by BJ Hanlon
He didn’t know much more except that somewhere was a great lake surrounded by mountains and cut off from the world. But he didn’t know where. He thought he’d been in Arianne’s head but couldn’t be certain. In fact, he doubted it now. That meant she was truly lost.
They began again after about an hour and the road descended back down the flank of a wide mountain in a nearly direct southern route. Not the way they were supposed to go.
Edin was beginning to think this wasn’t made by a mage. No mage would’ve sent men following a random trail north and south, east and west and all the compass points in between. This had to have been a trail carved out of the mountains by an extremely stubborn, ambitious man, and most probably, stupid.
He watched peaks pass by slowly like the crests of waves in the slowest tidal sea imaginable. As the trail widened slightly, Dephina moved beside him and was now on the inside of the trail as Edin took the outer edge.
To his right was a drop of ten or so feet. Not bad until he saw he’d land on a slope nearly eighty degrees that ended in a deep grassy vale that may get half a day of sun at the most.
“So, what is she like? This woman of yours,” Dephina said. “Is she as brilliant as I am? Or as beautiful?”
Edin glanced at her and smiled. He felt slow in his mind, slow and tired.
“Edin?” Dephina asked again.
He looked back and then up at Grent and Berka who were ahead. Edin cleared his throat. “Sorry?”
“What’s she like, your princess?”
“She is everything.” He smiled. “She makes me feel like,” he sat for a moment trying to find a something tantamount to her, he tried to snatch words from the air like an illusionist snatches coins from ears.
Then he gave up. “There are not words.” He felt tears forming in his eyes and knew he sounded corny and awkward for him.
Maybe a poet could describe this feeling. Edin thought. Maybe he could’ve read more poetry in his youth.
Edin felt weird, he didn’t like it, showing these feelings, telling people about them. He clenched his jaw and looked back toward the road. “I’d like to ride in silence for a while.”
And they all kept silent. For a long time, everyone but the horses and birds were quiet.
As they were rounding a bend, a shaggy haired mountain goat blocked their path for a moment. Then, without warning it leapt from the road toward the grassy vale. It landed lightly on a rock some twenty feet below. It looked up at them and made a very long bahh sound. Edin looked above them at the stone and wondered if there were any others, or if it was only this guy.
“That thing is crazy,” Berka said turning around in the saddle to stare down at it. “Did you see that jump?”
Edin nodded. He was taking up the rear again and saw all of them looking back as if they were making sure he was still with them.
Of course he was. Where did they think he’d go? Did they believe he’d just stop in the middle of the pass and climb into the mountains?
“That’d be impossible for any man. How can a stupid goat do that?”
“It is what they were meant for,” Dephina said. “Every animal in the world has things they were meant to do in life.” She was talking loudly, so they all could hear, and her voice seemed to echo far off. “For most animals, it is engrained in them. For humans, there can be great deviances from where they’d originally began, their original intentions, and how their lives end up based on the choices they make. Animals do not have those choices.”
“You sound like Horston,” Edin said. His first words in hours.
Grent laughed. “I’ve been telling her that for months. Oww.” Grent was turning in his saddle when a hunk of something clipped him in the back and dropped to the ground.
Dephina chuckled. “You say that again you get rye.”
“Are you throwing our food? We kind of need that,” Grent complained.
With the crazy agility Edin had seen the first time he met her, Dephina leaned down while still in the stirrups until her head was near her foot. She reached out and snatched the bread and popped back up.
Edin realized he was smiling and got rid of it.
A voice sounded in his head. The voice was just like his own and poked him.
You know what they’re doing, they’re putting on a show. They don’t care about Arianne. Only you do. You must find her. The voice said in his mind.
She’s being held and I don’t know where. It’s a huge world. She could be in the Esto Mountains? Edin responded, his own head fighting it.
You need to look; how would you feel if she left you?
I’m following my destiny; I’m helping the world. It is what’s best and she’d agree.
Just maybe not best for you.
Dephina just spoke about it, didn’t she? Our intentions can change, what we want is also not necessarily what we’re made for. He told himself and let the doubtful voice leave his mind.
The road flattened in a deep ravine next to a small stream with leafless trees and bushes on the banks.
The water bubbled and trickled over rocks heading the same way they were. Edin guessed it would be dry by midsummer. He followed it with his gaze as they rounded a corner and spotted a lake.
Or at least a large pond.
Running into it was a stone pier angled down like a ramp. Across the way on the far bank, Edin spotted a pair of small animals, too small to tell what they were from this distance, drinking from the water’s edge. The lake was maybe five acres, and it didn’t remind him of the vision, but it was a congregation of where waters flowed.
Usually there were lakes or rivers in mountains. The mountains collect snow in winter because of their elevation and then when it warms, the snow melts and has to go somewhere.
The Susot Valley had the river. Edin guessed that was where the surrounding mountains let loose their excess.
This lake seemed to swing around the backside of a squat fat mountain that from this angle, looked like a cat curled around itself. He wondered what was on the other side. A river or a lake or just more mountains.
The sun was ahead of them now and dipping beneath the gray mountains and the cold wind just began howling through the peaks.
Rocks began to tumble and Edin looked up. There were so many crooks and crevasses that would be good shelters for the local wildlife.
He had nearly forgotten to think about the dematians again. He forgot to watch for them. He’d been distracted. He’d been slow.
He stared at the short squat mountain. It looked like an ancient ziggurat that was built on by a culture long since wiped out.
Were there any more dematians over there? Any more ancient monsters from the past resurfacing?
But the lake was still and seemed to lack life.
“This will be camp,” Grent said as they stopped near the pier. The horses seemed to know what the slab of stone was for and crowded at the water’s edge to drink from the cool mountain spring. They all laid out the bedrolls as Grent started a small fire and Dephina cut up the cheese, bread, and bits of meat.
“You’ve never had my chili, have you Edin?” she said. “I can make it as good on the trail as I can in our apartment. It has green bell pepper, onion, and celery, which in the southern islands they call it the trinity.”
“They call it that everywhere south of Carrow,” Grent said but Dephina didn’t stop.
“I add my own spice blend which, if you ever stop by, I may teach you,” she paused. “Or your lady when we find her.”
Edin looked up at her. Edin had been looking at the horses. His gray stallion, with a white blaze on his face and a long mane, was staring at the cat-mountain across the way.
“We’ll go with you to find her,” Dephina said when they locked eyes. “This I promise you.”
He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”
“But first we find the elves. Where are they? You haven’t told anyone.”
“I promised the she-elf that saved my life. I am not certai
n I can break that.”
“You must, you will have us with you when we get there.”
“They do not want outsiders, if I tell you then you could let others know.”
“We will keep the secret.” She said, “I’d like to think that Uncle Grent and Aunt Dephina have earned your trust.”
“And your brother,” Berka said.
Edin glanced at Berka. “You wanted to kill me six months ago.”
“Brothers fight,” he said and took a big drink from his waterskin.
Edin sighed. “You have earned it, and you are my family.”
Just saying that, those words made him feel better. He did have family, didn’t he? Edin stared at her and nodded his head. “They’re very private according to the one I met. And very dangerous.”
“The she-elf who didn’t give you her name.” Grent questioned.
“He did say they were private,” Dephina said. “Maybe it is true that this prophecy states only you can bring them together, but maybe you go off on some wild chase or gods forbid, are hurt.”
The other two looked at her warily.
“Shut up, I’m being practical. It was part of my training and it should’ve been part of both of yours as well.” She said the last pointing first and Grent and then at Berka. “Edin has an excuse, he’s never been in a martial system as any of us.”
“What about you and me training him?”
“Formal martial system and martial schooling.” She sighed. “But see, for my son to grow up in a land free of these demons, I would walk right into that elven village and demand their help to save the world. For him I would punch Yio Volor right in his thick and pompous nose.”
He sat quietly for a moment. “The only statue I ever saw of him had a bird beak of a nose,” Edin said.
“It doesn’t matter. What if what we’re doing this moment is what we’re meant to do? What if it isn’t you who actually get to them, but you facilitate the meeting? Do you know what I mean?”
Edin shook his head. “How would I introduce you to the she-elf if I’m not there?”
She shrugged. “You tell us where to go and we all swear on the lives of our loved ones that we will find them, if it is the last thing we do.”
“And will not reveal their location.” Grent added.
Edin looked around to the others, to his family. “And Arianne?”
“As soon as we’re done. And who knows, maybe the elves have a ritual or spell to find her.” She paused, “of course if they’re real.”
“They are,” Edin said. He had to tell them as best as he could. “It started when you two rode to your deaths, or what I thought were your deaths.”
“Going out the Elori-way,” Grent said.
“That is true.” He fiddled with the waterskin. “That slope, the rocky one they tried to pin us against was the only way out.” Edin described what he could remember from the journey.
Dephina said, “So that’s it? Somewhere in the mountains, possibly even north of us right now.”
“Pretty much,” Edin said. “But it would be a guess either way. We could abandon the horses and try to climb up and over the mountains now. Or wait until we cross the pass and come in the way that I did.”
“Either doesn’t sound like fun,” Grent grumbled.
“I don’t want to climb mountains if I don’t have to,” Berka said.
“They are not fun,” Edin added and took another drink. “And by the way, there’s a beast in there. Something the she-elf called a ponnoa. It was like a snake only bigger. I think there were feet.”
“Want to toss me that aleskin?” Grent said. “I could use a drink.”
“It’s water,” Edin said and he realized what that meant. He hadn’t grabbed a ‘to go’ drink. A term he used after hearing so many of the town drunks, Ulson in particular, yell ‘barkeep, let me get an ale to go.’
But Edin didn’t grab any. He’d barely drank the night before and didn’t since the lighthouse.
“Does anyone have anything else?”
“I got some wine,” Dephina said tossing it to Grent, the warrior took a drink and then held it up toward Edin.
Edin shook his head. He wanted to be sober. There was not much more talk that night. The small fire made from bits of dry driftwood burned at the center of the road. The sky was perfectly clear and he could see the stars far above. He saw a comet or a shooting star dart from north to south almost directly over him, and he closed his eyes.
It wasn’t dreams of Arianne he had. They were the opposite end of the spectrum; they were worse than nightmares. Much worse.
Edin was in a dark room, or he guessed it was a room as the air felt still and tasted stale. It was so dark around him that he had no idea how vast the room was. It could’ve been infinite, endless like the space outside the world.
Then something appeared before him. One point of light, small and dim and Edin knew that it did not offer hope. It held something else: despair and it was growing. It was a fire, a white and red fire and it was almost as if someone was in… No it couldn’t be.
There was a black shape inside the fire, a humanoid black shape as if it were a chick in an egg held up to a light. Then the shape advanced, climbing toward Edin and the fire now showed a tunnel rising. There were long hands and long arms. It was taller and bigger than even the giant dematian.
Despite being so far away, a hundred, no a thousand yards, probably more, he guessed the swinging arms were as tall as he was. And just behind and to the right, something skittered along the ground. Something giant though still only half the size of the figure ahead of it.
And there were legs. They were like the roots beneath the spider trees, but this one had no trunk though the body was as large as a horse and there were a thousand creepy red reflections before it. Eyes.
Edin knew what it was.
He shook but could say nothing. Edin was nearly certain that the thing down there had seen him. Edin wanted, no needed to get out. To leave this, whatever this was, and escape. But he had nowhere to go. He couldn’t move, nothing worked, his voice his body.
All Edin could do was stare at the approaching pair and shiver and feel faint.
But then it wasn’t just a pair, it was more than that. A lot more. He could see beyond and between the two.
There he saw giants, he saw snakes and more spiders, he saw beasts above, a flying reptile and also a half crillio and half bird—something he’d never heard of before. And there was a fog about them. A yellowish mist that followed the humanoid black shape up the steps from the underworld.
Edin’s mouth dropped.
Harsh words hissed in his mind that made all the hairs on his dream body stand.
“I come.” It was long and drawn out meant to stay around like an unwanted guest.
Then he heard a cackle in his head. It rolled around like a ball inside a shadow box conking the walls and pounding the brain.
“Edin.” A rough shake woke him.
His eyes shot open and suddenly he let a culrian surround him and whoever was touching him. He blinked and saw it was Dephina.
“Edin, it’s okay. It was a dream, you’re safe.”
Edin swallowed and wiped his eyes. Then he saw the tunnel in his mind. Was that real?
A leader of monsters rising from the depths. The name came to him but he shook it out like a pebble in his boot. No, couldn’t be. It was too insane, too… unreal. If it were true, could he even wrap his head around it?
He looked back at Dephina and nodded. “I’m fine,” he said then thought, if I don’t go back to sleep.
Edin stayed awake on guard duty the rest of the night. He tried to shake the images from his mind and looked out over the water. It was black but the reflections of the moon and the stars on it gave it the feeling of a much larger world. A deeper and endless land where humans could go to escape the madness that was this world. A place in the stars with the gods.
It seemingly took forever for the sun to rise to a place wher
e he could start again to train his body, if only to take his mind off the nightmare.
Edin began with the Oret Nakosu and using his muscles to fight each other. As he went through the strengthening exercises, he felt a sort of push back in his own brain. It wasn’t just the muscles fighting it was his brain, his gut instinct. It told him what he saw in that dream.
Do not lie about it. Do not hide from it because when the world ends you know you’ll be at the tip. You’ll be the one with the closest view.
Edin felt a surety in those words, like the fact that the world would end was guaranteed. Edin’s heart thumped like mad as he pictured the great demon climbing the long tunnel from the underworld.
Edin couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t. That wasn’t him. It was another dematian. Stories said he had a tail with a barbed spike on the end. Edin didn’t see that. It was just like the one from the fields outside Carrow.
Grent joined him a short while later. Terrins like him needed much less sleep than normal folk. And although Edin could move like one, he wasn’t a real terrin and needed a lot more sleep. Especially after using the talent.
But he couldn’t even think about going back to bed. They moved to the sword afterward, standing far enough apart and facing the same direction. They raced through the sets matching speed and movements in a near perfect tandem. The master and the student.
They stopped and Edin let a cold breeze wick away some of the sweat that was on his body from the exertion. The breeze was fresh and invigorating.
“You two should join the circus with that dance,” Berka called out. Then he added an, “Ow, why’d you pinch me?”
“Because, if you were watching the same thing I was and knew what was happening, you’d pinch yourself too. That was brilliant and precise. Could you even tell what moves they were running through?” Dephina said.
“Yes, I mean mostly. Sure it was a bit blurry and all but…” Berka trailed off.
“He moves like a terrin.”
“I can see that, but since when?”
Edin called out. “About the time the talent appeared.”
They began riding again shortly after they finished. Berka had gotten up to train but they couldn’t wait and no one cared to let him finish the Oret Nakosu.