He proceeds to raise it farther, inch by inch. At times, it slips in his hand. He curses again. Once the neox is a foot above the ground, he wrangles and ties the pulled end of the rope to the hammered peg and lets the whole pulley system go. As he tenses in anticipation of the hanger failing, the neox swings in the dim light, its shadow cast tall across the cavern walls. He wipes his brow and catches his breath.
With a penknife in hand, Bernard steadies the neox’s swing and then measures with his fingers, starting from where its neck begins, about eight fingers down. He sticks the knife into its fur, and as he slices downward, thick red blood oozes out, and its organs and intestines spill into the shadowy darkness, plopping onto the dirt in wet clumps. The stench of the neox fills the air, burning the hair of his nostrils.
As scavengers, neox eat a range of food, from any number of brackleberries to rotten vegetation, and if they ever find a patch of fungi, they’ll eat the entire growth, which is evident in the sour smell emitting from this one’s innards. Bernard continues to pierce deeper past the neox’s duodenum, cutting and sawing away nearby bone. At one point, he accidentally punctures its bladder, and a putrid urine sprays over him. He steps back, coughing and holding back vomit, elbow to mouth. Marked by a sent frek.
Something scurries past the corner of his eye. He turns to the empty room, the torch flickering and casting new shadows across the walls. The emptiness feels ominous as he turns the knife in his hand for defense, scanning the chamber for movement. He steps over to the two tunnels he found earlier and screams into one, attempting to scare away whatever might be hiding down in the darkness.
Nothing stirs.
He turns back to the neox and catches a small red frek digging into the pile of innards beneath it. Bernard calls out, “Heyo!” He stomps over, shooing the frek off. It runs a few strides and then turns, standing on its tiny hind legs, no more than a foot tall. Must be a creshwillow.
With someone to talk to, Bernard speaks to the tiny frek. “I’ll give you what remains when I finish. Bargain?”
The creshwillow tilts its head, standing in wait. Bernard returns to the neox and starts to cut back into it, and as he does, the creshwillow becomes more daring, stepping closer to him and the neox. At first, Bernard attempts to scare him away, stamping his foot at the small frek, forcing it to run back two strides before stopping and standing back on its hind legs. After a time, the persistence of the creshwillow begins to grind Bernard down until he’s too tired to care. So as he skins the neox, below him the creshwillow gleefully chews and eats at its bowels, particularly a long pile of small intestines.
The dressing continues for the next hour until Bernard sets aside enough meat to make the whole affair worth it. The creshwillow is curled up asleep on the other side of the room, and Bernard, needing to gather a few more frontz leaves to wrap the last bits of meat, attempts to leave the cavern without waking it.
At the cave’s entrance, a cold sunrise peeks through the foggy, storming forest. The rainstorm has let up some but still pours with a constant, unwavering persistence. Bernard leaves the cave and gathers more leaves.
It takes another half hour before he returns. At the entrance of the narrow tunnel, he finds the creshwillow standing on its hind legs in wait. It turns its head as Bernard approaches.
“Did you take any of my meat, Brute?”
It tilts its head without answer. He walks past it and makes his way back down the cavern path, creshwillow in tow. In the cavern room, over a dozen more creshwillows, each varying in size, wander about. Some are small, some are fat, others extra furry.
“You brought friends?”
He turns to the creshwillow following him, who reacts by bouncing and jumping into the room full of scampering, hairy freks that fill it with a cacophony of whimpering noises. None, approshed, seem interested in the neox muscle he’s piled nearby. He watches a few gritting over the neox’s bloody carcass and leftover innards that are scattered across the cavern floor. Gently pushing the soft, fuzzy creshwillows aside, he begins to wrap the ignored portions of meat in his gathered leaves. One of the creshwillows hops onto his back to get to a higher ledge. It fails and flops to the ground, shaking its head. Bernard ignores them, annoyed more than angry.
“All right, friends, the rest is yours.”
They all stop and stare at him, confused and curious. He shakes his head, waves them off, and gathers the large stack of wrapped meat, heading for the exit. As he steps out of the room, one of the creshwillows behind him hollers, startling him. He turns, catching the other freks padding away from the whimpering creshwillow. Below it, a small object reflects the light. Bernard sets the meat down and walks over, picking up the dropped item. He dusts away a bit of dirt and finds a sliver of metal, which he turns over in his hand. It’s roughly a thumb’s length with sharp, chipped ends, blood from the neox or creshwillow coating it. For no reason, he pockets the sliver and turns back, taking the meat and leaving the pack of creshwillows behind. After a minor, he hears them return to their feast, the whole affair forgotten.
Finished, Bernard seeks his long-awaited night’s rest, ignoring the sunlight beginning to light the cave. He starts a new fire, warms his hands, and sprawls out along the warm, soft bed. It crunches beneath him as it wraps around his body. Before dozing off, he pulls the sliver of metal from his pocket. It flickers in the fire and sunlight pouring in from outside the cave. The sliver appears to be made of brass. I wonder if this was in that neox? He puts it away.
It may be due to the fact that it’s been over two days since he’s last closed his eyes, but he compliments himself on the softest bed he’s ever made and falls fast to sleep.
Chapter 2
A PROTNUK'S RIDDLE
A hooded figure dressed in green slips out into the rain as Bernard opens his eyes. With strained effort, he catches the figure disappear out of sight to the east. Body sore, he props himself up on an elbow and scans the room. Remnants of the night’s fire emit a thin trail of smoke while rain, pattering across the mouth of the cave, breaks up midmorn rays reaching through a thin fog rolling between the trees. But the sight that calms him after this sudden awakening is the neox meat still piled neatly at the foot of his sunken frontz-leaf bed.
Bernard sits up, rubbing his old hands, stretching the muscles of his face, cracking his neck, and turning his head in a circle. You’re getting too old for these young-man travels, he imagines Jame stating when he ultimately returns haynest, a sentiment, though true, that’s worn tiresome.
For as long as he can recall, Bernard has stood by Jame, and because of this, only in the rarest of circumstances has he been able to explore the greater Land around him. The routine paths that circle their simple haynest have long since lost their original luster, and his half-day treks have grown stale with predictability. The thought that the last thirty-six hours have been the most exciting thing that’s chanced him in the past few decades carries with it an unexpected agitation and disappointment.
With the neox meat packed after a small slice is cut off to curb his morning hunger and his rucksack slung across his back, Bernard walks to the edge of the cave, placing a hand on its roof. He surveys the surrounding forest, with rain and fog eddying among the trees. In the mud below, a pair of wet boot prints have been pressed in by the green-hooded figure. Curiosity creeps in as he wonders who might have been in the cave while he slept, though the temporary enigmit breaks as he concludes it was likely only a friend taking shelter from the rain. Since they left his well-earned neox meat alone, thinking too much about their presence seems superfluous. Even so, with Radiba’s state population being fewer than a thousand, the sight of another in these far-flung forests is worth noting.
The fleeting thought of the hooded friend shifts to the two dark tunnels in the large chamber behind him. Perhaps whatever conundra they hold is what first led the green-hooded one to the cave, and this thought—investigating the tunnels himself—takes actual hold.
Though never a full-
fledged explorer, Bernard considers himself to be a spontaneous Radibian, a trait that at times has gotten him into bits of trouble, specifically when he was younger. He once traversed beyond the Radiba state line and into Carvinga, coming face to face with a tenfooter. A mistake he’s long regretted after narrowly escaping the tall friend and hobbling home with a busted hand and broken leg. On long, cold winter nights, his hand aches in remembrance.
Ignoring Jame’s position on the matter, he decides heading out into the storm seems the less-advisable of two options, and so Bernard turns around with a pinge of guilt, knowing he’s following desire over duty. He pulls a couple of frontz leaves from the homemade bed and wraps them around his torch, lighting it once more for the dark cave ahead.
❖❖❖
Bernard moves through the narrow tunnel as he attempts to defend his unusual behavior. With his routine upended, the further he withdraws from it, the more unwilling he is to return to what became the usual, even at the cost of Jame’s wrath. His imaginings of Jame have transformed from a partner who’s merely curious about his goings-on to a partner who requires a full-on explanation of this adolescent attitude. Why did he wander for over two days chasing some frek through the wilderness? And why is he now traversing some unexplored cavern when he should be heading haynest?
This internal debate slows his walk for a minor as he questions the impulse to investigate the twofold tunnels. Another roll of thunder echoes through the cave, causing his indecisiveness to worsen as the ceaseless rain, rolling fog, and cracks of lightning suggest not the passing of a thunderstorm but rather an approaching tormisand.
Unlike a storm that lasts for an afternoon or evening, tormisands tend to persist for longer periods of time, upward of weeks, months, or sometimes years, and the first real sign of a thunderstorm evolving into a tormisand is the fog that rolls in. A tormisand marks its territory by sitting atop its prey, hammering the Land until there’s hardly anything left. And after these weeks of rain and storm and fog, on some arbitrary major, the tormisand will escalate into a row of considerable squalls, testing the foundations of its target’s architecture, which is already softened by the previous rains. This constant barrage forces most friends to build haynests inside rooted, unmovable hills and large trees.
The prolonged, tortuous tormisands are a relatively recent phenomenon, and their first appearance happened only three hundred years ago. Before they arrived, Radibians lived peacefully along the state’s shoreline and out on the small Radiba Isles, a region once considered one of the most tranquil paradimos of the Land. But after the first few tormisands ruined haynests and livelihoods, a migration into the uncharted Highlands transpired, where, unlike on the flat shores and open isles, the torrents and winds were diminished in the thick forests and stony mountains. Since this migration, no one risks living anywhere other than in the Highlands.
Following days of destructive squalls proceeds what Radibians have come to call the Peace Hours. A period the naive might assume marks the end of the tormisand, when in truth it only marks its first half. This stillness, where rain and fog and wind completely disappear, where the sky is blue and clear and calm, will last twenty or thirty hours. Then the Peace Hours end, and like clockwork, the second half of the tormisand persists as the first, only in reverse: first the squalls; then the lightning and thunder; and gradually the rain, which fades to less and less in its waning hours.
Because the winds following the Peace Hours arrive so suddenly, Radibians designed a warning system that’s installed outside haynests and along many of the trails throughout the Highlands that alerts passersby of the precipitous approach of the tormisand’s second half. Hearing these warning whistles across the forest demands immediate shelter.
Shaking off the fear of a tormisand, Bernard finds the cavern room now quieter than it was the previous night. In the dim and shadowed light of his torch, he regards the hanging neox: slaughtered and skinned, picked bone dry by the drum of creshwillows, now gone. Walking to the other side of the room, he aims his torch down each of the two tunnels, finding shadow and equivalent marks of time and age in both, giving no reason to choose one over the other. He decides to take the west tunnel, based only on the fact that it’s somewhat larger than the other.
The walls here are similar in texture to the chamber’s, with spotted crystallinity glittering against his torchlight. The path winds in on itself, curving downward and to the west, and soon forms tiny steps. He focuses the light toward the ground and discovers the steps are carved into a rough staircase. This puts a smile on his face. What could possibly be down here?
As Bernard continues downward along the now full-fledged and winding staircase, a small draft brushes against his skin, rippling the flame of his torch. The stairs straighten, and around fifty strides ahead, he sees hints of light coming from an archway. The sight quickens his steps, making him eager to see what’s on the other side. The wind strengthens as he steps closer to the entrance, and soon he catches the first glimpse of a considerable vista.
Through the arch, a grand stone bridge spans thirty strides wide, crossing a chasm that looks to be a hundred measures deep and two or three hundred across. Looking up and to the east, Bernard sees where a narrow opening in the cave ceiling permits a shaft of light, fragmented by incoming rain, to illuminate the enormous expanse. To the west, a formidable waterfall pours in from an unseen stream a hundred measures above and the whole of the room echoes its wallop into the darkness and rocks below. Across the bridge, another archway leads into a darkened turnaway.
Bernard strolls across the bridge, taking in the beautiful, remarkable exhibition, and upon reaching the other side, he finds the archway here is marked by long scratches in the stone, which don’t appear to have been made by conventional tools or machinery. Rubbing his fingers along them, he discovers they dig deep into the rock.
Bernard continues through the arch, which leads into a long and narrow hallway. At first, the turnaway appears to be the same in design, with stone floors and crystalline walls, but occasionally along the ground, skeletal remains lie in small piles. Bones and skulls. Light from the waterfall and bridge room is faded here, and he yields to the limit of his torchlight flickering no more than ten strides in front of him.
The hallway continues, stone after stone, a uniformity that is broken only by the occasional stack of bones. Ahead, a tiny squeal that resembles the sound of a creshwillow seizes Bernard’s attention. Must be a nesting ground, which explains the piles of bones. He pushes a pile over with his foot. Dust clouds around it. Been here a long time. Though the creshwillows act friendly enough, the sight and sound of little hidden freks slow his travel. From early readings, he’s sure that creshwillows don’t attack the living, but he’s not certain how they will react when someone invades their nesting ground; and after what was supposed to be a peaceful neox attacking him the night before, he’s not too confident he can rely on the suppositions of frek behavior.
The hallway stops and opens into a sizable square room with each wall carved in ornate reliefs. The scenes depicted are worn with time and difficult to discern in the low torchlight. A few look as if smaller-shaped friends cower before much larger ones. The light picks up half a hundred creshwillows in various states of sleep, some of which squeal and scratch in kiptales. Though a few rest on top of each other, most are scattered about the room alone.
Across from him, on the other side of the chamber and at the edge of his light, he sees a black throne. It looks to be made of polished and sculpted onyx. An odd double to the room, which appears more comfortable in stonework and natural formations. He decides to push his luck with the peaceful creshwillows and investigate the throne closer. As he walks, he catches a glimpse of the ceiling and a series of starscapes engineered from mined and purposely set crystalline rocks.
Drawing closer, Bernard finds that unlike the whole of this cave and the hallways and staircases leading up to it, the throne is in near-perfect condition, without a scratch or mark to
show its age. Moving his torch up and down the slick black stone, he notes that the throne appears almost entirely unused, and, what he finds most peculiar, it emits heat.
He reaches out, and just as he touches it, he hears a polite cough behind him. He spins and finds standing before him a short, stout man dressed in uniform purple, with wild gray hair. His eyes are pure white without a hint of pupils. The little man smirks before speaking in a soft and friendly voice.
“Looking for something important?”
Unsure where the man appeared from, Bernard takes a small step backward as a few of the creshwillows wake up around them, stretching and yawning. One hops up, sits on the short man’s shoulder, and picks through his hair.
The man in purple steps closer, his eyes unsettling. “What color do you see?”
“Apory?”
“The throne. What color do you see?”
Bernard turns back to the throne, wondering if there is some trick, if it would not be there. It sits in wait. In silence.
Turning back, he answers, “Black?”
“Black?”
The small man’s eyes widen as he steps closer still. Bernard counters the movement, preparing to exit quickly should the need arise. More of the creshwillows wake and watch the two friends chat.
“How delightful that you see black.” The man starts forward and sits on the throne. “To me, it’s constructed in stone. Dulled by age like the walls around us. You don’t see all this green moss?” As he speaks, the man pinches near one of the throne’s arms (that isn’t there), extracts a strand of moss (that isn’t there), and fiddles with it in his fingers before dropping the invisible plant to the floor. “Back to my original question, looking for something important?”
Humbly, Bernard answers, “I was just delaying going back out into the tormisand. I’m not looking forward to wading in the rain again.”
Advent of the Roar Page 2
