“Impossible!”
“This is the only warning you're going to get. Contact Fenn or Freda and join them in the Beyond. It's your only hope. If I'm wrong… well, you can always go back.”
“Very well.” She sat up, looking annoyed. How very like her. I covered the Trump and broke our connection.
“I told Blaise,” I said to Aber. Then I told him about the decadent scene I had witnessed. We both had to laugh.
Our father, meanwhile, had finished his walk around the perimeter of the Pattern. He was nodding and mumbling to himself, gesturing in the air as if trying to do complicated calculations.
Standing, I climbed onto the immense flat rock and walked around its edge, avoiding the Pattern, to join him.
“Well? Can you destroy it?” I asked.
“That is not the problem,” he said in a low voice, so Aber wouldn't hear. “It is only sand lying on top of the stone. It was… never meant to be permanent. The next one must be.”
“Sand?”
I looked down at the Pattern; it looked like a solid gold ribbon on top of the rock. I reached out to touch it, but he caught my wrist.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“To walk its length, you must start at the beginning. To enter anywhere else would kill you.”
“I wasn't going to walk it,” I said. “I just wanted to see what it's made of.”
“Do not touch it.”
“Dad?” Aber called. “Oberon?”
“What?” Dworkin said sharply.
“We've been followed!”
I followed my brother's pointing finger to see a line of hell-creatures—
“King Uthor's men,” Dworkin said. He looked at Aber. “You brought them here!”
“No!” he cried. “They must have followed me! I didn't know—”
“Get me a staff,” he said. “Then you both must keep them at bay as long as you can. I will do the rest.”
“A staff…”Aber said.
He used the Logrus to reach into the air, feeling distantly for something. Then he pulled a wooden pole from mid air. It was a little bit longer than four feet from end to end—about the same height as Dworkin—and it looked familiar. With a measure of horror, I realized it was the pole that had held King Elnar's head in Ilerium after hell- creatures had killed him. My king's head had been ensorcelled… it had spoken to me and called me a traitor. Aber must not have realized where the pole had been, or what had been done to it.
Aber tossed the pole over to me, and with a shudder, I handed it to our father. We didn't have time to get another one.
Without hesitation, Dworkin turned and began to walk counter-clockwise around the Pattern, tapping his staff upon the stone, speaking words I could not understand. Magic, I assumed. Every now and then he gestured and waved the pole.
A wind suddenly came up, stirring the grass, then flattening it as it began to gust. Clouds appeared overhead, obscuring the sun. As darkness fell, lightning flickered like the tongues of serpents.
King Uthor's army of hell-creatures, marching into the wind, ducked their heads and leaned forward. First one, then the other banner broke and went flying off into the sky. Still they trudged on, advancing steadily, pikes held ready
I drew my sword.
Aber grabbed my arm. “Come back with me!” he cried. He held up a Trump showing the main hall in our house back in the Courts of Chaos. “We can't stay here!”
“We must!” I shouted. “Dad needs us!”
The winds seemed to be circling the stone, faster and faster. They swept up dust and dirt and grass and trees. Screaming, I saw one then the other of our geldings fly past. I could no longer see through the wall of wind to where King Uthor's army had been—and I did not know how they could have survived it.
I looked back to see what had become of Dad. He was still circling the Pattern, in the opposite direction of the wind. In the center of the stone, a golden whirlwind blew. As it touched the Pattern's lines, it swept away the sand, scouring the stone clean.
As the Pattern disappeared, I felt the stone underfoot begin to move. Surging up and down, like a boat on an ocean, I felt myself drifting.
Aber threw back his head and laughed, and I saw the true nature within him let loose.
“Feel it!” he cried. “Feel the power! Feel the strength of Chaos returning! This is what it must have felt like before the Shadows came!”
“No!” I screamed back, the howl of winds wild around me, noise in my head and blinding colors in my eyes. Beyond the stone, through the winds, I saw… stars. Stars that whirled and flew like fireflies in the night. The land and the ocean had vanished. The trees and grass—King Uthor's troops—all had disappeared. Only the stone remained, floating like an island in a sea of nothingness. The madness beyond howled through my body.
“This is the way it should be!” Aber said. He was in his element, a Lord of Chaos, born to revel in the constantly shifting universe. “Now and forever! Come back with me, Oberon! It's over! Dad has destroyed the Shadows!”
He still held the Trump in one hand, and he held his other hand out to me. I took a step toward him, then stopped. I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “My place is here, with Dad. You go.”
He took a deep breath, then nodded. He looked down at the Trump… and vanished.
Dworkin continued to circle the stone. Horrorstruck by the nightmare surrounding us, I could do nothing but cling to the hope that this was not the end, but the start of something new and greater.
He reached me and held out the staff. I resheathed my sword, then took it.
“Look!” I pointed.
A tall white unicorn stood at the heart of the stone, her head raised defiantly high. A ruby dangled around her neck on a silver chain. Occasional gusts of winds whipped her mane and tail, and when she turned her head, her eyes glinted deep red, like rubies, like the Jewel of Judgment.
Dworkin saw the unicorn and grinned.
“She is holding this place together for us!” he shouted. “We must begin! There is not much time!”
“What must I do?”
“Use your knife!”
I drew it. He stuck out his arm.
“Cut me!” he screamed over the howl of the wind. “Open my vein! Let the blood flow!”
“No“
“
Taking a deep breath, I grabbed his wrist and gave it a quick slash—long but not deep. I did not want him to bleed to death. He must know what he was doing.
Dworkin grimaced, but made a fist. With blood pouring down his arm and dripping from his fingertips, slowly and steadily he began to walk backward, leaving a trail of blood. As it fell on the bare stone, sizzling and crackling like fat on a hot griddle, a glowing blue line began to appear. It burned with an inner fire, like nothing I had ever seen before.
I realized at once what he was doing… tracing a new Pattern, one that matched the Pattern within me, and within the Jewel of Judgment. He worked slowly and carefully, never slowing. And as he dripped blood, the Pattern burned deep into the stone.
Slowly the winds died. The storm abated. Still he walked slowly and calmly backwards, trailing blood,
