Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [19]
You have to do something. You have to find a purpose. You have to take a stand.
He was eighteen years old.
A sudden movement in the darkness to his right caused him to glance down the shoreline. A fisherman stood casting into the waters not twenty yards from where he stood. He watched as the rod came back and whipped forward, the line reeling out from the spool, the filament like silver thread. The fisherman glanced over and nodded companionably. His features were strong and lean in the moonlight, and Logan caught the barest hint of a smile.
“Catching anything?” Logan asked him.
But before the fisherman could reply, there was a noise off to his left, and he wheeled about guardedly. Nothing. The shoreline was still and empty, the woods behind the same.
When he looked back again, the fisherman was gone.
A moment later, he saw a tiny light appear somewhere far out over that water, little more than a soft shimmer at first, brightening slowly to something more definable. The light, diffuse at first, gathered and then began to move, drifting toward the shoreline and him. He stood watching it come, even though he knew he should move away, back toward the AV and safety. He didn’t even bother to shoulder the flechette, letting it hang useless and forgotten from its strap across his back. He couldn’t have said why. His training and his instincts should have made him react quickly and decisively. Self-preservation should have been his only concern.
Yet the light held him spellbound—as if he realized even then that it was the beacon that would provide him with the direction he sought.
When it was no more than a few yards away, bright enough that was squinting against its glare, one hand up to shield his eyes, it began to fade, and when it was gone, the Lady was there.
She was young and beautiful, her skin so pure and clear that it seemed to him, in the white cast of the moonlight, he could see right through her. She was dressed in a diaphanous gown that hung in soft folds about her slender body, white like her skin, her long black hair in stark contrast where it tumbled about her shoulders.
She stood several yards offshore—not in the water but upon it. As if it were solid ground, or she weighed no more than a feather.
“Logan Tom,” she said.
He stared, unable to reply. He did not think he was hallucinating, but he had no other explanation for what he was witnessing.
“Logan Tom, I have need of you,” she said.
She gestured toward the sky, and when she moved her garments rippled like soft shadows and revealed that her perceived translucency was real. She was a ghost—or at least more ghost than human.
“You are meant to be one of mine, one of my brave hearts, one of my great ones. I see it in the way you are revealed by the stars, as immutable and shining as they are. Yours is to be a path of great accomplishment, a path no other has taken before. Will you walk it?”
He started to say no, to back away, to do something to break the spell she had cast over him. But even as he made the attempt, she pointed toward him and said, “Will you embrace me, Logan Tom?”
In that instant he heard in her voice a power that he had not thought existed. It wrapped him in chains of iron; it bound him to her as nothing else could. He saw her for what she was; he recognized her vast, ancient power. The stars overhead seemed to brighten, and he would swear ever after that he saw the moon shift in the sky.
He dropped to his knees before her, not knowing why, just doing so, hugging himself against what he was feeling, lost to everything but her last words: Will you embrace me?
“I will,” he whispered.
“Then you will become my Knight of the Word. As he was, once upon a time.”
She pointed to his right, and when he looked the fisherman was back, standing on the shore, casting his line. He made no response to the Lady’s gesture and did not turn to look at Logan Tom. It was the same man, but this time Logan understood instinctively who he was and what he was doing there.
He was the ghost of a Knight of the Word.
“It is so,” said the Lady.
Logan