black that had become his left eye, that had burrowed deep. Perhaps it wasn’t hiding, as he had thought. Perhaps it was incubating.
Woe to the world when it hatched.
It had spread from his heart throughout his body, reaching even to his hands, to the black blade.
Or perhaps, seed crystal that it was, the black eye had simply titrated all the darkness that was already within him, latent. It wasn’t foreign, alien, other. The black was his true self.
What if it is yourself that you fear? Your power?
His vision shivered once more, and in the blood mirror through his truth-seeing black eye Gavin saw great wings sprouting from his back, unfurling with a crack. He saw his form swelling with power, growing invincible. He would take, and punish, and live. Live forever. What could he not do, given time? He would make all things right. Fix all he’d broken. Even himself.
But visible from his mortal eye, the self remained, aghast, ashamed at him.
Take the blade, and strike—or they will take everything from you! Strike! Be the god you really are! You’ve suffered enough. You deserve this! All can be healed! Rise from ashes, glorious!
Closing his left eye, he looked once more upon the man in the mirror. Lips cracked, skin burnt, hair lank, eye patch leering, his whole aspect a shadow of a shadow of the glory of his former self. There were only skeletal remains of Dazen Guile. He’d killed him. He’d killed everything good. And why? In order to extend an existence he hated?
Why would you kill an innocent to give another day to a person you despise? He had failed in every good thing he’d tried to do. He was loathsome. Everyone he loved would be better off if he were dead.
Let this be the end.
He braced the hilt of the gun-sword on the ground and set the point of the cruel sword between his fifth and sixth rib. Then he shifted his weight, adjusting to get it right.
Of all the things not to fuck up, falling on your sword had to rate pretty high.
“Dazen!” Sevastian said. “Elrahee. Elishama. Eliada. Eliphalet. He sees. He hears. He cares. He saves.”
Gavin snorted. “And yet here I am, on His front porch. Knocked on the door. Hell, I even punched a hole in it! He isn’t here, brother. Never was. This tower’s a monument to nothing. And you’re nothing but my madness.”
“Dazen, if Orholam came to speak to you in the flesh, you still wouldn’t listen. Didn’t, for your whole climb and for your whole life. But you listened to me. So who’s the right messenger to send to you?”
“You’re not a messenger. You’re a hallucination.” But tears were flowing. He was so ashamed and he could hide none of it now.
“A hallucination who tells you things you don’t know and kicks your ass?”
“Hey, you didn’t kick my ass!”
“You just don’t want to admit you lost a fight to an eight-year-old boy.”
From its brief levity, Gavin’s heart dropped again.
“It was supposed to be you, wasn’t it?” Gavin said. “You were the best of us. You were supposed to be the Lightbringer.”
Sevastian took a deep breath and pursed his lips.
“So we’re lost. Father killed the Lightbringer.”
“Sometimes the wicked win a battle. Sometimes those who hear the call say no to it. Men have power. Our actions matter, even unto eternity. But the ultimate victory is still assured.”
“We killed the fucking Lightbringer, Sevastian.”
“A Lightbringer,” Sevastian said. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I, too, would have been turned aside, corrupted, or killed. Who’s to say? What I know is this. If God needed perfect mirrors to bring His light to the world, it would be a world forever dark. Imperfect mirrors also—”
Gavin scoffed, pointing at himself. “Imperfect?! What, you see this as mildly flawed? Look at me! You know what I was! What I am.”
“I see. I see and I’m not turning away.”
“How can you not?”
Sevastian pierced him with a gaze that combined the best of Felia and Andross Guile and yet was somehow fully his own. “Because I love you, brother. I see the you that’s you, under all this. Yes, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting, but you can be more. I know what you can become, even still. There’s still work for you to do.”
Gavin sneered. “Not for me. I’m finished. It’s sunset. I’ve failed my mission. Karris is dead by now. I’ve betrayed half the people in my life, and failed all the rest. My time’s up.”
He remembered then his dream. In the dream, his hand had looked like this—this thorny, skeletal abomination. He’d been on a tower like this, and a giant had come striding up to smash him in judgment. Orholam Himself. And Gavin had known he deserved his fate, but still begged for more time.
It had been more than a dream. It had been prophecy.
And had done him just as much good as prophecy usually does.
He braced the hilt of the sword on the stones once more. The blood would make it slick.
He was so very tired of his lies, and his false bravery, and his false fronts, and his falsity on every human axis of virtue. His lies had gutted every word of praise uttered for him, denuded every moment of triumph, hamstrung every victory. Now it was time to let every lie die, no matter how precious.
“You know, for all the awful shit you did,” Sevastian said, “you had some good things about you. Even as Gavin, you were amazingly brave. You would risk your life to do amazing things at the drop of a hat. Not sure why you’d give that up, right at the end, when you could do the most amazing thing of all. If you had the guts, that is.”