The Journey: A Custodes Noctis Story

T
he Journey

By

Muffy
Morrigan

©
2012

Rob Emrys was thirteen when he killed his brother.

As
Custodes Noctis
it was his right and duty
to
send his brother to the
Other World
when mortally wounded
. Rob
knew that he would die shortly after, it was the way of the
Custodes Noctis:
the psychic b
ond they shared could not bear the
break
for long
and the survivin
g brother would die—
sometimes
living
long enough to avenge their brother’s death
, but no more
. The
hereditary
swords would be passed to the next generation and the line would continue. Rob hadn’t lived long enough to have been given car
e of one of the family’s swords—
that came after he was fully trained. The fact he wasn’t old enough to have finished his training didn’t change the fact
he was still
Custodes Noctis
and Tradition dictated his r
ights. He had the Gift of Sight
as all younger brothers of the
Custodes Noctis
, in fact it was that Sight that had let him know when he was six that he and his brother would never serve together as Keepers. When the moment came for Galen to die, Rob had
been prepared. He
gently stopped Galen’
s heart and
then followed his brother into the glittering lake filled with song
, the gateway to the Other World
.

When Rob had been revived a few moments later, pulled from the gentle lake to the harsh light of the hospital room, his brother’s body had been removed and the hum of the bond that had been there with him since he was born was gone.
His father was there, tears on his face, the dark purple
aura
of grief surrounding him.
He
had explained that Rob had been able to survive be
cause he hadn
’t started the formal
training
which
usually
finalized the bond
his brother
.
Even though
Rob
had stayed in the hospital until his foster
parents arrived from California, he was never left alone. When the time came, he was sent home with his foster parents.
His father and uncle were still the Emrys
Custodes Noctis
, but they felt it would be
better
for Rob to make his home
elsewhere
.
He
was sure it was a mistake when he was thir
teen—and the feeling would grow stronger
as time passed
.

Rob
turned his back on his heritage at first. He was never sure if it was just grief or grief
combined with
anger, but he’d turne
d away from what
he was supposed to be
, trying to pretend he was a n
ormal teenager. That didn’t last
for long.
Two things haunted him. First, Rob could still feel the phantom pulse of Galen’s heart against his hands
—the sensation had followed him since that day in the hospital when he was thirteen. Th
e second part was worse.
His Gift of Sight wa
s out of control. He remembered listening
outside the door one day when he was fifteen while his foster mother spoke with his father and uncle. Even though Uncle Bobby had the Sight too, it was nothing like Rob’s and from what he could hear, they were worried about him—worried enough to start making trips every three months to se
e if they could help him.
His uncle tried to
show
him
how to
control his Sight. It failed miserably, so his father—Gifted with the healing of the elder brother—had tried to help control it that way. The healing helped a little, enough so he could function most of the time.
Rob
wondered why they didn’t just take him home to Tacoma,
but the thought was so fleeting
he never asked to go back with them.

Fifteen
was the
decisive year.

He’d
taken a job in a local used bookstor
e that he loved
.
Since he was there almost
every day the owner made a deal:
he could help and she would “pay” him in books. H
e got to spend hours wit
h volumes he could never afford
but was allowed to look through before they went into the
locked
rare books case. It was there he had finally let himself become, in his own heart,
Custodes Noctis
again. He fell in love with the Sagas
of Northern Europe
.

He’d
bought a volume of the
Saga of the Winter King
, and realized it was actually a
Custodes Noctis
Saga. With that knowledge, he started digging more, reading all he could get his hands on. Some of the Sagas were only available in Latin, so Rob set out to learn the language. It was surprisingly easy. A little more research led him to the
surprising discovery that an
ability with languages
was
a
Custodes Noctis
Gift, even though t
here hadn’t been a record of someone with that particular Gift for centuries. He was curious if it really was one of his Gifts
, he’d learned
Old English and Spanish with ease as a child
.
To test his theory, Rob decided to learn a language that was completely
un
like any other. He’d asked the owner of the bookstore to order him a copy of
The
Kelevala
in Finnish and English
.
H
e
mastered it
so
quickly it seemed like magic. One day he was staring
the
The
Kelevala
with easy-to-
read modern English on one side and
Finnish
on the facing page,
and less than a week later he was reading the
Finnish
as easily as the
English
—and realized that the translation he had wasn’t all that good. That realization led him to the beginnings of what would become a lifelong obsession—finding the Sagas in the original languages and
translating them again
.

It was when he was reading the
Saga of the Legacy
that he realized
there had been a
monstrous
mistake in the translation. In one of the early stanzas there was a
critical
error in line five.
A single line that changed the entire meaning of the Saga—a single line that
had
c
hanged Rob’s life forever. He’d
known he was one of the
Custodes Noctis
of the Legacy since he was a child. He’d dreamed it one night on a summer holiday when he was with Galen and their father and uncle. Rob had told Galen about the dream, about the huge dark thing hovering over him, its claws reaching for them. His fourteen-year-old brother had listened and the four of them had talked about it,
but no one said the word
“
Legacy
”
even though Rob knew that’s what it was. And now he knew if there had been a proper translation of the Saga, his brother could still be alive, they could have trained
together and with Galen’s power
Rob’s out-of-
control Gift w
ould have been reined in before it led him to the brink of insanity.

When he was eighteen his father and uncle had been killed.
Their death had resonated through the world, Rob remembered the exact moment they had died—it was like a warm light had been extinguished.
When the phone rang Rob answered it, for an instant he heard someone on the other end. Someone crying softly, then the connection broke. A few minutes later,
t
he phone rang again and his foster mother answered
it. She spoke for a moment, then came to Rob to tell him that his father and uncle were dead.

From that moment he was on his own. Once again he had a fleeting urge to go to the funeral and see that they were buried according to Tradition, but the thought was gone before he could grasp
a hold of
it. Every now and then he would get the urge to go “home” to Tacoma, but it would die before he could act on it. Sometimes in the dark of night he wondered about that, but even
that was more fleeting than a tiny
wisp of a dream.

With his f
amily
gone and no longer able to make the trips to help keep Rob’s Gift under control, without his uncle to talk him through the Sight when it got so bad the world was nothing but a painful mass of swirling color, Rob’s Gift almost drove him to follow
Galen
into the Other World. His fost
er family was always supportive
and they took him to
see
many
different
healers, including a local
wisewoman
. She did her best, but there was no way she could help
control his Gift. She did say
she knew someone wh
o could, though, and handed Rob the p
hone number that would change his life. Billy Hernandez was a shaman, a very special shaman, she told Rob. He’d called the number before he was even out of her shop.

It was summer break from University. He was already into his junior year, but
with
the Gift getting so much worse, his studies had been suffering. When he called the shaman, the phone was answered with
:
“I’ve been expecting your call for the last three days.” Rob was on the road the next day, drove straight through and arrived to find Billy waiting by the road to give him directions to the house. As soon as Rob drove through the gate, the continual stream of light and colors muted to a soft hue. The la
nd was still flowing with color
but it wasn’t the painful attack it had been
outside the fence
.

The shaman had helped him learn to distinguish the many colors that filled his world, and how to completely shut off the Gift if needed. Billy had introduced him to a variety of people and
non-human
creatures so Rob could learn how each
“
looked
”
. He didn’t have the usual care of an elder of the
Custodes Noctis
to teach him and Billy had stepped in
to fill that role. It hadn’t only
been c
ontrol Billy taught him. The shaman
had passed on other knowledge
as well
.
It was there in the soft, sage-
scented New Mexican desert that Rob had first Wal
ked, leaving his body behind,
wandering through other realms and find
ing teachers of ages long past. Their wisdom still resonated through the world, and they passed on knowledge that had been lost since antiquity.

Rob returned to University in the fall
,
ready to finish his studies and set out on a journey he’d seen in the fire one night at Billy’s. Europe was beckoning him. Not the “taking a year off to find myself” tour many of his fellow classmates planned, but rather following the threads of the
Saga of the Legacy
, among others
,
and visiting places he had seen in his dreams.
The trip had been enlightening and he spent several months there, moving from country to country—finding lost Sagas, speaking with scholars, learning all he could. Once or twice, he received an unexpected welcome when he mentioned his name. It struck him as odd at the time, but he never pursu
ed it—again it slipped away. Those fleeting moments still raised questions, the older he got the more he could hold onto, but even then they slipped away before he could really get a hold on them. He was beginning to think it had something to do with his brother’s death, and the
Custodes Noctis.
A
fter he returned to the States to begin work on his Masters something very odd happened.

It
had been a moment
after he’d bee
n i
n a car wreck
. The memory of that incident was still in slow motion in his mind. He could see the truck crossing the median, see it coming towards him even as he attempted to get out of its way. He could still feel t
he airbag exploding
as the truck hit him
and those last moments before he lost consciousness,
the
overwhelming sense
of disappointment that
he wouldn’t survive
to see the Legacy through.