Gavin wondered how big the gap had been when Orholam had jumped it. Probably small. Old bastard.
Gavin walked over toward him. The sword was on the way. He picked it up, bloody as it was from the endless stream pouring past it. Gavin was exhausted. What was he gonna do? Hack apart the mirror, hoping it accomplished something?
He’d carried this damn blade halfway across the world. What had it done for him? It was as useless as he was.
He was sick of it. Sick of his own shit.
Without thinking too much—hell, he’d thought too much for his whole life—he simply threw the blade.
The throw was as pathetic and weak as he was, in body and in will; he couldn’t even commit to throwing it hard. He threw it sort of to Orholam, sort of at him, and sort of toward the edge, that it might fall into oblivion.
He didn’t even choose, merely tossed it away. But then, it was trash, like his plans; he didn’t care about it anymore.
The blade clattered and slid and stopped short of the edge and Orholam both.
The old prophet turned and looked at it, then at Gavin, then turned back to looking at the horizon without taking any more interest.
Gavin strode over to the old man.
The old man didn’t respond, so Gavin sat. He dangled his feet off the edge of the bloody tower.
Orholam didn’t say a word. Gavin was reminded of their days rowing together. After a long hard day of rowing, sometimes, a rest would come, and they would simply sit. In such times, there would be no chatter. Bone-weary, there was nothing to say, but there was a silent communion in the rest from their mutual labor.
As they had then, now in the cool of the evening, they sat together.
What did anything matter now? There was no rush. It was too late. Someone else was steering the ship. Someone else calling the cadence. A broken-down slave wasn’t going to change history.
Gavin was about to be cut free from his oar and tossed overboard; he was human jetsam.
In his dream of this tower top, Gavin had begged the approaching giant for more time; he’d wanted to fix things. Fix himself, he supposed, as he’d held his black-marbled heart in his hands, as if he could disentangle the living and the dead flesh knotted together using instruments as blunt and clumsy as his fingers.
The truth was, he was hopelessly broken, and time wasn’t going to fix him. Now he was out of time. But maybe he’d been out of time for years. If he’d had another century, he would still be himself.
But a stillness descended on him as he sat there with the old man. He beheld the horizon, and though he saw only in a bichromatic palette made painful by his recent vision of the sunset in full color on the other side of the glass, he was filled to overflowing with wonder. What was absent to his blinded eyes was yet there.
He could remember beauty, could remember how this gray-scale tone would correspond to a lemon yellow blushing to sweet tangerine. Velvet violet was stitched with subtle seams into the soft samite blanket of night, embroidered with silver points of light.
It was there, and he knew it was there, knew it was more real than what his eyes could presently see.
“What do you miss most?” Orholam asked quietly, not turning.
They’d failed together, Gavin supposed. Orholam had climbed up here, after he’d been ‘told’ not to come, and perhaps he believed now he was being punished for his disobedience by finding nothing here. His world had to be shit right now, too.
What came to mind wasn’t what Gavin expected, though.
“When I called down that . . . holocaust at Sundered Rock, I didn’t know what it was going to do. Not exactly. I mean, I knew it was going be bad, but . . . I came to, standing there, naked. The black just devoured everything. And that hot day turned cold. Bitter cold. Frigid. Even my brother’s body was cold. I couldn’t tell how long it had been—if I’d been unconscious on my feet for hours, or if the hell-stone magic sucked in even heat and it had only been moments.
“You know, I was the one person on that battlefield who should have understood what had happened, and I was . . . baffled. My skin was hairless in spots, but unharmed otherwise, but my clothes had disintegrated? I felt I had broken the world, like I’d cracked open an egg and something terrible had been released. But in that moment, there, among the dead . . . even the dying didn’t seem to moan. Or maybe I was deaf. I don’t know, but it was so still, as if a ripple of what I’d done was traveling out to infinity. Amid all that, I experienced this moment out of time, as if passing realms had locked here and the pressure had built until the earth heaved and everything fractured. Suddenly the landscape was changed, and you could only pray that the tensions had been relieved and that the aftershocks wouldn’t destroy you.
“Something had happened that was bigger than I could even understand . . . but it had passed, and these stupid, normal, boring-ass concerns came rushing back. Like: I was naked. And I couldn’t find my friends. And first it, it, it wasn’t even that I was afraid they were all dead or that I’d killed them. I couldn’t even think that far ahead. I only knew I was lonely. After all that? After this conflagration of magic the likes of which no one had ever seen or even heard of? No one cared if some guy on the battlefield was naked and his hair didn’t look right or some shit. But I was cold, and I saw Gavin had clothes and there—at the end of the fucking world!—it made me remember this one time when we were kids.
“We’d stopped on one of the little islands my father owned on our way between Rath and Big Jasper and we snuck out late one night and hiked up the mountain to look for this old ruin—which we’d been forbidden to do, of course. And we’d been going for hours and there was a sudden storm, and I’d left my cloak back at my room, and I thought Gavin was going to tell me what an idiot I was. He’d even reminded me to bring it. But instead of mocking me or hitting me—” Gavin’s voice cracked suddenly. He had to clear his throat hard. “Instead Gavin . . . Gavin hugged me under one arm and gave me his cloak. He said he was too hot. The damn liar. Asked me if I’d wear it home for him.”
Gavin cleared his throat, irritated. “He didn’t deserve—I mean, at Sundered Rock I was naked and stupidly embarrassed about it and he had clothes and was dead, and I, I just took them. It seemed really practical, you know? He didn’t need ’em, right? But I looked back at it, and I stripped the dead like a looter. I stripped my brother’s corpse like a grave robber. It was like I’d planned, you know, with Corvan. I mean, it was one possible outcome of like six: set a bunch of smoky red luxin on fire, come out as Gavin, take charge of his armies and pretend to be him . . . I’ve never had a plan go so flawlessly and so poorly.
“After that I used black luxin again, on purpose. To wipe out some memories. And I . . . what I was left with was my hero worship for my big brother. Like remembering that night in the storm. I thought he was the perfect Prism, that I could never measure up to him. I tried to be what I thought he’d been. And in the last couple years . . . I’ve seen and started to remember all the terrible shit my brother did. His cruelty. His meanness and fear. Some of it excusable because he was a child and scared and . . . and some of it not, not at all, regardless. And you know, learning about who he really was—seeing the truth about him? It’s been like losing him all over again. My family was shit, and I was shit, but I had a hero, and then I lost him for a second time. He wasn’t ever who I’d thought he was. He did some awful, awful shit I can never forgive him for. But at the same time . . . he wasn’t all bad. He was still the big brother who gave me his cloak.”