A Mythos Grimmly

by Morgan Griffith

  The light shifts from warm to cool and sharpens the tower's edges. Each corner attains a strange precision in the faint moonlight, obsidian stone chipped into a perfect cutting edge. Ismail is certain the stone would flay fingers--sandstone, he thought earlier, but not now. In the rising dark, he finds the brambles earlier sought, writhing from the ground in long lengths of salted fury, passing over the sharp walls with the whisper of skin against leather.

  Ismail slides backwards in the salt, meaning to move away from the tower's base, but he never gets far; he cannot remove himself from the tower. The creeping black is always close to hand, his cheek grazing one of those sharp edges as if he had moved forward after all. He looks at the sky to gain a bearing, but there is no sky to be found; what hangs there is hideous, devoid of stars and moon, and Ismail reels as if struck. He smells blood and presses his fingers to his wounded cheek. The tower grows with a groan of cold iron.

  ___

  The obelisk: no wider than shoulders, rising one hundred feet above its gneiss rubble base, from a barren granite island anchored in the center of a salt water lake whose shores are not easily viewed from the island unless one stands within the obelisk. A ragged doorway, unintentionally cut. No stairs, but rotting pegs, a stutter-step ascent.

  The room beneath the marble capstone, perfumed with bay laurel, smothers; no one stood upright within its confines, only sprawled to gaze upon the world through thinning opaline walls. Words worn into the base of the capstone by incessant fingers: non occidatum, non mortuum.

  ___

  The brambles are not black, but coated in salt as the ground; the lengths crawling the length of the tower and seeking purchase against Ismail's very own feet are pale and heavy with strange designs borne of the salt sea air. The brambles are barbed, humpbacked, and swollen with pearled crystals that, even with the sudden absence of light, glow. They light a strange pathway up the tower, shambling along its metal girth, reading for the golden light fracturing the buckled roof Ismail had not seen under the afternoon sky.

  Ismail shouts at the sight of the light, at the sight her

  she whom he has sought

  she whom the say does not exist

  she

  she

  spilling—

  She, in a river from the window germinating in the tower's iron side. She, as strangely shaped as brambles, ungainly from her time within closed walls. She, eclipsing the naked sky with beauty and being.

  Ismail does not stop to wonder what has occasioned the opening of the window, if it be the brambles rending the tower or another force at work. Surely if the princess could have pushed the iron panels wide, to welcome the day, the night, the air, she would have. He shouts again, calling to her so he might be heard above the rush of the salted brambles, and she, gazing down upon him as one might a lover long expected, looses her hair.

  Her hair spills like a flood of ink against the salted brambles, dark and fine, and tangled just so Ismail may climb if he wishes. Small, fragrant hands find his own within the tresses, pulling him up and up; diminutive, soft feet balance beneath his, shoving him up in the way of circus performers. It is effortless this climbing, until Ismail realizes his sword has been left behind, resting beside the fire he can no longer see from this terrible height. Ismail looks down once, over his shoulder. He resists the cupping hands and pressing feet and at his resistance, they allow him to fall.

  If he does not need them, they do not need him.

  ___

  The lighthouse: Thick square base, rising into a sturdy octagonal core, giving way to a gentle circular apex. Four hundred and fifty feet of salted limestone blocks standing in ocean air, some sealed with molten lead, some cracked by the movement of earth over time. Anchored by the weight of years.

  Within the circular room, a furnace to be fed at night so brilliant firelight might stream into the harbor, into the beyond. Flooring worn by feet, the dark, sweat-outline of a single body against the curve of a wall. Ships crossing the waters day in and out, ships coveted but never boarded.

  The molten lead, the salted rock.

  ___

  The night swallows screams.

  Silent, Ismail plunges toward the ground, a flurry of hands and legs, until he catches a bramble. It is fire in his hands, scorching salt licking a wound into his palm, down the length of his arm. The night feeds on his screams, grows dense around him, and the black tower expands under the force of his fear. A tendril of hair brushes his cheek and Ismail lunges for it, abandoning his quest for his sword if it means reclaiming the touch of those small hands, the support of those small feet.

  Each bears him up again and again, and Ismail's heart slows, his breathing calms, and he tells himself he does not see the barren sky above the buckling tower roof, sees only her pale and heart-shaped face within the black night of her hair; hears only her soft and breathless voice saying oh my prince, at last you have come; at last, at last.

  He tells himself it is he who pulls himself into the tower; he disregards her support, her hands sliding under his arms to haul him across the window's sill. The sill is coated with the dust of a hundred years and it sifts around him in a cloud when she settles him beneath the window. Her hair moves in the dust like thick-bodied snakes, only glimpses of her figure: slim and pale as bones, teeth.

  He trembles and cannot speak, does not dare for he finds every word inadequate as he crouches within her presence. Her shadow befalls him, though she glows within the tangle of her boundless hair, raking down cheeks and arms until the darkness of her puddles in his lap, the scent of cloves rubbed to warmth between fingers. He does not dare reach for her, though his hands beg to be knotted into the black, to find the small hands that once sought his, to taste of a palm, a wrist.

  It is she who touches him. Her hands are strangely cool, soft as pink lilies as they enfold his own. His own: calloused, blackened, and ragged from the search that has found an end here. The she who should not exist, smiling as the crescent moon through the cascade of her nocturnal hair.

  ___

  The peel tower: honeycombed travertine, eaten away by the years, but standing yet. It is the only structure for miles, existing only to hold its prisoner and the iron basket into which she climbs every night.

  Every night that is to be, regular as the stars raking the sky above: she presses hands and feet against the iron eating the prints out of her skin, identity taken and taken once more. The shadow of her hands and feet edge the bowl, erased not by fire or time; no wind will carry these shadows away, nor melting snow or fracturing ice. Every night ever to come, she climbs into the iron bowl and burns herself to illuminate the darkness.

  Every morning, she climbs out of her own ash. Reknits herself.

  That which you do not kill is--

  "...not dead."

  ___

  Ismail weeps. Ismail believes himself unworthy. She bandages his hands within lengths of her hair and the cool, licking fire of her soothes him; eats into his flesh and gives him something he didn't realize he was missing. He cannot put a name to this something: companionship, touch, the proof he was not wrong.

  He was not wrong.

  "You," he says.

  He swallows his other words, for speaking them in her presence seems like a curse. You are not dead, he means to tell her. I will take you from these walls. He lifts his eyes but cannot find hers for all the twisting hair. Maybe there is a gleam within some small parting; maybe it is green or black or something more like the color of uncertainty. But no, she is certain. He is not.

  In her certainty, she waits. He can feel her watching him, even if he cannot see her eyes. Ismail longs to brush her hair from her face, so he might gaze upon the beauty the stories have spoken of, but he does not. Only looks at her as she is, hunched and draped, skin like moonlight flickering here and then there.

  "You are not dead," he manages to say.

  At this, she moves. She crosses the room and still the hair which binds his hands does not slither free. Thes
e tresses are so long, they might encompass the entire room. Vines, he thinks; roots.

  "You are not dead and I will take you from these walls."

  Across the room, jeweled curtains part. Ismail cannot see hand or foot, but she stands before the parting fabric and he presumes she has moved them; has parted the draped brocades and silks with her pale-lily hands to reveal the grandest room he has ever seen. Within this room there stands a bed, mounded with pillows and promise, spread with more silk, the colors of fire and frost and the forests of his home. His throat tightens at the sight of these colors and a sound escapes him.

  Rest, he thinks. We should rest before we go.

  But she has only ever rested. Waited.

  ___

  The fleetfoot: obsidian stone cages a pendulous body in constant motion. The fleetfoot is never still, picking its way over night-drenched ground, over star-knotted river. On eight thread-thin legs the fleetfoot steps on no ground twice. Fleetfoot carries with it a prisoner and the night wind, the morning sun distantly towed on a string of silk. So distant, the fleetfoot never knows the touch of light.

  The fleetfoot leaves small craters in its wake, eight in a pattern if you know how to look. Prints left in long grass fields and muddy lanes, so children would know it passed in the night. Livestock has been lost to its steps, squashed where they stand without other reasonable explanation. Children in these parts dream of pressed pig liver, flattened cow tongues. They marvel at the discovery of a chicken's egg balanced on muddy crater rim, shell so thin the morning sun turns it into a globe of glowing gold.

  ___

  The splendid bed is as hard as nails. Ismail cannot understand how beauty is so dreadful against his tired limbs. He tries to sleep, to pass the night away before they take leave toward his ship; he cannot for the way the bed presses into every ache he possesses.

  "Princess, how do you..."

  But how did she do anything, let alone sleep in such a dreadful space. The pillows are as stone and the promise he felt upon first entering the room is long fled. He holds to the hair that wraps his hands still, seeking some relief, but neither is there any to be had here. It is cold and dry as the princess moves in a deeper part of the tower.

  "Princess, we should--"

  The night swallows his words. Ismail tries to tell her they must leave, for surely even the narrow cockpit of his glorious ship would be more comfort than this cold place she has known. He looks beyond the bed's draped frame, seeking the jeweled curtains, the window opening into night, but these things have both gone. The walls are sheets of iron alone, windowless, and the jeweled curtains have melted into rust, rot, ruin.

  "Princess?"

  She swells from the floor in a violent black wave and within the parting folds of her ebony hair, she smiles, but she has no face.

  She has no face.

  ___

  The black bramble wood before the iron tower: there is no record of any such place.

  ___

  Ismail turns his shoulder into the pillows, means to roll free of the bed, but he is well and truly caught.

  Of course, he knows he was caught long before: on a distant world of topaz seas and granite skies, where, upon a rotting parchment, he found the first mention of the first tower. That which you do not kill is not dead, what is allowed to live lives yet. In a small library, in a nook of scrolls, the laughter of a librarian echoing as Ismail was assured it was only a myth. Only a story, words inked onto paper by someone tired of their own small life. Words constructing a window into a place that never existed, never could exist.

  But these places did exist, scattered across a universe so vast Ismail feared he would never be able to search them all. One by one they fell to his explorations, until this place--

  the ages-old scent of bodies once kept; bodies in protest, bodies in revolt

  One never searches every place, Ismail knows. The dark rises before a journey can find completion, and places and items are missed in the headlong pursuit of a thing long dreamed. When one comes to the point where all vanishes into a single prick of light--

  "Prin--"

  There is no light and when she leans over him, no face. She isn't wholly right, not the right word, not the right flavor, but he knows no other. Her body is curved and pleasing and to him this says she, she, she spilling.

  She spills across him--the nail-hard bed ceasing to matter for there is only the rising pain of her as her blackened hair becomes the sea, becomes the tide carrying him out of the room, to a distant shore where stars gleam in the colors of death. Stars do not burn black, Ismail tells himself, but here they do, reflecting every wonder of her within their aspects. Every prick is a scream, pulling Ismail into her arms, pulling her inside of him.

  "Princesssss."

  She hisses from the place a mouth should be. But there is no face, the word misshapen as it pours from her. It is a thing mutilated, a skin turned inside out. Ismail's mouth cracks open because he means to tell her yes, he came for her and will take her away so she never knows another moment in this awful place, but that crack, the soft and wet oval of his mouth, is ransacked.

  Strands of her flood into his mouth, bursting past lips and tongue. She is a comet shooting down his throat, exploding through stomach and into bowels. Ismail's screams are a balm across the broken shape of her. His unbound hands open and close upon a black sky he can no longer see. There is only her shape above him, moving ceaseless as fleetfoot taught her. Rest is death, waiting is death, and what is not killed is not dead.

  ___

  The pagoda: thirteen levels of iron, wind bells beneath every eave, never silent. The second pagoda to occupy this location, the first of wood having been burned to the ground by lightning, by comet, by self-immolation. None can agree as to the method, only to the destruction, to the ash still circling its base. Without windows, unending iron stones packed into wall, into dome.

  Its uppermost level, a square iron room. Within the center of the floor, the shadow of a figure from a nightmare, limbs spread wide then balled close. The yes-no motions of a body struggling, succumbing. The imprint of coiling hair.

  All thirteen levels: the echo of a bone smile in a not-face.

  ___

  And why would they lock a princess away?

  The librarian asked Ismail in the closeness of the scroll nook, in an effort to show him how foolish his entire theory was. Princesses didn't need locking way, did they? Princesses were dainty, princesses knew their place.

  Her place, now, is the hollow of Ismail's stomach. She is a solid weight inside him, resting, for the journey inside has exhausted her. She is not still, however; the tendrils of her spread through him, up his wide-flung arms and down into his shaking legs. She is fire and salt inside him, and she pushes as if she means to be born--but she has not died, will not die--

  Ismail screams and the sound of it startles even him. He breaks from the fugue that has held him, tumbles to the floor, and spits a stream of iron stones. They splatter out of him and he is incoherent in his confusion. The iron burns his tongue and he thinks for one sweet moment he has dreamed the entire thing. He is sitting beside the librarian yet, and has only to reach out to clasp his hands.

  Ismail stands on steady legs, looks around the ruined room, and tells himself that is all this is: a dream. The bed lies in ruin, the curtains rotting to threads, the iron walls flaking with rust. If she was here, she is here no longer. Just as in every other tower. He smooths his hair and beard, rubs fingers over unbroken lips, and tells himself he is alone as he has been since the start of his journey. He will not find her because she does not exist. They all said so and he was foolish to ever think, to ever believe.

  His doubt gives her a stronger hold inside him. Ismail buckles to his knees, falling into the endless umbra of her. She stands before him, an immoveable, inescapable darkness. This shadow has a perfectly fine edge--Ismail can see the rotted light of the room just beyond it (just beyond her) but he knows he has no hope of reaching it. He
cannot move for she will not allow it. Only allows him to bend more fully into her.

  You will take me from these walls, Ismail.

  She speaks without mouth, without voice, as another heartbeat inside of him. Her gruesome hand presses to his heart as Ismail stares into the unending gloom of her, watching black stars poison the heavens, corrupting every world they erupt over. One slides into another, causes a burst, fragmenting skies, unhinging her terrible nature.

  What is not killed is not dead, but should have been.

  Black stars inside his collar, burning with unseen fire as they sink into his bones, his marrow. Ismail should scream and quake, but he moves beyond these things, the nest of her atrocious hand already becoming a home, the thing so dearly sought.

  ___

  The horologion clock tower: octagonal, crumbling and rust-stained marble, once buried but excavated by two calloused and eager hands, its full and empty height revealed once more.

  A vane atop its roof spins under eight winds (angel wings standing in relief upon the stones circling beneath the roof) but always tells the truth of time within its longest shadow: time is ever fleeting and what is not killed, cannot be not dead.

  Within its vacated heart, a water clock, but the water flows no more.

  ___

  Ismail flings his arms wide, then balls himself up tight. If he sleeps, he sweats through his robes the whole of an endless night, pressed against the curl of one wall. In a fever, he climbs into the wreck of the bed, which seems an iron bowl, and begs for her to burn him to ashes.

  She refuses.

  She--

  Ismail's bones cry her secret name as a chorus, Nyar, Nyar

  breaks him as she might a tray of painted ceramic, with fists gone to hammers, and under her assault, Ismail shatters.