by Giles Carwyn
“Arefaine, this is wasting precious time-”
“I’m going to chop them,” she repeated firmly, and set to work. Her Floani-filled arms hacked through the fibrous roots quickly and efficiently, and a few minutes later, she was able to yank the door a few inches farther open.
Climbing up the doors, she turned sideways and wriggled through the narrow gap. She clambered over the mass of roots into the huge, circular room. The sight took her breath away. The tower was completely hollow, rising above her in one massive chamber as far as she could see. A giant column of dirt-encrusted, flaking roots filled almost the entire space, twisting and intertwining as they rose into the darkness overhead. They looked like horrific serpents frozen in a desperate battle. She gazed upward into the gloomy dark, but could not see the end of it. A silver staircase spiraled along the outer wall, skirting the serpentine cluster of roots. The walls were lined with row after row of empty alcoves rising up into the darkness above.
She could definitely feel what her father had described. This was a place of power. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and her magic was close at hand, hovering around her like a dense cloud. Her senses were fantastically acute. The earthy smell of soil permeated the tower, and while she felt she could have heard an ant moving, the tower was utterly silent. Unnaturally silent.
She crawled over the sprawling roots, their rough bark scraping her knees and palms. Her passage was slow, almost reverent. Her foot slipped between the huge roots, and she winced at the inappropriate noise. She felt like a child sneaking into the emperor’s silent chambers, craving his welcome even as she feared his wrath.
She reached the stairway and left the shifting roots to stand on solid stone.
Her foot scuffed one of the steps, sending up a gout of dust that revealed a mirror shine underneath. She tapped it with her toe. It sounded and felt like stone, but looked like silver.
“This place is incredible,” she murmured.
“Of course,” her father said, reappearing beside her. “That was what Efften strove to be, something beyond the normal world.”
Arefaine turned to one of the myriad alcoves. They were small, barely large enough to hold a bowl of fruit. She thought they were empty, but each held a small pile of glass shards under a thick layer of dust. She stopped and picked up one of the fragments.
No. Not glass. Crystal.
She rubbed it between her fingers, feeling the sharpness of its edges after all this time. These are the shattered containment crystals, she thought to herself. She looked upward at the warren of alcoves. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
Her head swimming in amazement, she continued up the stairs. Clouds of fine dust swirled around her feet with every step as she climbed. Her whole body vibrated with energy. As the light from the doors below began to fade, she noticed that a ghostly light illuminated the tower from within. She looked for the source, but could not find it.
“What is making the light?” she asked.
“Ah,” her father said. “I never did fully understand it. Rellana was the engineer. She said something about tiny glass rods carrying sunlight through the blocks of silver. But the tower glows at night as well. So there must be something else to it, yes?”
Arefaine brushed her hand across the luminous silver walls, feeling giddy in this highly charged place. Her eyes followed the pillar of roots. Farther up, they choked off the entire width of the tapering tower, but she thought she saw a light in the distance.
“That is the top?” she asked, squinting.
“Yes, we are almost there and…” He trailed off.
She stopped climbing, and looked at him. “What is it?” Her hypersensitive ears heard something. A faint click. She looked around, but all she could see was the convoluted roots and glowing silver walls with their empty alcoves.
“Arefaine, before we reach the top, I must warn you about something.”
A cold feeling spread over her scalp. She suddenly felt very exposed and pulled her magic close to herself.
“What?” she asked.
“I know it is nothing more than an old man’s vanity, but the years have not been kind to me, my child. I am embarrassed to have you see the state into which I have fallen.”
She paused. “What do you mean?”
“I have not eaten in three centuries. I have not had a drink or felt a human touch in all that time. And it is difficult when you are so lovely to know that I have become so foul.”
Arefaine’s taut muscles relaxed, and she let out a breath. She gave him a reproving smile. “Father, I love you. I don’t care what you look like.”
He smiled. “Of course you don’t. As I said, it is an old man’s folly.” He kissed her hand with his ghostly lips. “I will leave you now. When next I see you, I want it to be with my own eyes.” His apparition disappeared, leaving her alone in the glowing tower.
Tapping the energy all around her, Arefaine suffused herself with power and continued up the stairs, around and around. The tower narrowed, and the dangling roots soon blocked her way. She had to turn sideways, tearing her way past the crusty vegetation until she could see daylight shining through the matted vegetation. Wriggling into the gap, she fought her way upward until she emerged through a muddy little fissure between two enormous gnarled roots. The smell of soil and dust mixed with a heady fragrance of flowers.
“It’s so beautiful,” she murmured, crawling out of the hole onto a swath of vibrant green grass. Every imaginable flower bloomed in abundance, creating brilliant splashes of color against the ever-present green of the leaves and ferns. Daffodils, roses, tulips, snapdragons, sunflowers, and flowers for which she had no names flourished around her and rose up the silver terraces of the garden set within a giant bowl.
She took a deep breath as she turned, taking in the visual feast, overcome by the abundance of life. There had been many beautiful gardens in Ohohhom, but nothing to compare with this.
Her joy slowly evaporated as her gaze fell upon the gnarled gray tree behind her. It squatted in the middle of the garden, a slash of dark brown against the fanfare of color. It was easily twenty feet in diameter and only half again as tall as it was wide, making it hunch like some angry giant. Its spiny branches grew sideways from the fat trunk, as though trying to protect it with a wall of spears. The sallow leaves only grew from branches on one side of the trunk.
This was the source of that horrible root structure she had climbed through. She shivered, walking slowly around the massive trunk. The ground was bumpy and uneven, as if the tree had suddenly burst through the ground in one massive eruption. Her gaze flicked from the sickly bark to the branches, which reminded her more of the spines of a corrupted beast than the limbs of a tree. She expected them to reach out and grab her, and she cycled her breath through her body, ready to call upon her magic.
“Come around to the other side, my child,” a thin, creaky voice said, seeming to descend from the branches. “Let me see you.”
She tensed, looking up, but could not find the speaker. Cautiously, she stepped over the thick roots and worked her way around to the dead side of the tree.
“Father?” she called. She kept looking for a cage of some kind. Was it up in the branches? She had always pictured her father trapped in a dark, dank jail.
“This way,” the voice creaked.
She continued around the trunk, but there was nothing. Only tufts of withered grass and those brown flaking roots.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Up here.”
She turned, looking up, and gasped. Stepping back, she clenched her fists, and her magic roared inside her.
An emaciated man hung over her, half entombed within the trunk as though man and tree had melted together. His skeletal toes barely protruded from the living wood. His stick-like knees emerged from the bark below his chest, face, and left hand. Where his wretched body could be seen, thin skin hung from his bones like cracked parchment. Yellow ligaments, white bone
and dry muscles showed through the cracks. His head was a blind skull, the eyes shriveled up into two sallow yolks nestled in their sockets. His nose had shrunk to a pair of gaping holes that shivered when he breathed. Stretched lips pulled away from yellow teeth webbed with tiny cracks, and wisps of curly black hair clung to his papery scalp.
Only his bony right arm was completely free, as if he had just torn it from the side of the tree that was blackened and rotting. He beckoned to her, but she couldn’t make her feet move any closer.
“F-Father?” she stammered.
“Welcome, child. I’ve waited so long to see you.”
Chapter 6
Issefyn screamed and screamed and screamed, never stopping, never drawing breath. The agony poured out of her in an unending torrent, her own voice lost in the mournful peals and howls of rage all around her.
The others were everywhere, under her, over her, crushing her under the weight of their writhing bodies. They were all naked in the dark, shuddering, kicking, lashing out at one another. And screaming. All of them screaming.
Issefyn fought them, fingernails gouging flesh, biting anything that came close to her. She had to get to the top of the pile, she had to get out from underneath them all. She was being crushed, suffocated as she screamed. But there were too many of them. For every one she threw off, a dozen more squirmed back to crush her again.
“Mother.” The voice came from her bones, from the inside of her head.
“’Teris!” she cried. “Kill them, ’Teris. Kill them for me.”
“Wake up, Mother. Wake up.”
Issefyn thrashed around, looking for the voice. Looking for the way out.
“Come back to me, Mother. Come back.”
She felt a sudden yank, as if a black hand had reached inside her belly and pulled her up by the spine.
“Please,” she screamed. “Please, ’Teris, please!”
The black hand pulled her through the mass of writhing bodies. Those around her clung to her, latching onto her arms and twining their fingers through her hair. They were pulled along with her, sliding through the ocean of limbs slick with sweat and offal. Finally she broke through to the surface, and the black fist lifted her into the storm with sheets of purple lightning racing across the sky. She felt her insides rip and come loose as she was hoisted higher and higher until she was overwhelmed by the lightning, her closed eyes seared by the blinding light.
Issefyn’s eyes snapped open. A haze of silt drifted in front of her, and she sucked in a breath. Water rushed into her lungs and she thrashed.
“Mother,” ’Teris said, floating lazily next to her. “Calm down.”
I’m drowning! she yelled, but there was no sound. A few stray bubbles fled her mouth.
“You’re not drowning. Calm yourself, Mother. Really.”
Curling into a little ball, her hands clutching her stomach, she found something ragged and stringy. She felt around, clutching at the spongy ropes.
Something was wrong with her legs.
She looked down, forcing her eyes to focus through the murky water. Her body ended at her waist. Ragged entrails stretched a few feet out from the wound, floating like tentacles.
“Come, Mother,” Victeris said. “I need you at the tower.”
She turned.
You did this to me! she croaked. Again, no sound came out, but Victeris seemed to understand.
“Your beloved containment stone did this to you, Mother.”
The stone! Where was her stone? She floundered around in the leaves looking for it. A pale corpse lay on the ocean bed next to her. No. Half a corpse. The severed legs of an old woman, completely naked. Her withered thighs and sagging buttocks shifted with the slight current.
“Calm yourself, Mother. You know where the stone is. You can feel it.”
She closed her eyes, throwing her scattered thoughts around her. It was there! Right there! With her all along. She grappled with her bloody waist, tearing at the squirming intestines. Reaching up, past her ribs, her fingers closed on the stone. A rush of joy flooded her, and she lay back, drifting in the water. She pulled the stone out of her chest cavity and pressed the warm stone against her breasts.
“The tower, Mother.”
What?
“Your stone is almost empty, Mother. But there is more at the tower. All the power you can use, and more.”
Yes, the tower. She flipped over and tried to stand up. But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t stand. Couldn’t swim.
“Come, Mother, follow me. I’ll bring you to it.”
She reached out toward Victeris’s voice, her hand falling on the sand. A gout of silt spumed up. She dug her fingers into the soft mud and pulled herself forward.
“Good, Mother. Hurry, before Morgeon’s daughter and her lover take it from you.”
Issefyn reached out again, pulling herself forward. The hand that held the stone dug into the ocean floor, and she pulled power from it, moving faster and faster, slithering through the sand and water.
Chapter 7
Arefaine stared at the creature in the tree, unable to speak.
“My daughter,” the old voice creaked.
“You’re not my father. Where’s my father?” she said, her voice frail. “Arefaine, you—”
“Where’s my father!”
The cadaverous face let out a slow, hissing breath. “He is here, child. Right next to you.” The thing pointed with his free right arm.
In horror, she looked closer. There, at the base of the tree, nestled between two huge roots, was another skeletal figure, his naked skull grinning at the dirt. The papery flesh upon his chin still held a wisp of a gray goatee and tattered green cloth wrapped around the bones of his hips.
“That is—” She hesitated.
“Your father, yes.”
She spun around. “Then who are you?” she demanded, her voice rising.
“I am the man who brought you here,” the thing said to her. “The man who stood by your side all these years.”
“You’re not my father.”
“No,” the thing said, his teeth moving, forming words as if he had lips. Arefaine felt dizzy. “I’m not. But listen to my voice. You know who I am. It was me all along.”
“You’ve been…You’re…” She struggled as the truth dawned on her.
“Yes,” he creaked.
“No.”
“Arefaine—”
“If that’s my father”—she stabbed a finger at the skeleton on the ground—“and he was the one who fought Efflum, who trapped…” The world seemed to slant, and she stumbled sideways. She put a hand to her head.
“My child, listen to me—”
“I’m not your child!” she shouted, backing away from him.
“I may not have been the man who impregnated your mother, but we are still kin. Our blood calls to each other. Your father filled your dreams with hatred and fear, and I was the one who found you in that darkness. I was the one who helped you. Me! I stayed with you all these years, delivered you from those cowering chalk faces. In every way that matters, I have been your father. And in every way that matters, you have been my daughter.”
Arefaine’s breath came fast and desperate. She tried to control it, but her lungs wouldn’t obey. She couldn’t get enough air.
She stared down at her real father’s corpse, the wispy beard, the sarong. A corpse. Nothing more than a brittle corpse at the base of this evil tree. She felt as if a huge chasm yawned at her feet. Everything she’d ever known was a lie. The isolation of the Ohohhim—the unbearable loneliness—had only been bearable because someday she would find her father, and he would lead her home.
And there he was. Bones and roots and dirt. That was home.
Her fingers reached inside the satchel that held the Heartstone. Jazryth. Her only other relative, warm and filled with dark magic. Strength flowed into her as she touched those rough, chipped facets, and her dizziness faded.
She turned her tear-streaked eyes to look at the th
ing embedded in the tree.
“You’re Efflum, aren’t you?” she asked hoarsely.
“Yes, I am.”
“It was you. All along.”
“Your father has not spoken to you since the day he sent you away.”
Her breath came quickly again, and she felt her control slipping. “You lied to me,” she said in a low voice.
“Since you were a baby, you assumed I was your father. I let you keep that assumption. I called you my child. But, Arefaine, all of the illuminated scions are my children.”
She clenched her teeth. The emperor had played this game for years, saying one thing, doing another. “You’re no different than the rest of them!” she hissed.
“No. They wanted to use you to quell their fears. I helped you reach your dreams. Yours.”
“You deceived me!”
“It’s true that in a small way I allowed you to deceive yourself. I did not break your illusions, but only to protect you. I did it because I love you.”
“This is what you call love!”
“Yes, I call this love. I came to aid you when everyone else had abandoned you. You needed a guardian, and I gave you what you needed. You needed hope, a gentle touch, and I nurtured you. Would you have made it out of the darkness without me?”
She sneered. “Did you actually think this scheme of yours would work? You thought you could draw me here, to this place, to free you. Did you actually think I was that stupid?”
“Please, Arefaine, don’t be turned away by my appearance. I am the same man you have known all these years—“
“Known all these years? I never knew you! My real father lies here, dead. And you killed him. Did you think I would forget him and put you in his place?”
“Your real father never cared about you. Not the way a father should. He loved his ideals first and you second. He plunged you into an eternal nightmare!”
“Did he?” she spat. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“Come now, Arefaine,” Efflum said sternly. “This is beneath you. When children are scared, what does their mother tell them? She tells them there are no monsters, that everything will be all right, that Mommy and Daddy will never leave them. She tells them the Snow Queen brings them presents in winter, that Grandmother still loves them after she dies. She promises that if you share with your brother, he will share with you. All lies! Convenient deceptions!”