5000

“Shelta.”

Kevriel glanced up at his adoptive father, who had uttered the isle’s name as if it were a vision from a storybook. “Shelta indeed,” he attested.

Gorovan kept his gaze of auburn brick fixed on the high walls of white stone, atop their bed of black rock rising from the sea. “It’s been so long since last I saw this place.”

“I’d bet it hasn’t changed?” Kevriel reckoned.

Gorovan’s knuckles whitened on the deck’s rail. “It never changes.”

Kevriel looked down at the open letter in his hands. “It may well be the only thing.”

The small crew of the small craft set about preparing to make harbor. Kevriel turned to help them readying the boat, furling the letter back into a small scroll in his fist.

“Do you fear it?” Gorovan asked.

Kevriel paused and looked up into fear-filled auburn eyes.

“The change that you now know is set to happen,” Gorovan clarified, mistaking Kevriel’s silence for confusion, “after what you’ve read.”

Kevriel smiled, a faint and frowning smile that did not reach his raven eyes. “I do not fear it,” he asserted. “I just don’t like it.”

“You must know,” Gorovan advised him in a low and urgent tone, “that in the face of what is happening on Glorion, this is our only hope.”

“A sad day,” Kevriel pronounced as he handed the letter back to Gorovan and gathered up some ropes to moor the ship, “when our only hope is such a hopeless thing.”

“Would you rather have never read it?” Gorovan suggested, regretting having ever shared the letter with this boy—this boy who had, for quite some time now, been a man. “Would you rather I’d not brought you with me here to Shelta, to discuss it with your father?”

“This isn’t about what I’ve read, or whether you’d brought me.”

Gorovan rolled the feather-light letter heavily in his hand.

“It will not matter what I know, or what I say,” Kevriel furthered, hefting a thick coil of ropes on his bronze forearm. “You and my father will go through with this. There will be no discussion. Leastwise not with me.”

“Do you resent it?”

Kevriel paused in his movements, arching one brow. “What? My voicelessness with Father?”

Gorovan lowered his eyes, a little.

“I resent nothing,” Kevriel maintained, “although the many voiceless soldiers, who are set to be the victims of this plan—”

“Victims!” Gorovan exclaimed in protest. “They, Kevriel—they would make victims of us.”

“So we’ll strike first, and justify our strike as self-defense?”

“It’s not a strike. We are not harming them, or victimizing them in any way. We’re helping them. We’re helping everyone.”

“And men like Eldor? Claron? You really think they need this kind of help?”

Gorovan scowled. He most certainly did think so. “They are… their cases may be different. We can discuss it, all of us, once we are back at home. Safe at home, with a new weapon of defense at our disposal.”

“Weapon,” Kevriel echoed, nodding with raised brows and a pursed, sardonic smile as he began to move away. “Lovely.”

Gorovan parted his lips as if to speak, motioning to follow his adoptive son toward the other end of the larboard.

Kevriel stopped and turned to face him. His firm raven stare kept Gorovan in his place.

“Do you not think that mayhap, in trying to make these men become like us,” Kevriel hazarded, “we are becoming them?”

Gorovan did not think so. Then again, he’d never dared to think of such a thing.

The ship soon drew in at Shelta’s shores, where Crion awaited them, having earlier spotted the ship and descended the island’s high crags to greet his visitors at the small, low port.

Kevriel greeted his father curtly. He then told him that he would stay aboard the ship, along with the rest of the crew—none of whom had read the letter or had any clue what it portended.

Crion felt no need to ask Kevriel why or to try to persuade him otherwise.

As he and Gorovan ascended the steep cliffs toward the laboratory at the pinnacle of the island, Gorovan apprised him of all that had transpired back in Daerion.

Crion’s eyes were wide as windows all the while, widened in a mix of many things. There was a speck of fear, like Gorovan’s. But, too, there was a glimmer of excitement.

“Do you think Xor will come?” Crion asked Gorovan as they entered the lab. “To Glorion? When the general returns, do you think Xor might be coming with him?”

Gorovan shuddered, both with the sanitary chill of the laboratory and the dark chill of the prospect that Crion had put forth. “I cannot say. But whether the king becomes involved or not, his two sons are fearsome forces enough for us to reckon with.”

“And his son Eldor—firstborn, yes? Heir to the throne? You’ve not told me much of him. Is he as fearsome as his brother, then?”

Gorovan swallowed. “He is… he is different. In many ways.”

Crion led him down the central hall toward Lastor’s study.

“But he is strong. And powerful. As his father was, those many years ago. And yet…” Gorovan kept on, “…and yet quite different.”

“He sounds formidable,” Crion gathered.

Gorovan judged that he had best not speak of this formidable foreigner’s connection with Crion’s daughter. “Yes. He is. I fear… I fear him more than any of them.”

“Well,” Crion spoke as they approached Lastor’s door, on which he softly knocked, “perhaps by means of Lastor’s magic, there will be nothing left to fear in any man.”

Lastor opened his door promptly, his black-violet eyes avidly taking in the unfamiliar sight of this new visitor.

“Lastor, this is Gorovan,” Crion introduced before Lastor had needed to ask. “You may not remember him. You were quite young when last he came to Shelta.”

“I remember,” Lastor stated through a civil smile. “I remember who he is.”

He had been young when last he had seen Gorovan, but the image of that auburn hair and same-hued gaze was catalogued somewhere in his memory. Of all the images that his lambent eyes had witnessed in his lifetime, few had ever escaped his mind.

“Welcome, Gorovan,” Lastor greeted him with a tame bow of his head.

“Thank you,” Gorovan returned the gesture. “And how you’ve grown! Into a strong and brilliant young man, by the looks of it.”

“I hope so. And what brings you to Shelta?”

Gorovan inhaled and turned his head, instinctively and expectantly, toward Crion.

Crion’s eyes crinkled in a fraught and fatherly smile. “May we come in, Lastor?”

Lastor assented in one deep nod, pulling his door open and welcoming them inside to have a seat. He apologized to Gorovan that he had no drinks to offer; the laboratory had never been a haven of hospitality.

Gorovan assured his gracious host that it was quite all right—though in truth, he could very well have used a stiff drink. He had never much liked sharing dark, heavy tidings with young and vulnerable souls.

He had no idea, truly, just how much dark and heavy knowledge was already held within this strong and brilliant young man’s mind.

Crion and Gorovan told everything to the young genius, and Lastor’s dark eyes flashed like infinite churning pools of purple lava.

“And so,” Gorovan concluded, “we will be needing your…”

“The elixir?” Lastor put in.

Gorovan blinked. “Is that what you’ve come to call it?”

Lastor nodded. “So. You want to heal these men, these monstrous soldiers from Zoll Zora, of all their moral ills. In hopes that their new humanity will keep them from destroying Glorion.”

Crion cringed inside to hear the name of that accursed city, that accursed race, passing the lips of his beloved adoptive son. This was the first time that Lastor had spoken of Zoll Zora. Crion had feared, awhile now, that Lastor had learned about the empire in those old books he’d been reading. But he had been struggling to dismiss those paranoid fears of his. Lastor had never mentioned or alluded to Zoll Zora since that day when Crion had first suspected his new knowledge. Crion had been striving to reassure himself that, given Lastor’s silence on the subject since that day, his fears had merely been paternal paranoia. Nothing more.

In some sense, Crion was deeply relieved about these circumstances; Lastor now knew about Zoll Zora, surely and explicitly. But this knowledge had a context, and that context made it safe. Lastor would not have to embroil himself firsthand in the crusade against—or for?—Zoll Zora. He would not have to campaign on foreign soil. He could simply hand the vials over to Gorovan, who would bring them back to Glorion and work their magic there. Lastor could stay on Shelta. Lastor would be safe and distant from the messy moral war.

“You hope to make them pure and virtuous, by means of the elixir,” Lastor continued.

“That is our hope,” Gorovan confirmed.

Lastor smiled softly. “Fear not, then,” he assured him. “Nothing would be easier.”

Gorovan raised his lowered head, brows slightly lifted. “Truly?”

“Truly,” Lastor affirmed. “I can give it to you now, and tell you how to use it back on Glorion. It will be very easy.”

He rose from his seat, crossing the study toward the doorway.

“Though it may take us a bit of time to mass-produce it,” Crion reminded him.

“No need,” Lastor tersely contended. “The strain is viral. Virtue will spread like a disease.”

Both men were equally surprised, at this.

“I will give you several vials of it for your use,” Lastor told Gorovan, “though, in theory, all you’d really need is one.”

“Are you certain of it?” Crion queried.

Lastor cast one simple, gentle look at his adoptive father, which was more than enough to remind Crion that he should never doubt the certainty of Lastor’s genius mind.

“Well, then,” Crion uttered, “would you mind, Lastor, bringing Gorovan some vials?”

Lastor smiled and canted his head, his hand already on the doorknob. “I was on my way.”

Crion and Gorovan sat in silence in his study, wordless all throughout the several minutes till he returned.

Lastor came with a small coffer cradled like a stillborn infant in his hands.

“Here,” he presented Gorovan, handing him the box, along with a dark silver key, “several vials, and a strongbox for their safekeeping. Keep it safe. And keep it locked.”

Gorovan stared mutely at the coffer. It was so light, but weighed a ton against his lap.

“It’s not locked now; you can open it,” Lastor advised him. “You can look.”

Gorovan gingerly opened the lid and beheld the vials of liquid virtue. They looked like tubes of water. That was all.

Lastor informed him of the properties and powers of the elixir. Its contagion was not airborne, but spread via bodily fluids alone. If not direct ingestion of the liquid in these vials, there would have to be direct contact with someone infected. This contact could be as intimate as intercourse, or as simple as a shared drink or a kiss—saliva was as just as liable a channel of transmission as venereal fluid or blood.

Gorovan imbibed this information as he looked down at the vials in the box, but he did not feel that he was registering any of it properly. His mind was busied with other thoughts. Did the elixir really look like water? Did water glow like this, with sorcerous light? Did water inspire fear? Was water a source of hope?

“And there is one symptom,” Lastor added. “Once virtue is contracted, it manifests as a sort of telltale scar: a spot or streak of red on the right palm.”

Gorovan paused—this symptom struck him as particularly odd. So this, he registered. “A scar? A red scar on the palm?”

Lastor nodded. “That is what the records indicate.”

Since his discovery of the elixir, Lastor had been tirelessly poring over the prolific records that he’d found along with it, which detailed everything worth knowing.

Most of this knowledge was actually quite new for Crion as well. He only now realized just how little Lastor had shared, with the rest of the laboratory community and even his own dear adoptive father, about the details of the magic he’d discovered. Then again, no one had been pressing him to share anything. Lastor was reverently respected on this isle—and a large part of that respect had always required that he be largely left alone.

Both men sat and processed all these details for a moment.

Gorovan did not begin to ask, or even wonder, about the complex inner workings that underlay this science. For him, it was not science—it was magic. It made no sense. It was not meant to be understood.

Crion softly cleared his throat. He was about to speak, but bit his tongue. A part of him hungered to go back with Gorovan to Glorion, to watch the fruits of Lastor’s genius science magically play out. His heart had always hungered after distance and adventure. Now home, for him, was distant. And the adventure, for the first time that he could remember, would be happening on his homeland shores of Daerion.

But then there was Lastor—surely he should not leave Lastor here alone, in the company of the scientists, all of whom respected him, but none of whom quite loved him like a father.

Crion’s hunger for adventure, this time, might have to go unsatisfied.

He looked up from his hands, clasped in his lap, and found that Lastor was looking at him, deeply, his eyes of pitch-dark purple endlessly insightful.

“You should go, Father,” Lastor opined.

Crion was reminded that, beneath those purple eyes, the mind of any man became as legible as a storybook.

“Oh, I…” he began.

Lastor sat softly down beside him, laying a loving hand on Crion’s shoulder. “You want to go. I know you want to go to Glorion; and you should,” he urged him. “You should go.”

“Do you want me to go?” Crion asked, half-smiling.

Lastor spoke in earnest, though his eyes were smiling, too. “As I said. You want to go.”

Crion mulled this for a moment. Lastor was right, as always. He wanted to go. And what was more, he told himself, he should know full well by now that Lastor was a full-grown man—more fully grown than any man that Crion knew. And Shelta was a safe haven, besides. So long as Lastor stayed here, surely no dangers could befall him.

“But you will stay?” Crion surmised with audible hope.

Lastor nodded twice. “Of course I’ll stay. This is the only home I know. I’ve no reason to leave, and every reason to continue with my research.”

Crion laughed lightly. “Such a diligent and brilliant little genius.”

“You’re coming, then?” Gorovan gleaned.

Crion heaved a deep sigh, then clapped his palms against his knees. “I am.”

“I am glad, brother,” Gorovan expressed, his smile genuine, though subdued by many other sentiments and concerns, “and your family will be glad to have you home again, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” Crion concurred, though that had honestly been quite far from his mind. “I’m sure.”

There were a series of farewells. Crion informed his fellow scientists where he was going, briefly explaining everything to them. His departure was unexpected, but unopposed. He then bade a sad farewell to this boy, this young man, his most beloved friend and son.

Crion reflected, as he clasped Lastor in a fatherly embrace, that this was the first farewell, in all his life, that had been truly difficult for him. But that difficulty was offset by the ease in his heart, to know that Lastor would be safe here on this isle.

“Wield it well, Father,” Lastor beseeched him.

“Of course, son,” he vowed, ruffling the hair on Lastor’s genius head. “We are lucky—indeed, the world is lucky—to have this opportunity to wield it in the first place. And I will not screw that up. I hope to live up to the promise of the magic you’ve produced.”

“Discovered. Not produced,” Lastor lightheartedly corrected. “And I’ve told you, Father; it’s not magic. It’s all science.”

“All the same,” Crion accorded, “I hope to do you proud.”

Lastor laughed. “Is not the son supposed to do the father proud?”

“Well you, now, Lastor, are no ordinary son,” Crion averred. “And besides. You’ve already done your father proud a million times over.”

They smiled and shared one last embrace, bidding each other a final farewell.

“I will wield it well,” Crion sincerely pledged. “I promise.”

Lastor nodded with a deep and knowing smile.

As Crion turned and headed with Gorovan toward the ship, he reflected that this was the first promise in his life that he was truly set on keeping.

Gorovan handed the box of vials to Crion as they headed down the cliff.

Crion looked questioningly at him.

“You keep it. Please,” Gorovan entreated him. “It’s heavy in my hands, and I’m afraid that I might lose it, drop it.”

Crion laughed silently and accepted the coffer. “A silly fear, brother.”

“Is it? You tell me what would happen, if that box were to plummet to the rocky seas below.”

“We would head back up and ask Lastor for more vials.”

“And then I would drop those,” Gorovan posited, in a jesting tone now, in spite of his serious fear. “Repeat the process, till there are no vials left! Then we might need to mass-produce after all.”

Crion shoved Gorovan playfully as they descended the makeshift stair that nature had carved into this side of Sheltan rock.

Gorovan stumbled for a moment with a sharp and sudden gasp. As he regained his footing, he turned back to face Crion, gaping at him with both a grin of good-humored indignation and a glower of ill-humored horror.

“See?” Crion noted. “You did not fall. You did not plummet.”

“I very well may have!” Gorovan protested, masking his fear with a clumsy laugh.

“I knew you wouldn’t. I would not have pushed you otherwise.”

Gorovan huffed and shook his head.

“You are full of fear, brother,” Crion remarked as they continued down the slope. “More so than I have ever seen.”

“Trust me,” Gorovan muttered below his breath, “there was a time, once, when I was far more fearful than you see me now today.”

“And when was that?”

Gorovan paused. “Many moons ago.”

“And whence this fear? Whence all this fear that torments your once stalwart heart?” Crion inquired, his tone still playful, buoyed up by his excitement as he neared the ship below—seafaring journeys, far adventures and departures, had never ceased to excite him.

Gorovan did not answer straightaway. The answer lay inside a pair of bright brown eyes. But Crion had never known of that; no one had ever known of that. That unilateral gravity, the fact that it had persisted well past his childhood and all throughout his life, was a secret that he hoped to bring in silence to his grave.

It was a sad and shameful thing, and full of pain, for him. For many reasons.

And it was the source of all his fear. If he had never loved as fiercely as he did, with every fiber of his heart, then this heart would not be filled with so much fear. As it now was.

“There are many reasons,” Gorovan guardedly replied, “for fear. There are many things for us to fear, now, and many reasons to fear them.”

They were approaching the port. Kevriel could now discern the figure of his father descending toward the boat, and even from this distance, Crion thought that he could see his dark brows furrowed in consternation.

“Well. The magic in this box,” Crion uttered as the ground beneath them evened out, so they could walk abreast of one another, “will help us to get rid of all those reasons. All those fears.”

“That is what I hope,” Gorovan solemnly agreed.

“And it is what I know,” Crion assured him. “We’ve nothing to fear. It will be quick. It will be easy. And then it will all be done.”

Kevriel let both his fathers aboard, birth and adoptive. “Father,” he welcomed Crion flatly.

“I’m coming home,” Crion announced.

“I see that.”

Crion stopped in front of Kevriel a moment and regarded him in earnest, the coffer cradled in one forearm, the hand of the other arm resting on Kevriel’s shoulder. “So you know? You know what is set to happen—you know what is in this box?”

“Yes, of course,” Kevriel confirmed, his tone both wry and deathly serious. “A weapon.”