Cloudfyre Falling - A dark fairy tale

by A. L. Brooks

  Giant and sorcerer sat for a time not speaking, watching the northlands sweep toward them and rushing by, feeling the rhythm of the vehicle as it shot forward.

  ‘Everyone well back there?’ Hawkmoth eventually asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Gargaron said. ‘All be well.’ He studied Hawkmoth’s sewing. He saw now it were not so much a tear in his side-pack but more as if some substance had corroded it.

  ‘Have an accident?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye, you could say that. I were rammed against carriage during our siege at Appleford. A number of my vials were crushed.’

  Gargaron frowned. ‘Lose anything of importance?’

  ‘Amongst some poultices and my randweed creams, Wrenbug’s bottle of Skinkk blood were cracked in two.’ He looked over at Gargaron. ‘It were seeped out before I discovered the bottle were in pieces.’

  Gargaron thought of Drenvel’s Bane. ‘A shame, I guess.’ Though surprisingly he found he did not much care now for the so-called legendary weapon. ‘An important substance for your concoctions, I assume.’

  ‘Aye. Though I were thinking more of your war hammer.’

  Gargaron shrugged. ‘It matters not. I doubt now such blood would have helped us bring back Drenvel’s Bane anyway. I feel Hor the Cutter took its secret to his grave.’

  Silence again between them. Gargaron watched Hawkmoth continue with his sewing. There were something calming, almost enchanting, about someone going about a menial task. A monotonous, repeated chore conducted with calm concentration, patience and care.

  ‘You mind if I ask you something,’ Gargaron said.

  Hawkmoth did not pause in his work. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘The star beast, Jhegoth. You claimed it be a witch ally.’

  Hawkmoth sewed up the last of the hole in his pack. ‘I believed as such, aye. And I know what you’re going to say. If the Harbingers be the pawns of witches, why then were they attacking it?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Hawkmoth sighed as he held his pack at arm’s length, studying his patch job. ‘Believe it or not, giant, I have been sitting here puzzling over that very same problem. I have not all the answers, you must realise. But perhaps Jhegoth has turned rogue, or done something to anger its masters. I have long kept my eye on Jhegoth whenever it has arisen from its hiding places. It is not of our world and I have feared for many a year that it may try one day to sully our lands, to make them unlivable to all but itself. And so perhaps in these days of Ruin, while the boom-shakes do their worst, while any survivors stumble about the lands shell-shocked and disorganised, Jhegoth has peaked out of his hole and observed this sudden power vacuum and as such has decided to weigh in on the current conflict in order to claim its prize. That being Cloudfyre. And perhaps the witches have seen this and will not stand for it and have thus dispatched its mightiest Darklings to take it out of the picture.’

  Gargaron considered this and both he and Hawkmoth fell again to silence. For a few moments, the distant snowcapped ranges were seen briefly above the cloud banks. As he watched them, Gargaron considered what the crabman had relayed to him. The story of the Elven woman and her sudden death. He thought about telling Hawkmoth, to fish for his thoughts… but ultimately he decided against it.

  ‘Anyhow, giant,’ Hawkmoth said, packing away his bone needle and twine. ‘You ought to rest while you can. Once we reach the mountains, the climb is long and arduous and biting cold as I remember it. And once we find Sanctuary, I dare say we will have a fight on our hands to claim Mama Vekh. Best rest and recuperate now before the next leg of our journey.’

  9

  Once Gargaron had left him, Hawkmoth gazed ahead in deep thought. He could not see the mountain range before him for the rain clouds were thick and dark and clotted, yet he could sense it there. As the garetrain sped onwards he could not help but consider Sanctuary. It had been many a year since he had left there. But he recalled the day clearly enough. For he had been most unceremoniously booted out. Thrown out if he remembered rightly. Marched out across Sanctuary’s forecourts by Sanctuary guardsmen, dressed in their robes of deep stone-blue, and in front of his Brothers, ridiculed and spat on, kicked and slapped, and warned that if he ever returned he would be strung up on the forecourt wall for all to see and he would have his belly cut and splayed and the alpine buzzards invited to peck his out intestines.

  The memory still hurt. After all this time. But he would not have changed it. He had met Eve, and she had taught him love, true love. And he had truly lived life with her, where as in his days residing behind the walls of Sanctuary, he had known naught but a void in his heart.

  PUKAYA’S BRIDGE

  1

  WHEN Melai awoke, she sat up shivering, realising the garetrain had stopped. There were a frost upon the windows, and inside the cabin a deep cold lingered, the like she had never known. Outside she saw frozen, barren marshland stretching off into deep fog.

  Melai stood and flew across to the door and pushed it open. Its brass handle were so biting cold to the touch it made her flinch. She peered up and down the aisle. ‘Gargaron?’ she called. A cloudy vapour puffed from her mouth. ‘Locke?’ No-one called back. ‘Does anyone hear me?’

  It were silent. She vacated her cabin and moved down to third carriage, supposing Gargaron were down there asleep beside his Grimah—the sleeping berths were far too small for his size after all. She found carriage three vacant. No Razor, no Grimah, no Zebra. No-one.

  ‘Gargaron,’ she called again, growing ever more concerned. ‘Can anyone hear me?’

  Again no reply.

  She turned and strode back through carriage two, rapping on cabin doors as she went, calling, ‘Locke? Haitharath? Anyone?’ She did the same through carriage one, her anxiety building. This were not a place in which she wished to be abandoned.

  When she reached the mighty locomotive she found the driving compartment vacant but the engine still thrumming. She heard distant voices. Holding her arms about herself for warmth, she moved to front of cockpit. She were too short to see out the forward windows unless she fluttered up onto the console. So she spread her wings, flew to console, perched herself and peered out.

  She saw Gargaron, Locke, and Haitharath. They were poised at the edge of a mighty ravine where the rail line crossed a long stone bridge.

  2

  Outside, Melai stood by Gargaron overlooking the chasm. Wind whistled and moaned and the way forward were shrouded in a green fog. Melai saw here their conundrum.

  Part of the stone bridge had collapsed and its beam-braces gone down with it. Between where Melai now stood and the remaining span of standing bridge, there were a gulf that must’ve stretched up to a hundred feet. Without braces to support the railcourse, the beam thinned and eventually became nothing but a waving, wispy green tendril on the wind. When Hawkmoth returned to the driver’s compartment and switched off the garetrain engine the beam sizzled and spat and faded slowly to nothing.

  From here, their garetrain would go no further.

  3

  Far below, a misty river wound through rocky stacks where foaming rapids crashed and roared. The ravine walls were sheer, too steep to climb, especially for those such as their steeds; and the opposite wall would have proven particularly challenging for any soul for it were curved inwards and climbing it would have potentially brought down the overhanging lip.

  ‘An interesting dilemma we have before us,’ Hawkmoth spoke, gazing out to where the bridge edge hung in the fog.

  ‘Can you not summon some beast of the air?’ Locke enquired of Hawkmoth. ‘To lift us all across?’

  Hawkmoth grinned. Perhaps at the childlike innocence of the request, a belief that he, Hawkmoth, could move mountains on a simple command. ‘I’m afraid I cannot.’

  Gargaron looked eastways and westways as the ravine ran. He fetched his map from his pack. Searching for an alternative crossing point. ‘Perhaps we might walk either that way or this, and see if we do not come to another bridge,’ he recommended. ‘Or someplac
e where the cliffs are not so sheer.’ On his map the ravine were marked by a small, meandering blue line. There were not even the bridge in front of them marked here. But instead one marked perhaps a hundred miles to their east. He glanced up at Hawkmoth. ‘If this map be accurate, there be a second bridge in that direction.’ He pointed.

  ‘Aye, Choner’s Crossing. And two day’s travel we will have lost reaching it,’ Hawkmoth warned.

  Across the ravine, as the fog thinned out, they saw a tall statue of what Hawkmoth claimed were the depiction of Pukaya, the river nymph. And beyond her, the railcourse line-braces wound up into the lower foothills of the Bonewreckers; so close and yet so far. The sky roaming slopes of the mountains themselves were still hidden beyond cloud banks but here were already an altitude where trees were becoming scarce and the few that had settled amidst the shale and slate and stone looked thin and crooked and lacking in foliage.

  In the end it were Melai who voiced a solution. ‘Why do we not construct a skywalk from here to the standing portion of the bridge?’

  The others looked at her. Gargaron were about to ask where she proposed to source materials for such a span when she pointed over her shoulder at garetrain.

  ‘The carriages?’ she asked. ‘Can we not break them down and utilise their materials?’

  4

  Hawkmoth may not have had an ability to summon flying beasts of the mountains but his staff had a keen knack of being able to dismantle things neatly; or at least it could melt rivets and bolts and welds without too much disruption to the various panels that made up this garetrain’s carriages.

  Gargaron and Locke lugged as much as they could to ravine’s edge and as they worked Locke broke into song; it helped pass time and helped distract his team from their labour. These were songs of the sea, he told them, songs from days when workers would haul nets in from the surf, singing as they plucked spine fish from nets.

  ‘So, you do sing?’ Gargaron said to him.

  ‘Aye. And mostly without a lute.’

  Gargaron smiled. Though no-one berated Locke for singing. Despite what he claimed about his singing prowess, he were not bad of voice, and his stirring tunes helped elevate group mood as the cold mountain air did its best to dent their morale.

  5

  Once they had dismantled much of carriages two and three, their next conundrum were how to go about suspending the various pieces above the span. Locke suggested sending his Zebra across. He pointed at the rope coiled and strung from rear of Razor’s saddle. ‘She could slither down slope with your rope in her jaws, and up pylon,’ he explained.

  ‘Does she know her knots?’ Hawkmoth enquired.

  ‘Knots? Are you pulling my leg? You ever seen a serpent tie knots?’

  ‘Exactly my point. How will your dear Zebra tie off the rope?’ Hawkmoth wanted to know.

  ‘Ah,’ Locke said. ‘I see. Fair point.’

  The simpler solution, as Melai saw it, were to have herself fly the windy gulf between ravine’s precarious edge to the remaining portion of bridge, carrying with her the length of rope.

  So it were agreed upon. She flew across, the wind buffeting her as she fed the rope through a segment of bridge. Here she took up rope’s loose end and carried it back to her companions. One end were now pulled through the iron grill of the garetrain, and the other through the bridge. Once both ends were tethered to one another, a vast rope loop had been established.

  Hawkmoth now prepared to climb across to the bridge, testing first the rope’s integrity. Then, with his staff strung across his back, he sat on edge of ravine, and clasping the two lengths of rope he swung out over the drop and arm over arm pulled himself across to the bridge.

  He were panting by the time he climbed up onto platform and sat there, his legs dangling over the ironwork, catching his breath. He were almost lost from view beyond the green mist; naught but a ghostly figure from the point of view of Gargaron and Locke and Melai, and them naught but wraiths to him.

  He called back. ‘I am ready here.’

  Gargaron and Locke secured the first segment of dismantled carriage via metal hooks (hooks that Locke had fashioned from carriage scrap) to the rope. And once done, with Hawkmoth hauling rope hand over hand from his end, and Gargaron hauling hand over hand from their end, they pulleyed the steel panel across to bridge.

  And so began construction of Melai’s skywalk. It took much of the afternoon for the pieces to be lifted and pushed into place, for Hawkmoth to meld them together with either bespoke metal clamps, or by melting the edge of one segment to the other through superheated flame squirted from Lancsh, the demon face on his staff. The final touch were to add support struts beneath their skywalk, two held in place by bridge’s stone pylon, and two more dug in against the rocky ravine wall, Hawkmoth hanging precariously firstly from the bridge pylon to weld strut in place, and then from the ravine side of the footbridge to dig the strut into the cliff face. Then he imbued the entire construction with a strength enchantment.

  When Hawkmoth tested the skywalk, he did so with the reclaimed rope tied about him; Gargaron, standing back from the cliff edge, his boots dug into the grass, gripped the rope’s loose end, ready to haul in the sorcerer in case their skywalk should collapse. But Hawkmoth walked its length and their little footbridge held steadfast. Locke went next with no trouble at all, refusing to be tethered. When Gargaron walked it, tethered, it shook slightly, but ultimately he crossed without incident.

  The concern now were for the larger brutes: Razor, Grimah and the serpent. And how their weight might affect the skywalk. Locke eliminated some of the problem when he shouted a command and his Zebra promptly slithered down the rock wall, splashed around the rapids and then coiled her way up the furthest bridge pylon to the northern side of ravine.

  ‘If only we were all but serpents,’ Gargaron commented.

  6

  Gargaron prepared Grimah for his crossing of the skywalk, tying the rope about his steed’s broad chest. Once done he tugged it to test its grip. He then pushed his forehead against the horse’s heads, trying to project a sense of calm, hoping his dear horse would not fret on its crossing. ‘I go first. You follow. Be calm now, I have you tethered. If you fall we will catch you.’

  He then turned and made his way back along the skywalk to the stone bridge, trailing the rope out behind him, the makeshift span beneath his feet groaning and creaking.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked as he reached Hawkmoth and Locke waiting on the stone bridge.

  ‘Hear what?’ asked Locke.

  ‘The skywalk protesting.’

  ‘Heard nothing,’ Locke claimed.

  ‘I heard it,’ came Melai’s concerned voice from where she were perched on the stone rampart that ran along the side of the bridge.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gargaron said. ‘Hawkmoth?’

  ‘I take it the skywalk be merely settling,’ the sorcerer said.

  ‘Settling?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Gargaron sighed. ‘I hope you be right.’ He turned now to face Grimah.

  His steed stood back near ravine’s southern edge. Behind him Razor paced back and forth. And behind Razor, the garetrain cut a ghostly image in the fog.

  ‘Right then, shall we do this?’ Gargaron asked Hawkmoth and Locke at his back. Both had gripped the ongoing length of rope; the idea were to combine their strength, along with that of Gargaron, and catch Grimah’s fall should the steed’s weight prove too much for their skywalk.

  Yet as Gargaron were about to call Grimah across he felt the stone bridge shift beneath him. He slackened his grip on the rope and turned to study the expressions of his friends.

  ‘Tell me you felt that?’

  The looks on their faces told them all he needed to know.

  ‘I felt it,’ Melai said, standing now, as if the bridge were about to tumble out from beneath her.

  What followed were a brief discussion about how their combined weight might very well end up compromising the bridge. ‘We don
’t need the rest of it plummeting down into those rapids,’ Gargaron said.

  Once this were pointed out, Hawkmoth and Locke crossed to the far end, uncoiling the remainder of the rope as they went. There they anchored the rope to Zebra. Melai stayed where she were.

  7

  Gargaron glanced around at Hawkmoth and Locke, both spaced out along the far end of the rope, gripping it, digging in their heels, Zebra backed up behind them. ‘You ready?’ he called

  ‘Aye,’ Hawkmoth called back.

  Gargaron faced Grimah once more, and gripping his segment of rope, coiling it around his fists, he said, ‘Right then, Grimah. Let us get you across.’

  Grimah, who had been standing there watching Gargaron, looked keen to get on with this. And needed no words of encouragement from Gargaron to set out.

  Gargaron eyed his steed step out upon the skywalk, surprised that their narrow makeshift bridge held as well as it did. There were a slight sag beneath Grimah as he reached middle part of the crossing, though Gargaron, pulling in the slack of the rope as his steed advanced, were confident Grimah would make it the rest of the way without incident.

  Though, as soon as he’d had that thought… things went sour.

  8

  Grimah took three further steps before a noise of protesting metal cut through the air like the squeal of a cat and the footbridge lurched. Grimah dug his hooves against the steel and Gargaron gripped the rope with white knuckles.

  Gargaron heard Melai gasp and hold her breath.

  For the moment, the skywalk held, albeit on a slight angle.

  Gargaron did not relax his grip on the rope; behind him Hawkmoth and Locke dragged in the slack that he’d collected. ‘Easy now,’ Gargaron called gently. ‘Easy. Easy.’ He eyed the footbridge, watching for any slight movement. But for the moment, it had steadied.