Below him, the sea crashed against the rocks of the Roaring Bay.His father’s body was down there, somewhere.Lost to the depths.Dashed to pieces by now, most likely, his bones picked clean by the scuttling things that crawled the ocean floor.He had a barrow, near Bryngodre, in what had once been the shadow of the green tower.Another lie.A bundle of straw wrapped in grave clothes and buried with all honours.Another obfuscation of an unpleasant, profound truth, each one a stone laid atop the rest to build the great kingdom of Parwys.
He laughed, his voice echoing through the unfinished tower.Green, too, its stone chosen to reflect the tower of Bryngodre, now shattered by Owyn’s hand.He wished he could ask his father about that choice—about so many choices.Why had he not gone to the Old Stones himself?Not seized Abal’s Hammer, as Owyn’s mother had so clearly wished?There was an emptiness there—would always be an emptiness—where a better understanding of his father should have been.
Of course, King Elbrech could never have spoken to his son of such things.Not without betraying his own fears and uncertainties, his own guilt, his own crumbling beneath the weight of so brutal and dark a legacy.Theirs was not a house of heroes, but of tyrants.A dynasty sustainable so long as its inheritors could forget, delude themselves, and believe in the legends of past glory written over the truth of history.So long as the bloodied blade stayed buried, the crimes it evidenced forgotten.
Something the wraiths had seen fit not to allow any longer.And so they screamed in Owyn’s ear, though he had given them all they wanted.
‘Is it my blood you require?’he screamed back at them, his voice rasping into the quiet morning.‘Is that it?The extinguishing of Abal’s line?’
A dark laugh boiled up.He let it out.No sense hiding anything, any more.Secrets were a poison.He knew that well.
He looked down at the dark, undulating shadows of the sea.The sharp rocks plunging upwards, like the teeth of some enormous mouth closing, desperate to taste him, pierce him, swallow him.
Let it end.Abal’s line.Parwys.All of it.Let the blood-soaked ruin be buried, that something new and different—maybe better, if good things are possible in the world—might be built.
‘Owyn!’
A voice he recognised, and could understand, amid the whirling miasma of accusations in ancient tongues.
‘Father?’he wondered aloud in answer.‘Is that you?’He laughed bitterly.‘Do you blame me, in death?Feel that I should have saved you from yourself?Seized your robe and pulled you from the tower’s edge?Goad me, now, to join you?’
‘Owyn!’The voice again, firmer this time.More real.Thick-tongued with exhaustion, but from a mortal tongue, echoing up from the tower below.Powerful in its reality against the wraith-voices that wailed and wailed and would never be silent.Powerful enough to grip him and hold his feet to the ground a moment longer.‘Owyn, I’m coming!Wait there!’
Footsteps, now.Owyn stared down at the sea.The waves rolled in, shattered into white spray, fell and rolled away again.Over and over again.They would wait.He turned to the stairwell.
A bedraggled figure emerged, just beyond the lightning- blackened remnant of the construction crane.A dark-haired man with fierce eyes, now soft with worry.His skin mottled by bruises and stains of earth and blood.
Yet Owyn knew him.Some deep memory, yet untouched by madness, long buried in him since childhood.
‘Ifan?’he said, disbelieving.‘Is it to be by your hand, then?’He nodded, feeling that he understood some vast mystery of the world.Something obvious that had been long occluded.He threw his arms wide and smiled.‘One push is all it will take.You may prefer your sword, but please, let me die like my father.Let my brief, idiotic reign end as his did.I think I deserve that much.’
‘I’m not here to hurt you, Owyn,’ said his oldest friend, who he had thought his enemy.Another grave misunderstanding.One that had cost them both, and their people, so much pain.‘Put down the hammer and come with me.It’s over now.It’s time to rest.’
The warmth he had felt, borne out of bright memory, shattered to a frigid wind.‘No!It isn’t.Can’t you see?’He gestured to the boiling clouds behind him.‘I know you can’t hear them howling—no one can.That’s my curse to bear alone.But you must see.Don’t lie to me, Ifan.We’ve had enough of lies.’
‘I heard them too, Owyn, for a time.’Ifan took another step closer, his hands stretched out, the beginnings of an embrace.‘I no longer do.I set aside my crown, I gave up my father’s sword, and the voices faded.You need not die, Owyn.Only the line.’
‘IamAbal’s line,’ Owyn said, baffled.
‘You are only a man, Owyn, like any other.’Another step.An inward gesture, welcoming.A smile through a bruised and broken face.‘Put down the hammer.Come with me.And it will all end, at last.’
‘It can’t be that easy!’Owyn roared, to drown out the wailing of the wraiths.Their voices seemed to have redoubled, pummelling him, driving him towards the edge of the tower and the waiting sea.
‘It is,’ Ifan said.
Owyn whirled, raised the hammer high, and swung it with all the might he could muster out over the crashing waves, the devouring rocks.He let that twisted glass—never a good fit to his hand—slide from his grasp.It tumbled, glimmered like a blood-red star as it fell and vanished into the dark.
He gasped with sudden relief as silence settled.Vertigo seized him, and with it a long-lost fear of death.He collapsed, trying to fall away from the edge, and Ifan was there to catch him.
‘It’s all right, Owyn.’
A sob broke from deep in his chest.A pleasing sound, in the quiet.He pressed his face to the hollow of Ifan’s neck and wept while the waves crashed, and birds sang, and the boiling clouds began, at last, to part.
Epilogue
Dying was certainly a novel experience.At least, insofar as she could remember.
Certain things came back quickly.Aching limbs and a great deal of awkwardness marked the first year as her reborn body accelerated through a decade’s worth of physical growth.Speech.Movement.Spatial awareness.Things more of the body than the mind, which still needed to be learned whether one emerged from one’s mother or from a rebirthing womb-fruit within the Great Tree.
