The Burden of Memory

by Welcome Cole

Nothing happened.

  The mage remained hunched over the table and its array of wretched devices, his morbid eyes twisted nearly forward as they focused on the tools before him. The demon remained standing behind him, still posed with one arm out and palm to the ceiling, still holding the staff erect on his other side.

  The voices began, exactly as they would at the crystal cave ten thousand years from now when he’d find the Caeyllth Blade. They arose like the whispers of a dream, at first so low he wasn’t even sure he heard them at all. But within moments, their volume swelled. Yet, as they grew in numbers and intensity, the differences between these voices and those wondrous voices he heard in the crystal cave became absolutely clear. These voices weren’t murmuring. They weren’t chanting some lost prayer to gods that no longer existed. They weren’t calming or entrancing. These voices were ghastly!

  The sound exploded through the chamber. The cries were desperate and unrelenting, the sound of a million souls desperately begging for forgiveness or cursing their brethren or threatening their lessers or shaming their children. They were the cries of sinners, the cries of the damned, the cries of the vilest, the most aberrant, the most wicked of his kind. They burrowed through his mind like insects. They coursed through his blood and lapped against the walls of his skull. They shrieked at him from the inside out!

  He threw his hands to his ears and dug his fingers into his head. The voices clawed through his gut. They were horrid and unbearable! So much hate! So much regret! So much terror! It was more than he could bear! His legs faded away beneath him. He was going to fall.

  Silence.

  He opened his eyes.

  His hands trembled. He knotted them into obedience. He thought forward to that distant cave where this whole nightmare would be born, and he felt strangely embarrassed for having submitted to the same trick twice.

  Gael’vra raised the bubbling orange vial up before him and chanted softly. The words starkly contrasted the crying pleads of those wretched souls from a heartbeat ago. These words were calm and direct and singular of purpose. The fiery glow of the Fire Caeyls so hideously sewn into his skin intensified in tandem with the volume of his voice. Wispy yellow vapors seeped from beneath his hood. The unearthly gas was heavier than air, flowing down across his shoulders and over his chest and sleeves. It dripped along his hands and fingers and onto the table where it pooled against the stone like liquid smoke. Gael’vra’s face was lost now, veiled beneath the morbid light burning from his flesh.

  Still chanting, still steadying himself against the table’s edge, Gael’vra slowly turned to face Graezon. He held the vial in his free hand.

  Graezon offered a half bow, and then, with arm still outstretched and the staff held upright, turned to face the semi-circle of cloaked wyrlaerds waiting behind him. The demon then moved the staff directly before it with the lens facing the other eight. It lowered its head before the staff and slowly pressed his brow into the wooden staff.

  Prave took Beam’s arm and pulled him closer. “Watch closely, Be’ahm. This memory is most important.”

  “Like I’m going to take a stroll instead? What else would I do?”

  Gael’vra raised the vial so that it was at the same level as the Fire Caeyl lens beyond Graezon. His chanting grew more intense as his queer eyes studied the bubbling liquid held reverently before him. Graezon’s unnatural voice soon joined his chanting, though the wyrlaerd kept its head pressed into the staff. The glow of the staff’s Fire Caeyl swelled in concert with the demon’s fervor, growing more brilliant as the creature’s voice rose. Soon the conjoined voices of the mage and the wyrlaerd filled the room.

  Moments later, the light in the staff’s lens exploded!

  A streak of sizzling yellow fire ripped out from the caeyl lens. It arced through space like controlled lightning and pierced the chest of the first demon on the left. Beam saw the details of their tarry features light up within the demon’s deep hood. He felt the shock seizing the monster as the energy seized it. An instant later, a second bolt of yellow light erupted from the creature, arcing violently into the next demon, who seized in agony with it arrival. The process immediately repeated as the light shot from one demon to the next. And as Beam watched, he realized they hadn’t expected this. This was not part of the plan, and they were collectively terrified for it.

  When the light had taken them all, the first demon, stiffened harshly. It groaned something inhuman. As it did, a streak of yellow light erupted from its eyes. This light sizzled across the space between it and Graezon, striking the staff’s Fire Caeyl like a fish on a line.

  Another demon further down the line cursed and stiffened, then cried out, “Traitor!” before its own light erupted from its eyes and seized the staff’s caeyl. In a matter of seconds, all the eight demons in that line were tethered to the staff, connected by ropes of caeyl fire like a dance of ancient sibyls around a killing pole.

  Gael’vra’s chanting stopped.

  The chamber fell silent, save for the peculiar humming of the burning caeyl light tying the demons to the staff, and the soft wheezing of Gael’vra’s breath. Still bracing himself on the table, Gael’vra turned slowly back toward the pit. He lowered the bubbling vial and studied it for a moment before the light of the unnatural yellow flames. Then, without ceremony, he raised it and drank the contents down.

  The vial landed on the table in an explosion of glass. Gael’vra fell forward onto his hands, mindless of the glass shards littering the tabletop. The caeyl lens in the staff flared blindingly behind him, then a thick stream of light burst from it, piercing Gael’vra’s head like a spear. An instant later, the light erupted from his eyes and mouth and leapt to the fire pit beyond so that he and the staff and the pit and the demons were all coupled as one by the singing caeyl energy.

  Gael’vra’s back seized, twisting him upright fiercely enough to snap his spine. The yellow light swelled around him like a gaseous fist. It surrounded him, smothered him. His spine wrenched again and again, his bones fracturing sickeningly. His face twisted horribly toward the fleshy ceiling, his lizard eyes leveled stiffly out from his head and his arms heaved out to his sides.

  Then, as abruptly as it had arrived, the eerie light tethering the actors in this macabre scene together simply died. The eight wyrlaerds of the semi-circle collapsed where they stood. Gael’vra fell forward onto the table. Glass vials and oil burners crashed to the stone floor around him. Flames of burning oil licked up the table’s legs.

  For a moment, he only hunched there, braced against the stone table, shaking and groaning terribly. Graezon rushed in to help him, but he cursed the demon back.

  Gael’vra slowly pushed himself taller. His face and hands looked on fire, though Beam could see they simply radiated the unnatural flames of the Fire Caeyls. The stench of sulfur and hot tar smothered the air. He held his bleeding hands out before him and cried out. He beat his fists against the table and shrieked. Glass shards danced away into the darkness. He pounded the table again and again before flipping it into the pit where it erupted in yellow flames.

  “It failed!” he bellowed, “All these years! These centuries! All my experiments! All for nothing! All for failure! Failure! Failure!”

  He threw back his hood and wheeled around toward Graezon. Beam fought back a rush of revulsion at the sight. His head was too large by half. His skull was misshapen and bore the remnants of deformed faces and teeth. Misplaced eyes peered out from between the knots of thick silver braids. Ill-formed lips and tongues mouthed silent words from the side of his neck.

  “You!” Gael’vra bellowed at Graezon, “This is your fault! You did this! You’re a traitor! You wanted me to fail! You sabotaged my efforts!”

  Graezon threw its metal-gloved hands up as it backed defensively away. The staff hit the floor with a punctuating crack. “No, Sire,” it said quickly, “No, I would never—”

  “You sabotaged me!” Gael’vra yelled, as he staggered toward the demon, “You feared I’d be more powerful
than you. You wanted me to fail! You wanted—”

  Gael’vra froze at mid-step. His breath locked in his chest. He held up his bleeding hands and twisted his morbidly extended tentacle eyes toward them. Yellow flames danced from his fingers. Flames erupted from his face and head. In the span of a breath, the light radiating from beneath his skin fully consumed him. The details of his person were lost beneath ferocious yellow flames.

  Screaming, he staggered back toward the pit. He groped at his massive head and pawed his skull. His screams were muffled, as if issued through a mouthful of sand. His face wrenched violently toward the ceiling. His spine again seized. Bones cracked sickeningly. Flames poured from his gaping mouth as he drowned in the caeyl fire. Eventually, he simply collapsed.

  Beam remembered to breathe. He looked at the body piled on the stone before him. He looked at Prave. He wanted to ask if Gael’vra was dead, but was too terrified of the answer to pursue it.

  Then he saw the truth! Where the man had been standing just heartbeats ago hovered a ghostly image, like the memory of a man cast from the viscous yellow vapors emitted by the caeyl pit. The gasses formed the spectral image of Paex Gael’vra, though his legs faded to nothing just short of the floor.

  Beam expected to see the image simply wash away, like clouds of breath dispersing into the air on a winter’s day. But it didn’t dissipate. To his horror, it began to move. It held its smoky, indistinct hands out before its ghostly face, turning them from top to bottom as if examining them. The image drifted tentatively forward, slowly easing closer to the wyrlaerd, Graezon. The specter’s motion was fluid, but uncertain. And as it moved, it left a foggy trail of itself that quickly evaporated behind it.

  My gods, the thing that was Gael’vra hissed, Look at me! Look at what’s happened to me!

  Beam flinched at the sensation of the monster’s words. They’d formed directly in his mind.

  The ghostly creature looked down at itself. It turned a slow, contemplative circle, then drifted back toward the pit as the fading yellow memory trail of itself dissolved in its wake.

  It worked, he whispered into Beam’s head, It worked perfectly! Look at me! I am there!

  “Prave?” Beam whispered, “What the hell is this?”

  “Silence, Be’ahm! Attend to the moment.”

  The spectral creature floated to the edge of the caeyl pit. For several moments it stood there, studying the light of the Fire Caeyls. Then it turned like flowing gas to face Beam. The memory of its face seemed to focus in on him as if it shared his timescape, as if it somehow knew he was there. A vaporous arm rose up into the space between them and pointed directly at him.

  I see you, the voice whispered in Beam’s mind, I see you perfectly. I know when you’re from. I know what you’re doing. But you are too late, aren’t you? I’m a god now. You cannot stop me, not now, not ever again. You’re too late! You’re—”

  A great flare of light erupted from the caeyl pit, flowing up over the ceiling like poured lava. In the same instant, serpentine fingers of yellow fire snaked over the lip of the pit, slipping forward along the floor toward the specter. They twisted up into its legs, merging into its torso like clouds colliding. Gael’vra twisted against it, screeching as he resisted the fire’s ingestion of him.

  No! His thoughts raged in Beam’s mind, No! Do not do this! You can’t do this! I won’t—

  But it was too late. As the pit flames completely consumed his ghostly form, as he and the caeyl flames melded into a single entity, his words died, replaced by a low, throaty groan that quickly crested into a horrid scream.

  The sound raked Beam’s mind as physically as the tines of a pitchfork dragged down a wall of rock. It crushed down on him like a river of rock. It was terrifying and unbearable and utterly inescapable. Yet, just as he was certain the horror of it was going to kill him, the flaming tentacles abruptly withdrew back into the Fire Caeyl pit, the blinding light faded, and Gael’vra was gone.

  Graezon collapsed in a metallic heap behind them. The stench of tar again smothered the air as the bubbling black fluid pooled around the wyrlaerd’s fallen armor.

  Beam doubled forward with hands on knees and tried to breathe. As he gulped for air, he peered over at Prave, but the mage was already walking away. And before Beam could get his breath back or ask him what in the bloody hell had happened, they were gone.

  ∞

  “Do you know where we are, Be’ahm?”

  More darkness. Beam peered through the fog of confusion, but couldn’t make sense of the gloom. A million pinholes of light spattered the black void above him. Slowly, his orientation returned to him. It was night. It smelled like a forest.

  He realized with a start that they were in the air a dozen yards above a forest floor. He seized the coarse bark of the great trunk beside him. They stood on a huge branch in the crown of an enormous tree.

  “Damn me, Prave! A little warning! Please! We’re twenty feet up in the air.”

  “Look there.” Prave pointed toward the ground below.

  Two cloaked figures stood in the nighttime shadows below them. They faced each other a pace apart. Several Vaemysh warriors gathered in a stiff circle around them.

  “This is the end of your journey,” Prave said.

  “The end?” Beam was surprised to find more pain than joy in the words, though it made absolutely no sense. It was great news, right? It meant he’d finally be freed from this drudgery, didn’t it? And yet… the thought of leaving Prave made him want to lie down on the floor. He couldn’t explain it, but there it was. This was the end, and he hated the thought of it.

  Prave again gestured toward the figures below them. “There stands your purpose, right down there. It is directly below you in the midnight gloom. That is your destiny, my dearest boy. It’s been waiting there for you over the course of many lifetimes.”

  Beam studied the congregation below. The figures stood as still as death. They looked frozen in place, though he knew it wasn’t the truth at all. It was just a stall in the dreamscape, a slight pause in the flow of time. It was a trick Prave used often. It meant Prave was preparing him for the lesson, and he had never felt so thrilled or more terrified to receive it.

  “I don’t understand,” he whispered, “I see some warriors? A couple soldiers? What is this?”

  “Look past the mundane. The importance runs far deeper than the simplicity implied by the scene. You would do well to prepare yourself for it.”

  Beam didn’t much like the sound of that. Then again, Prave’s preludes to his lessons, when offered, were rarely cheering.

  Before he could resist, he felt an all too familiar falling sensation and a pang of nausea. They rematerialized on the ground beneath the tree.

  He followed Prave toward the cloaked figures. Something seemed off down here. The world seemed strangely amiss, simultaneously familiar and utterly foreign. It was dark, though the shadows felt queerly physical rather than visual. The sky beyond the great tree’s canopy teemed with stars and a waning moon. The scent of forest life was rich and intoxicating. It was distinctly different from any other scenario Prave had exposed him to over the past years in the caeylsphere.

  The truth hit him like a kick in the head. It felt so unnatural because they were no longer in the caeylsphere. He didn’t know how he knew it, but this was the real world around them, the mortal world, the world of his timescape. He was back.

  As he and Prave slowly approached the group, normal time rushed back in. The congregation before him breathed with life, though the Vaemyn remained standing in silence. The cloaked figures stood facing each other, talking softly between themselves. They were both extremely tall, nearly as tall as Baeldons, though not as boxy in form.

  The taller of the pair looked down at Beam. Startled by the move, he quickly freed his sword, thrusting the business end up into the soldier’s face. But the man didn’t react. And as he watched, Beam understood that the creature wasn’t looking at him at all, but was only facing him.

/>   Beam lowered his sword, but didn’t sheathe it. “What is this?” he whispered to Prave, “Why are we here? Why are they here? It feels different. I don’t like it.”

  “You are too quick to spook. You are correct that we’re back in your mortal timescape, but they still cannot see you. We lurk behind the veils of their awareness.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Look at these armored figures, Be’ahm. They are housed in vessels of tar, which makes them subject to natural law, at least to a point.”

  “Wyrlaerds.”

  “Ay’a. Demons.”

  Beam looked at the Vaemysh warriors forming a circle around the demons. Though Prave had pushed them back into the natural timescape, the warriors remained nearly still as stone.

  “There’s something strange about this. What’s wrong with them?”

  “No one is home in those bodies. These men are hacks.”

  “Hacks? You’re saying they’re possessed?”

  “I’m saying they are nothing.”

  “Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Forget them, Be’ahm. They are unimportant.”

  “Unimportant? They’re men, for gods’ sakes!”

  “They are lost. They are infected. They are beyond hope.”

  “For the love of Calina. These are your own people. How can you just dismiss them?”

  “They were my people. Now only you are my people.”

  Beam opened his mouth to retort, but thought better of it. Something about this vision felt too important. For once in his miserable life, he needed to resist his baser impulses. He needed to pay attention.

  “Attend to the taller wyrlaerd standing before you,” Prave said softly, “Look at it very closely. Look into its eyes.”

  Beam looked up at the demon. He pressed his essence in deeper, pushed past the demon’s lustrous blue cloak and into the details of the creature hidden beneath it. He was startled to find that Prave was absolutely right. This demon was conspicuously different from all the others he’d seen, both in the real world and in the memories of Prave’s dreamscape.