Cleft knew of other banishments in the past. Why, Borylip was banished six or seven years ago for sneaking into a tent and assaulting a clanswoman while her husband was on an extended hunting trip.
Was Cleft really on Borylip’s level, in their eyes? Just for trying to survive?
He felt his anger returning, and he knew he’d never think clearly while in a rage, so he tried to calm himself by picturing Hacinda’s face. His wife’s face in the morning, when she was always the first to wake, and when Cleft woke soon after, he’d find her smiling at him.
She would never agree to this willingly. Not a chance. The elder had forced her!
So, what could he do?
Borylip had tried to return after his banishment. Six months after he was cast out, he appeared in camp, bearded and thin and with his skin covered in frostbite. He dropped to his knees and tugged the elder’s robes and begged for forgiveness, told them he had served his penance.
And they killed him.
Banishment meant banishment. In a world like this, the clan needed to trust each other. If you lost their trust, you could never regain it.
So, he would never have a place in the clan again. That meant he needed to somehow get to Hacinda and sneak her out of the camp, and she would tell him that they had coerced her into dissolving their marriage, and they would live together. Away from the clan, but together.
How would he do that? How would he steal his way into a camp full of mages who were no doubt on alert for any attempts to return?
Hmm. He’d have to think about that.
And think about it he did.
Cleft spent three days and four nights in that forest. His upbringing meant he could find plenty to survive on, and he fed himself on berries, leaves, and even a hare he caught in a snare. When he wasn’t hunting and foraging, he slowly built a plan in his mind.
It was this plan that led him out of the forest on the morning of his fourth day. He journeyed north, walking through the wilds until he reached a city. This was a city of metal. Specifically, metal boxes stacked on top of each other, ones not of modern creation but almost like relics of another time, another people, another world.
As he approached the city, riders came out to meet him. Cleft wasn’t worried because he had expected this, and he knew how carefully the gnomes guarded their city of Agnartis.
“Mage,” said the head gnome of his welcoming party. “Your journey has taken you into dark waters.”
“What do you think, boss?” said another. “Could be a pitman.”
“Too weak. We can use him in the quarries.”
“Or,” said Cleft. “You could pull your tongues back in your mouths, close your lips, and take me to your duke. I have something he wants.”
And so it was that Cleft found himself in an audience with the Duke of the gnomes. Cleft knew all about how the gnomes chose their dukes, and he knew that chose was the wrong word for it; they relied on prophecies of bullshit, silly tales that spoke of beings coming through portals of light.
Cleft bargained with the duke. He told him of his past and what he hoped would be his future, and it was in those hours in the duke’s office that a deal was struck.
“Alright, mage,” said the duke. “You will lead us to the Lonehills' secret camp. We will take them as slaves.”
“Not all of them.”
“Right, right. All but your family.”
Cleft couldn’t shift the weight of betrayal as, days later, he and a band of armed gnomes approached the Lonehill borders. It wasn’t just one betrayal, but two; the betrayal that his own people had struck on him, and his own treacherous counterblow.
Even after his abandonment, it was hard not to feel sorry for them. The ways of the clan were all he had ever known, after all. Until recently, they had been his people, his friends.
The more he thought about it, the easier it was to shake off. All he had to think about was the elder and the rest of them getting their comeuppance, while he and Hacinda broke free. Reunited once more, and searching the wilds for a new home, where they would have children and begin their own clan.
But fate makes a fool of a person’s plans, and fate had decided to be especially cruel to Cleft’s.
The gnomes used their swords and spears and strange tinctures of goo to attack the Lonehills, meeting with more resistance than expected. Cleft thought that by catching them unaware, they would not be able to fight. The gnomes would capture the clan with barely a fight, and the mages would be taken as slaves.
Just as they had punished Cleft while sparing his life, he would spare theirs. And the time they spent as gnomish slaves would let them think about how they had treated him.
As chance would have it, two dozen lonehill hunters had just that hour returned from a hunt, and all were still armed with bows, hunting knives, and elementals.
This meant that the mages were not unprepared. They had weapons to hand, elementals ready to use.
It became a bloodbath. Mage against gnome. Spears against magic. Cleft wandered through the chaos, looking for Hacinda, but he couldn’t find her.
The melee became so enraged, so bloody, that his plan spun out from under him. A gnome, one he had never spoken to, mistook Cleft for another Lonehill and stuck a sword in his gut.
Cleft stumbled onto his knees, still desperately searching for Hacinda even as blood gushed from him. He shouted her name even as the world around him grew dark and his consciousness left him.
When he awoke, the camp was silent. Blood covered the muddy ground. Tents were slashed, burned, destroyed. All around him were corpses of gnomes and Lonehills.
Feeling a stinging pain in his stomach, he dragged himself through the camp by sheer force of will, crawling to the tent he knew to be their healer’s. It was flattened, so he used what little energy he still had to lift the canvas and search it, finally finding some of the healer’s old tinctures.
There were four metal tins of strange smelling pastes. Cleft didn’t know what they did because he was no healer, but he knew they were medicine. And lacking the ability to distinguish between them, he smeared all four tinctures on his stomach wound, and then collapsed onto his back.
He awoke again, and it was nighttime now. Already the carrion birds had come to feast on the dead. A tint of ice was hanging on the breeze, and he found himself shivering uncontrollably.
But he wasn’t dead, and the tinctures had healed his wound.
Now, what about Hacinda?
There were only two possibilities, and neither of them good. But one was better than the other.
If the gnomes had taken Hacinda as a slave, then she would be alive. They hadn’t stuck to their part of the plan, but he would go back to Agnartis and reclaim her no matter what the cost.
So, Cleft searched through the corpses, checking the faces of all the dead who had once been his clanmates.
He saw Cleavon’s wife.
He saw the elder.
He saw hunters who he had often gone on trips with.
Finally, he saw a face he knew all too well. Then, at that moment, the final strings of Cleft’s mind finally snapped.
He wandered the wilds alone after that. No purpose, no place to go. He didn’t recognize the passage of time, didn’t care when day shifted to night. He just walked, foraged, pissed and shat. He lived like an animal.
There was no way of telling how long he lived like this, because time was a part of life, and life had long since departed from his mind. He didn’t even know why he clung on; only that he had once been so desperate to live that he’d broken the clan’s most sacred law, and he supposed a deep instinct to survive still lived inside him.
One day, he had just crossed a stream and was walking north, to where he saw a grouping of hills that rose higher and higher until they became a mountain in the distance. The city of Agnartis was east of them, but he didn’t want to go there. Not yet. One day, perhaps. If he was ever strong enough for revenge.
While he headed toward the mountai
n, he heard sounds.
He turned to see a pack of forest wolves in the distance. A pack a dozen strong, galloping across the plains. There was no doubting that they were coming for him.
Was this to be his end? After everything, he’d die at the teeth of a hunting pack of canines?
No.
He ran now. The concoction of healing pastes he’d put on his belly had long ago sealed his wounds, and weeks or maybe even months of doing nothing but walking had given him stamina as he’d never had before.
So he ran toward the mountains, not knowing what salvation they would offer, but just needing something to aim for.
It was as he reached the mountains that the pack finally closed in on him, and he knew this was the end.
But then he reached the base of the mountain, and there, he saw a door cut into the stone.
A door with a circle etched into it. He ran toward it and pushed, but the doors wouldn’t open, and the wolves were getting closer and closer.
Exasperated, Cleft slumped forward and banged his head again the door.
“Why? Why me? All this…just to survive, just…”
He had to get a grip of himself. He was beginning to look deranged, and he wouldn’t meet his end like this.
When he pulled his head away from the door, he saw that the circle etched into the door had begun to glow.
And now, it opened for him. Cleft ran inside, and the doors slammed shut beyond him, leaving him in a new world of darkness. The wolves howled for him outside.
Hours later, when it sounded like the wolves had left, Cleft tried to open the doors again. They wouldn’t budge for him, and placing his forehead against them did nothing.
With no other option, he started to walk into the darkness. His vision adjusted more the longer he walked, and soon he could at least see the outline of the tunnel he was following.
He walked through the passageways for hours, only stopping when his body and mind begged for rest. He slept then, and for the first time in a while, his nightmares came back to him.
Nighttime visages of great runes drawn on the ground. Runes that glowed and thrummed with power. He heard voices. Low, growling voices that spoke to him in a foreign tongue.
When he next awoke, he awoke with new understanding. He couldn’t say how it was given to him, only that he had it. He knew where he was; this was the Mines of Light. That place where, decades earlier, the original elders of the two clans had found the metals that made their medallions.
Now, he saw lines on the ground. Glowing marks of light that seemed to be leading him through the tunnels, guiding him.
Sensing that something was here, Cleft followed the lights. On and on they went, a spiral of them coaxing him deeper into the mines, through tunnels of stone and across great caverns where dew dripped from the ceiling.
He followed them for hours until finally, the lines pointed to one, final cavern.
Inside it, he at last saw for real that which had haunted his nightmares ever since partaking the flesh of his friend.
A rune etched on the ground, its light as red as a hundred forges. In the center of it, was a sarcophagus.
It was made of marble and had carvings of faces all over it. Cleft tried to open it, but the lid weighed tons, and he couldn’t shift it even an inch.
Whatever had conspired to guide him to the heart of the mines was in this tomb, he was sure of it. But how could he get it open?
On the lip of the lid, there was a carving that looked like a fossil imprint of a snail; just a little spiral barely bigger than a coin. Light pulses over it, always following the pattern of the spiral.
Was it telling him something?
Cleft followed the pulse of light with his finger, running his fingertip in that spiral shape until it lit up completely and became a rune of its own, albeit minuscule.
He watched in amazement as eight tiny creatures climbed out of the snail-like rune. Then eight more. Out and out they climbed, all these tiny little beasts barely bigger than his hand, with wicked faces and horned heads and wings on their backs.
Soon there must have been a hundred of them. They all lined up around the lid and each grabbed a part of it. Then, as one, they all flapped their wings and flew upwards, heaving the lid from the tomb and moving it away, before plonking it on the floor.
Cleft watched them fluttering, bickering, wrestling each other midair. One took a great piss, making a waterfall down on the ground. Others defecated while flying. Two of these things, these demons, began to fornicate while hovering.
He knew he should have been worried. He’d never seen a spell like this before, and this was surely a dark form of magic if ever he’d seen it.
But this was the thing; after he traced his finger over the shape on the lid, he felt something leave him. As though his inner spirit deflated a little. It was reflating now, growing second by second, but the sudden absence of it told him one thing; he had summoned these things.
He peered over the sarcophagus and saw a skeleton inside. A set of old, weathered bones. Five feet tall, with a circle carved into their forehead.
The bones sat up.
Or, part of them did. Some hazy representation sat up and faced him, their legs dangling over the side of the sarcophagus. Their actual bones were still at rest.
They wore a medallion around their neck, which they took off and then offered to him.
I was like you.
Cleft heard the words in his head, though the skeleton hadn’t spoken. Instead, it stared at him.
I was the first to discover what we could unlock with the flesh of our own.
“You broke the rule, too?”
I am the reason the rule exists. What is broken can never be fixed, but I will teach you how to make something new. Something better.
If Cleft had been changed by eating part of his friend, then wearing this new medallion was what changed him for all time.
The skeleton was an old clansman. Not a Lonehill, but from a different clan. Cleft didn’t even know that other clans existed.
Together, in the mines, they worked on Cleft’s powers. The ancestral spirit showed him how to make runes. How to design them to attract the demons he wanted. He taught him the various names of the multitude of demons that the runes could call forth, and how each demon had different skills. A rune for every occasion.
One day, the bone spirit faced Cleft.
You have learned well. There is one last thing you must do.
“What?”
My bones. Grind them. Make a paste and consume them, and our legacies will intertwine. They will see me again. Me in you, you in me.
And, his revulsion over such things long since gone, Cleft did just that.
New power surged in him. A power that even the eldest Lonehill mage could never hope for. A power that whispered to him. A power that meant he would never be alone again, for, with that power, Cleft could conjure beings of darkness. Ones whose foreign language he could now understand, who talked to him and told him their secrets as they guided him out of the mines and back into the wilds.
When he left the mountain, he found the wolfpack not far away. A dozen wolves who had once hounded him into that place.
They saw him and driven by hunger, they attacked as only wolves can; surrounding him on all sides, teeth bared, faces filled with hunger and fury.
Cleft used his new powers, etching runes on the ground with just a glance, and breathing some of his new power into them.
It was over in an instant.
His new foreign-tongue friends emerged from the runes and slaughtered the pack, sating themselves on their blood of the wolves.
Feeling stronger than ever before, Cleft headed for Agnartis, to where his old clan was. He had something to show them now. A power they couldn’t deny. And he would use that to win his place back. Hacinda was gone, but maybe there would be redemption for him.
It was an easy thing, then, for him to battle his way into Agnartis and to the place where the gnome
s kept their slaves.
Using his runes and foul new friends, Cleft freed the Lonehills that had been taken. He gave them back the elementals that the gnomes had taken from them, and he led them out of Agnartis.
The gnomes, those cowardly stone smashers, did not put up any more fight after seeing what Cleft could do. He didn’t blame them. Watching carrion demons slaughter your kinsmen inside a rune prison is a tough lesson to forget.
The Lonehills were in a stupor; astounded equally by their freedom and the powers they had seen Cleft use. Cleft led them south for miles, and it was after a full day of travel, with Agnartis long behind them, that one clansman summoned the courage to speak to him.
“Cleft.”
He turned.
It was Pendras. Always regarded as the most promising of mages, and one day destined to be the clan’s elder. Everyone thought so.
“No need for thanks,” Cleft told them. “I am with my people again. We are one again. Nothing will bring Hacinda back, and nothing will erase the rule I broke, but I hope in freeing you…”
Pendras shook his head.
“No, Cleft. You have atoned, it is true. But once a soul is broken, it cannot be melded again. You have free us and lightened your own conscience. But we are still not your people, and never will we be.”
Fury boiled in Cleft. Even now, after all this, they would not let him forget what he had done?
After everything he had lost?
All he had done was try to survive! Why was their rule so precious?
And understanding dawned on him. Was it the runes? Did the clan have some inkling of what would happen to a circle child who ate the flesh of his own?
He stared at the ground around his clansman, around Pendras with his all-so noble expression.
A few runes would be simple to etch. And his new friends would come, and they’d show these treacherous bastards what happened…
But then, Hacinda’s face flashed in his thoughts. He saw her, the way she always looked at him in the morning.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 46
