The Gathandrian Trilogy 03 - The Executioners Cane

those words were only in his mind or spoken aloud, he could not have said. He only knew they were true, and in a way that cut him to the heart, though he did not wish to understand them.
    No.
    The silence following his denial swallowed him up as the land swallows water. He could not endure it, but when he opened his mouth, the silence filled him also, crushing any words he might have had. Inside him, it felt white and heavy, like snow. Almost as it had in the last battle, and he could not bear the thought of revisiting such terrors once again. He had had enough of winter and silence, and even though it threatened to overpower him, he would be damned if he’d let it. Concentrating with the powers the mind-cane itself had liberated in him, he pierced through the whiteness within and found his own small centre. The effort of it all but shattered him but he fought on, holding to his sense of himself, the blue and the silver, as much as he could. All the time, the denial he had voiced clung to him, nearly choking him until finally he had strength enough to release it.
    Enough! You must listen to me, as well as I to you. Is that not where grace lies?
    A flash of heat in his mind and the silence suffocating him ebbed slowly away. Simon took a much-needed breath and rose to his feet.
    You have spoken well, this time-cycle.
    Thank you , was the only thought he could convey, though a wealth of others lay lurking beneath. Then: Are you the mind-cane in truth?
    A sensed sound like laughter, quickly hushed, and only this: I am what I will be and what I have always been.
    Good, thought Simon, another riddle to add to the many riddles this role of Lost One had given him. So I am not to know the answer to my question?
    There are many questions and the answers do not satisfy them, nor would they satisfy your thoughts, Lost One. Have I stepped alongside you for all these lengths and you have not understood this simplicity?
    That much was true, and in these words Simon found a rock of sorts he could hold to. He laughed, and his laughter formed strange spikes in the air around him which melted away almost at once. There is much I do not understand and much I never will, and perhaps this is true between us in both ways though I cannot tell it for sure. But you speak of time and I long to know your meaning: the time is here, for what?
    You fear so much it blinds you. Do you not read and digest the legends, the legends which speak of you?
    Simon let the memory of the legends Annyeke had showed him and the ones already in his blood fill his thoughts. He could see nothing obvious the mind-cane might be trying to convey to him, simply the story and life he knew: a boy lost and found again through danger and pain; a slow realisation of his life’s meaning; the struggle to change what had gone wrong; the battles on the way; death and life again; and then a kind of enlightening on the road to achievement. Taught by his friends, the snow-raven and the mind-cane, this was what he knew and what he had found. The legends revealed nothing else, and here he was.
    He blinked and something cleared in his inner vision.
    This is it then, isn’t it? There is nothing more beyond what the legends say and I have come to what is now. Annyeke and Johan and the Gathandrians interpret what is happening through their legends and I have come to the end of their knowledge. The next step is my own.
    He sat down, suddenly, heart beating fast, trying to understand his own unspoken words. Unexpectedly, he laughed, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, shaking his head. When he looked up, the cane was floating in front of him, its colours sparking and jagged as if puzzled at his response.
    His amusement seeped away and he found himself staring at his strange companion, as if looking at it truly for the first time. And when he came to think of it, perhaps he had not contemplated the fact of the mind-cane before, not with his eyes. At their initial meeting, Simon had been too terrified even to glance at it for more than a moment, let alone gaze like this. Since that time, he had run from the cane, fought with it, been thought-beaten by it and, more recently, held it close in order to access his own power, but he had never truly looked at it.
    He did so now. At first glance, it was nothing more than a walking cane. But, as his eyes grew accustomed to the shape of it, Simon could see slight curves and indentations patterning its smooth ebony length, as if it had