chapter Three
If Kylah had still been alive, she would have fled. She would have obeyed. As it was, she still found herself retreating a few paces until she floated over the grotto.
The Druid stalked her to the water’s edge, his hulking body swathed in the shadows beyond the reach of her dim light. In a swift movement, his staff of petrified birch cracked against the earth, causing that percussive vibration to ripple through her again.
It was the closest sensation to being touched Kylah had felt in almost a year.
She closed her eyes and let out a breath. “Do that again,” she murmured.
He didn’t.
Seized by the need to see more of him, she drifted closer. Her glow crawled up tattered, ancient grey robes lashed to an enormous body by weathered, knotted vines. Shells of swansea, whelk and eigg clung to where he’d fastened them into his hair from the temple, where warriors would have donned war braids.
Kylah met a scowl so intense she had to suppress an absurd and surprising smile. Never in her life had she been the cause of such an expression.
Why would it amuse her so?
The angles of his face remained inscrutible, hidden behind a layer of silt from the Allt Dubh. The rest of his hair caked to his head and fell down his back, contained by the same dried mud. Kylah searched her memory for what she knew lay beneath the mask. She didn’t have to go far. The image lurked at the surface of her mind’s eye more often than she cared to admit. Compelling, savage features carved by a primordial artist and defaced by some undisclosed blasphemy. Dark blue tattoos of a forgotten, ancient design covered the entire left side of his face, but were concealed beneath the silt.
The only clarity belonged to his eyes, which glittered at her with unmistakable hostility. It rolled off his impossibly wide shoulders with all the force of a physical shove.
“I’m sorry if my scream disturbed you, I thought I was alone,” she explained. “I promise to stay at a more pleasing register.”
He ignored her peace offering. “I know I’m not the soul ye’re after, Banshee, so there’s no reason for ye to linger here unless ye’re just entertained by disturbing my peace.”
Kylah found herself distracted by his white, even teeth bared in a disgusted sneer. She was, in all honesty, vastly entertained. But couldn’t exactly say why.
“How do you know you’re not the one I’m after?”
“I’m not bleeding, am I?” He rolled his eyes before giving her his back and slinking into the darkness. “Yer intended victim’s head would have burst during that wasted keen.”
“The keen wasn’t wasted,” she shrugged. “It helped me.”
“I doona care,” the blackness coolly informed her. “Now go away.”
Kylah drifted forward, hoping to find him again with her glow. “You still don’t know you’re not the one I’m after. What if you are An Dioladh and therefore immune? Like a Faerie creature or blessed by the Gods? You’re a Druid, aren’t you?”
“Druids are not Faeries.” He spat the word as though it tasted foul. “Nor are we cleric or Paladin to any god, contrary to misguided opinion.”
“Oh?” Intrigued, Kylah reached the back of the spare cavern and she started to follow the wall to the left. “You still could be An Dioladh.”
“Nay. I couldna,” he said shortly. She couldn’t pinpoint where the Druid’s voice hailed from in the dark. It was like he threw it off the walls and caught it from a different location each time he spoke.
“But how can you be certain?”
An inhuman sound split the darkness and the staff arced through her in a vicious lash one second before the entire bulk of the Druid flew into and all the way through her with astounding speed. He glanced off the stone wall with a heavy leather boot and, in a flurry of robes, used the momentum to twist his leg behind him in what would have been a powerful and devastating kick to her temple.
His boot sailed through her head and he landed with surprising dexterity for such a large and encumbered man.
Kylah’s hand flew to her chest. “You just… you could have…” Her entire body arced and vibrated with an unseen force and, though she’d not felt him at all, the impact of his intrusion was so potent she’d lost all sense of reason.
“Nay.” He said the word slowly, as though speaking to a dim-witted child. “I couldna.”
“But…” She couldn’t collect her wits. He’d just attacked her. A woman! A dead and lethal woman, certainly. But, even so.
His eyes narrowed as they traveled the length of her specter in a cold and calculating manner, as though searching for a weakness, any chink in her armor he could use to his advantage. Obviously unimpressed with what he saw, he lifted an eyebrow, creating fissures in the mud there.
“But… You are a Druid,” she repeated lamely, as though that should explain everything. The word had always held such mystic allure to the superstitious Highlanders, spoken in whispers of awe and fear alongside ancient words like Shape-shifter, Dragon, and Berserker.
“And ye are a fool.” He disappeared again.
Kylah blinked. “I’m not a fool, I’m a Banshee.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.” His voice now came from—inside the rock? That couldn’t be right.
She ignored his insult and pressed her ear to the wall. “We’re both creatures of magic, you have to admit that.”
“Wrong.” The rock told her. “Ye’re a creature of magic. I’m a being of power.”
Kylah drew back and frowned. The rock or the man? This had to be the most confusing conversation she’d ever had.
And the most fascinating.
Along the left wall, she’d reached the water’s edge so she trailed back to the center and started searching along the right.
And found nothing.
Disappointed, she looked back and a gleam in the black rock caught her notice. Embedded in the wall, just wide enough for a body to hide was an overlay of stone virtually invisible from anywhere in the cave except for where she stood now.
“Hello.” Investigating it, Kylah realized it must take a small miracle for someone the Druid’s size to fit. No magic, indeed. After following it, she realized the crevice angled rather sharply to the right, and since one couldn’t turn around in the space, one simply must angle with it and change direction before being dumped into a cavern twice as large as the first.
“Wha—” Kylah gasped, her mind incapable of processing the strange and complex stone and metal tools and contraptions displayed in front of her backlit by a roaring fire at the rear of the chasm. Abruptly she was grateful she didn’t actually have to blink, or her over stimulated eyes would have surely shriveled in their sockets.
A movement to her left warned her before a rock hurtled through her and broke against the wall. “Get… the f*ck… out!” the Druid roared. “Ye canna be here.”
“Why?” Guilt for imposing upon his solitude caused her to cringe. She’d never before been in the habit forcing her company on others, but then, she’d never had to. She couldn’t very well leave without learning more about this… this… she didn’t even know what to call the things in front of her. Kylah drifted toward a table of sorts crafted of stone and weighted with numberless round bowls of various sizes, colors and materials, avoiding the infuriated Druid. He looked more terrifying in the firelight. Menace roiled off of him. She could feel it in her Banshee way, inexplicably drawn to the strength of his rage.
Letting out a frustrated sound, he pulled chilly calm about him like a cloak. “Ye ask that question more often than a toddling child.”
Kylah didn’t like the condescension in his voice. “Well, it’s a simple question, isn’t it? I apologized for the scream, so why do you so passionately dismiss my presence? It’s not like I can upset anything here.” She slapped at a stone bowl and the Druid flinched, though they both knew it would remain undamaged. “Tell me the reason, and I’ll decide if it’s valid or not.” She leaned down to inspect the unfamiliar powder that glittered in her light.
“The why of it doesna matter,” the Druid countered. “My will should be deterrent enough,”
“Not to me.”
“Then I question yer intelligence.” He stalked to the table, hovering and glowering, as though warning her not to touch anything. An intimidation tactic, maybe? He was so tall as to tower over most men, maybe as tall as Katriona’s new husband. And possibly thicker, judging by the width of his robes.
Kylah wrinkled her nose and levitated to meet him at eye level. “I’m not stupid, I’m dead. What have I to fear from you?”
The Druid gave a derisive snort and shoved away from the table, “Considering what ye are, more than ye realize.”
What did that mean? Kylah looked over his shoulder to a cauldron left boiling over a second fire in the middle of the room. She looked up. The ceiling of the cave disappeared into the darkness. Where did the smoke from the fires go? How did he get the fodder for them?
She stepped around him and moved to an adjacent slab of balanced rock, ignoring his growl. This one stacked with smaller pieces of earth that varied in size, shape and color and seemed to be organized accordingly.
“You said that I’m a creature of magic, and you’re a being of power. What is the difference?”
He remained silent, but she could feel exactly where he was behind her. His body radiated so many complex, stimulating sensations that he stood as a point of reference no matter what he surrounded himself with.
“Is not magic a kind of power?” she prompted, turning to face him.
He put up a hand. “Patience, woman, I’m trying to answer in the right terms.”
“Which would be?”
“The simplest,” he said imperiously.
Kylah bristled. “You’ve yet to offer me a simple answer.”
He grunted and crossed his arms. “We’ve yet to touch complexity.”
She adopted his exact posture. “Well then, go on, touch it.”
His nostrils flared on a long exhale, and his eyes flared with something else, though the light was squelched as quickly as it appeared. “Magic is the manipulation of elements by creatures not bound by the laws of our plane.” His lip curled again, as though it couldn’t help itself. “Faeries, Demons, Shape-shifters, Berserkers, those who would call themselves deities and so forth. It is merely power we don’t yet understand.
“My power, Druid power, is gained by testing the elements of our Earth, our plane, through exhausting all variables and learning to control them for definitive use.”
Kylah nodded, though she wished she had swallowed her pride and asked for a more simplified answer. “What sort of uses? What do you seek from this knowledge? This… Control?”
He turned his head to stare at a row of strange tools all hung on hand-crafted hooks littering the far wall, offering what Kylah knew to be the unadorned side of his face. She yearned to uncover it. To make a study of it whilst his notice was elsewhere.
“Truth is what I seek,” he murmured. “What else is there?”
“Oh lots of things,” she ticked them off on her fingers. “Beauty, freedom, life, love, family—”
His derisive snort interrupted her. “Doona be ridiculous. Beauty is but an illusion that subjectively changes with perception and cannot be trusted.” He gave her a pointed look, but continued. “Freedom, also a perception, can be granted and taken at the whim of another, generally one with more power. Same as life, as I’m sure you’re well aware.”
Kylah flinched.
“And love,” he scoffed. “Love is an indefinable, variant weakness that can be used against you.” He vehemently shook his head, upsetting the braids at his temple. “Nay, I want for none of those things.”
Kylah couldn’t disagree with him on any particular point. Which unsettled her. All those “things” had been violently taken from her, by someone with a great deal more power.
Except… “What about family?”
A muscle flexed in his jaw, upsetting more of his mask. “I doona have a conception of what that word means, so I dare not speculate on it.”
Kylah thought on her mother and sisters, a stab of remorse staining their last interaction. Though she’d lived, for lack of a better word, the last year through a haze of broken apathy, she’d not taken for granted the omnipresent love and support of her family. She couldn’t always pull her mind from the constant fog to interact with them. But in life, and death, they’d always done what they could for each other. Though at times she had to admit, it hadn’t always been enough.
She closed her eyes, letting the pity she felt for the Druid overtake the welling of pain and terror that lurked below her surface, closer now that she’d called it forth in the cavern’s antechamber.
“No family?” At her words a blast of helpless tormented rage hit her with an almost physical force.
From him? Had to be.
But the Druid merely shook his head and waved a hand as if to expel the word. “But truth. Truth is constant. No one can change it. It just is.” His voice rose, every word perfectly annunciated. “Whether we believe it or not. Accept it or not. Whether we’re ignorant of it or able to wield it. It remains as is. When it is tested, the outcome is certain. Every time. Without fail.”
Kylah thought about his words. “If that is truth, then I believe love can be truth.”
His eyes disappeared into his lids a second time. “Aye, well, we’ve already established that ye’re a fool.”
“No we haven’t,” she corrected. “You’ve assumed that I’m a fool, but your theory has yet to be tested.”
He stared at her with a face void of expression for a long moment, and then blinked. “Let’s just agree that the evidence suggests.”
“Maybe so,” she shrugged. “But you can’t call truth until you have definitive proof after exhausting all the variables.” Kylah couldn’t hide her victorious smile. The first of its kind in almost a year. She thought she saw the corner of his own mouth twitch before he turned away from her, busying himself with the bowls.
She had him. But was smart enough not to say so. Which, in her opinion, was a strong variable in her favor.