Shower of Stones

by Zachary Jernigan

  And everywhere, he would find corpses. A storehouse of power the likes of which the world had never seen. With the talents the sigils had bestowed upon him, it would be an easy thing to gather the corpses together and transport them to wherever he liked.

  His grin grew wider. Dry laughter erupted from his chest as he lowered himself into a sitting position.

  Lacking even the energy to access a simple spell to be sure, he nonetheless sensed a disappointing amount of time had passed since he fled from Adrash. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Regardless, his spirits were not dimmed. Without consciously making the decision to do so, he had guided himself where he most needed to be.

  ‡

  He lay in the sun throughout the day and, after taking in one contemplative look at the broken sky as it rose above the world, slept when the sun died. The wind, carrying air cold enough to freeze water to steel, failed to even stir him in his slumber. In the morning, he felt full, though he had eaten nothing. He stood on solid legs and walked to the edge of his eyrie, staring down the wall of his prison with one corner of his mouth upraised.

  Yet his hands shook. He examined them, stained black with latent magic, and backed away from the open height. A searching thought (timid enough at the beginning to embarrass him, even alone) caused the boundaries at his wrists to quiver. He looked down at his ankles and saw that there, too, the alchemical ink had become agitated, the amorphous sigils eager to rise up his legs and arms, forming shapes, covering him in the symbols of his magical will. Those spells that had gathered on his scalp, mimicking long hair, lifted from his back and shoulders as fine filaments wavering in the wind, a hundred thousand snakes woken from hibernation.

  Gooseflesh rose on every inch of his naked, eggplant skin, and the open hands raised in relief on either pectoral muscle grew in definition, as though someone sought to push out from the inside. His testicles lifted as his cock stiffened painfully. His right eyelid slowly opened, allowing smoke to seep in a thin stream from the black cavity of his eye socket.

  The world bloomed into dizzying color. For the space of several breaths, his hearts pounded hard enough to shudder his vision. A wave of nausea bent him at the waste. He retched, yet had nothing to summon from his stomach.

  He had been afraid, yes. He had not known if the sigils would respond to his commands after such time and grievous injury.

  As good as their rousing felt, he forced them to still upon his hands and feet. He would not be arrogant now, giving in to temptation before his body had fully recovered. Not when he was so close to his goal. He lay upon the cold stone, allowing the sun to soak into the roots of his body, his thoughts drifting to the knowledge he had gleaned from the dead following Ebn’s assault and then stolen from Adrash’s weakened mind during their battle.

  He recalled the elder he had seen and encountered on the Clouded Continent, and it was an epiphany too reality-altering to do him much good—as was the revelation of Jeroun being only one planet among many: scholars had already posited this.

  And the existence of an afterlife? What did this matter? The dead were insignificant, a concern only among themselves.

  What he had learned about Adrash’s nature, too—his existence as a man before assuming the mantle of godhood, how blind he had become to the world he once actively ruled—enticed him while remaining altogether too abstract to be of any use. Adrash was a force nearly beyond measure, answerable only to an equal force: understanding his past or madness would add little of value.

  But those frustratingly blank identities, those mortals without names who had stood on a baked plain before Adrash? He worried at these like a loose tooth, trying to dredge something useful from his memory, a detail he had not seen in the moment of revelation.

  The Black Suit, a Knosi, beautiful in a boring way.

  The freckled woman, whose face he had disliked immediately, viscerally.

  The constructed man of brass spheres, eyes glowing actinic blue.

  Pol had not the slightest clue about the first two. Not even an itch of recognition. The third, however, he sensed he should know. Holding the image of the artificial creature in his mind created a disconcertingly slippery effect, as of trying to keep water from dripping through one’s hands. He had heard a story about a constructed man, had he not? He had studied the creation of constructs, and there had been one particular example …

  He tried to picture the classrooms of the Academy of Applied Magics, places he had always known. His brow furrowed in concentration. He placed himself in his own apartment, and could not remember where his bookcases had been, or whether his bed faced the east or the west.

  The name of his first instructor.

  The identity of the man who had deflowered him.

  His mother’s stern face …

  Summoning any memory from before his transformation in Ebn’s bedroom proved difficult. In fact, even the details of that night were blurred around the edges. She had raped him, he recalled. He winced, recalling pain and shame greater than any he had ever experienced

  But what had she done, exactly?

  Suddenly, it struck him as very important that he remember—as though, by doing so, it would unlock the other memories eluding him. As if a door would be opened inside him.

  ‡

  Another day passed while he waited to be strong enough.

  Another day, during which his memory became no clearer. Impatience pressed upon him, as though someone were staring over his shoulder, urging him to act. It built until he shook with it, impotent in the face of it.

  And then, just as the sun dropped below the jagged skyline and the scattered spheres of the Needle began rising in the east, a face rose out of the mist clouding his recollection.

  A broad, lavender-skinned, horned face. The face of a quarterstock. Pol had come to know it in the months before his cathartic encounter with Ebn.

  Shav. His name had been Shav.

  A madman, given to spells of dementia … of appearing to be one man and then another …

  All at once, Pol remembered every word.

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  The dragon and I. A halfbreed and a quarterbreed at this moment in time. The conjunction of the two is interesting, Pol. Interesting. I’ve seen a dragon crash into the sea, sure the animal had killed itself. Instead it surfaced, twisting its long neck and beating its wings upon the water, a great sea serpent clamped in its jaws—a sea serpent so large that it could’ve swallowed our tiny boat in one bite. Its skin shone like silver in the moonlight, and its thrashing frothed the sea like a child’s hand slapping bathwater.

  The Needle had only risen halfway, and the moon showed a quarter of her face. I stared at the destruction coming swiftly: a wall of black water that blotted out the stars along the horizon. I waited and told my men to prepare themselves. Some of them prayed to Adrash, some to Orrus, and some to the devil. Me, I just waited for the inevitable, almost wanting it. Most likely, I would die along with my men. An odd feeling, being that powerless.

  Someday soon, I think you’ll know what that feels like.

  ‡

  The moment snapped into clarity within the dim confines his skull, creating a scene so vivid it was as though he were seated again in his apartment on an atypically hot day in the Month of Clergymen, the year previous. He stared at the quarterstock named Shav and thought it odd, what he now knew without doubt. What he should have known then:

  Shav was no madman. Disturbed, but not mad.

  Perhaps not even disturbed, but very clever.

  Or even inspired.

  In his mind’s eye, Pol reappraised the broad, horned wyrm tamer, doubting every assumption he had made about the quarterstock: indeed, he now found himself wondering if the term quarterstock even applied. It had been the easiest determination to make, for Shav had never denied it. Moreover, what else existed that appeared as he did? Not a man and not an elderman, but a thing in between, a manlike creature singular in creation.

  Yet the quarterstock itself was a near-lege
nd. No one alive in Tansot—in fact, anyone in the recorded history of the city, the place where eldermen had always been most numerous—had verifiably documented the healthy offspring of an elderwoman. To assume one had suddenly appeared in Pol’s life, just as he desired an asset worthy of note …

  An asset who spoke such odd, portentous words.

  At the time, Pol had dismissed Shav’s rambling monologues. Surely, he had reasoned, they were merely the digressions of a precocious individual, the fictions of a talented mind severely maladjusted by the vagaries of unusual parentage. Beyond material assistance as a tamer, Shav could have no insight applicable to Pol’s situation.

  Now, however, he was forced to admit he had been wrong. The account of the dragon—it could only have been an allusion to events to come. Soon after the words were spoken, Pol and eighteen other outbound mages had ascended into the sky, bearing Ebn’s gift to the god, a massive statue in his likeness. Before they reached the moon, Adrash appeared and with a thought shattered the statue, sending its pieces in a wave of mutilation toward the mages, killing all but the most skilled. Pol could do nothing to prevent their deaths.

  Helpless.

  Someday soon, I think you’ll know what that feels like.

  Pol lingered on these words. He had been horrified, true, but had he felt helpless?

  No. No, he had not. Perhaps, at the beginning, for the briefest hesitation, he had not known what to do, but within heartbeats of seeing the statue turned into a bomb he had been filled with purpose, first to defend himself, and second to … to …

  He gasped as the sigils spuns to life on his whip-thin body, rising into a whirlwind of countless long-tailed sperm on his forearms and legs, whipping around his shoulders and neck and lower belly as they recalled with near-sentience their awakening upon him. He collapsed onto the cold rock, smoke pouring from his left eye, fingers twitching one motion over and over again—the same motion he had used to release a spell upon the Needle, altering one of its massive spheres slightly, announcing his challenge to Adrash before he had even thought the wages of this action through.

  Coils of concussive force leapt from his outspread fingertips.

  The rock face before him fractured like a broken mirror before crumbling onto his legs. He pulled his feet free before more of the wall fell upon him, and nearly tumbled off his perch. Teetering toward death, the upper half of his back over the void. Arms outstretched, rigidly under the control of the sigils. The spell bore into the mountainside, pushing him inch by inch backward in the process.

  He could find no purchase. He would fall.

  “No!” he roared, tightening the spasming muscles of his stomach, attempting to sit.

  As he fought to regain his balance, one of the sigils on his arm formed itself into a black circle and rose upward from his flesh as a tendril, wavering in the wind as though it were a charmed snake. Pol focused on it as its tip ballooned, stunned into immobility despite the danger.

  The sigil formed a face, black on black, horned.

  “Waste no more time,” it said. “Learn to fly.”

  Pol screamed as he tipped over the edge of his perch. The wind ripped the voice from his mouth as he fell. There was no time for thought, no time even for fear. Certainly, there was no time to recall the second portent Shav had spoken to him …

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  Before he leaves, my father tells me to contemplate death. He tells me to feel my mortality in the creak of my bones and the soreness of my muscles. With every heartbeat, you are closer to death, he says. He forces me to smell the stench of his underarms—the smell of the body birthing and decaying life at the same moment. He tells me to know, intimately, every sign of weakness in my body, and then reject each in turn.

  He breaks my arm with one blow, kicks me as I writhe on the ground. Remember this lesson above all others, he says. The body heals. It responds to trauma, to pain—not with fear, but with purpose. So must you. You need not die, my son, but in order to continue living—

  —you must suffer.

  ‡

  Pol dropped, head first, as fast as a body must drop, yet his perceptions were reduced to a crawl, drawn out into one long howl of wind—an avalanche in his ears, a needle in his eyes. Rigid-limbed, he spun as the spell continued to pass from his fingers, warping the air before him like heat radiating above a fire, strafing the mountainside in cracks as he rotated to face its solid wall again and again.

  The mountainside. It loomed closer each time he regarded it.

  Spiraling, caught and stretched in a sluggish current of time, horrified and fascinated at once (at his predicament, at his foolishness for not being more attentive when events had been playing out), he found space within himself to consider Shav’s words.

  He placed himself, once again, in his apartment. He held a knife in his hand.

  It had been near the end of the Month of Pilots, three weeks after Ebn’s disastrous goodwill mission. Confident the display of power he had recently shown was only the beginning, the birthing of greater magic within him, Pol nonetheless forced himself to caution. He would not underestimate Ebn. She had swayed a god, after all, if in the brief moment before his rage returned to him. Pol would not rely upon the dimly understood nature of his sigils, but attack his superior using brute force.

  A knife, cunningly crafted, intended for her skull.

  Shav had offered the support he could—first the knife, second the assistance of his wyrm, Sapes—before succumbing to yet another of his spells.

  You need not die, but in order to continue living, you must suffer.

  Pol cursed himself for not drawing the obvious conclusion sooner.

  Shav had known, or at least predicted.

  A month after he and Shav’s meeting in his apartment, his plan of attack frustrated, Pol had committed an act of supreme foolishness, relying upon tradition to protect him. Ebn, the more opportunistic of the two, broke into his apartment, breaching the oldest of etiquettes dictating how eldermen treated one another, and humiliated him. After ensorceling him into a state of immobile arousal, she raped him. Despite the aggression of the act, she still could not summon the rage to kill him and so resorted to greater violence.

  Finally, she had torn out his left eye.

  He recalled the agony, the humiliation. He recalled a pressure. Voices, calling him to transformation …

  You need not die, but in order to continue living, you must suffer.

  A sudden gust of wind pushed against him like a cold slab of glass, tipping him lengthwise in glacial motion, sending his feet into the mountainside. He braced for the pain of contact, of his skin being flayed against the rough wall.

  When it came, however, it was more intense than he could have imagined, drawn out into one torturous moment. Reactions slowed, he watched in paralyzed horror as his bloodied feet rebounded from the wall and rocked his upper body toward it. The closer his hands came, the more damage his spell did to the rock, boring into it in doubled lightning lines.

  When his hands finally passed into the mountainside, he screamed. The mineral, heated to its vaporization point, blackened and bubbled the skin of his fingers. His wrists. His forearms.

  He fought helplessness through the red haze of his torment. Soon, his face would hit the wall and he would be dead. There would be no fractured rock beneath him when he woke. He would not wake.

  Learn to fly, his sigil had said.

  Learn to fly.

  ‡

  A timeless moment before his forehead touched the mountainside, he did just that. A voice—or several voices: he would never be sure—whispered wordless directions, spoke a command Pol felt more than understood, and he remembered.

  He had once possessed wings. They had carried him into the night sky from Ebn’s bedroom. They had borne him to orbit.

  He tipped his head to the side in slow motion, cracking vertebrae. He then tipped it to the other side. Fully inhabiting his pain now, taking succor from it, he flexed burnt hands now under his ow
n control. He increased the power of his spell, pushing himself back from the mountainside before closing his fists and entering into a full dive.

  He was an arrow, suspended in amber. Enough, he subvocalized.

  The wind tore at him as time reasserted its normal pace. He bared teeth into the gale, grinning at the swiftly approaching ground. With a few muscular twitches, he corrected his spin.

  As he spread his arms out to either side, stretching the kinking muscles of his shoulders, wings unfurled from his back. Blacker than a moonless night they grew, doubling and then tripling in width, becoming assets befitting a creature of legend, a god.

  He arched, letting his wings cup the wind. His bones creaked as his body took the weight of gravity only feet from the snowy mountainside. His dive flattened into an unsteady soar over the frozen landscape. Quickly, he righted his shuddering wings and flapped down once, twice, three times, his confidence growing as memory took hold.

  He flew. It was as though he had been born with wings.

  ‡

  Before him, an invisible wall shielded the valley. He knew of its existence from his contact with Adrash, but understood little of its nature beyond the scope of its power. It had served to hide the valley from all but the most powerful gaze for all of human and elderman history.

  Until Pol, that is. He saw through it easily, first through the phantom organ of his left eye and then through his unaided right, gazing down upon the lifeless plain. Cradled at the valley’s exact center, bluer than any memory of blue, was the lake. Upon seeing it, his mouth began watering. He had not drunk since before the turn of the half-millennium.

  A smile rose to his lips as he recalled the taste of cold water. Water he alone would drink. Glory he would never be forced to share.

  Regardless of his excitement, he forced himself to caution, angling his charcoal wings to slow his approach. The alien ache in his bones grew more severe, the closer he came to the barrier. The remainder of his self-congratulations came to a grinding halt as the fractaling sigils fled from his leading fists, en masse, flowing like ink over his sinuous torso to gather as static, as jittering ants on his legs. The sigils flowing from his scalp flattened on the ridges of his back, tapering into a point above his buttocks.