Page 70 of Outside the Veil
“Watch yourself,mi vida, it’s not done yet.”
“I know that, love. Don’t you think I—”
The sudden crash of brush on Finn’s right cut him off. A heavy body hit his side and slammed him to the ground. He cried out as claws like scythes raked deep into his flesh. Sharp teeth flashed. Bear-Finn got hold of the wendigo’s throat. In a hideous show of strength, the wendigo took hold of Finn’s jaws and pulled them apart, until the bottom one broke with a sickening snap. It lifted Finn over its head and hurled him against an ancient pine. He landed in an unnaturally twisted heap, his back broken.
“Finn!Dios… Finn!”
“I’m still here, my hero. Please forgive me. I can’t—”
“Shh, shh, I’ll finish it. I have to. Finn… I love you.”
“Diego? What are you going to do?”
With a soft caress over Finn’s mind, Diego shut himself off from his love, though his heart broke to hear Finn’s anguish. He turned to the wendigo, which stood waiting, as if it knew this moment had always been inevitable.
“I have defeated your spirit guide three times, Shaman. You are too powerful to depend on such a weak being. It is time. Join with me.”
Diego had no intention of giving in yet. His lightning had hurt the monster, but not destroyed it. He needed a larger missile, a more massive gathering of magic than he had attempted before. He pulled the lightning to him once more, forming a ball as large as a mine shell.Not enough, it’s not enough.
In desperation, he cast out farther, reaching for something more to help him, and was shocked to find tendrils of magic connecting him to the trees, the rocks, the tiny lichen at his feet. Not bridges or paths, but an incredible shining web of connections. Exhilarated and frightened by so much power, he opened himself to the flows, let the energy flood through him.
“Shaman, you cannot destroy me this way. Wound me, banish me for a time, but I will live on.”
He ignored the wendigo’s taunts and kept at it. The ball expanded to the size of a small tank. When he prepared to hurl it, though, he had another hard shock.
The web connected him to the wendigo. This horrific, destructive creature was part of the magic as well, part of the fabric, the whole. The cold void inside it howled with ravenous hunger and desperate longing, but its connections to the world around it shone no less brightly than Diego’s.
He lowered his arms and let the lightning scatter.
“You see now. We must be one, Shaman.”The wendigo opened its arms in a dreadful parody of a lover’s welcome.“Come to me.”
“The void must be filled,” Tia Carmen had said. The terrible hunger had to be satisfied. It occurred to him suddenly that the stories of pouring hot wax down a wendigo’s throat were a metaphor for something else.
Diego moved into the wendigo’s embrace. Nature abhors a vacuum. “Finn, help me do what I need to do.”
“My love, you can’t expect me to help you be possessed.”Finn’s thoughts came to him full of bleak despair.
“No. Help me. Lend me your strength, your fire.”
“I don’t under— Oh. My hero, this is perilous.”
“So help me, damn it.”
The wendigo’s touch flung him into an empty blackness. Gripping cold stole his thoughts—the yawning chasm of need ripped a scream of despair from him. Finn came to him, stood shoulder to shoulder with him against the dark.
“The things I do for you, my hero.”
Diego didn’t answer. He used Finn’s love as an anchor, a starting point, and began to weave a different sort of lightning, a liquid stream of magic into which he poured his own warmth, his kindness, his love of the world.
Rather than hurl this magic, he poured it into the void, on and on, though it seemed only a drop in an ocean of frigid emptiness. He wavered, uncertain and afraid.
“Go on, my love. I think you have it right.”Finn’s essence embraced his, shoring him up, lending him courage. A bright pinprick appeared in the void, the first sign of thaw in an endless winter.
The wendigo shrieked and flung up a wall of howling ice to block the fledgling light, a shield behind which to mount its own attack. Bolt after bolt of black despair slammed into Diego. “Failure,” the wind shrieked at him. “At everything you set your hand to. A fraud, a sham. Your every effort comes to nothing. You bring only pain to those who love you.”
He faltered and dropped some of the threads he wove. His father’s voice thundered in his memory, ‘I won’t believe my son is a…a faggot! It’s a stage, an illness…’The voice of his college advisor joined him. ‘It’s not as if everyone can be Hemingway,Diego. We have dozens of students come through here each year who write better than you…’Mitch’s sneer came back to him. ‘Like you’re fucking Jack Kerouac or something. Well, you’re not. And you never will be…’
“Don’t listen to them, beloved!”Finn shouted down the memories. “It rakes your thoughts for your darkest moments! Don’t listen! You are brave and strong and…and a bard worthy of the High King’s table!”
