Yet it would house and protect their recordings, awaiting their return, because that was its mandate and prime directive. Survival was assured so long as there were sources of power to draw upon and ways to gain control over them. For Antrax, that was not so difficult a task. If not one way, then another. If not by securing them here, then by tracking them there.
After all, even for an artificial intelligence of its size and capacity, there were ways to leave Castledown.
Antrax took a moment longer to consider the readouts on its prisoner, and then spun slowly back through its network of living metal threads, searching.
Cloaked in the magic of the phoenix stone, wrapped in the blanket of his thoughts, Ahren Elessedil stood close to the table on which Walker and Ryer Ord Star lay entwined. He had been waiting and watching for what seemed like an impossibly long time, and he was growing restless. Something was nudging at him, a sense of dissatisfaction with his role as observer, a feeling of opportunity slipping away. He needed to be doing something.
Yet the seer had told him to wait. To keep watch. To serve as her lifeline to the Druid.
He stared down at her, amazed anew at what he saw. Her face was so calm, her features radiant. She was curled tightly against the Druid, who continued to breathe and occasionally to twitch as before, gone somewhere inside himself to accomplish whatever tasks he had determined were necessary to get free of Antrax. Perhaps the seer had gone with him. Perhaps she was only giving him the strength she said he so desperately needed. That they were joined was obvious-a joining that favored both, but Ryer Ord Star in particular.
She had found what she had come searching for.
He mulled that over for a moment, and in doing so he was reminded of the purpose of the phoenix stone. To help those who were lost to find their way back-not just from what they could not see with their eyes, but from what they could not find with their hearts. Those were the words the King of the Silver River had spoken to Bek Rowe.
To show you the way back from dark places into which you have strayed. To show you the way forward through dark places into which you must go.
Ahren Elessedil looked up suddenly, staring at nothing. Understanding flooded through him as he realized for the first time what those words meant. Who was more lost than the seer or himself? Who had strayed farther? Not just physically, but emotionally. She had betrayed them all by agreeing to act as a spy for the Ilse Witch. He had betrayed his countrymen by abandoning them when they needed him most. She was a traitor and he a coward. Those were the dark places into which they had wandered and from which they sought to return. In their hearts, they were lost.
He had not thought on his cowardice for some time, perhaps not allowing himself, perhaps simply caught up in what was happening within Castledown. But he would not become whole again until he had found a way to make amends for what he had done.
What would that take?
He knew at once. He looked down at the seer, pressed against the man she had betrayed. Having found her way back from the wilderness to give him the help he needed and to make herself whole in the process, she was at peace. The magic of the phoenix stone had given her that. It would do the same for him, if he let it. He could not bring to life those he had abandoned. But he could give them back their legacy.
Phoenix stone. The reason for the name was not that the stone could be reborn from the ashes of its destruction, but that the user could. That was the magic’s true purpose-to make Ahren whole again, to provide him with new life. That was what it had done for Ryer Ord Star in leading her to Walker. Ahren could have that, as well, but he must first do what the stone required-what it had already required of the seer. He must let the magic take him into the dark place where he would find redemption and, thereby, his way back from the cowardice that had crippled him.