The Truth of Things Unseen

The Paths of the Shadow

The Paths of the Shadow are narrow and winding

Close are the ways of the Unsunn’d Plains

The Paths of the Shadow are not for the finding

But find them he does, to the dark of the Flame.

Taliette’s brown gold hair tumbled over her shoulder. There was a little sway in her walk and a little curve in her smile when she turned to look at him.

She was still hollow. The broken place in her chest where her heart should have been was naked as the void.

"Just a little further, Esten," She called back. "Be brave, for your father."

Her voice was plain and clear. Her leather armour hugged the curves of her. She walked like a cat, easy and comfortable across the grass, head up, aware of everything. She turned, and she was staring right back at him, at his face, at his eyes. Almost as though she could see through the seeming that mother had laid on him when he was small. Down to the secret truth that no one must ever know. The truth of things unseen.

"Where are we going?"

"I need you to open the gate for me, Esten. Can you do that?"

The gate. Never in his life had he opened the gate. Even leaving his room made his heart tremble. Trapped, fighting inside his chest. Rats in his guts. To open the gate was worse than drowning. Worse than being bound and slipped headfirst down into a pipe.

For his father. He would be brave for his father.

He raised his hand to the place on the wall, and it became wood beneath his touch. He pressed the latch, and it yielded to him. The darkness churned in the passageway that led through the wall. Beyond was the wildwood.

The trees were looming towers, full of movement. They thrashed their heads around like monsters. Animals leapt between the tangles of them. Birds clattered their stiff feathers against them. The patterns of them spiralled beyond his comprehension.

Still, the girl led him on. He did want to please her. She was beautiful, and when she took him by the hand, how could anyone not do everything she said? She smiled at him as though she were proud of him. Proud the way father never had been.

She cradled her bow in one soft hand, a quiver slung across her back.

"Why do you only have one arrow?" he asked.

"I don't miss," she answered, without answering.

She high-stepped over roots and fallen timber. Rabbit paths and fox paths. The bright sun span splinters of pattern into her brown-gold hair, the strands of it flicked as she beckoned to him. He stumbled after her. It was actually not so bad, being outside with her in the fresh air, having something to do, some mystery to uncover. The fear was still there like a lump in his neck, but maybe he could ignore it.

And again, she was studying his eyes, looking sideways, as though she could see the truth of them. The eyes that appeared plain blue to everyone else but to him, in the mirror, were every colour.

They stepped down onto the road. The hard earth was rutted by carts and hooves.

"We shouldn’t be here," he hissed, but still she led him on, out into the open, where he had promised never to go. Rushing into ruin, but the sun shone in the sky, the birds sang, nothing bad happened at all.

"Are you afraid?" she said.

"No."

"It's alright to be afraid. I'm going to show you something now that will change everything. Are you ready?"

He clenched his fists. Counted the threads in the pattern, the leaves in the trees. Counting was certain.

"I'm ready."

"Here," she said, pointing at a tangled place between roots, as though she were showing him a mound of gold and pirate skulls.

There was nothing, and there was something. And the something was also nothing. And his eyes, which had been blind were opened.

The world was broken. He looked around him and saw everywhere the lines of pattern leading to nothing. The world was not just broken, it was smashed, like a plate. It was in pieces, and he was standing in the middle of it balancing on a fragment of a fragment, and how had he never seen this before?

All the fear he had felt made sense. His life made sense. How had he never seen it? He walked a tightrope with death on all sides, and he had been blind! Everyone was blind!

And there was the girl, balancing beside him. Holding his hand, firm and certain.

"I knew you’d be able to see them, she said. Do you understand now? Why I had to bring you?"

He had no words. He was a tiny animal on a frozen lake, and the ice was melting and cracking, and he was in the middle of it, watching the world disappear, animals moving unseen in the dark, coiling water. The girl was still talking -- he could barely hear her words. She stepped away from him, back into the trees, leaving him alone and disoriented on the open road.

"This is what I really came to show you, Esten," she said, and the curve of her smile was no longer gentle.

Up the road, hoofbeats rang out.

"We have to hide," he said quietly.

He tried to climb back up into cover, but she pushed him back down onto the road. He had to get off the road. No one could see him. They’d know him at once, then they’d come to the ring, and everyone would die.

I have to get off the road." He said again, louder this time, but it was too late.

A huge black stallion rounded the bend, hooves pounding the dirt, snorting, frothing with the charge, and atop it...

"Father!"

Lenses balanced on his nose. Red hair streaming out behind him. A little satchel slung over his shoulder.

"Esten! What are you doing out here? There are men on the road!"

And then there was an arrow.

Time seemed to slow. The arrow passed by Esten as though in a dream. Black metal, black wood. Crow feathers flickering. He felt the pattern of the road and the trees and the wind, and he knew where the arrow was bound and what it would mean when it struck.

There was a wet thump, and a moment later a splash. Taliette stepped onto the road and the horse was rearing up, and father was falling, falling down onto the cobbles, and she was on him, grinning with white teeth.

Esten watched her straddle his father, grip the arrow shaft that protruded from father’s chest. The muscles tensed in her arm, the ripple of muscle across the back, the fingers wrapped around the black wood, tension, and she ripped the barb back out again.

Blood sprayed into the air, coating the underside of the leaves, splattering Taliette’s smile.

"Father!" He screamed. "Father!" The hole in the older man’s chest was huge and ragged. Pink foam bubbled from the mouth.

Esten leapt at Taliette, but she twisted to the side and slammed him into the floor. She punched him in the head with fists like little hammers, once, twice, again, again. The strength went out of him. She was dragging him off towards the awful no space at the base of the tree.

He had no words for her. He could hear the sounds of air escaping from his father’s chest. He could hear her whispering in his ear. Crawling forever, trapped, arms pinned, forever alone.

Here was the empty space beneath the tree. She pressed him down into it, hissing in his ear.

He had no way to know how long he lay there in the dark, shivering and sobbing. The weave gripped him tight around his shoulders. His arms were crushed up to his face. There was no light, no sound, no colour. No darkness even. Just time and the itch of salt tears drying across his face.

In his mind, he saw the fountain of blood, the misty trees, Taliette standing in the middle of it, the broken world turning about her.

He had always seen the flaws in the Pattern. He realised this now. Since Mother had laid the glam'ring across his face, they had been muted, but some part of him had seen them, and so he had hated the grass and the trees, staying always in his cot in the dark of the Rook where there were none.

Now here he was, in the most terrifying place, and yet it was dark, and it was quiet, and he felt no fear, only stillness.

He began to crawl.

In front of him, he felt space. He could feel the threads of it, sense the pattern. Time was a river. Truth was an illusion. All of it slipped by.

Finally, here was the pattern beneath the pattern laid out around him. The complex canvas on which the world was painted. There was nothing to see, but the pattern could be sensed, endless. He could stop and rest in it. But somewhere, Father was bleeding, and Taliette was swaggering back to the ring wall, and Fen and Llan and Mother did not know what she was, and so he crawled on.

Time disappeared. The mousehole no longer hemmed him in. It opened into a space wider than worlds. He swam through it, pulling it into him.

Somewhere below, he thought he saw a great gate and a woman standing atop it with a cold light in her hair and a faded rose gripped in fists that were nothing but bones, and the Night King billowing and huge beside her and all the host of the dead, swaying, waiting for the gate to be opened.

The woman looked up at him and met his gaze. He jerked his head back, and the vision was gone. He crawled on. Time passed. He was not hungry or thirsty. He felt nothing, saw nothing, wrapped in eternity like a cloak.

And then, somewhere in the distance, there was light and warmth, but it was not the light of the sun. It was a dark light, a darkling flame.

He feared it, but it was at the source of all things, so he swam towards it.

"Esten."

A soft voice calling his name. A little to the left, he turned, pulling himself through the weave, careful not to get stuck. He wanted to find the voice. More than anything he wanted it.

"Esten."

Louder now and closer, and the dark light growing brighter. The voice drew him onward through the pattern of the world-weave like a lighthouse guiding a ship through the storm.

"Esten!"

He pushed through the final threads and saw - horror.

It was a fire, as big and tall as a tree, dark and light at the same time. A fire that illuminated everything, burning in the dark of the nothing. But the horror was not the fire. It was the thing that burned within.

"Esten!"

The voice was no longer soft and gentle, it was a crackling wail, torn from the lips of the girl bound in the center of the inferno. Her skin black and charred, reforming, burning away again, her eyes shrunken, at once blue again, and then immediately shrivelled and dried like raisins, the bones cracking and falling open and regrowing and cracking again and again, embers spilling like rain.

She reached for him, but she was bound. Bound by thick chains that glowed yellow gold in the heat that tore at her.

"Fen?"

"Esten!"

His name was a scream of anguish on lips that melted as she spoke. Melted and reformed. Forever burning, alone in the darkling flame, burning for all eternity.

"Fen!" It was her, his sister, bound in chain, burning and burning in the heart of the pyre. "Fen! How do I stop it! How do I stop it!"

"You can't stop it..."

The fire burned in a great space, there were no walls, only darkness forever. He felt solid ground beneath his feet. He crawled towards the fire, reaching for her, but the heat pushed him back. Tears dried on his face.

"I won’t let you burn! I won’t allow it."

"It is nice... to see you." Her voice turned into a gurgle as her throat burned out, then reformed.

"Nice to see me?"

She made an awful wet crisping sound like bacon on the skillet. He realised she was laughing. Then the fire burned up bright and tall, and she disappeared. When it burned low again, all that remained was a black skeleton, fire curling between the ribs and out of the hollow eyesockets. Flesh wove itself around the bones, baking and crisping as it appeared.

"How do I get you out?"

"Esten, listen to me. A new name I give you..."

The fire roared louder. He couldn't hear her words.

"I don’t know what you mean! I don’t know how to help!"

"I must never know it is you. Promise me, Esten!"

"I can get a rope. I can pull you out!"

The sound Fen made could have been a laugh. A bubble of fluid escaping the char.

"You want to get a rope?"

"I have to help you!"

She stared right at him, eyes of flame melting from their sockets. "I new name I give you." Her voice was triumphant. "I name you Estefar. Estefar is your name. Promise me I will never know it is you! Promise, or I burn forever!"

"I don't know what you mean!"

Then the threads were drawing him onwards in a rush, tangling around him, and he saw the world and the pattern and all of time laid out and the glimpse of a glimpse of a way. The fire passed by him, dwindling to a point in the far distance. He swam up and up, and then the weave spat him out again on the blasted side of a hill where stunted trees and yellow rocks wrestled with the wind.

Estefar, she had named him. Estefar.

In the old tongue, it meant "Luck".