Journey Into Nyx (5 page)

“My home was beyond your infinite forest,” she said.

He smiled at her gently. “Beyond the infinite forest,” he repeated.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I believe you,” he said. “And I marvel at your courage, traveling so far alone.”

There was a long silence broken only by the pip of the songbirds and the rushing of the water.

“What did you mean yesterday when you said, ‘At the feet
of the untouched city. By the hands of someone I love?’ ” Elspeth asked. “Is that about your mother?”

Daxos stood up abruptly. He offered a hand to Elspeth and helped her up.

“We should get going,” he said.

“Daxos, I thought your mother died,” she said. “How could she be in the Despair Lands?”

“Come on,” he said. He stood up and held out his hand. “I’ll show you.”

They stopped on a ridge overlooking the Despair Lands where all the trees along the open edge of the forest had died. Daxos tethered the horse to a withered branch while Elspeth stared out at the lifeless expanse of black sand, scattered boulders, and desolation.

“Is this natural?” she asked. She thought of the sick ground of Grixis pushing up through the lush fields of Bant. Elspeth felt fear rising inside her, like a wellspring that could overcome her. Time seemed to slow. It was like an invisible weight had been placed on her shoulders.

“Natural?” he asked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“What causes the land to die and the trees to wither?” she asked.

Daxos considered the perimeter of dead trees along the ridge.

“This is new damage,” he said.

“Damage?” Elspeth asked.

“There should be an ethereal boundary that keeps the forest safe,” Daxos said. “But with Nylea in Nyx, it’s getting worse.”

“What’s getting worse?” Elspeth put her hand on her blade as if enemies hid just behind the trees.

“It’s the breath of Erebos,” he said. “He takes pleasure in others’ misery, so he fills the world with his own despair.
It’s the only happiness he knows.”

“Is this just here?” Elspeth asked “Can he afflict the cities? How far can it spread?”

“The Underworld contains Erebos himself,” Daxos said. “I’ve never seen him cross the rivers into the mortal realm. Before the Silence, his voice was the hardest to hear. But he can afflict creatures and fill them with his toxic presence. Both humans and beasts, like the catoblepas, can be agents of his despair.”

“What is his purpose? Death and carnage?”

“No, that is what Mogis desires,” Daxos explained. “Erebos wants everyone to resign themselves to misery. We call it ‘drinking from the cup of resignation.’ At its most mild, it makes people sluggish and cruel. At its worst, it makes them reexperience the worst moment of their life. They can no longer separate reality from his affliction.”

Elspeth scanned the bleak horizon. Across the field, she saw the black entrance to a cave on the far side of the field of boulders and black sand. Panic rose up in her.

“This place feels oppressive,” she admitted. “Desperate.”

“And we are only on the edge of it,” Daxos said. “Perhaps we should go back to Meletis. I don’t want you to …”

A flash of golden light from below caught their attention. Elspeth pointed to a dark figure stepping around the boulders. Despite the distance, she could tell it was a centaur. They were more common in Meletis than in Akros, and they often sold their wares outside of Heliod’s temple. This centaur paced in circles around the rocks, repeating the same endless circuit.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“It’s a Returned,” Daxos said.

“Those are the people who wear gold masks?” Elspeth asked. She’d seen likenesses of them on a frieze in a catacomb below Heliod’s temple.

“A Returned can be anything that escapes the Underworld—anything
that had enough consciousness to worship the gods in life.”

“Creatures really come back from the dead?” Elspeth asked in surprise. She’d seen plenty of zombies on other planes, but those mindless creatures hadn’t
really
come back from the dead. They had been ripped out of the grave by a necromancer. Because Daxos probably had no conception of a “zombie,” she didn’t speak her thoughts aloud.

“No one knows what death is really like in the Underworld,” Daxos said. “The gods tell stories of what it will be like, but only Erebos knows for sure. And he lies. That’s all he does. I’m not sure he knows how
not
to lie.”

“Do you think your mother might escape?” Elspeth asked. “That she’ll come back to you?”

“I don’t know,” Daxos said. His voice caught in his throat. “I don’t know why some of the dead come back and some don’t. And even when they do come back, they’re not the same. It must be a horrible existence. They have a sense of all they’ve lost, but can’t begin to find it.”

Elspeth stared down at the Returned Centaur, who had stopped his mindless circling. He stamped his hoof on the ground over and over. It reminded her of an irate child, and she wished she could take away his frustration to ease his burden.

“They don’t remember their lives, so they follow some forgotten pattern seared on their brain,” he said. “Even if my mother did come back, she wouldn’t know me. She would have lost her soul and wouldn’t remember herself.”

“What happens to their souls?” Elspeth asked.

“The soul is severed and wanders on its own,” Daxos said. “They become eidolons. It’s drawn to the magic of gods, like a cub clings to its mother.”

“Has something happened that makes you think you might find your mother now?”

“Heliod used to control my actions,” Daxos said. “With
his absence, he can’t stop me searching. And this is where I lost her. If she did come back, she would be wandering here.”

Now that she understood why this was so important to him, Elspeth tried to squelch her rising sense of panic. She put her hand on his arm. “Let’s do down and look,” she said.

“I didn’t know Erebos’s despair would touch you so strongly,” Daxos said. “Down there, it might feel even worse.”

“I can handle it,” Elspeth assured him. “And we’ve come all this way.”

“Are you sure that you’re all right?” he said. “We can go back to Meletis. I’ll throw you in the river on the way home.”

She squinted at him and tapped her blade playfully. “You could try.”

They picked their way down the ridge, slipping on loose rocks, and made their way toward the cave.

“The cave is a shrine to Athreos, the Boatman,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happened to him in the Silence. I don’t think Kruphix would have drawn him into Nyx. He has too important a role in the passage of the dead.”

“Do you want to go inside?” she asked when they reached the entrance.

“Yes, I need to,” he said. “Wait for me here?”

“No, I’ll come with you,” Elspeth said.

“I can’t speak inside the cave,” Daxos warned. “Erebos knows my voice. He wants to steal oracles for himself, so I must be silent, or he will send his agents for us. Whatever happens, don’t let go of my hand.”

Just as they stepped inside the cave mouth, it was as if the darkness reached out and engulfed them. The light from the outside world evaporated, and it felt like she was being crushed by the blackness. With no point of reference, she began to feel off-balance, and she gripped Daxos’s fingers like a lifeline. The air bristled against her skin, and suddenly there were a thousand voices screaming in her ears.
Without thinking about the consequences, she cast a spell that flooded the chamber with golden light. Daxos shielded his eyes against the unexpected brilliance, but Elspeth saw what lurked beyond the circle of light. Ghostly, skittering forms encircled them—the lost souls of the dead trapped in the shrine with no one to carry them to the Underworld. The forms of the eidolons were made of light and aether, but under Erebos’s influence, Elspeth perceived them in gruesome detail. She saw a woman, her body rotting like a zombie, stumbling toward her. An old man fell to his knees with his heart pierced with a javelin. Nearby, a young man with his skull crushed in lurched against the wall of the cavern.

Elspeth wanted to leave Theros. Immediately and forever. She couldn’t planeswalk instantaneously, but she fell to her knees and focused everything she could on escaping this terrifying cave. Once, her friend Ajani told her that eventually planeswalking would get easier and become less taxing. Her terror and despair seemed to accelerate the process. The edges of her being were like sand blown away in the wind. She was willing to hurl herself anywhere into the Blind Eternities to escape this horrific visage …

Suddenly she felt Daxos beside her, the warmth of his body against her own. He wrapped his arms around her and became an anchor to reality. When she opened her eyes again, the eidolons were just blurry images. The vision of blood and carnage that had accompanied them moments before was gone.

“Please stay,” Daxos said. “Stay with me.”

Elspeth severed her spell and let the magic disperse. She and Daxos ran for the entrance and crossed the threshold into the sickly light of the Despair Lands. They didn’t stop running until they reached the withered boundary of the Nessian Forest and the unconcerned horse.

“I wondered what affect the Silence might have on the dead,” Daxos said. “I was afraid that the dead might be
trapped without passage.”

Elspeth threw her blade on the ground. She couldn’t remain still. She kept turning in small circles, trying to find the breath that seemed to have gotten lost in her chest. She felt like an animal trapped inside a hunter’s snare.

“I’m sorry, Elspeth,” Daxos said. “Erebos’s despair affects you profoundly. More than most people. My hatred for Erebos keeps me safe from him.”

“I saw his agents when Nikka and I were traveling to Meletis,” Elspeth said.

Daxos nodded, but he stared at her with an expression she’d never seen before. It wasn’t awe, nor was it fear or expectation.

“What spell were you about to cast?” Daxos asked. “I’ve never felt anything like that.”

Elspeth shook her head. Even if she wanted to talk to him about it, she wouldn’t have the right words.

Below them, they saw a flicker of light moving across the Despair Lands. They stood on the edge and watched as it drew nearer. When she reached the base of the ridge, they could see it was an eidolon of a young woman with a long black braid. Daxos paled at the sight of her. Her form shifted with distorted light. It was as if the eidolon were blinking in and out of existence. She reached up to them with pleading arms. She beckoned to Daxos to follow her, but he shouted into the wind.

“You coward,” he raged, and his voice rang throughout the Despair Lands. “I will end you.”

Elspeth was frightened that, in his anger, he might lose his footing and slip off the side. She stood close by, in case he needed her.

“Is that your mother?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It’s a trick,” he shouted. And then he said more quietly, “Erebos heard my voice in the cave, and is trying to taunt me.”

Daxos ripped off the amulet with the glass asphodel that his mother had given him on the last day of her life. He threw it down to where the ghostly woman had fallen to her knees. Still she beckoned to him. When the glass amulet hit the black sand, both it and the eidolon evaporated into smoke. Elspeth and Daxos turned away from the Despair Lands, and together they led the horse away and back into the forest. They leaned together as they walked, and just like the first night they met, each thought the other was leading the way.

J
ust as Rhordon the Rageblood raised his hammer to smash the skull of the injured leonin, he found himself wondering about the afterlife. Where would the leonin prisoner go after he died? Leonins didn’t worship the gods. So would Athreos refuse to carry him across the river and to the Underworld? It was an odd thought at an inopportune moment. An exceptionally large and brutal minotaur, Rhordon was not accustomed to having his mind wander wherever it wanted. He was an oracle of Mogis, whose voice had been constant in his mind until the Silence. And it wasn’t just Mogis’s voice that had typically overwhelmed his own thoughts—Iroas’s voice had been like a constant echo. Mogis would rant and Iroas’s voice would counter him, and the ripples consumed Rhordon’s mind and even his dreams.