by Alex Raizman
It was a prophecy he’d thought fulfilled with Nicandros had returned, bearing the half-dragon princess, and the Alohym had destroyed his mother’s forest as punishment. The dream had stopped that night and had not returned since.
He’d been certain that was the end of it. He’d foreseen the destruction of their home, and now the future was unwritten before him.
But he’d just had it again.
Which meant it was now a thing that still might come to be. It was something to guard against. It was a pending death, and not the literal destruction of his home.
Or it’s just a dream, you fool, Haradeth chided himself. He sighed and stood up, stretching his back. It was just a dream, or it was so symbolic it would be meaningless to him until it had passed. Either way he would accomplish nothing by worrying over it.
A gentle rapping came at his door, startling him out of his reflection. “Open,” he said.
Lorathor peered in, blinking away sleep. “Haradeth? I thought I heard a scream.”
“Just a bad dream, my friend,” Haradeth said, shaking his head.
“Must have been a dream thrice-damned to Shadow, from the way you were going on.” Lorathor’s forehead crinkled slightly with the faintest hint of amusement. Their last conversation with the Tarnished One – Bix, Haradeth reminded himself – had seemed to help the Sylvani regain some of his levity. “What was it?”
Haradeth shrugged. “An old friend of a dream, to be honest. One I’d thought I’d left behind with the illusions of childhood.”
“Such dreams – like those illusions – rarely truly vanish.” Lorathor shrugged. “At least, that’s how it works for my people. We retain most of what we absorb as children.”
“And for mine,” Haradeth said. He bit his cheek in thought. Something didn’t add up – Lorathor should have not been able to notice the scream, not as far as his room was from Haradeth’s. “Why were you even here to hear?”
“Bix contacted me.” Lorathor’s eyes did sparkle now, their wavy pupils alive with life, and his cheeks broadened with a smile. “She got the portal stones working. Well, she’s still calling them boogers, but…”
Haradeth nodded, his heart leaping with excitement. Finally, after all this time, they’d be able to re-enter the fray – and with a powerful weapon the Alohym could not predict. If only they could find the other stones, they’d have a network that would change the course of the war. “Let’s go see her, then.”
“You might want to get dressed first,” Lorathor said, eyeing Haradeth up and down. “The less skin to tempt her knife with.”
Haradeth was so happy to have progress, he didn’t even bother to blush at the reminder. Hurriedly, he prepared himself.
Bix was waiting, and with that psychotic little automaton was a different dream.
Hope.
***
Perhaps it was a case of familiarity breeding complacency, but the trek down to Bix’s dwelling seemed less ominous to Haradeth than before. There were still the flickering lights that barely could illuminate the passageways that had given the whole thing an aura of menace before, but they seemed less like something unnatural and more like the sun peeking in and out from behind clouds. The wretched creatures the Sylvani descended into as they aged were still present, muttering to themselves as they skulked from shadow to shadow, but instead of unnerving Haradeth he felt a surge of empathy towards them.
Humans revered their ancestors as their age claimed them. Some were revered for their wisdom, others were cared for because of their senility, and in the worst cases they were abandoned, but they were not feared. The idea seemed terribly unnatural to Haradeth. No species of Alith born showed disgust towards their elders. How could the life cycle of the Sylvani be so different?
“Haradeth, what are you doing?” Lorathor asked.
Haradeth wasn’t certain himself. He had diverted from the path and was walking towards one of the elder Sylvani, that much was clear. “I’ve got a feeling,” was all he could say.
“Be careful,” Lorathor cautioned, walking behind Haradeth at a distance that grew with every step.
“Be careful be afraid be weak be strong be nothing at all,” the elder Sylvani said in a sing-song voice. Haradeth knew there was a term for them, one Lorathor had told him, but he’d forgotten it. He was so intent on forgetting they existed because they made him uncomfortable that he’d forgotten their names.
“I will be something,” Haradeth said. He adopted a conversational tone, as if discussing the idea of being nothing was the most natural thing in the world. It was the way he’d seen humans talk to their infants when they babbled, as if the noises made some sense to them. Given that it eventually helped those infants learn to speak, perhaps there was some wisdom in the idea.
This particular elder had adopted a form not unlike a starfish, although it did not hug the floor. It rose up on smaller starfish as hands, and a single eye peered up at Haradeth from the center of its mass. As he approached, the skin of one of its arms stretched to reveal the Sylvani beak. It wasn’t moving, but the elder was still muttering an endless string of things Haradeth should be. The sound seemed to come from the underside, and Haradeth had to wonder if there was another mouth under this…man? Woman? Did Sylvani even make such distinctions, or was that just an artifact of speaking their language?
Haradeth stretched out his hand towards the elder. Its eye grew larger and split into two, then three and four and five, but it did not shy away.
“Haradeth, be very careful,” Lorathor cautioned. “They can be unpredictable.”
“I think it’s going to be alright,” Haradeth said, extending a sliver of his power with his hand.
All of the small gods had a gift. His mother could make plants grow just with her touch. His uncle, the forge god Vinania, had been able to shape metal with only his will and contact, purifying iron to steel and making it into the finest blade without need for heat to touch it. He’d almost destroyed an Alohym vessel as he died, turning the hull of the thing into spikes that protruded inwards to slaughter the inhabitants. Gianna-o-Zan, a goddess of Xhaod that Haradeth had met once, had been able to ride the winds as if she was a bird. He’d heard it had taken three Alohym to cut her out of the sky, zipping between the clouds and raining iron projectiles down atop their soldiers’ heads.
His gift – the gift of the last of the small gods that was still whole and healthy – was the ability to influence the minds and bodies of animals. The mental influence did not work on beings that were both sentient and sapient – humans, Sylvani, Underfolk. Their free will was too great. Among beings that came close – dolphins, crows, elephants, and others – it allowed him something akin go speech. But these Sylvani elders were more creatures of instinct than their normal counterparts. If Haradeth was right-
The Sylvani elder extruded a tendril so quickly Haradeth couldn’t reach. It wrapped around his wrist and began to constrict. Haradeth could feel the bones in his wrist begin to grind against each other and gritted his teeth against the pain. The sliver he had been extending became a torrent containing a single command. Calm. I mean you no harm.
The tendril relaxed but did not release its grasp on his wrist. It was enough. Haradeth sighed with relief, and Lorathor sheathed the sword Haradeth hadn’t even seen him draw. “Shadow take you, Haradeth, you are insane.”
“No,” Haradeth said, letting his power pulse through the Sylvani’s body, “he is.”
Haradeth could see it now, peering into the Sylvani’s form, sending waves of calming into the poor person. It made him want to weep, the way the brain had degraded. It took some coaxing to get the Sylvani to release him, and he turned to Lorathor with tears in his eyes as the elder’s muttering resumed.
“What is it?” Lorathor asked in a hushed tone.
“This isn’t your natural life cycle,” Haradeth said. “There’s some nutrient your minds need, some metal or humor that is not native to Alith. Your plants likely leeched it out of the soil when you w
ere on your home world, but here…”
“Here it doesn’t exist,” Lorathor said, his voice growing low. “Here…we cannot get it.”
Haradeth nodded somberly. “It directly impacts your ability to control your form. That’s why these Elders seems so unpredictable, because they aren’t fully in control of what they do. Their shapes warp so often their conscious minds cannot handle it-”
“And they go mad.”
“And they go mad,” Haradeth finished. “But in its absence…whatever is missing is also what causes your bodies to age. That’s why you’re functionally immortal here – but instead, this happens. With this chemical, you’d age like humans, although probably slower. Lorathor…I’m sorry. I thought I could help.”
Lorathor looked at Haradeth, and his eyes were radiant with excitement. “You did help, Haradeth. We could maybe find a way to synthesize this chemical here. We could find a way to recreated it. We all thought…we all thought this was our destiny. But it’s not a destiny. It’s a disease. And diseases can be treated.”
“Sometimes,” a voice said. Haradeth and Lorathor turned to face the speaker. It was Bix, crouched atop the amorphous form of one of the Sylvani Elders, riding it like some kind of inhuman mount. “But often…well, some diseases are best treated with stabbing.”
Haradeth had gotten pretty good with just accepting what Bix said, but he couldn’t help himself this time. “What disease is treated with stabbing?”
“The kind that are just going to kill their victim even if we don’t do anything,” Bix said. “Then stabbing can end their suffering. The kind that are caused by blood building up that needs to be let out. Then stabbing can let the blood out. And the kind that infect entire civilizations. Like the Alohym.” Her glowing eyes glistened brighter than usual. “Then stabbing can cure that disease very well.”
Haradeth nodded. “You said the portal stones were working?”
“The boogers. I said the boogers were working. You’re the ones that keep calling them by that stupid name.” Bix nodded and tapped the Sylvani elder beneath her. It began to roll back towards her home. “Now come. We need to figure out where you’re going.”
Haradeth followed, his step lighter than it had been in sometime. Finally, they’d be able to do something to help.
And maybe, in his lifetime, he’d see the Sylvani’s spared this madness.
***
The interior of Bix’s laboratory was more chaotic than the last time that Haradeth had seen it. There were springs scattered across the floor. On the shelves, a variety of faintly glowing crystals had been strewn with the careful placement employed by a bored cat rampaging through a kitchen. Scattered here and there were pieces of machines that Haradeth couldn’t even identify, half torn open and left with their wires exposed like the entrails of sacrificial animals.
He wasn’t certain, but Haradeth would wager a good amount of money that some of those devices hadn’t needed to be dismembered. It wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest to learn that Bix had done it because it amused or, or she was frustrated, or bored, or because the sun had risen that day.
“Now that I’ve gotten the boogers working, they’re connected to the other ones in their web. The ones that are still functional. Take a moment to stare upon me in wonder and offer me praise for my greatness.” Bix turned to look at Lorathor and Haradeth. Her mechanical eyes whirled when the godling and Sylvani smiled, narrowing to thin lines. “You have about two seconds before I feed you your own hearts.”
Haradeth and Lorathor practically fell over themselves with attempts to praise her. The seriousness of Bix’s threats was high on the list of things Haradeth wasn’t certain about. He still didn’t know what the diminutive automaton could actually do if she decided to get murderous, but he was certain that his abilities of having better endurance than the average human and being able to command animals would do little to save him unarmed against a woman of steel and glass and blades.
“That’s better,” Bix said. “You get to keep your entrails today. For now. I might change my mind.” She pressed her fingers into some empty slots on a console. They whirred and one of those light projections of the Sylvani appeared in the air in front of her.
It was a globe, showing all of Alith. Points of light began to appear on the landmasses. “These are the ones we activated. And by ‘we’ I of course mean me, because you two did absolutely nothing to aid me in this endeavor.”
“Was there something we could have done?” Haradeth asked, honestly curious.
“Oh no, you’d be absolutely useless. Although I could have stabbed you and saved some of my servitors. That would have made me feel better.”
“But then I’d be dead,” Haradeth said.
Bix looked at him like he’d just announced he’d have turned into a giraffe and flown to the moon. “I didn’t say fatally stabbed you. I’ve only ever stabbed you in the finger. I wouldn’t kill you.”
“You threatened to feed me my own heart earlier.”
Bix sighed, a sound like steam flowing out of a teapot. “That was twenty-three seconds ago. Ancient history. You can’t live in the past, godling. The knives lurk in the future.”
Haradeth found he had nothing to say to that. “What about the portals within the kingdom?” He asked, trying to turn Bix’s attention back to the matter at hand.
“There’s seven. The one in Hallith you know about. The other six are here, here, here, over there, up here, and down there.” The three-dimension image zoomed in on a map of the kingdom, each point highlighting with her words. “The one down there is beneath the ground in the Underfolk’s land. You probably don’t want to use that one because the Underfolk were all ‘oh no, we’re going to die, let’s go eat bugs in the dark’ when the Alohym arrived. A bunch of bug-eating Underfolk would be more useless than the Sylvani.”
“Hey, we’re Sylvani,” Lorathor objected.
“No, you’re Sylvani. I’m a sentient if slightly deranged automaton. And it’s true that the Underfolk would be more useless, because the only Sylvani being useful is you. That gives the Sylvani exactly one useful member, which is more than the Underfolk. So, congratulations, you elevate how useless our people are.”
Lorathor clamped his mouth shut.
“We go back to Hallith,” Haradeth said. “We can rejoin the army and let de’Monchy know about these portals. When we have those-”
“Nope,” Bix said. “That’s not an option.”
Haradeth rocked back in surprise at the interruption. “I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t beg for pardon. It’s beneath you. Beg for your life. That’s more fitting. And your little army has been driven out of Hallith and the Alohym scorched the entire plateau to glass.”
“What?” Haradeth said, his voice tight.
The image Bix was showing changed to show the plateau of Hallith. It was worse than Bix had described. The plateau’s top was a cracked sea of glass, with tiny bolts of unlight lightning hopping between the shards. “The drones found this when I sent them to check. There’s nothing there anymore. But also, very few dead people which is sad for me because dead bodies are fun but are good for you because that means most of your people got out alive.”
Haradeth closed his eyes tightly. The entire resistance was on the run again. They had been for some time – this clearly hadn’t happened recently. The glass didn’t glow with any remaining heat, and that much being melted would have left some residual. The Sylvani drones had arrived long after…
Haradeth snapped his eyes open. “Your machines. The ones that can fly about and take images of anything.”
“Hmm?” Bix asked. It was an innocent sound, one that clearly meant to convey that she didn’t know what he was getting at, but her body tensed with eagerness.
