It was warm, but her shield sufficed, and out she ran, around the bend and back down the corridor.
She was gasping for breath when she finally stopped, and had to slump down and sit there for a long, long while, regaining her strength. She placed her new gemstone on the floor beside her and let her serpentine shield lapse. The heat had sapped her—she could not have even entered that room without the magic of the milky-white gem set in her ring.
After a while, she dared reach down and touch the light-orange gem. Still it was warm, but not uncomfortably so.
She cupped it closer and listened for its song, then, hearing the pattern of the notes, she sent her thoughts to them.
She didn’t understand.
She glanced around, her gaze falling over a small stone jag in the tunnel for no particular reason. But that view gave her insight into the gem, and she brought forth its magic and slid over to reach out for the jag with her other hand.
It had been solid rock, but now, at Aoleyn’s command, it became malleable, putty in her fingers. She twisted it, she pulled off a chunk of it. Then she played with that chunk, rubbing it and rolling it, making shapes.
She set it down and ended the magic of the orange gem, and almost immediately, the malleable stone with which she had been playing hardened once more, but held the shape Aoleyn had forced upon it.
She had shaped stone. She had torn a piece of stone from the wall and had reshaped it!
Aoleyn fell back, gasping. She felt like a god, like some creature that could create and destroy the world itself. She could build mountains, or tear them down, she believed.
And she feared.
Shaken by the revelations, Aoleyn went back to her cavern home.
The next day, she took up the orange gem once more and began to test its limitations, her limitations.
She was not as powerful as she had believed, not nearly, and she was no god.
That came as a relief.
Still, she had found yet another new and wonderful magic, and with the orange gem she could shape small bits of stone, could draw pictures in it, could break it apart or meld it together with other magically affected stones.
“I could build a most wonderful house of stone,” she whispered, standing under the waterfall of hot water late that day. “I can shape it to pleasing curves and build thick walls and doors to keep out the wind and the wolves.”
Aoleyn rubbed the splashing warm water through her thick and long black hair.
The smile left her face.
“Or I can tear down a wall,” she whispered.
So entranced by the orange room had she been, so consumed by the possibilities, that she had nearly forgotten about the tantalizing, unreachable magic in the other wall, not so far away.
She gathered her smock and ran off, coming before the wall she had cracked with her lightning.
Smiling, she brought forth the orange gem and called to its magic, then took the wall apart, handful, by handful. When she grew exhausted, she lay down right there and slept. She couldn’t leave, for she could feel the magic keenly now, and knew that it would be hers the next morning.
She had barely begun her digging, clawing away the stone as if it was thick mud, when her hand closed on something harder, something the magic of her orange stone had not affected. Holding her breath as surely as the item, Aoleyn retracted her arm and pulled forth a clump of stone. Holding strong the magic of the orange gem, she scraped away the mundane stone, revealing a flat, round gemstone as wide as her palm. She released her magic and blew aside the stone dust remaining when the rock hardened once more.
With the edge of her smock, she brushed this new gem clear, marveling at its glisten in the diamond-created light.
She set it down on the floor and bent over it, reaching deeper into the diamond to brighten the light so that she could get a good view.
She had never seen anything like it. It was smooth, very much so, and flat, no thicker than her thinnest finger. It was almost perfectly round, and fit in her palm. Aoleyn lightly ran her fingers about it, hearing its magical song. It seemed thick with wedstone, and she saw some quartz, but there was more, for the bulk of the striated disc was gray with hints of white, but black splotches, four small ones arched about a larger, central one. Like the paw of a large gray and white cat, she thought.
Smiling at that, she picked it up and listened for its magic, then let herself fall into the song.
She thought of the cat again, giggling, but then felt a pain unlike anything she had ever experienced. Deep inside her arm and the hand holding the gem, she felt her muscles twisting and tightening, but too much so! Her bones felt as if they were bending under the stress, then cracking!
She moved her hand as if to fling the gem away, but nothing flew, for there was no gem.
And that thought only lasted the moment it took Aoleyn to realize that her arm wasn’t her arm at all anymore, but the arm of a giant cat, like a lynx, but larger, like the greater cats the Usgar called cloud leopards.
“The fossa!” Aoleyn shouted and she fell away, trying to retreat from the arm, the cat’s paw, her arm! She had turned her arm into that of a cloud leopard!
Screaming and crying, Aoleyn shook her head and thrashed her arm, trying to shake away the magic. The pain was gone, but it would consume her, she feared—she would become a deamhan, like the fossa, hunting under the Blood Moon, drinking blood and eating the souls of her victims.
She scrambled, she ran, she grabbed at the arm and cried for the magic to stop. She made it to the pool in her own cave and dove in without hesitation, slapping at the water as if it could wash away the curse.
And it did.
Her arm became her own, and the disc-shaped gem fell from her hand, sinking to the bottom of the pool, as Aoleyn swam and kicked her way to the edge of the pool, scrambling onto the stone floor once more.
She sat on the bank of the pool the rest of that day and into the next, staring at where she believed the gemstone to be.
“It was just magic,” she told herself repeatedly, trying to calm her fears. “It wasn’t the fossa. I am not the fossa. It was magic, nothing more.”
She tried to reason through all that had happened. Had the excitement of the magic melded her with the gemstone? It had been gone, after all, when her arm had been that of the cloud leopard.
She went about her day. She went out with her spirit, through the channel to the God Crystal and beyond, and found her friend owl in the pine tree. Then she flew, far and wide, and found, to her joy, a real cloud leopard.
She watched it for a long while, marveling at its beauty and grace.
The fossa hadn’t been a cloud leopard, she reminded herself. It had possessed a cloud leopard, but had withered and burned the beautiful cat from within, making it something ugly and evil-looking.
Back in her cavern, Aoleyn had her dinner then lay down upon her mossy bed. But only for a moment, for the gemstone called to her, and she dove again into the pool, bringing forth her diamond light. She came back out soon after, the flat, round gemstone in hand.
She set it down near her moss bed and fell asleep staring at it.
Her dreams were full of cloud leopards, of being a cloud leopard, leaping about the deep snows with graceful joy, playing along the ledges of sheer cliffs, lounging in the soft late-winter snowfalls.
“It is magic, nothing more” were the first words out of her mouth when she opened her eyes again, and before she went to wash, before she went to find her breakfast, Aoleyn picked up the stone and lay it flat on her right palm. She lifted the hand up high and called to the magic, then winced as she felt the pain of transformation.
Then she marveled at her hand—no, her paw. She bared her claws, then retracted them. She bared them again and swiped across—and wouldn’t Tay Aillig’s face melt under the scrape of this arm!
Aoleyn let the magic go soon after, and watched with relief as her arm twisted and wrenched and became just that, her arm, once more.
She thought
of the fossa. It was connected to this, she believed, but distantly.
Perhaps another had used a gem such as this, had become a cloud leopard wholly with the power of Usgar. And that man, or woman more likely, a champion of Usgar, had then done battle with the spirit of the fossa, and so had become possessed, and corrupted, by the deamhan’s magic.
Aoleyn held her breath as she considered that line of thinking. Where had she even gotten such ideas, she wondered?
But somehow, some way, there was a measure of truth there, or there certainly could be.
“Is it any more crazy than calling a red moon the bloody face of a goddess?” she asked aloud, giggling, but she bit that back, fearing that some power in this place, in the sacred tunnels of the God Crystal, of Usgar himself, would strike her dead for her impudence.
“What secrets do you hold?” she asked the disc-like gem resting on the floor beside her. “Are you the essence of leopard? The mother goddess of leopardkind?”
Aoleyn giggled again at her silliness, but again, it was short-lived.
How could she know, after all? With magic, she could make lightning and fireballs, could fly, could walk free of her body, could make fields of ice, could soften stone into putty.
Was anything truly outlandish? Was anything impossible?
She left the disc there by the mossy bed and went about her day, later moving to the far wall of the cave to play with her other new toy, the orange gem. What piece of jewelry would she make of this, she wondered, and what other magic tricks might it play?
She found one when using the orange gem on a patch of floor later on, intending to draw pictures to recount her time here. She sketched the body of poor Innevah, and an image of herself kneeling beside the fallen woman. She drew an owl, a fox, and, of course, a cloud leopard.
Then, sitting back, admiring her work as the stone hardened once more, Aoleyn had another idea. On a hunch, she called, too, upon the red ruby in her ring, and brought forth the power of the orange gemstone once more, winding the magic together.
Aoleyn’s eyes sparkled in reflection of that before her: a hot field of stone, smoldering, streaked with liquid red like that which she had seen at the hole in the hot crystal room. It crackled with heat, sharp dots of white-hot light glistening about the hardening black stone as it cooled once more.
It took her a long while to find her breath.
Back at her mossy bed later on, Aoleyn studied the disc-shaped gem intently. She used her diamond, then her wedstone, anything to find some hints, some clues.
“What else have you for me?” she whispered to the stone, for she was certain that she was missing something here. She thought she should tear a strip from her smock, to make a hand-wrap that could hold the gem.
But no, that wouldn’t suit her.
What would she do with this strange gem? She would make a second ring for the orange stone, she had decided, but this one was too bulky for anything like that.
On a whim, Aoleyn tickled the leopard-paw gem with lightning energy, froze it with the blue stone of her anklet, heated it with her ruby. She could feel its power, calling to her, beckoning to her, with each touch of her magical energy.
Aoleyn brought forth the orange gemstone, focused on it and on the ruby in her ring, as she had done earlier, and threw all of that energy into the leopard-paw disc.
There came a sharp crackle, like the snap of a giant tree, and a burst of power, of pure magic, flashed through the room, throwing Aoleyn backward. She came up coughing, her mouth and throat tingling as if she was inhaling stone dust or some other grating substance.
Stone dust?
Horrified, Aoleyn ran back to the spot, searching frantically.
The disc was gone—she knew that she had inadvertently, had foolishly, had stupidly, blown it apart!
But no, she saw it, and her heart fluttered, then sank again when she fell over it, to see that it was no more a singular gemstone, but was, instead, powder of that same stone, looking the same as it had before, except that instead of a single, solid disk, it was a conglomeration of a million million tiny crystals, arranged to perfectly replicate what the disc had been.
She put her hand near to it and felt for the magic, and felt, indeed, the magic, and more acutely, as if all the mundane elements of the gemstone had been removed, blasted away, leaving just the pure magical elements behind.
But what was she to do with this?
Was there some way she could reverse that which she had done, to make the tiny crystals into one again?
She didn’t dare try. Not then. Feeling quite the fool, Aoleyn went over to the pond and plopped down on the stone ledge, putting her feet into the warm water. There she sat for a long while, the whole day through, mulling, considering what she had done and what she might do now.
She called upon the wedstone and used its magic to fall deeper into herself, finding a place of pure serenity and meditation, considering all while considering nothing at all.
A long while later—and so deep was Aoleyn’s trance that she had no idea of how long—she opened her eyes and said, “It’s only magic.”
The revelation seemed obvious to her now, as she stripped the implications of judgmental divinity out of the equation. She had never thought of the magical crystal, or gemstones, in this manner before. She had been brought up, and then specifically trained, to believe these to be the powers of Usgar granted through his priestesses, but how could that be?
For Aoleyn had been able to bring forth powerful magic before her encounter with the fossa, before her turn from the tenets of the tribe—a turn that Mairen had called heretical, and for which Aoleyn had been fed to Craos’a’diad.
Why, then, was Aoleyn able to bring forth magic of even greater power now? If Usgar was the arbiter, if the magic god-given, then how could Aoleyn and Mairen both wield it proficiently while taking ethical viewpoints which seemed so diametrically opposed?
It was a puzzle she’d need a long time to resolve, she was sure, but for now, the thought that it was only magic, that it was but a force to be taken and shaped by the wielder, led her to a sense of great relief and serenity. Was a lightning bolt brought from the gray stone any different from the fire created by a bow drill?
She loomed over the pile of pulverized gemstone bits, inspired that even in so many bits, the gemstone had retained its shape and appearance. And its magic. She could feel the power all about the pile, even stronger, it seemed to her, than it had been when the leopard paw had been whole.
Aoleyn chuckled at herself, still thinking she had been reckless in so experimenting with the strange powers. It seemed like she hadn’t done too much actual damage, to the magic at least, but what could it mean? How could she hold this magic together? Should she put the tiny crystals into a bag, perhaps, or could she somehow melt stone around them and re-form the item, albeit clunkily?
What could be the binding force in this magic that had worked within Aoleyn, had transformed her arm into that of a great cloud leopard?
A smile came to the woman.
* * *
Aoleyn winced as the needle-like crystal, a tiny fragment of wedstone, pierced her skin yet again. Her palm bled, just slightly, with each successive jab; at this point, there were several dozen stabs, and the blood was starting to add up. But the last piece of the image was taking shape—what had been only in her mind was now clear for her to see upon her palm. She would be finished soon.
She smiled at the fresh pain. Among the Usgar, tattoos were forbidden for all except warriors, or, rarely, women claimed by warriors who wanted them to wear a tattoo badge. In the Usgar tribe, only men could be warriors.
But Aoleyn fancied herself a warrior anyway.
She jabbed the wedstone needle in again, sending her thoughts into it to excite the magic and make it vibrate, to fully set the tiny crystals of the leopard paw gem. She retracted the wedstone, but called more fully upon its powers to heal the wound around those tiny pieces, setting them forever in her hand.
She took a deep breath, hoping, then leaned over to the pool and washed her blood away. She brought forth her hand, palm up, shining in the diamond light. The image seemed perfect—she had been guided in their placement by the magic of the leopard paw.
Now she had a tattoo, on her palm, of that paw.
She looked to the pile. Many more crystal bits remained.
She had another palm.
But for another day, she decided, and she went to her moss bed, weary from her magical efforts. She couldn’t sleep, though, tossing and turning repeatedly as her imagination tickled her. She had to find out.
She rolled to her back and lifted her arm above her so she could see it in the dim lichen and glowworm glow.
She listened, not with her ears, but with her heart, and found this newest song, intimately. She called to it, her spirit sang the notes. She felt the discomfort, the twisting muscles, the popping bones, but it passed quickly.
Aoleyn lay there, admiring her limb, the paw of a great cat. She dismissed the magic, then waited and watched, and giggled when her arm reverted to its natural form.
It wasn’t a sigh of relief, or a burst of laughter to relieve the tension, either, because she had known it would happen. She understood now.
It was just magic, so she told herself.
She went back to the powdered gemstone the next day and took up her wedstone needle, thinking to put a paw on her other palm.
But no. Something happened when she coated her needle with the bits, something within her, some magical compulsion.
She was afraid now at the stark reminder that making a lightning bolt was not quite the same thing as rubbing sticks together to light a fire, but she couldn’t resist.
Her hand moved, seemingly haphazardly, poking randomly, it seemed. She stripped off her smock and kept going, jabbing, calling bits of healing.
She went to work the next day, and the day after that, and the days became a week, then two. She hadn’t gone out to Bahdlahn, and wanted to, but she could not. She barely ate and drank, and her sleep grew restless. She thought she should stop and consider all of this, whatever it might be. Had she been wrong? Was she making herself into the deamhan fossa?
Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 27