Editing Falcor and Malada

In the space between footsteps Falcor found himself back in the serene perfection of Malada's garden.  his armour and weapons gone, he was dressed in simple loose-fitting white cotton.  

"Young guardian," Malada smiled as she walked towards him, seemingly coalescing from nowhere as she approached.  "Your mind is troubled.  I feel you wavering from our path but you must stay strong or all will be lost.”

Overwhelmed by a desire to please her, Falcor struggled to stay on his feet as his body relaxed almost completely.  His thoughts were vague and barely coherent, like a man who had drunk too much fine wine.  Only his recent experiences and the mental disciplines he had learned, allowed him to regain some semblance of ordered thought.

“My Lady.”  He stammered nervously.  “I’m trying to serve but sometimes it is almost too much.”

“You need never fear young one.”  The warmth of her smile almost overwhelmed him again as he basked in the radiance of her love not simply an emotion but a palpable sense of being adored in a way that he had never experienced in his brief life.  

Once again, Falcor felt his grip on his own mind slipping from his grasp and he re-doubled his mental defences to maintain some threads of conscious thought - finding that conjuring images of the horrors they were facing cut through the waves of love crashing over him.

“Oh my child!”  Malada almost gasped her own surprise at the images in his mind, closing the gap between them and wrapping her arms around him, her cheeks moist with tears, the sight of which broke Falcor’s heart and smashed through his mental defences; as his thoughts slipped away from his own control he felt completely enveloped by her boundless love.

Falcor had no sense of the passing of time but as he slowly regained control of his mind, still reeling like a drunkard and struggling to stay focused he saw Malada closing a small tear-drop glass vial with an intricately-cut glass stopper, the whole thing barely bigger than his thumb.  He had seen the ladies in the Duke’s court use similar vials for their finest and most expensive perfumes.

“Oh child.”  Malada’s smile was still warm but tinged with sadness and regret now.  “I have not shed a tear for many lifetimes.  Not since…” She paused, obviously unwilling to say more, before changing tack, “…anyway, this is a time to speak of hope for the future not sadness for the past.  Such things we have asked of you and such horrors still to come.  But you are strong in heart and we know you will succeed.  You must.”

She passed the glass vial to him, their hands touching briefly as he carefully took it from her.  The contact between them was enough to send Falcor’s mind spiralling into another place again, fighting with all his newfound skills to regain control of his own thoughts.

He knew time had passed uncounted again but had no way to know how much.  As the clouds lifted from his mind, he glanced down at the vial in his hand, captivated by the sight of it glowing gently as though alive in some way, a warm white light pulsing like the beating of a heart.

“Keep this part of me with you always and there will be nowhere in all the heavens that I cannot find you.  Even should you be in the deepest dungeon of that lifeless land that my nephew has claimed for himself; there is nowhere I will not find you and bring you back here to me.”

In that moment, Falcor finally fully acknowledged the fear of being lost forever in the land of the dead, a visceral fear that he had been carrying buried inside himself.  A fear of being eternally disconnected from Karmana that was so much stronger and deeper than any thought of death in battle; a fear he hadn’t fully admitted even to himself, until now.  

“You have many questions, I know, so come, let me calm the storms in your mind.  Ask and I shall answer as best I can.”

With each question, Falcor felt his fears subside and as he relaxed so his grip on his mind weakened, making each question harder to ask than the last.  Eventually, even as he only half-heard Malada’s last answer, his foot landed on cold-hard stone and he tripped forward as he struggled to re-adjust back to the ruins of the buried tower, equipped once more for battle, as though he had never left.