Tomebound

What can drive out darkness but light? What can drive out wickedness but purity? Ah-Ren detests darkness and loathes wickedness! As dawn banishes the night, so shall Ah-Ren drive out sickness; so shall Ah-Ren do away with pain; so shall Ah-Ren dispose of death for all whose faith rests in Him. His promises are unbroken as the promise of the dawn! Who can raise the dead but Ah-Ren?

-Gospel of Lucence, Tract 7, Lines 44-49

Claeloch Territory, Grackenwell

Beam chose a tall hill overlooking the forest clearing to spread her prayer rug. She knelt on the scratchy wool dyed red and drew in a deep breath. The sun shone warm on Claeloch that day, the promise of spring on the breeze. She pressed her palms together, closed her eyes, and offered up a prayer of thanks to her savior.

Five years already. It had been five years since she’d been rescued from damnation.

“Praise be to Ah-Ren,” she breathed. “Ah-Ren, the Maker of the Morning. Ah-Ren, the Light of the World. Ah-Ren, the Merciful. Ah-Ren, the Lord Above Lords. Blessed be the Bringer of Life and the Banisher of Death, and cursed be every false god who blasphemes against You. Blessed be Your word.” She prostrated herself on the rug. Then, raising her head, she looked to the sky and asked, “Will you light the way for me, Lord? Where do I go?” A whistling wind between the trees was her answer.

Beam drew up her cloak. She was fortunate that the sky was clear and the sun warm, but she needed to keep moving or else freeze. Winter was brutal that year, and she feared she would not survive the cold of the night—let alone the other dangers that came out only after dark.

But that was her doubt talking. She’d come this far for a reason.

Beam rolled up her prayer rug and secured it to her pack. She descended the hill and ventured deeper into the woods, marching straight for the morning sun. A thin layer of packed snow crunched beneath her boots with each step; it was the only sound from one horizon to another.

East, Beam thought. The dream said east. No—the vision. Ah-Ren wants me to spread the good word to the faithless in Grackenwell. But how? What do I do? A long journey lay ahead of her. In truth, she traveled southeast, and both directions spelled danger. Claeloch had a milder, more temperate climate compared to much of Grackenwell, with its seasons of torrential rainfall. Not to mention whatever horrors lurked in the Everswamp—she was determined to find a way around it, even if it meant crossing over south into the Zan Desert.

The Everswamp was home to the Great Deceiver. It was home to the Legend of the Bogman. She shuddered to think of the unspeakable evil that settled over that place like its unending fog.

Evil was the sort of thing that some people could deny, like spirits or the gators of the bog... until they saw it firsthand. Beam knew evil. She’d suffered much evil in her twenty-eight years, but never so much as her time in the brothel.

***

Beam was eighteen years of age when her parents were killed in a slave raid. Grackenwelsh soldiers made sport of riding into Claeloch to round up more laborers to build their castles, their cannons, their roads and trenches. It was always ugly. Sometimes it was uglier than usual.

Beam’s parents had died in one of the fires that Grackenwelsh soldiers had set during their raid. She found them in the dark of early morning sprawled face-down in their room. The flames hadn’t touched them yet—they must have breathed the smoke in their sleep, she surmised after the fact—but no sooner did she find them than the roof collapsed in a spray of sparks. She’d barely made it out with her life, her arm badly burned and her gown in smoldering tatters.

Beam didn’t even have the chance to bury them. For some reason, that was the part that stung her the most in the years that followed.

Her parents dead, her village burned to cinders and the land salted, Beam had gone town to town looking for work, but no one would hire her. The rich bought slaves and the poor could spare no coin to pay a wage. She had no land. No belongings. No family. Nothing but the singed gown on her back.

That, and what was beneath her gown.

“You ain’t got a name now,” the brothelkeeper told her on her first day. “Your name is Girl. Your name is whatever a monger calls you for the night. Got it?”

She had no choice but to agree to the terms.

She had no choice for years.

***

A noise got her attention. She’d been reliving the past again, but she was brought hurtling back to the present. It sounded like a wounded animal.

She ran along a low-flowing river toward the source of the sound. She heard it again, unmistakably the groaning of a horse this time—she was getting close. The winding river took her to the edge of a narrow waterfall between a tight thicket of trees.

A horse lay on its side on the bank of the shallow river not far below. Its head lolled in the water, a red gash along its neck, one of its legs missing; the snow along the riverbank was tinged pink with its blood. A closer look revealed a man lying on his back on a jagged rock—a spear sticking through his midsection.

His limbs twitched. From this height of the short waterfall, she could make out his jaw opening and closing. He was barely clinging to life.

That meant there was still hope to save him.

Beam sprinted through the dense cluster of trees and navigated the jagged riverbank rocks, down the sheer hill with shriveled weeds poking through the snow. She slipped once, knocking her elbow against a stone—she kept running. Time was of the essence.

She reached the bottom of the waterfall just as the man raised a shaking hand to his mortal wound. He grasped at the spear with quivering fingers, trying to draw a breath that wouldn’t come. Pink spittle dribbled from his lips. His face betrayed the slow realization of his fate with every pulse of blood spilling out around the spearhead.

“Do not be afraid,” said Beam. She set down her bag and yanked out a massive golden book that she held in one hand and opened with another. Sunlight played off the oddly metallic cover, dancing across each page she turned.

“K-… k-… l-,” he wheezed. “K-… Kill... me...”

“You will live,” Beam answered him calmly. She closed her eyes and placed her right hand on the open page. “Ah-Ren has so much more in store for you.” Moving her left hand to the man’s wound—he gasped at the pain, eyes bulging—she mouthed the words she knew better than her name, rich in faith. An ineffable tingling sensation shot through one hand and out the other. “Lord Ah-Ren, have mercy. Lord Ah-Ren, bring life. Lord Ah-Ren, banish death. We who deserve damnation ask for Your salvation. By Your grace alone do we live. Lord Ah-Ren, have mercy...”

At first, she whispered her prayer, but it grew into a loud crescendo. Her mantra became a battle chant to shake Death itself from its skeletal horse. The speared man dug his heels into the pebbles of the riverbed as she worked her miracle.

Her eyes burned and she opened them.

Little lights twinkled in and out of life in her vision. She could feel the warmth of the man’s spilling blood, thick and sticky on the palm of her hand, but she bade the blood return to its home in his veins. It obeyed her.

She ordered the spear to retreat from him and commanded the man’s flesh to close and leave no scar. She threw the spear aside and it crashed into the river, not a drop of blood to be seen anywhere. When Ah-Ren had finished working through her, the light inside her went out like a blown candle. She could see clearly out of her own eyes again.

The man filled with a much friendlier color than before. His cheeks were ruddy with exertion and the cold. He blinked, his eyes relaxing, his breathing slowing to normal. He smiled up at her incredulously.

“Have... Have I died?” he asked hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Miss, have I died? Are you Death?” There was a delirious look in his eyes. “I was wrong to fear something so beautiful and kind.”

“You are still in the land of the living,” said Beam.

The man sat up, sobered, grasping at the shredded hole in his tunic, tapping and poking and running his rough fingers across the smooth skin where the spear had penetrated. “This can’t be. Am I going mad? I’ve just been stabbed, haven’t I?”

Beam closed her book and the sound rebounded through the trees. “You were, and my Lord healed you.” She finally returned his smile. “Sit with me a while. I have enough food to share.”

***

The two strangers filled their canteens in the crystalline waterfall, upstream from the slain horse. Then they found a clearing and kicked the layer of snow aside so Beam could lay out her travel rug. They were far enough away that they could barely hear the waterfall now.

They split a thick strip of dried beef that was tough but pleasantly salted. Beam tore a hard bread roll in half with great effort, handing him the greater portion. She picked at a crumbling wedge of cheese that she’d laid between them, but her guest folded his hands in his lap, apparently worried he’d overstep her generosity.

“So,” said Beam. The woods were deathly quiet again, save for the whispering of the water in the distance. She tried not to look in the direction of the horse. “I think that experience brought us closer than most. At least for strangers. Could I ask you your name?”

“Suppose you can ask a great deal of me now,” said the man. He was shy to meet her gaze. Looking him up and down, he appeared to be not much older than her, maybe thirty years of age or a few more. He had light brown hair down to his shoulders and a patchy, unkempt beard. “I owe you my life, after all. My name is Peadhar.” He shrugged. “Afraid there’s not much else to say of myself that would interest you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, if it’s quite alright with you,” she said with a friendly smirk.

He smirked back. “All right. Well, I’m a simple man. A hunter. Born and raised here in Claeloch, not a day’s walk from where we sit.” He resumed his new habit of rubbing the bare patch of his belly to make sure it was still intact. “They were soldiers from Grackenwell. Holcort, if I had to guess—tall, well-fed, they were. I had the misfortune of crossing their path.

“I’d bagged a deer this morning. They told me they were here in Claeloch on official business from King Garrotin himself. They said my deer was forfeit. Seized. Property of Grackenwell. I told them I was willing to part with half the deer for a silver coin. Even let them pick the half.” He chuckled to himself. “They didn’t find that quite so charming as I did.”

“What happened?” Beam gasped. Then she remembered herself, covering her mouth. “I’m sorry. Foolish question...”

He rubbed the hole in his tunic again. “They butchered my horse first. Cut off one of her legs, then raked a sword across her neck. Had that horse for five years. Reliable, gentle creature. Didn’t deserve that.” He sighed, looking past the trees to the waterfall in the distance. “Horse bucked me off when they attacked her. Didn’t even have the chance to run. They speared me like you’d spear a river fish for breakfast—only they didn’t bash my head with a hammer after. They had no use or kindness for me. Just left me to bleed out on the rocks.” He looked at her warily, blinking, like he wanted to make sure she wasn’t a ghost. “And then you found me, Miss.”

She shook her head. “No. I was led to you.”

“They say a dying man relives his whole life before he passes, as if in a quick dream,” Peadhar went on. “Sees himself as a boy, sees the love of his life, their young ones. Never married, though. Only spent a few nights with women in my life. Don’t have any children, to my knowledge. My dog died a couple of years ago. I had no one else. Guess you could say I haven’t lived much of a life. So, when I felt that spear in my guts, felt that long sleep comin’ on... all I kept thinkin’ of was that horse.” He shook his head. “Don’t know why. Just worried she would suffer.”

“All life is precious in the eyes of Ah-Ren,” said Beam.

Her words unsettled him at first. “Right.” He eyed her suspiciously for a moment, then breathed a sigh of gratitude. “I’d be a dead man if it weren’t for you. And who might Ah-Ren be? Is he a king somewhere?”

“He is king everywhere, my friend. King of every place where the sunlight falls. He is the True God Refulgent.” She reached over to the dry, flat rock where she’d placed her book and stroked it down the binding like a lounging cat. “He speaks to me. I am Tomebound to the Gospel of Lucence, and through it, Ah-Ren grants me the power to work miracles. To open the heart. To heal the sick. Even to save the life of a dying man.”

Beam could practically see the sudden surge of reverence that swelled in Peadhar in that moment. He rose from his sitting position on the rug so he could bend his knee to her. “If Ah-Ren is your god,” he said, “and He granted me this second chance at life, then I owe myself to Him.” He bowed his head solemnly. “I did nothing with my life before it was almost taken from me. I can’t make that mistake again.” Then he looked up at her with pleading eyes. “What must a man do to follow Ah-Ren?”

“Do you believe?” she asked him.

Peadhar nodded fervently. “I believe. Yes, I believe!”

“Then you have already taken the first and greatest step.” Beam returned the Gospel of Lucence to the special compartment in her bag. “He has rescued you just as He rescued me.”

“Were you at death’s door, too?”

“Oh, yes. In my own way.” She blinked away bitter memories of the past. “It doesn't matter anymore. We were worthless, deserving of damnation... but Ah-Ren has saved us both.”

Peadhar put a hand to his forehead as if he’d made a fool of himself. “Thousand apologies, Miss. I’ve accepted your healing, eaten your food... But I never once thanked you. What did your parents name their blessing of a child? Would you tell me that?”

“I don’t remember,” Beam answered truthfully. “I was given a new name when I was saved. Beam.” She smiled a benevolent smile, feeling a familiar weightlessness in her chest, enough to make her feel as though she could fly. This moment felt so carefully ordained, so tailored just for her, yet just for him, too. Shadows of a grander plan beyond her comprehension. “You deserve a new name as well. You will be... Luster.”

“So I am,” said the man. “Thank you, Lady Beam. I can never repay you for what you’ve done for me this day. Luster...” He said it a few more times under his breath. He seemed to turn the name over in his mouth, enjoying the feel of it. “And what would the True God Refulgent have Luster do, Lady Beam?”

The near-silent stream caught her eye, scintillations of the midday sun playing across the pristine water. “There are false gods in this world, Luster,” she told him. “Falsehoods to be silenced. Idols to be torn down. Only Ah-Ren can do this, through us. Everything we do is for His glory. It’s written in the Gospel of Lucence: I have prepared a way for you. Now you will prepare the world for Me.”

Luster stood up straight with his hands at his sides. “Then where shall we go, my lady? To prepare the world, I mean.”

She sighed peacefully. “The Lord will light our way.”