The Changeling

by H. P. Mallory

  Then again, Sinjin and Dureau were right; we had welcomed all these strangers from the camp of our enemy and given them a home.

  If just one of them remained loyal to Luce…

  I wrapped my arms about my belly, hugging my child.

  Talk to me, please, talk to me.

  But only silence came in answer. If only I knew what was happening to me. If only Sinjin would call with an answer. If only he were here to take me in his arms and hug away my fears.

  But of course, he thought the Daywalkers were behind it.

  Could they be?

  I didn’t want to be this person. And if it was just my own life at risk, I think I would have been strong enough not to be. But with my unborn child at stake, nothing was clear. I wouldn’t be hostile towards the Daywalkers, and I wouldn’t blame them for what had happened. But I would give their camp a wide berth from now on. I wasn’t proud of this choice, and I silently hated myself for it, but there was too much at stake.

  NINE

  Sinjin

  The path up the mountains seemed almost impossibly long and steep. Sometimes ‘path’ felt like the wrong word entirely and I began to wonder if we had even gone the right way. But then the trail would re-emerge, and we would press on with more confidence.

  “Here’s another one,” Damek announced.

  Damek was referring to the various markers we had come across that offered us the knowledge that we were on the right path.

  These markers appeared as pictograms carved into the rock, some colored with natural earth tones. They looked as fresh as the day they had been made, and yet I got the feeling they were centuries old, perhaps older.

  “What does this one look like?” I asked Damek, who was good at spotting them.

  “The sun, the moon, and that fat lady again.”

  I sighed. “Firstly Damek, you will learn as you get older that a woman’s shape is less important than what lies inside,” I began, to which Dayna snorted.

  “Easy for you to say when your girlfriend is one of the best-looking women at Kinloch Kirk!”

  “Well, there is no arguing that,” I stated with a shrug.

  “Although, I shall go on with my former thought, if I may?” I asked her with drawn brows. She frowned at me but nodded, all the same. “There is nothing wrong with the larger lady, Damek.

  Remember that and your life will be a happier one.”

  Damek shrugged. “I’m with Dayna and we’re never splitting up.”

  “Good for you,” I humored him. “But werewolves can pile on the pounds too, and I am sure your girlfriend would be comforted to know that you will not leave her if she eats one person too many.”

  At that, they both immediately started laughing.

  “Secondly, the ‘fat lady’ as you have persisted in describing her, is most likely to be a depiction of Gaia herself, The Mother, the one we are looking for.” At this, I decided to turn around and look at them both. It was an important point, after all. “There are many things that can and may go wrong on this quest, many dangers we have yet to face, most of which will be out of our control. One thing over which we do have control, however, is you fat-shaming the all-powerful being of whom we are searching.”

  Damek turned red; Dayna laughed.

  As we continued up the steep slope, the varying shades of night that flowed back and forth across the sky turned into an equally vibrant day.

  “Whoever designed the sky here,” mused Dayna, “likes bright colors and can’t make up their mind about which bright color they like best.”

  It was a strange sky to walk beneath, but whatever took my mind off things was good as far as I was concerned.

  Higher and higher we climbed, and the pictograms began to change.

  “I think I can read this,” said Damek, surprised by his own skill.

  “Me too!” enthused Dayna. “Let’s say together what we think it says.”

  Both spoke, “ The earth is born of these peaks .”

  I looked at the pictograms, and though I had never encountered them before, found that I too knew exactly what they said. Quite bizarre as I have never excelled much at languages. It took me moving to France in order to learn the language.

  “How are we all able to read it?” Damek asked.

  “Think back to the sun, the moon and the Rubenesque figure we witnessed earlier.”

  Damek frowned. “What’s Rubenesque?”

  “Voluptuous,” I explained.

  Damek still looked dumbly at me.

  “Fuller-figured,” I continued.

  “All tits and ass,” Dayna explained helpfully.

  “Oh, okay, now I get it.”

  “That is not what it means,” I objected with a shake of my head.

  “But I suppose as crude translations go, it will have to do.

  Think back to that pictogram. What does it mean?”

  “Day and night are all one under Gaia,” said Damek instantly, without even pausing to think about it. He gasped at his own words and went cross-eyed trying to look at his mouth. “How did I know that?”

  “We all do,” I replied.

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  I gave a curt laugh. “Damek, if that is the strangest thing we see before this quest is over, then we can count ourselves very lucky, and if we stop to marvel at each pictograph we encounter, we will be here a very long time. Although I am not altogether sure that time passes here as it does in the real world.”

  I hoped fervently that time passed quickly here, and that when we returned to the mortal world, no time would have passed. The idea that a day here could be a year to Bryn and our baby terrified me.

  “How much further do you think?” asked Dayna.

  “If the two of you are going to trail back there saying ‘Are we there yet?’ then you can go back now.”

  “I was only asking. Jeez.”

  I was being impatient with them. “I apologize, but I have no information on how far we are going.”

  “Up into the sky from the looks of it,” said Damek.

  “He was not wrong. We seemed to be seeing the clouds from above, and yet we grew no colder and the air grew no thinner. It was as if this mountain range had been created as a barrier to people like us, and I had to assume things would grow tougher as we went.

  “We should camp here,” I said.

  We had already settled down for the night when Damek spotted more pictographic writing, which made me wonder if it had always been there or if it was appearing now because we had stopped the first time.

  “There are three trials,” we all read.

  “What sort of trials?” wondered Dayna, once again looking to me as if I were in the midst of reading a book of instructions titled: ‘What Gaia’s Pictographs Mean’.

  “One would assume, trials that test our worthiness of a meeting with Gaia,” I answered.

  “I wonder what she thinks is worthy,” worried Damek.

  “I suppose we shall find out when the trials begin.” I looked up at the sky that had again shifted into a mauve night. Had that been a full day? It had felt like one hour. Two at the most. “You two sleep, I shall keep watch.”

  I had no idea if there was anything to keep watch against, but I was not going to fall at the first hurdle.

  Damek and Dayna cuddled up together to sleep. It was a mark of how tense our current situation was that they did not even try to sneak a quickie while my back was turned. You know things are serious when horny youngsters cease to be interested in sex.

  I sat on a rock and stared up at the sky. Somewhere out there was my Bryn, under a completely different sky. What might she be doing? How were things back home? Perhaps everything had sorted itself out; the baby was communicating again, it was all a big misunderstanding and I had embarked on this quest for nothing.

  One could dare to hope.

  Partway through the night, Damek woke. “I’ll stand guard for a bit.”

  I would have stayed up the whol
e night, but I wanted to be rested for the trials. “Thank you. Wake me if anything happens.”

  I fell asleep quickly.

  But I was woken more quickly.

  “Sinjin!”

  I awoke and was on my feet in an instant, in time to see Damek lashing out at the creature that attacked him. It was like nothing I had ever seen, as if someone had taken bits of every African animal and stuck them together piecemeal to create a living nightmare.

  As the thing that attacked Damek hit the ground, the young man looked back at me, and his eyes widened in horror.

  “Dayna!”

  I spun about in time to see one of the beasts springing at the werewolf who was just waking. Her eyes widened.

  I moved with vampiric speed, slamming into the creature and sending it tumbling down the mountain side. Dayna stared after it, gasping in terror, then looked up at me and mouthed ‘Thank you’. I nodded politely and rushed to help Damek.

  “That’s two I owe you,” he said.

  More of the creatures poured out of the night towards us, teeth flashing, claws flying. Damek and I fought them back, and then…

  From behind us came a primal roar, and a hairy shape leapt between Damek and me, sending the beasts scattering. Dayna had changed into her wolf form and was taking no prisoners.

  “Is she always cranky when she wakes up?” I wondered, raising an eyebrow at Damek.

  He grinned back at me. “She’s so sexy when she’s like this.”

  Not what I had expected to hear the young man say, but everyone is entitled to their own private fetishes, I suppose. I had once met a man who could orgasm by trimming his beloved’s toe nails.

  But that is a story for another day...

  “Come on.”

  We hurried after Dayna. She did not seem to need help, but we made certain we had her back, nevertheless.

  After they had lost the element of surprise, the monsters were not that terrible a threat. Dayna and I were both hunters by nature, and Damek was strong enough to hold his own in any fight.

  “Do you think that was the first trial?” asked Dayna, once she had shifted back (I was polite enough to avert my eyes, as one should when a lady is changing).

  “If it was, then we kicked its ass!” enthused Damek, punching the air.

  “I very much doubt it,” I replied. “I think those hideous things were merely part of the landscape.”

  “Part of the landscape!” Damek railed as he threw his hands into the air.

  I nodded. “The trials, I am sure, will be different again. Come on. We shall eat and then get moving.”

  It now seemed to me that the pattern of day and night followed us rather than the other way around. As soon as we decided we were finished sleeping, night ended.

  The trail was flatter now. In fact, it seemed flatter than it had been the previous evening. We followed it on until a sheer wall of rock rose before us, climbing vertically into the shifting skies. At the base was a large pictogram.

  “The first trial,” Damek read. He stared up. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  I followed his gaze. “Now this is a trial.”

  “This is suicide,” breathed Damek.

  “That is the spirit, my boy.”

  “Stick by me,” said Dayna encouragingly to her boyfriend. “We can do it.”

  Damek grinned. With Dayna beside him, he could do anything.

  Another joy of youth. Bloody annoying.

  Before we started, I tore one strap off each of the packs we were carrying and used them to secure us together.

  “If one falls, then the others will save them,” I explained, adding in the privacy of my mind, or if one falls, we all fall .

  “We don’t think this might be like a psychological test, do we?”

  asked Damek, hopefully. “Like, to pass the test, you have to find another way around?”

  “From what little I know of Gaia, she is not that sort of being,”

  I said, not without regret. “I fear the trials will be straightforward. Or in this case, straight up. Ready?”

  The other two nodded. I began to climb.

  I could not say for how long we climbed. Every time I looked up, the cliff stretched on endlessly. Perhaps it was different for everyone who climbed it, and it ended when you had reached a certain point. Or perhaps Gaia did not like being disturbed and the cliff was endless. It was beginning to feel like the latter.

  My fingers were scratched and raw, the tendons ached, and the sound of the wind roaring in my ears was driving me to distraction.

  “Sinjin,” I heard Damek’s voice from directly below me.

  “Can this wait?”

  “I don’t think I can hold on any longer.”

  “Do.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I could hear the pain in his voice. If I was in discomfort, I could only imagine how it felt for Damek. Behind the constant rushing of the wind, I could now hear his labored breaths, becoming more pained the higher we climbed, the longer we were forced to cling by our fingertips. And still no end in sight. If he slipped, he could easily hit Dayna and down they would both go. Would I be able to take the unexpected tug of both their weight? I had to do something.

  The next time I found a pair of good solid hand holds I stopped.

  “Right, I think you should take a rest.”

  “A rest?” Damek laughed, though even in that I could hear the pain.

  “We need to keep going,” said Dayna, “or our strength won’t last.”

  “Damek,” I spoke clearly and slowly, “I need you to, very carefully, ease your weight onto the strap, let me take it and give your fingers a break.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “I have got a good grip. I can hold you.”

  “But…”

  “Damek, you are minutes away from letting go and I would rather know it was coming. Do as I say.”

  “Okay.”

  I felt his weight tug at my belt where I had attached the strap and heard the gasp of relief as he let go the cliff face and could rest his fingers.

  “Good. Now, Dayna, you do the same.”

  “You can hold both of us?”

  “I would hardly have suggested this course of action if I could not. I have a good grip; I am quite comfortable. I do not know how much longer we shall be climbing, so doing this now is our best chance to live.”

  “If you let go, I’m going to be cursing you the whole way down.

  And it’s a long drop, and I know some really bad curse words.”

  Spending time with Dayna, I was starting to understand what Damek saw in her, and it was similar to what I saw in my Tempest, Bryn.

  Sometimes a man needs a good woman who can tell him off.

  I felt Dayna’s weight added to Damek’s, and my fingers screamed.

  I pushed the feeling to the back of my mind—my strength would hold, all I had to do was endure the pain.

  “Right,” I controlled my voice so the youngsters would not know how much pain I was in. “Let us take ten minutes. Please do not swing, the belt chafes.”

  “Thank you, Sinjin,” said Damek. “I’m sorry I…”

  “Do not apologize. You came. You faced the dangers with me. That means a lot.”

  “You’ve saved my life before, and Dayna’s too.”

  “Do we have to have this conversation now?” I tried to leave my body, to leave the pain behind.

  “Boy. That is a long drop,” said Dayna.

  “Do not look down,” I advised.

  “Not a lot of options in this position.”

  “Don’t suppose you fancy carrying us up like this?” asked Damek.

  “Sure,” I forced a laugh through gritted teeth, “If you both would not mind discarding the anvils you are both apparently carrying.”

  Ten minutes passed in a slow, second by second agony that started in my straining fingers and slowly proceeded up my arms, stretching each muscle so it felt as if my joints were being slowly pried apar
t.

  “Alright,” I tried to keep my voice level, “shall we proceed?”

  They both reached for the rock face and the relief of feeling their weight removed from me made the prospect of the rest of the climb seem quite easy.

  “Ready? On we go.”

  We edged our way on upward. A moment, later I heard Damek’s voice, trembling slightly.

  “Sinjin, there’s blood on the rocks.”

  “Sorry about that. Try not to slip on it.” My fingers had been shredded by the pressure.

  “Sinjin…”

  “Concentrate on what you are doing.”

  The cliff above me stretched on as if forever.

  And then suddenly it did not. When I reached for the next hand hold, I found my arm curling around the top of the cliff. I had to force myself not to rush, to take it easy so as not to mess up in the last few moments of our climb. Scrambling up, I grabbed the strap and hauled first Damek then Dayna up to join me. The three of us lay on the cliff top, breathing heavily and letting the feeling seep back into our aching and abused limbs.

  “If the second trial is another climb,” said Damek, “then I’m quitting now.”

  “Then you would have to climb back down,” I pointed out.

  “I’m sure there’s an elevator if we look.”

  Dayna laughed to herself. “If only we’d known how close the top was, we wouldn’t have had to stop the way we did.”

  I said nothing, but I wondered if such was true. What was it that Gaia considered worthy? Was she looking for physical strength?

  Good mountain climbers? Or was she looking for something else? I glanced down at my bloodied fingers and wondered what the next trial might bring.

  TEN

  Bryn

  It was at night that I most felt the absence of my child. For that brief period when I’d become accustomed to feeling the growing shape of her thoughts within me, I’d looked forward to going to bed at night. Lying there with Sinjin’s arms around me, both of us cradling my belly, I’d close my eyes and listen to the

  unformed thoughts and impressions of my child. I would allow my own happy, relaxed thoughts to reach out to the baby, sharing my security like a blanket.

  Now the nights felt empty and alone. Sinjin wasn’t with me, and my baby, though present, had been silenced. The room in which I slept that had once felt like a haven was now an isolation cell, and I lay awake long into the night, praying, wishing, and hoping for some sense of the baby within me.