Ivy League Illusion, Part 19
The Crone
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From what I could tell, the newcomer had a surprising amount of power—much more so than anyone I summoned, particularly by accident, should have. But the shadowy figure somehow drew power from the blackthorn, which in turn drew power from the unnatural soil of this place.
“Who…who are you?” I asked, trying to sound commanding but only managing a tone that made me sound as if I was ready to turn and run—which I was. But I had no choice but to wait and see what would come of my mistake.
Carlos, Susan, and Fjalar all looked just as alarmed as I was, but they couldn’t flee, either. The first two were still tied up, and Fjalar didn’t want to lose the chance to take my blood.
The summoned one moved out of the shadows into the reddish light of the bloated blood moon. Her outer form was that of an elderly woman. Her skin was pale as bone, and her features looked as if they had been chiseled by a stone cutter. Her eyes were about the same color as her skin, making her look more like stone than a living woman. She wore a black, hooded cloak that hid her hair and sometimes gave the impression as she moved through the shadows that she was a face floating in darkness, an optical illusion more than a fully-formed being. Unfortunately, she was all too real.
“I am the one you summoned,” she replied in a loud voice that nonetheless sounded like a whisper. I could tell that she wasn’t going to make any of this easy.
“I didn’t intend to summon anyone,” I said.
“How careless of you,” she said, though her voice conveyed no particular emotion. “But in fact, you wanted something powerful enough to defeat the draugr over there. It is unlikely that you will do better than I.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. I could feel her power growing by the second as the blackthorn grew its way toward being a forest. “But I still need to know who you are.”
“You may call me the Crone,” she replied.
“She’s an aspect of the triple goddess,” muttered Adreanna. “You know, maiden, mother, crone.”
She certainly looked the part, but I knew all the old gods were locked away on their own planes. If that weren’t the case, Norse gods like Freyr would have come looking for the dark elves, who were not quite as well locked away as the gods but certainly not supposed to be making mischief on other planes.
“I see you are puzzled,” she said. “I have lived through some of the old goddesses, but in fact, I am above and beyond them—their archetype, as you mortals would say. But it is hard to summon me in the way you have, and even more so to summon me by accident.” She looked around. “This place is powerful—and so are you. That must be the only reason such a thing could have been done in such a way.”
“Whatever price you would ask of him for your help, I will double it,” said Fjalar.
The Crone looked at the draugr as if he were an annoying fly buzzing in her ear. “I did not ask for a price in the way that you mean it. I intended to put him to the test to see if he is worthy of my help. But I may as well put both of you to the test…since you seem so eager to draw my attention.”
“You sound wise,” said DL. “Surely, you must be able to see enough to know that we’re the good guys.”
The Crone made a sound that might almost have been a laugh—if laughter could be created by scraping bones together. “I am not interested in good or evil any more than the wind is. It blows without exception upon both the good and the evil.”
“Then what do you care about?” asked Adreanna.
“I care about the cycle of life, for I stand at the end of life and at its new beginning. I am dusk, the time when cunning grandmothers gather their families around the hearth fire to teach them ancient lore. I am night, and in my darkness, mortals make love, create new life, and gain much needed rest, while not too far away from them, the children of the night hunt for their prey.” She glanced at the two captive vampires and at Fjalar. “But I am also present at dawn, the beginning of a new day, when I serve as midwife to help birth the babe, be it the vehicle for a new soul or a reborn one.”
“If we are your true children, then you should be on my side,” said Fjalar, ignoring the Crone’s last sentence.
“I know nothing of sides,” she replied. “You are a child of mine—but so is the wisdom I pass from generation to generation. So is the newborn mortal whose way I have prepared. Life, death, and rebirth—they are but aspects of the same reality, just as Maiden, Mother, and Crone are all aspects of the same human life cycle.”
“What test do you propose?” I asked, trying to get the conversation away from philosophy or theology and back to our immediate situation.
“The dokkalfar have mostly fled, destroying the portal to which Susan and Carlos thought to take you.”
My friends and I gasped almost in unison. It was only then that I realized the two dark elves who had been helping Fjalar were gone. The draugr tried to keep a straight face but did a poor job of concealing how unsettled he was.
“Apparently, you were more…difficult to control than they expected,” said the Crone, looking straight at me. “The arrival of your friends also upended their calculations. In any case, they thought to trap you here by destroying the portal. The prohibition on all other portals remains in effect, which means you are indeed trapped.
“This, then, is the choice I offer you. It would be easy for me to work my way around dokkalfar magic and send the five of you home. You may choose to accept my help. Or you may give the vampires to whom you pledged your aid what they truly want—their liberation from this place… and their lost humanity.”
“We offered to aid the vampires in escaping this place,” said Ekaterina. “Making them human again was not part of that understanding.”
“Think carefully upon my offer,” said the Crone as if Ekaterina hadn’t spoken. “While you ponder, I will offer Fjalar his choice.”
“This is crazy,” said DL. He looked over at Susan and Carlos. “Do you expect us to sacrifice our chance to go home for making you human again? You couldn’t even have thought that was a possibility before now.”
“We knew it wasn’t quite impossible,” whispered Susan as if afraid to voice what she really wanted. “We knew about you, Ekaterina. We knew you had been a vampire, unwillingly changed just as we were, who became human again.”
“Still, you cannot think it is reasonably for my prince and his friends to remain trapped here forever just to help you,” said Yong-Gam.
“Of course not,” said Carlos. “But…without the ability to leave this place, we will starve. We have no magic of our own. Some of you do. You may not be able to live on blackthorn berries alone, but I imagine you could grow other things, maybe even conjure food up from nothing. Perhaps you could also reinstate the illusion—which isn’t entirely illusion. How do you think you didn’t starve for all those weeks? You were eating real food.”
Eternity living in a Harvard simulation wasn’t my idea of heaven—but it wasn’t exactly hell, either, especially if I shared it with my wife and my two best friends.
“That’s an unfair choice!” Fjalar was almost shouting, and I was positive he wasn’t talking about the choice we’d been offered.
“The choice is not about fairness,” replied the Crone. “It is about desire. What is it that you truly want most?”
“What I want is not to have to choose between his blood and my immortality!”
“But will not the new mead that you create live on long after you are gone?” asked the Crone. “Is that not a kind of immortality?”
Without responding, Fjalar lashed out at the Crone with his draining magic. Since he’d already discovered that the blackthorn bushes around us acted as a dampener, and since he had to see how powerful the Crone was, such a strategy could only be described as stupid.
I wasn’t surprised when it backfired almost immediately. Blackthorn branches reached out and grabbed Fjalar in their thorny embrace—puncturing his skin in thousands of places as they did so. He screamed as whatever passed for blood in his draugr body started leaking out.
“Your adversary has removed himself from the competition,” said the Crone, turning her attention back to us. “Do you have an answer for me yet?”
“We need a little more time,” I said, though I had no idea what I’d do with it. I couldn’t leave the people I loved most in the world trapped here. But I couldn’t very well leave the two vampires here to starve, either.
“Do you know where the rest of the vampires are?” I asked Susan and Carlos.
“Far from here, I imagine,” said Carlos. “They would have fled when the blackthorn started blooming.”
“They didn’t leave when the dark elves did?”
“They aren’t trying to communicate, but I can still sense their presence,” said Susan.
“Which means the dark elves abandoned them here as well,” said Ekaterina.
“Figures,” said Carlos, rolling his eyes. “I had the feeling they always looked down on us. I doubt it even occurred to the dark elves to take the vampires with them, even though the dark elves are the ones who helped some of the vampires escape to this plain after the fall of the Collector. But even that was no altruistic gesture. From what I’ve heard, the Collector created this place, and the dark elves needed vampires to help unlock its potential.”
If Carlos was correct, the other vampires would all starve, no matter what we did. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that.
“I wonder what they’d think about being abandoned—and about the Crone?” I asked, though I was really thinking out loud more than asking a question.
“It wouldn’t matter,” said Susan. “The blackthorn would keep them away from here.”
“Thinking about doing…something unexpected?” asked DL, looking over his shoulder at the Crone, who seemed to be waiting patiently. I had no doubt she was listening to us, but how much she could hear over Fjalar’s screaming was questionable.
“The Crone is certainly unexpected. But her presence reminds us of just how magically charged the atmosphere is. That could work to our advantage if we could figure out how to tap into that power.”
“That sounds dangerous,” said Adreanna.
“We’re in a position in which we have to either break our pledge to Carlos and Susan, which will have magical consequences, or we’ll end up stranded here. I don’t see either alternative as acceptable.”
“We’re with you,” said DL with surprising firmness. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do.”
“I am oathbound to protect you from harm,” said Yong-Gam, his voice sounding uncharacteristically harsh.
“You’re also oathbound to obey me,” said DL, sounding every bit as determined as Yong-Gam. “Besides, forcing me into an intolerable situation is doing me harm. The Crone is the enemy here, not Max.”
Yong Gam looked at me with hard eyes. “Are you really proposing to fight her after what she did to Fjalar?”
“By himself, he’s much weaker than we are,” I replied. “And archetypes don’t normally manifest in such a…physical way. If we can figure out how to keep her from feeding on the local ambient magic, I think we can beat her.”
I sounded more confident than I felt. Despite having had an enormous amount of experience with the supernatural, I’d never heard of an archetype manifesting in this way, much less being summoned. Most of the supernatural community would have thought that, if archetypes existed at all, they were part of the collective unconscious, just as Jung had suggested. They would have had no physical or even magical reality.
Unless I had somehow made the Crone real myself. But that would be far more subconscious interference than I’d ever seen.
“I need to go into a seidr trance for a few minutes to decide which choice is best,” I yelled to the Crone.
“Do what you will,” she replied. She didn’t shout, but somehow her words were audible, even over Fjalar’s continuing screams. “I am nothing if not patient.”
The way she’d handled Fjalar suggested otherwise, but the last thing I wanted to do right now was get into an argument with her. Instead, I leveraged the various bonds among us to communicate psychically will my friends.
“Adreanna, while I’m entranced, try to assess just exactly how powerful the Crone really is—with an emphasis on whether or not we can defeat her if we must. DL, Yong Gam, Ekaterina, assess whether we could win in a physical fight. In particular, think about whether or not she could withstand a dragon.”
“We’ll do the best we can,” said Adreanna. “But I doubt we can be accurate. Anyone can see the powerful, but what exactly her powers are is a much tougher question.”
“Your best is all anyone can expect,” I replied. “I’ll do what I can as well.”
I let go of the connection, sat down on the ground, and cleared my mind—not an easy thing to do under the circumstances, but I had no choice. Fortunately, the same ritual that had given me mastery over the runes had made other aspects of seidr—Norse magic—come easy to me. The fact that my faerie ancestor, Queen Mab, had power over dreams didn’t hurt.
It only took seconds for my mind to leave my body. My awareness shifted to the soil beneath me, the source of the Crone’s power.
Being able to look closely, unrestricted by my physical body, should have brought me some useful information, but aside from confirming that the soil was full of powerful magic, I couldn’t at first come up with anything else. The type of power involved was unfamiliar to me. Perhaps I should have said types, for there were several different kinds of magic present. It took me a little effort to parse out the different varieties.
The original magic reminded me of what we’d found on another plane, the one the Collector had transformed into a place that made vampires stronger and was deadly to all life forms. The magic was like death magic, but here, its lethal nature was muted, used more for providing power to other operations than for destroying life. The power still felt to me like rotten meat would smell, but around it was other magic—older magic.
I felt the ancient touch of the original Collector, Simon Magus, the power behind the Collector we knew, who was really just camouflage to keep his master’s identity a secret. This ancient magic didn’t offer any sign of what it was for, but I remember Simon’s original preoccupation—trying to imitate or even outdo the miracles of Jesus. Simon’s reach far exceeded his grasp—his effort to die and resurrect had made him the first vampire instead of bringing him back to life. But it was after some of his grossest failures that he created this place. He might have learned from his experience.
Then I saw his intent, which he hadn’t bothered to conceal because he’d never expected anyone here powerful enough to understand. He’d built in the ability to perform miracles that would impress ancient audiences.
As far as I could tell, he had designed the magic to be usable only by him, but the dark elves had found a way to tap into it. That’s how they had been able to power such a realistic simulation for such a long time, adding touches like generating real food, if what Carlos had told me was true. Such an elaborate scenario would have required spells so sophisticated to make it run smoothly that they would have been nearly sentient.
The dark elves didn’t realize it at the time, but by cracking Simon’s ancient control over the magic—relatively easy since he hadn’t been here in centuries and had been dead for a few years—they had potentially released it for other uses. That and the addition of several layers of dark alfar magic that mingled with the older magic in unexpected ways, created a power that could use my spell as a vehicle for something I had never intended.
But the magic, already cracked and twisted by the dark elf meddling and further degraded by the appearance of the Crone, gave us a big opportunity. She could draw on the power but didn’t seem to be in control of it. What I needed was a method of tapping into it myself. That shouldn’t be too hard, considering that the power was leaking out all over the place, oozing through thousands of tiny fissures in the original design, flowing much faster now that the Crone had ripped herself free of it.
I opened my eyes and my psychic connections to the others.
“We can tap the same power that the Crone is using,” I told them. “If we need to fight our way out, we should be able to win.”
“Look around you,” said Ekaterina. “It may not be that easy, even with ample power.”
Clearly, I hadn’t been paying enough attention when I first came out of my trance.
During the short time I’d been studying the magic in the ground, Gigantic blackthorn bushes had grown up all around us, their thorns close enough to reach out and touch. If we made one move the Crone didn’t like, she’d crush us harder than she had the still screaming Fjalar.
Ivy League Illusion is related to the Different Dragons series. (The action falls after the end of the third book.)
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