The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  After a few seasons spent fishing and foraging for food alongside the natives, he was welcomed as a Tudik –a brother from away- and allowed to familiarize himself with the Barthans’ habits and customs. A few months later he partook in the ceremony of Uluik. He almost died, suffocating under the weight of earth and sand that the assembled fishermen dumped onto him. He had emerged into the light dizzy, his head a tumultuous twirl, gasping for air among shouts, songs and drum beats. He was taken to the sea, plunged into its cool embrace and called a man. Yet, he did not learn what he had hoped for. Though, from then on he had known that there was nothing in death for him.

  Now, as he crept slowly under the earth, below the Monastery of the Lost Voices, toward an unlikely streak of light, the deep and fragrant smell of the soil surprisingly unearthed memories of blue skies and bluer seas. In the heavy silence of that pitch-black tunnel, the cries of seabirds and the soft rolling of the ocean came calling for him from sunny corners of his mind. A slight smile slinked at the corner of his mouth.

  “The brightest memories for when you cannot see,” he thought to himself.

  A warm and salty wind at his back, he pushed on toward the floating slash of light.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Syndjya, Capital City of Alymphia.

  Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age

  Fall Passing Festival, One day prior.

  Darkness hovered over Syndjya. The lights of expiring pyres spotted the town, and the largest bonfire smoked heavily in the Great Temple’s square. The night had been long and festive and now, in the pre-dawn hours, a quiet peace floated over town. At this late hour, only a few guards made the rounds. Torch in hand, they moved slowly in small groups in the streets of CaupHaut and the artisan quarter.

  High above them, an unusual number of nightbirds hovered silently over the town. The festival’s nightcleaners, as the locals called them, came for the rats and other small rodents which were drawn out in high numbers by the trash left behind by the celebrating citizenry.

  The nightcleaners were most numerous over Higrpit, the lower town. There, they swarmed the skies in great numbers, unseen and silent until they fell onto a prey in a sharp swoosh not dissimilar to that of an arrow rushing to its target. That night if you had been one of the Lash-Poor-Mights or Nightgrounds that glided silently above Higrpit, you would have enjoyed the sight of dying fires at almost every street corner but you would not have seen the small flames of guards patrolling the muddied streets, for none did. Located south of the castle, a click or so east from where the great Leafload River curved away from the fields and toward town, Higrpit was no place to be at night, unless one belonged there, and guards scarcely did.

  Some fifty feet above the crummy, hay and dried-mud roofs of Higrpit, a gray Great Horned Owl floated on a night breeze. It had lost its left eye to a poacher some years before and its remaining golden orb peered intently at a narrow alley below. There were movements and sounds coming from it and the owl knew it would not go hungry for much longer. A small mischief of rats was fighting over something mostly hidden by the eaves of a roof. Their gnawing reached the owl clearly despite the distance. The great bird turned its head as it passed the spot from which the sounds came. It hesitated whether to dive or not. Other shapes, humans, shifted silently in the shadows nearby and the owl was weary of them. They would leave, it knew, and the rats would still be there. It shifted the angle of its wings and took some height. Then it made a large turn-around. It momentarily lost sight of its target, but its ears remained trained on the swarm and the sounds of its feasting. The human shadows moved away in quiet, wet steps and the owl knew it was time. It came at a low angle above the roofs, quickly descending and picking up speed as it did. It angled its dive cautiously, avoiding the roofs’ eaves as it entered the alley. The great owl targeted the rat furthest from the wall. Its claws sunk deep into the rodent’s flesh and it squealed weakly as the mischief disbanded. A hand, partly gnawed, dropped into the mud, splashing the owl’s talons. With a powerful flap of its wings, the great bird thrust itself upward and a second later it was soaring above the roofs of Higrpit and into the night sky, the now-lifeless corpse of the rat dangling between its bloodied talons. The owl rose steadily as it headed north. Soon, it was flying over the castle and toward the forest beyond, where its young eagerly awaited their share of the spoils of its hunt.

  Unlike dark and shiftily quiet Higrpit, the castle was aglow on its butte and alive with guards and servants making their rounds to the flames of torches. They ran around like busy ants in preparation of the festival coming in a day’s time.

  While the castle grounds around the main keep were very much alight and effervesced with activity, the inside of the keep itself was quiet and plunged into penumbra. The thick stone walls kept most of the noises and lights at bay.

  On the second floor, above the main hall where a low fire slowly died in the great hearth, past Aria’s bedroom doors and down the dimly lit corridor facing it, was Hob’s bedroom. His room occupied most of the second floor’s southern space and was roughly twice the size of Aria’s. One entered it through an imposing and richly decorated double-panel door which donned a large bear-headed handle on the outside and a wolf-head shaped one on the inside.

  At that very moment, as a one-eyed Great Owl rode the winds above the castle to its younglings, behind that door, the room was dark and quiet. Three layers of heavy draperies covered the large windows that faced the castle’s main gate. Their weight was such that they barely moved despite the fall wind that gently whooshed its way over the keep’s southern wall and bounced off its roof before diving back into the night.

  Only the soft whizzing of Hob’s breathing could be heard. Alymphia’s prince lay on his large bed, face down and arms by his side. Two finely-woven wool blankets were layered over him and covered his whole body and half his head. A goose-feather-filled eiderdown rested across his mid-section and three fat pillows formed a castle of their own around his head. He lay still in the peacefulness of his room, in the safety of the castle that was his home, and in the certainty of his ranking and of his place in life. But inside, he was dreaming of dark and disturbing things.

  Hob lay on his back in an empty bed that was cold and hard as he had always imagined the mountainside of the Great Barrier to be. He felt like he should shiver but somehow he was afraid to let his skin react naturally to the cold. Similarly, his chest itched something fierce but he did not raise a hand to scratch relief into it. He did not move despite the discomfort. He was not sure he could have and for some reason he did not dare to try. Around him the outlines of his room were a blur, as if seen from far away through one of the multi-lens contraptions sold in the artisan quarter, except that there were no bright colors or funny misshaping of the things he saw. Instead the world around him was a stillness of dull grays, condensed shapes and foggy edges. To his right was the only thing he could make out clearly: his royal weapons in the great-sword holder that rested on his nightstand. The rest of his room was a non-descript visual medley of shades and forms that wavered around him like the lazy countryside roads of Syn-dya in the heavy mid-summer heat. The itch on his chest became more insistent and Hob thought of the delight burying his fingers into his flesh would bring. But, despite the need, he did not move.

  “Strange thought,” he mused, the recognition of his processes a removed, impersonal tune.

  The need to shiver gripped him once more but still his flesh was not allowed to break into goose-bumps. The coldness seeping into him brought once more the Great Barrier and its frozen slopes to Hob’s mind.

  “The slopes of power.”

  The words drifted through the distorted space and Hob could not tell whether he had thought them or if they had originated from all around him.

  Above him the ceiling suddenly materialized. But instead of ornate moldings and large beams it was a hostile void of frightening intensity. With its coming, the twisted room took on an unsettling smell Hob could not place. He wan
ted to move now, dig into the flesh of his chest and sacrifice the skin of his back to the unforgiving coldness of his bed. But he could not and his impotence angered him greatly. He recognized the smell now. It was the odor of his nannies, of sour milk, sweat and sweet. It was the scent of his youth and it seemed to increase the intensity of his itching. Under his skin the itch started pulsating frantically and the blurred space around him contracted and expanded to the rhythm of that maddening need. The void above inched closer and rippled. The idea of ripping himself out of his own skin and floating fleshless in a different space imposed itself to Hob. That thought was warm and comforting despite its disturbing nature. The void moved closer still and as it did the smell that surrounded him started to change. It lost its sweet edge and the aroma of sweat became more prominent. The void rumbled and the smell took on a rancid lining, became more pungent, more threatening.

  “The smell of power,” voices whispered arrhythmically around him.

  Hob wished he could move, so he could see the faces whose mouths blurted the words at him; but they remained beyond his field of vision. The scent turned raw and wild, like that of a great beast and Hob’s whole body seemed to become an immense nose. The smell overwhelmed every other sensation out of his cognitive world, dethroning the itching of his chest and the harsh coldness at his back. Even the remnants of his room yielded to it and turned into the void itself.

  “The smell of power,” the voices continued at the edge of his perception, a cacophony fortelling the coming of his end.

  The smell turned acrid and wild and suddenly Hob understood that the smell would end him. A terrible fear swelled in his chest like an angry swarm that struggled to escape his flesh. His body morphed disturbingly under the onslaught. His skin bubbled and stretched until eventually his flesh started tearing. Trapped between the oppressive smell and its own terror, Hob’s body wavered onto itself and then ripped in all directions. Pieces of Hob caved inward, others seemed to be torn away by great mouths, and others, yet, shriveled and slithered onto themselves until they disappeared. He wanted to scream but he only managed a weak whimper that was drowned out by the voices chanting more and more frantically of the smell of power. In a terribly painful instant his physicality was gone and all that remained of him was a vulnerable, unbridled mass of feelings and ideas that senselessly swarmed onto one another. A raw pain echoed through every concept and tainted every emotion that composed him. It was an integral part of the incorporeal thing he had become. Through that pain Hob somehow still sensed the smell of the beast getting stronger. After a while, dizziness settled over him. It numbed the pervasive pain until he felt almost comfortable in that most naked of states.

  “Less to be wanted from,” he thought as a sense of peace descended upon him.

  “Less to be,” stuck out from the jumble that he had become.

  “More to get,” from a different side of him.

  “Hethens it hurts.”

  “Not so much for lack of being.”

  “I’d be more.”

  “More than the smell of power?”

  “More? Maybe. Do I have to?”

  There was a rhythm to his being now. A pleasant series of phrases and feelings arose and fell at the right tempo and mirrored the cadence of the rippling void around him.

  “What would I be?” a nodule within the mass questioned.

  “To whom?” another cluster asked.

  “To the pain, to the smallness,” parts of him responded.

  “To the hand that feeds?” a single, recessed point timidly advanced.

  “THE HAND THAT FEEDS!” a disparate multitude of reflections and nodules echoed.

  Fear rose again at his center and the smell that had almost become an unremarkable presence surged to the forefront again. His thoughts and ideas slid and rolled over one another in a disarticulated frenzy and the voices came forth again, their dissonant, breathless chanting slowly synching up.

  “The beast, the beast, the BEAST!” they intoned wildly.

  Panic exploded throughout Hob’s consciousness. There was no escaping the beast after all. As his mind swirled, jolted, and convulsed about itself, the feral smell poured over him in a deluge of staggering intensity. With that olfactory flood, a monstrous hand emerged from the void. It was gargantuan in size, so much so that Hob could barely comprehend its existence. Its palm was callused and raw, and the undersides of its gigantic nails were crusted with mud and dried blood. Patches of glistening, dark hair protruded from its knuckles and backside. Bundles of muscles pulsated under its leathery skin like thousands of wiry snakes. Its unconditional power was such as the one of creation.

  “HETHENS!” Hob’s mind blurted out although it knew it was not.

  The hand hovered above him, exceedingly primal and virile. It vibrated threateningly, its fingers incessantly about to close into a fist or maybe morph themselves into claws. It was so much in its overwhelming presence; more than the void it came from, more than the space it occupied and challenged by its mere existence. It was all Hob could sense, an omnipresent concept that seeped into his very core. His consciousness shrank in its presence, lost itself to the pervasive power that it exuded. Hob tried to push back but frozen in space and time he could neither flee nor conceptualize antagonizing it. That the hand would crush him was as inescapable a truth as the existence of the hand itself. Hob’s consciousness shrank further as the hand permeated more and more of its plane of existence.

  “Trapped!” he whined in a pitifully childish voice.

  Nothingness oozed out of the hand and as it edged closer and closer to his center it slowly erased him. Hob suddenly realized that he was not ready to be gone and panic washed over him. But by then the hand was over him. Its fingers closed slowly around him as he painfully diminished, his self-awareness dimming rapidly. The nauseating smell permeated him completely now and Hob briefly wondered if maybe, without him realizing it, he had become the smell itself. Then the hand contracted one last time, and in a final terrifying thought Hob comprehended that he was about to cease being.

  “Father!” he whimpered, the word breaking in his dry throat.

  Hob gasped and sat up in his bed. His mind was a confused twirl of negative emotions and disturbing visions. For a second a sharp dread in his chest warned him of something nightmarish coming for him. But then the fear quickly receded into a demanding slumber and Hob groggily realized that he had been dreaming. He adjusted with a lazy kick the eiderdown that had gotten tangled around his legs and flipped on his stomach. He mechanically pulled the blankets over his shoulders and buried his face in his pillow. A few seconds later, he was asleep again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the Slopes of the Great Barrier, Alymphia

  Year Hundred and Thirty of the New Age.

  King Rhegard was sitting at the foot of a large tree which, despite its abundant foliage, provided little respite from the downpour. Although sunset was still a few hours away and the sun shone somewhere above the thick canopy of dark clouds hovering over them, under the tree tops the world was gray and heavily striated. The king waited in silence surrounded by his commissioned officers, his son, and Master Baccus. The elites were somewhere around. They had melted into their surroundings and disappeared from sight as soon as the column had stopped. The king had dispatched one of them to scout out the encampment ahead and now they were waiting for his return. Some fifty yard away, behind them, the troops stretched down the incline in a blanket of men and horses. The men were arranged in five groups fanning across the forest floor. The city watch was forty strong and was assembled on the west side of the slope while the twenty five castle guards were on its eastern flank. The Alymphian soldiers had been split into three thirty five-men units that stood rigidly in square formations between the other two. The men were tense and struggled to stay still on the slippery forest floor as their feet sank into the mud or slid on wet grass. All were drenched and nervous. There had been no words about what they were to face yet, only th
at soon there would be fighting; Truth in Hethens’s Breath fighting. It undoubtedly meant that some of them would die; a fact that weighted heavily on their collective consciousness. Most of the men shook in their leather boots and metal plate armors and none dared to linger on the reason why. Though, if one had asked them they would have replied with a half-hearted laugh that it was awfully humid and chilly in these parts; and they would only have been half-lying. The nervous nickers and whines of horses that arose from the make-shift corral some hundred feet downslope did not help either. The horses were unusually unruly. They had all felt the nervous tension build into their mounts as they approached the Great Barrier, their willingness to be ordered forward decreasing steadily as they went on. The horses were afraid, and that fear was contagious. The officers who clumsily patrolled their ranks and strained to be heard above the rainfall knew that and they shouted their instructions and orders at the top of their lungs to prevent the men from dwelling on their fears.

  The elite the king and his counsel had been waiting for came back half an hour later. He seemed to simply materialize out the wall of rain a few feet from them. The officers gasped at the apparition, their hands flying to their weapons. But the king, his son, and Master Baccus, used that they were to the eerie furtiveness of the elites, did not overtly react.