by A. L. Brooks
Witnessing this, Melai turned from surprise to fear.
Screeching, she flew backwards, out of sword’s reach should this Rjoond try to strike her. ‘You!’ she scolded, raising her bow at him, aiming her arrow directly at his face. ‘How have you done this? What magic do you wield? What has Mother Thoonsk done to you?! Why do you murder her and her children?’
Rjoond lay back down, resting his head on knobby bark, exhausted, not even certain the flying angle before him were real. ‘I-I do not understand,’ he said groggily, faintly, hoarsely. ‘Please, who… who are you…? Wh-what be this place? I have forgotten.’ He reached his arm to her; it waved and swayed, as if he struggled to keep it aloft.
It were a ruse she knew, his feigning exhaustion. He had shrugged off the deep-water werm like it had been nothing more than a tired old crab. Now it lay dead, sprawled lifeless across tree trunk. What poison or magic did he wield? Other than her own folk, she had never known someone or something possess the ability to render lifeless a Soulsucka werm of the deep.
‘All of this,’ she spat viciously, ‘is your doing! How could you survive the bite of a Deviling Werm if not for the dark powers you have obviously brought here?!’
He made to raise his head again. Though he could barely lift it from trunk of tree. Granted, by all appearances, the deep-water werm had not eaten up his mind or will, but its effects were obviously being felt.
‘I… I do not know that of what you speak,’ he murmured. ‘H-honestly.’
‘Death!’ she screeched. ‘You deliver death. Everything be dying. You deliver naught but death!’
He looked about groggily. His eyes opening and shutting. ‘No. No, n-n-not me. I b-bring no death.’
‘Liar. My forest be dying because of you and your murderous lot.’
He lay there. His head against the trunk. When he spoke he sounded weak. ‘S-some blight be kill-killing all. No l-land have I crossed that re-remains untouched by it. It kills a-all before it with no discrimination. And none… none of it be my doing. My-my very own f-family has perished because of it. I am all… that survives.’
‘Murderer and a liar both,’ she screeched, and finally loosed her Barb of Insanity filled with its Dark Moonlight. Followed quickly by another, and another, and another in blurred, wild succession. The Rjoond had no time to react. But he barely looked surprised as the four arrows lodged fwick! fwick! fwick! fwick! deep into his face.
As he rolled backwards she fired a final shot, a three pronged Spittle of Xonsüssa, straight into his chest. With that, tears streaming from her eyes, she flew for the tree tops and away.
THE ABOMINATION
1
SHE could not watch the Rjoond die as she had intended. Did not wish, after all, to see him cutting himself up. Enough death she had witnessed in the last few days. Thus she flew and flew and flew, away and away. She did not wish to hear his howls of pain and grief when he flayed himself, when he hacked off his fingers and toes and face, when he chewed up and swallowed his own tongue, knifed out his eyes and sliced open his belly, when he lay there bleeding out. The Spittle of Xonsüssa would ensure his attack on himself would be frenzied, violent, brutal, and the pain multiplied a hundredfold.
She flew home to Willowtree and perched high in the Temple Tree boughs where she could see above all other trees, all of her world, all of Thoonsk, stretching away to horizon in every direction. And there she sat and prayed to Mother Thoonsk for forgiveness (for bleeding a foreign creature within the sanctity of the woodland), and for guidance. But no matter how much she tried to push them aide, the last words she’d heard from the Rjoond kept replaying in her thoughts: ‘Some blight be killing all. No land have I crossed that remains untouched by it. It kills all before it with no discrimination. And none of it be my doing. My very own family has perished because of it. I am all that survives.’
‘Lies,’ she insisted, weeping. ‘All lies.’
They had come, when Moon of Trolls had hung full and stark above, when the Bluerock Pipits were still nesting and not yet flown south for the coming of the rains, a contingent of Rjoond from Autumn, seeking an audience with all leaders of the forest nymph clans. They had come with yet a further proposal for another road that would slice through Thoonsk, they had come with the promise of wealth, with plans, and “recompense”, to upgrade and modernise the various settlements within Thoonsk herself, to open up trade routes, and the possibility of exploration for rare minerals, profits split evenly with various ‘land owners’ within Thoonsk. In return the Rjoond would expect to be granted permission to cut their corridor directly through the water forests. This would of course come with it the matter of cutting a swathe through Mother Thoonsk’s ancient children, her oaks, her beeches, her bloodwoods, her rosewoods, her ghost gums, her elms, her paperbarks, her willows, her freshwater pandanus.
What they failed to understand and comprehend were the fact that profits and money meant nothing to folk of Thoonsk. That roads meant nothing. That the suggestion of modernising were an insult to their way of life. Profits from minerals meant nothing to a people who drew all their sustenance and happiness from the very presence of the glades and forest woodlands. And to push down trees and cut a corridor of death through Mother Thoonsk would be like slicing off her own fingers and toes. And following communion and parley with wise Mother, the forest nymphs refused, and so refused second and third offers. No fourth or fifth offers were forthcoming. The Rjoonds instead resorted to bullying tactics: if the forest nymph clans suddenly ceased to exist, then of course there would be no vocal opposition to their scheme. And so a systematic genocide had begun. Yet Mother Thoonsk had thrown out the invaders with mighty walls of water and guerrilla attacks at every turn by her forest children.
Yet, here a Rjoond had come again. And all that remained now to defend Mother Thoonsk… were Melai.
‘Yes,’ she told herself, wiping her eyes. ‘He lies. He is Rjoond. No honest word ever came from a Rjoond’s mouth, and no honest action ever came from their hand.’
2
She remained at top of Temple Tree until dusk, until the red of the suns spilt across the sky, as if the heavens had ignited in inferno. By now the Rjoond she had shot would surely be dead, lying somewhere in a mess of his own meat and guts and bone and blood. Finally she swooped down to her deserted village, her deserted home, where the corpses of her sisters still lay upon the spirit stone, awaiting Thoonsk’s guardians to receive them.
With heavy heart she hovered there a moment and watched them… then flew into her home tree, into its dark cosy bole, and as light faded from Cloudfyre, Melai’s limbs sprouted root and anchored deep into the wood until she were encased within the tree itself and she were naught but eyes looking out at the night world, and ears listening to the whispers and song of the woodland.
Then she slept.
3
Both suns arose as per normal next morning. But to Melai the surrounding forest were unusually quiet. She cowered within the bole of her tree, simply watching the water glades stretched out before her family village, sun twinkling off the still waters. The willow boughs stretched out over lagoon surface, their soft reflections gently riding the ripples. Giant lily pads covered the area immediately at the base of her tree. In days gone she would awaken to woodland fairies playing about them. Or wingless pixies riding the poisonous brown-pink swamp frogs, hunting tadpoles and guppies. Nests of the weaver birds, the great shadowy tree bound masses, were normally a raucous mass of trilling life this time of day. But not a single peep came from them. In the distance the gargantuan Monmoth trees, long the wonder of Melai’s folk, were normally teeming with clouds of swallows. They too sat undisturbed this morning. Quiet. Deserted.
Since the day of the first shockwave, her forest she knew were dying, growing quieter, animals vanishing. She had received no word from the trees either; their voices had become soft, whispering, like someone on the cusp of sleep.
I have slain the Rjoond yet all is not well, she thought
to herself sadly. It grows more dire by the day.
Her skinny limbs, having coupled with tree in the night, now retracted. She emerged from her nest and peered down at the spirit stone, the enormous slab of rock upon which her dear sisters still lay side by side in death.
Traditionally Mother Thoonsk sent her woodland guardians within three rotations of Melus and Gohor to retrieve the bodies of deceased nymphs. While the water forests had been stricken with whatever curse the Rjoond had brought upon them, while bird and fish and frog were mysteriously dying, while numbers of Bucca and swamp cat and blue heron were diminishing, Melai had been preparing her sisters for their retrieval.
She had removed their clothing and rinsed their bodies. She had smoothed over fresh sap from surrounding paperbark trees, thus preserving them. She had placed logs filled with smoldering mushroom, the musky clouds of wafting spoor keeping away hungry wanton pixies and corpse flies, and half-fish half-devil corpse eaters who rose up from the depths of lagoon and would attempt to drag away the deceased children of Mother Thoonsk.
It had now been three rotations of Melus since her sisters had lost their lives and Mother Thoonsk’s guardians had still not come for them. This troubled Melai more and more. She did not wish to think what it could mean.
She leapt from her bole and swooped down to the communal platform where she and her sisters once laughed and chatted and braided each other’s hair; it were a large naturally formed space amidst her home trees, where a dozen mighty branches from a number of willows had woven together to create a spacious terrace some fifty feet above lagoon’s surface. The area were flattened and smoothed almost to a gloss from centuries of use by Melai’s kind. And here she alighted, standing before a separate side-branch that acted as a vast nursery which grew with water moss and yellow horse-ear mushrooms, figs and fyre-plums, dandelfruit and crab apples, salt-leaf and sugar berries, lemon sage and flowers of bluegrape that bloomed from small vines sprouting from the bark. That and more.
She ate, though her appetite were lacking. She bit fruit and fungus directly from their perch, not plucking them or picking them as she had heard folk from other regions were like to do, cut them and pick them and pack them up and ferry them off to markets to sell. That were a bizarre concept to her and her kind. She ate slowly, distracted, the state of Thoonsk continuing to trouble her. Why could she not hear swamp cats fighting and chasing one and other through the treetops? Why could she not hear the squawk of lagoon storks as they waded through water catching fish, or the distant croak of toads, or the buzz of cicadas, or the deep grunting sounds of faraway marine mammoth, or the treetop, spider-like scrambling of the headless, back to back Buccas?
It were bad enough yesterday, she thought to herself, but give me yesterday over this.
And then there were her sisters… Why have they not yet been collected?
She began to wish that she had stayed to watch the Rjoond. She feared now that he had somehow survived her attempts at finishing him off, that she had angered him and thus in the sunless hours he had perpetrated some mighty deed of evil, let loose some vile magic, something that had spread like wildfire through Thoonsk, something that with a simple kiss of breath had killed everything else left alive. Even the spirit of Mother Thoonsk herself, and that of her angels who took away the dead.
‘Why have I been spared?’ she asked herself softly. ‘Does he come for me now? Does he reserve a special little death for me?’
She would not permit him, she decided. She would set out to find him. She would appeal to the trees for help, ask if they had seen him, to show her to his whereabouts, be he dead or alive. She needed to know.
4
Wooden forest golems. Five of them remained to her. Sentinels. Standing in shallow waters before her family settlement. She could bring them under her command as an attack force if need be.
She flew down to them. And rubbed her finger tips, squeezing them, dabbing clear green sap that seeped forth from her skin against the bared wooden tongue of each golem. A moment or two later the vacant, woody eyes opened, lit with a strange green luminescence.
‘Doela-ta Riyyoondish, minun ajrurshen,’ she whispered. Find the Rjoond trespasser and killer. ‘Meestha ter lelunay uns throotler.’ Set forth with me to defeat him if he still lives. And the breath that left her mouth were tinged with wisps of silky vapour that drifted and wafted against each golem. It were a language they understood, a language spoken only in this realm, language of elder days, when nymphs bragged entire armies of these creatures. Not all nymphs spoke or understood this tongue. And in recent times those born with its knowledge had become all the more rare. But Melai had been one such born with its knowledge and its secrets.
Each golem bore fins, a fish’s tail, crab limbs armed with mighty serrated pincers. They bore sharp teeth in a wide garish mouth, with carp lips and goggling toad’s eyes. On Melai’s command each golem stirred and awoke, looking about as if they had been in slumber for many a year and did not recognise their surroundings. But one by one they submerged, and with naught but their eyes above water’s calm surface they swam away, the movement of their bodies almost serpentine through the lagoon.
Melai took flight. And followed.
5
She had expected a fight. She had expected to come across a raging Rjoond bringing down Thoonsk in madness. All she found though were his remains. Guts, dark dried blood, and limbs hacked free. His torso she found nearby, lying across bough of an oak. It were mostly hollow, intestines and hearts dragged free, rib bones exposed like a cradle of pale fingers. His head were naught recognisable. His face were flayed completely off. And his skin were already turning colour. Rot-black it were. Rot-black and unrecognisable. She had heard of this Rjoond phenomenon. How their dark deeds turned their innards to decay long before they died, how it bubbled out of them on death and tainted their entire being before decay set in.
His steed were nowhere to be seen but the Rjoond had suffered she knew. It were easy to see. She imagined she would be elated. Yet all she felt were a strange emptiness.
The golems had surrounded the scene. Awaiting her instructions. Waiting to attack and kill whatever assailed her.
‘Yysia,’ she told them softly. ‘Yysia sensa isi.’ At ease. At ease, our target is terminated. ‘Jirru noothith. Jirru noothith.’ To home now. To home now.
Out of respect for more life lost, she spared the remains of the Rjoond some moments of silence, her head lowered where she perched on the edge of the bough on which his torso lay. ‘Nahei,’ she whispered. I am sorry.
She turned, spread her wings and leapt into the air.
6
Thoonsk’s guardians arrived at dawn four days after her dear sisters had mysteriously and simultaneously fallen from the ghost tree. Through the woodlands they came, tree creatures, tall, majestic, wading through deep water, their long bark-laden legs gliding effortlessly, gracefully, as they strode onward, their long bark-layered arms swinging majestically, long fingers of twig and leaf dragging through lagoon’s pristine surface, forming ripple trails in their wake.
A deep thrumming hum came from their wooden mouths, reverberating up from the depths of their throats, heralding their arrival long before they were seen. The Lament of the Waiting Ones this song were known. Always sung during a Retrieval ceremony. Their red sappy eyes were serene, angelic. They strode forward in leafy robes of red and brown and gold, robes that drifted like spider silk on dawn’s cool breeze, robes that were webbed in veins like the leaves of trees.
Melai lowered herself to her knees and bowed her head. It were not proper to stare at Thoonsk’s guardians. Yet Melai were required to look upon them but once. To respond to their words.
‘Viasha Thoonsisk, janua srarsarri,’ they spoke. Mother Thoonsk, takes back her children. ‘Viasha Thoonsisk, eeyoon srarsarri tumaya florinthah.’ Mother Thoonsk will give them rebirth, in the form of another and kind. ‘Chilla Melaiys basheeathi?’ Are these the blessings of Child Melai?
&nb
sp; Their voices came in unison it seemed. Yet so quiet did they sound, their voices were more like distant wind shaking the leaves of a faraway tree.
Melai replied in similar voice. ‘Basheeathi na Melaiys tuhth.’ They are my blessings, aye.
Tears fell from her eyes and down her face as the guardians gently, respectfully took each of her five sisters into their woody arms. Here they bowed to Melai, turned slowly and Melai watched them carry the last of her family and folk away. She wept as they went, her tears dripping gently into lagoon. She wept as the morning mists silently engulfed the guardians. And soon they were gone and she were left there truly alone for the first time in her life. Below her face she saw beneath water’s surface tiny blue water horses, creatures that had fallen moments earlier in the form of tears. They swam away into the depths of the lagoon and Melai sat there watching them go, wondering what to do next.
7
The suns had moved on. It were somewhere around midmorning. Melai were sat idly on the slab of spirit stone where her sisters had lain, gazing out across the silent expanse of Thoonsk. She could not help but wonder exactly where it were that guardians took woodland nymphs, feeling a need to understand, now more than ever, where it were that folk were taken to. It were forbidden to trail the guardians. All she knew were that woodland nymphs were carried to a prepared copse of trees, where they were placed and reborn into another of Mother’s creatures. Though it did not quell her loneliness, Melai took heart that when her time came, she would be carried off to the same group of trees and be reborn into whatever form her sisters had taken. And they would be awaiting her.
Now though, she considered her options. She accepted that Thoonsk were dying. And hard as it were to admit, it had been dying even before she had encountered the unfortunate Rjoond. She began to question whether or not it were indeed the Rjoond who had delivered Thoonsk its curse or if something else were to blame. If she cast her mind back, strange things had been going on all across her water forest for the past dozen rotations of Melus. When her sisters had perished she had been desperate for someone to blame. When she watched the Rjoond plummet from the heavens it seemed obvious that here were the cause. Yet still, his last words rang in her mind: ‘Some blight be killing all. No land have I crossed that remains untouched by it. It kills all before it with no discrimination. And none of it be my doing. My very own family has perished because of it. I am all that survives.’
