I remember...

Once I was a man. That phrase nearly became a joke among we of Mullenkamp once. We all longed for Sydney, for that dangerous mix of the feminine and the masculine. I remember imagining his body twisting under mine, the look his sweat would give the tattoo on his back.

The tattoo on his back, it is the Blood-Sin! He has the key! He has played you false!

Sydney was no man to show submission, and in the end it was always us on our knees, on our stomachs, on our backs with the cold press of metal in our legs as they were thrown over his hard shoulders. We'd be pinned like butterflies and die forever after, fluttering hopelessly against the need that transfixed us.

Charisma or power, Sydney had that over us: the need for a body, for his body. He was not a kind man; if he felt it necessary, he would use that against us, to drive us to do things we would think unspeakable otherwise.

Do not play the child! Do not blame your weakness on another!

One man, Edmund, protested Sydney's dominance once as we gathered around the fire for dinner. "He would make a woman of me, Hardin," he'd told me, voice righteously offended.

"Worse things to be, for Sydney," one man said. I remember adding, "We were all men once."

"Once I was a man"... it was the worst complaint any of us could ever speak against Sydney. He was our light, our food and drink, our souls, and we had no other way to voice the lack of control. Even then, we complained not precisely due to bitterness, but regret. We looked back at freedom and remembered it regretfully, but could never hate Sydney.

"Once I was a man," one said in Sydney's hearing once, and we all held our breaths to observe the offense we were sure Sydney would take.

"Ah," Sydney simply said, cryptically, "Time will yet unman us all."

Forgive me, Hardin...

Darkness spread in those words, the hint of power and prophecy. Uneasy, none of us ever used that term again, for fear of the future.

The future would come whether or not we spoke of it, of course. I had hoped to never know what Sydney had meant.

Once I was a man, flesh and blood, walking in the light. I float now in the Dark, surrounded by the Dark inside and out, with what is left of my eyes -- just vision, my scrying skill -- wide open, yet held close to me. I fear that if I cast my sense out, I will lose the rest of myself.

I have seen the dead of Lea Monde; I have seen the soul and the mind separate and create creatures that were once men and now fight jealousy to possess the flesh they steal.

Do they cling to that flesh because it's all that's left of their time as men, or have they lost even that? Are they nothing but raveners for a body, any body?

They... we.

Sydney brought me to this, brought us all to this, as we blindly followed him to deaths which he must have foreseen. I survived long, but I saw men I had known for years unmanned, their flesh dissolving and souls on the wind, searching for skin. Sydney lead us to this place.

A tyrant always dies alone... Surrounded by silver-tongued leeches, he is utterly alone. He sows sorrow and reaps death.

I want to be angry; I want to be bitter. I want to find him and keep him safe. Even now, knowing that he lead us like sacrificial lambs, my image of him is as he hesitates when he hears the mention of his father; is the image of the apology and determination and regret in his eyes as he sends me to safety, leaving him alone to face the danger.

The Dark has been swelling angrily around me, within me -- the earthquake's last rumbles? Perhaps the battle is not yet over? I cannot tell.

There is a flash, like lightning, and a sound of cracking, the noise reverberating throughout this non-place I have found myself in, and I know suddenly that Sydney has died.

I can imagine, well enough to taste it, Sydney's pale flesh dissolving, and I think of dying alone and throw my mind out from this place I'd kept myself, looking for him.

He must not die alone.

No! Hardin, stay here! Don't go!

Dark moves on dark; I am moving yet going nowhere. "Show me Sydney," I command the Dark and though I feel laughed-at, it parts before me.

I can see the Riskbreaker, kneeling in a room in Lea Monde, the walls collapsed around him. I can see a child, blond and beautiful, no older than four. He could be Joshua, but as he turns to look at me, startled, I see dark eyes which have transfixed me more than once as his body moved over mine.

"Sydney," I say, and hear my voice emerge in a scream. He reaches a child-tiny hand towards me, almost desperately, and it's too easy to overlay the image of dangerous metal claws as they had reached for me many times.

And then Sydney is sucked away, into the tattoo on the Riskbreaker's back, bound to his cross.

I scream again, too many emotions to identify welling in me, and my vision is whisked away.

Around me, darkness spreads.