The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  Winter eventually yielded to spring. Snow slowly became scarce and its melting revealed a soft, naked ground that was soon reborn into a sea of jade which later would grow tall and thick into summer. Cahifu, it turned out, was an immensely larger country than Alymphia. And when Cassien came into sight of the mount, which he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was where his love was held, he had been traveling for more than eight months and, as far as he understood, he was still far from any neighboring nations.

  Over the course of his travels, the people of Cahifu changed. As he made his way eastward their skin slowly darkened and took tinges of dark yellow and deep orange. Their faces surreptitiously turned rounder while their features became softer, their bone structures less prominent. Their eyes became narrower and of darker shades while their hair also darkened until they were as black as the deepest night. They were increasingly short too, markedly more so than they had been in Lahit. Their tongue also changed. As Cassien moved east, Cahifuans spoke with increasingly higher tones, sharper intonations, and with a sort of whistling that was completely absent from the speech he first heard in Lahit. All in all, by the time he reached the mount from which Aria called for him in his dreams, Cahifu had become a different world from the one he first encountered along the shores of the Empty Sea.

  It was the end of summer; the land was a yellow expanse of dry grass and ripe-for-harvest cereal fields. The trees that sprouted here and there visibly suffered under the heat of the day, and their branches and leaves, while still green, drooped heavily. On either side of the road, farmers were bent over the earth in the fields of gold.

  Straight ahead, in the distance, lost in a crown of clouds, was the mount Cassien sought. He was on yet another wagon and sat next to a salesman named Longfi, a short and fat man with a pudgy, round face full of mischief. Longfi was bringing silver and bronze tools for trade in the villages of the Luhitha mountain range. Cassien had joined his convoy a few days earlier and since then he had become increasingly restless. He was nearing Aria and the closer he got the harder it became to bear being separated from her.

  “Ten. Leagues.” Longfi said, pointing at the range in the distance.

  Cassien had picked up enough Cahifuan to have basic conversations. Learning it was one of the only distractions available during his long, monotonous journey.

  “Tomorrow. Morning?” he asked.

  “Evening. Probably.”

  Cassien looked at the mountain range that spawned the whole of the horizon before them. They would be at its feet by the morrow. How long, then, for him to ascend it?

  Earlier that day, when the range first came into view, Longfi gesticulated with his hands in an attempt to encompass their surroundings and said:

  “Summer. Nice.”

  Then pointed at the range and said:

  “Winter. Bad.”

  From which Cassien had deducted that on the mountain range the weather would be inclement. He still had the leather coat he left Syndjya with rolled up in his pack and hoped it would suffice. It had served him well enough through Cahifu’s long winter and its sometimes violent snowstorms. He did not think that the weather on the mountain would be worse than what he experienced on his travels so far, it was summertime after all.

  About that, Cassien was dead wrong. During the first two days of his ascent of the Luhitha mount the weather cooled steadily and a rapidly thickening brume spread over the thinning landscape around him. On the third day the conditions worsened dramatically. Violent winds arose from the south and brought with them intermittent snowfall. Worse yet, around midday, the trail he was on abruptly ended around a bend. The only way left for him then was straight up the steep mountainside.

  Many at that point would have turned around, maybe wait for the weather to soften before going on. But the thought did not even occur to him. So strong was his burning to reach Aria that onward was his only possibility. So, on he went; at times on his hands and knees through thick brush, often belly down against the rocky slope as he climbed the gradually steepening face of the mountain.

  With each passing hour the air grew colder, the terrain more treacherous. As he crawled upward against strong winds and icy flakes, the hand-and footholds that he pulled and pushed himself on increasingly gave under his weight. A few times they left him hanging precariously by one hand, his feet dangling over an increasingly dizzying drop. Although he had fastened his blade to his pack so as to not be hindered by its swinging, its weight still proved to be an encumbrance and made the balancing act he had to subjugate himself to all the more difficult.

  When the world darkened around him and his breath grew short, he stopped for the night on an escarpment. There a small hollow provided him with some cover, although not enough to permit him to light a fire. He chewed on some salty meat for a while and drank some of the cold tea Longfi had assured him would greatly reinvigorate him. Afterward, curled up against the mountain, he uselessly blew on his hands in an attempt to warm them and waited for sleep to come. But once he lay down the cold intensified and its bite kept him shivering for most of the night.

  By the next morning the wind had ley up but the snowfall had become continuous. The mountainside was completely white and eerily muted. Despite the low visibility, Cassien resumed his climb. As he advanced, the mountainside grew steeper still and the temperature dropped further. Quickly his clothes became wet of snow and sweat and soon his coat stopped providing a barrier from the cold.

  Around mid-day, his arms and shoulders grew weak and numb and under the woolen gloves he had bought before setting out his hands turned stiff and worrisomely purple. He did not check his feet but they felt as bad as his hands. His face, too, was painfully cold and covered with icy snow despite the raised collar of his coat and the wool hat he wore low on his brow.

  At some point, when he could not see further than a few inches and the tiredness in his shoulders became too much, he resigned himself to stop his climb. By chance, he quickly found a small ledge next to a shallow depression in the mountainside; nothing that would shelter him from the wind, the snow, or the cold, but it allowed him to sit with his back to the rocky face and rest for a while.

  “Maybe I’ll catch a break in the weather,” he thought as snow piled onto his lap.

  The wall of frigid, swirling white shifted incessantly in front of him, and he closed his eyes against its brightness.

  “Aria,” he thought.

  He brought a painful hand to the stone his neck and could barely feel it under his coat.

  Cassien summoned her in his mind and she came to him dug out from his memories in many declinations. She had so many different faces; some gentle and loving, some fierce and fearless, others goofy and playful, others yet, humble, almost fragile. Her faces brought him some comfort. He did not feel much of his face anymore. His hands on his lap had disappeared under a layer of snow and he could barely feel his fingers.

  He knew her as so many different things; all she had been and had become, all he loved so intensely. But one of her faces warmed him most. The one intent on him, fraught with an intense, yet restrained desire; the face of his princess before they had kissed, flush with yearning, eyes bright with a low burning that he could only reciprocate. Although he did not feel it, a weak smile broke on his face at the thought, and the mask of snow around his purple lips cracked and crumbled onto his lap.

  “More than a year. It’s been more than a year,” he thought.

  It did not quite feel real. The long days of travel somehow did not add up to a year in his head. Aria’s embrace was still fresh in his mind, as was her smell and the way her tender waist had given under his touch. It could not have been a year already. His head slumped against his chest in the snow-filled collar of his coat. He was being swallowed by the quiet storm and soon nothing of him would stand out from the snow-covered mountainside.

  “A year that I’m coming,” he thought distantly.

  His mind was feeling slow now. The words came with difficulty as if hi
s thoughts themselves were gradually freezing.

  “A year…”

  When the words stopped coming, his mind congealed over Aria’s faces, until that, too, became too much and only the quickly fading face he cherished above all remained.

  The snow went on blowing over the mountainside, high above the sunny plains of Cahifu. And the respite Cassien had hoped for never came.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Luhitha Mountain Range, Cahifu

  Year Hundred and Fifty One of the New Age.

  Cassien is almost gone now. His body is rigid with cold in the icy cocoon of snow that conceals him from the world. Only a sliver of will still ties him to this life; his heartbeat is a slow struggle that is soon to be lost, his breath all but vanished.

  There is a quietness to slipping out of existence that he is vaguely aware of from somewhere well beyond thoughts and feelings. And it is that quietness, the promise of peace that it holds, that he is battling. The Great Whole calls for him in a soothing voice and with the last shreds of his life he is fighting to deny its embrace. The reason why he should refuse such a desirable call is long lost to him, as are any hints of what he himself might be. Only the urge to deny it remains. Far beyond his conscious mind, beyond even the primal jolts that fuel the undercurrents of his unconscious mind, a part of him desperately hangs on and refuses to let go. But despite that primordial intent that wills him to exist in the face of all, he cannot last much longer. His hold is weakening. The beat in his chest slows to a crawl. The small flame that remains at his center shrinks to the point of extinction.

  But when the thinning thread that still ties him to the world is about to break, the stone at his neck emits the faintest of light and the layers shift to reclaim him. Much energy and will have gone into that stone; powerful emotions and willful foldings of the layers; things that the mind usually does not comprehend but that it sometimes intuits, filled with the energies of life and death and stretched across the layers into the greatest of manipulations.

  These wills and energies trapped within the fabric of the stone are moving now. They thread themselves onto the thinning filament of Cassien’s will and span the improbable distances that fill the world. They stretch into a web intent on their source: love mostly, but hatred too, and death as well, in the aftermath of their origin. And that web grows across layers of flames of various shades of green and merges them into an expanding construct at Cassien’s core. The energies crystallize into a life force willed by the intent of those that poured all that they were into the stone. For, those he has lost have left an indelible imprint of malleable energies into it; his master willfully so, his love indirectly through the forces that were seizing her when she disappeared. Those strong wills refuse to let him go. They fuel the folding of what is, beyond space and time, and form a structure that bridges the layers at his center.

  When the faint glow of the stone ceases, Cassien moves. He is still unconscious, but his heart hammers hard in his chest and the blood that flows through his veins is warm of an unnatural heat. His sarcophagus of ice melts around him as he claws his way out of it. He stands tall in the snowstorm as water streams down his coat and vapor rises from his skin. The cold mountain wind rushes madly around him as he turns to face the frozen mountainside. A boulder protrudes to the left of the small ridge he stands on. He grabs onto it, and with a force unbeknownst to him he propels himself upward through the turbulent wall of swirling snow.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Luhitha Mountain Range, Cahifu

  Year Hundred and Fifty One of the New Age.

  Cassien woke up lying face down in the snow. He was spread flat, his arms above his head, in a three inch-deep icy imprint of his body. The first thing he sensed was the void that churned with a familiar hunger at his core.

  “It’s back,” he distantly acknowledged to himself, perplexed if not slightly anxious.

  There was a numbness to his thoughts and senses he had not encountered before. All he experienced seemed to come from behind a semi-opaque veil and only reached him after a short delay.

  He lifted his head off the ground and blew bursts of air through his nose to remove the snow that had lodged itself in his nostrils. His eyelids were crusted with ice crystals and he had to brush then away with a painfuly cold hand. He pushed himself off the ground, the hard snow crunching under his fists and opened his eyes into a squint.

  He was on a flat stretch of snow-covered land and the world was unnaturally bright. The sky was a vivid blue above him and the sun shone a cold light, low to his right. A few yards in front of him was a shoulder-high stone wall with a large passageway framed by two red and gold columns. Past the wall, Cassien could see buildings as well as trees with branches heavy with snow. Further, to the left of the buildings, a mountain shot skyward before ending in twin peaks high above him.

  Cassien did not remember how he had ended up where he was. He recalled the blinding snowstorm and the paralyzing cold that forced him to stop his climb. He had a vague recollection of being exhausted, of his muscles strained to the point of pain. But besides that he could not remember a thing.

  He stood up, his knees aching under the effort, and turned around. He was only a few feet from the edge of a precipice and a vast sea of clouds spread in front of him. He was still on the mountain, much higher than he last remembered. In the distance the gray-white of the clouds gave way to an indistinct yellow-brown that must have been the plains of Cahifu. The scenery was breathtaking. He would have lost himself in the magnificence of the panorama if not for the void angrily pulling for his attention.

  “Sit,” a gentle voice invited.

  The voice startled him.

  “Aria?” he murmured through cracked lips.

  The thought seemed ridiculous and he tried in vain not to follow it. But the tone, its gentleness was hers.

  Again he pushed away the thought and focused his attention on the pull of the void.

  The voice was correct, he needed to sit. He could contain the void; rid himself of it as he had done onboard the Wavecarver. But he wasn’t sure he would be able to at that moment. His muscles were rigid and slow. His skin felt foreign. The frigid air sent shivers along his limbs; shivers that spread over his back into throbbing goose bumps. He would not be able to focus in this condition; he needed warmth.

  He turned back to the buildings, the landscape before him a blinding spread of luminous snow. With a hand he shielded his eyes against its glare and headed through the entryway between the colorful columns. Beyond were five squat structures of gray and white bricks with roofs of red tiles which looked like small waves about to roll onto themselves. The wooden beams that supported the tiles were of a gold tinge and undulated from each corner of the building to the center of the roof where they met in a long, sky-bound spike.

  The buildings all looked similar except for the furthest which was significantly larger than the others and was ornamented with long red drapes that hung from poles attached to each corner of the building. Its central spike was an overgrown gold shaft that spiraled high into the sky and glistened under the sunlight.

  Puffs of white smoke rose lazily from the four smaller buildings, stark against the blue sky. Cassien eyed them with a childish yearning; there he would find warmth. His feet sinking deeply into the crispy snow, he crossed at a slow walk the hundred yards that separated him from the nearest building.

  The place was strangely quiet. The winds that stormed amongst the clouds downslope did not blow here, and the air was still. There was no movement between the buildings, nothing moved in the distance. The only sounds Cassien could hear clearly originated from himself: the snow crunching under his frozen boots, his labored breathing puffing into vapor out of his lungs, the familiar high-pitched buzz from the void which was more of a sickly vibration than a sound. But even those were muffled by the snow covering everything and only echoed weakly around him. If not for the trails of smoke rising from the buildings he could have easily thought the p
lace long abandoned.

  He walked to the front of the building and reached a red door decorated with strange, gold signs. He glanced around the plaza formed by the buildings and, with a shaky hand, knocked on the door. He rested a shoulder against the wall and waited, listening for sounds coming from inside. When none came he knocked again, harder this time.

  “Hello?” he called out in his heavily accented Cahifuan.

  His shaky voice reverberated unnaturally in the silence of the place and seemed inappropriately loud. The few trees spread in between the buildings shivered and one of them relented some of the snow that had accumulated on it. Its branches, newly spotted of green, bounced up and down a few times before settling down in immobility again.

  With every passing second the pull of the void was growing more insistent and his need to sit was growing correspondingly. He looked at the smoke coming from the buildings around the small plaza and was about to knock again when the door creaked open. It revealed a small man with deep, clear blue eyes lost in a sea of white hair.

  “He looks like this place,” Cassien thought. “Snow and sky.”

  Under a long, unkempt beard and hair that fell messily over his forehead, the man’s skin was yellow like the aged parchments of Master Baccus’s Book of Hethens. The smoothness of his features conveyed a youthfulness that contrasted with the overall impression his face gave. He wore a simple yellow robe, draped around him casually and fastened with a red leather belt at his waist. At once, Cassien knew him to be a monk.