The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  “Maybe the stone is hollow and some reagents in it mixed to produce light?” he wondered.

  He had observed such a phenomenon years ago in the Caves of Mulfar. He had been searching for High Priestess Alianda, the leader of the Soranians, who was rumored to see beyond this world and know things few did. The Soranians lived in the depths of the earth and rarely came up to the surface. In those caves the Soranian holy women had come up with a sticky paste made of earthy deposits, mushrooms and plant extracts, the exact composition of which was a jealously guarded secret that only a few of the adepts of Soran, their Mud-God, knew. Upon mixing in the last of the ingredients the paste would glow a bright blue. Then it would be spread on sticks, walls, or wherever one wanted light.

  But if the light from the stone was produced by such a mixture, why did it start glowing right then? Separate ingredients would have had to be dislodged and mixed together and he could not remember hitting the stone or shaking it. He was simply walking when it started glowing.

  “Plus, it’s unlikely to be hollow; it weighs about right for its size,” he thought.

  Unable to determine how the stone generated light, he pushed forward. With every step he took the stone glowed brighter and quickly its emerald light became so intense that he had to remove it from around his neck and hold it by its chain above his head. Its light cut through the darkness. It burnt green over the bare stone floor and walls and revealed a room of truly cavernous dimension. It stretched two hundred feet behind him and as many before him. Its width was larger than the length of the biggest temple he had ever seen and its walls rose a hundred feet above him into shadows one could have easily mistaken for the darkest of night skies. The only door that he could see was the one from which he had entered. There was no other exit in the gray surfaces surrounding him and yet he knew beyond doubts that the way to the Father of fathers was ahead. Now that he could see his surroundings, instead of rushing forward, the prince hesitated. He was alone in the huge empty room, and yet from the depth of his mind a soft vibration raised an alarm. And although it had no voice, the prince knew all too well what the pulsation said.

  “Something is coming,” it admonished him.

  He looked around, uneasy now, but he saw nothing. He warily ventured forward, one slow step at a time, the pulsation tugging at him.

  “It lies in wait for you,” it whispered ever so softly.

  He suddenly felt sure that something was above him. He hurriedly shone the stone’s light toward the ceiling but saw nothing there beside the massive beams that spanned the width of the room and the crisscross of the transverses that supported the roof.

  “There’s nothing here, nothing at all!” he said to himself.

  And yet the vibration kept whispering:

  “Something is coming.”

  The prince felt foolish but he nonetheless pulled his blade out of its scabbard. He crept forward, sword in his left hand, the stone in his right hand shining above his head onto the floor, his eyes sweeping the expanse of gray in front of him.

  “I see nothing, I sense nothing!” he bellowed to the vibration, frustration and fear now seeping in his inner voice.

  As if answering him the pulsation intensified. Its voice became more pressing. The prince stopped in his tracks, his hand felt moist against the hilt of his blade. He knew the vibration was right and yet he could not see anything amiss. There was nothing in front of him but stone. He looked around feverishly, panic blossoming in his chest.

  “There’s nothing!” he supplicated the drumming.

  But the voice kept pounding the same warning at him.

  “It’s coming,” it urged. “It’s coming.”

  Despite himself, the prince got into a defensive stance, sword up before him, lightly bent at the knees. He tried to look all around at once and with every heartbeat his head jerked in a different direction. Still, he saw nothing and the warning grew stronger. The maddening contradiction of what he knew and what he saw contracted into waves of anxiety that poured through his chest and into his limbs. His face flushed as his furrowed brow grew wet with sweat. He peeked right, then left, then center, then behind him and then cycled again, the stony world around him turning into a swirl of jade-bathed grayness. And then the voice strummed one last time in his chest with the finality of death:

  “IT’S HERE.”

  “SHOW YOURSELF!” the prince roared, turning his frustration and fear into a stern command.

  His shout echoed forcefully around him and rippled over the floor, walls, and ceiling, gradually diminishing in intensity until the space returned to its heavy silence. The prince waited, expecting something to come at him. But nothing happened, nothing at all. For a long minute he nervously looked around, not daring to wipe away the beads of sweat that had rolled down his forehead and threatened to fall into his eyes. Slowly he started relaxing. A small tremor seeped into his fingers as his nerves discharged the pent up tension that had built up in him. He took a deep breath, still scrutinizing the room around him and a few moments later he warily stepped forward. His vision blurred. Or more precisely, an oddly defined spot thirty feet in front of him became hazy, as if his eyes could not focus on that particular point in space. The blur seemed to recede slightly before wrinkling back toward him. The prince quickly blinked a few times and when the shimmering swath of space came back into focus, the two black-hooded monks he had seen during supper stood before him. Despite the light flowing from the prince’s stone most of their faces remained hidden in the shadow of their hoods and only angular jaws and thin, leathery lips showed.

  “What in Hethens’s name,” the prince let out.

  He instinctively pounced back, his sword up between him and the darkly-robbed monks. Despite the suddenness of their appearance, he quickly regained his composure.

  “Is one of you the Father of fathers?” he shouted. “I demand an audience with him.”

  For a moment the monks did not move or say a thing. Then, the one on the left said in a deep, crackling voice:

  “He has been touched by Ky-tra.”

  “Yesss,” continued the one on the right, his voice a rolling, high-pitched slither. “He knew of usss.”

  “Yet, he is not of us.”

  “No, not of usss.”

  “But touched. To be had, maybe? We do not know.”

  “Children, children, where go the children?” the words said with deep gluttony between barely parted lips.

  “The children of Ky-tra! Of us like we are of her!” the hooded figure on the left almost sang, the old skin on the visible part of his face cracking into a disturbing smile that revealed teeth of yellow and green.

  “The children, the childr-”

  “ENOUGH!” the prince interrupted. “I WILL SEE THE FATHER OF FATHERS NOW!”

  “No. You. Won’t.” the hooded figures chanted in unison.

  The monks raised their right hands in a strange gesture the prince had seen before but could not place. Moving their hands as one, they slashed the air in a repeating pattern. They started chanting in a tongue the prince did not recognize and as they did the stone shone impossibly brighter in his hand. Its light revealed every corner of the room as if the sun shone directly onto them. The two monks’ shadows stretched behind them, all the way to the room’s back wall and then onto it, up to the ceiling. The monks’ hands sped up and their chanting quickened. And as they did, a clawing sensation ripped through the prince. He reeled backward in surprise and fell to his knees. His blade rang weakly in his left hand and he let go of the stone which came to rest upright on the floor a few feet from him, its vivid emerald light bathing the hooded figures. The monks’ chanting turned into an incoherent stream of noise more ripped from their throat than actually spoken and a void unfurled inside him like a nightmarish wave he was powerless to contain.

  “NO!” he bellowed to himself, “Not now!”

  It couldn’t be the Night. It wasn’t time. And yet he knew the feeling all too well. He looked up at the mo
nks in disbelief. Their hands were a blur now. Their shapes were voluminous beyond reason and their shadows, stretched by the light pouring from the stone, were impossibly long behind them. As he took in the bewildering sight, his eyes wide with panic and fear, an anomaly jumped at him: some thirty feet behind the monks, their shadows was broken and where the bare stone floor should have been was a rough, rectangular shape that the prince’s mind failed to process. It was at the same time a fuzzy, blank image, a wooden surface, and nothing. The prince was seeing what was not there and simultaneously not seeing it. His mind revolted against what his senses relayed to him and sent painful jolts crackling behind his eyes. As the pain hit him and threatened to engulf his psyche, a familiar voice he had not heard in ages came back to him:

  “Beware of your senses. They’ll oftentimes betray you,” it counseled him.

  The voice brought some clarity to his struggling mind. No man can move so fast. Nor is it possible to sing like the monks did. Shadows do not turn into nothingness. The Night does not come before its time. These were facts. The prince gathered himself around those thoughts and the void redoubled its clawing as if trying to rob him of the little clarity he had regained.

  “I WILL NOT FAIL!” he yelled at the vacuum gouging at him.

  Ignoring the mounting pressure in his head and the sharp pain that now coursed through his muscles, he tore himself from the floor. The stone urged him to it and he wavered back to the light-gushing gem. He picked it up and secured it around his neck. Then he sat down on the floor facing the maniacal monks, his blade on his lap. He forced his heart to slow down and willed himself shut off from his senses. A gentle warmth seeped from the stone into his chest. It enveloped him and within seconds the whole world vanished to him. The light from the stone which a breath earlier had been painfully seeping through his closed eyelids disappeared alongside every other visual stimulus. The monks’ chanting ceased at once, or rather the prince stopped hearing it. The tension digging into him ended with the consciousness of his body. He felt nothing, at least nothing physical. For, in the sudden sensorial void the prince found himself in, a green light flickered into existence in the distance and the voice of his love came from it.

  “Come,” it gently egged him on, “come.”

  Barely had he willed it when suddenly his consciousness zoomed toward the light at blinding speed. And then he was back to the world. But that world was different from the one he knew. It was a world of dark-green flames and ghostly shapes, of muted sounds and thick, water-like atmosphere. In that realm, the monks were moving slowly, like one would expect old men to move, and their chanting was a sluggish, arrhythmic croaking. The prince stood up effortlessly. Behind the monks, where their shadows had turned into nothingness, he saw the outline of a trapdoor. He stepped toward them as in a dream and the monks raised their heads. For the first time he laid eyes on their faces. Aged beyond time, their skin was parchment-gray. Their features were painfully angular and deeply hollow. Their cataract-clouded eyes oozed madness and horror. They moved so slowly now that they barely reacted when he lifted up his sword. He hesitated for a fraction of a second; after all, one of them could be the Father of fathers.

  “No,” quietly flashed in his mind.

  “No,” he acquiesced. “Neither of them is him.”

  In one horizontal swipe he cut both their throats open. With a weak gurgle they collapsed onto each other like dead twigs cut from a branch. Their bodies flayed about feebly on the floor for a short while as blood bubbled lazily at their throats. Then they froze, exhaled heavily, and died. The stone at the prince’s neck started dimming, its light gradually vanishing as darkness seeped through the walls toward him. Quickly the shadows overtook the trapdoor and then the stone altogether stopped glowing. Then the world shimmered and the flames wavered out of existence. In the blink of an eye the world returned to normal and the prince was left in complete darkness. Adrenaline and something else he could not pinpoint, discharged along his nerves. He focused on the trap door he saw. It would lead him to the Father of fathers, he was sure of it. He carefully stepped over the bodies of the monks and slowly walked to it. The trapdoor was a rough square of granular wood with a shallow depression of a handle. Arching his back against its weight, he pried it open. The door slammed loudly on the ground and a musky emanation permeated the darkness. He cautiously felt around the opening and knelt over it. Although he could not see a thing, he could feel on his face the caress of a weak air current, thick of dust and earthy smells. He peered into the void before him, trying desperately to see what lied below, but to no avail. The hole he knew to be in front of him he could not perceive in the least. When he felt the walls of the shaft with his hands, arms extended in the hole, he found a metal rung. He carefuly slid hi down, his feet jerking from rung to rung, until he was completely in the shaft. Then he took a deep breath and started his descent.

  His climb down seemed to take a long while. He stopped counting the rungs around fifty, and did not reach the bottom of the shaft for what felt like another eternity. Eventually he stepped onto moist and crunchy earth that depressed slightly under his weight. He slowly turned his back to the row of rungs and faced a thin line of light that floated like a mirage in the distance. He waited, expecting it to fizzle out of existence, but it did not.

  “A door far down a tunnel?” he wondered. “Or something else entirely, but close?”

  He could not tell so he unsheathed his sword and stepped toward the faint light. He probed the space around him with his hands and found earth within two feet of him on every side.

  “A tunnel, then,” he thought.

  His nerves still tingling with something alien he could not place, he let his feet slowly take him forward. Exhausted that he was by his encounter with the monks, and strangely oppressed by the crushing amount of earth surrounding him, his mind pulled him toward an equally earthy, albeit brighter, memory, to a birthing ritual he had taken part in, years prior, on the island of Bartha, in the middle of the Empty Sea.

  He had been on his way to yet another Holy of Holies when his ship stopped for a few days to repair a hole in its hull and replace some rotting planks. As was his habit every time he set foot in a new locality, he sought out the places of worship and the ones of knowledge, which, he came to realize over time, were often one and the same in less developed cultures. His wandering around the sandy streets of Larlan, little more than an oversized fishermen village, led him to a roofless, wooden temple atop a palm tree-strewn dune. There, a large group of locals was gathered. Flat-faced and dark-skinned, they smelled strongly of sweat, fish and sea. The prince slowly made his way through the swaying crowd. At the back of the temple, by a leafy altar from which one could see the sea through the open door and a lush forest through a large opening in the back wall, a hole had been dug in the sandy ground. In the hole, a good ten feet down, past layers of sand and into the earth itself, a young man, wrapped in a white sheet and sitting on the bare earth, was smoking from a long wooden pipe. The smoke rose in opaque patches from the hole and hovered above the crowd before drifting into the wet wind coming from the sea. Three older men, wearing colorful garbs and seashell necklaces, stood over the hole, facing the congregation. They sang a slow, lazy tune that struck the prince in its unmistakable similarity to the rhythm of the waves that leisurely came to rest on the beach, a stone’s throw away from the temple, before retiring back to the vastness of the sea. To the left of the singing men was a mound of dirt and sand, undoubtedly the earth dug out from the hole. To their right a group of teenagers slammed the shells of large nut-fruits and polished wooden sticks together in a broken rhythm that complemented the song of the old men in the most unpredictable of ways. For a while the young man smoked, the old men sung, and the crowd swayed to the rhythm of wood on wood. Then the young man in the hole passed the pipe up and lay down on his back, facing the sky. When he did that the singing changed. The song’s pitch got lower and the percussions sped up. Then, one of the elder men let
out a shrill cry to which the crowd responded with a roar. The assembly surged toward the pill of dirt and started throwing handfuls of earth and sand down the hole. Within a couple of minutes the young man was completely buried under five feet of earth. The singing intensified, the rhythm sped up and the crowd joined in, hitting the ground heavily with the heel of their feet as they moved and sang as one. After what felt to the prince like an incredibly long time, a gasp came from the hole and the crowd broke into exuberant shouts of joy. Dozens of hands reached into the hole to pull out the dirt covered young man. He was raised on a sea of hands and taken out of the temple amidst songs and shouts. The prince found himself alone in the temple, watching in the distance the crowd bring the young man to the sea, rip the cloth off his back, and submerge him under the clear, blue-green waters before carrying him out of view.

  Later that night, as he was sharing what he had witnessed with some of his fellow travelers, an old sailor who had left the mainland to call Bartha home, explained to him that Barthans believed that true knowledge and understanding of life could only be found in death, that those who came closest to death are the wisest among men. It was in that spirit that every Barthan youth underwent the ritual of Uluik, rebirth into knowledge, to be welcomed into manhood, symbolically shedding childhood misconceptions for the true knowledge one reaches through closeness to death.

  “On Barthan,” he finished rather dramatically, “one dies into manhood.”

  The prince had reflected on that as he lay on the deck under the star-filled sky, the gentle swell of the sea rocking him slowly while in the distance the sound of festivities could still be heard. By morning he had decided to stay and seek knowledge as the Barthans did. After all, maybe in the grip of death one did get to know things otherwise unattainable, maybe even hear of words unknown to men. So he stayed amongst the Barthans and saw the ship that had brought him sail away without him.