by Kara Timmins
One, two, three, four, five . . .
The cold of evening came on and he was at around 556 when he heard a cry behind him. One word: his name. The yell didn’t sound angry or crazed but sad, like a plea. He thought about going back, but there was no way to know what he would find at the top of the hill. The sound could have been in his head, for all he knew. So he kept walking, and he kept counting.
He was still navigating the decline by the time the sun went down, which was exactly why he had wanted to wait. There weren’t many places that would make a good spot for a camp, but he was able to find a relatively clear patch, not much bigger from one edge to the other than he was tall. Still, the space was enough.
He built a little fire, sat down, and chewed his rough seeds. His eyes burned. They felt as dry as they had his first day at the salt flats, but this ache wasn’t from dehydration but fatigue. Everything about the day made him feel tired, a deep kind of exhaustion that moved him to a place of disconnect from reality. His head dipped between his bent knees and his eyes drooped. He had never wanted sleep more.
Something crackled beyond the light of his fire, a whiplike snap, most likely a branch. Had he really heard it?
The fire burned down, a little bit smaller than it had been the last time he had looked at it. He’d drifted off. His heart thudded uncomfortably. He sat very still and listened, but nothing moved. He rebuilt the fire and scanned the darkness.
Now fully awake, he realized the truth of his situation: he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night. There wasn’t anyone else to keep watch. The nights of having someone keep an eye out while he rested were over. He was alone. Everything in him felt heavy at the thought, and his face drooped, every muscle deadened by the cutting truth. If he could see himself, he imagined he would look like an old man, his back rounded and hunched, his cheeks drooping in a frown, the skin under his eyes dark.
He couldn’t think about it anymore. He couldn’t change the things that had happened that put him where he was. There was only one thing he could do, and that was to get up and keep moving. There was risk in moving in the dark, but it couldn’t be any worse than sitting alone in it. He rummaged through his bag and found a little pouch of tallow, which he mixed with some of the moss. He found a fallen branch stable enough to hold and slathered one end in the concoction. The campfire had burned down to embers by the time he was finished, but it still had more than enough heat to catch the end of the branch in a fresh bloom of flame.
He kept going. His body was tight from the short stint of rest, but the ache made him feel better. The strain was something else to think about. He couldn’t tell how far he’d gone. Time stopped making sense, and there was no way to see behind him to measure the distance. He stumbled a few more times, but he never fell.
Then the ground leveled under his feet. The stability felt so strange after so long of being tilted. Walking on a level surface made him feel unsteady.
His sense of the ground started to right itself after a few steps. His torch was almost out now. He was grateful that it had lasted as long as it had. The ground was soft, and he felt the familiar soggy mud sucking at each step. If he’d had a clearer mind earlier, he would have thought about the eels before he reached the bottom, but he only had enough wherewithal to think of problems as they presented themselves. He was in unknown terrain in every sense. He had to stop moving. It would be beyond foolish to tromp through an unknown swamp in pitch dark.
He had just enough light on the crumbling ember of his torch to find a cluster of rocks to sit on. How is it still dark?
There had been a time when he had been so good at gauging the phase of the day, even when there wasn’t light to tell him, but now he was completely lost. He felt as if he had been moving down the hill with slow, calculated steps for long enough that there should be some light at the very least. But the unending and unrelenting blackness told him he still had quite a bit of night left before dawn.
He built his second fire of the night, this one bigger than the last—another luxury of being on level ground. Sweat coated his face, and he licked the droplets that itched at the top of his upper lip. It didn’t make any sense. Even though the fire was bigger than the one he had made earlier, it shouldn’t be giving off as much heat as it was. Sweat trickled down to his elbow from his armpit. He didn’t want to make the fire smaller, he wanted the extra light, he needed the extra step or two of visibility in the dark, but he was so hot. Still sitting, he shuffled to the back edge of the rock, but the suppressing heat still pushed in around him.
“Eloy!”
He shot up to standing. The yell came from somewhere in front of him. The voice was so desperate, hurt. He recognized it. Of course he did; he’d heard that voice every day for so many years. The voice was Neasa.
But it couldn’t be Neasa. She was behind him, not in front of him. The more he thought about it, the more it didn’t sound like her at all. In fact, it probably wasn’t even a yell. He had fallen asleep again, that was all. He was so tired. He sat down, or more, his legs gave out, and he guided the fall.
He pulled the straps of his bags over his head. Anything he could take off to give him a moment of peace against the growing heat had to come off. Everything except his sword. By the time he was done, he was only wearing his shorts, his sword, and his stone. He wrapped his fingers around the stone, which was so hot he was sure it would burn him if he clenched it too long.
It felt like the warmth of the night was reaching down into his throat and scratching at the soft skin inside. He reached for his water pouch and was already imagining the relief before he had it up to his lips. But there was nothing inside. He jiggled the bag over his upturned mouth, but not even a drop fell onto his tongue. He was sure that the pouch was still half full from the last time he had taken a drink.
Maybe I drank more than I remember, he thought. Or maybe I snagged it going through the bush.
Whatever the cause, he didn’t have any water and the night was still too dark to try and find more. He just had to wait until morning. In the morning, he could get water and find a tree to climb to see how close he was to the black rock. It had to be close.
“Wake up,” a voice next to his ear hissed.
Eloy sprang up again, but there wasn’t anyone there. This time, he knew he hadn’t fallen asleep, and again, the sound was a voice he knew, even though he hadn’t heard it in years.
“Let me tell you a story,” Corwin’s voice said from the dark. “Don’t you want to hear it?”
“Corwin?” Eloy asked.
He knew it couldn’t be Corwin. How could it be? Corwin was a world away, safe. Eloy unsheathed his sword and held it toward the dark space he thought the voice had come from.
Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.
He couldn’t even hear the clicking and humming sounds of nighttime creatures. His arms shook as the silence stretched on. He held his sword up in front of him until he couldn’t any longer.
Of course, going without sleep and water does strange things to a man; he knew that. His mind was working against him. He went back to his camp and sat down in front of the fire. The flames were burning down, and though he didn’t want to, he added more wood. The heat sprang up around him, but so did the illumination. He relaxed again.
And then everything broke into chaos. The ground next to the fire broke apart into a cleft of crumbling earth. Eloy wasn’t ready to react; his fatigue dulled his senses and rendered him immobile. A gaping hole the size of a trap door opened in the ground.
He jumped back when the first gnarled and hooked hand shot up out of the dark hole and sunk its sickled fingers into the disturbed earth. Eloy shuffled back as three more arms shot out of the hole. He knew what they were even before they pulled their faces into the firelight. He had hoped that he would never have to look into the decrepit faces of the raiders ever again.
Two sets of pinhole eye
s stared at him, and the exposed holes where noses should be flared as it sniffed him out. Eloy hadn’t put his sword back in its sheath, so he had it raised and ready as the two raiders lunged. He didn’t know how he was going to be able to fight off two raiders, but he only had a moment to think about it before they were on him. He swung the blade toward the neck of the first that had clawed its way up. Eloy steeled his body for the impact, but nothing came. His blade continued its slice in a full arch. The blade didn’t connect with anything. The raiders were gone. The hole was gone too.
Eloy stared at the untouched spot next to the fire. Even the leaves and vines that had been there when he first set up camp were undisturbed. But his heart raced, and his body felt the flood of numbing warmth.
He stood stuck in a battle stance for a long time. He didn’t know what to do next. His instincts told him to run, but where to? Into the dark? Sitting still wasn’t safe either.
He didn’t have any options. There had always been a choice. Every situation had a solution. Knowing that always kept him moving. Now there wasn’t. More than anything, he hoped for some sign of morning.
His heart beat in his chest. If it kept going like this, would it kill him? The idea that his own body could turn against him and keep him from reaching his goal when he was so close was what finally got him to move back to his spot by the fire. He had to calm himself down.
The sweat dripped off him. He wiped at his forehead, but the drops still got in his eyes. It stung, but he was grateful for the distraction. Irritation was something he understood. It meant there was something in his body that was working properly, because he was starting to doubt the soundness of his mind. He squeezed his eyelids together until white waves flowed around the darkness from the pressure. The imprint of the waves was still floating around his vision when he opened his eyelids again.
He shouldn’t have done it. He should have stayed vigilant of his surroundings, but he kept his ears open for any sounds of danger. He blinked against the blurriness, and when everything came into focus, he kept blinking in the hopes of making sense of what was in front of him.
Black eyes stared through the wavering distortion of the fire’s flames. The thing now sitting across from Eloy didn’t blink. The creature had a mouth that was too big for its humanlike face. Its smile curved up, high into its cheeks, until it almost reached the bottom of its strange black eyes. Thin lips pulled back to reveal long, sharp teeth that locked and layered like the fingers of two hands folded together. Its skin was shockingly white against the blackness of the forest behind it. The looming face was something from a nightmare Eloy’s mind had never before had the depth of fear to conjure. Now he knew the image of predatory terror, and he would never be able to forget it.
This creature wasn’t like the raiders that had reached up from the hole in the ground. This new thing was something Eloy had never seen before. This thing was real.
Eloy waited, hoping for the nightmare to fade away like the raiders had. But it kept staring, kept smiling. Eloy blinked again, hard, in the hopes that the grinning creature would be gone when he opened them again. His heart thudded with sickening quickness. He didn’t want to open his eyes again. He wanted to go to sleep. He wanted to be asleep now so that everything that had happened would be a dream.
He opened his eyes with a new hope, but when he saw the pale creature crawling over the fire, impervious to the flames, he knew he was looking at the thing that had wrecked the forest. The menace that had been roaming around the rock had finally shown itself.
“Menace?” the thing said. Seeing the monstrous mouth move was worse than seeing it smile. “You think I’m the menace?” The thing crawled closer to Eloy, its long arms and legs bent at the joints like four spider legs.
Eloy realized too late that he should have been running, but he was frozen in fear. The creature crawled almost on top of Eloy. It smelled like crushed dead leaves and fresh snow. It smelled familiar.
The little energy that Eloy had left drained away as he stared into the thing’s wide black eyes. Deep within swirled flecks of light, like distant starlight.
“Wake up, Eloy,” the thing said in Francena’s voice.
Hearing her voice come out of its grotesque mouth was enough to break Eloy out of his stupor. He scooted back and reached for his sword at the same time.
The thing grabbed both of Eloy’s arms. It had a firm grip, and Eloy felt the sting of it just like he would any other kind of pressure. The pain was an ache he could understand and fight against. The flow of blood stopped running to his hands. Then his lower arms went numb as if they’d been submerged in ice.
“Sit still,” the thing said, in its own deep voice.
Eloy nodded. The thing let go of his arms, and he couldn’t hold back the shock of pain—the pain of life coming back into his limbs, which, upon looking down at his now-graying skin, was exactly what was happening.
The thing frowned, its mouth stretched all the way to the back of its sharp jawline. “I have questions, Eloy. And you’re going to give me answers.”
Eloy gave a dip of his head as he tried to pull his focus away from the pain in his arms. “I’ve never been the one to have answers.”
The thing rocked back into a squat, its long arms dangling over its knobby knees, “You have them.”
Eloy gulped, but the lack of moisture in his throat made him cough.
“You took your time getting here,” the thing said. “Longer than I thought you would. It was frustrating.”
“I didn’t know anyone was waiting,” Eloy said.
“Oh, I’ve been waiting. Waiting and trying to understand. You have to know how uncomfortable that makes me.”
Eloy shook his head. He had to shake some clarity into his mind. He had to think of a way to get away from this nightmare.
The thing’s eyes widened. The flecks in the darkness of the orbs caught some of the firelight. “You don’t know me.”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t make sense.”
“I don’t know how to be clearer.”
“No,” the thing said. “You don’t make sense. I can’t see you. I can see everything. I can see in everything. But not you. When I heard about you, I couldn’t find you. There was only a sense of you, where you had been. Like a dim light, I could see you. But where your little moving light was weak, the place here was strong.
“So I came here, looking for the meaning of you. But still I found no answers. Since you were coming here, recombining with your light, I waited. To understand you. But now you’re here and I don’t understand. I don’t know how to not understand.”
“What are you trying to understand?”
The thing pounded its fists against the ground. “I didn’t want to ask these questions,” it growled. “You were supposed to know these things. You were already supposed to know who I am. I even had Timyr tell you my story. I found it in his mind and pulled it out for you.”
“You’re one of the three children Kella found,” Eloy said in amazement.
“I wanted to hear the story.” The thing looked away, his voice much softer.
“If I was supposed to recognize something from that story, I didn’t.”
The thing snapped its attention back to Eloy. “You destroy, yet you don’t know.”
“What have I destroyed?”
“What have I destroyed?” the thing said mockingly in Eloy’s voice.
“I don’t know what you think I’ve done.”
“That makes it worse!” the thing yelled in its own voice.
“Maybe if you tell me . . .”
“You were supposed to know everything! You knew enough to ruin me! And you want me to tell you?” The thing started to stand but then slumped back down in a squat, its face calm. “I’ll tell you.”
Eloy leaned away from the outburst. He wanted to reach for his sword, more than he ever had before, but the itching and burning pain still danced over his arms.
“Do you know what the greatest power is?”
“No,” Eloy said.
The thing grimaced. “Information. And do you know how the power of information works?”
“No.” Eloy tried to squeeze his fingers into his palm. A little more and maybe he could make his hands work.
“You have it to give to others. Knowledge can change the course of things. But if it’s ever wrong when you don’t mean for it to be wrong, everything that comes after it is weak. Do you understand?”
Eloy nodded, grateful for every moment he had to be ready.
“You don’t. You were supposed to, but you don’t.” The folds of white skin bunched over its black eyes in a scowl.
“Explain it to me.”
“The problem is that I have to explain it.” The thing lunged forward and grabbed Eloy’s face.
The creature’s hands were warmer than Eloy’s already over-heated skin. Eloy waited for the numbing and sapping sense that had happened to his arms, but it didn’t come. The thing squished his cheeks, puckering his lips.
“You’re nothing special at all,” the thing said. “You’re regular, just like all the rest of them. But this . . .” The thing wrapped its long fingers around the stone and pulled. The leather cord snapped.
“No!” Eloy cried.
The thing squeezed Eloy’s jaw.
“This is what I’ve been sensing. It’s the same as the big light.” The thing let go of Eloy and moved back to its spot next to the fire, staring down at the stone the whole time. “As soon as they told me what had happened, as soon as they told me I was wrong, I came here. I folded the space and came right away. Then I waited for you. So patient of me, but I wasn’t waiting for you at all. Not really.” It looked up from the stone and sneered at Eloy. “How did you make the man see? How did you make them turn around? It was time for my people to take that land. They deserved it. But you showed him something that made me wrong. But you’re nothing. How did you make me wrong?!”
