by Jeffrey Hall
She waved him back to sit in front of her. When he had, she took his hand again. “An invitation.”
“From who?” said Joran.
“The Abyss,” she said. “Its keepers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I, for a long time. But when one listens long enough to any teacher they are bound to learn.” She stood, hobbled over to the box, and pulled one of the stones from the box. When she returned, she placed it in his hand. “Tell me, my sweet child, do you want to understand?”
Joran thumbed the stone in his hand. It felt like such a light, inconsequential thing. What could the stone possibly teach him? What secrets could it possibly hold? He knew of people like Geomages, like the woman Mum Casara served up to those criminals, who could interact with gems like the one in his hand, but it looked as though it came with a high cost. Pain. A chance of death. A connection to the nightmares of the world, things he had been trying all his life to hide from.
But those nightmares had always followed him. He still woke up from them, shivering and screaming, Mum Casara at his side, stroking his hair like a pup to try to chase them away. He often wondered if they would ever leave him, but maybe the only way they would was to face them. To understand them.
He swallowed, but forced himself to say, “Yes.”
Mum Casara traced into his other hand. “Smart child. I knew you were the right one to be at my side. Clear as the sun you had brightness behind your eyes.” She traced slowly into his palm. “Now you will understand. Now you will understand where the darkness in your soul comes from. Now you will understand why I exchanged the throat of a girl for the continued sanctuary of the Alley. Now you will understand everything. All you need to do now is listen.” She folded his hands around the stone, and as if on command he heard screams from further down the Alley.
“What is that?” said Joran, his eyes open again.
She flicked her finger towards the door of their hut.
He looked from it, to her, and back, the screams growing louder, a series of thuds echoing from further in the Alley.
She nodded to him.
And with the stone still in his hand and his heart pounding, he crept towards the flap to their hut and pulled it aside. He looked one way and saw the others of the Alley running, some huddling beneath the fanged outcrops of stone that grew from the walls like shields to protect them from whatever it was that had caused them to hide in the first place.
He looked the other way, and there were more coming, running from the darkness further down the tunnel, a place where the glimmer stones were small and dim. That’s when he saw it.
The darkness moving. Swelling. Taking shape. Pulling the shadow together like it was a greedy mouth sucking it into its dark belly: the center of the Alley.
And from the accumulating blackness there emerged two feet the size of grown men, their toes longer than legs, their claws sharp and curling like scythes. Then came its legs, thick and tall as trees, dark as night, scaled like armor. And then came the rest of it. It was so large and oddly shaped that Joran could barely understand what he witnessed.
Only as it turned towards the caved-in fissure did he see why the giant looked so strange. Because it was winged. Two great flaps were folded around its torso, like he had seen bats do when they hung and perched high in the rooftop of the Alley during the Days of No Growth. Spikes grew from the bottom of the wings, as dark, but longer than the claws on its feet. He could see its tail too. It slithered behind it, swishing and twitching as if it were possessed by another soul besides the one it was attached to.
But he could not see its face. It was hidden by the angle in which he viewed it, by the way its wings rose higher than its body like some terrifying, seductive veil.
This is it. This is your nightmare come true, said Joran to himself. He wanted to run. He wanted to join the others cowering on the other side of the Alley, but he told himself that this was part of his lesson.
With two giant, human-like hands attached to black arms it began to pull away the great chunks of stone the sword mage had brought down, hurling them back into the Alley without regard to where they fell or who they could hurt.
Such strength. Such ferociousness. Joran was in terrified awe of it as it cleared the rubble. In what seemed like only seconds it had stepped inside the fissure and out of sight.
Stay there. Please, stay there, he found himself begging even though the thread of fascination and morbid curiosity still coursed through him.
But soon the sound of shifting rock could be heard and more stone was flung from the opening. A moment later, there was a flicker of movement at the fissure’s mouth. The first of the thing’s feet stepped out, then its second, and then the rest of its body.
With its back towards Joran, it took two steps in the direction it had come from as its tail came lazily out from the opening to catch up with it.
A wave of relief came over the boy as he watched. His curiosity would not be satiated. He could put off facing his nightmares for a little longer. Maybe he would see it again, and maybe then he would see it fully and come to terms with its true nature. See its complete visage. Meet it with more strength. View it when Mum Casara and the stone he still gripped in his hand had taught him more.
But as the thought raced through his mind, the thing stopped. It stretched its wings, and they nearly filled the entire width of the Alley. Then it picked up its head and looked over its shoulder and looked at Joran.
Its eyes were purple and green and blue, like swaths of the Abyss captured and stored in glistening cases of flesh. And running from below those eyes was its snout, which ended in two nostrils surrounded by tufts of black hair that drooped like dueling beards. But worst of all was what hung below it. Its teeth. Long blades of star-strewn night, twinkling, sparkling, swirling with cosmos and other dreadful unknowns only harbored by the heavens that stood overhead and ordered all who ever looked up at them to wonder about and quiver from their vastness and how they stood hauntingly visible up there like stones used to build the houses of gods.
Its teeth, which came to such sharp points that they looked capable of ripping away the meat of reality, capable of breaking the bones of civilizations, of worlds, of universes, capable of puncturing the skin of time.
Its teeth, which hanging between them was the body of the other monstrous figure who had strolled down the Alley in a much quieter, but not less terrifying way, like Joran had seen mother cats do for their kittens: helpless creatures that needed corralling, goading, protection. Teaching.
Slowly the thing turned its head back to the darkness that had released it and started to run, stampeding towards the shadow, saving Joran from having to see it again. It flapped its wings and the gust of wind it shot against the walls caused stone to crumble and the upturned rock it had easily thrown aside to lift in the air. He did not see if it flew. The darkness had already taken back its body before he could see its next movements.
Only its tail slithered out after it, its tip fluttering briefly like a farewell, like a gesture saying to him, “See you again soon,” before disappearing again.
Then all was silent. All was still. All was safe, but not.
Joran stood there breathlessly, staring into the darkness, clutching the stone in his hand so hard he felt its sharp edges poking into his skin.
The others from the Alley started to emerge.
He watched as they came to investigate the fissure and the stones that were tossed aside like they were pebbles in a game. And some of those people, ones Joran had long suspected to be drugged or deranged, fell to their knees and folded their hands and touched their heads to the ground, shouting back into the darkness like they were praying to a god.
“Pela,” they said. “Pela.” They said it over and over again.
He felt a hand grab his own, the one without the stone. And there was Mum Casara, standing beside him without her cane. She traced in his hand.
“Tell me what you saw.”<
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“I... I don’t know. It was big. The biggest thing I’ve ever seen. It had claws and wings. A tail. Eyes like the Abyss. And teeth. Teeth like I never knew could exist.”
“The teeth of everything.”
“I don’t understand. What was it?”
“Devastation. Horror. Unfathomable pain.” She traced her finger once more into the dampness of his skin.
“A god of elsewhere.”
TO BE CONTINUED...
The second book in the Scarred World Saga, The Stone of the Scarred, will be available soon. To see a sneak peek of Requiem’s dark journey keep reading.
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Stone of the Scarred
The town of Road’s End started peeking through the trees like a curious group of creatures, the windows of its small buildings looking like glowing yellow eyes in the fading light as its denizens activated their glimmer stones and hunkered down for the evening. Beyond it, there were no hills or mountains or plain to fill in the horizon, only the Abyss; barely colored thanks to the falling sun, yet still they could see the dull purples and blues and greens that it would be in full daylight, the gaseous cloud marking the end of the world. Marking the Edge.
“We made it,” said Glassius, his shoulders slumping slightly.
“Made it,” repeated Requiem, slapping the neck of his horse in his own relief, in congratulations to his mount. Yethin had been right about giving up good stock. They’d ridden their beasts hard, and yet the things still stood, still plodded.
And they had arrived to their destination with the world still intact, something he had seriously doubted they would do.
“Do you think they know what’s going on beneath their own feet?” said Glassius.
Requiem eyed the sleepy place as they emerged from the forest. There were only a handful of people roaming the streets at this hour. The rest had all returned to their short, white-walled structures, no doubt resting their exhausted bones from hours beneath the small hills that surrounded the town, working the stone beneath the black ceiling, uncovering swaths of eldium, frog’s tears, and anchorite that Road’s End was known for.
But despite the peace that existed at night in that town, it was hard not to see the Avalant Line coming in from the Edge, a thick shadow running into Road End’s center accentuated and outlined in glimmer stones. The glimmer stones looked to be flickering in the darkness, but as they neared the Line, Requiem saw the disturbance to be harking bats leaving the nests they made in the sides of the great crack in the land. They heard them soon after, their calls sounding like moans as they took to the air in search of food, featureless shadows soon becoming lost in the morass of darkness that was the night.
A child crossed their path as they rode into town and Glassius called out to him. “You there.”
The boy stopped, frozen, as if he had just been caught doing something wrong.
“Where’s the local magistrate of this place?”
“Lord Bep?” said the boy, confusion in his voice.
“Sure. Him. Fetch him for us, will you?”
“Sun’s slipping,” said the boy. “He’s off duty.”
“A lord is never off duty. Now go get him and tell him he’s got an official from Glimmer at his doorstep.”
“Glimmer?” said the boy.
“You make me repeat myself one more time and you’ll pay to earn my words again.”
The boy’s eyes widened before he ran off, doubling the speed he was recently crossing the street with.
“You’ve some way with kids,” said Requiem.
“As do you,” said Glassius, looking about this town and then spitting. “I despise places like this.”
“Sleepy little, Road’s End?” said Requiem. “What’s there not to like?”
“They remind of the Shamble and the nuisances that they were during it. We’d ride into them, shake them loose of their soldiers, only to be attacked the same night by the ones we missed. Plenty of my men bled because of towns like these.”
“And how many of these towns bled because of you and your men?” said Requiem.
“Enough for us to finally subdue the Elder,” said Glassius.
“Sure you subdued him?” said Requiem. “Or did you just push off his feud with his brother a little longer?”
Glassius sat atop his horse, chewing his lower lip. It was only the return of the boy and what must have been the magistrate of Road’s End that stopped Glassius from his brooding.
The man who came to stand before them was short, barely taller than the boy. He had long grey hair that hung below his shoulders. He had a grey cape tied tightly around him to fight the chill, and to hide the night clothes that he was clearly adorned in beneath, the flaring of his loose fitting pants giving away his informal attire.
“What is the meaning of this—” began the man, but Glassius spoke harshly over him, stopping his words before they could finish.
“Are you Lord Bep, overseer of this rabble?”
The man cleared his throat. “I’m Lord Beplin Palson. 3rd magistrate of his family’s line and—”
“Run along now, boy,” said Glassius, nodding to the youth that had fetched them the magistrate.
The boy looked to Lord Bep and then to Glassius, and ran off as told.
Lord Bep opened his mouth to speak again, but Glassius beat him to it. “I’m Commander Oric Glassius of Glimmer. This is Requiem Balestone, Scarred. And before that look of disbelief turns into a bumbling question asking us to prove ourselves I’ll tell you we are who I say we are, and if you hold up our work then I’ll see to it this town is taxed so hard that you’ll be tearing down its wall just to come up with some stone to give back to Glimmer, and you, a stout lad like yourself would make a fine addition to the personal mines of King Larken. Understood?”
Lord Bep slowly closed his mouth, and the nodded. Requiem despised the commander, but he found himself admiring his efficiency.
“We have come to expect the work of a band of criminals known as Proth’s Prodigy has led them to Road’s End. Have you seen any of them? Had any contact with their members?”
Lord Bep shook his head. “No criminals in these parts—”
“Are you lying?”
Lord Bep’s eyes bulged and he threw up his hands. “I’m not lying, I swear.”
Requiem leaned forward on his horse. “Maybe they didn’t present themselves as members of Proth’s Prodigy. Been any strange folk over the last few months come through?”
Lord Bep ran his hand through his hair. “Well, I suppose there’s the Laven Company.”
“Go on,” said Requiem, exchanging a glance with Glassius.
“Private venture. Rare around these parts. Hell, rare anywhere in Moonsland from what I gather. Came about a year ago now that I think about it. Took a look down the Line. Wanted to have at an abandoned, dried up shaft. Gave us a decent amount of weight to give it a go. No local had a problem with it. Came about a month later with a few grups, some equipment, and about a dozen men. Hardly ever seen them sense other than a few new shipments here and there.”
“The leader of this company? What he look like?” said Requiem.
“Tall fellow. Strange. Tattoo beneath his eye,” said Lord Bep.
“A spiral?”
“A spiral,” said Lord Bep.
Glassius looked to Requiem. “That him?”
“That’s him,” said Requiem. “Can you show us the hole they took over?”
“Might be hard to see in the dark,” said Lord Bep, but he waved them over to the edge of the Line. Requiem and
Glassius dismounted their horses and followed the magistrate to stand between two glimmer stones. Lord Bep knelt down and pointed to a small crevice barely visible amongst the rutted face of the inner stone. A lone harking bat fluttering from it, screaming something awful as if what it just witnessed in there was too much for anything to bear.
“What’s this all about?” said Lord Bep.
“Do you have belly-grups?” said Requiem.
Lord Bep nodded. “They’re all laid up at the stable across town, but we’ve got a few. I’ll have to get Anderson to wake them up.”
“No time to get the grups,” said Glassius.
“What do you want us to do then?” said Requiem.
“We got rope on these horses, don’t we?” said Glassius.
“We ain’t no spider miners,” said Requiem.
“Time to act like it,” said Glassius, as he walked towards the horses and pulled off some ropes.
“Damn,” said Requiem. His body was already aching from the hard ride, from what he had put through over the last few weeks. As much as he wanted to argue with Glassius to wait for the belly-grups, he knew that Proth’s Prodigy was probably beneath their feet even now, working to hatch the brimlings and break the world. They couldn’t dally for comfort.
“We’re all set here, Beplin,” said Glassius.
“What are you going to do?”
But Glassius ignored the man’s question, already tying the end of the rope to a nearby tree.
“Clean out that shaft for good,” said Requiem.
And Lord Bep nodded, wrapping his cape tighter around himself. “Good evening, then.” He ran from them like they were ghosts on his trail to haunt him.
“You first,” said Glassius.
“Me?”
“Think I trust you with this rope?” said Glassius.
“Think I trust you?”
“I’m a man of loyalty to my king and kingdom. You getting down there is important to their health. You have a loyalty to no one but yourself. Me dying would serve you well.”
“This world cracks in two and we’re all dying.”