Unretirement

Dust fell away from the old book, its leather bindings seemingly impervious to the effects of Time’s great cogs. Silver engraving, scroll work of surpassing quality seemed to shift in the soft lantern light, sometimes appearing as thorny vines, others as flickering tongues of flame, or a hoarfrost coat. Fascinating artistry, I’d never seen anything like it before. The artisan who’d lavished their craft on this book had clearly possessed surpassing talent, and I felt a touch of pride in calling myself its new owner, a sense of attachment to the archaic relic.

The weight of the tome, its musty aged paper smell, the suede smooth texture of the engraved cover, those impressions somehow wrenched a feeling of déjà vu through me, and, for a moment endless and then forgotten, I was standing in two places at once. The feeling passed, and I made a note not to skip lunches too often, because low blood sugar and I had a long running disagreement.

Three quarters of the way to the end of the fine vellum pages a shape and color that did not belong caught my attention. Unthinking, I held the book up to turn the pages and the photo, an ancient looking black and white, softly yellowed by age, fell to the attic floor. 

“Hello you!” I exclaimed, not expecting to find remnants of the previous owner, who had disappeared under highly mysterious circumstances some twenty years back.

I bent over to retrieve the old picture, which had some impeccably fine, and quite impossible to read cursive script on the back. I shelved the inspection of that tidy scrawl and flipped the photo over to see what legacy the picture had recorded.

Ice water rinsed my spine when I saw, in that picture, an impossibility. 

A wizened man, bearded like a mad hermit, wearing an exotic combination of robe and heavy leather duster stood proudly in the center of the photo, his stern face lightened by an almost playful tilt to his eyes. Next to the gentile, in similar attire, and quite impossibly, was none other than me. I looked older. I looked healthy enough, if a touch thin, and unshaven. I looked like an Appalachian through hiker who had come through to the end, determined but tired, worn around the edges by tough going.

Forgetting that I’d never seen anyone who looked, or dressed, like that old man in my life, I strained against a sense of the unreal that I should be looking at myself. For a moment, I had the wild thought as to whether the house’s previous owner had known who would inherit the estate and had planned a rousing joke before they went and vanished.

“How on Earth?” I muttered aloud, still gripping the book, holding it like a life jacket against the tides of disbelief that pulled me to and fro.

The picture seemed genuine. It had no sign, no hint at all that it could have been doctored. The yellowing was natural, I’d seen enough old polaroids to know this one hadn’t been stained or dyed. Even the aging of the ink was consistent. And yet, it could not be. This year gone I would be twenty-seven. The Doppelganger in that picture was at least thirty-five.

“What am I wearing?” I asked the dingy attic, receiving no answers.

Still more than a little bewildered, I shuffled over to an old rocking chair, stuffing on its cushions making a bold effort at escape, and dropped into it, hoping the sudden rhythmic movement might shake my brain free of this delusion.

After a few cycles, the picture was still real, still showing me a scene of the impossible, and I had no better explanation. 

The lock on the chest that had held the tome cradled in my right arm had needed a savage solvent to unfreeze its mechanism before the huge iron key passed to me along with the ancient cottage would turn it loose. Twenty years this property had stood vacant, a rather fanciful little plot bordered by a spring fed creek, hidden in rural woodlands that backed up to the national forest. For sixty before that, it had been held by a single owner, whose father had passed it to him, just as father had passed it to father for some six generations, according to the faded records that could be dug up by the attorney presiding over the estate.

I turned the photo over to see what the cursive might reveal. My eyes scanned and I came with embarrassing slowness to the awareness that the language was not even English. It wasn’t anything I recognized. Had the owner of the property been one of those enthusiasts fluent in Elvish? The flowing characters did give that feeling, although, for all that they’d been wonderful movies, I’d never read Tolkien’s tale of the One Ring. 

I tried again to make heads or tails of the writing, as if concentrating on the strokes of the pen might compel them to part with their meaning. On the cusp of abandoning this whimsy as purely foolish, the characters shifted, blurred, and when my eyes refocused, there, in neat handwritten English was there plain as day.

At this point, I rubbed my eyes against my sleeve and stared at the lantern on its perch by the old chest, before returning my gaze to the picture. I was beginning to very much entertain the notion that I had, at some point recently, come up a salad fork short of a full dinner set.

But no. There the flowing symbols on the aged picture sat, alien, pregnant with meaning. And, just as they had before, under my scrutiny they evolved into an almost poetic message that read thusly:

“Rowan of the Lake, third of his name, if you read this then know that we failed. The creeping evil still shadows the land, and you are needed again to bind it. For good this time, gods above and below willing. I must prepare the gate to bridge our realms for your return, and I doubt my failing powers will be up to the task without consuming my fading life to cover the difference. Know that I do this thing gladly, for the worlds we both love. Take up your Tome once again, speak the words of power, though they come with cost. An Saole Eile needs again the Archmagi, and ever you were the best of us. May the aether flow, my most gifted student. May you triumph, my dearest friend.”

Farewell, Breghaed Din

Tuatha De Danann

 Archmage of the North Sea

I looked up from the message and realized that tears had collected in the corners of my eyes, though I couldn’t have said why. I brushed the liquid away on my sleeve and cleared my throat, which had tightened. I never cried; I was known for it. My wife said I had the emotional range of a graphing calculator. 

What had begun as startling now blossomed into a full throttle curiosity. I had to know, now.

Rowan of the Lake third of his name, the message had written. My name was Ryan Lake, the third. That…well, it was close enough to be more than a little suspicious. 

“Take up your Tome.” I whispered aloud and looked at the strange book that I seemed unable to resist holding tightly.

It was a book. A beautiful book, no doubt, of the finest I had ever seen. Before I thought too much about it, I opened the covers randomly and saw inscribed on the rich vellum sheets the same script as the message. This time, in addition to the flowing letters there were diagrams with wyrd geometry. Lines of formula utilizing sets of runes that seemed to hint at greater mysteries than the shape of the ink allowed. I turned the pages aimlessly, and a growing sense of unease built, because another faint tingling was becoming more insistent in my consciousness: nostalgia.

“Gaela’c Luxolas an’ Dwem” I whispered, tongue tripping not at all over words I had never uttered.

My stomach tried to climb through my spine and heat burned through my blood, gone before I could scream my shock.

Above my head the witch light hung like a full moon displacing the warm lantern light with a cold clear brightness.

A sense of panic grew loud in my thoughts and a pressure spiked behind my eyes, images building, impressions by the thousand welling up from some hidden place in my mind, long locked away. One after another, scintillating memory drove me to curl in the chair protectively over the book, the photo clenched in one hand, desperately treading water lest the torrent of images drown me.

When the assault passed, I stood from the chair and looked again at the musty old attic. I couldn’t believe it had worked. An interlaced temporal dweomer, a hypnotic suggestion, and a back up plan, in case something went wrong. Twelve years of mundane life, lived without the first hint that it was not the first time I’d been a young man. 

I regretted the wife, now. She deserved better than I gave her, and, now the distraction, the sense of being out of place, the call to study other worlds of fantasy and myths of realms that only lived in story all made sense. A good woman, and, for some lucky worthy, a better than good wife. But not for Rowan of the Lake, third of his name.

“So. The bastard slipped the binding after all.” I said, with a voice too smooth, unravaged by the passage of the first tongue, and the energies it bore along with it.

“Well, Master Din, my dear old friend, I’m on my way. Consider the Archmage of the Tempest unretired.”