by Tammy Salyer
Griggory approached Jaemus as the Knights went over the situation, staring intently at his chest. Jaemus looked down and saw that his Vinnric robe was hanging loose and the Himmingazian Scrylle map, rolled into a tube, was sticking out.
Before he could react, Griggory had plucked the map from his pocket and unrolled it. His thick, blond-silver eyebrows scrunched together with his intense focus, then he looked up to Jaemus. “You’ve had this all along?”
He nodded, unwilling to implicate himself once again in its theft. He’d only just managed to convince himself that the Himmingazian artifacts were actually more his property than Griggory’s in the first place.
But it wasn’t accusation that blazed in Griggory’s eyes as he gazed at Jaemus. It was… hope? Jaemus reached into another pocket and withdrew the two shards of the Fenestros he’d brought with him from Vinnr, one having belonged to Eisa, the other—Jaemus was still a bit squicked out by this—from the chest of the woman who’d been called the Speaker. “And these,” he said simply.
Griggory’s eyes widened. With close to reverence, he retrieved the third chunk of the Fenestros from a satchel and held it up next to Jaemus’s hand, his two shards still in his palm. It was easy to see that the three would create a single orb if held together.
Griggory’s lips tightened, then he said, “We have a task to get to now, Vreyja’s grandling. At our fingertips lies the map to Himmingaze’s future and we must follow it.”
Jaemus started to ask what he meant, but stopped when Griggory knelt on the floor and spread the map out. Uncertainly, Jaemus mumbled, “Perhaps now isn’t the best time.”
The older man peered up at him with squinted eyes. “Time? How much time do you think Himmingaze has?”
As if to prove his point, an immense drawn-out roll of thunder boomed outside, shaking the temple hard enough to rattle a few pebbles loose from its walls. When the roar stopped, Jaemus had to knuckle his inner ear to dissipate the echo.
“If we don’t act now, Bardgrim, the last of your people will be a memory. And only to those in this room. Your existence will be wiped from the Cosmos as if it never was.” Griggory’s eyes shifted meaningfully toward where the Glisternauts had amassed. “Is that what you want for them?”
Jaemus looked toward his companions, too. The drawn, vacant looks many of them held showed as clearly as a painting how close to overload they were. They’d seen so much, maybe too much, in the last few cycles, and none of it was easy for a people who’d barely even heard of a Verity before. Now they’d been immersed, like Jaemus, quite against their wills, in a Cosmos-wide battle for survival, and without the knowledge or tools they needed to win it. Among everyone in Himmingaze, only Jaemus grasped what was going on, and only barely at that.
He caught Cote’s eyes and looked into them for some direction. Cote, knowing Jaemus better than Jaemus knew himself, gave him a tiny half grin, the wrinkles beside his mouth deepening in a way that Jaemus found irresistibly fetching. With a hard swallow, he hunkered down beside Griggory.
The unique parchment held only the most basic resemblance to the page he’d seen before being ordained by Vaka Aster. It had been plain off-white then, just a flawless flat rectangular sheet. Now, though, the white didn’t seem so much like the color of a page, but rather a glowing light, pure and brilliant like a Glister Cloud speck. And the runic script written there was gone, replaced by ideas that seemed to flow from the map itself into his head. As he looked at it with Griggory, he realized he was looking at the realm of Himmingaze—the whole place at once. It was as if the world had been turned into a shrunken transparent orb that he now sat in the center of. He could look in any direction and make out every feature and shape he knew, as well as thousands he didn’t. All he had to do was tell himself to focus on anything—the bottom of an undersea trench, plants and stones littering the seafloor, fish swimming in the water, and anything that lay atop the water too, such as his hovering home of Vann—he could see it perfectly, as if he stood next to it and could touch it. And he knew precisely where everything was.
“There,” Griggory said. “All of them, near.”
Jaemus knew what he meant. He could see them too. Only one of the Fenestrii had been aboard Balavad’s warship—the one Cote had kept aboard the Bounding Skate—and Griggory had scattered the remaining three in the sea when he’d feared Balavad’s coming. Now, all were visible in the Scrylle map. Yet, almost as if the Creatress’s shrine were a magnet, none had been spread far from it. Each lay at different heights down the slopes of the undersea mountain that Isle Stonering now topped.
The quiet voice in the back of Jaemus’s mind that was always right said, It can’t be this easy.
Abruptly, Griggory released the edges of the map and rose, pacing hurriedly toward the shrine’s entrance. After a moment, he turned back to Jaemus. “Come on, Bardgrim. We have the map, and soon we’ll once more have the Scrylle, but we have no time to waste. Hither will take us to gather them.”
Jaemus turned to the Glisternauts and raised a hand in a “hold on” gesture. “Don’t worry, I’ll be—” He cut himself off and turned toward Griggory. “Did you say Hither will take us?”
Griggory was facing the Knights, still gathered beside Mylla, and didn’t answer him. Through the Mentalios, Jaemus could hear the whisper of a conversation as Griggory explained to them what he and Jaemus were planning. Finally, the Knight turned back to him. “Can you swim better than a slangarook?”
Upon hearing this, the monster poked its head through the entrance again, its eyes resting on Jaemus’s impatiently. Impatiently? his mind clamored. What in the five realms would a monster have to be impatient about?
Hither withdrew, and apparently tired of waiting for Jaemus to make up his mind, Griggory stepped out into the storm after the beast.
Jaemus’s sense of urgency seemed to have withered with the spit in his mouth. With a hasty rationalization that was becoming his go-to mental tactic, he decided that riding a sea dragør through the Never Sea was just another thing he could now categorize as Things That Should Kill Me But Might Not.
Though Griggory wasn’t offering Jaemus to the black-scaled ’rook for dinner, the idea of having to ride the thing was somehow worse. But after quickly explaining to the Glisternauts where he was going and persuading them to stay put until he returned—as if they had a choice—Jaemus clenched his jaw and forced his feet forward.
Griggory already sat atop the water dragør, beckoning to him. “Come, come. She’s not one to be kept waiting.”
She? Jaemus thought and had to stifle a maddened giggle. “She’s obviously a very friendly beastie—”
“No,” Griggory cut in. “She’d sooner use a Himmingazian as fleech bait than look at one. But this is Hither and her kind’s world too. She would like us to preserve it since we were the ones to endanger it. Come now.”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
The slangarook’s eyes, as big as Jaemus’s head, followed him as he got closer. He was mesmerized not only by their obvious message of You look like a decent bite, little man, and I could pick my teeth with your thin bones, but also by how much intelligence he saw in them. He’d never even considered how the other creatures of Himmingaze were being affected by the Glister Cloud’s slow destructive force until now.
Another crack of lightning shattered the sky around him, as if the Cosmos itself were splitting in half, followed by another vibrating roll of thunder. His feet found a way to move faster, and Griggory took his arm and pulled him onto Hither’s back with an ease that startled Jaemus. The man may only have the girth of a single strand of kelp, but he was easily as strong as Stave.
He straddled Hither behind Griggory, and with his hands gripping the Knight’s waist, they launched smoothly into the sea. Under normal circumstances, Jaemus would have been delighted by the wystic klinkí stone bubble Griggory created around them that kept them dry. But nothing fit the definition of “normal” these days. The slangarook moved thr
ough the water as fluidly as any ship he’d ever designed, even more so really, swimming with a graceful effortlessness that Jaemus envied and had never been quite able to match in the Glisternaut fleet. There was no turbulence once they got a few dozen feet under the surface.
He soon lost track of time as they hunted. Too much strangeness had happened too quickly, and he found that the best he could do was hold on as the Never Sea flowed around him and the sea of his thoughts swamped him. Somehow, he was able to aid Griggory by reading, if that was the word, the Scrylle map, and the old man directed Hither to the celestial stones.
The deeper they dived down the mountainside, more and more ruins of ancient buildings and then villages dotted it, all almost untouched by time. They’d been built by Himmingazians with all the soundness of the temple that sat atop the mountain, meant to last. The currents of the Never Sea had done only hints of damage, and Jaemus could see that the temple abovewater was the worst for wear of all the structures they came across.
These were my people’s homes thousands of cycles ago. My ancestors’. Himmingaze could be like this again, grounded, earth under our feet instead of waves. But what will the rest of the ’Gazians think of it? How will they react? He shrugged inwardly. I guess we adapted once. We can do it again.
Soon they came to the resting place of the last Fenestros. It lay exposed, a glowing pearl-white and gold orb on the flanks of the mountain. Griggory leaned forward and spoke softly to Hither. The beast swept up the celestial stone in her massive gob, presumably storing it somewhere in there with the others they’d gathered. Jaemus hoped very much the slangarook wasn’t swallowing them, thus requiring him and Griggory to wait until they passed through her before they’d be able to collect them and reunite them with the broken one.
“Now for the final key to unlocking the realm’s doom,” Griggory said. “Hither, to the seafloor, if you will.”
The water dragør swam farther, her great body moving through the water with such power and smoothness that it felt as if she were the water itself and Jaemus was just some cloddish, bobbing detritus being carried by a current. The sight of the seafloor, dimly lit by millions of tiny bioluminescent creatures, made Jaemus pause. They were surrounded by tall petrified pillars of a kind of flora he’d never seen in Himmingaze.
Those are trees, he reminded himself. He’d seen the seemingly infinite range of the Morn Mountains in Vinnr and now understood topography in a way no Himmingazian had in hundreds of deca-cycles. Old maps of his world still existed, of course, but no piece of preserved history of dead things that drowned in the Never Sea with everything else could truly convey the meaning of mountains, or forests, or even deserts like he’d seen in Dyrrakium. These were all things he now recognized as naturally as he recognized the sea itself. And he realized he’d been delighted by being introduced to them all in Vinnr, but he didn’t remember feeling as if he were being introduced to anything terribly new.
Our bones must remember and pass that memory along. We may be adapted for water now, but Himmingazians will come to recognize and embrace the world of our past faster than we might think. Comforted by this, he brought his focus back to what Griggory was doing.
The old Knight had stepped onto the sea floor, still in his klinkí stone bubble, leaving Jaemus atop Hither alone. Being a Himmingazian, and being so wrapped up in his own wonders, Jaemus didn’t notice immediately. But it wasn’t an issue. Some adaptations had come easily to the ’Gazians, and they’d long since acquired the ability to swim to great depths without need for air. Buoyancy could have been in issue, but his feet were trapped against Hither’s body by her fins, as if she’d known his mind was too occupied to notice Griggory’s exit.
He pulled his feet free and joined Griggory. Nothing came too close to the slangarook, and Jaemus realized that he didn’t feel the kind of fear he should have from so deep in the sea. He understood innately that nothing would come near the water dragør. Nothing that wanted to live, anyway.
The map floated at Griggory’s feet, gently wafted by the sea current but held down on three corners by stones. He beckoned to Hither, who then disgorged from her mouth the four found Fenestrii. So she hadn’t swallowed them. One small thing to be thankful for.
One by one, Griggory placed the Fenestrii around the parchment in a pentagram, laying the three broken pieces of the fifth orb at one of the points. Jaemus wondered if it would still be able to channel whatever wysticism it was meant to, being broken, but didn’t ponder the thought long. Griggory was older than history, he’d heard, and he assumed the Knight knew what he was doing.
He stood outside the Knight’s klinkí stone sphere and watched and listened as Griggory spoke a brief chant in Elder Veros, using the Mentalios link. The white and gold Fenestrii gleamed, and the shapes on the map bloomed up from the sea floor before Jaemus’s eyes, like a model of Himmingaze itself. Or was it inside his mind? No, he decided, even the image seemed to wave slightly in the current.
Jaemus had barely oriented to their location before Griggory’s finger poked through the floating image. “The Scrylle is there. Come.”
With the celestial stones now joining the three broken pieces of Fenestros in Griggory’s satchel, and the map back in Jaemus’s pocket, they remounted Hither and were off, moving along the seafloor.
Little time had passed when Griggory spoke up, as if picking up a conversation they’d already begun. “They were all one Verity once, you know.”
“… Come again?” Jaemus said.
“All the realms are so similar because the Verities began as one celestial, untold eons ago before the worlds were created, before even time was. And long before they began meddling with each other’s creations. The Syzyckí Elementum, the One was called, before splitting into the Five.”
Jaemus wasn’t sure what to make of this, his specialty being engines and aerodynamics, not wysticism and celestial sprites with impulse control issues. It’s only a matter of time though, he thought. Eventually I’ll be just another Knight of Vinnr, adopting and adapting to their ways more than my own. Like one big Syz-, Sizza-, Sizzling Element of sprite servants.
“The Si-zee-kee Elementum,” Griggory said, pronouncing each syllable slowly. Jaemus tensed a bit, realizing his thoughts must have passed to Griggory through the Mentalios.
Griggory went on. “The elemental union. And yes, the Mentalios lenses are a useful window into each other’s thoughts. You’ll need to get a bit more practice before you’re able to pull the curtains on your mind so others can’t see in when you don’t want them to.”
They quieted as Hither entered a petrified underwater forest, swimming as silently as a wraith among Himmingaze’s ancient ghosts. According to the map, the Scrylle lay amid a litter of shells and rock that had been swept inside the decrepit hull of an antiquated seaborne ship near the center of the forest.
“Say more about the Syzyckí Elementum,” Jaemus said. “Before, on the warship, Balavad told Ulfric, er, Vaka Aster rather, that he was this Elementum. Then there was an awkward discussion between them about who was what and what was who, and frankly, I was a little distracted by the fact that it looked like we were all about to die.”
“Ah. Fascinating! Two Verities communing. I would have liked to have heard that.”
“‘Communing’ isn’t quite the word I’d pick, actually.”
Griggory gave a snort. “Young Mystae, once you’ve lived long enough, you will be released from your fear. Fear comes from having limited time to live and not understanding that nothing ever ceases to exist. To die in the way we think of it. Everything is part of the Great Cosmos, the Syzyckí Elementum. We are all in it, part of it, our bodies and our spirits, even if they’ve become separated. Without the shackles of time, you can appreciate the simple wonders of… everything.”
Inwardly, Jaemus simply wondered if the man had lost whatever grasp on the rational he might once have had due to his incredibly long life. Fear of death? Wasn’t that as natural to all living things a
s breathing?
“But you asked about the Elementum. Hmm… Nothing is done but not undone,” Griggory continued. “All things move in cycles, whole to broken to whole again, renewed and anew, never the same but of the same parts. You see? Before there was time, the Syzyckí Elementum existed, always whole, always fixed. They chose, then, to become the Five in order to experience, in fact to create, change. Maybe it was the first change to ever be. From a fixed thing, they sundered themselves into many fluid things. But by becoming more, they also became less. They are each just a fragment, like a shard of a mirror, of their One self. And one day, they will see each other and be whole once again.”
“You’re saying the Verities are just a bunch of broken bits that will eventually be glued back together? If that’s right, it kind of seems like Balavad wants to stop them. Er, it. The gluing part, I mean.”
“We cannot know what the Verities seek to do. Sometimes I even question if they know.”
But you seem to know quite a lot about them, Sir Knight. Who told you this much? The question was on the tip of Jaemus’s tongue, but some creeping disquiet kept him from asking. According to what he’d put together from the other Knights, Griggory had always been a wanderer and had left Vinnr hundreds of deca-cycles ago, working in the shadows in Himmingaze, and mostly alone all that time. Who could say what else he’d been doing, or to whom he’d been talking? He was a strange one, no doubt about that.
“Like a broken mirror, or a broken lens,” Griggory went on, “they no longer have clarity. Things are distorted, maybe even corrupted, among the Five. Perhaps this explains Balavad’s desires. His vision of the Syzyckí Elementum is corrupted, so he seeks to prevent a return to it. He has lost sight of the One. Hmm…” He trailed off, musing. Then, after a moment, he turned to Jaemus. With a chuckle, the sound like a dull-edged saw cutting through metal, he said, “And there is one Verity who doesn’t even know she is, or will be, a Verity.”