The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  Twenty minutes later he emerged from the foggy strata and the Cahifu that stretched before him was not what he had expected. Where to the west of the WorldMight’s sanctuary, Cahifu was fertile plains strewn with towns and forests, east of it was a rocky sea of snow-covered peaks and countless valleys that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  As Cassien stood before the vast field of mountains, still shaken by the elites’ apparition, the world seemed insurmountably vast and inhospitable. Not only was he alone and without a clear destination, but he was hunted as well; hunted by the most skilled and fearsome men he had ever heard of.

  What were the odds that he would find the word now? Where would he go? How would he find the holy places of the world? How could he survive what lay ahead? His mind swirled with questions, each soaked with more anguish than the next and he had no answer to any of them. There was only the path that stretched before him, uncertain and daunting beyond words. As the whirlwind of questions threatened to become too much, Aria rose in his thoughts. He felt her presence like one feels the steadying touch of a loved one during times of hardship. He was leaving the WorldMight’s chamber behind, but Aria, his love, would be with him.

  “I made it this far!” he told himself, fresh resolve hardening his features. “I will find the word and free Aria, elites or no elites!”

  He told himself that a few more times and with each repetition he took heart.

  In front of him the path winded down toward a rising line of brush and halfway to it the trail shed its snowy coat and revealed the bare earth and rocks that hid underneath.

  “At least no more snow for now,” he encouraged himself.

  He breathed in the cold air and it tasted of something new. Beyond his doubts and fears there was the thrill of a newfound hope.

  He straightened up, shifted the weight of his pack on his shoulders and adjusted the blade at his belt. He had a vast world to rummage, mountains to scale, seas to traverse, and holy places to find. And it all started with the next step he took. He touched the stone at his neck and felt it radiate a warm confidence.

  “I can do it,” he told himself. “I can and I will.”

  He rested a hand on the hilt of his sword, and, determination etched across his face, he stepped toward the immensity that lay before him.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  It was spring. The slopes were vibrant of tall swaying grass. Newly-leaved trees spotted the mountainside and shed scores of colorful petals that a gentle wind snatched before they could reach the ground. It dragged them along its course in brilliant strikes of yellow, orange, and pink, flashes of color that at first seemed aimed at the bright, blue sky but that invariably ended swallowed by the moving expanse of green below.

  The prince was close to the end of his journey; he knew it for a fact. Soon he would be with his love again. He was full of apprehension, a slow giddiness that pulsated in his bones and made his steps at the same time lighter and clumsier.

  He had finally understood the riddles of his life and put together the threads he had gleaned over the course of his travels into a coherent thought.

  “It must be right,” he told himself repeatedly as he crossed lands and seas to return to where the beast lay.

  “Why else would the call have resumed?”

  But despite his certainty and the confirmation that the call represented, now that he neared the resting place of the beast, foreboding fluttered below his every thought.

  What if he still needed the word? What if he needed a word, any word, or anything else for that matter; anything else but what he knew? What if he had not understood correctly and the call was a fluke? What if-

  He took a deep breath and willfully stopped the flow of his thoughts. He had not found the word because there was no word to find.

  “A word that has never been uttered,” he thought. “How ridiculous!”

  He had wasted so much time looking for it. And now, in retrospect, it seemed unbelievable that he had not seen it before; a word that had never been uttered, how little sense it made. And worse, he had been so intent on finding it, his thinking had been so obtuse, his single-mindedness so extreme, that he had missed the hints that had pointed in the right direction along the way.

  But in all likeliness, had he followed a different path, sought some other way to awaken the beast, he would not have comprehended so much, seen through the veils of reality and understood the true meaning of the word Hak-ti, the True Speech.

  After all, it was all he went through that led him to the answer and he suspected that if anything had happened differently he would not be where he was, so close to freeing his love.

  The path he followed was all but gone, overtaken by grass and roots. Only broken stone-markers occasionally confirmed that he was still on a trail. But it did not matter if he lost the path. With every step he took, the call that led him to his love vibrated faster in his chest. It would bring him to her no matter what.

  He eventually reached a fork in the path. To his right the trail took a sharp turn up a narrow ridge that led further up the mountain. To his left was a flat stretch of land, with, some ways away, a wall overgrown with vegetation and behind it, quickly disappearing behind the bend of the mountainside, a flurry of trees with gray ruins peeking through leaves and brush.

  Snow-and-sky faces flickered in his mind. They were vague but he knew that they had been with him at the beginning.

  He followed the path up as it wrapped itself around the mountain and without much trouble he reached another flat stretch of rocky land. The sun was a large ball of fire in the sky above him. It shone warm on his neck. Across the stretch was the entrance of a cave. The vibration at his center sped up and turned into an indistinct rumbling in his ears.

  “I’m here,” he thought in disbelief.

  Somehow he remembered the cave clearly. He knew it would go some ways then bend to the right, to an imposing wooden door beyond which, after another long stretch, would be beast’s chamber.

  “I came back,” he said under his breath and the call fluttered in his breast as if answering him.

  He walked to the cave’s threshold and stepped in gingerly. A soft coolness enveloped him and a voice, barely more than a whisper, resounded faintly ahead.

  “Cassien,” it suggested more than it said.

  The word felt foreign to his ears. He knew it to be what he had been called in some distant past, but now it sounded strange and meant little to him.

  The walls of the cave quickly became shrouded in darkness. He wanted to run but given what he knew he had to do next he forced himself to slow down.

  After the bend in the cave, when most of the daylight could not reach him anymore, he pulled out a small lamp and a rubber oil flask from his pack, items he had acquired months prior as he reached a city-port at the easternmost corner of the continent. He poured some of the oil into the lamp and lit the wick by striking a small block of magnesium with a steel rod. He left his pack against the wall of the cave and raised the flame above his head.

  Its light revealed the door he had expected to stand in his way laying in shambles. Its left panel was pushed half-way open and precariously stood at an awkward angle while the right one lay on the cave floor a few feet from the threshold. Under a thick layer of dust, random flakes of red paint could be seen hanging from the battered wooden panels.

  “Time…” a ghostly breath echoed, and the prince shivered inexplicably.

  Apprehension rose again in his chest, muddled with trepidation and the buzzing of the call. He ignored it as best as he could, and stepping around the panel he walked deeper into the cave.

  Halfway to the beast’s chamber the face of his love, green and ethereal, came to him as in a dream. She was smiling and mouthed silent encouragements. Like a sleepwalker he marched toward her, his steps steady but slow, his features slacked, long of shadows, deep-set of innumerable years consumed.

  ‘Time’ the murmur had said.

  Time passed, inelucta
bly swallowed into the Great Beyond. And for the prince, time owed, unwittingly borrowed every night. Time suspended without his knowledge at his core by love and the greatest of manipulations. Time irreversibly etched deeply within him in broad strokes of void. Time deferred by the will of others.

  He reached the chamber. The space was as large as he recalled and beyond a line of blocky pedestals laid the beast. It was as it had been when he last visited: large and silently threatening, wolfish and snake-like, of stone and scales and hairs.

  He put the oil lamp on the ground a few yards from it. The small flame danced weakly and extended long shadows over its stretched out face. The prince brought the palm of his hand to its massive, scaly muzzle. At once he felt a smooth pulsation. It filled him with an agonizing joy that squeezed his heart tight and made his head swirl.

  “I came back,” he said softly, “I came back for you.”

  He hesitated, as if the word he would say next was too sacred to cross his lips, too precious to be mindlessly uttered, as if he were not worthy of it. He closed his eyes and the pulsation against his palm grew in intensity. His mouth trembled and his chin rumpled. Between barely parted lips, at the end of a shaky breath, despite a painful tightening of his throat, he said:

  “Aria.”

  The word fell out of his mouth with the weight of the world and although he barely muttered it, it seemed to fill the chamber’s space and turn the air into a thick smother.

  Suddenly his shoulders felt heavy, impossibly heavy. Eons of hardship and loneliness threatened to make their way from the depths in which he had buried them to the fragile surface of his consciousness. But he did not give into the emotions that attempted to rock him. He did not let himself succumb to the overwhelming tiredness that at that moment menaced to topple him. He steeled himself as he had done countless times before.

  When he had subdued the growing turmoil inside, he removed his hand from the WorldMight and sat cross-legged in front of it. Now he would see if he had been right, or if it had all been for naught. He relaxed his spine and let the tension in his knees and hips stretch itself out. He slowed his breathing until it became little more than a subtle expansion and contraction of his body. He kept his eyes half-opened, relaxed and gazing at the overall shape of the beast. He did not focus on it, he simply let it blur while remaining aware of its presence. Once he was fully settled, he waited for the Night to come.

  Hours later he felt the first tug at his center and readied himself. He had some time before he would feel the full force of the pull. The twinge was only the first hint of the Night’s coming. In fact it was so subtle that in the beginnings of his journey, when the Night first started encroaching on his evenings, he would not have noticed it. Nor would he have noticed most of the faint contractions that were to follow. But after countless years was attuned to the early signs of the Night’s approach.

  Over the months it took him to travel from the charlatan’s home to the WorldMight’s chamber, the prince carefully thought out and planned what he was to do next. He envisioned many times how he would use the Night as an opening to the true world, the world that encompassed both his world and the world of flames, a world from which he would be able to speak the Hak-Ti, the True Speech, and, if he was right, awaken the WorldMight.

  As he raised every evening his wall against the Night, he paid close attention to the ravenous emptying that unfurled at his core. Reaching the true world through that emptying would be a difficult juggling act. He would have to fend off the Night and at the same time dive beyond the wall he raised against it and allow himself to sink into its grasp. But not further, for that would mean his extinction.

  Now that the Night came to claim its due, he would see if he were right.

  “Get away from me, my black dogs” he started lightly, his mind expanding with every word in the space he had fitted out as he waited.

  “Get away from me, my black dogs,” he repeated, each word another brick in the wall that would keep the Night at bay.

  The initial tug instantaneously contracted out of existence and he easily shifted part of his focus to its point of origin.

  For a while he bathed in the heightened calm that followed. It felt as if nothing else would happen, but soon more tugs came. At first they echoed sporadically at his core and vanished more or less readily. Gradually they became more demanding, more forceful, and more frequent.

  Before long, the spaced-out, barely-felt tugs had turned into profuse and forceful pulls and the effort it took the prince to maintain his divided focus became grating.

  Shortly after, the full weight of the Night crashed onto him. The WorldMight was still in his field of vision but he did not see it anymore. His sunken features rumpled and wavered. His shoulders slouched and his back bent as if under an enormous weight. But despite the undoing that went on at his core, the prince held fast to his focusing on the source of the Night. He willed his broken wall to slow it down as much as it could.

  He remained torn in half for what felt like an eternity. He was slowly being swallowed from inside out as the void ripped ever larger chunks from his core. His hands trembled violently on his lap. His neck and head were taken by spasms that stiffly shook him from side to side and an oddly tinged nausea engulfed him.

  When it seemed that it had all been in vain, that the Night would consume him out of existence, far below the wall he raised, an indistinct point flashed green. Suddenly there was nothing else but that emerald flicker, deep within the Night at his center. It was all he had suffered for condensed in a single dot. It was all he had been and all that he was, resolved in one impossibly tangible glimmer of jade. It smelled of his love. It tasted of her. It was all she was to him finally revealed.

  With the last ounces of control he exerted over himself, the prince willed his consciousness toward it. Leaving barely more than a thought with his wall, he hurled himself at it as terror took over the jumbled tendrils of his mind. Every instinct he had screamed at him to stop, to return to the wall, to the safety of its presence and its regenerative clout. But he ignored them, and his mind so strained it might break at any moment he rushed for the jade speck in the middle of the ever growing void. He plunged all he was into the terrifying Night and when the last thread of his will was about to break, his love called for him.

  “Come to me,” she pleaded. “Come to me.”

  And with one last push, he reached the emerald speck and the true world that lay beyond.

  At once the pressure crushing his mind evaporated and his eyes flickered back to life onto the WorldMight and the chamber. Flames covered the world. They wavered over the rocky surfaces of the cave, light green and jerky. They rolled heavily over the beast in a dozen shades of green. They covered him, too, in various tints of green. And at his neck, his stone glowed of a blue-green light.

  He inhaled deeply and let the tranquility and gentleness of the true world wash over him. He did not feel the pull of the Night anymore and only a faint, slightly sickening aftertaste remained.

  For the first time, he was amongst the flames without being in danger and it felt foreign and strange. He slowly raised a hand and the flames followed. He wiggled his fingers and the flames moved in cadence like a second skin.

  “The true world,” he thought. “The flames are me as I am the flames. Many as one.”

  He pushed himself off the ground and stepped up to the WorldMight. Now he could speak the Hak-Ti. But what would he say? There was no word so any word would do. Calling the WorldMight by his name seemed appropriate.

  “Ca-ho. Nit,” he called out. “Wake up!”

  The prince heard himself speak. The sound reverberated in his skull and played against his eardrums as it normally did, but his words were also bits of flames, shavings of light brushed from the tip of the darker flames that covered him. They spread around him in glittering ripples, slowly fading as they moved away from him. Some of the shards floated to the WorldMight and were absorbed by its coat of flames. For a split seco
nd the darker flames covering the beast twitched and almost stilled, but before it really came to be they resumed their wavering alongside their flickering brethren.

  The light coming from the prince’s stone darkened and a twinge of fear and panic started rising in his chest. But before he could fully acknowledge the blooming emotions, the beast drew a slow breath. The long inhalation rattled in its insides like a lazy fall breeze coursing through dead leaves. Under its coat of flames, the WorldMight’s scaly eyelids retracted mechanically upward and revealed golden fist-sized orbs that seemed to peer beyond what was in front of them. In a thick cloud of dust the WorldMight rose. The chamber creaked and snapped. Stones fell around the beast in a loud shower and the walls of the chamber thundered. The beast towered above the prince; a flame-covered shadow with lifeless eyes that peered at him through the dust. The prince’s oil lamp stretched ominous grainy shadows around the beast.

  The WorldMight parted its jaws, revealing rows of dark fangs that glimmered threateningly in its huge mouth.

  “You woke me,” it said, its voice deep and metallic.

  And as it spoke, morsels of flame also left its green coat. They rode invisible currents and radiated in a circle toward the prince. When they reached him, his own flames absorbed them and at once the prince knew of the beast’s surprise and slight annoyance at being torn from its slumber. The flames also conveyed to him how long the beast had been asleep and that knowledge alone was bewildering.

  “Why?” it asked with another terribly slow breath and another arc of lingering light.

  “My love,” the prince said. “She is trapped in your dreams. Free her!”

  The WorldMight absorbed the slow bits of flames from the prince, but it did not reply right away. For a while it swung its enormous head from side to side.

  “Love?” he eventually said in a burst of warm air.