by Tammy Salyer
All the twinkling pinpoints of light in the creature’s long body suddenly froze and dimmed, and she got the distinct impression that the creature was fading from existence. But that couldn’t be, because she still felt its grip around her. She heard what she could best describe as the sound dry leaves made when they began to burn, a quiet crackling. First, there was only one crackling whisper on the air, but it was quickly joined by a separate whisper, then another until the crackling whispers grew to a gale, filled with the snaps and pops one might hear in a forest fire. In moments, it sounded as if the interior of the fortress itself were becoming an inferno, and the lights in all the beings blazed and pulsed strongly again.
She writhed, wanting her hands free to cover her ears before her eardrums burst. Abruptly, a forceful gust overrode the others, and all the noise cut off. After only a moment of relief, the first whisper came again, leaves burning in a breeze.
“Stop,” she said aloud. “What do you want from me?” But then she heard it, actually heard it. Words, spoken in Elder Veros, somehow forming within the clattering wind.
“We have been waiting for you, Mylla Evernal, last of the Ærdens. The time has come to mend time.”
It took her a moment to make sense of the words. “You can speak?” This was all she got out before she had to take a breath, her lungs only able to fill halfway. “H-how do you know me?” she added, and more questions overtook her thoughts—What does it mean, last of the Ærdens? Could that be true? Where is this thing from? Are these Balavad’s servants?—one after the other, too fast for her to keep up.
Stop. Get control, she ordered herself, putting her raging thoughts in line. What the thing had said about time struck her. Time to mend time. And Griggory’s cryptic statements from earlier made sense. “You’re the time walkers, aren’t you?”
The breeze-like noise died down, and something in the thing’s eye-lights shifted. She got the distinct impression it was displeased by what she’d said, but she likewise didn’t think the displeasure was aimed at her. She heard Griggory rustling around below as the thing addressed him.
“We are not time walkers anymore, Knight of Vinnr,” it wisped.
“No,” Griggory answered. “Of course, your roots are more bound than ever. I know the timepaths are broken. But I’m a believer in speaking the truth that will be as much as the truth that was.”
What struck Mylla the most was the fact that Griggory knew these creatures. How many more impossible secrets did the old Knight hide?
She picked her next question, maybe not the most important, given what was happening, but certainly the most curious. “How do you know my name?” she repeated. Then quickly added, “And could you set me back down”—try politeness, it works among some sentient creatures—“please?”
The branches wrapping around her clicked open in an almost mechanical motion. She dropped instantly and braced to hit the hard-packed floor. But just as quickly, another branch snatched her and dropped her, then another until she’d reached the ground in a not-entirely-gentle landing.
Pulling herself to her feet, she assessed that nothing was too badly bruised. “Thank you,” she said, adding to herself, I guess.
Her freedom did not necessarily translate to a sense of safety. Now that she was on the ground and looking up at the thing’s, the time walker’s, eye-lights, she appreciated just how dwarfed by it she was. Any one of the three beings could squash her and Griggory without noticing it, if not for the fact that she’d been right about their trunks. They were, to borrow Griggory’s analogy, rootbound and sunk into the ground. But if that were the case, how did it move, and how had they gotten from outside the wall to inside?
Before she could press them and Griggory for an explanation of what was happening, an image flashed in her mind. A new memory. They seemed to be coming more frequently and clearly.
“Pay close attention, my little evening star.”
My little evening star, she thought. That’s what my mother used to call me.
Her mother sits on a stool across from Mylla, who can’t be more than five or six. Mylla holds a contraption Ayanna has just given her that contains dials and arms and gears, something that looks both fragile and durable, depending on how it’s handled. The general shape of it is round, though not uniform because of the pieces that jut from it, and it’s made from a rich mahogany wood. She is wonderstruck at receiving such a gift and treasures it immediately.
Her mother begins showing her how the gears and arms move as she tells Mylla about time.
“The timepaths once connected everything. In the same way the Cosmos has only one sky, it also once shared a single past and future. Everything lived and died in the same history. This can show you the time, the true time, everywhere. But only when the timepaths are whole again.”
Mylla watches her mother closely, then asks, as she so often asks, “What do you mean?” She understands there’s a mystery here that isn’t going to be explained simply, and she wants to know more.
“The timepaths show the sun and moon when to rise and set, and this is true in all the five realms. When you bring this little box into their light, even if their light is dimmed, and turn the dials to any of the other of the four realms, you can see their time too.”
As Ayanna speaks, she shows Mylla one of the spinning arms on the side of the device and moves it with a finger. The point of the arm can be aimed at five smaller crystal circles, their colors ranging from bright yellow to glistening black. “Right now,” she continues, “it only works in Ærd. But someday, if the realms are reunited, it will work in them all.”
Her young mind is amazed. See time? It’s magic! Then a new thought occurs to her. “But, Mumma, what broke the timepaths?”
“The same thing that broke everything. The fracturing of the One Verity into the Five. The timepaths are now fractured too, but they start here, in Ærd. If they are ever allowed to branch again, it will start in our home, our realm.” Her mother gives her a beaming smile, sharing the delight of being part of a world with a unique and special trait. A world, it seems, that contains the magic of time.
Despite Mylla’s fascination, something about this unsettles her, but she is too young to understand what. She turns the contraption over in her hand, examining every edge and carved notch. “What is it called?” she asks.
“It’s a tesselock, after the timepaths, which we call—”
She snapped out of the memory. “Tessalopes,” she whispered to herself. Then more loudly: “That’s what you are, the tessalopes. You’re the creatures who create the timepaths that once joined the Cosmos together.” Her thoughts whispered with the memory of her father’s voice, from another time, explaining this to her. “When the timepaths were whole, they were like trees, every branch and root connected to a part of the Cosmos. It’s why the tessalopes look like trees to some people now. When the timepaths were broken, they became trapped in Ærd, and now we call them the ‘time walkers.’”
The thing’s eye-lights blazed for a moment, then resumed a slow flicker. “You are remembering your past, last of the Ærdens. Memory exists in the timepaths as well.”
It was a lot to take in—again—and she recalled not understanding, but at least accepting it, with much greater ease as a child. Now that she’d lived so many more turns, she gleaned a new insight into what her mother might have been saying, and it was simple: Ærd contained the time walkers, who created the timepaths, or more precisely, controlled the timepaths. Could whatever controls time control the Cosmos? Is that why Balavad’s Raveners were here? To enslave the tessalopes?
The tumult in her mind kicked up again with more questions. Did this mean the Ærdens had the key to stopping, possibly even reversing time? Could this be a secret way to stop Balavad from taking over the Cosmos? Could the time walkers help them? Which begged the question once more, and she asked it aloud, “What did you mean by me being the last of the Ærdens? How can there be no others? My father, he was a Warden of Time, a Temporal
is. He could still be alive. He could still—”
The tessalopes’ whispering sounds picked up again, and she realized this was the way they spoke with each other. She clapped her hands over her ears, letting them speak without interrupting them.
Using her Mentalios, she addressed Griggory. Do you know what they’re talking about? And because she had too many questions to limit herself to one at a time, she added, What else do you know about these creatures?
Seeming unbothered by the tremendous noise, Griggory watched the tessalopes but answered, I wandered many worlds in my time. I wandered them all, I think. Ærd was greener then.
He said no more, and Mylla waited, thinking he was having trouble calling up the memory. It was quite some time ago, after all, and he was, despite his outward appearance, a very old man. When after a few moments no further explanation seemed forthcoming, she opened her mouth to prompt him, but the tessalopes’ gale-whispers subsided.
She dropped her hands and stared at them expectantly. Several tendrils broke from the lower trunk of the tessalope who’d grabbed her and snaked toward her again. Fighting the urge to back away, she watched them closely, wishing she had her sword Star Spark.
“We shall have it now, last of the Ærdens.”
“Have… what?” She blinked. “I, that is, we, haven’t brought anything. In fact that’s why we’re—” The gale-whispering cut her off, raucous in its obvious agitation.
Shortly, the lead tessalope spoke again. “Come with us.”
This constant lack of clarification had finally pulled the last thread of her patience, like an errant thread on a sweater, to the point of unraveling it completely. “Look, Knight Dondrin and I are going no further until you—”
The trunks of the gargantuan shapes were sliding through the earthen floor like mist, and the leader was bearing down on her. Mylla threw herself aside before it flattened her and felt a peculiar cold sensation, as if ice had not been thrown on her but forced into the very pores of her skin. She sensed she had not avoided the tessalope, not completely, and the creature had simply dissolved as it moved through her.
She rolled to her back and followed the creatures’ passage with her eyes. They still looked as solid as the branches of the one holding her had. “What in all the worlds are these things?” she whispered to herself. Then more loudly: “That’s fine then. We’ll come with you if you promise to help us!”
Empty, pointless words. If anyone with any power was left in this world, it wasn’t her. Starting to regret the mistake of leaving the Knights so she could pursue this fool’s errand, Mylla picked herself up and looked toward Griggory. He’d stayed in the same spot, and she knew the tessalope must have gone right through him, but his expression and posture hadn’t changed an iota. Griggory was enjoying this, and Mylla was just going to have to follow both his and the time walkers’ commands like a lackey until, somehow, she got what she’d come for.
Chapter Fifteen
Mylla and Griggory were led deeper into the expansive building until even the minimal light coming from the gap in the wall they’d entered through had disappeared. Yet it wasn’t completely dark. The flickering lights that pulsed through the tessalopes gave Mylla plenty of illumination, as long as she didn’t want to see beyond a few paces.
Nothing to fear here, she kept telling herself. In her head, she believed it, but the way her skin prickled at every little sound, real or imagined, showed that her body had other ideas. She was a mere speck next to these giants, and if they turned on her, well… she’d already felt her ribs nearly crack when the first had held her.
Still, for being so mighty and seemingly solid, it was a wonder how they moved. She hadn’t been imagining it when she’d thought their trunks were like mist. They did indeed pierce the earthen floor of the structure, like roots, she thought again, but they shifted forward with no more solidity than the air coming from her lungs. It was such an odd thing to see that she started to wonder if any of this was actually real or if she was perhaps still in a black fugue at the bottom of the Never Sea in Himmingaze, dreaming it all.
It’s ridiculous to think I’m dreaming, but at least it makes sense how they could have come up behind Griggory and I so quietly. It’s like they are both real and unreal at the same time.
The tessalopes’ ephemeral forms made no noise as they crossed the chamber. And because Griggory had already scolded her for yelling, not to mention that neither he nor the time walkers had yet answered any of her questions, she held her silence for now as well.
Eventually, she sensed the structure’s far wall looming before them. She couldn’t judge how close it was, but the blackness thickened, or at least that was how she articulated it to herself. Where were the tessalopes leading them? What was this place?
The three time walkers stopped suddenly and spread out in a semicircle. Mylla stopped behind them, but Griggory seemed drawn to whatever lay ahead and kept going.
“Griggory!” she whisper-shouted. “Wait!”
He paid her no mind, and since she wasn’t here to babysit, she said nothing more. Let the old Knight worry about himself.
The tessalopes crackled to each other again, then the one who’d picked her up—at least she thought it was the one; in the dark and with the way they’d moved, she couldn’t be sure anymore—raised several tendrils. The differently sized branches whipped around slowly in the air for a moment, like an eel that’s been picked up by its tail, then converged into a single arm-like appendage. It was pointing ahead toward where Griggory was walking.
Follow him, I guess, she thought, and did so. But not before warning the creatures in a tone she carefully modulated to sound nothing like a threat, “Whatever you want me to see, it’s too dark in here for me. I’m going to have to pull out a set of wystic tools that I carry for… light. Just know that I intend no harm.”
She had her klinkí stones in her palm, but before she withdrew them from her pocket, the three tessalopes began to glow. Her breath caught at the sheer beauty of what was happening. The small lights moving up and down inside their tendrils sharpened and expanded, their many colors—reds, purples, greens, blues, oranges, and all hues in between—getting stronger and deeper. Each light point began to extend as well, not in a rounded shape like stars, but in length, until they flooded the creatures from top to bottom, like a vertical rainbow. The light ropes curved and spun around the things’ inner tendrils, curling up and down them like fire consuming a tree from its center.
After a moment, she had to look away, their brightness too much for her eyes. She took a few more paces forward, and when the creatures were to her back, she opened her eyes.
For all the fiery likeness of the tessalopes’ grand show, what she saw next chilled her blood.
She stood before another tessalope. This one was so massive and wide, it made the others look like saplings standing next to a thousand-turn-old oak. Its size, though, wasn’t due particularly to height and width alone. This creature was spreading out, expanding along the fortress like ivy on a garden wall. Instead of being inside the structure, it appeared to be the structure. Its eye cavities were where she expected to see them, even higher up than those on the time walkers she’d already met, but the rest of its branch-like tendrils extended from a central trunk and spread around the structure’s walls like a net, not weaving into the walls and ceiling but comprising them. She suddenly had the feeling that she’d been swallowed by a forest made of a singular tree.
Whatever made this tessalope like this, one thing seemed certain. Unlike the rest, this one was stuck fast. If it was indeed part of the fortress, and not the structure itself, it appeared the whole thing would collapse if the tessalope tried to free itself, if it even could free itself.
A moment later, it became clear what made this one different. Griggory stopped a few feet from Mylla, knelt on one knee, dropped his head, and said reverently, “Fimm, creator of Ærd, I have waited lifetimes to meet you.”
At Griggory’s statement, t
he Verity’s eye-lights blazed like a kiln’s heart. Mylla fell back a step at the ferocity, shielding her own eyes with a hand. This time, there was heat as well, tightening the skin of her face and back of her hand. Then came that dry, crackling sound like fire on wind but in words she could understand.
“Bring me the Scrylle, Mylla Evernal, daughter of Warden Temporalis Greven Evernal.”
The eye-lights dimmed enough for her to face the creature. Unlike the rest, the Verity’s, or vessel’s, lights were a solid blazing cavity of fire. As she looked, she had the discomfiting sensation that they were tunnels that led into infinity, and if she stared too long, she would fall in and burn forever.
She blinked when something tugged her pant leg. Griggory was beside her, pulling at her, and she abruptly joined him in kneeling.
Fimm. Verity of her home realm. The one creature who would surely give her the answers she sought. But now that she was confronted with her chance to ask her questions, all she felt was confusion. The Scrylle?
“Fimm, my maker, I’m—” What? Pleased to meet you? No, she couldn’t say something so droll. Best to just get to the point, as it seemed no Verity cared about ceremony as much as humans did. “I don’t have the Ærden Scrylle. My father took it when I was a child so we could travel the starpaths. He left me in Vinnr and came back to Ærd. So now I’ve come to retrieve it. Vinnr is under attack, you see, from another of your kind, Balavad of Battgjald, and if we could borrow the Scrylle, we might be able to stop him.”
Even as she spoke, she felt her hope sinking. If the Scrylle wasn’t here, where had her father taken it? A coward twice over. Not only had he abandoned her but he’d never even returned to Ærd to face the consequences of what he’d done. He’d stolen their greatest advantage against Balavad, if her memories were correct, and never brought it back.
The Verity confirmed this a moment later. “Warden Evernal has not been seen in Ærd since before its ruin.”
