“And if I don’t want your truth?” Gavin asked.

“My truth? Is this the madness speaking? There is no my truth or your truth. You have forgotten the truth; your forgetting it doesn’t make it cease to exist. I am here to remind you of it, so that perhaps in the last days of your life, you might reconcile yourself to who you have been, and die with a measure of peace.”

“You’re gentler than I would have been, back then,” Gavin said.

“Clearly not. But I do tire of your obstinacy, old man.”

Gavin waited in the darkness for a long time. It was impossible to tell how long, though. He felt his way around the chamber. Had he already done that? It felt as if he had. Maybe he only had all those years ago.

It was shaped exactly like the others, from the trickle of water down the wall to the hole in the bottom of the floor for his waste. Of course, in the darkness, the cell could be roofless for all he knew. It might extend only as high as his upstretched hand could reach, and he would never know.

That would be the kind of bitter joke young Dazen might have played.

So he moved around the cell, as methodically as he could in the total darkness, and jumped, slapping his hand against the curvature of the wall as high as he could.

“I could mock you for this,” the dead man said. “But I don’t find it foolish, despite how it looks. I rather admire your tenacity instead. I’m glad I didn’t lose that as I got old.”

“‘Despite how it looks’?” Gavin said. “Can you see in here?”

“A figure of speech only. I can hear you slapping the wall, and it’s what I would do. Would have done? Will do? I’m not really sure how to address us.”

“I would have thought I would only put the vile parts of me into this cell, into the black,” Gavin said, though he hadn’t really intended to talk to the thing.

“My control of black wasn’t that precise. It’s more of a battle axe than a scalpel. And as you might not recall, I had very little practice. Handling black is analogous to the other colors but far more difficult. And I wanted me to be a comfort to you. Can’t be all vileness and hate and do that.”

Only I would try to do surgery with a battle axe.

Only I would nearly succeed.

“The others,” Gavin said, still jumping and measuring the wall. He planned to go around at least twice, just in case he missed a spot on the first round. “The others said I was the Black Prism. Is that true?”

The dead man sighed. “So it worked, to hide that from you for all these years?”

“So the answer is yes.”

“Yes,” the dead man admitted.

“They said that I needed to kill drafters to refresh my powers.”

“That makes it sound like an evil power. It’s not evil. Black luxin itself isn’t evil… though I guess I, being will-cast into black luxin, probably would try to convince you of that. Hmm. Well, you needn’t believe me outright on matters pertaining to black luxin itself—I wouldn’t in your place, I suppose. Won’t in your place, whatever. Suffice it to say, I only killed those who attacked me first, or those who wished to suicide anyway.”

“The Freeing.”

“That’s right.”

“Is that what the Freeing was always about?” Gavin asked. “Giving provender to feed a black luxin drafter?”

“I don’t know,” the dead man said. “I think maybe it once was, but I don’t think that all the Prisms have been black drafters. Maybe only very few. The Spectrum was baffled when I made it past the first seven years. They expected me to die, or they thought I needed them. I feared that father figured it out then, but from how old you are, I’m going to guess he remained ignorant for longer than I imagined.”

Gavin said, “What happened at Sundered Rock?”

“I think you know by now,” the dead man said.

“Fragments only. I want to hear it all.”

Gavin could see no expression, of course, and eventually the dead man spoke: “Our plan worked, mostly. I—we—decided that some of the friends I’d made and allies I’d promised myself to were worse than who we were fighting. You remember this much, right?”

That was where the plan to replace the real Gavin had come in. Gavin said, “If I won, I wouldn’t really win. As it was, the war was traumatic, but brief. If I won as Dazen, I’d have gained the upper hand against the Chromeria, but I would still have had to subdue five of the Seven Satrapies. I might have beaten them eventually, but it was the wrong victory. My general Gad Delmarta had killed eighty thousand people in Garriston, and my army was full of Gad Delmartas. I remember what I planned with Corvan before the battle. What I don’t remember is what happened during and immediately after it.”

The dead man made a sound low in his throat. “Mmm. General Danavis managed to array the men I most wanted to die against the strongest parts of Gavin’s army. Unfortunately, it is remarkably hard to lose a battle in exactly the way you wish. A lot more people died in bringing me face-to-face with my brother than I’d intended, and then, of course, he kicked our ass.”

“How did he do it?”

“I don’t remember that, either. I remember thinking he’d cheated. But maybe there is no cheating, there’s only success and a thousand flavors of failure.”

“Thanks.” Old me is a dick. Guess that proves it is old me.

But the dead man went on. “At the end, rather than die, I drafted black—and wow, did I draft black. It struck like a thousand cannons. Afterward, over the years, I asked a score of different soldiers who’d been there what happened that day. None wanted to talk about it. When pressed, there was no stable, single story. I drafted so much black luxin that day that it obliterated other people’s memories as well as my own. And, like me, they filled in the details as well as they could without even knowing it. The mind abhors a void, so it fills it with avoidance and fantasies, and calls them truth.

“There was an explosion, they said. The gods walked the earth again, they said. No, the Guile brothers became gods and warred, they said. Magic had undone the world, they said. The brothers brought hell to earth, they said. Others insisted nothing happened. Just a huge battle like any huge battle, they said. Others said that was what split Sundered Rock, that the rock had another name before that they couldn’t remember now. Storm giants came to Sundered Rock, they said, and threw mountains and lightning at each other.