The priests surrounding the stone paled under the onslaught and screamed in pain as one by one prisoners’ were hastily sacrificed and bled out around the base of the crystal’s plinth, all in an effort to placate the raging stone but to no avail. As Medim’s temper grew, the crystal grew hotter. Finally, in an almost cataleptic trance, the priests took up their knives and swords as one and wailed as they sliced through skin offering their own blood for the sake of their crystal’s pain. Their heavily disproportioned bodies began bleeding profusely as they attempted to cool their precious stone the only way they knew how. Still, the crystal heated and raged as it pulled against the power holding it tightly confined. Fear smothered the priests and chilled their hearts as their blood continued to flow freely.
Only once before had they seen the crystal act in this way, a captive, a hated guardian of the dome had held the crystal in homage ready to die. As he had knelt ready to kiss the stone in his final humiliation and say the sacred words, it had suddenly pulsed with life and reflected emotion. It burned brighter than it ever had before and ribbons of darkness had shot from each of its twelve sides seeming to pierce the very souls of those waiting in their turn, to bleed and die. The priests had removed the crystal from the guardian’s hands in horror and the crystal had dulled as it cooled but it had cooled.
Now, the priests continued to wail as their sacred icon burned, it demanded more and more from them. Their blood flowed from their wrists and fell, filling the small trough surrounding the stone plinth. As the blood pooled, the soul of Medim raged as his temper reached its height, I was so close, so very close to escape, it thought and slowly its temper began to wane just as the blood flow slowed and stopped. The priests bled out happily, as one by one they died, willingly giving themselves in sacrifice to their precious idol, believing their sacrifice would enable them to become one with it in the afterlife.
Chapter 34
Gath Feels the Magic
Gath stared up at the mountainside high above him. Here at the head of the pass he had hoped to await Gideon’s arrival in comfort, knowing from his memories that there had never been any other way in or out of the vast valley now known as the Bleak. He remembered this pass well, somewhere here, on this plain; he had killed a deer and fed off it for almost his entire journey out of the mountain range. I’m sure it was greener then, he mused, so long ago, so very, long ago. He heard the flap of fabric behind him and turned to find Darnel close by.
‘Do you recall my mentioning I began this life here Darnel? Strange how I could have forgotten all about this place for so long, don’t you think?’ Darnel said nothing and he stood quietly in his toga, cold and shivering under the cool night sky. The white toga along with the pale skin reflected the moonlight beautifully. Gath smiled; remembering the brown sun-kissed youth he had first met during the pledging ceremony, and how he had enjoyed changing the young man to what he was now. A little magic had whitened the boy’s skin to the colour of alabaster and a servant always available to apply white powder to the young man when his own enthusiasm caused a blemish to mar the pale almost translucent skin. Gath loved to look at the young man standing so still in the pale silvery glow, a slight breeze played at the curls that were so carefully coifed by another of Gath’s servants and the boy gave the illusion of a statue turning from stone into life, as Gath watched he felt himself harden with desire.
‘Ahh, dear boy, you are a living god, and, you belong to me, my own personal angel of pleasure,’ he said as he reached his hand toward the young man’s perfect form. Darnel’s short toga left nothing to the imagination as Gath lifted the garment and feasted his eyes on his muscular legs, his large flaccid manhood and his delicately sculptured pubic hair. Darnel cringed inside, how he hated this man, this man who had taken his tongue and his honour, he knew his sister was so far unharmed but he also knew as soon as she grew up, Gath would have her just as he had him. He cursed his parents for dying and leaving both of them to Gath’s mercies, he had no life, no friends and his only personal possession was a small black pearl trinket box, holding a shrivelled and dried piece of meat.
‘A reminder,’ Gath had said, ‘so you remember what you could have lost and be eternally grateful to me that you didn’t.’ Gath had been referring to the choice Darnel had made, to lose his tongue or his penis. Sometimes, alone in the dark when Gath was asleep, or away on affairs of state Darnel would remember the horror of that night once more, he would see the young boy with his throat exposed to the sharp blade. The blood spurting across the filthy dungeon, the look on Gath’s face as he finally made his choice and stuck out his tongue and the metallic rusty taste of the dead boy’s blood mingling with his own as his tongue was cut away. Sometimes... sometimes, he wished that he had chosen differently, at least then he and probably his sister would both be dead now and journeying on to meet their parents.
Darnel cringed inwardly as his king cupped his manhood in full view of the soldiers and their women followers, in his head, he could hear their laughter, the cruel jibes of the men and the pitying looks of the women. Finally, as Gath let the toga fall and took Darnel’s hand in his own he felt cold comfort in knowing that although the king was taking him away from the prying eyes and the pitiful looks, he was going to be with him in his bed, alone once more.
Suddenly Gath turned back toward the mountain and stared hard, all thoughts of Darnel and his own personal pleasures’ gone from his mind.
‘Do you feel that?’ He asked aloud, concentration clear on his face, ‘does anyone feel that?’ He said louder. Gath walked a few steps nearer to the mountain and continued to look up into the dark recesses of the rocky crags. Darnel also looked up, under the night sky; the face of the mountain looked unscalable and darkly eerie. Pockets of total blackness occurred here and there where the moon’s pale light could not reach and the small plants that grew from rocks and crevices moved softly in the breeze blowing across the plain, making moving shadows of the tentacles and feelers look as if they were alive and crawling across the cliffs rocky surface. He shivered once more under the strange feeling of tension in the air, cocking his head to one side listening intently and thought he could hear something, something compelling. Involuntarily he took a further step forward. Soft gentle music, strange music filled with strength and healing, it called to him, since he had lost his ability to speak his hearing had become more acute and he found the strange music soothing. Suddenly out of nowhere a loud noise reverberated across the plain, it assaulted his ears and he quickly covered them with his palms to protect them as the noise continued to echo around the pass and explode again and again, like a mighty thunderclap, filled with the promise of rain on a hot and close afternoon. Darnel shivered as he watched Gath’s men along with their wives and followers leave their tents and gather, they too stood staring up at the dark mountain before them as the noise finally moved on and died.
In the silence that followed, the worried and superstitious women re-lit fires to ward off any lurking evil spirits, while their men folk awaited orders.
‘Assault the mountain... now,’ Gath hissed, as finally Darnel felt what Gath had felt moments before. His skin itched and crawled and the stub inside his mouth tingled painfully as if stung by a wasp. Around him, he could see where others were affected too, more than a few were scratching or rubbing their skin, magic, someone is using magic, Darnel thought, knowing the feel of a spell well, having witnessed Gath using magic many times.
Gath watched as his men scurried toward the mountainside, for some reason he thought of his escaped prisoner, his creature, the man from the Bleak and his intriguing tattoo. Home, he thought I will get home.
Gath had felt the presence of the wall, the great barrier, as soon as he entered the pass and in the light of day, he had fully intended to climb the mountain to view the marvellous structure. This expending of power, so much power… by ‘The Journey’ tis an omen, his thoughts continued. It began here… And it will end here… Abruptly he turned and walked the few steps bac
k to his tent without giving Darnel a second glance, quietly Darnel hurried away to the semi-privacy of his own small dwelling space, a side tent attached to Gath’s but kept apart by a wall of soft linen. Still easily accessible to Gath should he require Darnel’s services during the night but somehow Darnel thought that this night, he would probably be left alone and for that, he thanked the gods.
Chapter 35
Gath Meets His Son
After the morning communing in his rooms with his newly recovered book and becoming reacquainted with the language of his birth, Thaddrick spent the afternoon walking along the bank of the river before finding a secluded shady spot. Sitting on the lush green grass to compose his thoughts, he absently began piling small stones in a heap beside him. He knew the small Green Home group would be waiting for him this evening to tell tales and make plans as they had been want to do over the last few days but he needed time alone to think.
He gloried in the warmth of the sun shining on the clear clean river and the fleet fish glinting like molten silver just under the surface as they rose and fell catching the myriad of tiny flies and insects skating on the thin skin of the swiftly moving body of water that in this time did not have a name. At some point in the future, he knew something significant would happen here for the river to be named the ‘Beaut’ but although he had ventured, via a gateway into the future of the Green Home Forest many times, he had never yet found the particular place in time or the reason for the great river’s naming. Regardless, it mattered little to him whatever its name; he had always found this river a great source of solace. It had been on one of his trips into the great forest of the future, the forest so like the forests of home, that he had met Jed, Gideon’s father for the first time, a small boy as lost and alone as he felt himself. He had silently followed the boy as he played at survival and been impressed by both the lad’s respect of the flora and fauna around him and his care to leave the forest unspoiled. He remembered seeing the child fall from a tree and lay stunned on the earthy floor and the wild beast that had decided Jed would make a good meal, as he lay unconscious and the fight the wolf had had protecting the child. The boy had trusted him from the start and Thaddrick, as the wolf, had visited that time on many occasions over the years telling himself it was just to see how the boy was faring. Eventually he had grown to love him, both the child and then the man.
During the dark time, when Jed watched as his wife and child died in a fire and he had fled to the comfort of the forest the wolf had stayed beside him and tried to give comfort to the man he had grown to think of as a beloved son. On the night Gideon was born, he had been with Jed in his cottage trying to sleep beside the hearth. Even in his wolf form, he had known something was happening at the root of the magic, all day he had felt it, a disturbance in the very air, like a hot close day waiting for a storm to break, the signs of ‘the one’ had all been there but he had not noticed them. The girl Lydia, Gideon’s mother had even tried to tell them before she died that the Gatherer was the man after them, after Gideon.
‘Gath,’ she had said, ‘he wants my baby, save my baby.’
‘Did I know even then Themos?’ Thaddrick asked his dead brother, would I have acted differently if I had known that he was the one? He questioned himself. I could have brought him here, taught him from infancy the control and the histories he would need to know...but Jed... without the child, Jed would have never known the joys of fatherhood and Gideon would never have been the man he has become, the man he was been born to be.
Thaddrick picked up a stone from the now large pile and after considering it a moment he tossed it into the swiftly flowing water, it disappeared quickly with a small splash, leaving no trace, not a ripple to mark its passing. Jed would have been like that stone, disappearing in a sea of pain with no one to love him or to mourn his loss... he thought, knowing then, that he had done the right thing.
The river sped on, gurgling and chuckling as it raced away through the valley; the river, it had always calmed him, helped him during his periods of darkness and despair and over the long years and there had been many of those. Thaddrick, as the wolf had for an inordinate length of time watched helplessly as the great barrier he and his fellow mages had orchestrated, disintegrate piece by piece before his eyes as the pull of the void ate away at it. He had watched as the last of the Guardians had perished or had given up and walked away from the task before them. Behind the wall, he had helplessly been a witness as the beautiful valley died, the trees turning brittle and brown and the once fertile land turning to dust. His feelings of guilt and inadequacy as the barrier began to fail and the seemingly unpreventable death of this, the host planet plagued him, this planet, intended to be a salvation to the peoples of Arotia. All they had given in return was death, unless of course he could close the gateway, if he could not, well, then he and his brother would be to blame. We came up with this plan to save the life we knew, not to be the engineers behind another world’s destruction! He thought as in his mind, he could hear Themos even now, extolling the virtues of the earth and it being the perfect choice for colonising and possibly mixing with the indigenous people.
‘To a degree Themos, you were right,’ Thaddrick said aloud, again speaking to the brother he had not seen for centuries, ‘by mixing with the human inhabitants, civilisation on this planet has advanced tremendously, but to what cost?’ In his mind, he saw once more the dilapidated state of the once magnificent impregnable wall and he saw the strength of Sonal as he struggled to repair the tear in the magic’s fabric. Sonal, he thought, your act was as dangerous as it was courageous. The spell had as surely announced their presence and continued existence like a morning sunrise across a dark sky.
He smiled sadly, as he remembered the song Sonal had sung and his own surprise as the wolf in him had joined in. In all the long years he had masqueraded as the wolf, he had never so much as ventured inside the wall despite its many tears and rents. Brave Sonal had humbled him, pushing on through into the mouth of the dome and then returning and singing his spell of healing so valiantly. He had felt the rush of blood as the music of the root and the patterns in the magic’s fabric reminded him of long dead friends, friends who had elected to stay behind to guard the boundary between life and death. Their strength and sacrifice had flowed through Sonal, bursting out of him and reaching into Thaddrick’s soul, buried as it was inside the wolf and suddenly he filled with hope. Generations and generations of past Sonal’s, those men and women whose sole purpose in life was to add strength to the barrier. What did we condemn our children and our children’s children to? He wondered sadly, as he thought of the families who had grown old and died maintaining the wall whilst his people, the people who had come with him to this valley had lived on in safety and peace. Sonal, so brave… he thought, and the Guardians’. They who struggled and died in vain, just waiting for a relief that would never arrive, eventually not even knowing why they did what they did, just blindly fixing and repairing, day after day giving their lives as Sonal had given part of his for a wall that should never have been needed in the first place!
A lump burned in Thaddrick’s throat threatening to choke him and he swallowed hard. Sonal, he again saw Sonal and the new white streaks in his hair as he used himself as the balance for his song of repair.
‘Themos, what did we, no, what did I condemn them too?’ Thaddrick cried to the illusory figure of the man beside whom he had grown up as the tears silently began to fall.
As the tears slowed and finally stopped, cramp in his leg caused him to move and the book hidden beneath his robes stuck into him awkwardly. Wiping his face with his sleeve he took the book from the hidden pocket and flicked through the pages once more, seeing the ghost of his brother sitting beside him and scribbling into a book very similar to his own as they debated some point or another hotly and beside a river, just like this one, Thaddrick remembered. Perhaps that is why I love this river so much, because it reminds me of home, home and Themos and family. Abruptly Thaddrick k
new what to do, in seconds he was on his feet, his aged appearance belying the fitness of the man he was. He gathered his few belongings and began to hurry back along the way he had come, a slow smile spreading across his face.
As he walked back toward the living accommodation, he looked at the fledgling forest around him. All of the plants and trees brought as seeds from the dying planet of Arotia, from home. Parts of the mature forest Thaddrick knew would so resemble his old home he would find himself venturing back there, repeatedly as he sought for news of the one, or some sign that the prophecy would soon, come to pass. Then, when ‘the one’ finally arrives, I don’t recognise him, he thought, angry with himself for not seeing the truth before this.
‘Think on this Themos,’ he said as he continued to discuss the situation with his imagined brother and finding the process helping to settle his train of thought.
‘Gideon carries in him the blood of two great lines, one evil and one good, surely that should mean the balance would be satisfied,’ Thaddrick said aloud, the imagined Themos snorted in disdain.
‘Providing that the boy can learn to control his power of course,’ Themos answered.
‘Jed has instructed him from the beginning about love and life, respect and honour. Could I have done a better job preparing the boy for the choices and the sacrifices he must inevitably make?’ Thaddrick retorted. Themos said nothing as he slowly faded leaving Thaddrick alone once more; comfortable at last with what he knew he had to do.
The long low communal building came into view with the sun setting behind it, turning the white walls black in silhouette against its brilliance. Streaks of red and gold fanned the sky with long white trails of wispy cloud reflecting back the red and orange hues as the sun seemed to blend into the rooftop of the house. Thaddrick loved the sky at sunset, the colours always more intense and brilliant than they seemed to be at dawn, a grand finale of colour before the world turned, twilight gave up her dance and night fell revealing the millions of tiny stars twinkling in the blue-black sky. For too many years before arriving on earth, the Arotian people had suffered under the choking and cloying atmosphere of their dying planet, heavy, sulphur filled clouds and toxic rains fell from the heavens as the world they had lived in slowly blew itself apart.
The Tessellation Saga. Book Two. 'The One' Page 31
