He dropped his pack and threw himself in a straight line, down the slight slope off the path, toward the sitting child. Before he knew it, he had pulled his sword from its scabbard and was holding it with both hands, tip near the ground slightly behind him as he ran. He crossed the space between the mountain path and the things circling the boy in a few breaths.
He came in a flash behind the closest one, a gray praying-mantis-like thing with a curved up body with three muscular legs and two thin arms that had claw-like bones for fingers. It had neither head nor shoulders but in the middle of its abdomen were a line of tiny white eyes and a gash of a mouth that opened onto yellow and crooked needle-like teeth. Its skin was leathery and slick of some mucus and in the small of its back was a greenish, throbbing sac that squirmed as it it hopped about the child.
The prince put his momentum and weight behind his blade and thrust it straight at the pulsating sac. The green organ erupted and a dark, thick fluid sprayed over the prince’s face. The sword cut effortlessly through the thing’s body and came out between the line formed by its eyes and its mouth. The prince did not shy away from the stink of the fluid. He rotated his blade and cut through the thing sideways.
Before its lifeless body even hit the grassy ground, the prince was already rushing toward the second monster at hand, a legless, dark-piss-yellow insectoid that propelled itself around the child with three pairs of arms lined up on either side of a long tubular body. Its thorax ended in a hairy blob that had two large black orbs for eyes atop a pair of mandibles that were in effect overgrown jaws split in half. With one downward strike the prince severed its head. The thing’s momentum carried it forward. It grotesquely tripped over itself before collapsing in a pool of its own oozing blood.
The prince turned to face the remaining two monsters. They stood on the other side of the boy who sat his back to him. One was a massive, leathery bag of lard with short arms that split in long ribbon-looking fingers. Its body ended in a cone where its head and neck should have been and three twisted faces melted from it onto its chest. The other one was a glossy, dark-haired wolf-like thing with four arms for legs and with glistening, dark-red, fleshy parts hanging from its underbelly.
The two creatures slowly stopped moving, somehow struggling to understand what was happening. They looked at the prince over the sitting boy, their alien eyes reflecting the morning sun in slick accents. Their faces moved back and forth in jagged motions between the prince and the two fallen creatures.
The rush of battle beatting hard through the prince’s veins, he stood still for a second. The boy sitting between him and the remaining monsters had not reacted at all to the carnage that just unfolded and the prince briefly wondered if he was in fact alive.
Then the wolf creature bounced forward. It stumbled awkwardly on its four arms toward the boy, the pulsating bags hanging from its underbelly flagging about as it did. Despite its clumsy, unsteady gait, it was moving surprisingly fast and as it neared the boy, its eyes twitching in all directions, its elongated face opened vertically into a growl and revealed several rows of twisted, decaying teeth aimed at the boy’s face.
The prince tightened his grip on the hilt of his blade and launched himself toward the boy at full speed. He reached him a breath before the wolf creature did. Gripping his blade with both hands, he brought it up above his head and leaped over the boy. He slashed down at the incoming creature mid-air and let out a grunt as the impact reverberated up his arms and rattled his clenched jaws.
His grunt was echoed by the sound of bones cracking as his blade fractured the skull of the beast. He twisted his body to the left, pushed outward with his blade and the lifeless body of the creatures missed the boy by a foot.
He landed hard into a roll while the creature’s body, a jumble of arms and skull pieces, went crashing behind him. He pushed himself off the ground and was barely back on his feet when a deafening scream engulfed him.
The last remaining creature stood some twenty feet away. Its three faces rippled eerily in the morning light and their leathery creases, swarming with scores of beady, red eyes, wavered as greasy folds seemed to unravel around its impossibly wide open mouths.
The strident scream that erupted from its mouths was overwhelming in its broken humanity. The prince brought his hands over his ears and terror enveloped him. Scores of birds flew up from the treetops in an angry buzz and the bright morning dimmed into an oppressive tunnel centered on the creature. The prince took an unsteady step forward and his thoughts started fading away and giving way to raw panic. His head felt like it was being compressed by two irate, mighty hands. The stone at his neck pulsed weakly and then went dark as something terribly ancient expanded in him. He dropped to one knee, fighting to keep his hold on an ever dimming reality, when a familiar voice whispered quietly over the empty darkness that spread over him.
“My prince,” the voice echoed softly off invisible walls and resonated with green accents in the dark field that the prince’s consciousness had become.
His vision narrowed further. Tension present but not felt rippled beyond the shadows. The voice, barely perceptible, called out again and then the point that the creature and its cry had become collapsed onto itself and swallowed the remnants of the prince into nothingness.
The world surged back to the prince coated by an oppressive hiss that pressed hard on his eardrums. He was lying on his back and panic and fear sent jolts of exhausted energy down his legs.
He got to his knees and through the pain pulsing behind his eyes, he looked warily around. The creature was gone. Eyes wide, his breath evading him and nausea working its way up his throat, he planted his fists in the grass and gasped under the pressure still reverberating in his head. He started trembling and let out a whimper as saliva dripped from his mouth. The whimper turned into a wet cough that shook him for a while and eventually turned into a low grunt.
Once his stomach stopped threatening to force its contents back up his throat, he took a couple of deep, raspy breaths. It cleared his head to some extent and steadied him a bit. He spied his sword on the ground next to him. He grabbed it and propping himself on it slowly rose to his feet.
A sound came from behind him. He swung around and a fresh wave of pressure hit the back of his head. Wincing at the pain, he found himself facing the boy that the monstrosities had been after. He was obviously very young; with clear, rounded features, brown shaggy hair peaking under a silky blue head-cloth and deep-blue eyes.
“They will come back,” the boy said, his features flat.
The prince looked at the boy for a moment. Fear still pulsated through him and mingled with the pounding in his head in disorienting flashes.
“Let’s go,” he said through another burst of pain.
With trembling hands he sheathed his sword, and on unsteady legs he started to painstakingly make his way up the slope toward the mountain path. The boy followed him and they left the clearing without sparing the slain creatures a look.
They walked all day; their advance was slow on the ever changing slopes of the treacherous, rock-strewn path.
Around midday, the pain receded enough for the prince’s thoughts to emerge from their throbbing blur and details of his fight with the creatures started coming back to him. And as they walked between tall pine trees, suspicions about the boy began to materialize in the back of his mind. By the time the sun was well advanced in its ever accelerating dive toward the horizon, the pain was finally gone and troubling questions about the boy swarmed his tired mind.
“He wasn’t even scared. How could he be so calm and so quiet?” he wondered to himself. “Why didn’t the creature’s scream affect him?”
The prince took a sideway look at the small boy walking by his side. The boy, impassible in his blue attire, silently kept up with him, never complaining, never out of breath, never slowing down.
“We haven’t eaten all day and he’s fine. Where are his parents? What is he doing there? And what’s with the weird rock
he’s been fondling non-stop?”
As the day went on, more and more questions rose in his mind. But no answers that made sense were there to appease his increasingly uncomfortable qualms. He tried a few times to ask him questions but every time he was met with a mask of disquieting stillness and impassible silence.
Later, the sun had just disappeared behind the treetops, leaving the path darkly shadowed, when a slight emerald twinge erupted in the prince’s mind and fear iced his innards into a swelling fist.
“It’s coming. It’s not alone,” a distant voice whispered.
The truth in those words was indisputable.
“They’re coming,” he said, more to himself than to the boy.
The child did not say a thing and they picked up their pace.
Half an hour later, the boy said that he was stopping, and he strayed from the path through an opening in the tree line.
Now they were rushing up the steepening slope once again, their feet sliding over loose rocks and getting caught in the large roots that spanned the steadily narrowing mountain path. The prince could sense that the creatures were still some ways away but also that they were getting closer by the minute. He briefly wondered if they could push through the night once he fended off the hungry things that rose in him with the darkness of dusk. But after the horrific fight with the monstrosities, the fat creature’s scream that almost broke him, and the daylong hike up the steep mountain path, the prince was exhausted. Raising his wall against the Night would take the remaining of what little force he had left in him and by the time he was done he would not be able to do much besides sleeping.
The path kept twisting and turning along thickening rows of pine trees and after a while the prince realized that they were not going up the mountain anymore as much as they were weaving their way around it. Above them the sky had turned into a star-sprinkled, deep-blue stretch. The night was almost here and the prince started despairing that they would ever find a refuge. The forest around them was so dense now that they could not possibly leave the path and hope to find it again.
The first pull came softly, like the echo of a distant memory. It held at his center for a fleeting instant and then disappeared as if it never were. The prince knew it would return, more imposing, more demanding and gradually turn into a blindly, voracious thing.
They kept walking, him ahead, stumbling along the path, pushing off branches he could barely see in the ever dimming passage, the boy behind him, following without a sound. The trees had grown into an ominous army and they swayed as one, tall and imposing, against the dimly lit sky above, shadows over shadows that danced dark rituals in the nascent night.
The pull came again, stronger this time, and panic seeped into the prince. There was nowhere to go but forward and seemingly nothing ahead but a path bound to be swallowed by the forest. He was about to stop and face the Night rising inside him when the boy spoke.
“There,” he said.
At the sound of his voice the prince tripped over the edge of a large rock. He had been so caught up by his own fear-fuelled thoughts and the growing tension of the pull that he had almost forgotten the boy who trudged along behind him. When he turned around he could barely see the child’s small frame a few yards down the narrow trail.
“What?” he asked.
“There,” the boy said again.
The prince took a couple of steps toward him. The boy was pointing, arm extended, to his left.
“Come,” the boy said.
His silhouette walked straight into the wall of trees and disappeared from view. The prince hesitated for a second. Hungry tongues lashed angrily at his core and he winced under the onslaught. He took a deep breath and followed suit.
He entered the dense, prickly foliage head down. The wall of branches closed behind him almost instantaneously and he found himself in a coffin of bark, cones and needles. He stretched his hands before him and cautiously moved forward. Within a few steps later a threatening vibration surged within him. It sliced chunks from his essence and the prince stooped forward and let out a grunt. His mind began withdrawing inward and reprising its eternal incantation when the boy materialize by his side. He grabbed him by the bottom of his shirt and said,
“This way.”
He yanked at the prince to follow and momentarily tore him back to the world.
Moments later, they emerged from the thickness of the trees onto the bare flank of the mountain. Finally free from the thorny embrace of the forest, the prince opened his eyes. Bathed in moonlight, they stood on a small promontory at the edge of the forest. There, the mountain sloped vertically into the night and the wind slapped at them as it swirled around the edge of the cliff.
The boy pulled the prince along for another few yards and, behind a handful of bushes growing directly from the façade of the mountain, they found the entrance of a shallow cave. The boy let go of the prince’s shirt. He sat without a word on a rock, a few feet from the cave’s mouth, facing the dark landscape that stretched into the night under the starry sky. His face was as impassive as ever in the pale moonlight and his fingers ran their course along the edges of the rock on his lap.
The prince made his way further into the cave and slumped down to the ground. He did not have time to drop his pack or arrange his sword’s scabbard at his side. He managed to let out a throaty ‘Thank you’ in the direction of the boy, and then he succumbed to the fight already raging inside of him, the monsters of Haliphanp and the Father of fathers relegated to insignificance in obscure parts of his mind.
Chapter Nine
Syndjya, Capital City of Alymphia.
Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age
Fall Passing Festival, Two days prior.
“This is going too far,” Queen Silifia said, more loudly than she meant to.
She stood in front of the hearth in the official meeting room facing the king who sat in his king’s chair at the end of the table and His Highness Baccus, who sat to her left, midway down the table.
It was late and everyone had retired to their quarters for the night. The afternoon had eventually shed the ominous uneasiness that hovered over the day and turned into more appropriate festivities given the occasion. Before they headed up to their quarters, the king asked Baccus and her for a word. The queen had not had a chance to talk in private with him until then and had feared all day the results of the season’s passing meeting.
“It’s too much of a change, too fast,” the queen continued. “And I’m not even talking about the impact of that decision for Alymphia, both here and abroad. It could…”
She hesitated for a second, gathering her thoughts.
“It could cost Alymphia its standing with the neighboring nations.”
“Dear,” the king interrupted, “if the role of women in Alymphia is to be changed, it can only happen from the top down. You know that.”
He flashed a tired smile at her and slightly tilted his head in a question.
“But…”
The queen started pacing, her hands busy at the ornate belt of her official dress.
“I don’t see …”
Her face was a mask of confusion, doubt and determination.
“She can’t possibly be ready. She hasn’t been trained for that. She… she’s too sweet!”
“Silifia,” the king said softly.
“And what about Hob, He IS to be king! You can’t take that away from him.”
“Silifia, dear.”
“This is not right. What is he to do? It’s going to crush him!”
“SILIFIA!” the king boomed effortlessly, his tone still gentle despite the volume of his voice.
The queen stopped her pacing and looked at her husband and king, then at Baccus, supplication in her eyes.
“It is to be done,” the king said firmly. “It HAS to be done, for the good of Alymphia, and you know it.”
“But,” the queen started.
“Upon my request Aria has been increasingly involved in c
ourt business over the past two summers. And to her defense, you are terribly underestimating her capacities.”
“But she is a girl! She has no place at the tables of kings! They all are greedy, power-hungry fools!”
“Is that what you think of me?” the king asked softly, an amused smile on his lips.
“No. No, dear, you know I don’t,” the queen said slowly.
She walked around the table and slid on a chair facing Baccus. Shoulder slumped, head down, her hands on her lap, she looked defeated. As Hedgard GrandJoy, all that the king wanted to do was go to his wife, hold her and reassure her that it all would be well, that their daughter would be fine. But as King GrandJoy of Alymphia, he could not allow himself to do that. There would be much opposition, both from within Alymphia and from abroad. What he was undertaking would set a precedent that would threaten conventions in the world, and he would have to win many a people over; and Aria would too, in her time. Getting his queen’s approval was crucial, just as getting his trusteds’ had been. He could go ahead without their consent; he was the king after all. But a king cannot rule successfully in the long term without the support of his people.
“Change; people are so afraid of it,” the king reflected. “Yet it happens all the time. A great mystery this is.”
“Silifia, this is the road to greatness for Alymphia. Aria is first born and as such the throne will be hers. Now is the time to prepare for her ascent to the throne. You underestimate her. You underestimate women.”
The king glanced at Baccus. The old man was sitting still, his face a neutral mask. He was probably uncomfortable being the witness to such a private disagreement but if he was it did not show. The king had requested his presence. Mostly because he knew his wife trusted the temple runner but also because he would know what to say to her. Plus, Baccus was privy to the events that had started King Hedgard in that most unconventional course of action. Events the king was still had not shared with his wife and was unsure he ever could. The queen was staring at her hands, nervously picking at the beads finely sewn in the fabric of her dress. The king leaned forward and looked intently at her. She was still as luminous as the day he first laid eyes on her; still caring, still beautiful despite the seasons gone. He hated putting her through this, but there was no way around it. He had more or less convinced the trusteds of the necessity and advantages of his plan. And now he needed his queen to also support him. The queen looked up at him, a hint of coldness in her eyes.
The WorldMight Page 9