Wildmane

by Todd Fahnestock

  “Yes. They don’t keep images of others. They believe life should be lived like wind blowing over the grass, and despise any attempt to preserve the past or predict the future. They believe it sucks the beauty from the present, lets evil seep into their minds.”

  “They’ve destroyed something beautiful. It’s terrible.”

  “What makes you so sure your way isn’t the terrible one?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Because they burn, kill, and destroy. They are ugly and brutal. We build, create, nurture, grow. Those are all beautiful things.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” he said with a smile. “I am not defending them. I strive to understand them. These days, understanding is in short supply.”

  She paused, and realized this conversation wasn’t going how she expected. She planned to ask him to leave her alone, but she found herself curious about his next words. He was intriguing and frustrating. He could never convince her that Sunriders needed only understanding to be human, though, or that their ways were simply different. She had watched the Sunriders cut down her parents.

  “Some things don’t need to be understood,” she said. “They’re just evil.”

  “I don’t believe you believe that,” he said calmly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You mastered reading and writing in an illiterate community. Why?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Because you want to understand. You want to know more. You crave it. They said that threadweavers sometimes became addicted to learning—”

  “I’m not going to talk to you if you’re going to say such things,” she cut him off. “Don’t compare me to...them. I’m not a rot bringer!”

  He bowed his head. “Of course. My point is that learning to read and write is difficult. Nearly impossible if you don’t have a teacher.”

  “It just came easily to me,” she said, but she remembered her thirst to understand. She hadn’t just picked up the book about the mill and water wheel and read it. She’d spent days and days studying it until it started to make sense.

  “You taught yourself because you had to know,” he said as though reading her thoughts. “Because it drove you. That is the only way you could have managed it. And now you make your daily wage due to the very fact that you understand more than those around you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “This is enough. I want you to leave me alone. Why did you ask me here?”

  “I wanted to show you something.”

  “Well, I can’t look at it. I’m sorry.”

  His eyes were warm, and she thought she saw pity in them. Pity for her. “You have worked very hard and done very well for yourself. You are strong, independent. But you don’t yet know how amazing you are.”

  “You’re wrong about me. I don’t have to know. I don’t want to know how amazing you think I am, or what those cursed abusers of GodSpill did long ago that you like to read about,” she said. “Why can’t you understand that? Find someone else. I am happy. The only thing that makes me unhappy is you.”

  “I understand,” he said softly. “I was afraid once, too. You’re smart. You think I am dangerous to you, and you care far too much about your adopted family to put them in danger.”

  “Are you dangerous to me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Or rather, the knowledge I have to give you is dangerous to you.”

  She closed her eyes, wishing he wouldn’t say anything more.

  “But if you run from fear, you’ll run your whole life. Despite what you say, I don’t believe you actually want me to go. If you tell me to leave, and you really want me to, then I will. And I won’t bother again.”

  “I do want you to go! How many different ways can I say it?”

  “Then why do you still have the laughing stone?”

  Her hand went involuntarily to the pouch around her neck.

  He held out his hand. It was rough and tanned, callused from his travels. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want anything to change. Dorn had died because of what he knew. She didn’t want to die, but, at the same time, he was right. She wanted to know more.

  She put her hand in his, and she could scarcely believe it.

  He led her around the tower to an old wooden door rotting off its hinges. He opened the door, handed her inside, and she stepped into the darkness alone, running her hand along the wall, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

  “There is a stairway off to your right,” he said, coming up alongside her and taking her hand again.

  He squeezed her hand, then led her to the top of the tower, around and around the staircase. Her legs were burning when they reached the top, and he opened the doorway to blinding light.

  She blinked, stepped through, and then she could see his face again. Little crow’s feet appeared at the corners of his eyes as he smiled.

  “You said you were dangerous to me. Why am I trusting you?” she whispered.

  He gave her hand another squeeze. “Because I looked at a black stone and knew it should have colors. Because you touched a black stone and made a rainbow.”

  10

  Mirolah

  He hopped up on the blue stone rampart that ran around the edge of the tower. She could see the entire city from here. Rith was built in a huge, gradually sloping bowl with a small lake in the center. Everyone lived on the north side of the bowl, and she could see smoke rising lazily from their chimneys, people milling around the market at Vaisha’s Fountain. The rest of the city was empty, almost entirely destroyed during the Devastation Years and the following Sunrider Wars.

  “I can see Lawdon’s workshop,” she said, pointing off in the distance.

  “Where?”

  “Right there, just up from the market place. Those two chimneys. Those are ours.”

  He nodded.

  “I helped make the tiles for half the roofs in the city.”

  She went to the other side of the tower and looked to the north. The trade road twisted and wound through rocky hills dotted with sheep. A caravan made its way into the hills, heading further up The Arm. Storm clouds crouched on the horizon.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before,” she murmured.

  He had an amused smile on his face, and she suddenly felt twelve years old.

  “Come take a look at the rest of the city,” he said, “And tell me what you see.”

  She walked over to where he sat, perched on the rampart. She gathered her skirts in her hand and hopped up to join him.

  It was marshy in the center of the bowl around the small lake. Vines and moss had taken over the ruins. Some of the buildings had crumbled with time, but some had been blackened, twisted, and melted by the GodSpill Wars hundreds of years ago.

  “It’s built in a spiral,” she said suddenly. She had always thought the city was in a natural valley, but from this vantage, it was obvious that the circle was too perfect. There was only one Main Street, winding around and around. It made half a dozen revolutions as it radiated outward to higher and higher parts of the bowl, bisected by seven straight, wide streets leading outward from the center like the spokes of a wheel. Mirolah had always known the streets were curved, but she never realized they were the same street.

  “This place has only been called Rith for the last few centuries,” Orem said. “It used to be called Historia, the City of Time.”

  “Why change the name?”

  “It was lost. Those who once lived here were killed in the GodSpill Wars; there was no one to pass on the name, and those who have made their home here do not read. Now they have resettled here, creating a city. Not yet a thriving city, maybe, but it is growing.”

  “It wasn’t a city before?”

  “No. Historia started as a giant piece of art, a living, growing sculpture depicting the history of Amarion. Those who lived here were either sculptors or supporters.”

  She looked at the precision of the entire c
ity, radiating out in a spiral, and realized that the threadweavers of that time must have created the entire valley just so. It was staggering that anyone could make a valley.

  “They could create the impossible back then,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And it destroyed them.”

  The man was silent for a moment. “Almost everyone judges the Age of Ascendance by the way it ended. Don’t forget the decades of wonder and prosperity beforehand.”

  “Decades of abuse of the GodSpill,” she murmured. “In trade for centuries of suffering.”

  “You see only the scars. Look harder. See the whole.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look down there, the lake. See the small island poking up through the center?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not an island. It’s a statue. It’s where the story begins. Before it collapsed, it was a statue of the goddess Natra making the world. It stood over one hundred and fifty feet tall.”

  “From a lake?”

  He laughed. “It wasn’t a lake then. It was a fountain like Vaisha’s Fountain used to be, but as tall as the sky. It had an endless supply of water flowing through it. When the GodSpill was sucked from the lands, the water fell and it became a lake. I would love to have seen it in its day. Natra at the center of the world, creating it from her fingertips. Dragons, whales, humans, aath trees, equines all leapt from her fingertips. It was said to spout water from a hundred places, filling the air with swirling mists. You could never see the entire thing at one time. It was constantly emerging and disappearing, changing before your eyes. At night, the water glowed five different colors, and you could see it from miles away.”

  She tried to imagine it, but it just didn’t seem real to her.

  “How? How did it work?” Dorn had made colors dance through the air. How did GodSpill move stone?

  “The same way we build things now, one stone at a time. But back then, there were stoneweavers, master masons who could turn granite to clay and back with the power in their hands. People would come from all over Amarion and sometimes beyond, each bringing a stone from their homeland. They would present the rock to the master sculptor. She would listen to the rock, feel its proper place within the sculpture, then she would hand the piece to one of her children, the stoneweavers. They would climb high up onto the sides of the statue and place the stone in its proper place, smoothing the rough edges and melding it with the others around it.”

  She imagined the mists, imagined the giant statue of Natra, children scrambling up it like spiders, fitting stones.

  “It was the very best of what people can do together. This miraculous power, the ability to use GodSpill, it did more than meld stone. It melded people, gave them a common vision and the power to make dreams come true. People today worry about their next meal. We don’t look at the stars and dream anymore. And we are the lesser for that.”

  She looked into his eyes. They shone, like a thousand candles were glowing inside his body.

  “Losing the GodSpill crushed us, but worse, we lost our dreams. We became afraid, and fear makes people small. It clouds their eyes so that they cannot see dreams becoming reality.”

  Being next to him was like standing in the blasting heat from Lawdon’s kiln. His intensity never let up.

  She turned her back and took a few steps away, put a hand on the blue marble, felt its cool solidity, held onto it like an anchor. She had a vision of Orem walking up behind her and putting his arms around her shoulders. But he didn’t.

  “What about the rest of the city?” she asked.

  “The entire city radiated outward from Natra’s statue,” he said, pointing at the center of the lake. “Underneath that water, at the base of Natra’s statue, the street begins. A single wall runs along one side of the street as it spirals outward. The history of the world is depicted on that wall, one huge mosaic running for miles in a circle. It started with the arrival of the gods, the creation of the sentient races, the War of the Behemoths, the creation of the Godgate, Vaisha the Changer’s experiments, the Age of Awakening. It is all there, all the way up through Wildmane’s slaying of the god Dervon and the founding of wondrous Calsinac. They had planned to expand the city forever, telling the history of the world as it unfolded...” He pointed at the dilapidated streets that emerged from the water, muddy and broken, curving into the rest of the city of Rith. “But it was not meant to be. The mosaics above water were destroyed, and no one can see the ones below anymore.”

  The sun shone overhead, but to the east, a storm approached. Dark curtains of rain fell upon the distant hills.

  “It’s all gone now,” he said wistfully. “All that remains are the tips of a dragon’s wings.”

  She watched Orem’s back as he looked off into the distance, noticed the width of his shoulders, the way the wind barely ruffled his thick, curly hair.

  “How do you know so much?” she asked him. “Some of the historical events you speak of... I’ve never heard of them.”

  “I’ve been hunting for as long as I can remember.”

  “Hunting?”

  “I read every book I could find, spent my inheritance like water, walked more miles than any foot should have to suffer. I slept in ditches and rode all night through the rain. I talked to every city elder, crackpot witch woman, and charlatan illusionist I could find. And I never found anyone who could actually find or use GodSpill.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  He let out a sigh. “Something better.”

  She turned a curious gaze to him, but didn’t say anything.

  “There are times I thought myself crazy, but every day of my life I have woken up in the morning, knowing this is not how the world is supposed to be, feeling a sickness in the lands, a wound deep down, a dryness that no amount of water can fix. A voice in my mind is constantly telling me that there is something more out there. Something that is just out of sight, just beyond the tips of my fingers. This dry, scraping existence that we call life is not what it was meant to be.”

  She swallowed, and her heart beat faster.

  “I have seen a glimpse of what Amarion could be. I tried to turn away from it, tried to ignore it, but I cannot. There is only one thing in this world I ever wanted, only one dream that ever touched my heart. I want to bring the GodSpill back. We’re hollow without it. I would die just to spend one day in a world where anything is possible. For years, I have known we can recapture this power, we can bring back what makes dreams come true. Sometimes, it is so close I can taste it. But I have never held it.” He took her hands in his. “Not until now.”

  She stood up, tried to pull her fingers from his, but he wouldn’t let go. The sun had been swallowed by the clouds, and lightning flashed in the distance. Raindrops splashed off her nose, stung her eyes.

  “Please,” she whispered, pulling again.

  “Mirolah,” he begged her. “Come with me. This is a fork in the road. We can bring the GodSpill back.”

  “I have to go,” she said. “It’s raining.”

  He let her go of her hands and held his up to the sky. “Let it rain.” he cried. “Let it pour down. There are heroes in the rain, Mirolah. We see them! We can bring them back!”

  He turned his face upward, opened his mouth as lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, coming closer.

  She dashed for the stairwell, ran down around and around, until she burst out onto the street.

  She ran all the way home. Wind and rain battered her from all directions, soaking her clothes, making her legs numb and wooden. She had left her writing supplies out in the back courtyard. They would be rain-soaked and ruined.

  She turned off the muddy street and plunged down a flight of stone steps. Home was only a few minutes away. At the bottom of the steps, she turned a hard right and slipped in the mud. She fell to the ground, landing on her elbows, splashing mud into her eyes and mouth. Everything washed over her like a wave, and she started crying. She did not want an
yone to know about the GodSpill hidden inside her. She did not want to die like Dorn.

  She imagined people rushing out of their houses, circling around her, calling her a threadweaver, kicking her in the gut, yanking her around by the hair. She imagined Lawdon, looming above her, raising a stone high and bringing it down on her head.

  She lay in the mud and cried, letting it all pour through her. She was shocked back to her senses when a harsh voice said to her. “Foolish girl, crying in the rain.”

  She peered forward through squinted eyes to see Prinka standing before her, that leering red grin and craggy face.

  Mirolah scooted back in the mud.

  “You can’t run from him,” the twisted old crone said, moving forward and crouching. “His words have power. They can’t be ignored.”

  She grabbed Mirolah’s arm and yanked her up, out of the muddy water. How could such a tiny woman be that strong? Mirolah tried to pull away.

  “He has planted his seed within your heart,” Prinka said.

  “Leave me alone!” She shoved the old woman away with all her strength. Slipping and sliding in the mud, Mirolah ran off.

  “You are already with his child!” the ancient woman yelled after her. “You will give birth to his world!”

  She pressed her hands to her ears and ran.

  11

  Medophae

  Medophae opened his eyes to the curved stone ceiling over Tyndiria’s bed. She slumbered peacefully next to him, and he took a moment to stare at nothing. To think of nothing.

  He rose, carefully and slowly, and the bed did not move. He donned his simple captain’s uniform: a white shirt trapped by a leather vest. Simple black breeches, black boots. Tyndiria would have outfitted him in a noble’s finery if he had let her, but Medophae had been firm. If he was to be her Captain of the Guard, he would wear the same uniform as her other guards.

  Eventually, he had made a small concession to her. She had demanded that he wear some sign of his rank. She suggested a fancy hat. Medophae told her a true leader should be known by every one of his soldiers without a symbol to remind them. The person should be the symbol.