Pathos Of Lieran

Disclaimer: This story is the original idea of the author however the author has used AI Assistance during the drafting process. Manual editing was carried out after to ensure narrative adherence as well as proper grammar and pacing

Prologue

A seam split the air where no air was, and a portal opened between dimensions.

Beyond it lay a place with no name, a plane of white floor stretching smooth and unbroken into a seemingly endless void. There was no horizon. There was only the white, and above it a sky that was not sky at all but open space, black and depthless, hung with floating objects, shattered moons and slow-turning rings and things too vast and too far to name, all of them adrift in a slow and silent dance, as though the heavens had been set gently spinning and left to forget why.

A disc-shaped platform faded into being upon the white, round and flawless and smooth as glass.

Two figures stepped through the portal.

The first was a man in a fine dark suit, and upon his face a golden magician's mask, and the mask was not still. Its features moved as a living face moves, and just now they were arranged into an expression of open, aching worry.

The second needed no mask for men to know him. He was older, powerful in the way that mountains are powerful, wrapped in a heavy green overcoat, and from his being there rose a red and noxious mana, the red of Madness itself, curling off his shoulders like smoke off a pyre. His eyes were a sickly, bloodshot crimson. In one hand he carried a staff, and about him drifted his artifacts, and chief among them the Cosmic Orb, which circled him in a lazy orbit of its own.

This was Lieran. The world had a great many names for him now. Only one still mattered. The Dark Wizard.

"Please, Lieran," said the masked man, and his voice cracked on the name. "I beg you to reconsider. The Titan is not a foe you can vanquish."

"You have about thirty seconds before it arrives," Lieran said, without looking at him, testing the balance of the staff in his hand.

The Cosmic Orb drifted a slow circle and came to rest at his shoulder, as if it too were waiting.

The masked man looked at him a long moment. Then he bowed, low and formal, the bow of a stage-conjurer at the end of an act, and as he bent his golden mask shifted, its sorrow smoothing away into something blank and neutral, a face deciding, deliberately, to feel nothing at all.

"As you wish," said Sophon.

He straightened, stepped backward through the portal, and it closed behind him like a wound sealing over, and Lieran stood alone upon the glass, in the white, beneath the turning dark.

Far away, and not away at all, for distance means little to a portal and less to grief, a crystal ball on a tavern table caught the light of that closing seam and dimmed.

The tavern was one of the finer ones in the capital of the Kingdom of Varnalla, all dark beams and banked hearth-fire, and at a corner table, alone, sat a woman the whole kingdom would have known on sight. Her dress was purple, close-cut at the waist with a corset of the same deep color, and her hair fell long and black and carefully kept about her shoulders. Three snakes shared her stillness. One lay coiled at her throat like a living collar, and one upon each arm, tongues tasting the warm tavern air.

Before her sat the crystal ball upon its metal stand, and in its depths the scene had played out, the white plane, the glass disc, the man in green who had once been her husband. A single tear broke loose and traced her cheek and fell.

They called her Kalina. To the common folk of Varnalla she went by two names, spoken with equal awe. Lady Snake, for the serpents that never left her and the venoms she knew better than any living soul. White Witch, for the healing in her hands, the fevers she had broken and the dying she had drawn back from the door. She knew poison and cure as two dialects of a single language, and there were those who said, quietly, that a woman who could do both so well ought to be feared in equal measure.

But to those who knew the truth of it, she was something sadder and simpler. She was the estranged wife of the man who had become the Dark Wizard.

The air beside her table folded, and Sophon stepped out of nothing, and the gold of his mask caught the hearth-light. He crossed the floor to her slowly, as though each step cost him, and as he came his mask remade itself once more into sorrow.

Sophon had stood at Lieran's side for longer than most of Lieran's names had existed. Not kin, and not quite a servant. A powerful attendant, an ally of rare and terrible skill, a friend of the family kept close through every winter since the years when Lieran had still been a man with a house and a table and people seated at it. Lieran had since let go of nearly everything a heart can hold, warmth, mercy, the faces of those who had loved him. He had kept Sophon the way a drowning man keeps a single plank, for what he could do and not for what he was. And Sophon, who understood this better than any soul alive, had stayed all the same.

"My love," Kalina said to the figure turning in the crystal ball, and did not look up. "Why can't you come back to us?"

"I think we both know the answer to that," Sophon said.

She said nothing, and so he gave her the rest of it, quietly, because she had asked, and because someone ought to say it plainly at least once before the end.

"He is not out there to win, Kalina. He is out there because every road he ever walked was this road, and he knew it long before he knew your name, and longer before he knew mine. A boy in a shack asked a question no one would answer him, and he has been walking toward that white floor ever since, the better part of a lifetime, burning everything he passed for fuel. There is nothing left in him that could turn back. There is barely anything left in him that is still him." The mask's sorrow did not waver. "You could stand upon that disc yourself and bar his way, and he would love you, and he would step around you. Nothing in this world or any other will take this fight from him. It is the one thing he has never, in all his life, been willing to lose."

Kalina closed her eyes. One of the snakes lifted its head to her cheek and tasted the salt there, and she let it. "I could have stopped him," she said. "Once. I know a hundred ways to still a heart, gently, so gently he would have felt only tired. And I loved him too well to use a single one, and now the whole turning world will pay for my tenderness." She opened her eyes. "Bring him home, Sophon. If not the man, then the body. Do not let him end alone on the far side of a door with no one who loved him to see it."

Upon the glass disc, in the white and the silent turning dark, Lieran felt the count run out.

It did not come the way an army comes, or a storm. It came the way a wrong answer comes to a man who has checked his work a thousand times, sudden and total and impossible to unsee. The floating objects in that far black sky ceased their slow dance all at once. Then, one by one, they began to come apart, not falling but unraveling, as though the threads that held them in shape were being drawn slowly out of them, and as they frayed the black of the sky bled away with them and went red, a deep and sickly red, the color of a wound gone bad.

The white floor was the next to forget itself. It cracked from the horizon inward, seams of that same red light racing toward the disc, and where they passed the smooth plane broke into drifting shards and simply ended, the fabric of the dimension coming undone at its own edges, unmade faster than the eye could follow. Soon there was no floor and no sky, only the churning red, and the small green figure standing on the last unbroken circle of glass.

The void drew a breath.

And the Titan arrived.

It had no face. That was the first mercy and the last, because the mind reaches always for a face, for an eye to meet and a head to name, and here there was none to be found. It had no body at all. It was a vastness, a great spreading mass that kept no shape it would agree to hold, corrupted mana and raw madness churning together and pouring outward in every direction at once, and out of it uncoiled tendrils past all counting, black veined through with living red, writhing up into the ruined sky and down across the breaking floor, filling the world the way rot fills a fruit, from the inside, everywhere, all at once. At its heart the red wound itself into a slow and bottomless spiral that drew every light down into it and gave nothing back. This was AllNox. The Mad Titan. Not a being but a weather, not a thing but a spreading. The door that had opened long ago and never, in all the ages since, been persuaded to close.

Lieran did not flinch. The bloodshot crimson of his eyes reflected the greater red before him, a small mirror held up to a burning sea, and he raised his staff, and the Cosmic Orb rose with it.

"Every principle in this universe answers to another," he said, to the thing that could not be answered, in a voice steady as a man reading from a book he had written himself. "Fire to water. Weight to wing. Life to the grave. It was the first law I ever believed, and I have given everything I was to prove it holds even here." The red mana flared around him, hungry and obedient. "You are the one pan of the scale that has never had its weight. I did not come to vanquish you, AllNox."

He set his feet upon the glass.

"I came to balance you."

The Titan fell upon him, and the light of that meeting would have blinded any world lucky enough to be far from it, and in a purple dress a hundred dimensions away a woman watched her crystal ball go white, and wept, and did not look away.

How a man comes to stand alone against a god is a long story, and a sad one, and it does not begin with staffs or masks, nor with the crimson creeping into a good man's eyes.

It begins, as the strangest things so often do, with a boy who asked the wrong questions.