by JM Guillen
I strained for every breath.
I spun on every sound.
Every breeze carried the hot, fetid breath of a great predator, stalking me from within every shadow.
Of course, no wood could truly grudge against me. As the Herald of Autumn, I went as I pleased. Yet here, the world did not hearken to my golden call. No birds of prey ghosted my passing, and no wolf stalked behind.
No, the further I went, the less the forest rippled with autumn at my passing. This place knew neither autumn nor spring. It had become never dying but always dead. Color and light and life had bled from this land.
I was being stalked. I felt it by bow and horn, by Hunter, hound, and hawk.
I wished I had taken the Old Man’s boons or had him Oath he would come along. Cut off from my kind, I had never felt more alone.
I faced death with no ally at my side. In the past, Hraefn, or perhaps Black Horn Jack would have stood at my side. But those days were not these days.
I was alone.
In a small clearing, I marveled at the empty hopelessness of the land.
This was much more than the simple death of winter or the death that comes with fire or plague. It wasn’t drought of water, for the ground held only a light powder of dust. Instead, the world turned hollow. Every trace of life had been drunk from every last blade of grass.
Even the wind mourned.
As I stepped forward, I cast my eyes all about, turning ’round in an effort to locate the nothing that stalked me. More than the death of the wood, here, everything fell silent. Nothing moved, as if the spark at the center of all life had been devoured.
Yet I was still being hunted.
I crept forward, my eyes darting among the skeletal tree branches. Soon, they knitted so closely together that I could not see the sky, but still, I saw no watcher. I simply felt the gaze like filth dragged across my skin.
Reaching into my leather purse, I grabbed the sling-shooter and one of the stones. I knew its Name even as I touched it. It was the one two boys had thrown while playing so long ago.
I nocked the shooter, creeping forward. My breath caught tight in my chest, but still I edged onward. Soon the clearing drew in at the sides leaving just a narrow passage through the briars.
Then, from silence, sound.
The hoarse cry called ahead of me in the trees. It was distant, little more than an echo. When compared to the silence, however, it roared like thunder in the night.
I smiled. It was her. I knew it in my bones.
Hraefn.
I peered forward, expecting to see one of my oldest and dearest friends, preening her black feathers or combing her black tresses, somewhere in the trees.
No. She wasn’t there.
I strode forward eagerly. Hraefn and I had stood fast in darkness greater than this. We had stood together when Rome had crashed upon our people like a wave of swords. We had stood together as champions against the spirits of the Ban-sidhe.
But no.
“Hraefn?” When had it become so misty?
Carefully, I peered around. I heard the call again from up ahead. Cautiously, I slipped forward, ever looking for my friend with her laughing, wild eyes.
Hraefn. Hreafn Whisperwing. Hreafn Twice-cunning.
Hraefn of Mist and Shadow.
“No hiding, petulant brat. Come forth!” I couldn’t hide my smile.
It would be good, having someone familiar here, someone who would stand at my back. Yet I felt more than that. Of course, I missed her. I missed the way she smiled, and I missed the way she smelled in the night.
The cries fell silent, and my smile slowly eroded from my face as I crept through the mist. Chill ran goose-flesh up my arms as I heard her voice, one last time, like a distant, warbling echo.
Something was wrong.
Placing the stone back into the sling, I edged forward. Something was harrying my mind, tugging and worrying at me.
Why had I thought Hraefn would be here? What—?
Bait. The noise had been bait. I spun ’round, desperately darting my gaze into the sharp darkness of the trees.
“I know you’re here!” I called into the cold wood, my voice a tremor. I held the sling in front of me, ready to loose the stone at the slightest motion within the trees.
The darkness mocked me. It toyed with me. It waited in the depths with teeth from another age.
“Come then! Why not?” I spun another time. I could feel its weighty gaze full of finality.
Then, I saw it. I stopped, cold fear like ice in my chest.
Ancient, bleeding eyes met my gaze. For long moments, we simply stared at one another.
It was not Hraefn. It was not my oldest and dearest friend.
The huge raven in the trees had twisted into a dirge of blackness and night. Its eyes burned with that hollow, ochre-red of the creature I had fought in the streets. As it opened its mouth to loudly caw again, I saw the madness, the empty darkness seeping from its eyes and mouth, dripping to the ground.
Like night given form, it was horrifying.
With its third scream, it took flight, all warped claws and razored beak and shadowed wing.
Without thought or plan, I dropped to a knee and pulled back my shooter. For the second time in its long existence, the stone was given flight. I could feel its cry of joy as it took to the air.
The raven swerved to the side, and the stone sailed off into the shadows.
The not-raven screeched. The sound was like broken glass in my ears. I spun toward the sound, and—
It was gone.
I panted, my breath visible in the all-too chilled air. I turned twice, thinking I saw those maddening, hellish eyes, but no.
Nothing.
I could still feel it, however. Like a thorn behind my heart, I sensed a broken place within the melody of the world. Whispers, strange and lost, seeped from the dark places between the tree branches.
“Tommy…” It was familiar, every voice I had ever known. “Nothing, Tommy. Nothing is what we thought you were.”
No. That was the raven.
Strange images flashed in my dreaming mind. I reeled, seeing what wasn’t there.
It was a raven, and it was a woman as well.
I blinked, trying to understand.
She lay in wait in the deep holt of the wood, lay in wait for the children there. Her hunger was nigh insatiable. More were coming, but she grew too impatient.
Their eyes were a sweetness. She pulled them out, with fingers that weren’t, while they screamed.
Then the raven lunged again.
Still stunned by the strangeness of the whispering and the odd images, I rolled aside as its talons slashed at me, inches from my eyes. I swung the sling wildly and felt myself connect with a wing. The raven squawked loudly and flapped over to a low-lying branch.
“Autumn.” The thing croaked. Drawn out, the word was bent as if one could torment a word. The bird canted its head at me, its hateful eyes burning.
I am back in Old Man Coyote’s lodge. He sits across from me, looking into the fire.
“Can’t quite do much o’ nothin’, Tommy.” His eyes have been stitched shut.
For the first time, I wonder why he looks like a cowboy, a white man.
“No.” I shook my head, meeting the bird’s gaze.
It found Molly. After I left its corpse, the spiders found her. They crawled into her, into her mouth and nose and ears. They dug into her sweetness and ate. They devoured her until there was only darkness left—
“No!” I drew a second stone, even as I stood, trembling. With a smooth motion born of the hunt, I spun. I cupped it, drew, and let fly again.
The stone sang. It had never flown but always had it wanted to. As the seasons drifted by, it yearned.
And now, it flew.
The stone tore through the darkness and strange glamour. It struck the raven squarely in the side of the head. The not-raven fell from its branch.
In my dreaming mind, I could hear
the screaming. In the real world, there was only silence.
I ran over to it, wishing that I had found myself some boots after all. I wanted to stomp it. I wanted every bone in its body broken, those cruel eyes smashed.
The stone had caved in the creatures head. Buzzing around the caved-in skull were hundreds of small, stinking flies, weaving as if they did not understand what had happened. They were like filthy, rotten smoke, oozing from the corpse into the air.
“No. Not this time.” I scrabbled in my bag of Eddie’s treasures and found one of the bright yellow bottles. Popping the top, I doused the corpse with the sharp-smelling liquid, spraying all around it. Once the bottle was halfway empty, I pulled out one of the wooden matches Eddie had given me.
I could almost hear his words:
“Shadows are burned by fire.”
Purifying orange flame danced and leapt among the darkened trees. It consumed the tiny flies. In the dreaming world behind my mind, they screamed as they burned.
Their death felt strangely satisfying.
“Well told, Eddie.” I smirked, putting the matches in my pocket.
While caught in the grips of my Telling, the mortal’s dreaming mind had understood something that not even Coyote had grasped: the Old Man had held the sun’s fire but never used it.
Secrets like that were rare to come by.
This darkness could burn.
I smiled. “Who needs your boons, Old Man?”
Only the silence of the wood answered.
Reaching into my pack, I grasped my third stone and fit it to the cup.
Sling ready, I crept along the path.
18
The narrow path shrank to little more than a twisted tunnel through bramble and briar. Grim sunlight bleakly pushed its way through the tangles, shafts of light that did little to illuminate the darkness. These spots of light grew fewer as I went on. Eventually, the dark and mist darkened so that I could scarcely see my hand in front of my face.
I shivered with the cold, not the cold of winter, but the cold of the grave. The frosty mist writhed along the ground. The world underfoot grew weary, exhausted, taking its final, wheezing gasp.
Among the withered underbrush, I reached the end of all things. Every step I took, I took carefully, testing my weight before trusting the ground.
I cast about, paranoid that more of the creatures grew close. Though I didn’t feel the eyes as I had before, these cold shadows could take any form, could infect any creature. If the not-raven were any indication, these shadows did not need a man at all. The abominations could be anything from a serpent to a wolf.
Caution labored my every step, my every muscle tensed.
I felt it before I saw it.
A slumbering weight drug me down, like a world-weariness in my shoulders. It wasn’t truly harder to walk, merely harder to want to walk. Exhausted to the bone, the ever-present cold drank my warmth from me. As I trudged forward, a curious hopelessness stretched from my heart to my mind, like a cobweb of ice and sorrow.
I stopped, blinking. What—?
Similar to Coyote’s Dreaming of homesickness, this sudden weight seemed sourceless. I hadn’t noticed the feelings at first; I simply kept putting one foot in front of the other, pushing my way through mist and shadow so thick that they had weight.
But this was wrong, was somehow—
Its growl rumbled like thunder, like the tumbling of stones beneath the world. I saw eyes, fiery red with hunger and rage, before I saw anything else.
It was tall, whatever it was. All I could see were those gleaming hunter’s eyes, shining in the mist. For an eternal moment, I lost myself in them. For the first time in my thousand-thousand days, I truly knew what it was to be the hunted. I had never understood helplessness before this.
I was a fox, and the sun dipped toward slumber. I heard the blaring horn, felt the hounds draw closer. My heart pounded with terror.
I was a little boy, facing the darkest depths of night. I could hear the hoarse breathing of the creatures in the shadows, could see their gleaming teeth.
When the darkness snarled, I felt hot wetness run down my leg.
It roared then, a primeval, terrifying sound. It jolted me from the strange visions.
I tried to pull myself from its hunter’s gaze.
It had me. In the moment I had seen the visions, it had snared me. The shadowed abomination lumbered closer, certain of its kill.
On instinct, I pulled and shot.
The stone sailed through the air, flying as it had always known it was meant to do.
It was perfect.
It struck squarely between those hell-red eyes, and the creature staggered. Not truly hurt but startled.
No way a simple stone would fell yon abomination, but it bought me a moment, a precious second.
If I hadn’t owned that single nonce, I would have been dead.
Never in life had I run so quickly.
Its roar jolted like sky-fire through my body.
Suddenly, I saw. Drifting along, lost in that miasma of strange hopelessness, I had been blind. Now, I saw the bones of the creature’s victims. Now, I smelled the rot, so stark and foul that I wanted to stop and retch.
By the Hunter, how had I missed the creature’s sign? How had my mind been so ensnared?
With my heart pounding like a bird’s wings, I ran. My foot slipped on a crumbling bone, but then I was off.
I was not the hunter. I was the prey.
Behind me the creature roared like a storm at night. The entire world trembled in fear. In the recesses of my heart, a tiny spark of innocence died at the sound.
I did not bother with direction, with my back trail. The ground beneath my feet blurred with scattered bones, broken trees, and dusty earth as I fled, graceful and quick as a hart.
Like thunder, like crushing inevitability, the monstrosity followed.
19
I cannot say how long I ran with fear burning like fire in my veins.
My mind shuddered like a panicked animal. Nothing existed beyond the world immediately in front of me, and I fled. Mist swirled all about, obscuring tangled briars, bidding me to stumble. Soon, I was completely turned around, lost in a labyrinth of mist and darkness.
The creature loomed everywhere I turned.
More than the monstrosity chased me, however. It somehow bent the world and my mind, as if sanity and reality melted and bled when it strode near. This caused more visions. It never casting glamour upon me, yet wherever it trod, insanity and madness followed along, cloaking me in an aura of depravity and despair.
I knew when it got close. The strange, mad whispers and the spectres at the corner of my mind announced its approach.
I saw a man in the shadows, dignified and learned. Yet he was no gentleman but a spider. His doors opened in every corner of the world, and he could step to any place, leaving husks where mortals had once slept.
I saw an old woman with hair in her face. She crawled along the floor like a crab, muttering and whispering numbers. She knew the day of everyone’s death.
I saw a capering, giggling boy in the shadows, with extra joints in his fingers. They bent backward, serpentine. He would tickle sleeping children until they bled, and then feast on the blood with a long, forked tongue.
I saw a man in a plague-mask, working strange alchemies lost to the world. He made potions that brought visions of the truth through tears of blood.
This and more. Nothing sane, nothing hale or whole.
The creature brought irrational darkness.
The entire time I ran, I grabbed only vague glimpses of my pursuer. It was gargantuan, whatever it was. It had burning, hate-filled eyes and a toothy maw.
It towered above me, even when on all fours. Behind me, I heard the forest give way as it crashed through tree and thorn. Nothing, not nettle nor sharp bramble slowed its pursuit. The world melted before it.
It was feckless.
Wait.
That was exactly how I had
thought of the creature I had fought before. That one had been far weaker, weaker than even the raven, yet all of them—
Feckless hunger, no thought or cunning. Simply relentless.
It would never stop.
I burst forward, all grace and speed. The gray, dusty ground flew underneath my feet, but never did I stumble or fall. I needed to get as far from the creature as I could, so that I could make some kind of stand.
In some alleyways, there prowls a gaunt man who always hungers. He has no eyes, in truth, although none who see him ever remember that fact—
I shook my head, fighting off the relentless dreams that lusted, that craved.
I almost ran headlong into the stone cliff. In that nonce of time, I had a choice: I could turn and keep going alongside the cliff face, keeping my speed and trying to put more distance between us, or…
Instead, I decided to scramble up the stone face.
Fleeing into the sunlight seemed like the best idea. I noticed a small shelf, about twice my height along the cliff. If I could get there, perhaps…
I had to leap the smallest bit to gain purchase, but my naked toes helped. Working my way up the cliff, the sharp stones sliced my hands. The blood shone starkly red against the grey stone, casting into contrast the strange shadows on the cliff face.
Every shadow is a gateway into the vast dead city. Dead? No. The light that shines across it from strange, unknown stars makes it seem dead, but this is Dhire Lith, the city where death only dreams. Here more people than ever lived madly scrawl lost sigils and glyphs to write histories that never were.
A darkness dwells within them, a darkness that clutches and grasps.
They write with flesh; they write with blood; they write with the screams of the lost. The Liber Noctiis itself was born here, an abortion of a book written with the mad cacophony of entire worlds—