The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,381

went to one edge. The tower itself wasn’t black as it was on his side of the mirror. Here it was lambent white, all the way up.

On a whim, Gavin went to the side where he’d left the old prophet below him.

Of course he wasn’t there.

“Orholam isn’t here, either,” Gavin said.

He suddenly barked a sad laugh. Orholam isn’t here.

There’s nothing here.

It’s beautiful . . . and there’s nothing for me here.

I came all this way, and now I’ve lost everything, and there’s nothing here.

Every effort had been wasted. Deluded.

Then he felt something tingling deep within him. He knew instantly what it was. It was as if a flame had touched an old black wick. He looked up to where the sky was still blue—and drafted blue luxin into his palm. Then he did the same with red. And with every color in turn.

His gift had been restored.

But only to torture him.

He sighed out all his hope. He released the colors from limp hands and groaned.

Maybe he should climb down the tower. Maybe he should try to live here, in this better world, where he was whole. Maybe there were versions here of all the people he had known . . . though that didn’t make sense. Sevastian and the old prophet were gone.

No. There was nothing for him here. It was perfect, and he was not. No matter that his skin had regrown, he could still feel those black thorns inside his body, sapping his strength, rending his flesh anew with every movement, no matter that here he healed immediately.

He’d made it here. Alive. He’d invaded Orholam’s own realm. But he didn’t belong here.

He looked at the great waterfall. He knew that when he went through it again, back to his world, he’d lose his fingers and his powers and even his color vision. Again.

He’d thought he might die, invading this realm, and instead he’d found life. Now, going back, he would find his drab life, adorned only with all the encroachments of death.

The black eye throbbed. It felt like it had been loosened in his skull by the cascading water, and now it ached. Gavin rubbed around it, carefully. He couldn’t bear to touch the damned thing here.

He took one last look around, locking the colors in the vault of his memory, and then before he could lose his courage, he took one last deep breath of air, so pure it made his lungs ache with goodness, and ducked quickly back through the waterfall—

—emerging soaked in blood.

He was disgusted, angry, full of contempt for the meanness, the stench, the sticky grotesquerie of all this world. It could be all he had just seen, and was relentlessly not.

Beauty is possible, but we choose ugliness.

He scraped the streaming, steaming, sticky blood from his face, and eyes, using his hand as a strigil to scrape away all the accusatory gore. His two fingers were gone again, as he knew they would be. Dogtooth gone. His sight once again black, white, and red.

Of course the red remained.

His gift was gone. Of course it was.

And his brother was gone. Sevastian, the one last good thing in this world was gone.

And yet Gavin lived, still. As ever.

Then he saw a familiar figure. The old prophet was sitting over at the edge of the tower, watching the sunset, heedless of the slow cascade of blood, sitting in it, apparently unperturbed by the mess. Apparently, the bloodfall from above had alarmed the old man and spurred him to make the last bit of the climb to find out what the hell was going on.

Gavin wondered how big the gap had been when Orholam had jumped it. Probably small. Old bastard.

Gavin walked over toward him. The sword was on the way. He picked it up, bloody as it was from the endless stream pouring past it. Gavin was exhausted. What was he gonna do? Hack apart the mirror, hoping it accomplished something?

He’d carried this damn blade halfway across the world. What had it done for him? It was as useless as he was.

He was sick of it. Sick of his own shit.

Without thinking too much—hell, he’d thought too much for his whole life—he simply threw the blade.

The throw was as pathetic and weak as he was, in body and in will; he couldn’t even commit to throwing it hard. He threw it sort of to Orholam, sort of at him, and sort of toward the edge, that it might fall into oblivion.

He didn’t even choose, merely tossed it