by Silas Post
They strutted away from us with synchronized movements, never once looking over their shoulders to ensure we followed behind. Perhaps they knew in other ways; from the sound of sand parting against boot and hoof as we trod in their wake, sinking so deeply into the beach’s surface that the effort was a difficult labor.
Still, we hung further back, keeping the sand sirens close in our sight but distanced from our conversation.
“Is it common for a goddess to create her own acolytes?” I asked.
“Kirsis never had to,” Rikki said, “and Redelia’s acolytes are tight-lipped about their past, but they are mortal. These creatures are not.”
“Jarah,” I said, “have you known any cyclopean servants to attend the goddess toward whom we venture now?”
“No,” Jarah said. “I have never met this goddess before. Never heard stories of her good deeds or learned of demands my people fulfilled. These sands never coalesced into maiden forms when last I knew.
“In the months since I left my island nation to seek out my brother in Greenloft’s realm, it appears some things have changed. Including the quantity of sand. It was never this high or arduous to wade through.”
“At least the storm holds fast beyond the island’s bound,” I said, stooping to lift a large shell from the sand. Its ridges were broken and dark, a sharp contrast to the soft contours of the beach’s low dunes.
“Yes,” Jarah agreed. “In that way, we have always been blessed. The island is immune to ocean storms. A gentle mist or drift of snow is the bleakest weather I ever experienced growing up. The harsher elements know their place, beyond the nearest rim of the island’s foundation.”
“How is that?” Rikki asked.
“I assume the mountain diverts all turbulent winds and shields our villages from their wrath,” she said. “Calm skies, fertile land, and ample food always worked in unison to make this an easy place to live in peace.”
“All the more reason we must hurry to your people,” I said. “Even if the castle has not dispatched its ships of war, Prince Wick’s fleet of acquired cargo ships have a foul purpose beneath their hulls. Your people are not accustomed to danger, which makes his approach doubly lethal.”
The women leading us across the beach traced the shoreline without venturing toward the pale grasses and short, leafy shrubs that formed the outer ridge of the island’s vegetation. Their hips swayed together in a mesmerizing display, side to side, while long slender legs touched lightly on the sand’s surface. Each footfall was a blur, a splash of sand that rearranged itself into a foot again as those mysterious women set out on their next step.
At last, they turned back toward us, all three at once, and spoke in their harmonic voice. “Please. She awaits below.”
The ground began to swirl, as though a threat of quicksand made real. A whirlpool sank before us, revealing a spiral of short ledges as the sand continued to drain away. Those ledges were stairs, and they curved in a tight radius into the heart of the ground below this beach until darkness subsumed the cylinder’s floor.
Here on an island whose central mass was a towering mountain of solid rock, a goddess held court in a temple exactly its opposite. On the periphery, barely on the isle proper, a spiraled chasm whose depth might rival the majestic peak that cut this island’s face from the sky itself.
My foot lifted from the sand and hovered over that first step.
I glanced at that mountain, and a curious vision sparked in the corner of my eye. Along its face that familiar light emerged. It was the faintest blue but still as strong here against the sun’s morning rays as it had been in the storm’s darkest hour. It flashed there, halfway up the mountain slope, and then it was gone.
A reminder of the task at hand? A warning not to deviate from our path? Redelia had not flashed us with cryptic signs before, but we were far from her temple now and her power would strain to reach us if at all. I could not risk chancing her future, not if hers was the light that led us to shore.
“Please,” the sand sirens said again, “she awaits below.”
I set my foot back down in the sand.
“I am humbled by her holy invitation,” I said. “How shall I address your grace?”
The girls looked at each other carefully, never breaking their smiles. When they turned back, they said, “The goddess of shifting sands.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but by what name should we address her?”
Again, they consulted with each other through the bared teeth of strained smiles. They turned at once toward me. “Araine.”
“Kindly tell Araine that her company is not ours to keep, not while our holy mission remains undone,” I said. “The day is short, the journey long, and lives hang merciless in the balance.”
The smiles fell from the girls’ faces now, a hint of disdain curling their lips downward.
“What are you doing?” Rikki asked. “The goddess might help us.”
“Or,” I whispered into Rikki’s ear, my forehead resting against her hard, spiraled horn as I spoke quietly, “she might be jealous of the temple Redelia would dedicate on this same island. Ours is the goddess of captured light, and a curious light flashes from the mountain.”
Rikki looked up then, drawing Jarah’s gaze as well as the sand sirens’. We all watched the mountain as that curious light shone, then dimmed again. It appeared in a new location after that, but only briefly, dimming once more into nothingness.
The ground beneath us began to tremble, sand rushing from the beach to fill the entrance to the silo of spiraled stairs that opened just moments ago. Beside that entrance emerged a woman rising from the sand, taller and broader than the three women that led us here.
This new woman had hair in one long braid that ran from her head to her feet. Her hair was light brown, like the fur of a young fawn, and her skin was a few shades darker. I was relieved to see it was skin, rather than a carapace of sand.
As the woman rose from the beach, her flowing white toga blew against the faintest breeze. She clasped her hands before her and spoke, without looking back at her acolytes.
“Thank you, girls,” she said. “That will be all.”
The sand sirens burst into lifeless columns of sand. Held together by nothing at all, they crumbled into mounds of fine powder. Three small dunes were all they left in their stead.
“Perhaps this morning is too beautiful to spend inside a temple tower,” Araine said. She smiled with coconut-brown lips. Her eyes were the same dark color, with no pupil or whites at all.
I knelt on the sand, as did Rikki and Jarah. Our knees sank into the fine powder until we were almost waist deep. “Goddess Araine,” I said. “Thank you for the gift of your appearance.”
“What brings a holy emissary to my humble shore?” the goddess asked.
“Redelia… carries a warning,” I said. “The people of this island are in peril and she sends us to warn them.”
Araine looked at Jarah, focusing her attention on the cyclopean woman’s large, lavender eye. “You have returned.”
“Yes,” Jarah said. “Though I did not know my departure was so keenly felt.”
“The departure of a single soul is a transient loss on life’s ledger,” Araine said. “To recuperate one from the many, however, is a windfall profit. Your detention in Greenloft did not escape my cognizance, though how you fared thereafter remained a minor mystery.
“Your return would be no surprise, I admit, if my influence extended throughout my entire domain,” she continued. “I see so little from these lowly dunes, but I am not blind to the good fortune of your arrival. I require an escort so I might survey my home from its highest perch. There is great power at the heart of the island, and that is a more fitting place for my temple to reign.”
“With all respect,” I said, “our mission is cast and we are bound to its completion.”
“Surely there are not three emissaries,” Araine said. “Would Redelia not spare so minor a deviation to help her sister in a time
of such deep need? Would she not lend one of your accompanying women to my employment?”
“I doubt—” I started, but Rikki pulled me backward and cut me short.
“A moment, your grace?” she asked. Araine eyed her warily, but nodded her assent. Rikki took Jarah and myself aside.
“You are familiar with the word ‘smite,’ ” Rikki said. “Do you wish to suffer an example?”
“We come to dedicate a temple to Redelia,” I said, “so that the goddess can watch over the island and shield it from those who would do harm. We cannot forfeit that position to Araine. Nor can we dally when our goddess grows weaker toward untimely death.”
“You want to tell Araine — a goddess with a temple and acolytes of her own — that her request falls on deaf ears?” Rikki asked.
“It is not fitting for any of us three to bear that news to a woman of Araine’s stature,” Jarah said. “It would be proper for Redelia to intercede.”
“Of course,” I said, clasping Jarah on the sides of her face and kissing her squarely on the mouth. Her large singular eye blinked in surprise.
I turned back toward Araine. “Goddess, I’m sure a woman of your divine wisdom holds a place of honored esteem in the mind of my mistress Redelia. Perhaps a kind inquiry directed to her attention would clarify the extension of our service. I imagine she stands ever ready for your psychic call.”
“I see,” Araine said. “You beseech me ask permission from a goddess an ocean hence, when I have mortals I can command here with a glance and a whim? No. Unflinchingly no. A goddess does not beg to control her own domain!”
Her voice rose to a harsh crescendo as she made her intentions clear, stepping toward us with her hands held palm-side up. Short spouts of sand rose from the beach where her hands were, quickly swirling into cyclones the width of an adult man.
“You are invaders here, all three,” she said. “The penance for your trespass lies at the top of this island or the bottom of its beach, but nowhere between.”
Araine’s flowing white robe billowed against her body as her conjured cyclones grew in shape and size. Rikki, Jarah, and I made an earnest attempt to track backward with the goddess held in our center sight. We tread away from the rolling tide and toward the island’s interior, but the sandy shore was deep and our legs sank further beneath the sand with every step.
Jarah made the furthest progress, her legs long and powerful. Rikki and I struggled to put any distance between ourselves and the irate goddess that stepped slowly and deliberately toward us, walking atop the dunes as if they were solid stone. Her acolytes, those maidens built from the sand itself, emerged behind her, rising from the depths in unison as if climbing invisible stairs that led to the surface.
“Escort me to the throne of my domain,” Araine said, pointing directly at me.
“I am not at liberty,” I said. I trudged further from the goddess of shifting sands, sinking deeper with each labored step.
“Why do you resist, I wonder,” Araine said. “What has your goddess done for you, that you are so beholden to her whim? Does she infuse your soul with divinity, that intoxicating jolt you mortals cannot well contain? Does she suckle upon your body and tease loyalty from your corporal pleasures?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but it filled with a spray of sand, blown by the constant churning of the cyclones that flanked Araine left and right. I spat to the side, the fine grains grinding between my lips and teeth.
“Her heart is pure and her actions just,” I said. “That is pleasure enough for me.”
Araine laughed, but stopped abruptly when Rikki paused to bleat, her fists balled tight. “You’re all show, aren’t you?” she asked. “That’s why you can’t achieve the mountain’s peak. You’re only power is to deceive.”
“Her power is substantial and it is stunning,” the sand sirens replied, locked in their three-part harmony. A wave of sand rose from the beach then, a dry tsunami that crashed over Rikki and me at once. I was blinded by sand as it pelted my eyes and deafened as it filled my ears before receding in a splash of powdery silt.
“Blech,” Rikki said, spitting sand from her own mouth now. “Not all show. Got it.”
“Victor, Rikki!” Jarah yelled from the beach’s edge. She had climbed her way toward the palm trees and low shrubs that signaled the edge of the beach’s expanse. “The sand is shallow here!”
So there was hope of traction. Of escape.
We ran.
The cyclones continued to swirl, dredging sand from beneath and spewing it in every direction. Deep chasms, much like Araine’s temple, pierced the ground below, sucking in the sand and pulling me with it, caught in their riptide.
I trudged forward, but at a fraction of the speed those sand sirens did. They were nimble in this terrain, unbothered by the sand that inundated us from the cyclones’ swirl. One caught Rikki by the ankle as she lifted her hoof for another halting step forward, while another grabbed onto me, hindering our already-slow escape.
“Our mistress is great and good,” she said, while her counterparts recited the same words.
“Your mistress,” I said, chafing at the sand that forced itself between my leathers and my skin, “makes demands she has no right to.”
“I make my own rights,” Araine said. “Consent to carry my holy soul to the island’s peak. I am a goddess. Obey me!”
“You have acolytes,” Rikki yelled, failing to beat back the siren that gripped her. “Why can’t you accomplish this task yourself? What terrible truth do you hide?”
“I do not answer to mortals,” Araine said. “They answer to me.”
The weight of an entire shoreline bore down on my thighs, stagnating my progression forward as the sand siren clung to my waist and weighed me down. Her legs were dead weight, sinking below the surface and pulling me with her, her scratchy hands gripping me tight as we descended further beneath Araine’s domain.
Rikki stopped running and kicked her hind legs out. Her hands sank further into the sand ahead, burying her face and horns, but her hooves shot upward and kicked that siren in the stomach. Its maiden form fell into a million pieces, allowing Rikki to gain some distance from the pile of sand she left behind, but that fiend soon coalesced once more into Araine’s mindless acolyte, bent on drowning us below the beach.
Sand assaulted my face. I shut my mouth, my eyes. I strained to resist the backward pull of the cyclones that drained the beach into bottomless chasms at the goddess’s side.
A splash of sand erupted toward me as something loud thumped against the beach. I squinted my eyes open and found an uprooted palm lying within reach. Bushy fronds rested atop the sand as its long, smooth trunk lay behind it. “Grab on!” Jarah yelled.
She had lifted a tree from the very earth and thrown it my way as a lifeline. I clawed toward that fallen palm with a sand siren still clinging to my waist, then I latched onto the first tuft of green leaves I could find.
I clung firm. Araine’s twin cyclones bent toward me, blasting my exposed skin in a painful torrent of sand. Like a thousand knives piercing my cheeks, those tiny grains stabbed at my face and drew fresh hot blood from my pores.
The palm swung across the beach’s surface, flattening the sand as it went. Rikki charged slowly forward, half running and half swimming in the fine particles that flooded this beach. I reached toward her as Jarah continued to swing this fallen tree in a wide arc, squinting my eyes against the onslaught of sand.
I caught Rikki by the arm and hoisted her onto the palm, but the siren that clung to her leg would not let go. We were four bodies weighing down the tree trunk now, and Jarah struggled to pull us toward her. The tree dug into the beach, halting against the immovable wall of sand that built up against it.
We climbed our way forward, along the palm trunk beam while Araine strutted across the beach toward us. Sand sirens clung to us, ankle and hoof, but we progressed toward Jarah’s outstretched arms.
I grabbed hold of the dense mat of roots at the base of that t
ree, pulling myself toward Jarah as her hands clasped my other arm. The second my foot touched down on the dirt and grass, the siren that clung to my body burst into a cloud of sand that did not reassemble. We pulled Rikki in after us, exploding the sand-crafted woman that gripped her as well.
Araine continued to approach as we got to our feet, but she stopped at the edge of the sand. Her bare toes rested just an inch before the nearest blade of grass. Behind her, a sandstorm raged on, but no grain or gust made it to us.
She laughed and said, “You will obey my wishes. You’ll see.” Despite that threat, her approach had stalled.
Whatever stopped her from leaving that shore, it was not her own restraint. We did not test the bounds of whatever force held her at bay. We scrambled to our feet and sprinted into the tropical forest ahead, brushing past ferns and succulent aloes beneath the protective shade of ancient palms until the sound of Araine’s laughter echoed in our memories and not our ears.
12
When we finally slowed from a sprint to a jog, we were deep amid the dense vegetation at the foot of the island’s central mountain. A large rock that jutted from the ground like a level bench offered a moment’s rest from our harried trek, and I accepted its invitation eagerly.
“Let’s see how much of the beach came with us,” I said. I pulled off my boot and dumped an ounce of sand from it, brushing my foot bare before slipping it back on and switching to the other shoe. Jarah had her back turned, untying the bright blue skirt that knotted at one hip. She shook it into the wind, letting sand skitter toward the ground in a noisy shower of minute granules.
“What I wouldn’t give for a nice lagoon,” Rikki said, running her fingers through her long auburn hair.
“I thought you hated getting wet,” I said.
“The sensation of sand-blasting is far worse,” she said. “It’s in my ears, my navel, the fur by my hooves. It’s everywhere.”
She reached for the scarlet bow that tied mid-back, holding her top tight against her body and supporting her full breasts.
