by Awert, Wolf
Haraak’s head swayed. “You may stay overnight. But I cannot help you. There is an evil magic at work in your friend, one from the Other World whose only purpose is to separate the sky and the earth forever. Go to Ringwall. There are mages there that can help you. For us Oas, an attempt at healing your friend would be immeasurably dangerous.”
Brolok opened his mouth for another try at persuasion. Even though he knew it was in vain, he could not give up on his friend. But before he had formulated a sentence, Nill had one of his rare lucid moments.
“Haraak, please leave us here, hide us from our pursuers and call a druid.”
Two black swampravens flew up into the air. The Oas all looked flabberghasted; not only had Nill addressed the eldest by name, but had also uttered the bird-cry that belonged to it.
Haraak looked at the swampravens and waited until they had returned to the ground before saying, “We can offer you protection and will do so if you ask it of us. I do not know why, but you touch me, mage. But a druid will not be able to help you. Druids know the elements, but the Other World is not their given path.”
“My druid knows it… and if he doesn’t… he knows a way.” Nill’s voice grew weaker as he spoke. Everyone present could see how much strength it cost the young man to hold to the ropes that kept him in reality.
“I am sure the druids would be honored by your faith in the powers, but who is the druid who can do the impossible?”
“Dakh-Ozz-Han.”
Haraak flinched, composed herself and then said with all the warmth and kindness that had previously been missing from her demeanor: “Dakh-Ozz-Han is a figure of legend. He left us thousands of springs ago. I am surprised you know his name.”
“He’s not dead, my lady,” Nill whispered. “He taught me much and took me to Ringwall. If you don’t believe me, send for Kelim-Ozz-Han, his son. I don’t know him, but he was the one who answered Grimala’s plea to teach our friend Tiriwi the magic of the five elements.”
Haraak leaned back. “You seem closer to our people than I thought. Please forgive us your less than warm welcome. I do not know Tiriwi personally, but Grimala is an old friend, although she is not an Oa of the Waterways. I will do what I can.”
With these words the eldest touched Nill’s forehead. Her fingers left a dry spot on the sweat-drenched face.
“He will sleep dreamlessly. It will help him regain some of the strength he so desperately needs. Take him to the hut over there. Remain there until I call for you.”
The days passed. Brolok, Bairne and Nill were well cared for. Now and then the eldest came and touched Nill’s brow, but despite her efforts the young archmage could not always be stopped from storming out of the hut with madly-rolling eyes, naked and screaming.
“I am Perdis!” he would scream, or else: “Perdis, you foul dog, come out of your hidey-hole!”
Perdis was everywhere. Nill was Perdis. Perdis was his pursuer and his savior. Perdis was begged for help and cursed to eternal damnation. The entire world became Perdis. And it grew worse with each passing day. Ramsker had found a low hill from which his stood guard like a stone sentinel. Whether he kept watch on Nill and his friends, or all of the huts and their inhabitants, no one could say.
XIV
As Urna had correctly assumed, her son had stumbled from the cave and taken his visions with him. The stone forest, turning soft and verdant before his eyes, and the fire in the earth, no longer held back by the thin crust of stone. Sedramon staggered aimlessly through the bushes that surrounded the low rocks with a fever in his head and a pain in his chest where his heart had lost the rhythmic beat of nature. It had been too much. The encounter with a mother he had never known would have been enough to disorient a stronger man than him. The ease with which she had dragged him through the Other World – him, a sorcerer of Ringwall! She considered him a magical weakling, although she had not said so in words.
Sedramon-Per felt humiliated yet strangely exhilarated. Magic, the curse of his life, the master over his dreams and thoughts, the controller of his body, and yet… there was the promise of rising above the magic, no longer being driven by it, but instead bending the primal power himself. Burning determination and reluctance fought a violent battle in his mind.
She told me to practice. As if it were so easy!
His departure from the cave was more of a flight. He ran, stumbled and staggered through the thin trunks of the forest, aimless yet driven. Anything to get away from his mother – anything! But where to go?
When he stopped for the first time he did not know how long he had been running nor what direction he had taken. Quarrysand lay behind him and the puddles, the darkening trees and the changed smell offered a hint to what the place might have looked like before his father had taken some mucklings and made a place where you could build a livelihood. Sedramon hurried to get dry land under his boots. He spent the night hungry and cold, crouched between two bushes; the dew that dripped from them woke him early the next morning.
He gathered up his few possessions and continued on his way. He drank the water from the last swampy puddles and chewed down a handful of watercress in passing; he did not take the liberties of pauses and meals. When the ache in his gut grew too powerful, he would tear loose pieces of bark from nearby trees to sate his hunger. His food consisted mostly of whatever grew on the bark in question: the bitter green moss went down his throat just like the white goatees and the orange, matted mixture of threadhay and serptongue. And so Sedramon rushed through the land in a fever until he finally stopped, his strength consumed by the long distance he had traveled; clutching a tree for support, he vomited up the acidic mix of leaves and bark that had been his breakfast. He stumbled on, but barely three steps later his eyesight left him and the soft mossy ground rushed up to meet him.
When he awoke, he was lying on something soft and looking into two gray eyes that were surrounded by a deep, glowing crimson. His unconsciousness faded into sleep and his fever crept away at the smell of burning herbs and cool leaves that soft hands placed gently on his hot skin. The monotone sing-song voice chased it off entirely.
“Where am I?” Sedramon whispered when he opened his eyes for the first time without the haze of the fever.
“With me,” a slender, white-haired woman said. Sedramon looked into those gray eyes, as bright as a fen-heron’s down feathers on a misty day, as calm as an underground lake that has never been troubled by the wind.
“It will take some time before you can stand again,” she said simply.
With these words she left Sedramon’s sight, and only the rustling of leaves told him she was still somewhere nearby. Sedramon tried to push himself into a better position and get a good look at this unknown woman, but his body would not obey him.
A spicy smell filled his nostrils when next he awoke. He was lying naked on a bed of thin twigs, leaves and dried moss, held together by broad fronds. He managed to raise his head and looked in shame down at his body; his protruding ribs, his bony hips that could have put a mountain elk’s antlers to shame, and a row of short round toes, staring at him like a group of pale judges, silently coming to a verdict. He could not make out anything else. On different parts of his itching body, smoke was unfurling from small, sticky lumps; little piles of bark burned into white ash on his red skin. He could feel the heat and smell the aroma of the burning substances, and something else he could not quite recognize seeped into his body. A gentle hand supported his neck and another brought a wooden bowl with sweet, watery syrup to his mouth. He fell asleep again.
“Where am I?” he repeated when he woke up after a much longer sleep. This time, his voice was stronger; gone was the feverish whisper, in its place a demanding impatience, but his croak had no true force behind it.
“With me.” It was the same answer he had received a few days ago. “But now it is only the two of us.”
“Who else was here?” Sedramon asked, glad that his mind was finally able to start making sense of the world again.
“The fever. It was stubborn and not of this world.”
“Are you a healer?”
“No, merely a simple shamaness and fen-witch attempting to understand the magic of the plants.”
“Forest and fire?” Sedramon asked hastily. Before his eyes, dark green treetops and roaring flames appeared.
“No, neither forest nor fire. Only the plants and the water they grow in. Some of them are very old. You should know the strength of Wood. I can feel the magic of the elements within you.”
“Yes, I know the elements. Still…” Sedramon paused. It would do him more harm than good to spread the word that he could not control the powers that surrounded him.
“You are a powerful sorcerer. I can feel your strength. You could help me as I have helped you. Together, we can achieve much in the worlds of Pentamuria.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. But for now, sleep.”
Sedramon stayed with the fen-witch for a few days until his strength returned. She came and went as she pleased. She cared for him, asked nothing in return and enchanted him with her strange beauty. In the nights they shared a bed and she warmed his burnt-out body. He had rarely felt so happy.
It was only a matter of time until Sedramon could leave his bed. He stood up, fought back a sudden dizziness and walked over to the part of the hut where the branches were less dense; he supposed this was the door. He attempted to push the twigs apart, but they did not give. I’m trapped, he thought with a stab of horror. He pulled at the branches with all the strength he had regained. Not even the leaves rustled under the pressure. He searched for the underlying magic and found Wood and, hidden carefully, Metal.
The fen-witch appeared out of the forest and brushed aside the twigs without issue to enter the hut.
“Are you keeping me locked up in here?” Sedramon asked, frowning darkly.
“Quite the opposite; I’m keeping the world out. Here in the woods you need to be careful that nothing enters the house uninvited. The obvious drawback is that it is more difficult to leave as well,” the witch answered with a small smile as she stroked Sedramon’s cheek. He flinched away. He did not feel like tenderness at the moment.
“I could do with some food. Something solid to see if my teeth are still there.”
“If you’ll help me skin and gut the beast, we can go hunting.”
Sedramon was not sure whether he had regained enough strength to go on the hunt, but he nodded silently nonetheless.
“Then come.”
The shamaness simply dragged him along. Sedramon tried his hardest to move silently, even though he knew there would be no game in the immediate area of the hut. To his surprise, they did not have to go far. They stopped at the edge of a clearing full of overgrown grass and colorful herbs. The shamaness laid a finger to her lips.
Before long a movement on the other side of the clearing caught Sedramon’s eye. A small pack of ocaps pushed their way through the undergrowth, perfectly disguised by the light stripes on their coats; they almost looked like part of the grass around them. They stepped cautiously out into the open, sniffing the air through their pointed snouts. The calves began to graze immediately while their mothers looked around; once they were satisfied there was no danger, they joined their young. The bull remained upright as a sentinel. He would only eat when the others were full.
One of the young ones had strayed from the pack and Sedramon wondered how they were supposed to slay it. They had not brought any weapons and they had missed the opportunity to lay traps. A slender white hand beside him made a slight motion in the air, and from the earth sprouted green shoots, reluctant at first, but then faster and faster. They formed a soft, swaying circle around the carefree animal. More and more shoots rose from the earth and the circle grew tighter. Sedramon could taste the Wood upon the air. The animal suddenly realized that it was surrounded and flung itself against the new growth, which swayed from the impact, but was too densely woven to let it out.
The noise the shoots made was so loud that the other animals fled in blind panic. Only the calf was caught alone, and it stared around with wide eyes and trembling legs.
“There’s our dinner,” the shamaness laughed. “Now we just need to fetch it.” With these words she raised her right hand as if she was pulling threads from a blanket, at which sharp boughs broke through the ground and speared the calf. Its legs struggled and it opened its mouth in a cry of pain. Then it was over.
“Can you carry it?” the woman asked Sedramon. “I must cover our trail and hide the traces of magic. Otherwise, the animals won’t come back to this place, despite the tasty food I’ve laid out for them here.”
“You slew it with magic,” Sedramon said in wonder. In Ringwall, he had never stopped to consider where his meat came from. Back in Quarrysand they had kept cattle and geese, ducks and chickens. Game was generally hunted with bow and arrow, or with a spear. The mucklings would use traps. But he had never once seen an animal killed by magical means.
“What did you expect? Why do you think we even have magic?”
“But wasn’t it cruel spearing it through the belly?”
“No crueler than a stroke with a sword.”
“Yes, but…” Sedramon could not formulate a proper argument against it, but his stomach turned at the idea of using magic in a hunt. Suddenly he saw an unknown coldness beneath the lovely face, and the gray of her eyes put him more in mind of glaciers than summer clouds. And he heard his mother’s voice in his head, warning him of half-shamanesses.
“What are you? A witch or a shamaness?” he asked flatly.
Perhaps he was imagining it, but the answer seemed a little reluctant.
“A bit of each. Yes, I am a shamaness, but first and foremost, I am a witch. Would you like me to bewitch you?” she asked with a slightly forced laugh.
“I think you’ve already done that,” he admitted, and he cast aside his caution and laid his arms around her.
Their supper was rich and nourishing. Despite his qualms earlier, the calf tasted outstanding, and he felt his strength return. He rose from his seat and stretched, off-handedly brushing at the twigs that made up the door as he did so. For a moment they resisted, but then gave way willingly. Sedramon looked over his shoulder and saw those big eyes above smiling lips. He stepped outside.
At first I thought she’s keeping me locked up here, but I’m probably just imagining it.
The laughter died in his throat when he noticed that the plants became less and less compliant the further he moved from the hut. Even the small leaves were as rigid as the tip of a spear.
“Have you drawn a shield around us?” Sedramon called towards the hut.
“Yes,” the answer rang out. “The shield you’re feeling is a witch’s hex. Nobody can come through unless we let them. Our sleep is safe. No one will dare disturb us, and should they try, they won’t find a way through.”
“A hex?” Sedramon repeated.
“What else? Would you like to learn how to do it? I can show you.”
Sedramon gave a non-committal grunt and returned to the hut.
“I really should move on soon,” he said. “I’m looking for something I won’t find here.”
“I know, my love, but the time is not yet. You will not find what you seek at this moment.”
“How would you know? Is knowledge of the future part of your Witchcraft?” Sedramon fought to keep his voice light and upbeat. This time, the hesitation in the answer was definite.
“The future is closed to me. I am no timerider. But I can read the magical patterns of our world. I am not ignorant – Pentamuria changes with every cycle the sun makes. And the changes are coming faster. You and I are part of this change.”
“You could come with me,” Sedramon suggested.
“Weren’t you listening? It’s not your time yet.” Her voice assumed an unfamiliar sharp tone.
“One might be forgiven for thinking that you’re expecting something. Wh
at’s worth waiting for, then?” Sedramon forced his own voice to be soft and calm to counter the Metal in hers.
“Can’t you feel it? Do you truly want to know? Then I will tell you. You can only leave once we have managed to combine our magics. Your elemental magic, so strong it only obeys you reluctantly, and whatever lies behind it that I can’t recognize, even though your aura screams it out into the world; and my Witchcraft, and…” she stopped. “There is something else; something you’re not ready for. But it must all be put together to a single aura. There are many ways to do this, but they all take time.”
“You know me well enough, it seems. I’m still far from being able to claim mastery over the elements and I certainly don’t intend to walk any dangerous roads while I’m still little more than a novice. As for combining magics – why? All it can result in is an early death or insanity.”
“Whoever told you that was either weak or didn’t want you to become strong. Even now, more than one magic slumbers within you. Why do you think you have these difficulties with the elemental magic in the first place? But it will pass. I have already undergone one such combination. Trust me when I say I know what I’m talking about. Together, you and I can reach a peak of magic no one has ever climbed before. Knowledge and power – are they not what sorcerers live for?”
“I don’t know what I live for, and I’ll have to find out the answer to that before I make any decisions. Forest and fire, wherever they are, will give me that answer. I will leave tomorrow and I would be glad if you accompanied me.”
It was a cold night and their bodies, usually so warm, seemed to lap up every last bit of heat in the tiny hut. Sleep came knocking several times, but it, too, seemed locked out by the hex. Accordingly, when he got up the next morning, Sedramon felt shattered. He did not give up. He packed his few possessions as two gray eyes glared at him mockingly.
Sedramon flung his bag over his shoulder, tried to part the twigs and turned around when he failed.
“Do you mean to keep me here forever?” he asked calmly.