The GodSpill

by Todd Fahnestock

  She let the magistrate’s men loose. They tumbled across one another trying to gain their feet, then slammed against the wall, terrified of her. Each one of them looked at her as though she was the darkling who’d claimed Fillen.

  “I am a citizen of Rith,” she said. “I live here, and I’m not about to let you kick me out of my home—”

  A strange noise outside caught Mirolah’s attention, distant, like rocks clacking together in the wind. She spun to look at Medophae.

  “Did you hear it?” she said.

  He spun, looking out the doorway.

  The clacking wind sound broke the silence again, much closer now.

  “How could it find us?” She leapt to stand beside him. “There’s no trail to follow. We used a portal.”

  “It’s what they do,” Medophae said.

  The rapacious sound came again, unmistakable. It was the spine horse. Shocked screams followed.

  Medophae charged into the street.

  10

  Mirolah

  Mirolah leapt through the doorway and skidded to a halt next to Medophae. The spine horse stood at the end of the street. Its legs were as long as she was tall, and its rocky head hung low. The spines along its back stuck high into the air, and lava dripped from its toothy jaws, sizzling as it hit the packed earth. One burning eye fixed on Medophae, the other a dark, crusty wound where Medophae’s sword had stabbed it the last time they met.

  Villagers ran, screaming and covering their heads as the heat washed over them. A little boy at the back of the pack tripped, tumbling to the ground before the monster.

  The spine horse paused as it looked at Medophae. Its windy, clacking roar shook the buildings. The little boy curled into himself, screaming as his clothes caught fire.

  “No!” Mirolah’s breath caught in her throat. It was Fillen all over again. She had returned to Rith. A monstrosity had followed her.

  Medophae sprinted toward the creature like a charging bull.

  Mellic’s cobbler shop burst into flame as the creature crouched, readying to attack.

  Medophae reached the boy just as the horse opened its mouth. With the speed of a striking snake, he shielded the boy with his own body, then flung him high into the air.

  “Mirolah!” he shouted.

  The boy sailed towards Lawdon’s house. Mirolah pulled threads, caught him in midair and lowered him gently to her side. He was horribly burned, down to the bone in some places. “Oh, gods,” she whispered. “Oh, please no.”

  The horse bit at Medophae, but its teeth chomped dirt. Medophae rolled away, came to his feet, and the godsword erupted in his hand, a shaft of raging fire. The horse’s clacking howl shattered the windows of nearby shops. Medophae’s clothes and hair caught fire.

  Mirolah tore her gaze away from Medophae. He’ll survive. I can’t help him, but I can help the boy.

  The little boy seized, his back arching.

  No. No no no.

  Movement overhead drew her attention, and she looked up, gasped.

  Above her, devouring the sky, was a giant, swirling gray funnel. She’d had never seen anything like it before. A tendril of light blue smoke curled upward from the boy. The highest wisp of it twisted into that gray maelstrom, and she suddenly realized that was the boy’s spirit. He was dying. She felt his emotion—fear and confusion—slither past her.

  She suddenly realized what that swirling maw had to be. That was the Godgate, where the spirits of the dead went, returning to the original place where the gods created the world.

  “No!” she shouted. She thickened the threads in the air between the boy’s smoky soul and the churning gray storm. It stopped his departure like a net. But the swirling grew more distinct. It demanded the boy, and she could even feel it tug at her now.

  She heard people talking near her, in the real world outside her threadweaver’s sight. They were muffled, rising as if from a deep well, and they threatened to distract her. The magistrate argued vehemently with Lawdon. Casra screamed.

  She shut them out, focusing on the bright bridge, the threads, and she sent herself into the boy’s body. He was weak, so weak. She had watched Medophae during his sickness in Gnedrin’s Post, when he was close to death. She had watched the colors of Medophae’s threads dim over those grueling days, and that’s what this boy’s threads were doing, except they were winking out quickly. He was at death’s door.

  Mirolah could pull from GodSpill from the lands to move things, to assemble things, but that type of GodSpill couldn’t heal human beings. It was wild, too strong. She’d tried with Medophae, and it nearly killed him before she realized the secret to healing. A human body needed GodSpill from another human body, the living spirit of another’s life. The GodSpill inside a person was softer, more...compatible.

  But taking from her body to give to the boy was dangerous. It could kill her. She’d also learned that with Medophae. What she gave from him took a ferocious toll on her as well.

  She had to be careful.

  She found a small part of the bottom of the boy’s foot that was not burned. She split her attention into a thousand threads. She became that foot and analyzed his blood, skin, muscle, and bone. Her threadweaver eyes searched out all the charred body parts. Those threads had been altered to new forms that were not useful for life. So she changed them to match the unharmed flesh and infused them with GodSpill pulled from the threads of her own body.

  Live, she thought to them. Live!

  Her attention raced through his bloodstream, across his flesh, healing. She sewed him back together using threads pulled from her own body, methodically undoing herself to add to him. With each thread she felt weaker.

  But the boy’s blisters shrank. His melted skin reformed. The burned holes knit together.

  She glanced up at the Godgate overhead. It was closer now, and it hungered for her, not the boy. A dozen invisible hooks pulled in her chest, her arms and legs. They suddenly yanked tight, and she gasped.

  She looked back at the unmoving boy, and found that she was high above him. With a chill horror, she realized she was now a curl of rainbow-colored smoke, and she was floating upward! The smoky tendril of the boy’s soul had descended to hover over the body, questing, uncertain, but it hadn’t reentered yet.

  Mirolah’s threadweaver vision began to fade. The bright bridge vanished, and the threads that comprised everything flickered in her sight, becoming common buildings, regular air, moving people.

  “Mirolah!” Lawdon yelled, grabbing her limp body below. Even though she hovered over herself, she felt his hands, like he was touching her arms through five layers of clothes.

  I’ve killed myself, she thought in horror.

  She’d used all of the GodSpill in her body to save the boy, like she had poured the water of herself from one bucket into another.

  She had to replenish herself somehow. She had to pull the GodSpill back into herself! She reached out, trying to connect to the GodSpill in the threads, trying to open the bright bridge again. Her questing fingers reached into the threads of the air, the packed street, the trees of the forest—

  And they caught her, like hands closing over her wrists. They tightened, pulling her away from the Godgate in a tug-of-war.

  You belong with us. It was the same voice that had whispered to her when she stood on the rise overlooking Rith.

  “Thank you!” she said to it.

  We are one.

  She suddenly realized she knew that voice. This was the same voice from the GodSpill in Daylan’s Glass! It was the voice of the force that had taken her apart thread by thread, then reassembled her and put her back into her body so that she could free it.

  The GodSpill, the mystic creative force that saturated the lands, that enabled threadweavers to create wonders, tugged her away from the Godgate. But it didn’t put her back in her body like last time. Like it had in Daylan’s Glass, it absorbed her. She became a tiny drop falling into its vast sea.

  “No!” she cried out.
<
br />   This GodSpill, once a raging storm within the prison of Daylan’s Glass, was now free. It was a part of everything. There was no conquering it, no subjugating it. It wanted her, and she had nothing with which to tempt it this time.

  I upheld my part of the bargain, she screamed at it. I set you free. This is my life. I’m not you, I’m Mirolah!

  The GodSpill pulled her away from her body like the tide pulls a bit of sea foam. She soaked into the wall, the packed earth, the air, the fields and forest. The GodSpill flowed throughout the lands of Amarion, rejoicing in its freedom like a little child, and it took her along with it. She was no longer the small, mortal human she had been; she was a living map of the human lands. She was the water of the Inland Ocean, the stone towers of Buravar, the moss-covered streets of Denema’s Valley. She flowed through the bodies of a dozen new threadweavers that had newly discovered their power. To her, they looked like sparks on the huge tapestry of Amarion.

  She breathed in, expanded to contain everything, forever inhaling without the need to exhale. She was everything, and everything lived within her.

  “Mirolah!” A man’s voice called to her, an annoyance, though that name seemed familiar to her. It was important somehow. Where was that voice coming from?

  She turned her attention from the vastness of the lands to pinpoint the single mortal voice. It came from a tiny village called Rith along the southern peninsula.

  That, there, said a different voice, not the mortal man’s voice, but a voice within her vast self. Go back there.

  She focused her attention on that town, that street, that man who spoke to a dying female woman as he held her in his thin, ropey arms.

  Heal her, the voice said, so she filled the threads of the woman’s body with vibrant colors, bringing the vigor back to her dying flesh.

  Yes... the voice within her said. Thank you...

  Mirolah sat upright, sucking in a huge breath that, thankfully, did have an end. Vigor poured back into her limbs. She breathed out, and looked all around her. She was in Rith. The wooden houses and shops. The dirt street. The blue sky overhead. She wasn’t a map of the great tapestry. She wasn’t a vast everything. She was Mirolah, warm and alive and human. She put her hands to her breast, to her stomach, to her head.

  “I’m back in my own body,” she gasped, and she ached with the joy of it.

  “Mirolah,” Lawdon said. “By the gods, I thought you were dead!”

  She looked upward. The Godgate was still there, but it was distant, faded. Its gray swirl continued, superimposed over the sky, as though waiting for her. She could feel the hooks, pulling gently.

  Legends told that only the dead could see the Godgate.

  “No!” she whispered harshly. I am Mirolah, threadweaver. Lawdon’s foster daughter. Medophae’s lover. I am not the GodSpill itself.

  Lawdon hugged her. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” he said.

  She was so scared, so confused, that for a moment she didn’t know what had just happened, how she had ended up tumbled into the GodSpill’s vastness. She couldn’t remember anything before that terrifying fall into that flowing ocean of power.

  Her gaze fell on the still boy next to her, and it all came back.

  “No...” she said.

  His little body was burnt beyond recognition. He was dead.

  “No! I healed him!” she said, picking him up in her arms.

  “You did what you could,” Lawdon said. “You tried. It just...it wasn’t enough.”

  Her heart thundered. His flesh had mended. She’d invigorated him with her own threads, but...

  I took it back. I panicked, and I took it back to keep myself alive.

  “Oh, gods...” she said.

  She searched frantically for his little light blue wisp of a spirit. She could do it again. She could bring him back. She had to. Please...

  But his spirit was gone, sucked into the Godgate.

  “No!” she wailed, curling over his body.

  “What did you do?” the magistrate yelled, towering her, his tall form casting a shadow. “What new monster have you brought down upon us?”

  She tried to get her bearings, squinting up at the angry magistrate, blurry through her tears.

  “Medophae,” she said. “Where’s Medophae?” She craned her neck to look back up the street.

  Medophae rose from the burning corpse of the spine horse. One of its legs lay a few yards from the rest of its body. Yellow blood like molten gold splattered the road. The beast’s head had fallen where the godsword had severed it.

  The intense heat was dying down with its owner, and Medophae staggered away, his arm twisted and broken where the spine horse’s teeth had chomped it. He was blind, bald, and burned down to the muscle. Blood flowed freely down his savaged arm, covering his hand and dotting the dirt.

  Golden fire crackled fiercely around him, and the charred skin receded under the onslaught of new, bronze skin. His eyes healed, and he blinked. His arm twisted about, righting itself. Bones popped into place and mended. Hair sprouted from his head and flowed down to his shoulders.

  “You are every bit the horror we thought you to be,” the magistrate shouted.

  “Shut up, Deitran!” Lawdon shoved him back. “She tried to save the boy!”

  “And yet he is dead!” the magistrate roared. “Look!”

  “She—”

  The magistrate struck Lawdon across the cheek. He fell to the street, and the magistrate lunged at Mirolah. She didn’t even see the dagger until he stabbed her. His snarling face came close to hers. “Die, rotbringer,” he said. “Die! A curse upon you!”

  The man suddenly flew backward, yanking the dagger from Mirolah’s belly. Medophae, wreathed in golden flame, held the magistrate up in the air by the neck. His lips pulled back in a snarl.

  “Don’t!” Mirolah said, pushing her palm against the searing pain in her side. “Please. Don’t hurt him. I...”

  Medophae looked at her wound, and a low growl came from him. Golden fire spat and fell to the ground in flecks, and his biceps trembled. The magistrate dropped the dagger to grapple with Medophae’s steel-like arm, unable to breath.

  “Please!” she shouted.

  He threw the magistrate to the ground.

  Medophae turned, cowing the villagers who had gathered close. “She came here peacefully,” he said. “She tried to heal this boy, and your magistrate stabbed her. If anyone else comes close, I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

  “Medophae—”

  He picked her up and walked through the crowd.

  11

  Mirolah

  The moon was large when they rode out, and Mirolah was heartsick. She should be dead. That boy should be alive.

  Medophae had stopped long enough to get their horses. He hadn’t bothered with saddles or supplies; he didn’t even pause to replace the clothes the spine horse had burned off his body. He just pushed the bits into the horses’ mouths and fastened the bridles, helped her mount, then got on the horse stark naked. They rode out straight away, Mirolah holding her side. The wound was jagged, and pain lanced through her with every movement, but she didn’t heal it. The pain reminded her of her failure. She wanted to feel it.

  Medophae led them until they were miles away from Rith. He kept looking back at her, then finally pulled to the side of the road.

  She leaned over her horse’s neck. Blood leaked onto her thigh, onto her horse’s flanks. The horse snorted, its ears twitching as it smelled the blood.

  “What are you doing?” Medophae said, dismounting.

  He helped her down, and she slumped against him.

  “I’ve seen you heal worse than this. Fix it.”

  “I killed him,” she whispered. “I killed that boy.”

  “The boy was dead before you could stop it.”

  “No. I healed him and then I...I took it back.”

  “What?”

  “I was dying. I saved myself instead of him.”

  He knelt to the ground,
his arms around her, and she went with him. He just held her.

  “You can’t blame yourself for that,” he finally said. “I told you healing is dangerous. What you tried has killed other threadweavers.”

  “He could be alive instead of me. We brought that thing to Rith. It chased us down.”

  He bowed his head.

  “We should never have come,” she whispered.

  “Maybe.”

  “We should have faced that spine horse where no one could get hurt.”

  “You didn’t know the spine horse was going to be there, Mirolah.”

  “You think we aren’t at fault?”

  “We didn’t choose to bring that monster to Rith. We didn’t ensorcel it in the first place to chase us. When it came, we dealt with it.”

  She curled forward and hugged her knees. The tear in her side lanced through her, and she clenched her teeth.

  “Heal yourself,” he said. “You’re going to bleed out.”

  So she did. She reached inside and mended the wound, pulling on her own life, changing the shape and color of the threads. But she left a scar on her belly, long and ragged. She wanted to remember this feeling. Medophae was right about everything he had said. They didn’t intentionally do harm, but it didn’t change the fact that the spine horse came, that it killed that little boy. She and Medophae were different. Their mere presence could be a deadly threat to normal people. She couldn’t ever forget that. She kept seeing the face of the little boy.

  “This has happened to you before,” she said. “Where someone died that you tried to save.”

  He stood up, let out a long breath. “We are to blame. You’re right. We always are. Dying is a lesser evil than living when others die because of you. It’s the curse of having power. It’s the curse for...being what we are.”

  “How do you live with it?”

  “You try to save the next person,” he said without hesitating. “It’s the only way. There will always be monsters in the dark, and they’ll always be ravenous. When we can, we stop them. That’s enough.”