by Sam Sykes
It shook its head with some grim mockery of despair. It rolled its fingers, twirling the severed limb like a daisy petal before tossing it aside, adding to the Omens’ sun-ripened buffet.
‘They don’t hear you. I hear your suffering, my son, as does Mother Deep.’ Its eyes brightened. ‘Ulbecetonth hears. Ulbecetonth grants you this mercy. .’
With a gentleness not befitting its great size, the creature’s hand took the man’s head in its palm. It bobbed up and down, weighing the organ as though it were a piece of overripe fruit, pregnant with juices. Then, in the span of a belaboured groan, the creature’s talons tightened over the man’s skull as its jaws parted and uttered a final pair of words.
‘Through me.’
Lenk found not the voice even to squeak at the sight. The creature’s arm jerked, stiffened, sank claws into flesh and dripped thick, viscous ooze from its palm. The slime, like a living thing, swept up with an agonising slowness, seizing the man’s face with grey-green tendrils, seeping into nose, mouth, ears, eyes until all was nothing more than a glob of moist, glistening mucus.
‘Rest, now.’
The Abysmyth laid the Cragsman out before it with an almost reverent delicacy, staring down at the body with eyes that yearned to express pity through their emotionless voids. The ooze, as if in reaction to the demon, pulsed once like a thick, slimy heart before sliding off the man’s face, uninterested, to pool beneath his head.
It was the expression on the man’s face that finally drove Lenk to collapse. He fell to his knees, not with a scream, but a slack jaw and quivering eyes that could not look away from the Cragsman. Dismembered, tortured, drowned, the corpse wore no fear upon his face, no anger nor any mask that the young man had seen upon the face of death.
Upon the undisturbed sand, beneath the shade of a tree swaying with the quiet song of a breeze, the Cragsman stared up at the endless blue sky with closed eyes, a slight smile tugging at his lips.
‘This is the sound I remember,’ the Abysmyth gurgled happily, remorseless, ‘the sound of mercy.’ It ran its massive hand over the man’s face, a sign of benediction from black talons. ‘And to you, my son, She grants the gift of tranquil oblivion, through us, Her children.’
‘Endless is Mother Deep’s mercy,’ the Omens chattered in agreement.
‘Mercy?’
Lenk’s own voice sounded blasphemous in the stillness, echoing against the empty sky. Slowly, he drew himself up from the sand, body rigid and shivering, cloaked by a cold the sun would not turn its eye to.
Such a sound did not go unnoticed. The Omens paused in the midst of their feast, glancing up with bits of pink and black stuck in their teeth, bulbous eyes quivering. The Abysmyth’s great head rose, fixing two white eyes out towards the sand.
Two blue orbs stared back.
‘Mercy is a purpose.’ Lenk could hear the words coming from his mouth, but could not hear them in his head. ‘You have no purpose,’ the last word was forced from his lips like a spear, ‘abomination.’
He took a step forwards and the Omens scattered, white sheets in the wind as they flew up to the safety of the tree. Behind the net of leaves, their spherical eyes peered out, watching, unblinking, horrified.
The Abysmyth had no such reservations.
‘What would a mortal know of purpose?’ It rose up, matching Lenk’s step with a thunderous crash of its webbed foot. ‘A fleeting light in a cold, dark place, quivering and then snuffed for ever, your purpose is only to receive Her infinite mercy.’ It stepped out of the shadow, a blight upon the sky and sand. ‘Your purpose is to hear Her.’
‘Our purpose,’ Lenk felt the urge to pause at that word, but his mouth muttered regardless, ‘begins with you.’ His sword was up and levelled at the beast. ‘Where is the tome?’
‘Tome? TOME?’ The Abysmyth howled, scratching at the side of its head as if pained by the very word. ‘The book is not for you to see, my son! Its knowledge corrupts, condemns! I won’t let you fall to such a fate after all I have suffered for you.’ It stomped again, petulant. ‘I won’t!’
Only when it stepped into the sunlight, a great stain on the world, did the extent of its suffering become clear. Its wounds pulsated with its rage, the sickly green ichor gnawing at its flesh, carving deeper furrows into its skin and baring masses of bleached white bones and innards that resembled beating patches of dark moss.
‘You see,’ it all but cackled as it saw Lenk’s eyes widen, ‘this is the price we paid, we, Her children, for you.’ It shook its head. ‘The longfaces, those purple-skinned deviants, would not listen to us, to HER! They would not listen! We tried to make them, and what was wrought?’ It gestured to its mangled chest. ‘Scorn! Impurities! They cast a disease upon us Shepherds and now you say the flock is already brimming with sickness? I will not accept it!’
The creature’s roar echoed in Lenk’s ears, the same word repeating itself in his head: We, we, we. There were more of them, more Abysmyths, more cursed creatures with sharp teeth and glistening ooze.
He felt he should have been terrified by such words. He felt he should run, seek the others and flee the island. Such thoughts were small candlelights in his head, choked out and extinguished by the voice that quieted the demon’s howl with its echoing presence.
‘You don’t belong here,’ it spoke through him, ‘you were cast out, sent to hell.’
The creature grinned. It did not merely appear to grin, nor did Lenk imagine it grinning. Such an expression seemed painful, the edges of its face cracking, the corners of its lipless mouth splitting with the effort. Still, the demon grinned and spoke.
‘We’re coming back.’
And then the grin vanished. Lenk stared into a vast, black face dominated by expressionless eyes. The creature tilted its head to the right, as though regarding him for the first time.
‘Good afternoon,’ it uttered.
It tilted its head to the left.
‘I. .’ it sounded almost contemplative, ‘want you to die now.’
‘Riffid Alive,’ Kataria whispered breathlessly.
There were very few occasions outside of violent situations where it was acceptable to speak the shictish Goddess’s name. Everyday prayers and curses were for weaker deities of weaker races; the shicts were born with all the instinct they would ever need. However, if the Foe of all Kou’ru could have witnessed the carnage on the beach through Kataria’s eyes, she highly doubted the Goddess would begrudge her.
What had, undoubtedly, begun as a pristine stretch of white sand, completely indiscernible from any other chunk of beach, was now smothered under twisting sheets of grey and white. She stepped upon what had once been the beach, covering her nose as a heavy sulphurous odour sought to choke the life out of her.
The sound beneath her feet was thick and crunching, not unlike walking on pine cones. The sun’s warmth paled against the fierce heat that choked the beach. She glanced down; the earth smouldered, red embers burning stubbornly through the blanket of smoke that roiled over sands scorched black. She glanced up; what thin trees remained standing had been charred into dark, lanky arms reaching up towards a sky no longer visible from the ground. Upon their fingers burned bright fires, beacons in the smoke that drew her further down the coast.
They illuminated the earth, however faintly, and the story continued in the charred sand as Kataria spied the first tracks.
There had been a battle, she recognised, and not a clean one. Footprints were muddled: bare feet with webbed toes crossed over heavy, booted indentations in a brawl that sprawled the length of the shore. Here, someone fell hard upon the earth and left a pool of thick, boiling red behind. There, some strange green ichor pulsated hungrily in the sand like a disease. And all across the sand were the vast, webbed prints of something large that had stalked through the melee in long strides.
Abysmyth.
Lenk had told her to regroup with the others if she found any sign of the creature, but, she reasoned, he often told her many things she didn’t c
are to hear. For the moment, she forgot him, forcing down concern and instinct, and leaned closer to the ground, following the story further.
The demon had appeared somewhere in the midst of the brawl, after the earth had been scorched. It had wrought terror upon the field; everywhere its foot had landed, the depressions of fallen bodies lay nearby. Interesting twist, she thought, but unsatisfying.
If the Abysmyth had indeed killed and injured as many as the tracks suggested, where were all the corpses? Where were the drowned victims? Occasionally, shallow trenches had been carved where the bodies had hit the earth, indicating that they had either crawled or been carried away.
Whoever the Abysmyth had struck down had apparently escaped with their dead and wounded. She frowned, uneasy. That only accounted for one side of the battle; where were the frogmen that had rushed into battle beside the demon? For that matter, where was the demon? She paused by the base of a flame-scarred tree, scratching her chin thoughtfully. The wind moaned, peeling back a blanket of smoke.
It was then that she saw the needle-like teeth leering towards her.
She whirled, bow up and arrow drawn, levelling her weapon at the gaping maw that loomed out of the grey. Her hand quivered once, then stayed; the mouth did not move. Instead, the mouth glimmered a shimmering, crystalline blue.
The smoke retreated further, exposing the face that held the teeth, the large black eyes that dominated the face. From behind a skin of ice, the frogman howled soundlessly at her, immobile and unblinking within its azure prison. His spear was held above his head, icicles hanging from the weapon’s tip, the frogman’s muscles frozen and unquivering under a sheen of frost.
‘Well,’ she grunted, ‘I’ll be damned.’
Somehow, the human curse seemed more appropriate for what occurred next.
In a great sigh, the smoke peeled back. A forest of frozen flesh was laid bare before her eyes. They stood in a charge that had no end, mouths open to utter a battle cry that had no sound beyond the cracking of ice in the distance. Dozens of the pale invaders, turned into an expanse of endless blue, rushed towards some unseen foe that they had never reached. Many of them hadn’t even set two feet upon the ground before the ice claimed them.
And now they levelled their hatred, their black stares, upon her.
Kataria, however, had no more attention for them. Her concern was reserved for the emaciated beast that had stridden into battle with them. The Abysmyth’s tracks were not apparent in the frost-kissed earth nor the smouldering black sand. However, one set of footprints did catch her attention.
He, or she, for the tracks were made by slender feet set lightly upon the ground, had stood before the frogmen. The frost radiated from that position in a great arcing wave, staining the ground with ice. From there, this new character had turned about, unhurried, by the looks of its shallow, well-defined footsteps, and traipsed down the shore.
Where it had stopped, carnage was born. Fire savaged the land, sending bodies to the ground as burned husks, barely discernible from the scorched earth. Trees were split down the middle, as though by a great blade.
It didn’t take the shict long to deduce the presence of magic. Even through the acrid stench of brimstone, the stink of wizardry was thick in the air, a foul amalgamation of sulphur and something metallic, with a somewhat lemon-scented after-aroma.
That answered a few questions right away — for what earthly fire could smoulder for so long? What mortal ice could remain frigid even under the sun’s unrelenting warmth?
More questions arose than were answered, however; Dreadaeleon was the only creature she knew capable of the practice of magic, and he was far too frail to wreak such devastation. Besides, he had taken off with Gariath, across to the other side of the island. . hadn’t he?
The Venarium, she knew from listening to the boy, were the sole practitioners and custodians of magic. They were, she had learned, a secretive and largely boring lot, more content to study and make rules than actually use their powers for anything interesting.
This character, this set of prints, however, was anything but tedious. She followed the trail, noting each shattered tree, each heap of burned corpses, each patch of ice. So intent on the tracks was she that she hardly noticed the Abysmyth when it appeared through the gloom.
She did not start at the sight of the creature. Rather, she was struck dumb by it and its sudden appearance.
It was dark, far darker than she remembered it, wisps of smoke pouring from its gaping maw, an enormous wound in its chest and craters that had once been eyes. An icicle the size of the Riptide’s bow skewered it through its ribcage, holding it aloft like some demonic kebab, its webbed feet barely grazing the ground as they swayed in the wind.
Despite the oppressive heat, Kataria felt her blood run cold.
The Abysmyth had been a definition up until this moment. Despite being a creature of hell, it had existed according to rules: it killed and it could not be killed. The ending of the trail’s story had changed everything. Something had fought the frogmen and Abysmyth, something that left no bodies, only smears of pulsing green ichor.
And amongst it all, someone, a man or woman who strode between infernos and blizzards as casually as one skips through a meadow, had given her a plot that she no longer wanted to read.
Suddenly, finding Lenk seemed like a rather good idea.
Her ears twitched and, for a fleeting moment, she was almost relieved to hear a sound other than the crackling of ice and fire. Such a moment was short-lived; the sounds of steel singing through the air slipped muffled through scars in the smoke, accompanied by faint mutters of voices she had never heard before.
They were vaguely familiar. There was grunting, snarling, the sound of something heavy being swung through the air. Yet there was something odd about the voices: they all spoke at once, echoing and reverberating off of each other to become incomprehensible. Like wisps of smoke, they trickled through to her, brief scents of sulphur and brimstone without the stink of something truly burning.
And then, all at once, they were silent.
She waited, ears twitching, hoping to hear more; she ought likely to have fled, she knew, but was tempted into stillness by the sounds. She had to find the end of the story that had begun back in the jungle.
Moments passed, a tense eternity of quiescence. In the distance, a seared branch crumbled at its joint and collapsed upon the sand with a faint crash. Her breath was loud, she knew, so loud she might as well have been speaking.
‘Ah,’ she barely whispered, ‘hello?’
She received her answer half a blink later.
Lenk came hurtling through the air like a wiry javelin, cutting through the smog and leaving a trail of clear air behind him. He hit the earth, shifting from missile to plough as he dug a deep trench in the charred sand, a cloud of ash in his wake. There was an alarmed cry, a faint crash as he struck the tree.
Then, silence once more.
She rushed to him, not bothering to call his name, not bothering to shriek out in alarm at whatever had hurled him such a distance. She made no noise, save for the earth crunching beneath her feet and the words hissed between her teeth.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead,’ she chanted to herself like a mantra, ‘Riffid Alive, don’t be dead.’
He might as well have been, lying in a half-made grave with the seared tree to mark it. Motionless, eyes closed, sword held loosely in hands, he looked almost at peace in his trench. So deep was the rent in the earth that she had to leap in to reach his body.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead.’
Two fingers went to his throat; nothing. A long, notched ear went to his chest; soundless.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead.’
She leaned closer to his face; his breath was cold and icy. Her eyes remained open, watering as the smoke stung them.
‘Don’t-’
His eyes opened with such suddenness that she recoiled. He rose from the ground like a living corpse
draped in an ashen cloak. His sword was in his hand, naked and silver. His eyes pierced the gloom like candles burning blue. His stare shifted over her, merely acknowledging her presence, before he soundlessly pulled himself out of the hole.
‘Lenk,’ she all but cried after him, ‘are you-’
‘Not sure,’ he replied. His voice was like the sound of the embers beneath his boots. ‘Fight now.’
‘What fight?’
That, too, was answered as soon as she emerged from the grave.
Sixteen
MOTHER, WHY?
‘They won’t listen! They can’t hear You!’
Kataria’s ears twitched. A dozen voices, all choked and speaking at once, tone shifting wildly between each word.
‘I’ve tried! How I’ve tried! How I’ve suffered!’
Footsteps, embers crunching under massive, webbed feet.
‘But for what, Mother? They refuse enlightenment, deny You!’
The crack of ice.
‘Have I done nothing to show You my devotion? Is all my suffering in vain?’
Silence. The sound of smoke rising from the earth.
‘NO!’
The endless grey trembled and scattered, exposing the Abysmyth as a towering tree in the centre of the forest of frozen frogmen. The beast was alight in the gloom, eyes flashing wide and empty, talons wet with ooze, pulsing green ichor pumping in time with each staggered breath it took.
‘There’s. .’ Kataria paused to stare at the creature with ever-widening eyes, ‘more of them?’
‘More?’ Lenk swept the smoke for a sign. ‘Where?’
‘Behind us,’ Kataria replied. ‘Dead. Something happened here.’ She glanced from the demon’s wounds to a glob of the throbbing green substance on the earth. Not blood, she noted, not bothering to wonder what else it might be. ‘Probably whatever happened to this one as well.’
‘One or one thousand,’ the young man muttered, raising his sword. ‘We will clean the land of their blight.’
