by Kim Wedlock
The young man visibly tightened at his arrival, but Rathen disregarded him. He was in no mood for hostility. He turned his back and approached the bow instead, where he leaned against the bulwark a respectful distance from the tribal girl and watched the prow cut through the waves.
The swells were small - they had yet to exceed two feet in height - and met the lichen-patched wood with a gentle wash at tediously regular intervals. The sound was just as anticipated.
He sighed in boredom, wishing not for the first time that Aria's voice might pipe up in song, and his grimace deepened when it didn't. "What I wouldn't give to be back in the desert," he grumbled quietly to himself.
His eyes flicked quickly towards Eyila, widening in alarm, but she didn't react to his foolish words. He apologised anyway, then asked if she'd eaten, but again she didn't respond. She didn't speak, grunt, turn or twitch. It was as if she'd encased herself within a glass box. In eight days, not one of them had managed to get any kind of reaction from her.
His frown softened in pity. He could only imagine what must be circling in her mind, and he hoped he'd never know for sure. She'd been away from her village when the massacre had happened, and while he doubted very much that she'd have been able to do a thing to stop it, she almost certainly held her absence to blame. She'd heard no last words, no dying wishes - she'd not even had the opportunity to try to save anyone, and as the tribe's healer, that must surely have been the final sting in the tail. She'd returned home excited for a festival, expecting to be welcomed, and prepared to recount what for her had been an adventure. But instead, she had found her whole world long since obliterated, as if her people and her home had been nothing more than flies caught in a spider's web.
She was too young for such a tragedy. Too young to be left all alone in the world, stranded with people she didn't know, who didn't understand her, who knew nothing of her culture...
Aria's beaming face suddenly shone in his mind. She, too, had been far too young, but in a merciful twist of fate had also been too young to understand it. Instead she'd pottered along, blundered into a garden and stuffed her face quite merrily with strawberries.
...What if something happened to him while she was away? Would she react the same way as Eyila? Would she take an unspoken vow of silence and stew in self-pity, thoughts of revenge, or grapple blindly with the mere struggle to move on? No one could tell which way Eyila's thoughts were leaning - could he guess where Aria's would go?
His heart jumped into his throat as his stomach made another dreadful lurch. Would she even find out that something had happened?
Yes, she would find out. If Kienza couldn't save them from whatever tragedy his imagination could conjure, she would tell Aria all she needed to know, and she would help her find closure. She wouldn't take a vow of silence, she wouldn't stew. She would move on, because she wouldn't be alone.
He sighed heavily and turned away from the water, shaking the dour thoughts from his head. He was in no mood for them - though he had little doubt that they'd return to plague him again in a few minutes' time. He felt Anthis's eyes on him, but as he met his gaze, the young man looked quickly back down to his books with an enduring grimace. Rathen's eyes narrowed.
Perhaps Eyila was recovering, but the hostility circulating around the ship discouraged her from trying to break through her shell. She could be forgiven for that since everyone else was succumbing to it. Against the realms of possibility, the two and a half days they'd spent on open water had been more agitated than four weeks in the desert. Though Rathen had been absorbed in his thoughts for the first day, he wasn't beyond noticing how severely they'd taken personal space for granted in the vast desert; trapped on this tiny boat, if they weren't in their cramped, bare cabins, they were sat on each other's laps. He'd wondered time and again if it had been Kienza's intention to drive them all to the brink of throwing themselves and each other overboard. After all, she could have made a bigger boat. She could, in fact, have made cabins five times larger on the inside than out. Having said that, she could have teleported them all straight to Enhala and done away with the need for a boat altogether.
He hung his head in shame for having only just realised it. But her hope of forcing them to bond and overcome the tensions that had risen to form walls of steel between them would be disappointed.
But...at least she hadn't left them to swing side by side in hammocks.
Over the past two days Petra had become increasingly brusque, and Garon seemed to fall victim more often than the rest. She snapped, she grunted, and she spent a little too much time tending her blades to the point that she was surely doing them more harm than good. Curiously, however, though Garon was just as commanding as always, he had become strangely if begrudgingly obedient towards her in return. It was a combination which led him to quite a narrow band of speculation, and no small degree of bewilderment.
Anthis spoke only to the inquisitor. He had little interest in trying to socialise with Rathen - a fact which Rathen found himself more irritated by than insulted - and Petra could barely tolerate his existence. Though he, like everyone else, did still try to chip away at Eyila's silence, believing for some obscure reason that a girl whose entire family had just been slaughtered would have any interest in talking to a murderer. Even if he was a murderer with morals.
Rathen's eyes trailed away from him in lingering thought, but he shook aside Kienza's echoing words. Despite the evidence, he had little desire to allow anyone to occupy his mind.
He moved away from the bow and headed back inside to collect his own work. There was little else to do, and with sleep eluding him, he wanted nothing more than to busy himself until breakfast. He settled at the port side of the ship where he could keep an eye on the approach of the sun, sitting upon a box that had been conjured with the boat which, knowing Kienza, was just an empty prop, and lost himself in his work. He got nothing at all done, and when the sun finally peeked over the horizon, a yawn rattled through his aching body.
He sneered with distaste. Typical.
"Uh-oh..."
Petra's quiet, dubious tone was quick to grasp attention, and as she hurried away from the edge of the ship and made urgently towards the helm, everyone else's suddenly skittish eyes set to careful scans of the horizon. But it was quickly apparent that there was neither ship nor beast out in the water, indeed no obvious cause for alarm anywhere in sight. Only the still, empty sea and clear blue skies they'd been surrounded by for days.
It wasn't until one drew his gaze back in that they finally noticed what had unsettled her.
Slowly at first, the colours around them had begun to dim. Blue and brown hues drained to duller tones so slightly that they each wondered if they weren't simply imagining it, but when the horizon began to mist away and Petra's usually vibrant hair turned a dark shade of steel, it became more difficult to mistake. At that point, the leeching happened faster.
Rathen and Anthis backed cautiously away from the greying bulwarks. There had been not even the slightest sign of a change in the weather, and yet from nowhere a fog had coalesced around them, forming a thick, dense cloud that engulfed the ship with a ravenous hunger and concealed the world absolutely just mere feet out from the hull.
Anthis glanced nervously towards the helm. "What do we do?"
"There's nothing we can," Petra called back, hopelessly. "The fog won't hurt us, it'll just spit us out in the direction we came from. I told you, we'll have to find another way. Or another lead..." Despite her resignation, Garon spotted a disturbed doubt in her hazel eyes, though they too were now rendered quite colourless.
A nervous silence blanketed the boat, the gloom muffling even the wash of the waves. No one moved beneath its weight, preoccupied with straining their senses to detect when their direction began to change - a slight tilt, a change of the breeze, a shift in the source of the weakened afternoon light. But there was nothing. Nothing but fog. Uneasy glances passed as they continued their efforts, until Rathen dared to step away, a
sudden critical haste in his step.
The others watched in distraction as he moved to the furthest edge of the ship and peered keenly off into the fog. He said nothing, and no one asked, even as he snapped his head to the left to follow his curiosity, his expression twisted in concentration, tinged with disbelief.
They jumped as he spun around and hastened towards the helm, his eyes unnaturally wild. "To the left, quickly," he commanded, but his agitated step faltered before he reached them, his attention snatched suddenly to his right by another phantom. "No, right--left! Left!" He whirled back to the inquisitor in full expectation while he and Petra stared uneasily, and his desperate eyes flashed with urgency. "Quickly!"
"She did something to him," Petra murmured. "The woman."
"I don't think she did..."
They looked down towards Anthis, but Eyila stole their attention herself before they could follow his gaze towards her. Their concern doubled. Nothing had ever managed to break her meditation, and yet this time something had encouraged her to climb down from the bowsprit she'd been perched upon for the last three hours and lean far over the edge of the ship. And the fact that she stared just as attentively into the fog as Rathen, and with the same frantic look, did nothing to ease their minds.
"Turn right!"
Petra whipped back towards Garon as he began to turn the wheel. "What are you doing?!"
"They can sense something," he replied plainly, turning the ship to the left at Rathen's next conflicting order. "I doubt any of your sailors had mages on their ships, but we have two, and I'm not inclined to overlook something they're both picking up on."
"Right again. A little more..."
Petra murmured, far from assured as her troubled gaze slipped back onto the girl, whom she watched turn her head an eerie heartbeat before Rathen gave a matching adjustment. She folded her arms tightly across her chest. "There's no telling where we're going to end up..."
Rathen's eyes were ablaze beside her. "'Where we need to go'..."
After three minutes the abrupt corrections came more slowly, and Rathen soon fell silent and allowed the ship to straighten out.
"What's happened?" Petra finally asked, but he didn't spare an answer as he hurried towards the bow. His urgency had diminished, but it hadn't died, and again he began to scour the thick, surrounding cloud. Eyila moved up beside him, her expression equally charged.
The others began to stare closely in a futile attempt to discover their distraction for themselves, and so were quick to notice when the fog began to disperse. They held their breath and strained their eyes all the more, trying to see further than the cloud would have them in their impatience, and their hearts began to race.
But there was nothing there. Nothing but water and sky.
So why had neither mage stepped back from the bulwark?
"What--"
"Keep going," Rathen said just loudly enough for them to hear. "Straight ahead..."
Garon's lips tightened, but he didn't voice his doubts, just as he didn't address the weight of Petra's eyes as they lingered expectantly upon him, nor their growing alarm. Instead he let the boat carry on the gentle breeze and currents while his eyes remained fixed to the two at the head.
Rathen didn't feel the penetrating gazes. The magic was too strong to release his attention, too strange for his mind to let go of, and it encouraged a dubious fascination more befitting of Anthis than himself, especially as its source drew closer. But where was it? Beneath the waves? There was nowhere else it could be...
His eyes narrowed. No. He doubted that very much.
He squinted into a nearer pocket of emptiness, searching diligently for the edge of the spell chains to uncover some clue for what they concealed before it could spring upon them.
But it was already too late.
His hold slipped from the wood as he staggered backwards, the air knocked suddenly from his lungs, while Eyila leaned forwards with a startled gasp. It would have been the first sound he'd heard from her in a week, if he'd noticed it. But how could he notice it? Where a moment ago there had been an unbroken horizon and water stretching on forever, now...
A similar chorus of gasps whistled behind him as the ship continued to pierce through the spell like a slow-moving arrow, followed by the sluggish advance of astonished footsteps.
Not a quarter-mile out ahead, six islands had formed out of the waves, floating serenely, still and silent upon the cerulean water, their reaches shrouded in a tangle of emerald, peridot and malachite. The virile overgrowth was broken only by the bold contrast of near-white limestone, intrusions of weather-sculpted outcrops, some with sheer faces, others perfectly rounded - but the closer they sailed, the higher their nervous fascination rose, and as their keen and confused eyes grew sharper, the stone soon revealed ever finer angles and edges. The islands, the largest enough to support a large town, another barely the copse of trees that overran it, bore not outcrops of rock, but domes, towers and pavilions, and littered among them, as they peered even closer, houses carved directly into the interior cliffs. The incredibly expansive remains of a truly ancient city, unmolested by the elements despite standing abandoned in the middle of the Roquna sea.
Anthis gasped once more in awe while Rathen and the others gawked, and began murmuring to himself about buttresses, capitals and pediments, a dull and half-whispered account that went ignored until 'Zikhon' passed his lips. Then their eyes tore away from the sight.
"A communal settlement," he breathed in astonishment, his voice barely rising. "The elves didn't regard Zikhon with fear or foreboding back then, remember?" His eyes roved hungrily over the still-distant masonry, and a stupefied smile crept over his lips. "Oh...it's so...immense... And it's old - look, the lines aren't straight. Magic didn't make them..."
"We should adjust course." Petra returned Anthis's startled look with an immediate glare and took a challenging half-step towards him. "We are trying to get to Enhala. Or have you forgotten?"
"Of course not," he replied quickly, his eyes darting briefly back towards Garon at the helm, "but it's along our route anyway, and this place has never been documented - if it had, I would know about it, as would many others, and this passage would have been redrawn and been busier than the Red Road. There's a greater chance of finding something in there than in Enhala!"
Petra's severe expression worsened. "How very convenient for you." She looked expectantly towards Garon while Anthis fought against shrinking back from her. "Well?"
Even from the far end of the ship they could see the calculations moving through his eyes. "Anthis could be right," he said with consideration. "This place was concealed behind a spell; it's not likely to have been stripped like Enhala. And it's still standing strong..."
"Yes," Rathen grunted dubiously. "Remarkably strong..."
The ominous shadow cast by the thought of stepping foot on an island dedicated to the God of Death joined with his scepticism and began to spread among them like a disease. It prickled the back of their necks while the breeze carried them closer to the dense, green cluster, and every gaze lingered heavily upon it.
The stone's details gradually became clearer and finer, and with them the delayed realisation that nothing was missing. No arch had collapsed, no wall had crumbled, no roof had caved in. No structure bore any damage at all. Despite Anthis's dating of several thousand years, the entire landscape could have been carved in the last fifty.
White statues also began to take shape, complete and uncountable inhuman forms the size of a man standing guard atop every other rock and hill, watching with eternal eyes the seas surrounding their hidden charge. But the haunting atmosphere worsened at the sight of them. And further still when more stepped up to join them.
Another, sharper bout of gasps suddenly spiked up across the deck, and Rathen frowned curiously at the abrupt and foul curses that punctuated it. But before he could question their alarm, a rush of heat flooded his body at the whispered mention of his name. Spoken with unmistakable horror.<
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He found himself suddenly frozen with dread, pinned beneath their heavy eyes as they drilled through to his core, unable to grasp the courage to even look behind him. His sight remained nailed to the still figures - their paper-white skin and black tattoos, their jet-black hair, their ribs and shoulders disproportioned from the rest of their long, lean bodies, and the terrible, thorn-like spurs at their shoulders and elbows. He couldn't tear his eyes away, and the longer he stared, the greater the terror that crept up his spine, a terror unreasonable but unsuppressable, absolute and primal in its roots.
He swallowed hard, fighting against whatever was trying to paralyse him from deep within his gut. There was something frightfully familiar about the magic in the air. Somehow he managed to suppress the nausea at the dreadful shame that it conjured, and his hand flicked for the comfort of one that wasn't there.
Another string of fetid curses drew their attention off of him, and Garon looked back with eyes sharp and wide as he spun the wheel in a full rotation to the left, then another to the right. They didn't need to ask what was wrong when the boat didn't turn. Their hope dwindled, and they looked in solemn silence towards the islands they hadn't yet reached and yet seemed unable to escape.
Some of the white figures melted back into the tangled forests while Garon continued his futile battle against the calm and unnatural current.
"What are we going to do?" Someone whispered, but no one had the courage to guess. And though a keen hope returned to snatch their breath away when their direction finally began to shift, they discovered with an even greater blow that it was not of Garon's doing. They skirted the second largest island, dragged among rocks and reefs without a bump despite the impossible squeezes, and a small quay emerged from around the head, little more than a flat reach of stone thrust out into the water to serve as a jetty. And it was lined with yet more of the frightful beings.