Tides of the Dark Crystal

by J. M. Lee

  Tavra, can you hear it?

  At first, she was hesitant, but after a moment she climbed down his arm so more of the lake water flowed across her body.

  Yes . . . Yes. I can hear it. It is reaching the tree, I think . . . I can hear a song in reply. Something resonating . . . Distant. Down, to the right.

  Glad you are with us, he thought to the Silverling.

  Perhaps this spider body can be put to use, after all.

  Amri held his breath as Naia pumped her wings and plunged, powerfully driving them into the murky deep. When his lungs screamed for air, Naia breathed life into him, gills open like lace around her neck. Tavra caught a bubble, holding it under her legs like a smooth, clear opal.

  The lake seemed endless. It had been dark above, but as they dived, the lightning of the storm dimmed to a dull flicker. The sounds of the storm, the drumming, earthshaking thunder, died away, and as it did, Amri heard the sound of a flute. Through the underground streams and water it sounded like the eerie song of a ghost—transcendent and unending, calling out to something that might no longer be strong enough to hear. Surrounded by the song, it was as if they were floating through a dream.

  Tavra pricked him gently. There. I can hear it calling.

  They had reached the lake bottom. It was so dark, even Amri could scarcely see the pit of roots that clustered there. He held on to Naia as they landed, feet easing into the thick mud that had pooled, grown over with slime algae and decomposing plant life.

  Amri pushed at the mud with his feet, trying to find any sign of life.

  Do you see anything? Naia asked, holding on to him while he worked.

  He was about to tell her no, but the soles of his sandals knocked against something. Something that wasn’t stiff and petrified like the rest of the roots that surrounded them. He knelt, using his hands.

  Then they heard it.

  Ringing, softly moaning in answer to Kylan’s song. The voice of the mud was like that of rock, but faster, warmer. Wetter, mixing with the song of the lake water. Amri worked swiftly, lungs screaming until he had to ask Naia for another breath. And then, renewed, he gave the mud a last push.

  Under the thick layers of silt and sludge was a bough of root that had not yet died. Amri pushed the decomposing bark away from it, finding a spot of green in all the black and gray. The place in the root where the tree still lived glowed in time with the song that saturated the deep water, a single pulse of light in darkness.

  Amri tugged Naia down and pressed her fingers against it. She saw it and hunkered beside him, holding the tree root with both hands. She did not speak the language of the rock or the mud, but she did know the voice of the tree when she heard it.

  The tree lives, she gasped. Periss was right. They must never have seen it because they couldn’t swim this far down.

  Can you heal it?

  I don’t know. I’ll try.

  The blue light from Naia’s hands settled on the lake bottom. The tree’s sorrowful song quieted at first. After a long moment, Naia shook her head, though she didn’t take her hands away.

  It’s calling for someone else. I can’t do this alone.

  You mean me? Can I help?

  No, it’s . . .

  Naia closed her eyes, focusing. She had a gift; he’d seen it before. To hear the song of Thra, to dreamfast with creatures other than Gelfling. He put his hand on her shoulder, lungs aching for his next breath.

  It’s asking for the Dousan, she said finally. She looked up at him. Its people. Periss, Erimon. We need them here, now, or this tree will die, and the storm will kill us all.

  CHAPTER 19

  Amri tried to stay calm. The faster his heart beat, the more air he needed, and Naia couldn’t keep him alive at the lakebed forever.

  I can’t bring them all down here, he told her. But I can bring them to the cave. Tell the tree I’ll do that. Do you think it will be enough?

  Naia took her hands from the dying tree’s root long enough to hold Amri’s face.

  It will have to be. I believe in you!

  Their lips met, and she filled his lungs with air, more warmly than before, then thrust him away. He held the feeling in his heart, letting it buoy him toward the surface so far above. When he broke out of the water, the storm raged more violently than before, splintering the sturdy palms and blowing the Dousan tents to pieces. Still the Dousan meditated, clinging to the rocks and bowing their heads against the violent wind and cutting sand.

  Amri coughed water as Periss hauled him out of the lake. The Dousan had to practically scream in Amri’s ear to be heard over the wind.

  “What happened?”

  “We have to get all the Dousan into the cave,” Amri said around the remaining mouthfuls of water. “The tree needs to hear your call. Naia is trying to heal it, but she needs to hear your song!”

  “What are you talking about?” Erimon hadn’t given up on Periss. The wind had torn away his cloak, and without the marker of his status among the xeric, the sandmaster looked more akin to his brother than ever.

  Periss turned on Erimon, eyes wide with hope.

  “Our people meditate, send thoughts and dreams into the universe, trusting Thra to send providence. But they won’t take action—won’t even lift a finger to save the gifts Thra has already provided! If they won’t, then I will.”

  He tore from Erimon’s grasp and ran to the nearest Dousan that clung to a rock in a steadfast, stubborn huddle. Amri followed him, but Erimon grabbed him and held him back.

  “You say you saw it? The tree truly lives?”

  “And can save us yet, if you’ll believe in it!”

  Like the living spot of the tree in all the dead, a spark of light flickered in Erimon’s countenance. Like a wall breaking, like he was waking from a dream that he had been dreaming too long.

  “Then let us gather the Dousan. We haven’t much time,” he said. He turned toward the lake and took a horn from his belt. Instead of blowing into it, he merely raised it into the wind. The storm rang through the horn, loosing a resounding note that filled the entire valley. Periss, whose efforts to rouse the Dousan had been either unheard or ignored, looked up at the sound.

  Then, slowly, so did the bowed heads of the Dousan scattered around the oasis. They looked to the horn in Erimon’s hand, blown by the storm itself.

  “To the cloisters!”

  Without looking back, Erimon took Amri by the shoulder and broke into a run. Periss joined them, and they hurried as quickly as they could down the footpath that would lead them out into the sands and, if it hadn’t been destroyed, the promenade into the caves.

  “Do you think they’ll come?” Periss asked. “They’re so deep in meditation already—they may not have heard the horn—”

  “We must trust they will listen,” Erimon said. “We can only lead by example . . . as you have, my brother. I will make proper amends when we survive.”

  The promenade was long buried below the shifting sands, but Erimon and Periss didn’t need the stones to show them the way. When they reached the opening to the cave, Erimon took the horn out and thrust it into a crevice in the rock. There it stuck, the wind howling through it, sounding an unending wail.

  Amri fell to his knees the moment they entered the protected cave, sand pouring from the folds in his cloak. The cavern was rippling with crystal light, reverberating with the sound of Kylan’s firca. The Spriton had climbed to a pocket in the stone above, where he sat and played the little flute that sang with the enormous song. Onica rose from where she’d been waiting, helping them inside the cave and brushing them free of the endless sand.

  “The tree?” the Far-Dreamer asked Amri.

  “Alive.” Then, to the two brothers, he said, “Go! To where Kylan is playing. His song reaches the bottom of the lake, where Naia is. Your song has to reach the tree!”

  “But
the others—” Periss began.

  “You can’t wait for them! If it’s just you two, then so be it!”

  Amri climbed to his feet as the Dousan brothers scaled the wall up to the ledge where Kylan played. They sat beside him, Erimon adjusting Periss’s posture when they did. A moment later, the two brothers’ voices filled the chamber, ringing in harmony with the firca’s melody. Their chant was a long, drawn humming that reminded Amri of the Mystics. Of Aughra’s chant. Of the song they’d heard in the dream-space, the cosmic song of Thra.

  “How will we know if it’s working?” Amri asked. Onica gazed at the three, held her hands out. Amri tried, too, and when he did, he could feel the vibrations of the song filling his palms. It was almost tangible. His fingers grew hot, as if to dream-etch, but the language that whispered in the back of his mind was one he couldn’t understand.

  “If it works, the tree will rise and break the storm wall,” Onica said. “And if it doesn’t, we may be the only ones that survive this trial.”

  Commotion caught Amri’s ear from outside. Three Dousan stumbled in, shoulders caked in sand.

  “How did the storm get so bad?” they murmured. “Is this the answer Thra has given us? What shall we do?”

  “We followed the horn. In my dream, I thought I heard a voice. The tree . . .”

  “The tree lives,” Amri said, helping them. “Now you must help it, so it can save us.”

  Just as the three left the doorway, two more came out of the storm. Then a sixth and seventh. In a long chain of hands, the Dousan of the Wellspring filled the cavern, coughing sand and shaking off the last tendrils of their deep meditation.

  The Dousan fell silent, though at least this time they were awake. In their silence, they heard Erimon and Periss, the song of Kylan’s firca. The doubt clouding their eyes faded as they looked upon the two brothers and the Spriton, heard the song that touched every rock of the cavern. Amri remembered what Periss had told Erimon. He stood aside and pointed at the etching of the tree on the wall.

  “Thra has already given you an answer. To the darkening, to the Skeksis, to all the corruption that seeps into our world. Believe in the way Thra has shown us all along, even if it seems hopeless. In the tree. In the Gelfling. In each other!”

  Amri held out his hands as the storm threw itself against the mountain, a monster knocking on the door. To his surprise, a Dousan stepped forward and took his hand.

  “I will believe,” she said.

  Another followed her. Amri didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Holding the first Dousan’s hand in his left and Onica’s hand in his right, he knelt. The rest of the Dousan followed, bowing their heads toward the earth, where beneath them ran the waters from the Wellspring. Releasing their breath in the many-toned hum until it pushed back the roaring storm.

  Hear us, Amri prayed. He remembered Onica’s prayer as she’d stoked the hearth on the Omerya. Hear us, Naia. Hear us, Tree of the Wellspring . . .

  A dreamfast rushed through his mind like a cold wind. A vision of the tree in its prime, huge fronds flocked with birds and ripe fruit. Moisture from the oasis condensing on the underside of its leaves, every evening showering the oasis with a light, sweet rain. The Dousan clan, coming and going from the sparkling oasis, finding their center before returning to the desert.

  This song thickened the air, in the dreamfast and the chant. Vibrated into the earth and along the rivers that fed the lake. Amri could only hope they reached Naia and the weakened, dying tree at the bottom.

  Amri . . .

  Amri opened his eyes. The Dousan surrounded him like statues, as still as the stalagmites in the cave, their chant a roiling whirlpool of power. Beside him, Onica had awakened, too. He thought he’d heard Naia’s voice. But from this far?

  “Amri, look,” Onica said.

  They stood as the Dousan chanted. Outside, the darkness had lifted, revealing a gauzy pink and gold.

  Amri stepped outside of the cave and gasped.

  Still growing, at an impossible and rapid speed, a tree was unfurling from within the lake. Its spiraled shoot jetted into the sky, thick boughs with huge succulent fronds blooming like a storm of another kind.

  The storm wall broke as the tree pierced it, scattering the lightning and wind. The clouds parted in a ripple, dissipating. Behind the black of the storm, the sky was light with morning.

  A ray of light and color lit the cavern. In the center of the ring of Dousan, a fire burst to life. As its ethereal, rainbow light burned into the walls of the cave, Amri saw the familiar etchings appear—the figures and words that he’d seen on the deck of the Omerya, but now they were joined with others. The picture of the Wellspring Tree and the Dousan. Of the two Dousan brothers, the first to join hands around a Spriton song teller playing a firca made of bone.

  All the Dousan stared at the fire. Amri stepped toward it as it glittered blue, peering into its brightness. For a moment, he saw a shape—a ship made of coral. Cera-Na. Maudra Ethri’s back as Tae handed her a scroll tied with a piece of silver twine.

  “What is this?” Onica whispered.

  Maudra Ethri and Tae turned toward them, as if they’d heard something . . . Then the fire turned gold again, and the vision was gone.

  Amri swallowed the chills that crawled up his throat. “They saw us. What was that scroll?” Then he remembered what Naia had said, about her dream. A message, reaching her maudra mother in the Swamp of Sog.

  Naia.

  Amri ran from the cave, leaving the awakening Dousan behind. The promenade was still deep under sand, but in the brightening morning and with the storm broken by the tree, the way back to the Wellspring was clear and easy. Amri scrambled onto the solid turf and raced through the smaller palms toward the woody trunk of the giant tree that now grew from the center of the lake.

  “Naia!” he shouted, looking for her. “Naia!”

  The tree’s bark was made of woody, layered diamonds like the scales of a lizard, pointing upward to capture what meager rain fell in the desert. Cradled in one of the shelves made of the bark, resting in a nest of lake weeds, was the Drenchen girl. Amri splashed through the water and climbed up the tree to where she lay.

  “Oof,” she groaned when he reached her.

  “You did it. Naia, you did it.”

  She gave an exhausted chuckle. “It wasn’t me. When I was down there, I could hear you. Through the water and the river. I heard Kylan’s firca. I heard the Dousan singing the song of life.” She looked at the palms of her hands. “I became one with the tree, in that moment. I felt as if my heart had grown wings. And then this miracle . . .”

  Together, they looked up through the morning suns as they came through the tree’s fronds, sparkling with the water that still dropped in pristine rain from so high above. Naia smiled and put her hand against the tree’s bark.

  “Oszah-Staba,” she said. “The Wellspring Tree. Its tears have always filled the lake. But now they can be tears of joy instead of loneliness.”

  Amri looked out across the Wellspring. Everything had been destroyed by the storm. Every tent and torch, every stockade of supplies was gone. Not even rubble remained. At first he worried that even the Crystal Skimmers had been taken by the storm, but as he looked out into the dune where they’d left Tappa with the other Skimmers, the sands shifted. One at a time, out came the Skimmers, bellowing and wailing to each other as they surfaced.

  They climbed down as the Dousan returned to the lakeside. Periss shoved his way through the throng to grab Naia by the waist. He hoisted her up.

  “You did it! I knew you could!”

  She pushed him away when he set her down.

  “It was all of us. And don’t do that again.”

  Erimon, less exuberant than his brother, stepped forth. They gazed upon the Wellspring Tree together.

  “We were wrong,” he murmured. “Periss . . .” />
  “Your sand skiff will make a fine apology,” Periss replied.

  Naia looked between Kylan and Amri with a blinding smile. Amri returned it, feeling it beaming from his core. The feeling was unstoppable, like the fire that burned even now in the cloister of the Dousan cave. The tree. The Dousan fire lit.

  Even Tavra spoke kindly into his ear.

  “You did very well, Shadowling,” she said.

  “And how are you, spiderling?” he replied.

  “Tired.”

  In the past, her short answers had always seemed aloof, as if she didn’t want to speak to him any more than she had to. But this time he heard something else. Not sadness, not reluctance; just exactly what she’d said. Tiredness.

  With a start, he realized maybe this was just the way she was: not cold, but reserved. He remembered the dreamfast they’d shared, when they’d rescued Onica. Even then, with the one she loved, she had held back. Not to hide things, but because that was just the way she was. He shifted his weight, awkward with the forming idea. Remembering that ice was also water.

  “Anything I can do?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t ask for more than what you have already done.”

  A Crystal Skimmer’s bellow pierced the calm. The other Skimmers whistled in reply, rustling farther from the sands as the Crystal Skimmer came gliding roughly in from the desert. The deck strapped to its back was in shambles, the Skimmer itself covered in scratches and heavier wounds from the storm. The crew aboard was barely holding on as the Skimmer crashed to a halt.

  “Maudra Seethi’s Skimmer,” Erimon gasped.

  Amri and Naia followed the sandmaster to the Skimmer, which moaned in pain. Dousan bearing water from the lake tended it as Erimon leaped onto the Skimmer’s harnesses, helping down the meager remains of a battered crew.