The Agency

Two parts left after this one. Yay! Part 11 will come tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight.



"Rowan! Rowan, god damn it, come back!" Jason's fists struck the bark of the Rune Tree until they bled, but it was no use; the portal that had opened in front of the Elf had closed behind him in seconds, and now it was just a tree again. Even the stone was gone. There was no way to follow.

Jason rapped his head against the tree and rested, panting, his forehead bitten by the bark.

Rowan was in there. Rowan had gone on alone--that couldn't be right. Why else were they all here, unless it was to go with him through the Gate? How were they going to get him back?

And how were they going to get home?

Sara and Lex had to practically pry him off the tree, but he assented to their wishes readily enough. He had to think. There must be something they were missing, some way they could reopen the Gate and get Rowan back.

"What do we do?" Sara asked, on the verge of panic herself. "He's gone, Jason, he's gone, what do we do?"

Jason pushed away from the Tree and forced his brain to climb back on the tracks of logic. "We wait," he said. "We make ourselves comfortable and we wait. He went in there to learn something, and we have to assume that when he's done he'll come back out, or bring us in. Whatever brought us here couldn't have intended to leave us all to rot."

"I still don't get why we're all here at all," Sara said. "Rowan read the incantation. I was just sitting nearby holding a flashlight. You two weren't even in the same county. We didn't even all know each other."

"Still," Lex said, "it does make a certain sense, depending on who brought us here. I am meant to be guardian of the Singer. You are carrying the Singer in your womb, Sara. I'm as certain of that as I ever have been of anything. It's my job to keep your baby--and by extension you, of course--safe, so if you were to come here, I was too."

"But why me? Because I helped with the spell?"

The Seraph looked helplessly confused. "I don't know. I just know that where you go, I go."

Sara plopped down in the grass with a tired grunt and rubbed her temples. "Great, because that's not going to get annoying."

Just then, the wind kicked up again, and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, as if a helicopter was landing in the clearing--all three stepped back closer to the Tree, Lex hooking his wings to keep them from being thrown about in the gale, and Jason shifted position so he was in front of Sara.

A shadow fell across the grass...then another...and another...and another.

There was a great rushing sound, as of...wings...

Oh, fuck. Jason knew that sound.

When at last the wind died down, the three of them stood staring, and Jason could hear Sara's heartbeat thundering in her chest.

"I don't suppose either of you have weapons," Jason said calmly.

Lex shook his head grimly and Sara said, "I was in bed. Do you sleep with a gun in your pajamas?"

Jason snorted quietly. "You're lucky I have clothes on."

“Maybe they’re just here for a friendly chat,” Sara mused.

As one, the four Seraph facing them all drew long, curved knives like the one the Agency had recovered from Joshua’s angel.

“Doesn’t look that way.” Jason cast a glance around the clearing for anything that might work as a weapon, but the only potentially deadly things were tree branches, and only to him.

That was when he noticed that one of the Seraph had a spear gun loaded with a wooden projectile, and a quiver full of the same hanging from his belt.

They all looked exactly alike down to the nondescript dark grey clothes they wore--just like soldiers, dispatched as a unit on a mission, and by the looks of it, sent by the same sorcerer who had sent the Seraph after Lex days ago. They carried the same kind of knives...and weapons designed to kill vampires. They had known exactly who they would find here.

That didn’t bode well.

Not at all.

“If they’re like you, they can’t take off from the ground, right?” Jason asked.

“No. Only from height.”

“So if we can lose them in the woods they’ll have to follow us on foot. All right. I’m going to keep them occupied, and you get Sara as far away from here as possible.”

“No way,” Sara said quickly. “We’re not leaving you behind to fight them all. If you want me to run I’ll run, but Lex can stay here and help you. Besides, those wings of his will only slow us down.”

Lex looked torn, but said, “She has a point. I can be of more use here.”

“Fine. Sara, as soon as you get an opening you make for the trees.”

“But how will I find you again?”

“I’ll find you by scent. Don’t worry. Just lay low and wait for me.”

“But--“

“That’s an order, SA-9.”

Before she had a chance to retort, the Seraph took a step toward them, raising their weapons with the robotic grace of synchronized swimmers.

Sara moved backwards, edging toward the Tree, while Jason and Lex moved forward.

“What’s the plan?” Lex asked quietly. Jason was surprised, but pleased, that he was obviously not afraid.

“Don’t die,” Jason replied.

The first stake whistled past his left ear, and after that, there was no more time to talk.


*****

The fabric of the dream fluttered like a curtain, and when it stilled, Rowan was no longer in a clearing, or even within view of the Tree itself.

He stood, instead, in a painfully familiar place, one that had not existed for years: the center of the labyrinth outside the Clan Oak Temple.

This time it was night, clear and cool, the sky above flecked with stars that he could see moving in a slow, stately waltz around an axis point that was, it seemed, directly over his head. The sounds he would have expected in this place--wind, birds, the distant songs of Elves and laughter of children--were gone, but the peace he remembered remained.

He still held the stone in his hand, and absently looped it back around his neck as he took in the view he had never expected to see again.

It was definitely the labyrinth he had grown up walking, but beyond it, all around the Temple, the trees were blurry, drifting in and out of solidity the way the trees of the clearing had at first. The Temple itself looked the same as it always had when bathed in starlight. Was the rest of the village out there, too? Did it still exist in dreamtime, or had his mind simply conjured this place up?

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and whirled around.

She smiled.

Rowan fell back a step, hand going to his mouth, the other reaching out expecting his fingers to go through her the way they should a ghost.

"Mother?"

Neneva's smile widened, and she half-bowed. "Son."

He resisted the urge to throw his arms around her; they had never been physically affectionate. Rethla rarely were outside their work, as their touch tended to affect people very strongly even when they weren't actively using their skills. Neneva had always understood that, and besides, there was something in the dignity of her office that kept a distance between her and everyone else, even him, even when he was a child.

"Are you..."

"Am I a figment of your imagination? Are you dreaming me? No, and yes."

She looked exactly as he remembered her, although more like his dreams than in actual memory; here, as then, she had her Winter coloring, her hair white and shining, her eyes pale silver. The land around them was not in that season--was this place, then, frozen in time?

"How can you be real? You died decades ago."

"No, I did not. Come with me, child--there is little time." She started walking out of the labyrinth, and he only hesitated a breath before following her toward the Temple itself.

"I was found in the forest," she went on once he caught up. "Rescued, alone of all the Clan, from our dark and bloody fates. For a long time I thought you were dead, as well--I had heard that the slavers took you, and I prayed that you would die rather than face such an existence."

"I prayed for the same thing."

"But this grace was given to me; I survived, and found a new home, here."

"Here in a dream?"

She paused. "This is not a dream, my son. The Gate is a dream, and the Tree is a dream, but this place is very real. The Jenai created it beyond the mists of sleep so that no mortal could ever cross its borders. This place, and this place alone, is protected, forever, from destruction. They can reach the Tree, but cannot pass through the Gate to our realm. No one can hurt us here."

"How do I get back?" he asked.

She frowned. "For that you must ask the Sibyl."

"Is that where you're taking me now?"

"Yes."

He walked beside her around the Temple, and up the steps to its grand double doors, but try though he might to see what lay past the building, there was only shadow, color and darkness blending into one another and bending around itself every time he looked. It hurt his eyes, and eventually he gave up.

"What do you do here?" he asked Neneva. "Are you Jenai?"

She laughed. "Of course not. I serve them, as will all who survive the genocide of our people. They will save us and the chosen few will come here to act as their acolytes. Your acolytes," she amended, with emphasis.

Now it was his turn to frown. "I don't want servants. Least of all you."

"That is not for me to say," she told him. "Now, through here...you will know her when you see her. She is expecting you."

She pushed him gently through the doorway, and disappeared before he could say any of the thousand things he wished he could have. At the very least, he wished he had hugged her, custom be damned.

Still...she lived. Whatever she was doing here, she was alive. He couldn't help but find comfort in that.

Rowan entered the Temple, his mind full of memories of what it had looked like in his youth. What he found was a bit different.

Rather than the main sanctuary full of light and color, he stood in a stone room, windowless, lit only by the candles that were massed around something at the far end that looked like a wishing well without a roof. The room was stark, without rugs on the floor or stained glass, without any sort of life.

As he approached the well, he tried to focus his gaze on the walls, and for a second here and there he thought he saw carvings like those on the Tree. They, like everything else, drifted out of focus the longer he stared, and his eyes began to water with the effort.

Beyond the well, something moved in the darkness.

Rowan stopped a few feet from the well and waited.

"Weaver," came a soft, almost ghostlike feminine voice, full of wind and shadow.

He didn't speak, but gave a slight nod.

She separated herself from the edges of the dream and came forward, her shape shifting as the trees had, until she became a tall, almost wraithlike figure, draped in layers of shimmering cloth that looked like a moth's delicate wings. A veil covered her face, but he could see her hair, pale and feathery as it fell all around her, reaching the floor. A faint silvery sound like bells or water moved as she moved over the stones. She seemed to float, slither, and undulate all at once, dancing like a column of incense smoke climbing the sky toward heaven.

She, too, wore a stone around her neck, hers hanging from a thin silver chain. She reached up with one hand, its fingers long and spidery, and lifted the veil from her face.

"I know you," he said.

"You do." It was a confirmation, not a question. "Many a long and weary turning have I waited for you to return, my brother."

"Are you the Sibyl?" he asked, even though he already knew she was.

"I am. Of the seven of us who were Firstborn, who looked into the face of the One and One who fashioned us with Their own hands, only I have passed in this same body since that day."

"So there were seven Jenai originally. How many are there now?"

"At this moment? One."

He started to question her, but she waved her hand, and drifted closer to the well. Her eyes were blue, a dark and forbidding color like the water before her, and he found he didn't like looking into them--recognizing her made his body tense and his mind feel something he couldn't name but didn't like. It wasn't fear, or revulsion, but it certainly wasn't love.

"Look into the well, my brother."

Rowan hesitated, and she gestured to him. When the sleeve of her diaphanous robe fell back a little he saw that there were lines running along her forearm that looked like cracks, and indeed, she seemed brittle with age. How long exactly had she been alive? If she was telling the truth, and she had really been created as one of the first Elves, it could have been thousands of years--or millions, depending on which myths one had read.

He hadn't come all this way for nothing, though. He stepped up beside the well and looked in.

She held her hand over the water, and its murky blue depths cleared. "In the first days, we were seven," she said. "Our children became the Secondborn, the Elves."

He watched. The water shaped itself into the bodies of seven creatures, Elf-like in appearance but godlike in power, able to bend and twist reality at will, to read the future and the past like a child's Rune book, to heal and to create as easily as destroy.

The Sibyl appeared, young and sylph-like, with laughing eyes and radiant skin.

"We were the manifestation of Deity upon the Earth," she said. "I was the eyes of the Goddess...the Singer was Her voice. The Weaver was Her hands."

The water changed again, and Rowan stared at himself...only not. He knew his own face, and there was something in the Weaver's eyes that he knew as his own, but the form he saw in the well was regal, with the bearing of a king, or a god. Where his hands touched, reality was transformed, in accordance with his will. Day became night. The dead drew breath. The warp and weft of the universe were held in balance.

He saw others: the Warrior, with her sword of truth; the Maiden, a child who made things grow; the Teacher, who imparted the wisdom of the Elves to humankind and to their own children; and the Shadow, rarely ever seen, but feared by all who didn't understand him.

The Sibyl spoke again, and he listened with half his attention, watching the scenes play out before him to her narration: "The Shadow was the Weaver's opposite, death to his life. He was also the Weaver's beloved. Of all of us, the Shadow faded first, and then the Maiden. One by one we were killed, or vanished. Only I remained, here, alone, for centuries, as I watched the Clans massacred. I chose a few to attend me over the years--those who were strongest, whose faith was greatest, whom I could trust.

"And now the end times have come, and we must awaken again. Long have I seen the signs, long have I waited to call my siblings and friends forth from the blood of the new world, seven of us to return, to remake what we once made."

"How will we do that?" he asked.

"When the last Clan falls, when war tears Mortalkind asunder, it will be time. We will reclaim the Earth as our own, and help the God and Goddess to scour it clean of the creatures that have nearly destroyed it."

Rowan blinked and looked up at the Sibyl sharply. "Wait...what?"

"So it was written, so it was ordained. The future of our people has been carved into these very walls. Read it if you will."

"Carved--by you?"

"There has been no one else. I have been alone."

Rowan shook his head and stepped back from the well. "You're insane," he said. "You're mad if you think I'm going to help you kill off humankind--and worse, just sit by and wait until the rest of the Clans are slaughtered so we can start fresh. That's not why we were created. That's not what Elves do. We're healers, not murderers."

The Sibyl might have laughed; it was impossible to tell. "Speaks one who has killed many, and will kill many more in the future. Speaks one who has killed his own daughter."

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't regret that," he said. "But I don't regret defending myself or helping to liberate Clan Yew. I've taken life, yes, but I've given it too."

"And you have a daughter now," the Sibyl replied. "A daughter who will one day become the Singer, and who you will bring here to reclaim her birthright, and join in our sacred purpose."

"No."

The Sibyl actually had the good grace to look surprised.

"I'm not bringing my daughter anywhere near this place if that's what you want from her. She'll be raised to love all people regardless of blood. If that means she never becomes a true Jenai, so much the better--and neither will I."

Anger choked him, and he looked around the room for a way out. "Send me back. We're done."

The Sibyl's face did not change, and she didn't reply. Instead, she waved her hand over the water's surface again. "Perhaps before you make a choice you will regret, you should see what is at stake."

Against his better judgment, he did as she said.

He saw the Earth burning; he saw the slavers attacking what few Clans remained and murdering, raping, and maiming the rest of Elvenkind. He saw humanity fall into chaos and the sky ripped apart by nuclear war. He saw the forests turn to ash, the soil turn barren as it was systematically raped of its nutrients, the oceans and rivers filled with the dung of factory farmed animals and the corpses of his people. Famine spread over the planet, and everyone he had ever known, or ever would know, died in pain, while he endured, immortal in a world without any hope, powerless to stop the inevitable.

The water changed again.

Now he saw the clearing beyond the Dreaming Gate. Four Seraph, armed and brainwashed into bloodlust, attacked Lex and Jason, who had sent Sara to safety in the trees. The two were strong, and Jason was a skilled warrior, but they were outnumbered, unarmed, and cornered.

Rowan watched, frozen, as Lex went down first, bleeding but still alive, his arm hanging useless and one wing shredded limply by his side. He clawed his way out from under the two Seraph who slashed at him with their knives, but both blades struck home and he bled, and bled, pinned back against a tree.

Jason was faster than any one Seraph could hope to be. He kicked one in the head, spun around, and threw himself back into a second's chest, seizing the knife and whipping the Seraph around into the first one. They came at him again, and he slit one's throat and dodged the other's knife in time to drop to the ground and plunge his stolen blade into its gut. The knives were enchanted somehow, or poisoned--both Seraph fell screaming to the ground, foul black smoke rising from their wounds, blood bubbling dark green and slimy into the sunlit grass.

The vampire tackled one of the two remaining Seraph, distracting the fourth from Lex.

"Go!" he yelled. "Find Sara and get out of here! I'll hold them off!"

Lex was too badly injured to argue--he knew he couldn't fight any more, but he could make sure Sara was safe. He pulled what remained of his wings tight around him and ran into the woods, disappearing into the blurry background in seconds.

Jason snapped the third Seraph's neck with a sickening crunch that echoed through the well, but he wasn't fast enough to stop the fourth, who leapt sideways, retrieving a spear gun that one of his comrades had dropped, and firing a wooden shaft.

The stake thudded dully into Jason's chest.

Rowan heard himself crying out, but there was nothing he could do.

With the last of his strength, Jason lifted his knife and threw it, a perfect shot--it buried itself to the hilt in the last Seraph's eye, and with a shriek of pain, the creature tumbled dead to the ground.

Jason toppled forward into the bloody grass, his hands too weak and unresponsive to pull the stake from his sternum. He lay on the ground halfway on his side, his breath shallow and wet, blood trickling from his mouth. A violent shudder ran through him...and he was still.

Rowan screamed into the vision, and felt his knees colliding with the stone floor, his hands gripping the edge of the well. "No! No!"

The Sibyl watched him in silence, her seamed face showing not a trace of pity. When he finally raised his eyes to hers, he knew his were burning with rage, and hers were placid.

"The Weaver had the power of life and death," she said. "If you take up your true identity once more, you can bring him back."

Rowan bowed his head until his face touched the cold stone. "And I'll be a part of your holy crusade."

She seemed almost reluctant to say so, but finally, "You alone can choose what to do with your power. If you and I must be enemies, my brother, then that is what we must be. I admit I have not foreseen what will become of us should you take the road of evil."

"Evil is a relative term," he said, his voice flat even though his insides were shaking. "What will happen to me?"

"You will remember. And you will become. This life you have now will cease to be. There will be pain, and sorrow, and one day you will die--in pain, in darkness. The rest is yet unwritten."

"Tell me what I have to do."

She didn't. She merely pointed.

He looked up at her one last time. "Hope, for your own sake, that you and I never meet again, sister."

Then, he bent his head and drank from the well.



© 2009 by Dianne Sylvan.