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now for some time, though visited once by a recently created ancient god.
Martel roams from room to room, from chamber to chamber, from porch to
portico, as he waits for the dawn.
Even you, last god, bringer of darkness, cannot bring the dawn quicker.
The rose color of the eastern horizon is only the first of a handful of dawns
since the re-creation of Aurore. Martel sits on the columned wall above the
ravine, dangling his black-booted feet over the edge.
The dampness of the dew lends a sharpness to the corel blooms that cascade
from the overgrown garden and across the far end of the same stone wall on
which Martel sits.
Corel. . . Emily's villa, and Kryn's scent. Can you separate them?
He reflects upon his twists in time, letting his feet drum against the stone.
Can you put them back together again? Should you? A dorle chitters with the
first ray from the rising sun. So much smaller than on Karnak the sun was, and
yet the heat was the same. Should be, since he'd planned it that way, but the
visual sense was different, a touch of strangeness, with the high sky a
greener shade, holding a hint of green, green seas.
In the early-morning light, the villa is still vacant, emptier now than when
the white marble had stood gray in the predawn darkness.
Martel gathers his own blackness and casts it, extending himself throughout
the villa and the grounds, letting time flow around him as he becomes one with
die deserted structure.
As he touches the stone, reinforces it, repairs it, he rejects time itself. As
he changes half the marble from white to black. As he wills the gardens back
into their formal states, and the emerald grass back into the lawns, and the
rose trees back into their guards. As he adds black roses among the white. As
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he hopes. . . If not, someone will be most amazed. His last effort is to bind
a corner of time around what he has wrought, letting the villa sleep
immaculate and untouched, until he returns. If he returns.
Once more, the raven spreads wing and departs, this time to cross the Middle
Sea toward the White Cliffs.
Atop the White Cliffs the raven alights, still a black bird that perches above
a smooth circular pool of whitestone. Three black footprints, inked into the
white rock, yet lead to the circular stone depression that resembles nothing
so much as a petrified pool.
A pair of dorles chitter. The lone sea gull has been gone for some time.
The raven stares unblinking at the white stone pool, at the black footprints.
The bird disappears, and a man stands atop the boulder. For a space he stands.
Then he walks down through empty air to the precipice, from where he looks
over the edge, as if to reassure himself that the waves still crash in against
the sheer stone face far below.
They do, and the water foams golden green, as it did before and will again.
Martel steps out into the emptiness. He gathers his cloak about him and is
gone, replaced instantly by the wide-winged raven he also is.
The two youths who have climbed the gentle slope from the upland meadows drop
their jaws open as they watch the transformation. The taller one, red-haired,
recovers first and sprints for the edge, peers over, and sees nothing. He
looks up and sees the raven beating into the distance.
The shorter, brown-haired boy has found the stone pool and the black prints.
The two look at each other. The shorter makes the sign of the inverted and
looped cross. They shake their heads and hurry back to tell their parents, who
have not slept well in previous nights, and who will sleep even less well in
nights to come.
Martel notes this as he flaps off, but does not hesitate. His destination is a
small cottage behind a larger home, south of the city called Sybernal, a
cottage he once thought of as home, or the closest thing to it.
Someone has kept the quince pruned, even planted a younger tree close by the
oldest, as if to ensure there will always be the same number of quinces. Which
means there will not be.
The cottage is as he left it days, or has it been years, ago. Except that a
black velvet rope is looped to bar access from either the porch or the front
entry. A small black looped and inverted cross is mounted upon a black marble
pedestal beside the pathway leading to the cottage. The cross is not new,
though its location is.
Martel extends his perceptions and finds that the cottage is empty, although
recently it has been cleaned.
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