“The stone outside, you carved it, filled it with your memories.”
“And more besides. The stones were not simply repositories for memory. They were also a means of communication, each one connected to the other. A useful innovation for a civilisation that spanned half the world.”
“All brought down by your sister’s husband?”
“Yes. Whilst I roamed the ice searching for the impossible, he had other work in mind.”
Vaelin recalled the cave paintings, the three visitors who became two. “Your sister died saving the ice people. You brought sickness and she healed them, though it cost her life.”
“She was a healer. She saw it as an obligation, though we begged her to stop.”
“Is that what changed him? Made him hate what he built?”
“Essara’s death may have darkened his soul, but I suspect his first steps along the path to what he is now were taken long before. It was the disappointment, you see, the constant dissatisfaction. He tried so hard to build his perfect world, a civilisation that would see humanity ascend to something greater. But people are still people, however comfortable their surroundings. They lie, they feud, they betray and however much you give them, they always want more. Without my sister’s influence it grew harder and harder for him to keep giving, keep guiding in the hope they would one day fulfil his great vision. And so, having proved themselves unworthy of the world he had crafted for them, he resolved to bring it all down.”
Lionen took a bowl and began filling it with stew, from the aroma Vaelin judged his liking for the recipe to be well-founded. “Tell me,” he said, settling back, bowl in hand, “did the Eorhil woman find the stone I left for her?”
Vaelin recalled Wisdom’s tale of her journey to the fallen city, the meeting with the shade of Nersus Sil Nin. “She did, with help from a blind woman who shared your gift.”
“Ah, the blind woman.” Lionen smiled fondly as he ate. “Often seen in my visions, but never spoken to. Such a comely thing in her youth, I should greatly have liked to meet her.”
“You crafted the stone that gave Wisdom her name,” Vaelin said. “Knowing she would find it one day.”
“The vision changes, sometimes she finds it, sometimes she doesn’t. I suspect the blind woman saw the need to give destiny a small nudge. I journeyed back to the city after my time on the ice, finding long-rotted corpses and destruction, a scene my gift had never revealed to me for it has always cast my sight far into the future. The black stone had gone and the memory stone lay shattered, though I was able to pull enough knowledge from the fragments to divine who had done this thing. I spent years amidst the ruins, lost in grief, diverting myself with learning the language and lore revealed by my gift. One day it brought a vision of the Eorhil woman holding a perfectly square stone fashioned from the same material as the memory stone, except such an artifact did not exist in this fallen city, so I made it. I recrafted the memory stone, chiselling away for the better part of a year until it was just a small cube, and into it I poured all the knowledge revealed by my gift. I hope it made her happy.”
“It made her . . . of great use to her people, and mine. For which I thank you.”
Lionen gave an affable shrug and returned to his meal. “What were you looking for ?” Vaelin asked him as the silence grew long. “Out on the ice where you took your sister’s body.”
“A legend. I know to you my people are little more than myth, but in this time we have our own tales, old songs from the days when the earth was young. I’ve seen much that would suggest this world is far more ancient than we could ever comprehend, a mother to countless wonders. I went in search of one, a being the people of your time would term a god, said to have the power to return the dead.”
His gaze grew distant and he resumed his meal, eating in silence. Vaelin wondered if this meeting was so familiar to Lionen he had become wearied with the repetition. It occurred to him that his gift was truly a curse, filling his mind with visions of a future so distant and removed from this time but holding a terrible truth, robbing his own age of meaning.
Another tremor shook the ground, stronger this time, causing the shutters on the windows to rattle and shaking Lionen from his silence. He scraped the last of his stew from the bowl and rose, taking it outside. Vaelin followed, finding him tying it to a length of rope strung between two dwellings. “It’s a long climb down to the river,” he said. “The wind will scour it clean. An empty gesture, but I’ve always found habits hard to break.”
“Did you find it?” Vaelin prompted. “This god of legend?”