by Jesse Galena
© 2015 by Jesse Galena
All rights reserved
First Edition, 2015
Cover art: Jatin Aggarwal
Editor: Jennifer Levine
ISBN: 9781311279316 (ebook)
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced in any manner without the expressed permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Without God, I would not exist. Without my family and friends, I would not be alive. Without my wife, I would not be here. Without you, I would not have a reason to write.
This book is for you, for me, and for everyone who wants to read.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part Four
The Middle of the Road
Part Three
The Beginning of the Road
Part Two
The End of the Road
Part One
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
They say the shadows of that place birth your deepest fears. The moonlight that filters through the sickly clouds can pull the darkest nightmares from your imagination. Once freed from the realm of the mind, it grants them inhabitance here, making them tangible. Physical. Killable.
Perhaps that is what draws some people here. It is a place where denial holds no point, where the most repressed fears and thoughts can surface, forcing us to overcome them or succumb to their will. When the mind-shattering images manifest with claws and teeth and repressed emotions, what good is a blade or an axe? If the power we possess could subdue it, would we not have slain it in our sleep, when all the world's laws and possibilities were at our command?
Time holds no perceptible pattern there. It flows from past to future and back like sea foam in the tide. Is that how it remains after so many years of neglect? Is that why they say some of its structures still dare to pierce the clouds while others lay in ruin and decay? Are the lost souls who wandered that land still roaming within it?
Far on the horizon, I can see the marred walls and decaying structures that lie in that massive kingdom. Gray clouds of unnatural origins circle its borders. The clouds devour the light that dares to penetrate them. They chew it with unseen teeth, stripping it of its radiance. What gray shreds remain dribble from its maw down to the land below. The abnormal clouds diffuse the now-colorless light, casting an atypical glow rather than true illumination.
While the mystery of its fall and the nightmarish creatures that dwell within have never left its borders, its skyward spires and mountains are visible from the surrounding lands. The looming clouds that circle it are visible from even as far as the eastern ocean. That kingdom is a wound upon the world, one that will not heal. It sits on the edge of humanity, its presence felt beyond the reaches of its borders. It is an isolated plot that reminds us that there are forces beyond our power and beyond our understanding.
A feeling of inescapable dread washed over me as I beheld the ruins. I shuddered at what impossible sights may wait for me beyond those borders. While want of my fears taking a physical form was not what drew me to this cursed land, neither would fear of it keep me from entering.
Part Four
The wavering light from the fire bathed them in an unsteady red. The boy’s pale skin seemed to reflect the color from the fire light. The woman's darker tones pushed altered color away, keeping her naturally brown skin nearly the same. He knew not what to expect when he went searching for the old recluse. Whether she was a stable crone or a withering madwoman with a rickety mind corrupted by the horrors she had witnessed, he was still unsure.
Her home was sturdy, made of treated wood and sealed well despite being intentionally far from civilization. The windows were solid and lacked any tarnish. There was a squeak when she opened her door, a natural strain on the hinges from the heavy wood rather than from faulty craftsmanship. The inside was void of art or items to draw a guest's eye, but it did not lack personality. Books lined one wall. Firewood lined another. Two rows of exotic spices hung above shelves of fine, dried and sealed foods from distant lands. A single, well-constructed chair made of an elder tree, with beautifully stitched cushions upon it, sat before the fire. A small, wooden table stood beside the chair. Her only plate rested on it, a few crumbs of food still littering its surface. Her home and everything in it only accommodated one.
She answered his questions, but the half-answers from her thin, wrinkled lips never satisfied him. He continued sitting on the floor, growing increasingly uncomfortable as the moments passed while he waited for her to speak again.
"The rumors cannot be true," the boy finally said, his annoyance echoing through his tone. "A land that only has monsters and moving statues? There must be an ecosystem. If it were only monsters, what would they eat? There has to be some sustainable source of food. Some supply of fresh water rather than the stagnate ponds and salted stream you saw. Even the most fearsome predators require these basic needs. It would be impossible for life to be sustained otherwise."
"You assume they need food," the old woman said softly. She curled her long, bony finger and he found himself leaning toward her without thought. "Eldritch creatures of that purpose do not eat for nourishment. They only eat for pleasure. Something else keeps them tethered to this world."
Deep in the boy's brown eyes, she saw the terror he tried to keep hidden. Her haunting words clung to his mind and rattled his heart. In that moment, he knew that the memory of her—her voice, her words, the smell of burning wood from the fireplace, the sight of her full, graying hair, and the feeling that she invoked—would never fade.
Despite her conviction about the unholy accounts of the horrors being true, they were too unsettling and illogical for him to believe they were anything beyond delusions.
"You said those things were alive," the boy said, regaining his composure. "They need something to sustain them. Living things need food and water and—"
"What does a thought need to exist?" she asked dismissively, cutting him off. "Does it need food or water?"
"No," he replied quickly, "but the person thinking it does."
"And what if that person tells someone else? Then he could die and the thought would live on. What if he announced it? More people would know. What if the world knew? What if he wrote it down? Would that thought ever truly die?"
"Perhaps not, but those people still need sustenance. They would need an active mind to think and ears to hear. He would need paper and ink to scribe it."
"So food and water become less important. There are many ways for the idea to circulate and spread. Many ways for it to live."
The boy grew tired of speaking mad philosophy with the half-cracked woman, but he was not willing to concede.
"But an idea does not become tangible when it is thought. A craftsman needs iron. A seamstress needs cloth and thread."
"Yes!" The woman lurched from her chair. Excitement ignited her blue eyes. Her hands latched onto the boy's hands. Her old, dry fingers were rough against his own. "The poet needs paper. Without metal, no one believes the smith can craft. What if metal was a concept people did not believe in? Is the smith worthless, or do the people simply not understand the material he needs?
"There is something there, something in that dreadful sarcophagus of civilization that can manufacture creatures beyond our understanding. A material or method we have yet to uncover for ourselves. Perhaps the discovery of this is what corrupted that wretched place into what it is now."
The boy chuckled, the laugh tasting sour in
his mouth as he beheld her reaction. What she said was impossible, yet it stirred a fear within him that he refused to admit.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I am not here to debate theories about how it might have happened. I want to know what you saw. What is really there?"
The boy's eyes were wild with lust for something beyond his grasp. His lips pressed together like a drunkard eyeing a fresh bottle. She could almost hear the thoughts that spun inside his skull.
"The riches of an abandoned treasury?" he asked, the lust slopping over from his eyes into his speech. "The designs for buildings that can withstand storms, tides, and dragons? Potions and brews for curing incurable diseases? The promise of immortality and restoring life to the dead? You have been there. You have seen it. What truly hides beyond the borders of that corrupted kingdom?"
The old woman stared at the boy with dull eyes and a vacant expression. His voice was soaked in a familiar longing that was an unpleasant memory. She remembered saying the same words, questioning all she could to gather information about the abandoned kingdom. His words were an echo of hers across twenty years. She knew what he thought beyond his words. She knew the constant pulse of curiosity and unrelenting desire that fueled him. Adventure. Riches. Priceless artifacts of unnatural and impossible power. And, like her, the want for something even more powerful and rewarding than those. All was possible within those borders.
"If you believe such wonders can exist behind those sickly borders and near the shores of the great sea, then should you not believe an equally powerful, elder spectacle of terror could also reside within? Could your eyes be so poor they cannot see that if one is possible they both could be?"
"A cure for diseases is possible," the boy said. His condescending tone, accompanied with his dismissive smile, shut her ears to whatever following words sloshed from behind his teeth. Unsure if he still spoke, she cried out.
"I have seen!" the old woman shouted. "I thought it to be rumor and madness, as you do now. Your fear of a spider or flame or death is not a simple image there. You do not fear its spindly legs or its heat or its uncertainty. Your innermost thoughts perceive every hair on its leg. You feel it pierce your flesh as it crawls across your spine. You know the sting of its fangs and the effect of its toxin. You know its blinding light and horrid touch. You know its unfeeling cold and wretched stench. Your blood will press against your flesh in an attempt to escape it. Your bones would shred your muscle to run from it if they had a greater will.
"If you fear the spider in your nightmare, the land does not make a large spider or a hoard of them to crawl across your flesh and into your mouth and ears and eyes. It produces a creature that manifests what you truly dread about such things. What the deepest, most unexplainable portion of your inner being fears more than a vision of its form or mere utterance of its name. It takes that. It takes it and molds it into a beast. And when it ravages you and does whatever you fear most to your remains, it stays. It haunts those grounds and preys upon others as it preyed upon you, giving each subsequent traveler another creature to fear or to fear becoming!"
She found herself standing over the boy, who still sat on the floor. Her arms were up, aching slightly as though she had flung them wildly. She recalled doing none of this. She wavered as she pulled away from the boy. The loose skin behind her narrow chin wavered as she settled back down in her chair, her face warped with exhaustion and fear.
"It will take all that you love," she said with limited breath, her eyes distant in the firelight, "and it will leave you a shell longing for death but too fearful to take it."
The Middle of the Road
My eyes fluttered as I woke, and I saw her. The dim light of the dawn made her visible. On the other side of a deep scar in the earth, standing between a tree and a lone pillar to a structure long destroyed, she watched me.
Though she was clad in fine, metal-lined armor, it was her helmet that caught my attention. A metal cylinder covered her face. I didn’t see any slits where her eyes or mouth should be. The helmet continued to rise until it split into two metal necks that continued to rise above her head. On the end of each neck, there was a metal face with proper holes for eyes and a mouth. I saw no eyes behind those masks. It was a unique and strange helmet. I had never seen anything like it.
Her armor was fine enough to be that of a royal guard or well-paid mercenary; sweat-soaked farm clothes covered my body. She had a blade forged by a master artisan who knew steel like a lover; I had a knife at my side.
My eyes were still weary from sleep. I closed and rubbed them, and when I opened them again she was gone.
Was she one of the monsters they spoke of in this land? No. She seemed to be human. Could she have been the one who was following me before I entered this place? Why would she follow me this far? If I had any other options, I would not have come. Perhaps she was going to punish me for my crimes. The punishment for murder was execution. Why would she come this far? Despite my desperate hopes, there was little chance I would retrieve what I wanted and escape from this place.
I rose. Grass and red-petaled flowers gave as my feet trampled them. A dip in the landscape nearly went unnoticed, but my naked feet felt the grass give way to dirt. I stopped as my eyes turned from where she had stood to what lay before me: nothing. The ground fell off. A massive chasm resided between my still-distant destination and myself. My stomach filled with sickness at the sight of the sudden drop. I stepped back. My knife slid back into its sheath as I regained my balance.
I looked back. She was still missing.
Who was she, and what was that thing on her head? My view of her was ever brief, and I could not help but keep thinking about her. The image became neither clearer nor more corrupted with each moment I thought.
There was no sense resting any longer. I was as awake as a man could be. I started the day early.
I found a way across the chasm: a long walk south brought me to a bridge. It was old, but less so than the rest of the ruins. Rope held together boards that nearly matched in depth and length, leaving gaps smaller than my foot between them. The ropes that held it together were still sturdy, upon inspection, but that did nothing to settle my fear as I made my way across the bridge.
The bridge groaned at my weight. The ropes strained as they tightened. The bridge sunk with every step as if it was slowly lowering me into the mouth of the chasm, hoping I would not notice. In my need to be certain my feet did not slip into those gaps, I looked down. I saw the pit over which I traveled. Creaking rope and waterlogged boards were all that kept me from dropping into the depths.
The stone walls of a great building had broken away as they reached over the edge of the pit. The chasm must have opened and taken part of the structure with it, leaving the other half a broken maze. A shattered wall revealed the contents of the room that hadn’t fallen down the chasm: there were tall cages and nooses hanging over the edge of the cliff. Was this once a prison? Was it simply a place for executions? If so, it was a fitting place for a murderer. My stomach turned at the thought. Two of the walls reached out to either side of the bridge. It was forcing me to enter.
As I drew closer, I saw a silhouette standing on the edge of the roof before the brightest part of the sky.
It was the woman I saw earlier.
She held a long blade that curved like an S, making a horrid, rounded edge perfect for gutting. The end straightened into a dagger-length point. A thrusting point like that would puncture the leather that protected me. A sword of that size could easily run me through and split me in half.
The light behind her shadowed the colors and details of her armor. I could make out nothing else. When I blinked this time, she did not disappear. She stared at me. Watching me as I continued into the building on which she stood. The roof of the building was too high for her to jump down to the bridge. For the moment, I was safe.
Did she construct the bridge? Open the chasm? Was it all just to lead me here? Would she find me in there? I couldn’t think like that.
There was nothing behind me. I had to press on.
I walked with my knife drawn and my hands out before me. There were no windows. No light. Darkness overtook my senses. I knew not which direction I faced and thought I would just as soon slip off the edge of the cliff as I would find the exit on the other side.
Echoing through the unknown depths, I heard the woman call out, whether in pain or pursuit I was unsure. Her screams fell between a beast's wail and a lady's cry. The echoes granted the noise the unnatural feeling of having two sources.
My hands felt the cold stone of the walls. I followed them, continuing into the black. In the darkness, I could not tell what was a doorway or a destroyed portion of a wall. In this place, each held uneven edges and great wear. What drove me, even more than the fear that my quickened pace would lead me into the chasm, was my need to get away from the screams of that woman.
The broken walls and collapsed ceilings offered limited light in one of the rooms. While the view of the sky gave me little bearings on which direction to travel, it revealed a hole leading into the chasm and a mural painted on the wall.
The painting was old. The characters in it were like dirty white shadows. It showed a massive, serpentine monster rising from the depths. It stretched to the ceiling and curled back down toward the ground. A dozen people with outlines that suggested they wore armor stood before it, prodding at it with weapons.
As I walked past the image, a strange smell filled the air. I breathed in quickly, catching the scent again. It smelled like charred flesh.
I stepped closer to the painting, and the smell became more powerful. Eyeing the mural, I realized that what I thought were faded details were just lines from the cracking wall. I reached out and touched one of the images of the soldiers. Part of it came away on my fingers. The smell grew stronger.
