“Breath to light, undo me to Me,” he repeated over and over.
He gently pressed his mind not to get dragged by his thoughts and emotions and returned it promptly to the space behind his eyelids when it did. But the king’s presence and his clear impatience did little to help him still his mind. He was slowly getting there, the world fading around him as he withdrew inward, when someone knocked loudly on the door of the meeting room. Baccus did not move. He kept his eyes closed and pushed himself gently toward the vacuum that slowly expanded inside of him.
“Yes?” the king’s voice boomed, annoyance crackling at the end of his breath.
Baccus heard the door creak on its hinges and someone step into the room.
“Father,” a voice started.
It abruptly stopped, then went on, lower.
“What… Am I interrupting? My apologies!”
“Prince Hedgard,” drifted across the dark mesh beyond Baccus’s eyelids.
“Come, sit. It is good you’re here, Hedgard. This might be important. But be quiet,” the king said softly.
More footsteps. Wood scraping on stone floor. The sound of someone dropping himself into a chair. Then silence. Baccus pushed his concentration a bit harder. His reaching the Other World would have been instantaneous had he been with a few of his fellow practitioners. But by himself it always took longer and as the seasons went by, it proved to be more and more of a challenge. Baccus had no idea how long he sat there. Time twisted onto itself and took a different dimension when he dove in. Eventually, he reached the Other World. The green sheet of reality spread over him slowly, and as he always did, Baccus raised his left hand in the Sign of the Giving and traced the shapes of Harlu-Him in front of him. When he opened his eyes, the Other World had blanketed itself over the physical world, a fine green wavy layer shimmered over everything. Both the king and the prince sat silently, staring intently at him, a hint of boredom on their features. They were also molded in the green substance of the Other World.
“Only two shades,” Baccus thought sadly.
He focused his mind onto one of the chairs along the table, grasping at the light-green waves surrounding it. He lifted them with a push of his will and the chair rose amongst the waves. King Rhegard and Prince Hedgard simultaneously jumped out of their seat.
“By Hethens!” the king exclaimed.
“What in the name of…” started Prince Hedgard.
But at a sign from his father the young man went quiet.
“This is what the little amount of power I have left allows me to do, my king,” Baccus said. “I could do much more in times past, among my brethren. The ones I warn you of are far more able, far more deadly in their manipulation of the world than I am.”
Baccus willed the chair higher and pulled onto the green flames some more. The chair rose another few feet until it almost touched the stone ceiling.
“If you both would retreat to the far wall my lords,” Baccus asked.
Once King Rhegard and Prince Hedgard were at a safer distance from the chair, Baccus focused all his attention onto the flames swirling at the edges of the chair. He grabbed onto them with his mind and forced the flames in the direct vicinity to pool on either side of the chair. When the flames were dense enough and Baccus could barely hold them from expanding outwardly, he pushed harder still, straining against the outbound force and held it there for a couple of seconds as he built will into them. Then, keeping his grip on the flames, he willed them in opposite directions. The chair tore in half as a piece of paper would, the sound a chilling rip that reminded Baccus of bones snapping under a war-hammer. The pieces of chair went flying away from each other, bounced loudly against the walls, and landed in a tangle of wood and splinters on either side of the table. Baccus looked directly at the king.
“This, my lord, they could do to you, in the blink of an eye.”
Horror had spread over the king’s features. Similar emotions could be seen on the prince’s face, only mitigated by utter shock and surprise at what he had just witnessed.
“What is this?” the king asked breathlessly.
“The world is more than meets the eye, my king. Energy flows through all things. Energies that can be manipulated with, as you can see, potentially deadly ends.”
Baccus closed his eyes as the pull that had been growing at his center dragged him back inside. The strain must have shown on his face for the king asked:
“What is it temple runner? Are you in pain?”
Baccus let go of the Other World. The sea of flames shivered shortly and then was gone.
“The balance, my king,” Baccus said. “What one uses of the world is in turn taken from him in corresponding amount. This limits greatly what one can do alone. However, when many practitioners are gathered, they can spread the pull amongst themselves.”
“The pull?” King Rhegard interrupted, a puzzled look on his face.
“Yes, the pull, the price one has to pay for manipulating the world, my lord. Spreading it amongst practitioners allows for a far greater use of the world with little to no effect at any one practitioner’s level.”
The pull suddenly tugged at him voraciously, ever hungry and insistent.
“I haven’t exerted myself so much in many summers,” Baccus reminded himself.
“My king, allow me a few minutes to gather myself,” he said, his voice shaky. “I will tell you more shortly.”
“Indeed.”
The king walked to the jumbled pieces of chair lying to the right of the meeting table. He knelt down and ran two fingers along the jagged edge that had been the center of the back of the chair only a minute ago. Splinters were sticking straight out from the wood, telling the king that the chair had not been ripped in half as is usually a piece of paper, by pulling each side down in opposite directions, but rather by applying an incredible amount of force on the sides, straight out. What the temple runner had just done was utterly… the king found himself short of words to describe what he had just seen. Amazing? Sure. Terrifying? That too. Unbelievable also came to mind. His thoughts were racing with the consequences of what he had just witnessed.
“This changes everything... But is it even real, could it be Cythra’s doing? Or an illusion, maybe? But if it’s real, the threat the temple runner talks about is beyond what I thought we’d ever have to face. The power he has… he himself is a threat. He says he cannot do more, but is that true? And what are those ‘others’ who are coming to attack us? How does he know about it? Can we face such a thing? What would Alymphians do if they learned of such power?”
The king’s wild train of thought was interrupted by his son’s voice.
“Father, what… what in Hethens’s name just happened?”
The king turned to his son. The young man was pale and was obviously working hard to conceal how shaken he was. The king stood up and went to him. He grabbed him by the shoulders and peered intently in his eyes.
“Hedgard, may what you have witnessed be a lesson. The world is full of unknowns, and unforeseen changes are never far away. According to the temple runner we are facing a grave threat. I need you to handle yourself. You will be king someday, never be anything but Alymphia’s king in all you do. Alymphia needs you strong.”
Finding strength in his father’s words, the prince straightened himself up and his face contracted into resolve. He nodded forcefully.
“Good. Now let’s hear what the temple runner has to say about what awaits us.”
Father and son turned to face Baccus, silently dreading what was to come next.
Chapter Eight
The sun was setting over a wide lake in the valley down below. Its light was a dazzling spread of shivering gold chips on the calm waters. High above the glittery spread, the child sat quietly on a large rock that protruded from the mountainside. His legs hung in the air over the tip of the bushy pine trees that managed to grow on the steep, rocky slopes. A dark-blue, silky drape was wrapped around his head and one of its ends floated f
reely in the wind at his side.
He had been sitting there for a while now, his eyes, slanted against the light, lost over the green fields that stretched far down between the mountains. His hands rested on his lap and between his small fingers was a black rock in the shape of a blade. It was heavily jagged, with a broken tip and his fingers ran mechanically back and forth along its teeth. Every so often he turned the rock over and then his fingers resumed their slow pilgrimage.
The prince stood a few yards away, closer to the rocky path. He was looking at the child intently, unsure of how to approach him. The child’s head-cloth flapped in rhythm with the trees and the prince sensed from his immobility that disturbing him would be unwelcomed. And yet, what else was he to do? The moon had already risen behind them, high in the darkening sky at their back. The brightest stars shone their still-timid light between clouds beyond the great peaks on either side of them. Night would soon be upon them and the Night craved the prince. Soon he would have to sit and withdraw from the world to face it. Once more he would raise himself against it in stubborn repetition. That, in itself, would not have been a problem, if not for the monsters of Haliphanp coming after them.
The prince took a step forward and almost called out for the child, but he did not know what to call him. That morning he had saved him, or so he thought at first, for the more he reflected on the events of the day the less apparent that fact became, and hours later he still did not know his name.
The child was not much for talking, much like the prince himself. Much like him, the boy was comfortable sharing a silent company. And much like him still, the boy seemed to appreciate sitting in silent contemplation. Although, where the prince often sat in silence, radiating peace and to some degree comfort, something distressing emanated from the quietness that surrounded the child as he sat above the valley.
A soft pulse, not quite a sound nor a vibration, raised a quiet warning in the prince’s mind. It alerted him that their pursuers were on the move again, along the rocky path that winded up the mountain. They needed to go now.
“Hey,” the prince finally said. “We’re going. Now.”
Although the boy still did not move, something subtle about him shifted. His fingers never slowed their course along the edge of the black rock and his gaze remained unperturbedly lost over the horizon, but an almost imperceptible tensing of his posture told the prince that he had heard him.
“Hey!” he repeated, louder now. “Let’s go, they’re coming.”
For a moment it seemed as if the boy was not going to answer, but then he raised his eyes from the burning line where where the earth seemed to slowly swallow the sun whole. He looked up toward the growing night sky and simply said:
“I know.”
“We have to go,” the prince urged him. “Soon the night will be upon us and I won’t be able to save you like I did before. I won’t be able to defend myself for a while either. We have to find a safe place and soon.”
The boy finally turned toward the prince and looked at him. There was no trace of fear in his soft features, or much of anything else for that matter. He must have been five, no older than seven. His face was still rounded by childhood fat, his head still a bit too large for his body. And yet his face was as devoid of emotion as that of the dead; peaceful but empty and cold. His blue eyes had a chilling stillness to them. They reminded the prince of insect’s eyes; too flat somehow, their light more a reflection of the world around them rather than the expression of an inner glow.
“It will be fine,” the boy said.
The prince looked toward the bottom of the path through the tree line, where it curved around a handful of thorny bushes and disappeared out of view.
They shouldn’t have stopped when they did, but the boy had insisted. Well, not really. He simply stated that he was stopping, left the path and climbed up on the large rock hanging over the mountainside and had been sitting on it ever since.
“We really should go,” the prince said.
When he tore his eyes from the path, the child was staring at him, his head tilted at an awkward angle in an unformed question. His eyes shone alien in the dark cloth surrounding his face and the light of dusk at his back formed a halo around his head that intensified the flat glare of his gaze. The end of his head-cloth flapped in the wind across his frail chest like the broken arm of a giant crab.
The prince almost reeled back and had to will his hand at his side when it instinctively tried to jump to the hilt of his sword.
The boy sat immobile, his face an uninviting, blank canvas, his tiny frame almost absent to the world in its stillness but for the motion of his fingers running their course along the dark rock.
An unquestionable fact took hold of the prince. He did not understand how it could be, but now that the thought had occurred to him it could not possibly have denied its truth.
“He is one of them!”
Images of the monstrosities he faced earlier, of the terrifying fat creature, flashed in his head and the thought of them attacking while the Night lashed at him sent fresh waves of panic down his spine.
The boy slid off the rock in a fluid movement and again the prince found himself having to repress the urge to run away or prepare to fight. His head-cloth flapping in the wind, the child stepped toward the prince and stopped a few feet from him. His shoulders hung awkwardly lower than one would expect and his arms dangled at his sides giving him a surreal doll-like aura.
“The night,” the boy said, and he pointed over the prince’s shoulder with his serrated rock.
The prince nodded his understanding. Despite whatever the boy was, he had not been a threat to him during their day-long ascent of the Holy Mount. His realizing what the boy was did not change that fact. After all, the boy was not the one hunting them.
The prince adjusted his pack and walked back to the path. The boy followed suit and they resumed their hike. They probably had less than an hour to find a hiding place.
High above them, well past the point where the trees gradually turned into shrubs, and higher, still, past where vegetation lost its fight to the unforgiving cold and the inhospitable rocky surface of the mountain, shrouded in a thick mass of slowly rotating clouds, was the Monastery of the Lost Voices. Or so the prince hoped.
There, he had been told summers ago by blood worshippers, lived the Father of fathers, also known as the World-Light, a man who had been alive longer than the Path of Whispers had been walked by men, a man of phenomenal knowledge and unbound wisdom. A man, who, no doubt, he had been assured, would know of all the words that ever were.
Armed with that knowledge, the prince had left Heartfent, the capital of the Unbound Territories. He had left behind him the slaughterhouses that their priests called houses of worship, the place he had called home for a few seasons.
For blood, they had claimed, has its own language. A language made of words few knew; for few were pure enough to hear it. He had dedicated months to their obscure worship, losing himself in the smell of steel and the sounds and flow of the life-blood of countless beings. For long nights he fought nausea, submitting himself to degrading rites; the face of his love the beacon that pushed him ever forward. For if the word he sought was to be found in blood, then so be it. But it had been in vain. Foolishness was all he found in Heartfent. Since then he had been restlessly seeking the Monastery of the Lost Voices.
In his search he visited numerous locals that were supposed to be the seat of the Father of fathers. Alas, none of them turned out to be the true house of the one who, legends said, had risen above men and attained the secret of Life within life. These fruitless wanderings had led him to Haliphanp and to that very morning when the prince had found himself yet again at the feet of a range rumored to house the holy man.
But unlike previous times, there he had encountered neither pilgrims nor monks. At the bottom of the mountain path where one would expect to find stalls from which merchants sold traveling goods or holy relics to wayfarers about to att
empt the long hike to the holy convent, only a knee-high stone mount, mostly hidden behind overgrown grass, had hailed him on his way.
In the shade of the tall trees flanking the path, no devout knowers-of-all were waiting to offer their services to travelers. Not even a sign to show the way and reassure travelers that they were indeed heading in the right direction was to be seen. Instead he found the boy sitting in the middle of a clearing two hundred feet off the mountain path and four monstrosities circling him like vultures would a freshly abandoned carcass.
The first thought that came to the prince was that he was witnessing a morbid farce. His mind refused to believe the information relayed by his eyes. It was not so much the monsters’ disquieting appearances that took him aback, their disturbingly angled limbs, or the yellow bones and sickly green organs that protruded from oozing openings in their scaly gray skin. It was not their distorted faces which folded like soiled fabric around nests of bulging eyes. Nor was it the way they moved, somehow walking, stumbling and rolling all at once on two, three, or five limbs as they hopped hectically around the quietly sitting boy. Neither was it the disturbing noises they made, cloth sliding onto cloth, low bestial growls and wet bursting of thick bubbles in gaseous swamps all rolled up in one. No, it was neither of those things that nearly turned the prince’s stomach inside out in his throat.
What almost froze him where he stood in horror was that these horrible patchworks of teeth, claws, and flailing flesh were human; or had been before something went horribly wrong. The prince knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. He could not have said how or why he did, but it was undeniable. Their aura, for lack of a better term, spoke to him in the most natural way. It was as if he could see directly under the misshapen assemblages, below the raw ferocity they exuded and sense the human heart beating underneath it all.
“Hethens’s Breath upon us all!” he whispered to himself.
As his mind reeled against what was before him, the prince’s left hand instinctively shot up to the stone at his neck. Immediately he felt the stone spread a steadying warmth in his chest and melt away the distress that paralyzed him where he stood. Then he sprang into action.
The WorldMight Page 8