The Burden of Memory

by Welcome Cole

  “We’re back in the laboratory,” he said to Prave, “You said we were watching Faenthol burn six hundred years after the God Caeyl. When are we now?”

  “No more than a handful of days past that event. Faenthol continues burning far to the north. It will continue to burn for days to come. This first Divinic War has found its end, but the destruction spread across this earth by Paex Gael’vra and his ilk will take centuries to recover from. The infrastructure has been decimated. All the great libraries in all the royal cities have all been laid waste. This war has reversed hundreds of years of progress and scientific advancement. It has sent the people of this world back to a more germinal time.”

  Beam walked around the tables fingering the broken spheres of glass and tarnished metal tools. “What happened to Gael’vra? Where are his dolls?”

  “It’s been long since he moved beyond those primitive experiments. You’ll find his new research more interesting, more unsettling, and much more familiar.”

  Before Beam managed a response, the darkness shifted. He felt a rush of pins and needles seize him. He reflexively braced himself for the uneasiness about to be delivered.

  When he opened his eyes again he found himself standing in a wide circular room that he somehow knew lay deeper in the mountain, far below the laboratory they’d just stood in. This new chamber was perfectly round and hundreds of feet wide with a low, colorless ceiling that left him feeling as if he were standing in a great hatbox. A huge circular pit filled the center of the room. It emitted a thick, nearly palpable yellow light that danced up from it like dull flames. The dense, tenacious vapors sifted up from the light and pooled across the low ceiling where tendrils trickled away along the ceiling’s surface for several yards before simply extinguishing in the shadows.

  Beam’s skin prickled as he walked up to the rim of the glowing pit. No railing separated it from the rest of the chamber. As he moved closer, he felt his hair rise from his head. It reminded him of his first encounter with Chance and the battle with the wyrlaerd. Those odd energies had caused a similar reaction.

  The light boiling inside the pit was so intense he couldn’t look at it directly. It radiated a kind of warmth that wasn’t truly heat, but something simultaneously less tangible and more visceral, like being smothered in the stinging sparks created when wearing thick wool. The pit was a few dozen feet deep and filled with tons of jagged yellow crystals, some the size of wagons. They burned as yellow and fierce as a midsummer sun.

  “Fire Caeyls,” he whispered as he studied the light between splayed fingers, “Where the hell is this place?”

  “In your timescape this will be called Eo Naehg Lek.”

  Beam thought about that. Though the name was delivered in Vaemysh, he understood it perfectly. “Crow’s Ghost Keep,” he whispered, “This is where Prae’s castle will eventually be built. How do I know that?”

  “Because you are remembering.”

  Beam looked about the dark chamber with its meaty red walls polished so perfectly that he could see their images looking back at them from within it. He thought about Prae’s keep in the southern forest, thought of the magical door in the midst of the cliff face that had led them to this place.

  “Wait,” he said, looking at Prave, “Prae’s keep stands on a highland area just beyond the southern forest. It’s on a respectable hill, yeah, but it’s sure as hell not on any mountain.”

  “The world changes,” Prave said without looking at him, “The Water Caeyl Mages of these times were powerful indeed. However, no matter the depth or scope of their power, they could not create matter. They could only transform it.”

  Beam looked up into the thick ropes of yellow vapors swirling across the low ceiling directly above the great pit. The vapors snaked across the rock as if alive, like morbid tentacles of light feeling their ways to freedom. Images flamed through the vapors, images of scowling faces, disapproving eyes, screaming mouths and groping hands, images that twisted grotesquely before melting back into the ropes of light. He heard the distant memories of their voices and he felt their screams.

  “Chance’s stories,” he whispered as he watched the macabre spectacle, “The ones about Ja’an and the Divinic Wars. They’re all true, aren’t they?”

  “Why do you ask confirmation of what you already know as truth?”

  “It began here, didn’t it?”

  “Your Water Caeyl Mage, your Chance, believes the Divinic War of his time was the only event of such tragedy. What he doesn’t know is that horrible event, that war waged an epoch before his time, was only the most recent in a series of them.”

  “A series?”

  “The demon wars were many and spread over ten thousands years.”

  Images materialized in Beam’s mind, images he immediately recognized as memories, Prave’s memories rising up from their slumber to march across the landscape of his mind. They arrived gently, but insistently. Images of wars and demons, of city-states rising and falling and rising again, of civilized people cast back into older times, times of antiquity and barbarity.

  “There were five others before it,” he whispered as the memories seeped into his awareness, “I can see them now. The first ended with the burning of Faenthol to the north. Tens of thousands died in that war. Gael’vra and his wyrlaerds led it. Gael’vra was the first. He was the first of the…”

  Something pulsed in his head. He heard himself groan. The images grew grimmer as they stormed through his head. He saw the death and destruction of great cities, saw scores of thousands of innocents dying, saw vast fires covering whole nations, saw armies of demonically possessed corpses laying waste to the countryside. He heard the cries of the innocents and felt the raw grief of so much death, of so much chaos and misery and destruction. Disease ravaged the people long after the fires died out and the demons were vanquished. The memories rushed in too fast, too powerfully. They burned through his mind with raging determination, like a barrage of punches that can’t be evaded but only endured.

  “It’s all right, Be’ahm. Do not attempt to resist them. They are your memories, and they will not be shunned.”

  Beam squeezed his eyes shut and struggled to breathe. His heart pulsed in his ears. The memories were too big, too tangible, too horrid. There wasn’t room in his head for them all. He couldn’t contain them. The pressure was unbearable!

  “Let them come to you. Let them speak to you. This is why you were born.”

  Beam threw his hands to his skull and fought back against the pressure swelling in his head. He staggered away from the wall and into the darkness at the periphery of the round room. He remembered the other wars. He remembered the names of the insane men who’d brought the faces of the Wyr to this world, who’d watched it burn with such hatred and thrill, time and time again. He remembered the names of the children littering the streets, their bodies reduced to twisted, burned shells, and he knew Prave was right. Prave was absolutely right. He was remembering! He was remembering everything!

  He fell back against the wall as his knees threatened to abandon him. He pulled his sword from its scabbard and held the God Caeyl against his brow. Its healing energy surged through his face and neck, and down into his chest and limbs, and with that reassuring warmth he summoned the calming energy he needed. He refused to submit to his fears. It was only a bloody dream!

  “It’s no dream, Be’ahm.”

  He opened his eyes. His head ached. He pushed the wet hair back from his face and drew a stuttering breath. He willed himself to calm as he watched Prave making his way around the wretched pit, moving slowly, stiffly, and with the deliberation of an old man.

  “Where… where are you going?”

  “I’ve already told you,” Prave said without stopping, without even looking back, “It’s time you witnessed the truth. This is the beginning of the end.”

  Beam swiped his face and looked at his wet palm. His heart kicked at his chest as if trying to escape this horror without him. But what he knew, and what hi
s heart obviously did not, was that there was no escape. There was only endurance. The only way to survive this nightmare was to outlast it. He had to attend to the lessons presented, no matter how unspeakable the images, no matter how painful the memories. He had to endure them. He had to embrace them or be sentenced to eternity in this hell.

  With that, he forced himself to stand upright. Then he followed Prave.

  As they made their way around the great curve of the caeyl pit, he heard voices. He stopped and listened. On the far side of the pit, directly across from them, stood eight cloaked figures. They were huge in stature, easily eight feet. Their faces were shrouded within deep, colorless cowls that draped their shoulders and flowed to the floor. They faced the caeyl fire in an orderly semicircle a dozen feet back from the pit. They chanted collectively, murmuring a monotonous cadence, speaking words Beam couldn’t make out.

  A long, narrow table stood out before them at the very edge of the flaming caeyl pit. As he studied the table, a solitary man materialized before it, taking form slowly, gradually, as if the memories arrived even as Beam watched.

  He dragged a hand over his mouth, exhaled slowly, then walked closer. The table was another stone workbench of sorts, adorned with vessels of experimentation similar to the original tables from his first visit in the great room far above them. The surface was crowded with squat metal oil burners adorned with boiling vials of glowing liquids. Glass jars of glittering powders lined the back edge of the table. The only difference, aside from the increased sophistication of the tools, was the half dozen figurines of gods and demons and saintly figures scattered throughout them.

  The man standing before this worktable was a giant. He worked with his back to the semicircle, ambitiously grinding some unnamed concoction with a huge mortar and pestle.

  The memory of a ninth figure abruptly materialized from the shadows two paces behind the man and well ahead of the others. This one looked exactly like the other eight forming the semicircle behind him, very tall and with features deeply cloaked within his colorless hood.

  “Attend to the man,” Prave whispered behind him, “Disregard the demons.”

  Beam looked back to the table. Despite the coarse hood half covering the grinding man’s face, he remembered that this was Paex Gael’vra. The man easily stood a full head taller than the giants surrounding him, and his shoulders were wide as a saloon door. He was even larger than he’d been the last time they’d visited the upper cavern. How long ago had that been? Two hundred years? Three? They’d shifted through time so frequently in this dream, he no longer had any standards to measure time against.

  Gael’vra’s wide-set eyes protruded sickeningly from the sides of his head, displacing even his hood. Thick flesh wrapped the orbs so that they looked like the conical eyes of a lizard. A few inches long, the fleshy sheaths ended in bubbles with yellowish, veiny sclera that appeared devoid of iris or pupil. The hideous eyes moved independently of each other, tracking the man’s attention and flickering demonically in the bilish light of the caeyl pit.

  A clutch of long tendrils erupted from the man’s chin, moving as if alive, creeping snake-like along his chest and up around his neck. Thick shocks of white hair flowed out from under his hood to spill down over his massive shoulders.

  “He’s over seven hundred years old now,” Prave whispered to Beam, “He’s mutated beyond any Faen resemblance to his original self. The caeyl energy won’t keep him alive much longer. He’s done all he can with it. He knows he’s dying and is most dissatisfied for it.”

  Beam considered the frail, aged Prave hunched before him. The man’s face was gaunt and drawn, though webbed with complex creases. His hair was white and thinning. The image was heart wrenching and unbearable. He wanted to do something for the man, wanted to save him, to restore his lost vitality. Yet, even as the thoughts blossomed, he knew it was a fruitless wish. Despite his own superhuman efforts to deny it, his friend and mentor had been right all along; Prave wasn’t real. He was nothing more than a memory, the image of a man who’d he passed beyond these mortal plains long ago.

  This unsolicited grief seized him violently. He shuddered as he resisted. He told himself there was no time to grieve. He could only honor Prave’s memory by being the man he was born to be. By never again being the fool he’d been. He was here to learn. He’d no longer offend Prave’s memory by avoiding his duty. So he straightened himself. He turned away from the memory, and he walked carefully toward the table.

  He stopped in the narrow space behind the table, directly between it and the flaming pit. The unreal heat of the caeyl pit scaled his back, but he forced the sensation away. It’s just a memory, he told himself. Instead, he focused on the Fire Caeyl Mage standing across the table from him.

  The man’s hideous face shimmered peculiarly within that hood, as if his skin absorbed the glow of the pit and reflected it back. But on closer inspection, Beam realized that wasn’t the case at all. The light from the pit wasn’t the source of the man’s illumination. The vile truth was the yellow light came from within the man’s hood, from beneath his skin. The flesh of his forehead, his cheeks, his jaw line, even his neck were lined in thick, twisted welts radiating their own yellow fire. Gael’vra had sewn Fire Caeyl shards into his flesh, into every exposed surface. Even his knuckles, fingers, and wrists bore the twisted, radiating lumps.

  “He’s trying to push the Bloodlink,” Beam said as he watched the man work, “Isn’t he? He’s trying make it—”

  “Silence!” Prave said suddenly, “Just watch now.”

  Gael’vra poured a stream of brilliant red powder from the mortar into a bulbous glass container that was already half filled with simmering yellow fluid. Beam knew without asking that the mage was again melding the energies of the Blood and Fire Caeyl energies. But this time he added a few drops of a silvery fluid from a round glass flask bubbling on one of the burners. Beam remembered that this was liquefied God Caeyl dust. And as he watched the monster work, he realized this was no experiment. The dark mage had long since mastered this procedure. This time it was a ceremony.

  “This will kill you,” the hooded figure standing immediately behind Gael’vra said in a deep, gravelly voice, “I know you understand that. And yet you insist on proceeding. How can the results possibly be worth such risk?”

  Beam found the man’s voice both uncomfortable and uncomfortably familiar. He’d heard it before. Or, at least, one exactly like it. Two dim yellow lights glowed from deep within his shadowy hood. He was clad in an odd armor that looked too tight by miles. As he probed this creature, Beam caught the scent of hot tar.

  “A wyrlaerd,” he remembered. He looked at the other eight standing in the semi-circle behind it. “They’re all wyrlaerds.”

  The demon stepped up closer behind Gael’vra. The movement created an odd hissing sound. Beam saw that the armor was composed of a series of smooth, interlocking plates that glided mechanically across its chest, abdomen, and legs as it moved. In its metallic gloved hand it held a tall, slender staff that stood a foot taller than itself. The staff was made of interlaced wood stems terminating in two snakes’ heads mutually gripping in their mouths a round, convex Fire Caeyl.

  “That staff,” Beam whispered, “The snakes. It’s similar to my sword.”

  “Ay’a,” Prave said, “Its symbology was born with the Caeyl Mages.”

  “And the armor,” he said, though he’d already remembered the answer, “It’s sealed, isn’t it? Made to contain the tar. It predates mudsteel.”

  Prave nodded. “Much as water channels their consciousness, tar is a natural vessel for their essence. No other substance on Calevia allows so close an integration of the Wyr and mortal realms.”

  The demon slipped a hand up over the Fire Caeyl Mage’s shoulder. The movement seemed odd, almost personal, as if the two were brothers rather than mortal and demon. It eased its head in close to the mage’s cowl, whispering, “My Lord, please. I beg you, think about this. The risk is unnecessary.
We aren’t yet defeated. We can still overpower the white caeyl mage. If you die drinking the—”

  Gael’vra wheeled on the demon. A flare of light exploded from his hand. The demon staggered backward, nearly falling. For a moment, Gael’vra only stood there, glaring at the demon. Beam noted that even in his rage he still gripped the edge of the table as if he might collapse without it.

  “I’m dying anyway,” he said, struggling to breathe, “This is… my only hope of… of continuing my work. What good am I to you or… or to anyone else if I’m dead?”

  The demon said nothing, but only hunched before him with the cane leaning at its side and its head lowered submissively.

  “Do not get in my way, Graezon. Do you understand me? I won’t tol… tolerate your interference. Not now. Not when I’m so close.”

  Beam looked over at Prave. “Graezon,” he whispered, “The demon was here from the very beginning.”

  “By your will, sire,” the demon said with its head bowed.

  The dark mage studied the beast a moment longer, then turned back to the table. He leaned into the stone surface with both hands, and there he paused. He seemed to be regrouping, steadying himself, fighting to collect enough air to continue.

  After several minutes, he pushed upright again. He pulled the bubbling vial of brilliant silvery orange fluid closer to him. He laid his hands flat on either side of it and bowed his head. “It’s time,” he whispered with great effort, “Every… everything is ready. Begin now.”

  The demon behind him didn’t move. It looked strangely uneasy.

  Gael’vra slapped the table and yelled back at it, “I said begin!”

  Graezon wavered as if uncertain it should comply. But then it submitted with a single nod. It raised the staff with the Fire Caeyl prism at its head and stood it out at arm’s length on his right. Then it slowly raised its left arm out to the other side with the metal-covered palm to the ceiling.

  Beam braced himself for what was certain to be another horrifying encounter.