Jherrick stared at a golden leaf, quiet in the pool. “I am nothing,” he breathed.
“You. Are. Everything.” Flavian’s voice was soft by his ear.
Suddenly, Jherrick felt presence in the nothingness. Something massive, unknowable. Something intelligent that watched him, yet cared not how he chose, nor what he chose to do next. Something that loved, unconditionally. Its presence filled the emptiness, soft and quiet. Touchable, limitless, warm with love and creation and bliss. Jherrick came to absolute stillness, breathing with eyes open, marveling at the presence inside the nothing. The presence that filled everything around him, even his very body.
“Now you see.” Flavian spoke by his ear. “There is a reason you came to us. Your exposure to death and suffering have honed you, prepared you for your journey. Come with me now. It is time you began the Path of the Dead.”
Jherrick’s breath stilled. A dead boy’s glassy eyes rose in his thoughts. “The Path of the Dead?”
“For only when one walks the Path of the Dead, can one find the souls who wish to return.”
Jherrick’s eyes snapped up to the oculus. “Resurrection. You’ll teach me how to bring Olea back.”
“Perhaps.” Noldrones Flavian moved around Jherrick and knelt, his starlight eyes infinite. “But I must warn you. Those who have truly completed their journey cannot be brought back. If their Essence deems its mission upon this world complete... they will not come to your call. If they have left things unfinished, though, their Essence can be found and returned to their flesh. In order to learn this, you must allow all that you have been to die, so you can be reborn into what you are becoming.”
“How do I do that?” Jherrick breathed.
“By dying. Come. It is time we prepared you for your death.” Brother Flavian stood. He held out his long-fingered hand.
Jherrick paused, then slowly rose. “Are you going to kill me?”
“No.” Noldrones Flavian’s smile was ancient, unknowable. “You are going to kill yourself. Then you will make a choice; to become what you are meant to be, or to sigh away into the breath of the Void. Come. It is time to fast and prepare.”
Jherrick glanced back at Aldris. Flavian followed his gaze. “It may be that you can gather him back together again, but it may be not. If his purpose has been fulfilled with his death... he will remain as he is. Forever.”
“In this tomb,” Jherrick murmured. “A beautiful corpse.”
“Where eternity will see him as he is,” Flavian murmured. “Noble. Righteous. A true warrior with a kingly heart. Come – you shall not be allowed to return here until you are ready. It would be too much of a temptation, so say your goodbyes.”
Jherrick sank to one knee, a palm to his chest. He gazed at Aldris’ corpse for a long moment, feeling the emptiness of eternity. The man was at peace; he was peaceful, laying as he was. Who was Jherrick to disturb the dead from their rest? To pull them from the maw of the Void and thrust their souls back into their bodies? Yet, that was exactly what Brother Flavian was insinuating Jherrick might be able to do. Rising, Jherrick gazed down upon his dead Second-Lieutenant once more, and wondered: if the time came, could he do that to a friend? Could he take away that eternal peace and make a man – or a woman – resume a life of misery?
Jherrick took a long breath, then turned, following Brother Flavian’s silent steps out through the opalescent colonnades.
* * *
Jherrick stood in the open air, shivering in the lingering chill of dusk. Naked but for a loincloth of white silk in the mist-wreathed evening, he stood in an ancient place of learning. A semi-circular amphitheater of opalescent stone rose up behind him, on the last vestiges of the Sanctuary’s citadel. In every direction beyond the amphitheater roiled a thick, impenetrable mist. Endless, as if whatever world this was had forgotten everything else, besides the staircase that wound back up through that mist to the citadel.
There were no stars high above, the dusky evening sky lost to the shifting mist. Before Jherrick stood a towering cliff of white stone thrust up out of the vast nowhere. Carven with the effigy of a winged bird-woman lifting hands in prayer above her head, her eyes were rolled back in ecstatic trance. Thirteen breasts decorated her chest. Feathers flowed down her body and opened from her figure in enormous wings, blending her into the mist all around. She had not one set of wings, but seven, from the smallest at her neck down to the longest at her hips, even a tiny set of wings opening from the inner eye between her brows. Demonic creatures writhed around her ankles. One clawed foot crushed a demon that snarled with a dragon’s head, tearing at her feathered ankle with fangs.
Between her clawed feet lay the tomb. It yawned before Jherrick, black, a natural crevasse riven between the bird-woman’s strong legs. The entryway had no carving, no decoration. This was a place of trial, and the barrenness of the rip in the rock told him as much. Noldrones Flavian stood before that void, wearing his usual fitted robe of starlight silk, though today he had painted sigils in a white shell-paint over his high cheekbones and the backs of his hands. It was the same paint he cupped in an agate-stone bowl as he stood before Jherrick, daubing a fine-tipped brush into the white slurry and beginning to inscribe similar sigils upon Jherrick’s naked chest.
“To the Dusk we send you.”
The death-ritual had been explained to Jherrick, and the wet touch of Flavian’s brush with its white shell-paint was chill but not unexpected. Painting sigils that Jherrick didn’t understand, Flavian worked his way with his stylus over Jherrick’s collarbones, his chest, in a line down his abdomen, then moved around to his back. And then, he focused upon the left side of Jherrick’s neck, painting with careful precision.
“To the Dusk we intend you.”
The sigil Flavian had writ upon Jherrick’s neck burned like fire, and as this last piece was committed to his flesh, the rest of the sigils began to itch and sear also. Jherrick shivered, enduring the sensation, but it was not unexpected: the shell-paint used for this ritual contained poison. A poison that would send him far, out past his own mind and into the emptiness of the Void. A hallucinogen and system depressant, it would bring Jherrick visions, then cessation of heart and breath. If he came to an understanding of what he was and wished to come back, he would return to life.
Theoretically.
“To the Dusk we commend you. Break, Child of She Who Made Us. Break, and be re-formed by the hand of the World Shaper.”
At last, it was finished. Flavian stepped back, then nodded toward the tomb’s riven entrance. “Are you ready, Acolyte of the Noldarum?”
“Yes. I am ready.” Jherrick’s voice was hollow to his ears.
“Then enter the Tomb of the World Shaper and see what you will see.”
Jherrick stepped forward, chill curls of mist crawling over his skin in a counterpoint to the burn of the paint, now smoothing out to a dull throb in his flesh. A lit orb-candle was placed in his hands by Noldrones Flavian. “Place the candle in the niche as you situate yourself. Have a few dippers of water, then lay down in the grave. Once you are situated, blow the candle out. And then you will travel to the Void. If you decide to come back, you will.”
“Thank you.” Jherrick accepted the candle in his cupped hands. His eyes locked with Flavian’s, but there was nothing more to say. Flavian nodded, and turning to face the black crevasse, Jherrick stood tall. Whatever happened, he would be a changed man. Tomorrow, or the next day, or sometimes up to seven days. The Noldarum would wait a week before they came to get Jherrick’s body from the tomb; sometimes it took a while for a man to rise from his grave.
Sometimes they never did.
Jherrick stepped forward, his bare feet chill upon the white stone of the amphitheater. Moving into the crevasse, he entered a shadowed space so dark he was thankful for the candle’s meager light. Jherrick could see no more than three feet ahead as he moved slowly forward. Twenty paces in, he came to a set of descending stairs and stepped down. Down and further down they went, until the l
ast glow of the crevasse’s outlet behind him was utterly lost in the darkness.
Then he arrived. A small dead-end space, it had an alcove carven with the bird-woman again, but smaller: only human height. Decorated in luminous paints, she glowed ochre and umber, jade and turquoise, and a vibrant royal purple by the light of Jherrick’s candle. Every set of wings glowed in jewel tones. Her gaze was fierce, uncompromising. Spying the candle-niche at her clawed feet, Jherrick nestled his flame in amongst a thousand orbs of melted wax. The goddess’ face came alive in the light, hideous, beautiful, her wings stretching out as if they would encompass the world.
A narrow tomb lay at her feet, carven two feet down into the opalescent bedrock. Gazing in, Jherrick saw a concavity of stone for his head, situated beneath the goddess so she would be the last thing he gazed upon as he dwindled to the poisons. To one side of the room was a circular well, with a winch and a stone bucket. Jherrick moved to it, recalling Flavian’s instruction to take water before he lay down. He let the bucket fall, heard it splash, turned the crank. It came up full, the water black within, clean and cool.
Jherrick doused his hair, then brought water to his mouth and drank. His body was beginning to sweat from the poisons in the paint, chill yet strangely warm and pulsing, as if with fever. He shivered, though his neck and chest felt hot, flushed. He’d been through trials of poison before to earn his Khehemni Bloodmark through fever-dreams, but never one that was supposed to actually kill him – and this poison was working quickly, making him feel faint, his head reeling.
Jherrick swallowed bile, arresting himself from vomiting. He took one last mouthful of water, then stepped to the grave. It yawned at him, waiting. He looked up at the goddess, lit fierce and horrible by the candle’s light.
“I will die and return,” Jherrick murmured, readying himself for his journey. “I will learn resurrection magics. Then I will find Olea and I will bring her back to this world – to me.”
Jherrick den’Tharn stepped into the grave. Within its dark confines he sat upon cold stone, staring up at the goddess with her wide jeweled wings. Turning his head, he blew out the candle, and was doused in an intimate, crushing darkness. Closing his eyes, he lay back. Settling his hands upon his chest as he’d been instructed, he cupped his bare, beating heart.
Then the poison took him – straight to the Void.
CHAPTER 9 – ELYASIN
The darkness of the Heldim Alir was absolute beyond the group’s lofted singing-stones. Elyasin’s mind drifted as she gazed from one ghostly tableau upon the tunnel walls to the next. Battle raged around them in the fey light: images of war wrought so long ago that none who had inscribed these runes of precious ore yet lived. Lost in thought as she paced behind Therel and followed by Luc, she hardly noticed that Ghrenna and Thaddeus had halted at yet another branch-point before them – the fourth one they’d come to in as many hours since their morning meal.
Squinting at a series of way-marker runes running through a recessed alcove to their left above an ornate seepage-basin covered in sigils and draping white moss, Thad suddenly cursed and halted. The scribe’s uncommon response to a branch-point caused Therel to run right into him.
“Move on, Thad!” Therel chastised with a jostle. “Read the way-markers and let’s get going!”
But Thad was rooted, staring at the lefthand wall of the Y-split. Gaping, he stepped to the recessed wall and basin, and Elyasin’s heart sank, realizing why the scribe had stopped. There was Thad’s white chalk mark upon the wall – the same mark he’d made just an hour ago. They had come full circle, the tunnel looping back upon itself to join up with where they’d been.
“Dammit!” Therel cursed as he realized it also. Lifting a hand to touch Thad’s mark, he gave an exasperated growl. “I thought you were leading us along the main thoroughfare, Thad! Not another Kotar-fucked side-branch.”
“I was! I mean, I am!” The scribe was flustered, taking his wired spectacles off and lipping at the ends. He gestured one lanky arm at the moonstone and silver sigils flowing above the basin and its wealth of luminous moss. “These are the same sigils as before! They mark the main tunnel I’ve been keeping us to. We’ve just come full-circle.”
“The main tunnel of the Heldim Alir led us in a circle?” Elyasin asked. “Well, that’s never happened before.”
“No,” Thad spoke breathlessly, “it hasn’t! The sigils of the full moon and the kruk-tan, the Giannyk scythe, that signify the main tunnel have always led us onward – not around to a point we’ve been before.”
“So the main tunnel’s ended in a loop?” Therel’s brows knit, and he set his hands on his hips, gazing at the sigils above the basin. “Well, where’s the fucking exit?”
But Thad’s eyes were unfocused, his lips fallen open as he gazed at the alcove above the basin. “Of course! Why didn’t I see this earlier?!”
“What is it?” Elyasin moved close, easing her eyes into a light trance to see the picture upon the wall. Luc stepped to her side lofting his singing-stone, as did Therel. Elyasin saw the same picture she had seen numerous times in the past three days since her and Luc’s talk in the grotto. It was an image of that hillside city with the cavernous darkness again. Obscure and too bright, the image looked like the city was swaddled in fog lit by a hundred lighthouses, yet with a cavernous emptiness in the center.
“We’ve seen this,” Elyasin murmured. “I’ve seen it at least twenty times on the left-hand wall in the last hour alone.”
“Since we took the last branch,” Thad nodded, turning eager green eyes to Elyasin. “Yes! And always upon the left-hand wall. Don’t you see? The main tunnel took us in a left-hand loop, marking this image upon the left the entire time. We’ve just come around something. Something massive. And I would wager, important.”
“But there’s been no doors!” Luc scoffed, stubbing his boot in the grit upon the stone floor. “We went all the way around a dead-end.”
“Or is it?” Thad murmured cryptically, peering at the wall.
“What are you looking at, Thad?” Therel sidled close, leaning forward to peer at the image.
“It’s Ghrenna!” He turned enormous eyes to Ghrenna now, who was hovering back a few paces and gazing up at the sigils that crowned the recessed juncture. “Or Morvein, at least. There, standing on a high lip of stone just beyond the picture to the left!”
Moving forward with the grace of a wraith, Ghrenna stepped close to inspect the wall. Elyasin stepped in also, looking at the left margin of the image. She could still see the mist, and the town on the hillside, but now, she saw what Thad had seen – a woman standing upon an overlook. With long white hair done in an ornate braid over one shoulder, she was pale and dressed for battle, with a white keshar-claw pendant depicted around her neck.
Glancing at Ghrenna, Elyasin was shocked: Ghrenna was the spitting image of the woman in the picture. Dressed in charcoal-black buckled garb something between the wild Elsthemi style and Kingsman gear, Ghrenna had a snowhare pelt around her shoulders. Her lush white waves were woven into the exact same ornate braid as the woman in the picture, and Morvein’s white keshar-claw pendant glinted in the blue light of the singing-stones upon Ghrenna’s bared chest, set through with fiery opals and veins of amethyst and onyx.
“What in Halsos’ Hells?” Therel leaned forward, blinking at the wall. “Is that Morvein? And is this a town?”
“It seems like it’s a cavern,” Thad spoke fast. “See the vastness of the dark edges? Like it’s not the black of night, but inside the mountains here. The buildings seem odd – I can’t make out windows or doors.”
“Like a cavern large enough to walk around in an hour?” Therel’s deductive logic was keen as he hummed to brighten his singing-stone. “One whose entrance is hidden by wyrria?”
“The Giannyk were masters of portal-wyrria,” Ghrenna interjected. “I don’t remember a chamber like this, but it could be a place I – Morvein – found.”
Ghrenna’s slip of pronoun was noted
by Elyasin. Therel and Luc’s glances were sharp also. No one had missed it, but everyone held their tongues. Ghrenna had been referring to herself as Morvein more and more lately – it was all too obvious that Morvein’s memories were seeping into Ghrenna’s everyday awareness. In addition to singing in other languages at night, Ghrenna had started to murmur Giannyk phrases by day. As she did now, her cerulean eyes going distant and her lips speaking the rolling vowels and clipped consonants of the Giannyk as her hands smoothed over the stone of the alcove.
“There’s more.” Thad frowned, watching Ghrenna and pushing his spectacles up his nose. “Glyphs form around the edges of the picture as the mist curls. I’ve seen them in other tableaux down here, like someone imprinted the walls not only with scenes of memory but overlaid pictographs. Many glyphs repeat. Not just directions through the tunnels like the way-markers, but like descriptions of the pictures themselves.”
Elyasin shared a look with Therel as Ghrenna wandered away to smooth her hands over a different section of wall. “Are the glyphs anything you recognize from the maps of the Brother Kings, Thad? Or Metholas’ codices that you found down in his crypt under Fhekran Palace?”
Thad peered harder at the wall. He slung his pack to the ground without letting his focus break, digging out a piece of parchment and a charcoal nib. Without letting his eyes wander, Thad placed the parchment upon the tunnel floor. Drawing without looking, he set down twenty symbols, then thirteen more, then wrote numbers below each glyph. At last, he allowed his trance to break. Blinking behind his spectacles, he glanced down at the parchment.
“That’s all of them in this image. The numbers are how many times I’ve seen each glyph on the walls these past weeks. Though there are far more glyphs than the ones just in this image. I’ve chronicled five hundred and thirty glyphs so far in my journal as we’ve walked, which I believe make up the pictographic Giannyk language. I’m starting to put sounds to them when Ghrenna speaks Giannyk while looking at a wall.”
Goldenmark Page 13