Isles of the Emberdark

by Brandon Sanderson

“There are many birds like her,” he said. “But only she has a talent to bestow.”

“That’s a mainlander bird,” she said. She held up the light. “I knew it was when I first saw it. The sharper beak, the black feathers, more sleek. I assumed it wasn’t an Aviar, because mainlander birds can’t bestow talents.” Dusk turned away and continued cutting. “You brought a mainlander chick to the Pantheon,” Vathi whispered. “And it gained a talent.”

“The Aviar are special. Everyone knows the separate breeds and what they do. Why assume that a fish would learn to breathe air, if raised on land? Why assume a non-Aviar would become one if raised on Patji…” It had to do with the pool, of course.

“You realize that your bird changes everything,” Vathi said quietly, joining him, shouldering her pack and carrying her tube in the other hand. “There will be a new kind of Aviar,” Dusk whispered, stepping over his corpse. “That’s the least of it. Dusk, we assumed that chicks raised away from these islands did not develop their abilities because there was no flock to train them. We assumed that their abilities were innate, like our ability to speak—it’s inborn, but we require help from others to develop it.” “That can still be true,” Dusk said. “Other species, such as Sak, can merely be trained to speak.”

During his years alone, words had never been a problem for him. Then again, during his years alone, he’d never had anyone for whom he wanted to find the right words. “I don’t want to send you,” she said softly. “I don’t want to lose you, Dusk.”

“Something is in that darkness. Cakoban and our people came from it, and the Ones Above are interested in it.”

“Then I will die,” he said. “Like Tenth the Navigator himself.” Dusk touched his own forehead, then pressed his finger against hers. “I gave up Patji for the planet, Vathi, but I will not give up the planet to those people from the stars.” “Fool man.” He did not respond. Because she might be right. He was going anyway.

“You forge a new world, Vathi. You venture into the darkness, same as any explorer—only instead of deathants in the dirt, your darkness is filled with smiling aliens who want your soul.

Theirs had never been a romantic relationship. That just…never had been right. It was intense nonetheless. The politician determined to drag her people toward modernity; the trapper who taught the oldest traditions. Opposite sides of a…well, medallion. One that represented the soul of a people. He embraced her, however, because it felt like the right thing to do. Sak jumped on her shoulder, and her Aviar onto his. “Goodbye, Vathi,” he said into her ear.

I am First of the Sky, taken by Patji at last. I have a brother on Suluko. Care for them, rival.

spores, then how does the tree kill?” “So many questions.” “My life is about questions,” she replied. “And about answers.

“Someday we will sail the stars like they do. But change would have happened even without them. The world is progressing. One man cannot slow it, no matter how determined he is.” He stopped in the path. You cannot stop the tides from changing, Dusk. No matter how determined you are. His mother’s words. Some of the last he remembered from her.

“The blossoms can think,” he found himself saying as he led them away from a mound that showed the tuskrun pack had been rooting here. “The fingers of Cakoban? The trees themselves are not dangerous, even when blooming—but they attract predators, imitating the thoughts of a wounded animal that is full of pain and worry.” Vathi gasped. “A plant,” she said, “that broadcasts a mental signature? Are you certain?” “Yes.”

symbol of your ignorance. On the Pantheon Islands, nothing is easy, nothing is simple. That plume was placed by another trapper to catch someone who thought to find an easy prize. You cannot be that person. Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?”

I took mine off the corpse of my uncle, after he led me through the darkness one night. Because I got bit, and then dropped the antivenom. He died by my foolishness.”

That was the speech for an apprentice, he realized, upon their first major mistake. A ritual among trappers. What had possessed him to give it to her? And to grant her a medallion? True, he had the one he’d taken from Sky, but still. She followed behind, head bowed, appropriately shamed. She didn’t realize the honor he had just paid her, if unconsciously. They walked onward, an hour or more passing. By the time she spoke, for some reason, he almost welcomed the words breaking upon the sounds of the jungle. “I’m sorry.” “You need not be sorry. Only careful.” “I understand.”

“My mother did not name me for the time of day. I was named because my mother saw the dusk of our people. The sun will soon set on us, she often told me.”

Why had he found those words to speak? He followed into the clearing, concerned at himself. He had not given those words to his uncle; only his parents knew the source of his name. He was not certain why he’d shared them

That said, despite all the changes, something inside of him felt that Patji approved. Once, this island had been a deadly test where solitary trappers proved themselves worthy. Now, however, invaders had arrived from another world. The time for training was over. Either Dusk’s people proved themselves, or they went extinct. The changes to Patji were necessary. Dusk hated them, of course, but he could see that they were necessary.

Yes, Dusk and the others had heard of a magical pool like the Ones Above described. But they’d never known it to make people vanish. Until, that was, they’d stepped into it and thought about vanishing. It had happened, just like that.

A small bird—with a red head, and otherwise black and white markings. He knew the breed; it granted the ability to hide your mind from anything looking for thoughts. The same power Kokerlii had. There were five different breeds with that once-important ability. Dusk immediately knew what Vathi was planning.

“Rokke doesn’t have anyone. She was kept by a trapper on one of the other islands—one of the trappers who refused to come in. He died, and she was found in his safe—” “I don’t need another bird,” he said. “I won’t replace Kokerlii.” “Dusk,” Vathi said, taking his arm. “Please. Look at her.” He looked. The little Aviar gazed at him with wide eyes, then hid in the attendant’s hands. “I don’t need another Aviar,” he said, then pointed at the pool. “My corpse floats in the waters. I count it three times.”

And then, something new. An impression. Something out there liked what he was planning. Dusk splashed out of the pool, wiping his face and gasping for breath. A group of glowing golden butterflies, disturbed by his appearance, fluttered away. Sak shook herself, flinging water across his cheek as he dragged his waterproof pack to shore. However, he hadn’t emerged back into the basin with the blossoms. He was in another place. Another world. A land with a dark black sky, no sun to be seen. Streams of soft blue made lines in the air—like smoke flowing in an unseen and unfelt current.

Beyond the land was a dark abyss, though he could pick out a curious dividing line. Like the surface of the ocean, separating the sky from the waters. You could see it if you looked hard, and there was a…distortion below. It seemed like water; his brain said it was water. But when he dipped his hand down, he couldn’t feel it. It was the ghost of an ocean, mostly transparent, extending into the infinite distance. This was what he had to cross.

“Dusk!” Vathi hissed. “Will they come? To the call of the dying one? Is that something they do?” “How should I know? I have never known one of them to be killed before.”

Of the Dusk, he thought. Of the Dusk.

Dusk lingered on the shore of the tiny island in that dimension of endless black, marked by blue smoke ribbons high in the sky. This place intimidated him. It was more than the lack of light, or the nothingness. He was accustomed to looking across an expansive ocean, but there, the horizon was only a few miles away. Here, it seemed infinitely far off. As if…there were no curvature to the sea on this side. As if he weren’t standing on a planet, but an infinitely flat plane. That unyielding darkness whispered, This is where you stop. Go back to your little room in your big city. Go back to your jar.

However, the only other natural features of note in this place were little floating lights in the shape of fishhooks. Those glowed like the wick of a lantern and hovered in the air, held aloft by some unknown power. They tended to come in pairs, the hooks intertwined. He’d read in the reports what the scientists thought: These correlated exactly with the locations of people and their Aviar, as they moved around on Patji in the real world.

Here and there, glowing fishhook lights dotted the region, representing the guards in the nearby fortress or the workers and birds in the Aviaries. Beyond that, nothing at all. Endless streams of flowing blue smoke in the sky, moving in distinct rivulets, and an infinite black “sea” below with only the slightest hint of a division between them.

This place, however, defined emptiness. Was he really thinking of traveling out into that? The idea frightened him, and that fright—contrastingly—made him smile.

“Those blue lines in the sky? Can we navigate by those?” “Best we can tell, they are like clouds—they shift and flow. Never stable enough to use as a means of navigation. And there are no features, other than this island, that we’ve been able to locate.” “Compasses?” “Do nothing,” Ruen said. “As if there’s nothing for them to sense. There probably isn’t. To triangulate, we’d need to plant radio beacons

So Ruen led him around the small island to some stones textured like coral—and there were scratchings. Old pictures and runes. Of boats and men and a giant serpent.

“But this is the story of Cakoban,” Dusk said. “Maybe. Maybe that’s just what you want to see. You do have to take the stories with some skepticism. We’ve sailed for centuries, and never found any sign of a serpent with a tail as long as the ocean. But neither have we found signs of where we came from. We did not originate on the homeisles, best we can tell from the archaeological record.”

We have stories of empires, and vast cities, and wars with no place they could have happened, except maybe the frozen mainland to the south. But there is no archaeology to support those assumptions. If we lived there, we didn’t leave ruins, or even arrowheads…” “We came from another land,” Dusk said, eager, standing and pointing. “One somewhere out there. We were summoned to this land by Patji and the gods, Cakoban being led by their signs.”

This took them toward the sacred pool. Something he was never supposed to reveal to any but a trapper who had finished their apprenticeship. The water came only to their calves; it was bitter cold, though he did not know why.

A cool emerald lake rested here, sequestered.

men ask so many questions? “Dusk! There are Aviar here, in these branches! Hundreds of them.” She spoke in a hushed, frightened tone. Even as they awaited death itself, she saw and could not help speaking. “Have you seen them? What is this place?” She hesitated. “So many juveniles. Barely able to fly…” “They come here,” he whispered. “Every bird from every island. In their youth, they must come here.”

You could not capture a bird before it had visited Patji. Otherwise it would be able to bestow no talent.

“They gain their talents here, don’t they?” she asked. “How? Is it where they are trained? Is this how you made a bird who was not an Aviar into one? You brought a hatchling here, and then…”

She grabbed a piece of half-rotten fruit nearby and pulled it apart. Tiny glowing worms squirmed in the flesh of the fruit. A similar light seemed to glow in her eyes as she realized. “It’s not the birds. It never has been… It’s a parasite. They carry a parasite that bestows talents! That’s why those raised away from the islands cannot gain the abilities, and why a mainland bird you brought here could.”

“All minds in this place are invisible, always, regardless of Aviar.”

The lake was not deep. Two or three feet. They had to lie down to get covered completely. While submerged in that frigid water, Dusk thought he saw something…glowing butterflies… And an impression. Like words. Well done.

She understood. “I suppose,” Dusk said, “I’ll have to go on my own.”

“The Ones Above have rules. They can’t conquer us unless we’re advanced enough. Just like a man can’t, in good conscience, attack a child. So they have left their machines for us to discover. When we poke and prod at it, we will find explanations inside of how the device works, left as if carelessly. And at some point in the near future, we will build something like one of their machines. We will have grown more quickly than we should have. We will be childlike still, ignorant, but the laws from Above will let these visitors conquer us.”

Wordless, she held something up. A single feather—a mating plume. She had kept it. “Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?” she whispered. “You said it was a trap as I was pulled away. When we found the manual, I… Oh, Dusk. They are planning to do to us what…what we are doing to Patji, aren’t they?” Dusk nodded.

So today, he looked. He saw infinity. An old friend, but coy. Normally something interrupted it. Clouds. Churning waves with sunlight streaking through. Even the horizon wasn’t truly infinite, but more a…waypoint along an ultimate destination. Here, he saw infinity. A horizon that seemed impossibly far away. That not-sea, it…just. Kept. Going. Look through binoculars, and it was the same. A flat expanse, completely uninterrupted. Upward, he saw only darkness and blue streaks. Downward, that smoky depth. Infinity in three shades. Each more unnerving than the one before.

“This name,” she whispered, “says Second.” “Of the what?” “…Of the Dawn.” A sign? A coincidence? “We did come from that darkness. Otherwise, where is our origin? Every island is explored.”

“I agree,” she said, “that we probably came from across the darkness. It matches the stories, and exploration is our heritage.” “And so…” “So you must be right. This darkness represents another way to travel between worlds. One our ancestors, using only stone tools, managed.”

“Fetch this man all of our remaining luminist.” “Luminist?” he asked. “Because worm paste sounds so…gross.” “I like it,” he said.

“Unless they’re like these,” the guard said, holding up his finger for one of the light butterflies to land on. The thing seemed to have no substance. As ephemeral as a reflection. To test his theory, Dusk snatched the thing—and felt almost nothing in holding it. Just a faint sense of pressure as the butterfly slipped out between two of his fingers. Insubstantial, as if made of liquid. The guard glared at him. “These are holy.”