You may want to, but do not have to, read "Tales of the Dominia Cabal: Lucien" before reading this.

“Why do you still come here, Xeria?”

The elven woman looked over at the aged horse-headed lighthouse keeper as he spoke, her brow furrowed. She debated momentarily whether the truth or a lie would be less cruel. They were, after all, in the halls of the Lighthouse, which had been the old man’s purpose for nearly the entirety of his life. She wanted to say, because I remember the way it used to be, but she thought he might take it the wrong way.

Instead, she said, “Because this is my legacy.” She turned and walked over to one of the many statues lining the interior walls. It was an intricately carved likeness of a manticore posed to strike, the fury in its face as terrifying as its inspiration had been nearly a thousand years earlier, when Xeria had carved it. “I helped build this place, Marcoll. It’s beauty still feels like home to me.”

The elderly Equan walked over to where Xeria stood and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Then he moved that hand to one of the spikes on the manticore statue’s tail and, with one quick motion, snapped it off. Xeria gasped, but Marcoll laughed warmly. “Don’t take yourself too seriously. That spike’s been broken off and reglued a dozen times just in my lifetime. It was first broken long before I was born.”

Xeria took the stone spike and looked at it for a moment. A part of her fancied that she remembered carving its details, but that was a lie. She knew, intellectually, that she had done so, but the specific actions of carving this one statue, let alone this one detail thereof, had long since flittered away. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said, handing the spike back to Marcoll. Then her expression softened slightly. “Have any of the others been by recently?”

The Equan shrugged. “A few of them still come by, from time to time. They like to pretend it is to see me, but I am not quite a big enough fool to believe lies,” he shot her a knowing glance before continuing, “even the kind ones.”

The elf nodded. “It’s funny, in a way, that we never seem to run into each other here anymore. Planeswalkers, I’ve found, have an odd draw toward one another.”

“You would know better than me,” Marcoll said as he moved over to his simple wood-burning stove. The teapot sitting there started to whistle just as he reached it. “Now, if my ever-failing memory serves me in this one fleeting instant, you were always partial to the leaf teas. Red Leaf, yes?”

Xeria nodded. “I grew up in, and have lived most of my life, in forests. The fungal teas of this plane have always tasted…off…to me.”

“I didn’t ask for your biography,” Marcoll said with a smile and a pleasant tone as he poured the water into her cup. Once he finished, he slipped the Red Leaf teabag into it and moved to hand it to his friend. “Although, I suppose that returns us to my original question of why you still come here. After all, you do not seem to like this plane very much.”

“I come to visit the Lighthouse, Marcoll. Not the plane.”

“The Lighthouse is on the plane.”

“Mostly,” Xeria said pointedly. Then her demeanor tightened, and her smile fell just a bit. “The light is still burning, is it not?”

Marcoll laughed. “Of course. And, just to make sure this is out in the open, if it had been anybody but you asking, I would have been offended at the question. I have, essentially, one job. One purpose. And that is to keep the light burning. The light that you started.”

“I know,” Xeria said with a small sigh. “I was there.”

“You would like to see it, I imagine.”

Xeria nodded. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, you understand.”

“Of course not,” Marcoll said. “But, still…”

“Still…” she echoed, before sipping her tea. The two were silent for a while, and Xeria took her time looking around the Lighthouse’s sitting room. It was a wide space, surrounded by alcoves containing statues and paintings. Many, but not all, of the statues had been carved by her centuries ago, like the manticore she had already observed. She felt like she had done a couple of the paintings, as well, but most had been provided by the others, the other planeswalkers who had helped her build the Lighthouse.

“Well, shall we?” Marcoll said.

Xeria was surprised to notice that, during her musing, she had finished her tea. With a slight smile and a nod, she stood up, and the two of them moved to the staircase that wound its way around the Lighthouse and up to the light itself. The artistic, romantic side of Xeria wanted to say that this brought back all those memories from when she and her companions first built it. But that was just another lie. She had climbed these stairs so many times since then that the first time had slipped away almost completely now.

The stairs, by design, opened up behind the light so as not to blind those who ascended them. But it was not the light that captured Xeria’s attention as she reached the top. Even after all these years, all these centuries, she never quite got over the view at the top of the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse had been built at the place they had named Precipice Peak. It was a large hill, nearly a mountain, that sloped up gradually until it came to a point where it was sheared off suddenly and completely by something beyond mortal comprehension. And what now sat beyond that precipice defied reason even more.

Xeria stared out into what should have been the plane’s sky, but wasn’t. Instead, she stared into an abyss, a swirling maelstrom of aether that only a planeswalker would recognize. It was long ago that this plane, called Pythdon by the locals, had been sundered by beings of immeasurable power. The sky itself was shattered – had been shattered, more accurately – and what had been left was something horrible. It was a wound in reality itself, left unhealed and festering for thousands of years.

“Do you know why we built this Lighthouse, Marcoll?” Xeria asked him suddenly.

The Equan shrugged. “I know what I have been told. I know what has been passed down from previous keepers of the Light, and what I have been passing on to the next. But I do not pretend to understand the nature of these other planes, or this…thing…that lies between them.”

Xeria nodded. “What you have been taught, I imagine, assuming it has not gotten muddled in the intervening years, is what we told the first of your position. This plane opens directly into the aether, and this light, magical and eternal, is meant to ward off those who travel through it, or anything that might dwell within it, from crash-landing on the plane without intending to.”

Marcoll mirrored the other’s nod. “That is what I was told.”

The planeswalker sighed heavily. “And, I suppose, that is true enough. There are too many things across the innumerable planes that we do not know, let alone understand. And it would be naive to think that life, of some sort or another, cannot exist or even thrive within the aether. So, all things considered, I suppose what we told the original keeper of this Lighthouse was not precisely a lie.”

Marcoll snorted without meaning to. “Only half a lie?”

“Half might be generous,” the elf said. She had not moved or taken her eyes off the aether opening in Pythdon’s shattered sky. “When we found this plane, it was already broken. We found only fragments of descriptions of what this place was once like. It was beautiful, once. Like some of the paintings below, with a blue sky and green grass and tall flowers.”

“I think there are none left on Pythdon who could imagine such a thing.”

“No,” Xeria said, agreeing. “By the time my friends and I found this place, all those who lived here had fled underground. Or, more accurately, their descendants were born and lived there. Some magic had been woven here, apparently, to help facilitate the adaptation of the beings who had once inhabited the surface.”

“Magic?” Marcoll asked. “By whom? You?”

Xeria laughed. “No, such powers are far beyond me. And they had been cast long before my colleagues and I found this place.”

“Then who?”

She shook her head. “There is no way of knowing. Some of my friends assume it was some powerful planeswalker in a moment of altruism. I am…less optimistic about our kind. My guess is that it was done by one of those who broke the sky in the first place, or one of their group.”

“Did you know who had done it? Broken Pythdon, that is?”

“We did not, at first. We still do not know, but we have our guesses. You are a historian, Marcoll. Tell me, do your histories contain the name of ‘The Dominia Cabal?’”

The Lighthouse keeper furrowed his brow, at least as much as his horse head allowed. “That does not sound familiar, no. There are stories of old, vengeful gods, but-“

“That’s likely them, then,” Xeria interrupted. “I feel as though if there were ever any gods on Pythdon, they have long since died or abandoned her.”

“I suspect most of those below would agree,” Marcoll said sadly. “It is a hard life below ground, a hard life they have inherited.”

“But it is life,” Xeria said with a melancholic smile. “It is better than they would have been left with, had the Cabal or whoever did this had their way.”

“I suppose so,” Marcoll said thoughtfully.

“And if I am being honest, Marcoll, even if there is a cruelty to that truth, I think that is why we built this Lighthouse. This light,” as she spoke, she gently touched the side of the massive, magical beacon, “shines into the aether. Sure, it stands to warn others that there is a plane here, with an opening into the Eternities. But more than that, this light screams out into the infinite blindness. It yells into the void, declares into Infinity ‘We Are Still Here!’” As she yelled those words, she held up her arms wide in a dramatic display.

The motion and the declaration were perhaps a bit silly, but still Marcoll could not help but shudder a bit. He debated whether he should say something, but Xeria continued on instead.

“Despite the machinations of absent gods and arrogant immortals, despite the onslaught of powers that can shatter worlds, despite the Eternities themselves clasping their hands around her and squeezing, Pythdon is still here! That is why this light shines on, Marcoll. That is why this light must never die. Because mortals, the everyday kith and kin of normal, mundane life, they are still here! Despite all of the powers of existence working against them, they live on, and find a way to flourish.”

“I admire your passion, Xeria, but I don’t think many on Pythdon would call our existence ‘flourishing.’ Descend into the Caves for a day or two and you will see what I mean.”

For the first time since they had climbed the stairs, Xeria turned away from the void beyond the Light and looked instead at her friend. “You’re right, I’m sure, Marcoll. But they do live. And in time, who knows? Who knows what they might accomplish? Who knows to what heights they might one day climb?”

“Right now, the only height to climb on Pythdon is here at Precipice Peak. And there are few below who seem willing to do even that.”

For just a moment, Xeria looked worried. “But there are some, yes? You do have apprentices, after all.”

Marcoll smiled. “I do, and you have met them. And one day in the future, you will walk these stairs again with one of them, and perhaps have a similar conversation.”

“If fate is willing to grant me enough time, perhaps one day I will walk these stairs with someone very much like you, and perhaps, just perhaps, we will see this wound healed.”

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

“No,” she answered immediately. “But even if I am not the optimist that my friends are, I still carry a certain amount of hope.”

They stood in silence for a long time before Xeria turned toward the stairs. “I should go. You have duties to attend to, and it is unlikely the others will arrive any time soon.”

The Equan shrugged. “It could happen.”

“It could,” Xeria agreed, “but it is unlikely. There are so few of us, and our visits are infrequent these days. But still…”

“Still.” Marcoll said simply.

Xeria turned to walk down the stairs, but took only three steps before Marcoll spoke one more time. “So that’s why you still come here, isn’t it?”

She looked back at him. “What?”

“For the same reason that this light still burns.”

She stared at him for a long moment, and then, very slowly, nodded. “Yes, I suppose it is. I suppose coming here is my own sort of declaration. My own shout into the void. I Am Still Here!”

Marcoll smiled at her, and she smiled back. She took a deep breath, exhaled, turned around, walked down the stairs, and vanished, leaving Marcoll, the Lighthouse, Precipice Peak, and all of Pythdon to simply persist behind her.