The Verse of Sibilant Shadows: A set of tales from the Irrational Worlds

by JM Guillen

  Danger be damned. I would not lay here, helpless and afraid.

  “We won’t be havin’ none of that.” His boot found my hand, and I gasped. He didn’t crush or grind, but held firm.

  Almost instinctively, I began to gather glamour about myself. It was all I had that might hold his strength at bay. It was the glory of autumn. Changing leaves, frost on pumpkins, apples ripe in an orange afternoon, the full moon on a chill night, and the distant howling of wolves: they all answered me.

  I felt his grip on my Name shudder the smallest bit. For the briefest of moments, my breath came with September frost.

  He grinned, gritting his teeth. “Not jes’ now, O Herald.” He winked. “The settin’ sun still shines. Summer hangs on yet.”

  I tried pulling away, but he stepped from my hand to my naked chest, a leather boot against my fair skin.

  “Yeh got stones, Tommy. That’s fer sure. I was like yeh once, young, pulling on my traces.” He grinned at me. “Care to hear about it?” No one could Tell like the Old Man. A story from him could be the end of me. His words could unravel the world.

  I shook my head, weak as a puppy. “No.” My voice was a rasping whisper.

  He laughed. “I’ll wager not. Still, looks like I’m the one who’s dealin’. I reckon yeh’ll have my story whether yeh want it or not.”

  I struggled to move, but he leaned onto the boot, holding me fast.

  Power, unseen yet more real than the dying sun or the ground beneath me, gathered around us, whispering lost songs. When he began, his voice edged with night, the power in his words beat against me, merciless and sharp.

  “Once, the people lived in darkness and cold, deep in the shadow of the first mountain. All knew that the creator had a great fire far away in the sky. The creator kept the fire because he believed that if man held it, he would learn all the hidden secrets of the world.”

  The same power slumbered within me but sleepily turned its head toward the story in fascination at his ancient, fierce glam. His voice crashed like thunder through an endless sea. My secret heart opened to his words, and my glamour fed into his strength like the wind feeds a fire.

  Terror stabbed like a spear in my chest.

  He was stealing my strength, taking it and weaving it into a Telling that, no doubt, would only make him stronger. His words gouged as water shaping stone. He could kill me. He could steal every bit of glamour I possessed.

  I had to stop him, yet for all my effort, I merely writhed on the ground.

  The power surrounding us eagerly gave in to his story, taking the form that the old trickster gave it.

  “So man called upon all the animals, asking for help to get some of the creator’s fire. Deer said he could grasp heaven’s flame as he was swift. He ran as fast as he could yet never got to the sky.” He winked at me. “Blue-jay said he could fly and pull down wisps of the sun. However, when it blackened an edge of his beautiful plumage, he turned back.”

  His words shifted like shadows in mist. More than a mere tale of his strength, after gaining the power of his thousand-thousand Tellings, this story was palpable.

  It had been told until it was true.

  They told it around a fire; they told it in winter; they told it in the silence of night.

  Yet even as I watched him shape the world, I could do nothing.

  “Finally, I went to the people. I knew I could trick my way into the heavens to steal a piece of the sun.” He grinned fiercely. “I shadowed and stalked my way there, wending my way through the seven gates. I passed every guardian, beguiled my way through every door. Eventually, I stood at the creator’s hearth, where the sun burned.”

  I took a deep breath, turning my head from him. On the horizon, the sun had not set.

  It did not matter.

  I had to steal his story. If I didn’t, he would draw every shine of glamour I had and leave me weak and mewling, completely in his power. I did not fight against his story—could not deny or disbelieve. No. The Old Man was too strong for that. Instead, I threw my glamour into his story, pushing it forward. I affirmed what he said, lent truth to the shadows he wove.

  I drew everything I was:

  Ten-thousand manic Hunts through the sleeping wood.

  Cutting nights lit only by howling wolves.

  Wind that warns, wind that beckons.

  Frost biting life away, bit by bit.

  Wind ridden by ghosts.

  Autumn’s Troth.

  Summer must always give way.

  His grip on my Name slackened as frost returned to my breath.

  “YES!” I growled as fierce as I could make it.

  He glared at me, those ancient, mad eyes wide with surprise.

  Now, to make his story mine.

  “You slipped to the hearth of the creator—cunning thief that you are—and you stole your way to the brilliant, blazing sun.” My words drew the glamour from his Telling, like the shifting of tides.

  He reeled a bit as I drew his Telling. “Yes. Yes, I...” He shook his head, slightly dazed.

  Danger laced my Tellings too, for I was no mere sprite of the maple tree. I was the Herald of Autumn.

  The power, drifting around us like a rabid ocean, shuddered. Now that fascination slowly entrapped him.

  I had just the barest thread of it, just the smallest bit. Slowly, I tried weaving my own glamour from his words.

  “But then, you bit it off. Just the smallest piece.” I grinned at him. “When you did, oh, how it burned!” I saw it clearly in my mind. The fire, brighter than summer’s shine, burned in the Old Man’s mouth, and somewhere in the distance, I heard him scream with the pain of it.

  I pushed up to a sitting position.

  “You screamed and wailed as it burned away part of your tongue! At the creator’s hearth you found no water, no relief. The sun’s fire scorched and ate and burned. Like old, bent wood, you were little more than tinder, fodder to feed the flames.”

  I saw in my mind not his cunning nor his cleverness, but his folly. Asunder in his foolishness for seeking the fire of the sun, this was the story that mattered. I told of his smallness, his weakness.

  He shook his head, faintly, denying my story. He had not expected I could perform a Telling of my own.

  My strength beat against his. Perhaps it was possible. Maybe I could…

  Yet, maybe I couldn’t. The sun still shone on the horizon. Summer’s green grass wafted in the wind…

  No. Focus. I mustered my strength, steeling my voice.

  “That’s where you get your broken tongue, Old Man! You dared to hold the sun’s fire in your mouth! It bent you, twisted you. That’s why you ever speak in riddles and lies! That is why you cannot be trusted. The sun’s fire burned you and left a mad, decrepit monster!” My words landed like hammers, pounding the power that sang around us into him. I pushed myself to a crouch, gazing squarely into him. My eyes sang with the power of the Hunt.

  I glanced around for my bow.

  He shuddered as the strength he had summoned thundered into him, wrenching its way into the filaments of sanity he had left. The power of our sparring tore through him.

  The story changed what he was. Reality bent, reflected, changed.

  No, it was what he always had been.

  Then his scowl pierced me. The madness, once a shadow in his eyes, raged as a storm. Each breath blustered with seething insanity from somewhere deep within him.

  The power buckled and boiled around us.

  He grasped the thunderstorm, wielding it with little more than his triumphant grin.

  I had believed, for just a shining moment, that I had him unawares. That perhaps, just perhaps, I could sever the last shard of his mind. I had hoped that I would walk away from this alive.

  I was a fool.

  Then, Old Man Coyote, shaman of the first people, spoke.

  “Yes. I held the fire of the Great Spirit.” He laughed now, a twisted, mocking thing. With that tug on the glamour that seethed and boiled between
us, my weavings fell to broken threads.

  He was magnificent.

  “Its power drove me mad. By its light, I saw things none were meant to know.” His eyes met mine. “I saw future and past, laughing and dancing in every instant. I saw infinite histories, written in blood and pain.”

  I remembered who he was. I remembered everything he had done. How could I have possibly hoped to wield glamour against him? He, who had stood against the Valkyries when they came to this virgin land? My struggle against his Telling was futile.

  “Its wrath changed everything I was, Tommy. It was the secret heat at the center of all things; it was the passion between man and woman; it was the first Medicine.” He almost whispered as his eyes drifted far away. “Mine. Mine.”

  The Telling slipped away from me, sand through my fingers. Too soon. My strength had failed me. I tried pushing myself to my feet, but of course I couldn’t. I stumbled backward.

  The sun refused to set. Its light wrapped like shackles in my mind.

  He stared into me, eyes empty. When he spoke again, it was a whisper, but the whole world listened.

  “It is mine to call, mine to cast. It rests within me still.” Those words echoed through eternity. He drew in a powerful breath, and then, cupping his hands, whispered a secret into existence that no mortal would ever hear.

  For an instant, the world was aflame.

  A glowing light erupted from his hands, singing a forgotten song. The element flared with what fire was before there were men to name it. It was what fire dreamed of being again.

  He held it high. The old, salt-and-pepper haired man faded. Now Coyote stood on two legs like a man. The sun’s fire burned white and eternal in his hand, but it burned him not. No, he wielded the fire, shaped it with secrets and shadows.

  Then, the man returned.

  Yet his words drawled strangely.

  “I could kill yeh here, Tommy Maple.” His voice thundered when he said my name, though he no longer uttered a Telling. He held the fire toward me so I felt its heat, even from five strides away.

  I squinted against the light. “If you meant me dead, I would be so.”

  He smiled. “Clever boy.” He cast the fire, throwing it as one might a river stone.

  It landed at my feet.

  The ground trembled under the burst of yellow-white flame. The fire whispered, both beckoning and threatening.

  The forest debris caught instantly.

  I crawled away. In my weakened state, my ridiculous attempt at Telling had left me thoroughly exhausted.

  The sun neared setting. Soon, summer would be gone.

  “True fact. I could kill yeh, but I won’t. I need yeh, O Herald.”

  “What for?

  “Ne’ermind that. Yeh just remember that I had yeh here. I had yeh, and I let yeh live. Cross me, and I’ll find yeh like this again. Next time, we won’t be friendly.” He leaned closer. “This is just the first step of our little dance. We ain’t through by a long shot.” He rocked back on his heels and glanced at the sky.

  “Easy to threaten now.” I scowled. “Yet I’ll wager you are going to make away before summer’s last sun sets.”

  He said nothing before walking away. Then, he turned back, as I weakly rolled away from the rapidly catching fire.

  “Yeh’ll want to head to town, two hours north. The road’s this way.” He pointed and grinned, a helpful old man. “And, Tommy, we’re playing nice.” That grin turned feral.

  “If yeh come a’ hunting, I’ll know. I’ll know it before you start.” He canted his head to the side, curious. “Yeh come huntin’, and I’ll be mist. I’ll be shadows.” His grin twisted with terrifying madness. “Yeh won’t see me again until next time autumn rolls ’round, if’n yeh follow.”

  I nodded. I completely followed.

  Then, like a snowflake in the sun, he was gone.

  2

  The sun yet clung to the horizon while the strange flames coerced me into retreat. With minor effort I crawled away from the weirding fire. It didn’t spread as if it were hungry; instead it meandered, sampling the earth around it. It scorched its secret name into the carpet of leaf clutter and twigs. Without the Old Man’s power, I knew the fire would soon wither and die. Still, while it burned, it echoed of his strength. I dragged myself for uncounted minutes until it became a flicker in the shadows.

  Then, I fell to my back in the leaves. Autumn’s birth shouldn’t be long now. I needed only to wait for the last golden ray of summer to succumb to the eventide.

  My alertness nagged at my mind. Typically I awoke with the first dawning day of autumn—not as the summer died into night. When the sun roused me for my season, I wandered the wood, innocent and forgetful, for days before I fully came into myself.

  Never was I aware as I was now. Not this close to summer.

  I knew the reason, of course. Old man Coyote had Named me, brought me into myself. I must learn why.

  I pondered him, his not-so-veiled threats, and his mysteries until the last brilliant shaft of sunlight shot past the treetops.

  From that secret place behind my heart where poems are born, a shudder rippled through the earth.

  All creation whispered my Name.

  “Tommy Maple.” The trees rustled. Already traced with gold this far north, they bowed their heads to me as I sat up.

  “Tommy Maple.” A stag stared at me from across the clearing. It snorted, mist spreading in the cool air. Thrice it pawed the earth at me, an ancient greeting, the mark of a creature Oathed to the Hunt.

  “Tommy Maple.” The birds in the sky, the moment they felt my gaze, veered as one toward the south.

  The world belonged to me once more: the gold and red, the mist in the air, the bite of frosted wind. I pushed to my feet, then began to walk, feeling the early fallen leaves dreaming beneath my feet.

  He meant for me to meet him in the town.

  A ludicrous proposal, of course. Who of the fairest folke would play his game with Old Man Coyote? It would be a trap. Still, if he meant me harm, he had me. He could have taken me at any moment.

  He had my Name.

  “I need yeh… Yeh just remember that I had yeh here. I had yeh, and I let yeh live.”

  Terror washed over me. I wish he’d taken an Oath, even a minor one, before he’d left. If I had been stronger perhaps I could have…

  I laughed at that thought.

  Oaths hardly bound the Old Man. He would look me square in the face, make any promise I wished, and then kill me without breaking his Oath.

  The slumbering leaves rustled deliciously under my feet as I came upon the road, flanked with miles of exploding red and gold. On the other side of the road, a squirrel caught my gaze and immediately scrambled toward an old, acorn-heavy oak.

  The rusty, faded-blue truck rumbled and rattled along, drawing nearer. It was perfect. I couldn’t have drawn him in a Telling.

  The white-haired man belonged to this land, as if he had wandered these hilly woods since his first step. His blue coveralls had worn thin in all the wrong places. An aged but gleaming shotgun hung on the rack in the back window of his truck.

  He pulled up next to where I stood, eyeing my nakedness critically.

  Then he drew deeply from a briarwood pipe. “Bet there’s a story here. I’d like to know it.”

  I smiled. “It’s a good one.”

  He let the quiet moment grow long. “You from away?”

  I nodded.

  He sighed.

  “Name’s Kenneth.” He opened the truck’s door.

  I extended a hand. “Timothy.” I would not be giving him my Name.

  “Think I got pair of my boy’s jeans. He’s wicked short, but I bet they’d fit.” He said “sho-at” instead of short.

  I nodded again.

  Kenneth stepped out. He rummaged behind his seat until pulling up a worn pair of jeans and throwing them to me. They squeezed, but I could wear them.

  When I started to thank him, he raised a gnarled hand.r />
  “No thankin’ me, boy. I’ll get your gawmy ass to town. You can pay me with the story of how ya got here.”

  I suppressed a grin.

  That made twice he’d asked.

  Still a bit dizzy from my Telling-spar with the Old Man, this was thankfully different. An eager human made for a simple Telling.

  It couldn’t get much simpler than this: I needed clothes, money, and food.

  If I crafted the right story, Kenneth would have all I needed. He would have it and give it happily since I chose how it ended.

  “Are you sure you want me to gaw your ear off?” I asked Kenneth as we lurched along the rutted bumpy road.

  He let his gaze wander from the road to me.

  “Ayuh. Wicked boring out here. I gotta tell the boys about the naked, red-head lad I found in the woods.”

  My smile broke wide open. That made three times.

  It was all I needed.

  “Well, sir, that’s a complicated one. I have one thousand beginnings.” I paused. “No. That’s not right.” I caught his blue eye in the mirror. “A thousand thousand, each stranger than the last.”

  3

  Time drifted by, like a rainy afternoon.

  I guided Kenneth through the wandering, shadowy path of my Telling, yet once done, he asked for more. I gave even as I took, leaving him with lost secrets that he could never tell and the wild imaginings of a much younger man. For a season, he would almost hear the whispers of the autumn wind. For a year and a day he would dream of the Hunt, the prey, and the wild chase.

  He would remain fey-touched until his last.

  I believed our trade fair.

  He left me with a thick jacket to cover my back, boots for my feet, and his son’s pants. Though he had no food to offer before the Telling, he found a forgotten chocolate bar that I downed quickly. He offered thirty-seven dollars.

  I only took thirty-three.

  I gave his shotgun no thought though. I sought a bow neither of ash nor rowan. He would have granted me both. He would have begged to. But I could always call my bow if I truly needed it. The many turnings of the years had taught me that unfamiliar weapons only created situations where I must call for my bow sooner.