Ariel's Tear

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Ariel's Tear Page 10

by Justin Rose


  Ariel shook her head. “Our light is clean, like sunlight.”

  He looked again at the cloud that still drifted overhead, at least three hundred strong now, several hundred feet up and spread out in a wild spray. The light was orange and hazy, like embers clouded in smoke and ash. It flickered and shifted in intensity like a dying fire.

  “What are they then?” he asked.

  Ariel’s eyes were wide and gleamed in the darkness. Her body trembled with fear and offense. It was the most emotional Reheuel had ever seen her. “Something new,” she whispered, “something horrible and new.”

  “You don’t mean they’re—”

  “They were goblins,” Ariel replied. “I’m afraid they’re something else entirely now.”

  “Gath Odrenoch,” Reheuel whispered, “they’ll be there before morning.”

  “We have to find the Tear,” Ariel said. “It will not stop them, but at least it will weaken them.”

  Reheuel packed his blanket quickly and dragged his pack over his shoulders. “We’re leaving now,” he said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

  Ariel shook the moisture from her wings and flew upward a few feet. The cloud had passed now and was moving off to the west, a sea of glowing lights that winked and guttered in the darkness. A smell of ash drifted over Ariel and Reheuel. Their eyes stung as if from smoke.

  They moved off together up the mountain side. The ground was still wet, but much of the excess water had run off down the mountain face and the going was faster. Ariel occasionally stopped to provide steps.

  Midway through their trip, Reheuel noticed a light filling the southern sky. He thought at first that the clouds had cleared. Instead of the moon though, he saw another cloud of lights filling the sky, white and beautiful and clean. They shone like tiny suns, as alive and constant as their celestial counterpart. Reheuel wondered briefly how he could have ever mistaken the ember light of the goblins for these clean creatures.

  Ariel gasped. “My children,” she said, “where are they going?”

  “Looks like north,” Reheuel replied.

  “The goblins,” Ariel said. She instinctively moved toward the light, protective and afraid. “They’re going after the goblins.”

  Reheuel shook his head. “They couldn’t. They were broken without the Tear.”

  “Rand could,” Ariel replied. “If she made the others . . .”

  “They’ll die,” Reheuel finished, letting his eyes fall to the ground at his feet.

  “Yes,” Ariel said, “and if they live, then what will they be? Without innocence, they will not be fairy. They will never reconnect to the Tear. They will be—”

  “Outcasts.”

  Ariel sank down to her knees on the earth, staring at the lights, the brave little lights flying to the north. Her eyes closed, and she let her hands fall folded between her legs. And, once more, if fairies could weep.

  After several hours, they neared a group of cave mouths. There were rough timber walls blocking these openings and gates with iron studs. But no visible sentries stood astride the walls, and no movement showed around them. Only the sounds of running water echoed from behind each gate.

  Ariel peered cautiously around the trunk of the birch tree she stood behind. “See if you can get closer,” she said to Reheuel. “They may have all left.”

  Reheuel nodded and slipped out into the open, crouched down in the shallow bell heather. His bow was out now, strung and nocked with a broad tipped arrow. His feet made almost no noise as they softly brushed the heather flowers. He reached the wall undetected and placed his ear to the wood. Again, he heard rushing water but nothing else. He studied the wall above for movement and carefully checked each visible arrow loop. But no movement caught his eye. He waved to Ariel to come forward. If there were any guards, they could hardly help but notice her glowing figure.

  She landed on the ground beside him and looked up the nine foot palisades. “Use these,” she whispered and placed her hand on the wall. Along its face, tiny pegs of solid light, just large enough for Reheuel to grasp, jutted out evenly. Reheuel hung his bow around his body and quickly pulled himself up the palisade, slipping quietly over the far side. He rested silently on the wall’s upper walkway and peered into the cave, his first true look at the goblin world.

  The three cave mouths all opened into the same room, a massive hall-like structure filled with low stone barracks and stables. He could smell the stables and the rank odor of whatever creatures were kept inside. About halfway across the hall, he saw the gleam of water. A narrow river flowed across the cavern in a semicircle, its outer loop toward the wall on which Reheuel rested. The cave into which the river flowed seemed to be the only entrance further into the mountain. Ariel flew up beside him and sniffed the air. “I don’t think there’s anything here,” she said.

  Reheuel nodded and approached some nearby stairs. They were too narrow for his feet, and he had to walk sideways as he climbed down. His long strides skipped over four steps at a time. Ariel flew down beside him and pointed to the river. “I guess that’s our route,” she said.

  A small bridge extended over the stream, wide enough for three to walk abreast but with no rails or walls. It hung just inches over the surface of the water, and beneath it an iron grill descended into the water. A stack of roughly carved poles lay on the bridge, and a dozen or so tiny canoes floated to the left, bumping softly against the iron grill. Reheuel walked out and lifted one of these canoes, dragging it over to the other side where it could run with the current. Ariel landed in it as he stepped down and shuddered as her feet settled in a layer of slime. “We should land as soon as possible,” she said.

  Reheuel nodded. “I’d hate to be caught on the water if they find us.”

  He stood in the center of the canoe and punted it along with the current, shaking occasionally as he struggled to maintain his footing. The canoe rode dangerously low under his weight, its walls just two inches above the water level.

  “Look at the banks,” Ariel said as they rode.

  Reheuel glanced at them. They were steep and straight, unnaturally angular. “They were carved,” he said. “These streams must be like roads.”

  When the canoe entered the dark mouth of the exit, Reheuel stowed his pole on the floor of the canoe, its end hanging out on the right side, and unslung his bow. The new cave was little more than a tunnel, a long, narrow hole lit only by Ariel’s glow. On the walls, strange carvings flickered in the dim light, ancient monsters and creatures with names lost even to legend, remembered only in the hereditary fears of the goblins. Several times, as they rode, Reheuel thought he saw these carvings move. But each time he attributed it to the poor lighting and the shifting shadows.

  The ride through the tunnel lasted for about twenty minutes, and then a light appeared at the mouth of an exit. It looked like neither sunlight nor daylight; it was duller, pale blue in tone. At first Reheuel thought it might be starlight, for it carried an oldness and a grayness. But it was too dim for starlight, too lackluster. This light was not so much old as sickly.

  Reheuel tensed and lifted his bow in anticipation as they entered the light, but almost immediately he realized how useless the motion was. Moving from the pitch of the tunnel into this new light blinded him, causing him to quickly swing an arm over his eyes. He overturned the canoe as he did so, slipping off and crashing into the cold, four-foot water. Ariel shot upward immediately and hung above the water, staring in wonder at the world around them. For it was a world. The words hall and cavern fall desperately short of describing the true expanse of the area they had entered. It was conical in shape, as if the entire mountain were merely a hollow shell or an immensely thick wall. On its sides, from the floor around her and upwards for half a mile, thick, phosphorescent blue moss clustered like matted grass. It lit the entire expanse as far as she could see.

  Towers and castles carved from the living rock of the mountain rose upward haphazardly yet majestically, the handiwork of centuries of lab
or. The angles were rough and ragged, the walls unpolished. Yet the overall effect of a city built from one stone was staggering. Many buildings had the melted look of stalagmites, covered in the residue of a thousand years of dripping water. Others had channels carved into their roofs and running down their bases toward the stream, single-droplet rivers carved by time.

  And amidst all the grotesque splendor, the city was silent. No guttural nickers rattled from the open doors, no mealy howls from the towers overhead. The city might have been abandoned for centuries to judge by the sounds. Only the smell assured Ariel that goblins did indeed dwell in this place, the sickly, heavy scent of habitation and refuse, rotting flesh from scrap piles and rotting feces from some distant sewage system.

  Reheuel clambered to shore and grunted in anger, clutching his leg. A long, thin lamprey clung doggedly to his leather chaps, struggling to break through to his flesh. Reheuel stabbed it with his dagger and flicked it back into the water. The surface roiled briefly as some larger shape moved in, drawn by the blood in the water.

  He stood and looked around at the city that surrounded them. It went on for miles, far beyond where his gaze ended. The far wall above the city was merely a hazy patch of light, like the sky from the earth above. “Which way?” he asked Ariel, the sound of dripping from his soaked clothing amplified in the silence and stone.

  Ariel pointed toward the center of the city. “That way,” she said.

  Reheuel nodded, studying the towering keep that rose about half a mile distant, at least twice the height of any other building. “Guess it’s pretty safe to guess which building?” he asked.

  Chapter 9

  Tat—tat—tat . . . The rain dulled to a thin staccato on the roof of the fairy keep, and around the main hall, fairies crept from their crevices to revel in their freedom from thunder. Randiriel watched them with a vague sense of disdain. She hated herself for the feeling, hated herself for so quickly condemning what she had only recently been. But the knowledge of her own prior weakness only increased her disgust. As the other fairies began to laugh and sing once more, she left, flying out to the roof to watch the rain clouds thin.

  It was late, and the sky overhead was dark save for a few tiny gaps in the cloud cover where stars dared to peek through at the world below. The mountains of Gath were visible in the distance, darker pyramids in a sea of near-black. Randiriel loved the sky. It was one of the few traits she remembered sharing with the other fairies. They all loved to watch the sky. Only now did Randiriel begin to understand why even this similarity had in some ways set her apart.

  The others had loved the sky for seeing it, enjoyed it as it was given to them. They watched the sunset, tasted the rain, and felt the wind as it played in their hair. They seemed so content with experience as it came, so naturally receptive to the bounds of their five senses. But Randiriel longed for something more from the sky, from the dim shapes on the horizon. She wanted to experience beyond sight and hearing and touch, beyond smell and taste. She wanted to wrap together all of those experiences at once and somehow be one with what she saw. When seized with these desires, she would often fly out into the clouds or valleys she was watching, flash as fast as she could from point to point and take it all in at once, every detail of sensation that her body gave her. But even this fell short of truly experiencing what she saw.

  Was this what it meant to be real, to be haunted by a phantom desire for more than what was immediately real, to be ever in need of something further? Or had it been only an aberration, a symptom of discontent with her lot as a fairy? She knew that it could not be the latter. For, as she stared out at the night sky, already matured past her idyllic fairyhood, she still felt that haunting need for more.

  She sat for several hours on the roof, watching the still forms of the Gath mountains in the distance. She wondered how Ariel was faring there, how close she was to regaining the Tear. Then her thoughts turned to the west of the mountains, to Gath Odrenoch where the Iris flew, and she thought of Geuel and wondered whether he had reached his precious city. Just then a flutter of wings sounded above and Brylle landed beside her. “Thought you’d be up here,” she said.

  Randiriel nodded. “Quiet is hard to find below.”

  They sat silent for several minutes, just watching the slow dissipation of the clouds. Then Randiriel pointed toward the Gath mountains. “What’s that?” she asked, “do you see it?”

  Brylle nodded. “Lights of some sort. They’re coming out of the mountain. Surely not a fire?”

  Randiriel shook her head. “No, they’re . . . flying, I think. They look almost like,” she paused, struggling to find another comparison but failing, “fairies.”

  Brylle shuddered, an unnatural revulsion coming over her at the comparison. She could barely see the distant cloud of lights, and she could definitely not identify them. But somehow the comparison still struck her as wrong, as twisted and vulgar. “Surely not,” she said. “They’re all below.”

  “The Tear,” Randiriel said suddenly, “what else could it be?”

  Brylle felt her stomach churn. “You think the goblins—”

  “They’re headed north. The only city there is Gath Odrenoch,” Randiriel said, leaping off the roof and flying back down toward one of the windows, calling over her shoulder, “Round up the council members and gatherers. Meet me in the throne room.”

  Randiriel spent the next half hour racing through the halls and corridors of the keep, seeking out every fairy who had shown independence. When she finally reached the throne room, about four hundred fairies had gathered there, all whispering excitedly among themselves in tense anticipation. Brylle sat, ashen and pale, with the rest of the council members in their thrones. Randiriel ignored the thrones and stepped in front of the assembled fairies, raising her hands for silence.

  “Brothers and sisters,” she said, “listen to me. In the last few days, we have learned many things. We have traded the innocence of childhood for understanding. We have discovered self and free will and pain. But tonight we must learn something new. We must learn to fight.”

  Behind Randiriel, several council members stood to their feet. “Silence!” cried one, a tall male fairy in a silver tunic. “Randiriel, Ariel told you to care for our people. But you overstep your authority. We are born of the Tear, and our people live through the cyntras of Innocence. They cannot fight. It violates their nature.”

  Randiriel turned on him. “The Tear is gone!” she cried, “And yet here we stand, all of us. We are more than simply vessels of the Tear’s power. We are complete in ourselves. And I believe we can do as we will with the power we have left.”

  A female council member spoke. “All of you who do this, you sacrifice all hope of becoming one with the Tear again. You will be alone. Forever.”

  Rylen, the fairy in gold, stepped toward Randiriel. “I don’t want to go back anyway,” he said. “I don’t want to forget. I’ll follow you, Rand.”

  Randiriel turned to the others. “And you?” she asked. “I saw a cloud of lights tonight, like our own in migration. But they were darker and foul, headed for Gath Odrenoch. The goblins have taken our power, our very form, and now turn that form against our friends. Reheuel and his sons bled to protect us. We owe them our aid. And if not them, we owe ourselves. Do you not want vengeance for our fallen brethren?”

  The male council member clutched a staff of light now, formed inside his hand. He slammed it down upon the floor and silenced the crowd of fairies with a deafening boom. “We have no ties to the outer world,” he said. “We cannot afford to form them now. What happens in the world of men is the business of men.”

  “And what happens when that business is finished?” Randiriel asked. “What happens when the last of the men in Gath Odrenoch die? Will the goblins fly back to their caves and cower once more? They’ve attacked us once. They will finish the task. Let us unite with man while we can. If not for honor, then for survival. Perhaps none of you here care for man or the Iris. But I know you all
love the City of Youth. For the hope of her restoration, join me.”

  Brylle stepped down from her throne and stood beside Randiriel. “I will fly with you,” she said. “Those creatures are a mockery of all that the Tear preserves.”

  Seeing one of the council members with Randiriel, several more fairies stepped forward. Gradually, as the group increased in size, more began to step forward. And finally, all but a few dozen of the fairies in the room had joined Randiriel. She turned to Brylle and Rylen. “Thank you,” she said.

  Rylen placed a hand on her shoulder. “You set us free,” he said, “and we do this freely.”

  “See you both after,” Randiriel said. “Perhaps after tonight there will be time for brighter things.”

  “There’s a whole world out there to see now,” Rylen said, “and where’s the joy in seeing it alone?”

  Moments later, the windows of the fairy keep glowed as hundreds of tiny suns filtered out into the night. The dew on the fields glistened beneath their sunlight, and dozens of small night creatures scurried for cover away from their effulgence. Occasionally brighter glints flashed about these suns as fairies practiced forming weapons. Spears of light and silver daggers glittered in their fists as they flew, their eyes filled with a noble fear. For the first time since Ariel’s Tear struck the Faeja, the fairies were going to war.

  * * *

  Hefthon woke to the smell of ashy smoke, the kind of smoke that curls from a bed of dying embers doused in water. He sat up quickly and searched the woods around him, his first thought flying to a forest fire. But the ground was still soaked. Water squelched in his woolen blanket as he turned, and he shivered with the chill of his wet shirt. The woods were dark and silent save for the drip of water from heavy branches.

  He sniffed again, wondering if the scent had been some clinging remnant of a dream. But still his nostrils burned with ash. He looked upward then and saw them, hundreds of orange lights flickering in the darkness about fifty feet above. They were too far distant for him to see them clearly. Most merely looked like glowing embers. Several, however, held grotesque forms in their light, dark shadows of long-limbed figures. They hissed and winked as they struck moisture and straggling raindrops in the air. All of them, even the brightest, were wreathed in a kind of haze, as if half their composition were a cloud of smoke.

 

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