by Sean Rodden
Stolen bones and a murdered father.
The unbearable unsaid.
Thank you for your kindness, my old friend, but like all absolute truths, some pains just… are.
“Your omission remains unaddressed, Sammayal.”
The Lord of the Shaddathair inclined his head, let fall the lids of his eyes.
“You would not have dived into those dark waters so eagerly had you known, Prince Yllufarr. In times dire and grave, self-assurance is a warrior’s most resistant armour.”
“And knowledge is his sharpest sword.”
The Shaddath pressed his lips closed, considered, nodded. He then bent low before the cool-eyed Sun Lord, his long arms sweeping outwards like great corvine pennons.
“Of course, Prince Yllufarr. I erred in judgement, though not in intention. Such is the tale of my being, of my existence, told over and over again until blood wells like an unending scream in the ears. ’Twas… I… where are my words? Forgive this Unforgiven soul – contrition is not a thing with which I am familiar. Nor comfortable. My… apologies.”
Yllufarr peered pallidly at Sammayal’s pale pate, then looked upon the Darad and the Fian. Both glanced at the Shaddath, scowled, then shrugged. The Prince’s thin mouth quirked toward a smile, but achieved little more than a smirk.
Inevitably, even the most arrogant of souls bows to someone.
“There was no ill in your intent, Lord Sammayal,” said the Sun Lord, smoothing the set of his features. “Your purpose was and remains pure. Rise now, and bow before me no more, lest I become favourably inured to the habit.”
The Unforgiven straightened, searched the Prince’s placid aspect for a moment, then smiled, a slow cautious curving, yet nevertheless sincere.
“I will lead my folk away now, Prince of Gith Glennin. We will endeavour to restore this place. We will attempt to heal ourselves. We will await the Golden Voice of Gavrayel and his breaking of our bonds.” He stepped nearer to the Sun Lord, and his words became but a whisper, solemn and earnest. “And when next you call for us, my oldest and truest of friends… we will come.”
A moment, yes, a moment only, barely the span of a single breath, but one that swept away the dust and blood and tears of two thousand years.
And then it was the Sun Lord Yllufarr, Prince of the Folk of Gavrayel in Gith Glennin, who bowed.
There is darkness, and then there is darkness.
Utter blackness, black beyond blackness. Night benighted, folded in upon itself, then benighted again. Should all the galaxies, right down to the very last lonesome star, have been removed, ripped from the universe, every sun ruthlessly extinguished, the eternal afterdark would have seemed perfectly garish and gaudy when compared to the absolute everblack of the Way of Darknest Night.
Rundul gritted his teeth and trudged on. He had known this would not be fun.
“The Gaddagorth can transport you anywhere you wish to go, friend Rundul,” the Athain Prince told him upon the threshold of the Hass, “providing the destination is a place to which you have been and with which you are sufficiently familiar. But while… in transit… it is essential that you concentrate, focus, think solely upon the desired destination and nothing else, nowhere else, lest your being be torn to shreds and dispersed across a dozen sites to which your consciousness is naturally drawn. I cannot be overly emphatic; let nothing distract you, permit no mental lapses, remain focused upon your purpose. You must be fixated upon this one intent – possessed of an adamant single-mindedness far past the point of compulsive obsession, verging on sheer insanity.”
The Darad’s beard and the lines about his eyes shifted slightly.
“I think I can handle that.”
Not nothingness. Only the spatial emptiness of an unseen step down.
Stripped of the intrinsic stone-sense and supernatural scotopia common to all Daradur, Rundul stumbled, pitched perilously forward. He threw his arms wide, using basic instinct and his heavy war-axe to re-establish his balance. Had the ponderous weight of his pack been distributed less evenly, the massive Darad would certainly have tumbled headlong into the blackness, bowling over and over, quite possibly crushing his unwitting companions before and below him.
Could have warned me! Rundul called out irritably.
And then it was that he realized his voice made no sound in that perfect dark. He could feel the vibration in his throat, the movement of his tongue and lips, the breath in his beard, but he could hear nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the thud of blood in his ears. He was deaf and blind in that unctuous blackness, treading a stairway down into the deeps of seeming oblivion, into a void, a nihilistic neverplace. The steps themselves were sheer and steep, and felt as though they were fashioned of the smoothest glass, treacherously slick, greased with the oleaginous muck of midnight.
Rundul cast a few mute curses at the darkness, persisted downward. Slowly. Step by step, stair after stair. He grimaced at his uncharacteristic tentativeness. He had never before proceeded so cautiously, so guardedly, so very… gingerly.
And a thought came to him then, unsought, unwanted – reviled even.
So this is how it must feel, this is what it must be like – well, near enough anyway.
He could not so much as think the word.
Fear.
“We’re going in there?”
“Yes, friend Rundul.” The Prince of the Neverborn turned from the yawning jaws of ruined Ulviathon and regarded his companion with cool colourless eyes. “Does this disturb you?”
“Disturb is not quite the word,” the Darad grumbled, wrenching the haft of his war-axe with uncharacteristically restless hands. He dug a steel-shod toe into the bruised bones at his feet.
“You were informed that the demon swallowed the Gaddagorth, Captain, and you made no complaint.”
Rundul’s thick brows knotted violently.
“It was a story. The Athair are a figurative folk. I thought the Shaddath was being, I don’t know, symbolic or something.”
“Of course. As it happens, he was not.”
Eldurion of the Fiannar permitted himself a slight smile, but chose, perhaps rather wisely, to say nothing.
Rundul looked beyond the Sun Lord, past shimmering rows of terrible teeth into the stygian throat of the beast. A low growl like a gathering thunder rolled in the Darad’s chest. He took a single step forward. Bones snapped underfoot.
“Remember, friend – ”
“I know, I know,” the Captain of the Wandering Guard rumbled impatiently. Another step, more dead bones crunching into shards and dust. “Concentrate on the destination or I’ll be dead in fifty places at once.”
The Sun Lord’s smile was a subdued but beautiful thing as he moved aside and gracefully gestured with one black-gloved hand.
“After you, my dear friend.”
The Captain of the Wandering Guard had never experienced such cold. He had walked the white wastes of the Nikadsledt, hiked the ice hills of arctic Angarald, traversed the impassable Pass of Rurin in the storming heart of Vallagardian winter – yet he had never suffered such cold. The cold of the Gaddagorth was not a natural cold, not like the throat-shredding cold of glacial meltwaters, not the deep dry cold of a dawnless polar night on the Neverending Ice. No, this cold was a force, one that was felt neither on the skin nor in the gut, nor even in the lungs. This cold did not freeze the heart, did not mottle the skin a poisonous black, did not make a chill slow sludge of the blood.
This cold burned.
And the thing it burned was the soul.
“Time itself is transformed within and about the Gaddagorth,” the Sun Lord warned his already very wary companions in the shadow of the house of stones. “Time is essentially broken, shattered, sliced into moments, specific periods defined by distinct beginnings and ends. Until we have walked the Way of Darkest Night all will become explicitly episodic in nature, a tale told in fits and starts, each scene only a brief burst of light and noise in the mind. And these moments may seem askew, out of sequen
ce, haphazard and random. The rules, the law, the sense of chronological order to which we have become accustomed will not apply: Before comes after; the past follows the future; the logical flow of cause and effect is interrupted – worse, discarded. You will be disoriented. Confused. Bewildered, even. But you must not permit your concentration to falter, neither the Darad on the destination nor the Deathward on the Darad, not in the slightest, lest we all be lost forever.”
Eldurion nodded sombrely.
Rundul was about to grumble something underly intelligible and overly irascible, but that particular episode was already ended.
The Darad stared upward. Stiffened his grasp of his war-axe. The thing, whatever it was, was utterly enormous.
He had seen the beast before – rather, he had seen its like before. Upon the killing ground of ancient Doras Serrin. In the night and the slicing rain and the flying blood. Yes, he had seen this creature’s like, its semblance, about the titanic shard-stones of Carricevan, demon-spawn dying upon the broad blades of his angry axe – but those things, those ulviathoi, were mere imitations, miniature mimics of the true monster.
“Is this…?”
“Ulviathon”, Eldurion grated, his glittersome gaze scrutinizing the horned and plated fiend.
“It is and it is not,” responded the Sun Lord. “This,” he waved one hand indifferently yet somehow quite contemptuously, “is but the shell of the thing, the form it was forced to take, to inhabit, so to speak, after the Fall of unholy Ilurin. A vessel for the demon, much as the body is the vessel of the soul. The true Ulviathon was an entity of pure energy and impossible beauty, a Hiath whose power is… was… matched by few, and exceeded by fewer still.”
Rundul and Eldurion looked upon the darkling Ath at their shoulders with new appreciation, with an esteem akin to wonder. Yllufarr was far from ordinary, they knew, even for one of the Neverborn, but the Prince’s quiet modesty, his sure yet self-effacing nature, made it easy for them to forget that he had existed before the Three Worlds, that he had known the greatest of the Hiathir, that he had heard the very Voice of the Teller himself telling his Tale.
“Ulviathon was not permitted to assume its true form here on Second Earth,” Yllufarr expanded in the dark of Maol an Maalach, “for it would have been too potent, too pure of power to be contested. No, it had been stripped of its beauty, and its power was limited to that which this corporeal form could contain and control. Even so, it and its demonic spawn were more than a match for…” His words trailed away into silence and salient sorrow.
“You faced the demon, and you destroyed it, Prince Yllufarr,” assured Eldurion. “And you freed your seven hundred.”
The Ath’s fair features contorted as though something foul had offended his palate. His body tensed as echoic talons of Ulviathon’s ravings tore again at his mind.
Thou slitherer! Thou creeper, crawler! Slinker! Craven worm! A blade in the back is all thou art! All that thou shalt be anon!
“But I did not face the fiend, Eldurion.” The Sun Lord’s words were bathed in bitterness. “Not until… after. The victory is tainted. My methods were unorthodox. I did not win this war in the way of the warrior.”
Assassin! Murdering worm!
“I care not how you achieved the feat.” Eldurion’s tone remained as hard as iron, but iron with edges worn smooth. “I care only that the feat is achieved. The beast is dead and your Knights have gone into the Light. Cease your self-flagellation. These are lashes you need no longer endure.”
Thou whore of Gavrayel!
The Sun Lord opened his mouth, then clapped it closed, saying nothing.
“Look,” grumbled Rundul, “if my guess is right, then I understand what’s going on here, my Athain friend. And you’re wrong, very wrong. Far better the bare blade in the back of the foe than the back bared to the foe’s blade. Trust me, I’ve been there, I have carved those runes.” He paused, waited a while, soon saw the tension in the Sun Lord’s stance ease slightly. “Are we good, brother?”
Prince Yllufarr of the Neverborn stared into the monstrous gaping maw of the demonic carcass before him, into the blackness beyond those wicked sword-like teeth.
Into the very guts of the thing.
Death calls for thee now, thou killer in the dark.
“Good enough…brother.”
One by one, the three companions entered the colossal dolmen. The Athain Prince led, tall and terrible, the dark music of his being as saturnine as a death march. The long-legged Fian came next, grim and grey as a ghoul, his weathered mien etched with dogged determination. And the hulking Darad warded their backs, his huge fists grasping the haft of his war-axe with a ferocity unnervingly near to actual trepidation. Scowling to himself, at himself, Rundul of Axar took some small solace in exaggerating the differentiation between I don’t like this and I don’t wanna do this. But either way –
Fuck.
The first few strides were unremarkable. The atrabilious air of Coldmire accompanied them, morose and morbid, a melancholic gloom painting the ink-black stone a glum and sullen hoar. But this uncertain halflight soon faltered, even as day succumbs to dusk, and dusk to darkness, like grey ash compressed by irresistible forces into the blackest coal. They sensed the walls and capstone recede, retreat, hurtling away into a formless cosmos that knew no light, that had never known light, would ever know no light. Everything altered. Only the rock beneath their boots remained solid, remained real.
And even then –
Rundul almost swung his axe as he felt the stone smoothen into a plane of unblemished black glass. There then came a sudden stripping away of the Darad’s intrinsic earth-sense, his awareness of where he was within the world, of the entelechy of his existence, his reason for being, his… belonging.
And then he stepped out into nothingness.
And down.
Fuck!
“Do not trouble yourself with the destination, friend Eldurion,” the Sun Lord advised as they entered Gaddagorth Hass. “You need only concentrate upon the Darad. You will be blind and deaf and numb in the Way of Darkest Night; therefore you must rely upon senses other than those of eye and ear and touch. Bind yourself to the Darad, to his being, to his will. And this will permit you to follow him wherever he might go. Do not flinch. Do not allow your focus to waver in the slightest degree. You must be steel-strong of will, inflexible, far past stubbornness to the point of absolute and unreasonable obstinacy.” A judicious pause. “Tell me, Eldurion of the House of Defurien, is that a thing that you can do?”
The aged Fian’s aspect remained as grave as, well, the grave. But there was a wicked glinting to his gaze, and from somewhere deep in his bosom, in the hard place between scorn and irony, came the words –
“Have we met?”
Expecting a step but finding a landing, Rundul lurched forward, fell to his knees. Invisible matter scattered about him, shattered beneath his weight. Sound whispered at his ears as his auditory senses returned to him, oozing back into his consciousness with the speed of crawling worms. The fuliginous blackness gradually faded, and light bloomed, blossoming in his brain in fields of varied grey, then coming back to him in copious waves of colour. He could hear the strange material under him clack, crack, snap, rattle as he pushed himself upward with his war-axe. He wiped a wayward tumble of hair from his eyes, braced his stout legs wide, hefted his weapon warily. He saw the Ath and the Fian a few strides in front of him, standing still, staring at something just beyond the range of his returning sight. He squinted, his black eyes fighting to focus. Then the floor beneath him shifted, and something crunched hollowly underfoot. He looked down, groaned.
Bones.
Everywhere, age-yellowed bones.
Maol an Maalach.
“Welcome to the Dam of the Damned, my good friends,” the Darad heard the Sun Lord say. “It is here and it is not. Or perhaps we are here and we are not. The queer quiddity of the place. Or of ourselves.”
Rundul sent Eldurion a bemused, exasperated loo
k. “This coming from the one who says let nothing confuse you…”
The aged Fian’s eyes gleamed silently in the hollows of his hood. His naked sword was held fast in his hand. He said nothing.
“Compose yourself as quickly as you are able, friend Rundul,” instructed Yllufarr. “Our congenial host awaits us.”
The Darad scrunched his eyelids closed, bared his teeth. One step, then another. Walking the Way of Darkest Night. The cold burned. Black ice on fire. The Stone Lords did not know physiological pain, no more than does a slab of granite, but they were aware of bodily injury, and they registered damage as surely as did less robust creatures. Damage to the body, to the mind, to the heart and soul. And Rundul’s soul hurt.
He did not think about it. Not at all. Not even for a moment.
His mind ached for his efforts, for the effects of his extraordinary concentration upon the destination. Such singular application of his awareness, such deliberate fixation, such focus, making his mind sore, raw, stretched thin and bunched tight, like a muscle pushed perilously past its physical potential.
Pain.
First fear, now pain.
But he thought naught of either.
Rundul could feel tethers attached to his sentience – his only connection to his companions in this horrid place, in this Way of Darkest Night. Meagre strings of cured gut pulled overly taut, to the point of snapping. And should those tenuous ties give way, his noble friends would be lost and gone forever.
Rundul did not think of it.
Only the destination mattered. Nothing else.
One step. Another step. And another step. Walking the Way of Darkest Night. One step. Another step. Then another step. Over and over again.