“I know. And maybe you won’t ever. I hated him until I didn’t. I don’t know if I could ever pinpoint the one moment when I realized my feelings toward him had changed, but I do remember looking at him one day and thinking how handsome he was. How wonderful his smile could be. How mischievous. And as it turned out, he’d been trying to impress me for far longer than I knew.”
“The Great White didn’t like that very much, did he. Being your mentor and all.”
“No, I don’t suppose he did. Things were different then, Sam. Wizards were more commonplace. Not just the Darks, though they’ve never had a problem thriving. After everything changed, after Myrin fell into shadow, the Darks splintered into the forest, and those that walked the path of light chose instead to just… walk away, beyond the borders of Verania. In the end, there were only a few of us left.
“But before that, it was good. I had the man I was convinced would be my cornerstone, though I had already passed the Trials on my own. And I had Morgan. The Great White was gone, but I was convinced I’d made the right choice.”
He looked back up at me, a somber expression on his face. “Morgan had such potential. Even though I thought him brash and foolish, I could see the strength in him. Myrin could too, and though I thought there was some jealousy there, it wasn’t enough to come between them. Morgan loved his brother more than anything else in this world. He worshipped the ground Myrin walked on. It almost destroyed him when—” He sighed wearily. “It almost destroyed the both of us.”
“You went Dark.”
He nodded. “After we banished Myrin to the realm of shadows and after I brought the King of Sorrows back from madness, I felt it. In my head. And in my heart. It started out small and quiet and went on for years. It was a seduction, always there and whispering to me. All I had to do was give in to it and all my wounds would be healed. All my grief would just… fade away. And I would like to tell you I fought it valiantly. That I resisted and was almost able to escape it, and that in the end, it proved to be too strong. But that would be a lie. It was shocking, Sam, just how easy it was to give in, to bend to its whims. I locked myself in Castle Freesias and just… let it consume me.”
A twisted thrill raced along my skin, and I fidgeted in my seat.
“It was without order,” Randall said, voice flat. “Without reason. It was chaos, but there was such a beauty in it that I wondered why I hadn’t considered it before. Why I had looked down on the Darks as I had, given how free I felt. I was without a cornerstone, though I had never needed one. Cornerstones die, Sam. One day they die, and you are left alone. I knew this. And I still wasn’t prepared for it. Maybe my circumstances were different, maybe fighting Myrin as I had compounded my situation, but I don’t know if I can use that as an excuse. I was angry. And in mourning. And raging against everyone and everything. And it was easy. To give in.”
“How did you come back?”
“Just because I’d given up on myself doesn’t mean that others had given up on me,” Randall said. “You’ve seen them before, yes? The addicts. In the hospitals. In the streets of Meridian City.”
I nodded.
“It was like that, I think. An addiction. And I needed to be detoxified.”
“Morgan.”
“Morgan,” Randall agreed. “And at great cost to his life. I could have killed him. I almost did. He never gave up on me, even when I’d given up on myself.”
“And the Great White? Why didn’t he—”
Randall snorted. “He didn’t need words to make his disdain for my relationship with Myrin known. I understood that I had a choice. I could continue my education with him, or I could choose Myrin. I made my choice. I haven’t seen the Great White since. And I can’t say that I wouldn’t make the same decision if I had to do it all over again. For all that I’ve lost, for all that Myrin has done, I did love him once. And he loved me. Maybe I could have done more to save him, but—I don’t know that it matters. Not anymore.” He smiled sadly. “That’s the price to pay for living such a long life, Sam. You have time to dwell on all your mistakes.”
“Can you see why I don’t want it?”
“I can,” he said, not unkindly. “But I don’t know if you have a choice.”
And I hesitated.
r /> “There,” Randall said with a frown. “That. What was that?”
“I….”
He watched me with a thoughtful look on his face. “What happened to you? In the Dark Woods. You’re not who you once were.”
“Are any of us?”
“Deflection.”
I rolled my eyes. “So maybe some things are the same.”
“I can feel it, you know. Your magic. Even when you were young, it was expansive. More so than I’d ever seen before or since with any magical being.”
“And now?”
“Now it seems almost limitless.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, even though I thought it could be true. “I can’t do the things you can.”