by J. Gibson
She brooded as well in Uldyr’s absence, and could not discard the thought of him. Their reciprocated admiration, their months before this, these played in her daydreams, and her sleeping ones too. His intelligence and experience had captivated her. Kind, powerful, and as much as anyone had ever been, heroic, at least in her estimation. She smiled any time he entered her mind. More importantly, she believed that no matter the outcome of their venture, he would be there, waiting for her at the end.
When this battle with the Church had concluded, she and Uldyr would return to their roaming of the countryside and cities. They might even venture back to Reneris one day, to the city of Orilon or the Hinterlands. The latter would be a challenge for her, but if she faced her former life with him, she might well overcome it.
She wanted to transcend it, to be more than another spirit broken by phantoms of the past. He would expend his greatest effort to help her do so, even if she could not prevail. Even if she failed again and again, or regressed and succumbed, he would lift her to her feet anew.
They had been apart for so long. How long, she couldn’t say anymore. An age ago felt less than a day, and each day seemed an age. She was as a wandering waif, and he stood as her sole support. If he died in solitude at his home from the wounds inflicted by the daggerhand, no amount of condolences in the world could mend her.
When they were together, she often followed him with her eyes. She felt empty without that, never knowing where to look. The first few days of their departure had been the toughest, but she retained the sorrow. In the moment, she never felt any urge to weep. Just numb, or unfulfilled, or alone. Even with Bhathric there, she felt out of place.
She had grown used to it, the dull misery; so dull she could hardly call it misery anymore.
They went down a slope and crossed a stream which severed the road, then up the next incline. Up and down, they rode from hill to hill. Another hour passed and her rear, groin, and thighs ached for a rest, but she did not complain aloud. After a number of miles more, the pathway slowed its rolling. It wound like a liberated spool of thread and then lay straight to a deep decline. No signs of travelers or higher habitation presented. A bizarre stillness thickened the air. Before, the wind spun and twirled, rustling leaves and sighing in the brushwood and fronds. Now the leaves kept quiet, save their crunching beneath shoed hooves.
A few miles further on, they met a narrow passage between rocky hillsides which climbed as high as she could see. Unrest draped over her as a heavy blanket. They were outsiders descending into a dark and vacant landscape of haunted forest and gloomy mounds. Finally, they exited the opposite end of the passage.
There ought to be more life than this.
A force, menacing and hostile, befell this common route of travel. On occasion, she caught glimpses of shadows and light flickering between the trees. The world remained hushed.
Their small party divided the road right at its center, a stone’s toss from either side. Uneven ground shifted her in her saddle. The trees drew in closer, ensnared, suffocated. She yearned to be free of this dismal place.
“Don’t you think it odd?” Bhathric asked, ostensibly to anyone. “Neither a sign of spirit nor creature.”
“It is dull.” Eclih sighed. “If luck favored, we’d be assailed by a roving troupe of bandits.” He jested to comfort them.
A foulness worked here, beyond the touch of winter and night on the world and sky. Animals native to the forests did not flee unless something foreign invaded their domain. She knew that Eclih could sense it as well as she, for ages on the road had worn him and sharpened his wit.
The stillness sent a shiver up Athenne’s spine. Hairs at her nape prickled and cowered.
A community emerged at the end of the road; a sullen pool of thatched rooftops and crude stone walls. From the contraptions scattered about the buildings, she inferred that it had been a farming village. Had been, that was, because life had emptied from the region. Not even the remnants of life remained.
Abnormally defined, a hard line of snow divided the ground between the woodlands and the first hovel. Clouds hung dense in the sky and blotted out the stars, moons, and rings. A foreboding air refused to leave them. The hooves of their horses and their breathing rose and fell in singular seclusion.
Bhathric’s steed startled and reared back. “Easy,” she muttered, controlling it at the reins. Nothing moved in sight that ought to spook a horse. Dead grass and shadow surrounded the village beyond the icy ring, stretching out from the buildings to the black forest.
The trees here had gnarled and diseased, layered in snow, soot, and grey lichen. A char like old paint coated the houses and the ground beneath them. Behind each trot, Shah left muddied prints of slush and ash.
With a whispered incantation, Bhathric cast a spell of illumination which swept outward as a flash of light, giving them vision of the area for a moment before it dissipated.
“Ghora, I believe this is.” Eclih kept his voice low. “A farming village.”
Athenne had been right, though it hadn’t been difficult to deduce from the lay of the land.
Eclih halted and they stopped after him.
“Where are the villagers?” Bhathric scanned the range at their sides, desolate and drab.
“I’m loath to evince obvious proofs, but something has happened.” Eclih faced them on his mount. An earnest concern carved across his countenance. “We best not linger.”
“You’ve no interest in investigating?” Bhathric objected. “A village, scorched in a ring of snow, its people vanished, and you’ve not an inkling of desire to know why?”
“How do buildings burn without burning?” Athenne shifted her weight on Shah as she gazed from hovel to hovel, studying. “These dwellings are covered in ash, yet their rooftops are unburnt. Their wooden doors stand. Burned, but without ruin.” She looked back at Eclih and Bhathric. “What sort of magic produces soot without flame and leaves thick sulfur in the air? Summons such peculiar snowfall, within Imperial wards, no less?”
Bhathric stared at Eclih with a defiance in her eyes, her eyebrows raised. “All the more reason we ought to examine the buildings. Mayhap there are survivors.”
“Can you two feel this chill? There is something here,” he replied, or warned. “Whatever has done this, we’ve neither the time nor the resources to waste. We must carry on. The others will be waiting for our signal.”
A home not scorched like the rest stood over the far side of the road on a grassy hillock. This building distinguished itself from the many round, stone-walled hovels with reed or sodded overheads by its wooden roof and square, half-timbered construction. That, and it spread out twice as large as any other home in view.
The village priest’s cottage.
An oak tree like a tower shadowed it from above, too close. The house’s door sat agape and a feeble light sputtered within. Rather than acknowledge Eclih’s protest, Athenne made off toward the building.
“Athenne!” he yelled.
She did not look back.
As Athenne came to the main door, she dismounted. Bhathric and Eclih approached, still atop their horses. With unhurried steps and senses peaked, she pressed the door open. It shuddered to a start, as if it had not moved in some time. Ice and snow crackled to life and rained down around her from the door frame and wall.
A candle lit one side of the living quarter, as she had suspected from afar. It had burned to a stub, nearing the mouth of its holder’s socket. Across the floor, grain spilled out from a torn fiber sack. A hasp fashioned of bronzed iron around a centimeter thick stuck out from the interior of the door, broken in half, as if by forced entry. Her left foot fell through the threshold, to the groaning of lumber.
Bhathric called next. “Athenne.” Her pitch rose a shade from its usual sound. “Be careful.”
Inside, she found a dining table littered with gardening tools, a chair, a hearth caked in ash, and in the corner, stacked firewood. The air smelled musty, unlived. She did not sp
eak, but listened, and intruded further. Bhathric and Eclih did not follow, and no sound but the creaking of the boards beneath her steps roused. She approached the entrance of the cottage’s sleeping quarter. To the right of the door hung a silver mosaic adumbration of the Mother Sentinel, the largest statue in the world, erected near the city of Orilon in Reneris.
The artist had depicted her with her eyes shut and her arms outstretched at either side, an inaccurate pose. In reality, the statue’s hands were before the face in a prayer seal and her eyes were open. Though, Renerins of Orilon often said that the Sentinel watched with her eyes closed. A rough city, Aitrix had called it. Still, the statue represented the All-Mother, overlooking Her children in all Her glory.
Athenne’s hand pushed the bedchamber door inward. She peered within to a near-empty room containing a chest, a bed, and a side table, too short for the bed’s frame. At the foot of the bed were a woman’s undercloths, heaped in a pile. The priest, or someone, had been there not long before. How long, she could not surmise. No sign of a struggle beyond the shattered latch on the main door manifested.
She emerged from the cottage, surprised that Bhathric, at least, had not tailed her. In hindsight, inspecting alone had been foolish, but she needed know and see for herself. I must not always be timid.
“Anyone?” Bhathric asked.
Athenne shook her head, and Bhathric and Eclih exchanged a look, their expressions perturbed and tense. Eclih, especially, seemed disconcerted.
“This post is vacant,” he declared after a short silence. “Who is the priest of Ghora?”
“Couldn’t say. We ought to check the officer’s stead, see if she’s there.” Bhathric assumed the village’s paladin was a she, as most field officers were.
What has happened here? No village priest, no residents. At least, none they had encountered. At some point, the people of Ghora had awoken to a service led by their attendant guardian. They prayed, sang in chorus, bathed each other in the blessings of the Mother. Then they were gone, priest’s cottage and hovels left bare, the hearths cold, the world outside, still as the dead. What would the three of them find if they scoured the entire region, extending feelers in all directions, in search of anyone or anything?
Back atop Shah, Athenne started up the path behind her comrades, their heads dipping in the white dark. The night’s air swung lifeless around them like a body dangling at the end of a noose, cold enough to show their breath. Another dwelling, similar to the priest’s cottage, resided not far away.
“Here,” said Bhathric.
At the front of the building, adjacent the door, a plaque shone from beneath a thin veil of snow.
Bhathric hopped off her mount. “We can’t let our Athenne have all the heroics.”
Eclih’s face twisted with displeasure, but he kept quiet.
Bhathric brushed the sign, sweeping it down to the polished surface and shaking her hand off to the side, flinging melting ice and water. The beams of the moons almost certainly exaggerated the plaque’s clarity. Bolts seating it to the wall gleamed a clean silver. Someone had replaced it recently.
“Field Officer—Mirea Athelys,” read Bhathric, carrying out each syllable. “Hm.”
She turned to them. “It’s the one.” Bhathric drifted a few paces back. “Let us not dither.” Without hesitation, she kicked the door. Unlike the priest’s abode, no fitful orange light blinked at the bent end of a failing candle. What Athenne perceived from her position—furniture—took the shape of black masses.
The door banged against the inner wall. Bhathric stepped forth, swallowed by the darkness. Eclih and Athenne exchanged an anxious glance, and then she peered to the sky. Except for spots of thin and dense clouds, only faint stars bled through the blackness, too many to count; burning balls of gas, according to the natural philosophers. Their simple, silent beauty would have mesmerized her any other time.
“Quiet as the crypt,” she heard Bhathric say. The light poured over Bhathric as she materialized from the house’s shadowed embrace. “Someone was here not long ago, but there’s nothing now. No arms, no badge.”
“Any sign of struggle?” Athenne asked.
Bhathric raised her hands at her sides. “Nothing.”
No hint abandoned, same as the priest’s cottage.
“We should turn back. We ought to inform Aitrix of this. The Church could be aware of our movements and evacuated the village. We could be riding into a trap.” Athenne didn’t believe this to be the case, but she could muster no more reasonable an argument in the moment.
Bhathric focused on the officer’s bothy. “Not so dull now.” She reseated in her saddle.
“Not what I had in mind.” Eclih frowned. “Nonetheless, as I stated, we can’t afford to lose the time. Whatever this is, we must drive on. We’ll deal with what comes when we meet it.” Athenne sensed the fear in his voice through his effort to conceal it.
She wanted to survey the remainder of the area, but withheld the desire. If it were anything similar to what they had already witnessed, there would be more of the same. Nothing. Scouring the village and outer forest would cost them hours of time and valuable energy. In that, she agreed with Eclih.
They rode over a hill and down a northwest angled track, passing by clusters of hovels, littered among field ploughs and stables. Revealed by the skylights, they glimpsed the neighborhoods in their distant vacancy.
“Even the animals have evanesced,” Athenne said. Full troughs for pigs and sacks of feed for cows, chickens, and horses were visible from the roadside, yet no creatures stirred. Only the woeful silhouettes of deserted homes, idle apparatuses, and empty pens greeted them. Ghora was a burial ground without markers, underlaid by an insidiousness like the whispers of a fatal secret.
She shuddered.
“The more we ought to depart with haste.” Eclih faced forward, paralyzed at the back of his horse.
A tangible constraint had come over Bhathric with the mood. She no longer dissented or nudged.
Athenne did not want to push or upset him further. He had humored them enough to wait as they examined two dwellings, and so she would leave their investigation at that. As much as she desired to overturn each rock within a mile every way in hunt for answers, she concurred, both with Eclih’s spoken and unspoken censure. Whatever had done this, if it had been a thing, would not be something they could handle as they were.
Still, we might regret not turning back when we had this chance.
CHAPTER VIII: FALLING
Garron
He dreamt of blood. An ichor which threatened to swallow the world. A deluge that overcame forests and cities. A sea that would engulf him whole and drag the planes with it. The ichor was a horror, a force of nature that swept away all in its path. It was monstrous. Nothing could stop or slow it. The Mother would weep to see Her beautiful Earth, consumed by its dark red embrace.
It had been less than a day, but the prior evening waned as a distant memory. Months, he had survived during his weeks in Aros. He wondered whether Epaphael—mutant god of destiny, time, and damnation—had cursed and given him a dozen days to suffer for every one that others felt. Might death take pity on him, come sooner? He hoped.
If only it were so.
He stirred, drenched in a soup of sweat. He rose most days around this hour, no matter the time that he had slept, chained to force of habit. In what may have been a lifetime ago, he had spent mornings in prayer to cleanse himself for the callings to come. This dawn, he awoke to no such righteous fervor, and instead remained motionless in his bed, deliberating. Why not? No place offered him safety anymore.
As he had expected in the wake of his capture by the inquisitors, a knock came upon his bedchamber door. It must be Archbishop Delacroix. The solidity of the upright slab of shaped wood hindered his sight, but his confidence sustained. She alone had visited him in his weeks there, save the stray deacon, machine, or sadistic creature of the Overrealm, bent on his ruination.
“Father Latimer.”
Her voice sounded reserved yet insistent. “Garron, we must speak now that you’ve returned.” She had taken to using his first name on occasion since their initial encounter in his chamber, after cruel fate had absorbed him in its raging tempest and cast apart the edifice of his resolve. Whether the informality meant to endear her to him or lure him into a false security played through his mind.
She evidently believed that he had already awoken. Priests commonly rose early in the mornings for prayer, and he had lived that life to its fullest for most of his manhood. Indeed, he had awoken, but this morning, he would not come as beckoned. He wanted to lie, and rest, and wait. He wanted to enjoy silence, to sink into his cushioned bed, a sheet over his face, and be without need or want or duty.
He could not have it.
Delacroix addressed him again.
“Garron,” she said, in an even, sympathetic tone. “I have reflected long on what has happened and what must come next. I understand that your experience has been harrowing. The Martials informed me of the state in which they found you. Will you allow me a moment?”
Near the end of her appeal, her voice collected a palpable worry. He knew her likely concern, for the ideation had plagued him. She suspected he would not answer, that she may push the door open to find his rigid body hanged from a fixture or crumpled in a pool of blood. Consideration of the possibility would be well placed. Anyone in his condition would have thought on it, might have acted. But Garron was a fool. A fool who wanted to die, yet hoped that life would improve so that he may carry on.
“Father?”
Rising fear shaded her voice. If he had the energy, he might have moved then. Her compassion ran deep, but so did her composure. He found himself fascinated to hear her apprehensive and frightened, if only in slight. Did his interest signify that a force had touched him for the worse? He ought not take pleasure in any such thing, and yet he had, for a breath. It proved a shift, something which he could not consider without a confliction so fearsome it brought him pain and crisis. He had to drag his thoughts elsewhere.
