The Light of All That Falls, page 88
“I really do have to go. Soon,” he said seriously. If he tried to make it to the palace, he wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t collapse on the way, or become too weak to resist being dragged back into the time stream. “Would it be all right if we just… sit here? Just for a minute longer?”
Ell gave him a half-amused, half-concerned look. She sank back against the wall next to him.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked quietly, squinting at him. “You look tired.”
Caeden smiled weakly. “I am.” His body was also a couple of years older than the one Ell knew—not enough for her to specifically notice, sitting here in the shadows, but enough for her to register that something was different. “I’m… struggling with something. A kind of crisis of faith, I suppose. I thought maybe you could help.”
Ell blinked. “Of course,” she said, sobering to seriousness immediately.
Caeden exhaled. “I know this is going to sound morbid, but… what would you do if I died?”
Ell’s brow furrowed.
“If you died?” she repeated softly. “If you died, Tal, I would grieve for the rest of my life.” Ell said the words simply, with an honest, quiet sadness at the thought.
Caeden nodded slowly. “I’d be the same if I lost you, too,” he assured her, a deep, sharp pain in his chest at the words. “But what do you think it would mean for your faith in El? In His Grand Design? I’ve been trying to come to grips with that question, and…” Caeden rubbed his forehead. “I don’t doubt His existence, but how could I continue to love, worship, even just accept a god whose plan involved something so precious to me being ripped away?”
Ell was silent for a few moments, thinking.
“As much as I’d like to think that it wouldn’t shake my faith… I’d be angry, too. So angry,” she admitted, an ache to her voice. “But I also hope that my grief and pain would eventually fade enough to remember that He gave us each other in the first place.” She smiled slightly and cupped his cheek in her hand, holding his gaze. “I know that’s easy to say, though, while living it would be infinitely more complicated. So as much as I would love to ease your mind here and now, Tal, I just… don’t think that there are any easy answers. It could take a lifetime to come to grips with something like that.”
“Maybe more,” agreed Caeden softly. He took her hand in his, squeezing it, his heart a stone in his chest. “I worry about the man I’d be without you, Ell. I’d fight El Himself, break His plan and burn the world if I thought that it could bring you back.”
Ell smiled slightly. “No, you wouldn’t. You aspire to be better than that,” she said, brushing back a strand of his hair affectionately. “Besides. You’d know it’s not what I’d want.”
Caeden looked away, emotion choking him.
“‘Be the man I aspire to be,’” he murmured eventually. “A friend of mine said that to me, once.”
Ell leaned in, putting her head against his. “Terrible advice for most people, but for you?” She kissed him gently. “Be that man, and I will never stop loving you.”
Caeden looked up again, into her eyes. That genuineness. That light and happiness as she gazed at him.
A lump formed in his throat.
“I’ll do everything I can, then,” he promised.
Ell grinned back at him, giving him a cheerful kiss on the head as she used his shoulder to push herself to her feet. “I know you will.” She gazed at him, caught between affection and mild concern. “Faris is waiting, but I can stay for a little longer if you need to—”
“Go,” he said, forcing a reassuring smile through the ache in his chest. “I’m just glad I got to see you again before I leave.”
“Me too. Stay safe in Dianlys, and we can talk more when you get back.” She kissed him. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” said Caeden, voice almost a whisper as he memorized her smile. He watched as she started to walk away, willing himself not to call her back. Willing himself to finally let her go.
“And Tal?”
Caeden’s heart felt as if it would wrench from his chest. The sunlight caught Ell’s hair as she looked over her shoulder at him.
“If you died, I would trust that I would see you again one day,” she called, strands shining in the reflected morning sun from the Crystalline Palace. “In a better world than this one.”
With a final, brilliant smile, she was gone.
He sat there for a while longer, the time stream tugging harder and harder at him, his emotions a jumble, replaying the conversation again and again. He wiped at his cheek, vaguely surprised to find tears leaking down his face.
Ell had been wrong about him then, but he could prove her right now.
“‘Be the man I aspire to be,’” he murmured to himself.
Then he froze. Thought for a long moment, barely daring to breathe.
He shook his head dazedly and gave a soft, disbelieving laugh. Asar would have found it funny, too.
Caeden finally knew what he had to do. Knew how this had to end.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes, relishing the warmth of the sun against his skin.
Let his defenses drop.
Let the gray stream take him, one last time.
Caeden wrenched himself free from the grasping tendrils of the river, crumpling to the stone underfoot and snatching at the thin strands of Essence that now flowed wildly around him.
The last echoes of the explosion faded as the shattered lines of power pulsed gold, red, and blue in a chaotic web, the dizzying colors of kan-modified Essence twisting and melting into one another, then diminishing as they decayed in the broken feedback loop of the Jha’vett. Red with flecks of yellow pulsed everywhere in the stone, the ground rumbling ominously beneath him.
Caeden gritted his teeth as his awareness sharpened, life flowing back into his limbs. The time stream was pulling at him fiercely here, so close to the rift. He dragged himself away from the center, every movement an effort both physical and mental, past the inner ring of columns.
The pressure on him eased, and he collapsed against one of the pillars, panting. He’d made it. Impossibly, he was here.
But there wasn’t much time.
He closed his eyes, heart drumming in his chest. Focused. Kan was simplicity itself to grasp here, only feet from the rift, but with the chaos around him and the insistent pull of time, it was still difficult to concentrate.
For a long few moments nothing happened, and Caeden’s apprehension began to grow. He took a deep, measured breath. Tried again.
Pain arced through him.
This was harder than his transformation into his original self. His body protested, resisted. Everything snapped and tore in violent argument, but he kept going, the sliver of consciousness that he was able to maintain focused only on pushing back the time stream, keeping him here and now.
His arms thickened and tightened, everything in his body suddenly leaner and harder than it had been before. A small, detached part of his mind noted the pull of the old scar on his face as agony twisted his expression.
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, it was over.
Caeden lay there, trembling, before draining more Essence—the last of the fading power in the room—and crawling to his feet.
Step by aching step, he made his way along the corridor and, with a final burst of energy, pushed open the doors of the Arbiterium.
He blinked in the garish red light for a second, looking around dazedly. After a moment he spotted whom he was looking for. A man staring in disbelief at him.
Himself.
Caeden walked forward slowly, each step an effort, though he tried not to show it. The Essence from the Jha’vett was almost gone now. It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was what was left to say.
“Tal’kamar. Aarkein Devaed,” Caeden said calmly as he reached the stunned-looking version of his past self.
“Yes.”
Caeden let out a long breath. He’d seen this so many times. He’d played the words over and over.
And yet right now, his focus gone in a haze of exhausted emotion, that memory was just a blur. All he knew was that he had to finish this, convince himself. Set himself along the right path once and for all.
“My name is Davian. I have used the Jha’vett to come here, now, to deliver you a message.” He swallowed. Davian would have said this to him, given the chance, but Caeden… Caeden knew it was the truth. Felt it more deeply than anything he’d ever felt.
Perhaps, ultimately, that was why it had worked.
“It is… something that you need to hear,” he continued softly. “Something which only a friend can tell you.”
Tal’kamar glared at him skeptically.
“The Jha’vett is broken. What you see are the consequences of it breaking.” He shook his head, a frustrating arrogance to the motion despite the consequences of what he had just wrought surrounding them. “But let’s say I humor you, stranger. What message does my friend bring that requires him to travel through time itself?”
“That you have been deceived,” said Caeden, calm certainty in his tone. “That no matter how much it hurts, you need to recognize that El is not who He says He is. You need to accept that you are on the wrong side of this fight… and that you always have been.”
“Is… that all? Is that the best that you have to offer? ‘Change sides’? Just like that?” Tal’kamar gave a cynical laugh. “I fear that you have come a long way for no reward.”
“That is not all,” Caeden assured him. “You also need to accept that it is your fault. It is your fault, and there is no undoing it.”
“You’ll have to do better than—”
“You alone.” Caeden cut him off before he could speak further, a spark of anger suddenly igniting at his former self’s attitude. His myopic, deliberate ignorance. “You killed your friends and loved ones. You destroyed a civilization and sent the scant few survivors on a path that led to yet more destruction. None of this can be undone. None of the lives that were lost can ever be brought back.”
“Enough,” snarled Tal’kamar, looking rattled.
“You slaughtered innocents. You hid behind the names Aarkein Devaed and El, but it was always Tal’kamar—always you,” said Caeden insistently. “You lie to yourself about what you truly believe, and you do it over and over and over every single day because you are afraid of admitting to what the alternative means.”
“Enough.” It was a clear warning this time.
Caeden kept going.
“You need to accept that your wife is dead and that she cannot be brought back. That Elliavia is dead and that you will never see her again.” The words tore at his chest but he pushed through the emotion, willing himself to get it all out. “You need to do this, because your selfishness has already cost the lives of more good men than there are stars in the sky. Your selfishness, Tal’kamar. Not your blindness, nor your arrogance, nor your good intentions. Your utter contempt for anyone but yourself.” Caeden said the words loudly now, furiously, begging his past self to listen even as his body’s remaining Essence began to fade. He needed to hear this. He needed to accept it.
“That’s not—”
“Listen to me, Tal’kamar!” snarled Caeden, putting every ounce of urgency and emotion and energy he had left into the words. “You are at fault! You and you alone! You shield yourself from what you’ve done, you justify and justify and justify but you know deep down that it is NOT ENOUGH! For all that you’ve been given, you are fearful and weak and cowardly! For all you have lost, you have not learned! It’s not fate and it’s not love and it was never, ever because you thought that you were doing the right thing! You know this! You know this better than—”
“ENOUGH!” Tal’kamar screamed, and as Caeden felt the last of his Essence trickle away he could see that the man before him was lost to his anger now. Blinded by a red haze of enraged denial.
It didn’t matter. Eventually, he knew, that man would change.
Licanius was out of its sheath. Tal’kamar raised it high.
Caeden smiled.
Acknowledgments
This trilogy has been an immense undertaking, and as it comes to a close, I find myself owing a huge debt of gratitude to the people who have made its completion and success possible.
First and foremost, thanks go once again to my wife, Sonja. A lot’s changed in our lives since I started writing this series, but one thing that hasn’t is her practical and emotional support—first of a dream I wanted to pursue, and then of a job that can at times be all-consuming. Her contribution to the success of this trilogy truly cannot be overstated, and I am thankful for her and her involvement every day.
Next, to my editors at Orbit, Priyanka and James, who have helped hone this book (and the series in general) so much. Priyanka has had the unenviable task of jumping into this series at the end of what is quite a complex story, but her insights have proven immensely valuable, and I’ve been delighted that her suggestions have meshed so well with my own vision for the book.
As always, a huge thanks to my awesome agent, Paul Lucas, who continues to be utterly invaluable in navigating the business side of this industry. I have absolutely no doubt that I would be in a far inferior position in my career right now without his hard work and advice.
Thank you as well to all my beta readers from throughout the series. These are big, complex books, and reading the earliest versions of them—trying to decide what’s working and what’s not, picking up inconsistencies, and constantly having to separate time-travel twists from stupid mistakes—I suspect can end up being more chore than fun. It’s hard to express just how much I appreciate everyone who was willing to contribute to that process.
Last but certainly not least, a massive thank you to all of you who have taken the time to read the Licanius Trilogy. I know that starting a big series like this, especially from a first-time author, is a risk: you’re committing a huge chunk of your entertainment time to what’s basically an unknown quantity. That so many of you have done so—showing so much enthusiasm and support along the way—has genuinely, measurably changed my life for the better. I will be forever grateful.
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Author’s Note
Aelric and Dezia
To answer a common question that arose during beta reading: yes, there is more of their story to come! I should firstly emphasize that this won’t be my next project—I’m excited to move on to writing something in a new world for a while, now—but it’s definitely going to happen at some point, and probably not too far down the track. For the curious, here’s some background on why I decided to shift it to a standalone book…
Years ago, Aelric and Dezia’s story line was planned to fit within this trilogy. When I started outlining The Light of All That Falls, though, I pretty quickly realized that the size and scope of what I wanted to do meant that something of a rethink was needed.
The first, and probably most practical, reason for this was sheer word count. My (probably conservative) estimate puts the Aelric/Dezia narrative at around 100k–150k words; Light, for reference, is around 280k. Combine those numbers and you get something impractically large, especially for print… which means that if I had gone ahead and included it, the trilogy would almost certainly have ended up extending to four books.
Which, of course, would have just forced everyone to wait another year or two for the conclusion you’ve (presumably) just read.
While I think that would have been unfortunate (and possibly unpopular!), I’d have happily made the call to do it, if I’d thought that it was going to result in a better overall reading experience… but there were some important artistic reasons for the decision, too. Introducing new points of view midway through a story sort of dampens the pace by default; time has to be spent getting comfortable with a character’s internal dialogue, and as a reader, you generally aren’t as invested in them for a while—if ever—compared to more familiar faces. On top of that, the main setting (Nesk) in this instance is an entirely different country and culture, and the extra world-building needed to do that justice would almost certainly have affected the pacing even further.
All of this, I think, could have caused frustration for a lot of readers. Slowing down the narrative like that—especially toward the end of the overarching story—may have ended up feeling like filler, even if it wasn’t.
Aside from that, the last relatively minor (but still important) consideration was that Aelric and Dezia’s narrative is one that I think will work quite well as a standalone. The consequences of their time in Nesk are obviously significant, but their story just isn’t as intimately tied to the larger plot as it is for the main four characters. So giving the Shainwieres a separate book (and thus some breathing room from needing to drive the larger Licanius Trilogy narrative relentlessly forward) will, I’m confident, allow it to become a much more fully realized tale.
Anyway, I hope that provides a little insight into the thought process surrounding this part of the story—and, of course, that you’ll be interested in the finished product when it’s eventually written. As always, thanks for reading!
—James
Glossary of Characters
Aarkein Devaed (ARE-kine deh-VADE): A powerful Gifted whose invasion of northern Andarra two thousand years ago resulted in the creation of the Boundary. Considered by the Old Religion to be a figure of great evil, strongly associated with Shammaeloth himself. Also see Caeden.
Aelric Shainwiere (AIL-rick SHAYN-weer): Ward of the king, brother to Dezia. A talented swordsman who, for political reasons, deliberately lost the most recent final of the Song of Swords held in Desriel. Left Ilin Illan to deal with his disgruntled financial backers.
Aelrith (AIL-rith)/The Watcher: One of the sha’teth, who was once commonly seen by Shadows in the Sanctuary. Now deceased.
