The Gates of Night_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [64]
Someone held her hand.
“You are in yourself,” a voice said. It was musical, inhumanly beautiful yet filled with terrible misery. The woman’s voice, the one she’d heard earlier. “You’ve seen the past. This is the now. Only you can decide what happens next.”
The air was like water, and Lei found she could push against it. She turned in place, and a woman came into view.
A woman made from wood.
The stranger’s skin was polished bark, dark as any night. Black leaves enshrouded her head, this inky foliage taking the place of hair, and cascading down to cover back and breasts. Even her eyes were wood, though they glittered with bright dew. She was beautiful, and though Lei have never seen her before, she was achingly familiar.
A woman of wood … a woman of dark wood …
“You’re the staff,” Lei breathed.
“Once I was much more,” the dryad said. “But now, the staff is all that remains of me.”
“Why haven’t you spoken to me before?”
“I have done all that I could. My spirit is bound deep within the wood, and song and whisper are all I have left. Yours is the only mind I can touch, and I can speak to you like this only because you have fallen so far within yourself.”
“Why me?” Lei said. “Why can you only speak to me?”
“I have no answers for you, but you drift through the river of knowledge. Have you learned nothing from what you have seen?”
The memories rushed back. Xen’drik. Blacklion. The blazing pain of the brand. “That wasn’t real,” she said. It couldn’t have been. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but this is a trick. You—you’re probably Lakashtai, trying to manipulate me the same way you did Daine.”
“This is no dream,” the dryad said. “And it is not my doing. I am here only because of the bond between us. The serpent is the Keeper of Secrets, and these are your secrets revealed.”
Lei’s head pounded. No ground lay beneath her feet, and she was still falling into the endless white. No escape from these terrible thoughts. “No. This can’t be real.”
“Of course it is. This is the answer to the questions growing within you. Why could you hear the voices trapped in the dream-chamber of Karul’tash? How did you escape death beneath Stormreach? How did you repair the shattered orb? And how can you speak to me? In any other hand, I would be cold wood. But you can reach within.”
“What am I?” Lei whispered.
“I do not know what you are,” the dryad said. “But you are not human.”
“No!” Lei reached back, placing her hand across her dragonmark. Memories tore at her mind.
She spoke of her desire for a daughter, whispered the sahuagin Thaask. It was a subject of sorrow for her, one of great difficulty.
Everything is an experiment, her father said. All that is flesh must perish. We knew that from the start.
Just remember, I always loved you, her mother said, then her voice grew cold. Do what you must.
Lei’s dragonmark burned beneath her hand. It will take time to synthesize a mark that will meet all tests, but for now the outline will do. The pain grew sharper, brighter, until she tore her hand away from the mark.
“What am I?” she cried, howling her pain into the white void.
“You are Lei.” The dryad still held her left hand. “You are what you have always been. Nothing has changed but your knowledge.”
Tears seared in Lei’s eyes. “No. Everything. Everything I thought … my mark … do I even have parents? Am I even alive?”
The dryad slapped her.
It was a gentle blow, cushioned by the thick air or liquid that surrounded them. But it still came as a shock.
“You think you know loss? I have lost more than you can imagine. My world was torn from me. And when I thought I was at my lowest point, when I thought I had nothing more to lose, I was bound to this staff, a prisoner in the last fragment of my beautiful tree. Once my voice shaped the night, and now I am but a whisper. So your illusions have been stripped from you. You have life. You have love, if