That truth was that some nightmares were real. Colibrí gave them a moment—this was something that couldn’t be rushed—and joined them in sheltering her spirit against the horror before them.
Halja filled the Stillness, spaced apart and motionless. They just stood there, unmoving, uncaring, like a horizon of her figurines. Many she recognized, some were new. The ones still attached to the Stillness, their sinew joined like a rooted plant, or that were still slowly pushing out through it as if it were membrane, were the safest, because they would never attack while emerging or bound.
But the rest strode forward toward the forest at whim.
There was no pattern or reasoning behind it. Sometimes one just suddenly lumbered toward the safehold, slow and careless, and died without ever pausing or attacking. Sometimes other halja scattered far across the expanse all moved as one, and Colibrí wouldn’t have noticed if not for her perch. They rushed the barricades, working as if they were a veteran warband, and killed a few warriors before being slaughtered themselves.
The only constant was that it never ended. The halja came again and again and again. None of the warriors bothered to strike at any that didn’t move. That was a lesson they had learned untold Cycles ago, long before she was born. It was a waste of strength, because halja emerged with every heartbeat and there were always more than enough moving halja to keep their spears occupied.
Colibrí narrowed her eyes, then scowled in confusion. And yet… there’s less halja than there should be? The edges were usually crowded, and what spared them from being overwhelmed was the fact that newborn halja spent more time, well, still, than anything else.
But right now it was a little too silent, even for the Stillness.
What did you do, Peacemaker? she found herself wondering. Her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the Guardian.
The Guardian used her great black wings to glide from tree-lord to tree-lord, landing so gently along the lords that it was almost like they embraced each other as old friends. Maybe they were. She continued slithering through the safehold, so massive that even now Colibrí still couldn’t see her tail, until her head ended up above the war towers facing the Wound.
She gave one last snap of her wings, sending gusts of wind down into the dead air, and then snapped them closed. Warriors stared up at her in utter shock before throwing themselves down in respect, but she could already hear the older warleaders and Warmaster Jhul himself barking about warrior discipline.
Colibrí stepped forward into the balcony looping the wooden tower, and craned her head up at the Guardian. “I feel as if something isn’t right, Great One.”
The Guardian said nothing, for a moment, then her tongue flicked out, tasting the air. “What you feel is a lack of pressure, the relief of teeth withdrawing from your throat. Which is odd… considering what I am seeing.”
Frowning, Colibrí looked down into the lower layers and gasped. The halja had turned to face them as one, staring eerily at the barricades, then began to move forward in a ripple of motion. A light flared further back on a low fake root, and Colibrí could feel the raw Flow even from this distance. It was thick and heavy, without finesse, just like with the arrows, and it bore the color of the Unseen Flow—violet.
Peacemaker suddenly appeared beneath the light in his disguise of mask and gray cloth, arms clasped before him.
“He is challenging us,” the Guardian says. “Or rather, he is challenging me, and places himself as the prize.”
“Eh?” Colibrí asked.
“Back to the safehold!” the Guardian snapped suddenly, her voice loud and hard and gushing from the natural forest all around them—then she darted down toward the edge of the Stillness, her wings exploding out to carry her.
The warriors fighting at the eternal lines below paused in shock. Some fell back while others remained, already engaged. Conchs rang out behind her and she both heard and felt the waves of urgency throughout the safehold—a warning from the Guardian wasn’t to be taken lightly.
Colibrí shoved aside a gawking young magus and sprinted out of the tower, then made her way down the root-roads to the middle layer where they were so thick and pressed together they might as well have been a field. The natural roots, covered by moss and leafy parasites, jerked downward as they met their smooth, hollow imitations.
It was from the opposing gray field that the elder halja rose.
Colibrí skid to a halt as she felt its arrival. The ancient creature came from the Stillness, growing from it, with sinew cords curving upward like plant sprouts to form its outline, but the monster also surfaced as if the Stillness were a liquid sea, the gray swelling and rippling. It was so bizarre that her mind struggled to make sense of it.
The elder halja itself was a bulbous lump, like a tadpole with legs but no tail, and its arms were skeletal things twice the length of its body and tipped with three claws. There were no eyes or anything else, just a macabre grin that stretched far from one side of its body to the other, and it was filled with jagged teeth.
This halja was more solid than all the others, but it was still a lattice made of gray, sinew-like cords. The spaces between them were small and to her utter horror the places were the cords met were masses that mimicked human faces. It was vague, like a basic shape carved from wood—just an impression of a nose, cheeks, eyes—but the mouths and lips, oh seas and skies aflame.
Those were strikingly defined and to Colibrí looked as if they were all chanting silently. Hands sprouted from the sides of these faces at the wrist, and they waved in tandem like grass in the wind all along the halja.
The elder halja rose to its full height to meet the Guardian, so massive that Colibrí herself might be the same size of its smallest fangs. Colibrí struggled to calm herself, spear tight in her hands, and braced for the sensation that followed the appearance of all elder halja.
Colibrí felt its emptiness claw through her spirit in search of meaning to feast upon. The foreign presence then clenched around a mass of understanding—knowledge of what a halja was, compression that they were wrong and forever her enemy—as well as all the fear and anger and other jagged emotions also tangled within that mass, and then dragged it through her mind. The mass was then shaped into thoughts, and those thoughts were in turn forced up through her chest, into her throat, before finally reaching her lips. Colibrí spat out the words like they were foul parasites being expelled from within.
“Know me, for I am Ghaokla, the Empty Oath,” she and every human in the vicinity were forced to whisper hoarsely, their voices in perfect unison, but it was pointless—the elder halja devoured the words without understanding that it could never be filled with meaning.
Colibrí shuddered. This… this is the elder halja that killed the Guardian, she thought, stunned. It must be.
The two titans met in a clash of raw force and sorcery. Intense pressure thundered through the air, hinting at a battle beyond physical might, beyond fang and claw, and Colibrí felt as if two suns now stood before her, their light invisible yet still somehow painfully bright and hot.
All of the hands along Ghaokla’s bulk slapped against the chanting mouths and suddenly the Jurakán fell silent, as did all the shouting and conch horns sounding off around her.
All Colibrí could hear now was her own heartbeat and the formless words being whispered from all around. It made her feel like there were insects tickling the inside of her ears, seeking to eat her thoughts—and, she realized, it was also the first time she’d be alone in her own head since she had been a sproutling. That should have filled her with joy, yet instead only drowned her in terror and confusion, and she soon found herself panicking—but not for long.
Passion and motivation evaporated from her, all her urgency gushed out, and she slowly fell to her knees, eyes partially close. Her spear slipped from her hand and cluttered down onto the root-road. Her body bowed, and she struggled to remember—not what she was doing, but why she cared about any of it.
Thou
ghts flitted through her, images of Yabisi, Sanemoro, Kisari, and Narune, but they left her even more confused. She looked up and watched as the world lost its color, and felt nothing but coldness in her slowing heart. The swarms of halja continued approaching them, reaching their barricades along the many haphazard forest layers, and the warriors there continued kneeling without emotion as they were slaughtered.
None of them cried out or tried to defend themselves. They simply stared at their disemboweled, bleeding flesh with indifference.
Oh? Colibrí watched this all from her perch with mild amusement—then gasped as she felt the Guardian’s presence stab into her mind like fangs and inject her with sorcery that was like burning venom. The Unseen Flow filled her with false passion, purpose, and courage, mere shells, but they warded the real things being besieged inside her, and died in their place.
It was like waking from a dream. A headache thudded through her, the Jurakán snapped back, frighteningly close, and life made sense again. She snatched up her spear, then staggered to her feet, gaze darting around until it settled on the Guardian.
Oh, how their champion fought! She curled around Ghaokla, ignoring the halja leaping onto her, wings beating as the elder halja opened its enormous maw and took in part of her, teeth scraping against prickly scales. Its long arms reached out to grasp some of the Guardian’s coils as the Guardian wrapped herself around the abomination. Despite the thin, skeletal look of the arms, the Guardian wasn’t gaining against them at all.
The true struggle between them seemed to be in their use of Flow and Stillness however, and she could sense the reverberations of that battle deep in her spirit. What was startling was how the Guardian still fought while weaving such a wide, complex spell in their defense.
They couldn’t fail her—in fact, the Guardian was probably the key to everything. Colibrí’s eyes narrowed and she glanced back to see Warmaster Jhul and Jerrico rushing down the curving root-road. The warmaster was shouting orders while warleaders directed reserves to hold the breaches created by Ghaokla’s momentary hold over them.
“Jerrico!” she said. She rushed to the side of the high magus and jolted him from his terrified stare.
“Oh, señrosa—”
She thrust her spear out to point at the Guardian. “Give her as much Unseen Flow as you and our apprentices can gather. And send your warriors to fight with us.”
Jerrico frowned. “What? I can do more than that. I’m quite versed in battle sorcery, and—”
“If the Guardian isn’t hurting it with Flow, then you won’t scratch it,” she snapped. “Just empower the Guardian as best you can.”
“Very well, I’ll do as you ask.” He sighed and passed a hand across his face. “Saints fucking find me, how I regret being born into a world where—” He threw out both arms at the Stillness “—this is allowed to fucking exist!”
She squeezed his shoulder in thanks, then rushed out to where Warmaster Jhul was giving orders to his recovered warriors. The spiritseers were already out, fighting, nearly the entire Circle slaughtering halja in return, but they were still few against an infinite tide. Even worse, the halja seemed to focus on them as if they knew each spiritseer was worth a hundred warriors—Peacemaker’s doing, no doubt.
And yet she watched with pride alongside Jhul as her fellow warriors gave their lives to support their mystics.
“We need to help the Guardian,” she said breathlessly. Yabisi’s sentinels flanked her on either side, startling her—she had forgotten all about them, but they hadn’t forgotten about her.
“No,” one said, his body covered in sweat. “This is exactly what the cacica feared. If you turn into a wild beast out there—”
She whirled on him. “Could I truly do more damage than the halja are already doing? Than Ghaokla will do? It already killed the Guardian once—everything will be lost if she falls again.”
They all stared at her in confusion, but she didn’t have time to explain. She snarled at the warmaster, her ears flattened, but he only regarded her calmly.
“Give me a plan and a reason to risk it,” he told her.
“There is no plan! We need to go and weaken Ghaokla as much as we can, until the Guardian kills it.”
Jhul frowned at her, then turned his gaze to where the two titans were fighting. Colibrí knew his thoughts; elder halja grow stronger with time, so Ghaokla must be truly ancient if it was matching the Guardian.
“You believe we can make a difference?” he asked thoughtfully. She saw doubt making its way across his face through well-traveled creases.
“This entire battle will be decided by who walks away.” She shrugged and laughed. “You felt its power, Jhul. Even if we’re only a wasp to the halja, we should still try stinging it with the hope that it’ll flinch. Anything, if it might aid the Guardian.”
He looked unconvinced, his spear still upright, his feet planted. “Colibrí… we would have to leave the safehold’s defenses, wade out into the halja and Stillness, and then avoid being crushed while finding a way to even damage the thing.”
“Well, I am going,” she snapped. “And I’ll bring any warrior willing to go with me.” She turned to the sentinels watching over her before they could protest. “You’re welcome to come along and do something more useful than treating me like a sproutling, cowards.”
They scowled, hurt, but she didn’t care.
“I won’t use my power,” she insisted. “There’s no need. I believe in us. But if I do turn—” She thought about what Peacemaker had said and paused to lick her lips. “—then I’ll be right next to the elder halja, away from the others. Easy to kill or leave be, and maybe, in my mindless state, I’ll do more good than harm.”
It was Warmaster Jhul that answered. “Very well.”
The sentinels bristled, and one of them stepped forward, “Warmaster—”
“I’ve spoken with the cacica,” he snapped. “And she speaks the truth—let her go.”
He turned to a nearby runner. “Cry out for raid volunteers. Let them know that I don’t expect them to return.” The runner left.
It was only heartbeats, but they felt like an eternity, and the lone runner had become many, spreading the warmaster’s word as warleaders struggled against the chaos stretching across the forest’s expanse.
She was surprised with the number that sprinted toward the warmaster, all of them scarred veterans—and to her surprise, a few spiritseers, including an elder of the Radiant Flow, a big bulky woman whose body was crowded with as many burn scars as muscle.
“We can’t afford to waste you, Elder Sanaa,” Warmaster said to her with a frown.
The spiritseer—Sanaa, apparently—grinned. “Every fire and light is extinguished in the end, Warmaster. We call them useful, anyway.”
He sighed and turned to Colibrí. “You’re on your own; my focus will be on holding the safehold.” He paused, frowning. “This is Peacemaker’s doing, I fear.”
She nodded. “He’s out there.”
“So I heard. The spiritseers will deal with him when they are able.”
But Colibrí gave him a fierce grin and shook her head. “The Guardian will snap him up in her jaws once she is freed from protecting us.”
Warmaster Jhul thumped her shoulder and then moved forward to fight with his warriors.
Colibrí watched him go, then looked around her, at the warriors, spiritseers, and the uncomfortable sentinels who had fallen silent.
“The Halfborn warrior,” one of the veterans said with a grunt, and the spiritseer elder laughed.
“Colibrí is her name,” Sanaa said with amusement. “The bird that never stops.”
“Will my spirit be a problem?” Colibrí asked them. Sanaa should be the one leading them, really, but Colibrí knew enough about Redflow to know it was better if the spiritseer was given space. “I called the warband together, but that doesn’t mean I have to lead it.”
They all regarded her, then the warrior who had spoken before rubbed her chin.
“Considering we’re dancing right toward our deaths, maybe a Halfborn isn’t the worst spearhead. I hope you bite as hard as everyone says.”
The spiritseer elder laughed and so did the others, and for a moment Colibrí was a young warrior again, back before Narune, back when she still believed she could change the minds.
Colibrí continued to ignore the Jurakán’s screams and the throbbing in her head as she gave them a smile. “Then warleader I am. Let’s go mark a worthy end to our stories, eh?”
They cried agreement, then surged forward as one across the root-roads.
Despite her words, Colibrí had no intention of dying. She wanted to see her loved ones again, and that was what drove her. That, and the realization that they couldn’t just stand there and hope for their champion’s victory. If the Guardian fell now—oh sea and skies aflame, the thought alone was too much—then nothing would matter.
They continued down the root-roads, choosing those where the fighting was minimal, and helped what warriors they found against the swarms of beast halja they were facing. Colibrí had a good thirty at back or so warriors with her, all of them scarred veterans, and none of them hesitated. They moved with the jerkiness of a body warming up to a task, and then, once they had sampled a little of each other’s methods, they were a pack, warriors in sync, and she had to give them very few commands.
Some among them were excellent archers, and here where the root-roads were less tangled and the space across the Stillness empty, they became the safest weapons, even more so than the ever-dependable spear. Their archers flanked out to the sides and fired arrows without stop, easily shooting while on the move, with accuracy worthy of pride. Though she led as warleader, she let the spiritseer elder and the other spiritseers be their spearhead; as they sprinted across the widening layer and neared the Stillness, the halja they met were cut aside by the mystics, sparing them a greater toll of blood and lives than would have otherwise been taken from them.
Cradle of Sea and Soil Page 33