by Tammy Salyer
“So, does that mean you don’t know why it’s so… well, so harsh now?”
“You said there was a war. I assume it’s this way now because Balavad won,” he said matter-of-factly.
She had no response for that and could only surmise he was right.
They trudged on. And very shortly, proof of just how dark and destructive the war had been confronted them.
Within the confines of the tree tunnel, it would have been too dim to see more than a few feet if not for Mylla’s glowing wystic stones. When she realized that more solid light was coming from the opposite direction, which meant the tunnel was nearing its end, her first reaction was relief, until she saw what had been hung from the trees along the tunnel wall.
Corpses, dozens of them, strung from branches by their necks with chains. Though many of the bodies were mildly rotten, the cold, dry wind that blew endlessly down the path had preserved them to a greater-than-usual degree, making their features and clothing obvious. Chillingly so.
They were Raveners. Though their unsettling gray eyeballs were long gone, their lips had shriveled away from elongated, glassy teeth. If that hadn’t been enough to show her what they were, their uniforms, thin, gangly bodies, and clawlike hands made it unmistakable.
Mylla stopped at one of the bodies and approached it for a closer look. The corpse was hung high enough that her face was level with its torso. The Ravener’s clothes were strings and rags, barely enough left to flap in the constant gusts. She scanned it quickly from boot tips to head. His, or perhaps her—the corpse was desiccated enough that its gender was indeterminable—eye sockets had something sticking out of them. The spindly objects rustled, and she nearly jumped back in fright and disgust, thinking it was an insect or reptile. But she looked closer and realized small, stiff vines had grown up into its skull and out through the eyes. She looked quickly away, finding it too grotesque and unnerving to view for long.
The tunnel of death showed clearly that the Ærdens had fought and won a few battles at least and then displayed their enemies’ corpses as threats of what would happen to others who stood against them. It was grisly.
Avoiding the eyes, she examined the rest of the corpse, wondering if they’d died in battle and been hung afterward, or if hanging itself was the cause of death. Either would be gruesome, but which it was would tell her a bit more about the Ærdens. Had their actions been purely malice-based, or were they simply being pragmatic? Just how much suffering were her forbearers willing to inflict on others? Mylla had learned early in her soldier training that a people’s actions and methods of conducting warfare gave the clearest insight into their true hearts. Cruelty or torture, even if it was hoped it would lead to some good, denoted not pragmatism but something dark. Cruelty was a monster that lived in the hearts of some and demanded its tribute, regardless of the supposed good its application might evoke. The words And once you feed cruelty, it only grows hungrier whispered through her head. Her eyes flicked back to the chain around the corpse’s neck. Had it been Eisa who’d told her that?
She was reminded of Commander Brun of Ivoryss, and the Ravener she’d had chained up similarly in the catacombs under Asteryss City. The leader of the Dragør Marines had never struck Mylla as particularly monstrous, despite being unerringly stubborn and suspicious of the Knights. But if the adage was true that being cruel was a sign of an inner darkness, then Brun was herself a brute, like the prisoner she held. But then, maybe Mylla was just being naive. Maybe the truth was that it took a monster to slay a monster, and if not for people with the constitution and willingness to do whatever was necessary to stop darkness from spreading, people like Brun, maybe they would all be forced to live in that darkness. Perhaps most grisly of all was that Mylla could see no major wounds on the corpse. This Ravener, and the others, had died from suffocation. She was descended from the people who’d done this, a dark-hearted people.
The body still wore a thick belt at its waist, with a heavy buckle that looked to be made of medal. A black stone was embedded in the center near the bottom, and a familiar pattern of three chevrons peaked over it. The mark of a Flesh Caster, Balavad’s order of protectors. Heeding a strange impulse, she reached out to run her finger over it. Through the blue light haze of her klinkí stones, she misjudged the space between her hand and the buckle and nudged it harder than she’d meant to.
The corpse was pushed backward into the tree, its mass barely the weight of a feather. Upon striking the trunk, the whole figure and much of its remaining clothing disintegrated into fine dust and was instantly dispersed through the trees by another blast of wind.
Mylla stepped back, aghast. A jangling sound came from above her. The chain that had been hanging around the Ravener’s neck swaying in the gust.
That wasn’t the only thing left of the creature. The belt buckle had fallen to Mylla’s feet. The last vestige of the Battgjaldic soldier. She almost stooped to pick it up, a dreadful souvenir, but didn’t. Why would she want such a thing?
Griggory had witnessed her actions silently, but he now said, “Come, My Evernal. To the end we shall go.”
Grateful to be pulled from her gory fascination, she followed, keeping her eyes on the light they approached as it grew brighter, trying to ignore the dead faces hanging on each side that seemed to be staring down at them.
My Evernal? she thought. What an odd thing to call me. As odd as everything else about him, I suppose.
Another night was settling around them when they at last emerged in a wide field. In the dimness several hundred paces before them rose a titanic fortress. Between where they stood and the fortress, the remaining trees thinned gradually until they were gone completely. The open space ensured no one could approach the construction without being spotted from a distance.
It rivaled Vigil Tower’s footprint in size, spanning as wide as a city block, but that was the only similarity. The outer walls rose so high that a low bank of gray clouds covered the top, and she couldn’t tell how far up it went. The road led on to its main gate and ended. From this distance, she could see the fortress was built at the edge of a cliff, though it wasn’t possible to tell how high it was, and the sound of waves crashing on rock somewhere below joined the constant howl of wind.
Like the plain behind the starpath platform they’d arrived at, the bare field between them and the fortress was devoid of signs of life. But it didn’t matter that they could be seen from the fortress when they crossed the open space. She wasn’t here to be sneaky. She was here for answers. Yet, even as the darkness thickened, no lights came from windows that might have dotted the walls of the fortress—it was already too dim to make out the finer details of the structure—and she feared that the inside could be even blacker than the night outside.
“Do you think we have anything to fear?” she asked Griggory as they paused, still among the trees.
He scratched his chin as if pondering a depth to the question she hadn’t realized it could have. “There is always something to fear, don’t you think? What you know, what you don’t know—all can be fraught. It’s how you face the fears, and if you do, that’s important, yes?”
She groaned to herself. Never a straight answer with him, is there? “I mean, do you think we should wait for light before…” She jerked her head to indicate the fortress.
“All I can say with certainty is that time will pass whether we stay or go, now or later. But I cannot say how much time will pass.”
What did that mean? Was he saying he thought they shouldn’t tarry because the others might need them back to face Balavad soon? Or was he saying that biding their time might be better in order to give them a chance to better observe what they might be facing? She couldn’t guess from his expression, which was as placid and featureless as a calm lake’s surface. She did know that Ærd set her teeth on edge. Yes, she feared things here, what she might find, and what she might not. And nightfall’s secrets only worsened those fears. The image of the desiccated Ravener bodies rose in her mi
nd, and she had to hold back a shiver at the thought of coming across more of them inside the sprawling citadel, where she might accidentally brush up against one in the dark and feel their dead, dry flesh on her own before she saw it.
“We’ll wait for morning,” she decided aloud. “Better to see what awaits us.” And what might come for us.
They settled in, and Mylla knew that she would not sleep.
As they approached the fortress walls at first light, she couldn’t quite make out what material they were constructed from. Either it was unique, or she was having trouble focusing. When at last they stood beneath the walls, she found that what she’d thought was bad eyesight turned out to be the most astonishing thing. The walls were not built of stone and mortar, but wood. And not hewn wood, but growing, interwoven trees—just like the buildings in her memories. She’d assumed those, at least, were fanciful inventions of her childhood mind. But it appeared that was not the case. People in Ærd dwelled in living buildings.
Or they had. The tree-walls of this fortress had long since withered and died. They were stripped to gray-white like the skin of the Ravener’s corpse now, but grew so thickly that she still couldn’t see through them. She began to suspect the world was dead everywhere. Is that what Balavad had wanted? Dominion over nothing but the dead?
Staring up at the tree-wall, which seemed to rise to the height of the horizon itself, her wonder turned to astonishment. There were faces in the wood, or face-like visages, and they were massive. She blinked and looked again. No, not faces, but the sheer volume of twining and twisting branches and vines that comprised the wall seemed to be moving. Each time she shut her eyes and reopened them, the pattern seemed different.
She quit looking, suspecting that her mind was becoming a bit too overwhelmed. She needed to block out her reactions and keep her focus honed.
The only nonorganic component of the tree-wall was the gate itself, a giant iron-barred portcullis that had been left down. From the mazelike twisting of the tree-wall, she couldn’t tell how it worked, or whether there was a winch or hinges. It wasn’t important, though, as time had done enough damage to the wall itself to have left a gap next to the gate large enough for her and Griggory to fit through. Mylla considered calling out to ask to be received, but letting her voice break this condemned silence seemed a bad idea.
“Have you been here before?” she asked Griggory in a whisper.
He shrugged. “I was not allowed inside. The time walkers disapproved.”
She swallowed around the tightness in her throat. “Well, the time walkers, whoever they were, don’t seem to be here to stop us now. Inside it is, I guess.”
He gave her a curious look and then, without hesitating, slipped through the crevice.
Mylla, however, did hesitate, dreading the thought of moving through the bramble that may or may not contain some kind of living creatures with faces that stared at her and disappeared before she could be sure she was seeing them. Just quit this, Mylla. Griggory is older than you by the age of the Cosmos, relatively, and thus wiser by default. If he isn’t scared, why should you be?
She chuckled sardonically to herself, then followed, moving as quickly as she could until she was right on his heels.
The thicket, if it had been filled with leaves, would have been impassable. But barren as it was, they were able to squeeze and climb through to the interior, getting poked and gouged by sharp branches on occasion. On the other side, they came out into a titanic open keep. What she’d thought were walls surrounding a courtyard were in fact the walls of a single structure, and only by craning her head back all the way could she finally see the ceiling. It was in the shape of a massive dome high overhead, also woven from the thicket of trees and vines.
For a moment, she had a vision of the space filled with light and many-colored vines writhing up the tree branches, flowers blossoming from floor to roof, with small animals and birds living tranquilly among the immense growth. It was glorious and vibrant, a menagerie of abundance and life and warmth. For a heartbeat, she was moved by a sense of joy. Then the vision vanished, leaving her surrounded by skeletal trees and bleak death again. That’s what it used to be like here, she thought. And on the heels of that came: Could it be again?
Beside her, Griggory was taking in the sight as well. She heard him mumbling to himself, but his words were too faint to make out.
With only trifling swatches of the outside light breaking through the roof, she could make out very little past where they stood. Again she thought about calling aloud. What did it matter if she did? She sensed the inevitable. No one was here. She wouldn’t be heard.
But they did need more light, that was a fact. She’d had to put away her klinkí stones inside the bramble and use both hands to climb through. As she reached for them now, she felt something poke her in the back, like a thin branch. But she wasn’t moving, and the thicket was behind her—
Suddenly something gripped her around the shoulders, the waist, all the way to the top of her knees. Something sharp and boney, and it squeezed, vise-like, then yanked her from the ground so fast her chin hit her chest. No, not her chest, something hard, like bark on a thick tree stump.
“Rook’s balls! What—” she started to shout, but her body was whipped sideways and spun halfway around, twisting her neck painfully again.
She blinked away black dots from the whiplash and finally saw what had grabbed her. She very well might have screamed, if not for the enormous pressure squeezing her lungs shut.
Chapter Fourteen
The first thing Mylla’s mind tried to tell her was that it was going to be all right, she was having a momentary lapse of reason thanks to the many strange phenomena she’d been party to over the last thirty-night or so. It would pass. It had to pass.
Because there was no way she could be staring into a face of an extraordinarily tall bark-skinned… man? Rather, a manlike creature. No, a… a…
A moment later, even the survival instincts of her mind couldn’t pretend there was anything remotely human about the thing that had grabbed her.
A tree then, her mind gibbered. A tree with the sentience and visage of a person. Deep breath, Mylla. This is just your mind playing tricks.
But she knew that wasn’t true. She felt no different from her normal self. Then even her assessment of the thing as a tree was pushed aside. Though she knew all of this was real, there was simply nothing in her language to account for what she was seeing.
It became apparent to her as soon as she looked down and saw how high up she dangled that the thing glaring at her from depressions that reminded her of eye sockets, which were easily the size of her head, was over a story tall. Things, rather, as from the corners of her eyes, she could see two more flanking the monster that had her.
It wasn’t comparable to anything she knew. It appeared to be composed of the same vine and tree amalgamation that the building was, except also… not. Its whole form seemed to writhe and twist as if it were a bundle of impossibly long snakes, but inside all that movement, blue, red, and green lights twinkled here and there. Like the Glister Cloud in a way, her mind yammered. The only reason she assumed she was being glared at, or that it even had eye sockets, was due to a mass of little lights filling the two hollow spaces she was being held up before. The lights in these glinting hollows seemed focused and unmoving, as if examining her.
The proxy eyes, however, were where all resemblance to a human form stopped. It had no arms, unless the dozens of branch-like appendages of various sizes springing from around the central trunk of the creature and jutting off into the air around them could be considered arms. Three or four of these were wrapped around her body, and her closer vantage of these showed their color to be a grayish brown. Their roughened surfaces, again reminding her of bark, were peeling and crusted, a bit like stained and weather-beaten shagbark hickory.
Also un-humanlike: the thing didn’t have legs. A bundle of sapling-like cords coalesced around a central point and thicke
ned as they got closer to the ground, like a tree trunk. If her eyes weren’t deceiving her, these “trunks” didn’t stop at ground level but extended into the earth like roots.
The thing held her in front of its eye-lights long enough that the loudest of the buzzing panic in Mylla’s mind began to subside. Her next thought was, These things were the faces I thought I saw in the wall. These things are the wall, or part of it. Why did I think they looked like faces? she wondered, because now that she was close, nothing but the hollows filled with eye-lights was face-like. And how can something so large move so silently?
Her next thought was for Griggory. She didn’t want to move or wriggle, didn’t want to give the thing a reason to squeeze her harder, but she had to know if the old Knight had been harmed.
She craned her neck to look over one side of the… branches? holding her, then the other side. Griggory, amazingly, stood right where she’d left him, feet on the ground, staring up at the creatures mildly. And possibly… delightedly?
“Griggory,” she wheezed, unable to yell with the pressure squeezing her torso. “Are you safe?”
He didn’t respond to her, didn’t even act like he’d heard her. His eyes moved from one to the other of the creatures. She counted three total.
“Knight Dondrin!” she yelled louder, finding some bravery in the fact that these things didn’t seem to be concerned with him. So far. “Can you hear me?”
This time he looked to her and frowned. “Shhh, My Evernal. This is a sacred place, and still. A place of stillness does not favor mortals’ demands.”
She stared at him incredulously. Was he chiding her? Now, when there were monsters present? What in the five realms of the Great Cosmos was going on?
She decided to try a different tactic. Looking directly into the thing’s light-filled hollows, she spoke in Elder Veros with as much strength as her restricted lungs could summon. “I mean you and your kind no harm, creature of Ærd. But I do ask that you put me back down on the ground.”
