The World Raven

by A. J. Smith

‘Would that make me your spiritual father?’ he enquired.

  She laughed, revealing girlish dimples. ‘I suppose so. I never knew my real one.’

  Nanon tilted his head at the girl. He had been distracted since they left Ro Weir and hadn’t had the opportunity to study her. He had a basic understanding of her motivations, but her humour was a little elusive. She was Rham Jas’s daughter, a dark-blood, and also a sarcastic young human girl. Clever, but irritating. Complex, but blunt.

  ‘I did,’ he replied. ‘I know he’d be proud of you. And he’d come back and haunt me if I didn’t look after you.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she stated. ‘I don’t believe in gods, monsters or magic. I just believe there are things I haven’t yet seen... and things I can’t yet explain.’

  ‘We won’t stay in the Fell for long,’ he said. ‘You and I have much work still to do. A dead god thinks to reassert his might... and a soldier of the Long War such as yourself should help me try to stop him.’

  ***

  The Plains of Leith were colder than usual. The sky was muddy black and the clouds crackled, arcing flashes of lightning into the dark night. Nanon felt low, pensive, as if something was awaking or waiting to happen. The edges of the forest loomed ahead of them, beyond huge swathes of burnt tree-stumps: the result of the Hounds’ bombardment.

  ‘Where are the Karesians?’ asked Keisha, running alongside him. ‘You said there were loads of them – and those Dark Young.’

  ‘Something’s changed,’ he replied.

  ‘They burned a lot of trees,’ she said. ‘Big trees. Won’t grow back for ages.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They could be further north. Are we going to run into them?’

  ‘No, they’ve left,’ he replied.

  The young Kirin girl looked at him as they ran. ‘You’re being strange. Why are you being strange?’

  Nanon stopped running. They were dots in the middle of an endless plain of wet grass and dark sky. ‘I don’t think I’m strange,’ he said. ‘Your father used to call me strange.’

  She shrugged. ‘This whole situation is strange – you’re strange, I’m strange, that forest is strange. I get over the strangeness by asking questions. Your purpose is to answer those questions.’

  ‘My purpose?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘Yup. If you don’t answer, I’ll have to find someone else to be my spiritual father.’

  He tilted his head at her. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘And don’t tilt your head at me, it means you’re about to say something strange.’

  ‘Strange is relative,’ he replied.

  She nodded. ‘Point proven, I think. Now, do we just wander into the trees?’

  ‘I know the way. I’ve been here a few times – well, many, many times.’

  He resumed running, but more slowly. She followed as they picked their way through blackened tree-stumps and ash-covered ground. The earth smouldered and the smell caught the back of his throat. Hundreds upon hundreds of the trees were dead, burned to stumps. Nothing more than mounds of black, dotting the landscape. But the Hounds had left. They’d left because there were no more Dokkalfar in the Fell.

  ‘It hurts,’ he muttered.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The Shadow Flame. Most have already walked in. Maybe a handful are left.’

  ‘Explain?’

  Speeding up, he entered the tree line. The forest was ghostly quiet.

  ‘Hey! Didn’t I tell you your job?’ Keisha shouted after him. ‘Your purpose is to answer my questions.’

  ‘Just shut up and follow me,’ he snapped, losing his patience with the human girl.

  She sulked, but at least she sulked quietly.

  Nanon couldn’t feel his people. Only echoes and memories. The Fell Walkers had followed Vithar Loth into oblivion. Mass suicide was no way to fight the Long War, but they’d lost hope and that was a dangerous contagion. The Dokkalfar of the Fell had followed their Shadow Giant into the dust of the world. But maybe not all of them.

  ‘Some are unsure,’ he said to himself. ‘They wait, trying to gain the courage to leave these lands and step into the beyond. We must reach them.’

  Nanon ran into the trees, stretching his legs into a sprint. His humour had left. He had given up his feeble attempts at relating to humans. At that moment, he was an ancient Dokkalfar, a soldier of the Long War, with a purpose. He must save the few remaining forest-dwellers. If the Fell Walkers could lose hope so completely, then the world was a darker place than he thought. Was the Long War even worth fighting if he couldn’t protect his own people?

  ‘Hey, slow down,’ shouted Keisha, trying to keep up.

  He just ran, reaching out with his mind, trying to sense his people. Tendrils of pain and tiredness lashed through the forest, crawling up trees and weaving through the canopy. He could feel death. Death in its purest form. The loss of hope and the acceptance of oblivion. Something more maybe... but it was continually eclipsed by the pain.

  Dokkalfar lived long lives. Some, those ancients who kept up with the passing ages and stayed sane, could live forever. Their lives were not trivial. They were not expendable. Births were rare and deaths were times of great sadness. For a whole settlement to kill themselves... it was unthinkable. It was the kind of pain that could kill a lesser Dokkalfar.

  ‘I can’t keep up with you, freak face!’ shouted Keisha.

  Nanon stopped running. He felt like he was moving through thick treacle and his head was heavy with emotion. Emotion not his own.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I’m... not at my best. I can feel things I can’t control.’

  ‘You look ill. Well, as ill as you can look. You look pretty strange anyway.’

  He frowned, distracted for a moment. ‘Stop calling me strange. I’m not strange, I’m just different.’

  Keisha moved her eyes from Nanon to slowly gaze around the forest. She wrinkled her nose up and pouted. ‘I don’t like this place. The trees feel angry.’

  He stood and faced her. ‘You can feel that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You shouldn’t be able to. I don’t think your father could.’

  A shrug and a cheeky smile, and she strolled off in the direction Nanon had been running. She was frustrating and very human, but she had successfully distracted him from the pain of his people. Perhaps a human spiritual daughter wasn’t really so bad.

  ‘Keisha, wait for me. We’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  This seemed to please her. At least, she didn’t complain.

  ‘How far?’ she asked.

  ‘At walking pace... maybe an hour. If the feelings are so strong this far out, you may need to help me stand upright when we get closer.’

  ‘My arse, you can keep yourself upright.’

  She frowned, scratching at her head.

  ‘What? Are the feelings too much?’ he asked.

  ‘Are they always so... well, spiky?’

  ‘Spiky? They’re not spiky.’ He faced her. ‘Tell me exactly what you can feel.’

  Her nose wrinkled up. He could sense her confusion, the difficulty she was having putting the feelings into words. They were uncomfortable for her. But not in the way they were for Nanon. Could she feel something else?

  ‘It’s like they’re... hidden... and sharp. I keep thinking they’re going to cut me. Don’t feel any pain really. Deception, chaos, weird stuff.’

  This was worrying. Nanon couldn’t feel anything of this kind.

  ‘I don’t think you’re feeling the same things as me,’ he replied. ‘The only things I know that can cut you like that are— shit, I think I’ve been tricked.’

  He spun round, frantically flashing his eyes through the encircling trees.

  ‘Tricked? By who? Calm down, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘There are no survivors. I’ve been lured in. Lured in by something that likes to feed off Dokkalfar energy. And now there’re no Dokkalfar to stop them.’

&
nbsp; Keisha was not vulnerable to mental deception, it seemed. She’d cut through the illusion of anguished forest-dwellers and seen the Jekkan magic at its heart. The Fell Walkers were dead and something else had come to claim the energy of the Fell.

  ‘Nanon, talk to me!’ she barked at him. ‘Your eyes have gone weird. And why have you drawn your sword?’

  He hadn’t noticed, but his katana had whistled free and he held it defensively. Paranoia and fear crept up on him. From out of nowhere he felt the chaos magic of the Jekkans.

  ‘Good evening, knife ears,’ said a sibilant voice from the darkness.

  ***

  Nanon couldn’t remember when he’d first encountered the Great Race of Jekka. They’d always been there, a constant, shadowy reminder of deep time. He remembered stories and he remembered fear. Long before he actually met a Jekkan, he was taught to be wary of them, to treat them as elders of the world, too powerful and chaotic to dismiss.

  They’d had an empire once. Maybe ‘empire’ wasn’t the right word; perhaps it was just a culture, a dominant civilization. They called it a caliphate. The forest-dwellers had fought them when they were already in decline. There were no tales of the heights to which they rose. Even the Dokkalfar weren’t that long-lived. Maybe the Gorlan mothers knew more, but they were not given to casual conversation on the subject.

  The shadows of the Great Race that remained in the world were barely a myth, forgotten lore from before the nations of men that the eldest Tyr were taught as part of their education. These shadows didn’t understand order or compassion. They were creatures of instinct, of whim. Their rituals were sexual and violent. Their craft was twisted and chaotic. Their servitors were formless and alien. It took a lot to scare Nanon, but the Jekkans dug into his head in a way few other creatures – or anything – could.

  It was their magic, their alien craft. They worshipped the Old Ones, creatures from before the Giants walked their paths of divinity. The Great Race had taken unknowable sorcery from these titans of deep time, and used it to build mighty cities, an infinite empire of chaos and domination. But still they had fallen. Their citadels had faded from memory, their armies defeated and their magic pushed back into the veins of the world, hiding and festering as only true power can.

  But all knowledge of them was only a legend. Through such spans of deep time, truth was irrelevant. The reality was bad enough without speculation upon where they had truly come from. They had merely arrived from the void.

  ***

  ‘This forest isn’t for you,’ he said, looking into darkness and shoving Keisha behind him.

  There was no clearing, just endless tunnels of darkness leading between the trees. Nanon was holding both his swords, but he doubted their usefulness against Jekkans. Perhaps another form? Would a ravening lion or a monstrous griffin be more appropriate?

  ‘Keisha!’

  ‘Yes, Nanon?’

  ‘I think we should run away.’

  She hunkered down, narrowing her eyes and breathing quickly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you after we’ve run away,’ he replied.

  A deep rumbling sound rolled from the darkness, a repeating cry that cut into his brain. He recognized it as not speech or any natural sound, but the alien undulations of a primal creature too horrible to describe.

  ‘Run!’ shouted Nanon, terrified at the presence of a Jekkan servitor somewhere in the Fell.

  Keisha didn’t argue and they both turned and broke into a sprint, grabbing at and pulling the trees in their haste as the sound rose in volume.

  ‘What the fuck is that sound?’ barked Keisha.

  ‘Just run,’ he replied, leaping over a bramble bush. ‘Get out of the forest and we can escape it. In here we’re basically dinner.’

  The darkness was total, seeming to Nanon to be some unnatural sorcery designed to disorient and confuse. There was a Jekkan here somewhere, perhaps watching them and directing its servitor.

  ‘Which direction?’ asked Keisha. ‘It all looks the same.’

  ‘Just run,’ he replied, stretching his legs into even more frenetic motion.

  The Kirin girl easily kept up with him, using her unnatural blood to match his pace, but they were no closer to the edge of the forest. Or maybe they were. Even with Nanon’s advanced perception, the darkness meant he had no indicators of the correct direction. In fact, he feared they were lost. The vibrant life-force of the Fell was drained and his senses were dulled.

  Keisha gasped, her eyes straying into the darkness all around them. ‘What was that? I saw a face.’ She stopped abruptly.

  Nanon grabbed her arm and pulled her away. ‘Whatever it was, you don’t want to see it again.’

  She was reluctant to move with him, staring instead into an ominous, black passage between the trees.

  ‘Come on!’ he virtually shouted, trying not to look into the gloom.

  Then the creature appeared, rushing forward, displacing darkness, like an emerging sea monster breaking the water. It was taller than a horse, wider than a house, and comprised of black, iridescent bubbles, rippling into numerous eyes and tendrils. At the fore, merging into the sticky surface, was a face. A Dokkalfar appeared to have been subsumed into the mass, its face locked in an open-mouthed scream of terror. It was Tyr Dyus the Daylight Sky, formerly a warrior of the Fell and Nanon’s ally, now just a pained echo of his untimely death.

  Keisha froze, blood beginning to trickle from her nostrils as the maddening beast approached. A dark-blood she may be, but her mind recoiled from the Jekkan servitor.

  Nanon shoved her aside and faced the creature.

  He had one chance to keep them both alive.

  ‘I am Tyr Nanon the Shape Taker, warrior of the Heart and soldier of the Long War. Face me and die!’

  He shrugged off centuries of appearing meek and unthreatening. He delved deep into his memory and grew in size, displaying his might as an ancient Dokkalfar Lord. Ten feet tall, hugely muscular with eyes of burning red. It was his natural form and a shape he hadn’t taken for five hundred years.

  The servitor stopped and began flapping at the air with fleshy tendrils. It was hesitant. Perhaps it had never felt raw, natural power of this magnitude.

  ‘Back!’ roared the old Tyr.

  He knew he couldn’t kill it, but maybe he could scare it off.

  ‘Back!’

  Keisha was on her knees, too shaken to run and too cowed to fight.

  He took an enormous stride forward, fighting his fear to approach the servitor.

  ‘I am not a mortal. You can’t scare me with your chaos magic,’ he bellowed. ‘I am not a child or a man. Chain your pet and face me!’

  It was a gamble, almost a bluff. He didn’t know how far his power would stretch, whether he could withstand an assault of Jekkan magic. The servitor was mostly mindless. The creature behind it was far more dangerous.

  ‘There is much here to consume,’ said the sibilant voice, slicing the bark of a tree next to Nanon. ‘Your people are dead, but their might lingers. It’s intoxicating.’

  He felt every single death. All of a sudden, wave upon wave of hopeless suicides flooded over him. The Fell was a tomb, a monument. Nothing more.

  ‘Back!’ he repeated, shouting through a quivering mouth and black tears. ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ Now he was shrieking.

  He discarded both his swords – now seeming like nothing more than large knifes – and strode forward again. He growled at the servitor, tears smearing his face and energy crackling across his fingertips.

  The face of Tyr Dyus appeared again, screaming at him as the servitor reared up.

  ‘Just die, knife ears... accept your fate and leave this Long War. You cannot defeat Shub-Nillurath.’

  He considered it. For a moment, Nanon wanted to die. For a moment, he felt as if he had nothing left. He couldn’t remember when he’d last cried. It might have been a hundred years ago. It might have been more. His head whirled as he began to lose control. His iron resol
ve, his mask of normality; it all cracked slightly, a fissure of doubt and anger running through his mind.

  ‘Just die... fall into forever and join your lost people.’

  The servitor could sense his rage. It was a primal, unintelligent creature. It couldn’t reason out what it experienced; it could only feel the immense power before it. If Nanon’s mind had been more focused, the beast would have killed him. As it was, his unchecked rage cowed the creature.

  ‘You have always been afraid of your power,’ said the voice. ‘It makes me glad to see you like this. You should join us in the Tyranny of the Twisted Tree.’

  ‘Stand before me,’ roared Nanon. ‘You are of the Great Race of Jekka, you are not an assassin who skulks in the darkness.’

  The servitor retreated. Moving slowly, it rippled flat, the face disappearing, until it was nothing more than a patch of moving darkness, playing off the trees as eldritch tendrils of shadow. Was it afraid of him? Or had it been commanded away?

  ‘Nanon,’ murmured Keisha. ‘I can’t see you. I just see dark.’

  ‘Stay still,’ he replied. ‘Stay down. Don’t look.’

  She moved shaking hands up to her face and covered her eyes, curling her body into a ball on the grass.

  Sound disappeared from the woods. No tree rustled, no wind blew. Even Keisha’s heavy breathing was silent, emerging from her mouth as nothing more than a fog of cold air. He braced himself, calming his mind but keeping the rage intact.

  Then it appeared. A Jekkan, in the realms of men. Nanon had never seen one outside of their chaos-infused ruins. It looked the same – tall, slim, robed in black, with luxuriant whiskers and hooked claws. Around it, a nimbus of shimmering blue obscured any fine detail. It appeared to hover, rising several feet above the dark grass and swaying in a sensual dance. He couldn’t approach it. The nimbus was woven from chaos magic and would unravel his mind if he touched it. But he could stand his ground.

  ‘What do you want? Why did you come down from the Claws?’ he asked, tensing his huge body, attempting to keep his power focused forward.

  When it spoke, its words split the bark from trees and cut Nanon’s arms. It took several words for the speech to settle into a form that didn’t cause damage to the Fell.