by Mike Wild
“Hooper,” Slowhand said worriedly, “maybe that bump did more harm than we thought. You do know you’re talking to a plant?”
Kali ignored him and studied the sphere again. What she saw could easily be mistaken for a plant, that was for sure, but there was something more to it. A complexity about the hairy fronds and an energy inside them that suggested something more advanced, more alive.
“I don’t think it’s a plant. I mean it looks organic, yes it is organic, only not in that way.”
“Not in what way?”
Kali stroked the sphere, tracing the outline of the shape within. “Strip away our flesh and our bone,” she said, “our veins, organs, muscle, sinew, tendons, and what do you think you get?”
“A bloody mess?”
“I mean what’s left, Slowhand. The very core of our being.”
“Your companion shows a knowledge beyond that of her world, archer,” the voice said, startling them both. “You see before you the nervous mesh central to the body of everything that lives. The threads, if you will, within us all.”
“Right. So, your sphere, it’s some kind of grow bag?”
“Slowhand!”
“Joke, Hooper. Breaking the ice with the plant is all.”
“It isn’t a plant.”
“I know that, for fark’s sake. Of all the steaming pits – you really do think I’m thick, don’t you?”
“No, no, of course I don’t. Not at all.”
Slowhand stared challengingly and found Kali couldn’t hold his gaze. He shook his head in resignation and ran his own palm over the sphere. “What I don’t get is, are you saying it was once one of us? Human?”
Kali looked around at the decay of ages, and smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t think human, no.”
She was only just beginning to appreciate the possible nature of the being whose presence they were in, and despite the gravity of the situation that had brought them here she couldn’t help but almost giggle with the thrill of it. The mummified corpse in Be’Trak’tak was the closest she ever thought she would come to meeting a member of the Old Races, but now?
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Him? How do you know it’s a him?”
Kali was getting a little tired of questions when so many of her own were clamouring to be asked. “Maybe because if it was a her– maybe someone called Endless Passion – you’d already be working on some unlikely contrivance to make your pants disintegrate.”
“Hey. That is below the belt.”
“No, we know what’s below the belt. And where it’s been.”
“Hey!”
“Hey!”
They stopped, remembering where they were. Kali turned towards the sphere to apologise but then stood back, gasping.
“What the hells…?” Slowhand said.
Inside the sphere, the liquid had begun to flood with clouds of grey. They were clearly more than clouds, however, as not only did their mass seem to be made up of tiny organisms but they moved with purpose, variously wrapping, obscuring and agitating the fronds of the ‘plant’ until they began to change, thicken and grow. What their unexpected host had described as ‘the threads within us all’ were beginning to take on a fuller form, one gradually becoming more recognisable as a living being.
First came a skeleton, one bit of bone at a time, the bones lengthening to join others, creating joints, limbs, ribs, a skull. Next came sinews, organs, tendons and muscle, these growths in turn becoming interlaced and overgrown with capillaries, blood vessels and arteries, which, when whole and connected, began to flow with blood the colour of sky. Over these vessels grew tissue and then flesh, a body forming before their eyes. And, lastly, came eyes, hair, features, until both Kali and Slowhand found themselves staring at a fully formed being, floating before them in the sphere.
But it was like no being either of them had seen before.
At least, not quite.
The thing was, Kali recognised elements of the creature she saw before her – the musculature of the limbs, the shape of the torso, the physiognomy of the face – but what confused her was that they seemed to come from two different anatomies. She was familiar with this creature and yet wasn’t at the same time. Because while it had always been her dream to meet a living, breathing member of one of the Old Races, she had never, ever dreamt she would meet a living, breathing member of both Old Races simultaneously. It was hardly what she’d expected the Dragon God to be.
“You?” she said breathlessly. “You’re –”
“The first of the dwelf. The last of the dwelf.”
“My gods!”
“Dwelf?” the archer said, confused.
“Work it out, Slowhand.”
“Are you telling me this thing is half dwarf, half elf? A hybrid?”
“Yup.”
“Glad I wasn’t hiding in the wardrobe in that boudoir.”
Kali raised her eyes. “I doubt it happened like that.”
“No? You wanna tell me another way you know of making,” Slowhand paused and shuddered, “little dwelfs?”
“I am not the result of physical procreation,” the dwelf explained, “but of other processes.”
Slowhand wasn’t sure what that meant. “Are they as much fun?”
“Slowhand!”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“You said ‘other processes.’” Kali said to the dwelf. “You mean those birthing pools? Is that what this sphere is - your own birthing pool? Were you created here?”
“Created when your race was young.”
“Looking good on it, pal,” Slowhand said, then pulled a face as he visualised the frond thing the dwelf had first been. “Now, anyway.”
“Actually, I doubt he’s as old as we are,” Kali corrected the archer. “That’s right, isn’t it? When we saw you grow, you were being created all over again, just like the first time, weren’t you? The liquid in this sphere is the same as that in the pools but... more complex, somehow. It enables you to form and reform at will?”
“Nutrients, proteins. The essential building blocks of life. I would not have survived this long had I not been able to revert to a state of stasis among them.”
“You’re thousands upon thousands of years old,” Kali breathed. “But at the same time, so young.”
“Oh, come on,” Slowhand objected. “He can pop in and out of existence, just the same as he was, every time, with all his memories intact? I may be just an old soldier boy, Hooper, but –”
“Perhaps you simply do not have all of the facts, Killiam Slowhand,” the dwelf said.
As he spoke, his body faded into a state of translucency for a second and something that looked like a length of stretched and shimmering gold could clearly be seen coiled throughout his body.
Slowhand stared. “What the hells?”
Kali could hardly believe it herself. She thought back to her meeting with Kane in Andon, the way he used the threads as physical things. It seemed the Old Races had too, but in a way that even Kane would likely find hard to believe. The Old Races, particularly in their last age, had been outstanding engineers, but she had never imagined – never could have imagined – that they had begun to engineer themselves.
“I think that’s a line of thread magic,” she said. “An actual magical thread interwoven with his very being.”
“Yeah?” Slowhand responded, perhaps not quite grasping the enormity of what she said, or perhaps, being Slowhand, simply asking the sensible question. “Why?”
“It is a necessary part of the process,” the dwelf said.
“Necessary for what? To churn out those things from the pools? Or maybe just try and suffocate anyone who pops by?”
“The atmosphere chamber,” the dwelf said. “That was not I.”
“Oh? Then who?”
“No one. Your entrapment was accidental, the process automatic. However, I regret the facility was left unsealed.”
“Atmosphere chamber?” Slowhand asked but Kali placed a hand on his shoulder, prefer
ring the conversation walked before it ran.
“If you were the one that freed us, thank you,” she said. “And for chasing away the k’nid, however you did.”
“That is what you call the spawn? Interesting. But yes. The k’nid, like most organisms, are susceptible to certain harmonics and vibrations which cause them discomfort, in this case forcing them to flee.”
“Harmonics and vibrations you’ve used before. To interrupt the absorption of those bodies out there.”
The dwelf was silent for a second.
“I had no interest in saving the intruders,” he said. “Only in protecting this place.” As he spoke, the structure shook once more, rumbled deeply. “The birthing k’nid have inflicted considerable damage on the complex.”
“The Faith, too, by the look of what we’ve seen out there,” Slowhand chipped in. “Why the hells didn’t you use these harmonics to get rid of them, too?”
“Because I have observed your world and know their motives, the singular, dark mission of their Church. Had my presence been revealed to them it would have served no good and perhaps have led to other discoveries. Also, my influence over the complex is no longer absolute. The damage it has sustained even without the k’nid – naturally over the long, long years – has left areas of it dead to me.”
“Like the birthing pools - the Crucible,” Kali said, and the sphere rumbled again as she spoke. “The Final Faith turned it on, didn’t they?” she said, remembering Jenna’s recordings. “That was what she meant by their mistake.”
“And now you can’t turn it off,” Slowhand said.
“The Faith disturbed the precise calibrations of minds long since dust, spawning the k’nid in numbers not intended. Worse, the prism central to the birthing process – the same prism that could abort the process – became misaligned beneath their meddling hands.” The dwelf sighed. “You are correct, archer. I cannot stop it.”
“Stop it?” Slowhand repeated. “Why in the hells did you start it? For gods sakes, why on Twilight would you want to create such creatures in the first place?”
The dwelf’s answer sounded regretful and – considering what it seemed he, or at least his people, were responsible for – also somewhat unlikely. “To save the world.”
“News for you, pal, that’s her job,” Slowhand said, nodding at Kali. “So what’s the real story?”
Kali wasn’t as hasty in responding. The dwelf’s regret had sounded genuine enough for her.
“Do you have a name?” she asked.
“I was created to be a guardian,” he said. “The elven word for such a role would be Tharnak.”
“Tharnak it is, then. Tharnak, please, I don’t understand. How would creating these things save the world?”
“Our world faced a threat foretold in tomes of as great an age as divides our civilisations now. A threat both from the unknown and unknown in essence. Though both elven and dwarven races knew of its coming, we knew also that it was alien to us. We did not know what could stop it because we could not know what its weaknesses were. And so we constructed the Crucible. Its purpose was the creation of a singular life form specific in its purpose – to combat any threat.”
“Must have been a pretty unique threat.”
“It was. As unique as the solution we devised. The creatures you call k’nid were the result of complex manipulations of Twilight’s life forms – extracting from them those elements which brought them victory in the survival of the fittest. In the process we gave birth to other creatures, and these, too, became part of the process. Our survival was at stake and so we had to create the ultimate defence. A life form capable of surviving any environment, of winning and transforming that environment and becoming its dominant life form. The only life form.”
“So overwhelming it would spread like some disease,” Kali said, “consuming the enemy. Tharnak, we’re not the enemy and your creations aren’t saving our world, they’re destroying it.”
“Because,” the dwelf said, “they were never meant to be unleashed here.”
“Unleashed here? I don’t understand.”
“On this world.”
“What?”
“The k’nid were destined for the heavens.”
“Okay, pal, that’s it,” Slowhand cut in. “Hooper, don’t waste breath on this guy. He’s a short wick in a long candle.”
“Slowhand, let him fin –”
“No, Hooper. Think about it. What isn’t ringing true here? Apart from this heavens rubbish? If this project of theirs was so damned important – so vital to the future of both their races – why is it stashed away up here at the top of our world, hidden in a secret valley behind the Dragonfire? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s a farking loony bin, is why.”
“My friend has a point,” Kali said, biting her lip. “If elves and dwarfs were working together, in a time when there were only elves, dwarves and a handful of primitive humans who would have posed no threat, who exactly were you hiding yourselves from?”
“Many of our peoples were against what we would achieve.”
“Hardly surprising,” Slowhand said.
“Do you imagine that because we were races who had attained greatness, that we did not have as many fundamental divisions among us as divide the peninsula today? There were those who ignored the threat to us, those who courted, even welcomed it, and those who actively sought to prevent us stopping it, for their own reasons, insane as they may have been. We were called blasphemous, sacrilegious, and even within our own ranks there was doubt. Doubt that could only be assuaged by my creation. A living compromise between elf and dwarf factions, a believer of both sides.”
“So the Crucible was built in secret?” Kali said. “Your rulers, governments, churches, knowing nothing about it?”
“For three years our people – those who believed – worked with and within them, utilising their resources and hoping, also, to recruit some to our cause. But – as is the case with your own Final Faith – the ideals and aims and beliefs of most were too intractable, entrenched to change. Had we been discovered we would have been banished, or worse. Still, our people managed to establish a chain of contacts, supplies and the means to transport them, the cooperation of sympathisers to our cause and, eventually, began to establish their presence, here, in the Drakengrat Mountains.”
“The waystations,” Kali said.
“Constructed, again, in secret, and as defended in their time as the Crucible itself. Not only a means to ferry our materials but designed to intercept any who might wish to stop what the Crucible hoped to achieve. Some of the airships therein were fighters.”
“Fighters? It sounds like a war.”
“More than just a war. A holy war. We had no wish to spill the blood of our own but we had to protect the complex whilst its purpose was achieved.”
“A holy war?”
“As I said, the k’nid were designed with a specific purpose and that purpose was to destroy the deity in our heavens.”
“Destroy the deity?” Slowhand echoed. He almost laughed. “Are you saying their purpose was to kill God?”
“Some called it God.”
Kali found herself almost physically staggering. “Deity,” she said. The dwelf had spoken in the singular so presumably he was not referring to the various gods whom most on Twilight had worshipped before the coming of the Final Faith. Was he, therefore, speaking of their God, the one God? If that was the case, did that mean the Old Races acknowledged its existence literal ages before the Faith came into being – as an actual entity? That it might be real was something she struggled to accept. “Tharnak, are you talking about the Lord of All?”
The dwelf almost spat his response, so vehement was it. “I am talking about the Lord of Destruction, the Lord of Nothing!”
Kali frowned. Lord of Destruction? Lord of Nothing? What the hells did those phrases mean? Were these just other terms for the Lord of All, or for something else entirely? She was about to ask when another tremor ran through
the Crucible, more violent than any that had come previously, and she was forced to steady herself against the sphere as growth fluids sloshed about inside. Even Tharnak himself seemed concerned.
“Would that I could show you,” the dwelf said with a sigh. “Make you understand. But there is so little time.”
Tharnak’s weary resignation made Kali realise that she was unlikely to get any further with this line of questioning for the moment and, while she still didn’t understand the meaning of the threat, there was something becoming increasingly obvious to her – something made inherently clear by the fact that the Old Races were no more.
The threat, she thought. Is this what happened to the Old Races? My gods. Is this how they died?
“Your attempt to eradicate this deity,” she said, “it failed, didn’t it? Why?”
“Hubris, arrogance, foolishness. At that stage in our civilisation, though we possessed the technology to do what we did, it was not enough. We needed the magic, too. But the magic, by then, had become weak, for we had destroyed those who made it whole.”
“Destroyed? Destroyed who?”
“The Dra’gohn.”
“The Dra’gohn? You mean the dragons?”
“If that is what you call them, yes.”
Kali didn’t have a clue why the absence of dragons should affect the magic – make it whole – but that hardly seemed the point. The Old Races were the reason they had gone away?
“How?” she asked. “Why? What happened?”
The sphere shook again and the dwelf’s weariness returned, almost as if he were dying with the Crucible. “Cowardice… greed… does it really matter? They were gone – and with them, our only chance to survive.”
“But this place,” Kali protested, aware as she spoke of how naive the question seemed. “All of its potential – couldn’t you have somehow remade them, brought them back?”
The dwelf actually laughed, although the sound was guttural and bitter. “How many times over these countless, lonely years do you think I have been tempted to try? To rectify our mistake, and to apologise to them, even though it would have been too late? No, it would have been an empty exercise, for that is why we failed. The magical threads that bind our creations are weak. Nothing made here can survive for long if it leaves the Crucible.” The dwelf paused. “How could I bring the dra’gohn back knowing that when they took to the skies I would once more be responsible for their end – that they would die?”