by Sean Rodden
The company moved through the morass of Coldmire as quickly as caution allowed, meandering in the mists like lost souls seeking to return to cadavers long decomposed and reclaimed by the earth – the grim grey Fian an eidetic extension of the everhaze, the Darad melding mercurially into the mist for the dusking of his inrinil, the Ath but an ash floating through the fog. But even such spectres were forbidden any course that might have been efficient in Coldmire, and Eldurion led them along a route selected for its sure and solid ground rather than for its directness to their destination.
They carefully circuited still stream and poisonous pool, keeping to the high ground when possible, prudently shunning the heavily hazed hollows and sunken places of the moors. Often would their grey leader pause briefly, nostrils twitching at a subtle shift in the stench of the fen. He would then turn aside from a perceived peril, avoiding a discerned danger that those who followed him had neither seen nor sensed.
Somewhere above the grey mantle of the mire the unseen sun had arced toward middleday when Eldurion drew to an abrupt halt. He squatted on his haunches, grey eyes aglitter, fingers tracing over the sphagnum and muck at his feet. He rose shortly, turned and nodded to his companions.
“We are fortunate, my friends,” the Fian revealed. “Doubly so. We have lucked upon the trail of the marsh moose. And the way leads eastward and likely does not wander as wildly as that upon which I have taken you. I determine that we can move with some speed now.”
Rundul glowered at the moss-covered mud.
“Are you sure, Fian?” he rumbled doubtfully. “The earth doesn’t speak to me in this wretched place.”
“I am certain, Stone Lord,” came the reply of greased iron. “The mire can accommodate some haste now. Where the ground might support the vast mass of the marsh moose, so surely can it support you.” Beneath eyes as grey as the haze of Coldmire a slow smile creased the Fian’s face. “Or mayhap you are fatigued?”
The hulking Darad growled, but his ebon eyes were bright with humour.
“Lead, old man. And I will follow.”
And so the Fian led, and the Darad followed.
But Yllufarr of the Neverborn lingered momentarily, pushing a lustrous black lock that had fallen free back beneath his hood. He bowed his head slightly, listening intently to the slick wet voice of the fen. Harkening, hearing. His uncoloured eyes glowed with a thinly veiled light.
Something. Something was out there. Something was there, somewhere in the mists.
Something somewhere.
The glow in Yllufarr’s pale eyes grew to a gleam of long-kindled loathing. But he pushed the urge to strike out in search of the thing aside and away, and took to the trail of the marsh moose.
And eyes were on him as he went.
The trio looked upon the ruin of the immense marsh moose in a detached silence.
Only the great grey bull’s forelimbs, prominently humped shoulders and regally racked head remained above the surface of the quickmud that had claimed it. The animal’s hide was covered in slime and sphagnum. The creature’s maw had fallen open and was thickly frothed in exhaustion. Tattered sheets of moss hung from the bony tips of its massive rack. Its wide round eyes had rolled up in their sockets, exposing whites made pink by burst blood vessels. The exertion of the creature’s fight to free itself from the fetters of the fen had served only to hasten its doom.
A single pale plume of breathmist fluttered feebly from one flared nostril into the grey fog of the bog.
“The beast lives,” observed Rundul.
Eldurion nodded slowly.
“His heart is shattered within him. His end is near. But he yet suffers...”
There came a sound like that of the plucked string of a harp. An arrow black of shaft and vane appeared, protruding from the pierced eye of the animal, vibrating visibly. The moose died instantly
Yllufarr slung his blackwood bow back across his shoulder.
Eldurion inclined his head.
But Rundul of the Wandering Guard chuckled lowly.
“Stone and steel! If the beast hadn’t foundered here that may have been me lying in the muck with an Athain arrow in my eye!”
“Perhaps the Prince would not have been inclined to show you the same mercy, Stone Lord.”
Rundul’s breast rumbled with laughter for the Fian’s words and for the small eerie smile playing on the Sun Lord’s lips.
“If not for mercy, then surely for the sheer fun of it,” agreed the Darad.
Then something else rumbled within him, and he eyed the carcass speculatively, one finger tracing the edge of a blade of his axe.
“Shouldn’t we butcher the beast?”
“Hardly, Stone Lord,” refused the Fian. “All that exists in Coldmire, flora and fauna, are a poison most lethal to those that do not dwell here. Should we not perish for the poison blackening the blood of the animal, then we should certainly die of disease for the filth of its flesh.”
“The Daradur are susceptible to neither poison nor disease.”
“Then you would surely die of the taste.”
Rundul frowned, but said no more, and reluctantly dismissed the hunger panging in the hollows of his belly.
“Let us away from this place,” Yllufarr suggested softly.
And Eldurion took them around the moose and its misted muddy grave and led them away into the east.
They paused atop a grey-heathered hummock and studied the growing gloom of the northern skies.
“Night comes,” Eldurion announced. “And night in Coldmire comes swiftly and is most utter, unfavoured by either moon or star, and forbids safe navigation. We will halt here and continue come the morrow’s dawn.”
And indeed, the dusk was unnaturally brief, and in little time the misted mires were bound in a pure and perfect black. The temperature plummeted to a hard arctic chill, freezing the fog, cladding the flora of the fens in a thin film of ice. But beneath the rigidified mosses and stiff cotton grasses, the saturated soils of the moor did not harden, as though the wet of the waterlogged earth was a constant thing, never varying, never altering. And the call of Coldmire, that constant sound of slimy things seeping and oozing, seemed to intensify in the icy air as though great greasy hands had risen from the roil to wring the very night.
Rundul of the Wandering Guard rummaged through the party’s provisions that he had borne through forest into fen, retrieving for Eldurion a bear brush cloak which the Fian quickly wrapped about himself, warming fur inward. Yllufarr was of the Neverborn, and as such was not subject to the infirmities imposed upon mortal beings. The Darad was as innately immune to the cold as the rock from which he had been Made.
As Rundul erected a small tent, Eldurion struck a small fire of tinder from the Darad’s pack and prepared a hot meal of stew and brew, confident that the frigid fogs would sufficiently conceal the lowly leaping light of the flames from the eyes of hungry things that roamed the wetland night.
Rundul soon joined the Fian beside the little yellow blaze, and they supped in a shared silence, the quiet of two souls bound in purpose and brotherhood. The stew warmed Eldurion from within, a healing heat that swam through his veins, chasing the chill from his heart. The Darad consumed dried cuts of bacon and bison beef hungrily, and drank deeply of the boiled brew. The meal soon finished, the two leaned back in something close to contentment, staring silently into the deep of night.
Some distance away, Yllufarr stood atop a mossy mound, his cowl pulled close, his eyes shut in concerted concentration as he harkened to the noises of the night. He heard the morass move, heard the thick gurgle of thixotropic silt swallowing a stricken swampdeer, heard the soft padding a prowling lynx, the quickened heartbeat of its wary prey, the whispered wind of a great grey owl’s wide wings, the quiet squeak of its quarry. There were many voices of death on the mires, and somewhere within and around them he found the sound he sought.
There it was – below the wet writhing of the bog, above the feeble frightened cries of dying things. A vo
ice. No...voices. Vague and vacuous. Remote, removed. Yet close and contiguous to all. At once both near and far. Like the very mist. Everpresent. Ethereal.
Sublime.
So it was that Yllufarr of the Undying first heard the soft sorrowful Song of the Shaddathair.
Dawn descended dark and dismal on the wretched wastes of the wetlands. The sky seemed a vast slab of slate bearing down upon the bogs, compressing cloud and cold into a corporeal thing, palpable and substantial. Eldurion felt the hovering haze fall upon his shoulders, driving down, pushing him into the peat. His nostrils twitched at a conspicuous change in the air.
“We will have rain this day,” the Fian foretold. His face was as fell as the firmament.
Rundul groaned.
Yllufarr stood silent and still at their sides.
“Come,” commanded Eldurion, his voice an alloy of resolve and commitment. “We will make haste while we are able, and pray the rains when they come do not make a sea of this place.”
The rain began in the bleak fullness of morning. Cold and hard it fell, torrents of tapered teeth, fine fangs of steel slicing into the sludge, manifoldly magnifying the misery of the mistbound mire. And the rains ripped and rent with neither relent nor surcease for the duration of the day, greasing the grey of the ground, swiftly supersaturating the spongy soil into a roiling soup of oily slime.
All pretense of path or trail disappeared, vanished, drowned in the deluge. Yet the party persisted, tenaciously trudging the seething sludge of the fen.
Eldurion led, head hooded and bowed against the cataract of the cracked heavens, steadfast and silent, his body warded from the wet by an oilskin cape that Rundul had provided him. But a deepening damp chill seeped into his soul.
The hulking Darad slogged along, often sinking up to his knees in muck and mud, yet his immense strength and stamina permitted him to persevere. He muttered and mumbled at whiles, rumbling at the rain, but his ranting was more for dislike and displeasure than for any real discomfort.
Only Yllufarr of the Undying was unthwarted by the storm, the long lean Ath softly treading the surface of the sog as though it was as solid as stone. And the torrent did not touch him, deigning to dampen neither cloak nor cowl, but rather parting and pulling aside to allow the darkling Prince of the Neverborn passage unharried.
Nevertheless, despite their defiance and determination, the party’s progress was minute, minimal, agonizingly slow, measured not in miles but in mere fractions thereof.
And the rain-wracked wastes of Coldmire seemed to know no end.
Time died. The bog knew neither day nor night, no sunrise and no darkfall. But only rain. Hard cold grey rain. Torrents, cataracts, tears of heaven falling as though in endless and inconsolable grief for ruined Eldagreen. And Coldmire drank of the bitter waters, thirstily sucking on the shriveled breasts of the blasted sky. And what had been a mire became a place of shallow and silted lakes, moving and morphing, blindly seeking one another with twisting tentacles, then combining, becoming more than they had been.
Becoming a sea.
Head bent against the rain, Eldurion led with inhuman resolve and determination, pressing through the bog like a man bereft of reason. In the world beyond Coldmire, where the skies were clear and time yet lived, three days passed. But Eldurion did not rest, did not relent. And he sought no reprieve.
I will do this thing.
The soaring shards of stone rose from the muds of Coldmire like teeth from the diseased gums of a dying dragon. Tall and grey, they were, rearing against the rain, tearing great gashes in the mists of the marsh. There were dozens of them, mighty monoliths erected in an age long-passed by hands long-dead for purposes long-forgotten. The stones marked the foot of a significant mound in the mire, entirely encircling the hummock in a henge of gargantuan granite, unsleeping sentries warding the rise from the wastes and the wet and the wicked things of the night.
“Impressive,” muttered Rundul into the rain as he ran one hand over the weathered face of the nearest rock. He traced the swirl of a chiseled symbol with one finger. Something of admiration kindled in the bright black of his eyes. “What does this place signify?”
“Carricevan,” replied Eldurion quietly. “Carrioch Duin Spiarradh – the Gate of Gods and Ghosts.” Dark rain dripped from the rim of his cowl like the woeful weepings of those very spirits of whom he spoke. “This cromlech was erected by the Tuathroth, the primal progenitors of the Rothic people, long before the coming of the Fiannar to this World and the rise of the Daradur from the womb of Mother Earth. Similar formations remain throughout the lost realm of the Tuathroth – of these, that which embraces Arrenhoth would be most familiar to you. We know from the songs and stories of the Rothmen that the Tuathroth held Eldagreen a sacred place, hallowed and holy, where the immortal folk of Faerie once walked among mortal Men.”
Yllufarr’s eyes glowed with a pale fire. He knew of the folk of Faerie, though the Athair of Gith Glennin called them by another name, and then only in voices hushed with dread and loathing. The Shaddathair. The Shadowfolk of Sammayal. But of these ugsome Unforgiven, Yllufarr of the Undying said nothing.
Eldurion glanced upward into the rain.
“The day dies. We will take shelter in Carricevan this night.”
And like a phantom that may have once haunted that place in the time of Tuathroth, Eldurion of the Fiannar floated into the confines of Carrioch Duin Spiarradh.
The otherwise barren hill of Carricevan was crested by a single and simple structure of stone – three titanic triangular shards of granite leaning inward upon one another and forming a rough pyramid, and this capped at its point by a circular slab of gleaming white rock, like the flat face of the full moon balanced upon the summit of Eternity.
“Doras Serrin,” announced Eldurion. “The Portal to the Stars.”
One by one, the party slipped from the rain through a crevice where two of the supporting stones fell loosely together. Within the angled walls of the dolmen was a broad open space, sufficiently tall and wide to accommodate a dozen large men, and the air and earth there were neither as cold nor as damp as they were otherwhere in Coldmire. And upon the faces of the three walls were carven oghams of the lost Tuathroth, simplistic swirls in the stone, symbols depicting broad ideas rather than individual words.
“The Tuathroth had no written language of their own,” explained Eldurion. “Theirs was an oral tradition, one in which knowledge was passed along and preserved in the form of the spoken word rather than in texts and tomes. But on occasion they employed symbols such as these, where and when their beliefs warranted. Here they have graven ‘That Which Was’, ‘That Which Is’ and ‘That Which Will Be’, respectively. The Tuathroth believed Doras Serrin to be the place where one might find passage from this Earth to the Otherworld of their religion, and from the Otherworld to this one – and so here it was that they would lay the great among their dead to rest.”
Rundul frowned.
“Aye, my Daradun friend,” smiled the Fian as he ducked back out of the dolmen. “Doras Serrin is a tomb, and here the ghosts of thousands haunt.”
The Darad did not fear the dead. But nor did he care much for them. He followed the Fian out into the rains.
Yllufarr remained within Doras Serrin for a moment, his pale eyes pulsing with an ancient and eldritch puissance, secretly probing both shadow and stone. But whatever power that had once been there had long since deserted the place. The Prince prayed that so too had those who had surely come by way of that portal. He slipped from the shelter of the stone and rejoined Eldurion and Rundul beneath the fallings of rain and night.
From the crown of Carricevan, the three surveyed their surroundings. The comparatively solid haven of the hill was closely bounded on sides north and east and south by an impassable lake of liquefied earth. And from this morass there arose another – a sea of spears and tapered spikes, slim pikes of petrified wood, branchless and bare – the blackened bones of drowned Eldagreen stabbing skyward from thei
r watery grave.
“The rains have caused this,” said Eldurion, glaring darkly at the spiked seas about Carricevan. “We should have been able to proceed eastward from here, parallel to the southern marches of the marsh. Now we cannot.”
“I will seek a way,” stated Yllufarr simply. “Rest this night within the walls of Doras Serrin, friend Eldurion. Whatever ghosts that may have once visited there are now gone. Go easy into a good sleep.” He smiled strangely, an echo of the eeriness of Carricevan. “The Darad will willingly watch and ward you – from without the walls, or I am very much mistaken.”
Rundul harboured little love for either rain or revenants, but of the two he loved the latter least.
“Ah, good Prince – what better way to watch the night than without walls to obscure my sight?”
“This from a Darad who only recently was heard wishing for halls of stone,” the Prince smirked.
Rundul scowled, growled.
Grinning, Yllufarr disappeared into the dense dark deluge of the rain-ravaged night.
And eyes were on him as he went.
“Is it heavy?”
Eldurion’s steely voice seemed to startle Rundul, as though the fullness of the Darad’s attentions had been riveted elsewhere. Risen from a short slumber, the Fian emerged from the rocky shelter of Doras Serrin into the beleaguered deeps of night on Carricevan.
The rains had changed, altered, hardened in the swelling cold of the night. They had degenerated into a deluge of driving sleet, shards and slivers of ice fraying the fog and tearing the bog. An unceasing cascade of shattered glass.
Rundul made a guttural sound that sounded like “What?”
“Heavy,” repeated Eldurion, pulling his cloak close around him. “Your burden.”
The Darad squinted against the sleet, glancing back through the aperture in the stone to the massive pack he had borne through Ravenwood, across Coldmire. He shook his head, and sleet fell from his hair and beard.
