Never to be Free
This content was originally included in an issue of Duelist magazine. The original article can be accessed via Internet Archive here.
Main Magazine Page: The Duelist #34
Short story by J. Robert King
Long before he traveled to Rath aboard the Weatherlight, long before his fateful, final encounter with Selenia, Crovax attempted to free his angel.
This is a final story of Crovax in his youth, for at the end of this day he will be a man—his destiny at hand—and his fate will be sealed by his love for an angel.
Part Three
Morning clouds streamed past, blue-white bunting beyond Weatherlight’s rails. Far below, the rising sun laid a shimmering white runner across a murmurous ocean. Sunlight burnished the airship’s planking and made its sails glow like angel wings.
Standing at the ships helm, Crovax beamed. It was a perfect morning. He was the only one on the bridge—he’d modified Tahngarth’s work roster to make sure of it.
“all my life has been for this moment,” Crovax whispered. His dark skin shone with an inner light and his brown eyes gleamed with joy. No longer the idealistic youth, Crovax had grown into a strong man in his prime—brave, resourceful, canny, and proven in battle. At last the man born to greatness had inherited his destiny. “All my life I have worked to be worthy of you, my love. Today I am.”
He lifted his hand to the jewel at his throat and drew the glass stopper from its base. Out poured a scintillating cloud of glowing motes and sparks, the soul of his beloved angel. Secret guardian, secret love, Selenia had spent these long years captive to the gem. Today, she would be freed from the stone and bound to the stone’s wearer. Today, they would be married.
Out of the shimmering mist, she formed. Beautiful, powerful, otherworldly, Selenia hovered in midair. With slow pulses of her pinions, Selenia drifted before Weatherlight‘s helm. A surge brought her swooping down to light beside Crovax. Her wings folded, and she took the man’s dark hand in her own bright one.
“Good morning, love,” he said. “Today we will be married.”
“Who will marry us?” asked Selenia, looking about the empty bridge. “Won’t you at last tell the crew of our love?”
“Yes, once we are married.”
“But, we need the captain to marry us.”
“I am acting captain this morning. I can marry us. I am captain and bridegroom, both.”
Selenia’s smile was sad.
Crovax dropped to one knee before his beloved angel, and he stared deeply into her shimmering eyes. “The moment I first met you, I bowed like this before you. I bow again, for from that moment to this, you have been mistress of my heart.” He gazed into her piercing eyes. “I love you, Selenia. I pledge myself to you. I will forever be your servant, but you shall no longer be mine. On that first night, you asked that I free you. I pledged I would once I was a match for your master, my father—once I was a man worthy of you. At long last, that day has come. At long last, I will grant your first wish—”
Crovax lifted high the tiny crystal stopper, which glinted like a diamond in the sun’s beaming eye. “This is the key to your prison. It bears the enchantment that binds you to the gem at my throat, Even as I forever pledge myself to serve you, I release you from your servitude to me.” He slammed the stopper onto the. ship’s helm. The crystal shattered in his palm. As-he raised his hand back up, sunlight broke over shards of glass embedded in blood-streaming cuts in Crovax’s palm. “Let this blood signify my devotion. From now, forever, my soul is yours, Selenia.”
A smile of trembling. joy spread across the angel’s face. She reached out toward the man kneeling before her, but her hands never quite laid hold of him. Sudden distance rose wraithlike between them. Her fingers, turning incorporeal, passed through his grasping hands. The look of joy fled her face, replaced by fear and despair.
“What is it?” Crovax gasped, rising. He tried to wrap her in his arms, but he might as well have gathered a cloud. “Where are you going?”
“Your father summons,” she said. A pang of dread stitched itself across her face. “He has made another prison; enchanted a new crystal. He knew you would free me, and now his ring lays hold of my soul, I must go. He summons me. The manor is under attack. He summons. I must go—”
“Wait” Crovax shouted in mistery. “I have freed you—”
Already she was as thin as a memory. “Your father claims me.”
Crovax flailed in the empty air where, moments before, his beloved had stood. “No! No! He cannot have you! I will save you from him. I am your servant forever! I will save you.” He folded to his knees on the thrumming bridge and collapsed, sobbing.
Below the soaring Weatherlight, the isles of Urborg took shape.
In the prow, Crovax gritted his teeth. Down there was Father. The man had not been a monster, really; only a loveless dictator, rearing Crovax, Jolav, and their sisters like animals for market. They were fed on strict schedules. penned for their lessons, and sheared, shapedn, and molded to be as cold and calculating as Father himself.
Perhaps it was necessary—the danger-filled jungles of Urborg masticated lesser men. Perhaps Father’s fierce nature rose inevitable from the death of his young wife, his lifelone love. But Father’s strictures made him hateful to Crovax, mad Crovax’s childhood a veritable prison sentence.
How could a man who had lost his own love steal the love of his son?
Father was down there, in that horrible jungle, and Selenia was down there too.
Weatherlight dipped toward the ocean and stooped like a falcon upon the isle. Dark forests swelled upward. At the end of a valley, Father’s manor lay—cylindrical, towers and domes of thatch, stone walls and verdant ourtyards, portcullises and small. windows ablaze with lantern light.
Not lantern light. Fires. The manor was burning.
“Land the ship!” Crovax shouted.”The manor is burning! It’s burning!”
“There’s a clearing ahead,” Hanna called out urgently, at the door to the bridge. “heading three, three hundred fifty-three, eight!”
“Trim airfoils!” Sisay commanded within. “Bring us to ground.”
The groan of landing spines came from below. Hot fronds thrashed across the deck sending crew members sprawling. The ship carded out an avenue of descent. Sharp snaps came as boughs broke and dangled. The airship set down.
Crovax leapt overboard and darted toward a dark figure silhouetted in flames. The man stood beside a saddled loper, the huge creature’s red scales marked with bloody gashes. “Jolav!” Crovax shouted. “What is happening?”
Jolav staggered about, his armor scorched and scored; his face bleeding. No longer a boy, Jolav’s jaw was strong, his head shaved like Father’s. A battered and bloody sword hung in his grip. Something haunted his eyes. “They killed him.”
“Killed whom?” Crovax demanded, shaking the man impatiently.
“Father. They killed him—” Jolav choked out. “He went hunting. His mount came back empty. I found him on the south landing. They almost killed me. I fled…”
Crovax clenched his jaw and drew his sword. Emotions kaleidoscoped through him. Father was dead. Relief and joy should have filled him. But even though Father had been Crovax’s captor, Selenia’s master, he had been a rock, terra firma for Crovax—immovable, inescapable, unopposable—the ordering and orienting principle. It was only in opposing him that Crovax could stand at all. The young lord felt a sudden vertigo, adrift in the sky.
“Who has done this?” asked Sisay, now standing beside Jolav, a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Who has done this?”
“Monsters. Fiends. Gallow…Gallowbraid and Morinfen they called themselves,” Jolav panted. His sword trembled in remembered fury. “They led monsters out of the swamps—a portal there—from somewhere they called Rath.”
Sisay sent a grave look toward Gerrard, Rofellos, Hanna, and the others crowding up beside them.
“They came looking for you, Crovax,” Jolav said, suddenly bitter. “They came lookinf gor you. But this is the last place you’d be.”
“I am back,” Crovax snapped.
“So are they!” Jolav growled, setting his feet for a charge.
The others had only moments to turn and life their swords before the beasts converged. Suddenly, the jungle swarmed with them—massive and twisted figures, twice the height of a man, with dagger teeth, dead-white eyes, ravening claws, and skin like rawhide. Then there was no more time—only the clangor of steel on tooth, claw on armor. Mind reeling, Crovax was slow to defend himself. Jolav’s own blade, bloodied and batter as it was, leapt before him, carving into the face of one ravening beast.
Jolav roared through fatigue. “Must I even fight for you?”
Crovax’s blade came to life. He skewered a beast, sending it spilling in blood and gristle at his feet. Climbing onto the thing’s back, he planted his feet and chopped into two more monsters. Shrieking, they tumbled together, their severed parts intermingled. With rage stored up for his father, Crovax killed his father’s slayers. Heads flew, arms writhed upon the ground, blood painted him red and gold and black.
Crovax only laughed. In mad agony, he could only laugh.
And then the dead lay all around. Crovax stood in their midst—Crovax and his companions. They all lived, all but the elven mage Rofellos. The crew stood about him, saying tender good-byes. Crovax had neither time nor sanity enough to dwell on the death.
“There will be more,” Jolav warned. “There are bands of monsters everywhere.”
Crovax strode to Jolav’s loper and swung into the saddle. Ignoring his brother’s protests, Crovax dug his heels into the beast’s sides and sent it bounding forward. In three long strides, it left the clearing, Weatherlight, and burning manor behind.
Selenia was the answer. If Father had been Crovax’s earth, Selenia was his heaven. If he found her, he could right himself again.
The south landing. That’s where Jolav had said Father lay. Crovax sent the wounded steed pelting along the path. He remembered each twist and turn.
They reached the landing. The body lay flat on the far side. Crovax spurred the beast across the landing and dropped from the saddle beside the dead man.
Father lay on his back, a line of blood leaking from his lips. He stared, wide-eyed and fearful, into the bald sky. The man actually seemed small. His hands, which once had wrestled the entire estate from the unforgiving jungle, lay now dirty and clutched to his belly, and his knees were pulled upward. He who had been a whole world to Crovax now seemed only a child.
Crovax knelt there and sadness swept through him. He laid the man’s lefs flat, smoother his hands on his chest and, last of all, closed forever his eyes—those fearful, sad, unseeing eyes. “Rest, Father. Rest.”
Only then did Crovax see the ruby pendant at the man’s neck—twin to the one he himself wore. Selenia would be within. Father must have been slain just after she arrived… A quick inspection showed no crystal stopper. Crovax’s fingers found a ring of glowing orbs, held together by twining gold. He clutched the ring in his hand and felt the power welling in it.
“Selenia, I summon you! Come forth!” he cried.
She emerged in a burst of golden light, as though a second sun had awakened in the jungle. Out of the heart of that blaze, she coalesced, motes of fire sinking inward to form the gray wings, golden hair, and flowing figure of Selenia. “You have come for me,” she said.
“Slay them, Selenia! Slay the monsters that have overrun Father’s lands.”
Selenia glanced at the glowing artifact. “Release me, Crovax. Release me!”
“There is no time! Go! Fight!” he commanded her.
Like a beacon of fury, she flashed away into the jungle.
Crovax watched her go. Moments later he heard the shrieks of dying fiends. He mounted the loper and sent it in her wake. Already, he felt his world returning. The ground was beneath his feet, the heavens were clear and bright above. He had said farewell to Father and hello to his love. Even now, she was purging the land he once had fled, the land he now called home.
By the time he reached the clearing, Selenia’s private war was done. She knelt there, waiting for him, her sword poised upon her knee.
Crovax reined up beside her and and clasped her hand. “Rise, Selenia. You will never bow to me again.” He lifted her to stand before him. “I am no longer your master. I am your servant. You will server neither me, nor anyone else again.” In his free hand, he crushed the glowing orbs. The moonlight flashed over jags of glass painted in blood, as the orbs reopened the wounds the stopped had inflicted earlier that day.
Selenia’s eyes, jubilant for a moment, darkened in sudden terror. “I must go.”
“No!” he cried. “No! What is happening?”
“Another claims me, Crovax,” Selenia said. “I am not free. I was never free.”
“What?” Crovax shouted. “You can’t leave. You can’t betray me—I love you!”
“I must. I belong to another.”
A great, glowing circle opened in the distant jungle, a portal to a dark place of ash and fiends, The rim of the portal danced with flames. Its center thronged with beasts like those that had laid waste to the manor. No sooner had the doorway swelled into existence than Selenia was drawn toward it.
Crovax chased her as she slipped ever out of his reach. “I will find you.”
Selenia said, “Yes, love. You will find me. They will draw.you to me. You were never free, either.”
Then she was gone, swift as a gray dove among black boughs and scimitar leaves. She passed into the portal, and the hosts of evil drew, her into their arms. Next mornent, the fiery hole closed to utter darkness.
Crovax staggered to a stop. He stood. Stunned. Around him the others—Sisay and Gerrard, Hanna, Mirri, Orim, and Tahngarth—gathered eventually. They surrounded Crovax just as they had surrounded Rofellos—mourners around a man slain in his prime.
Perhaps I have been slain, Crovax thought. Perhaps I am dead.
He could not feel his companions hands on his shoulders. He could not hear their soothing voices. Their sympathy was nothing to him. And in their eyes he saw only his own gaze.
The spark was gone.
All light had fled.
The windows to his soul were dark…mad…dead.
In addition to his upcoming Magic novel Time Streams, which details the story of the Urza’s Legacy card set, Rob King also has a short story in the upcoming Colors of Magic anthology. Rob is currently working on the Phyrexian Cycle novels to be released in 1999 and 2000 and on Mad Merlin, an Arthurian fantasy for Tor Books.