by A. L. Brooks
5
They made long distance in good time. Until Gargaron noticed Melai grimacing. ‘Be you well?’ he asked her. Her injured wing were folded protectively beneath her arm. She did not answer. ‘Be you well, I say?’
‘Yes.’
But she were not. The way she struggled to speak. The way she held her wing and arm. He noticed now also a peculiar odour. Some weedy reek. She were bleeding he saw. Yellow blood dripped from her elbow, running down his destrier’s sweating flank. He prayed it were simply her wound that were ailing her. Yet he could not push aside the idea that the doom that had killed all else were now killing Melai.
6
It were early afternoon when they entered a part of the woodland where water levels were the shallowest Gargaron had yet witnessed since his fall into this strange world of Thoonsk. Here though trees of immense girth grew. And were peculiarly shaped, as of a wrist thrust from water and its palm upturned and fingers growing out and up as branches old and gnarled with bark the colour of soot. At their bases, knots of twisted root rose and fell over one another, and upon each tree there had been gouged patterns of ghastly faces where white sap beneath had oozed through and dried, and now, in the general wash of diffuse green hews of the surrounding forest, they glowed like that of moonlight.
Gargaron wondered if the depictions of these tortured souls were meant to ward off intruders by some long lost forest race. If so then it did not work on he nor Melai nor Grimah for something else occupied their thoughts. Melai’s injury. And by the time Gargaron had placed Melai upon the ‘palm’ of one of these trees she were seething between her teeth. Trying to swallow her pain.
She sat there, a hunched and pathetic looking creature if Gargaron had ever seen one.
‘Will you accept my help now?’ he enquired of her.
She would not look at him. Though pain pinched her face.
‘You stubborn fool,’ he said. ‘You have seen inside my thoughts, you have seen I mean you no harm, and yet still you distrust me.’
‘Thoughts can be masked,’ she argued weakly, ‘thoughts can be falsified.’ Yet, she had touched his living blood, she knew blood manufactured no lies.
‘Falsified? Aye possibly, but not by the likes of me,’ Gargaron gently argued back. ‘I lack both knowledge and ability to orchestrate such tricks.’
She said no more. Instead she turned over and lay down. Her ribs pushed against the pale green skin of her chest. She were terribly gaunt. She had not eaten nor drunk since he had met her. She were weak, he knew, and growing more so by the minute.
‘Cast off your stubbornness lest it contribute to your demise,’ Gargaron told her as he rounded the tree (he could move more freely here for the water level were barely to his knee) so that he might find a gap through bough and branch to speak to her, face to face.
‘Why should you care if I live or die?’ she asked him rasping.
‘Why should I not? I hunt and I kill for a living aye, but otherwise I find life precious. Now, even more so, now, with so much death, life seems imperative. So, tell me, Melai of Willowgarde, what ails you?’
She winced. Yellow blood continued to drip from her. ‘I know not. But a cure all is what I need.’
Gargaron thought of his Lyfen Essence. ‘I have medicine that chases away death.’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You do not trust me?’
‘No. I need Greenwater moon.’
Gargaron frowned. ‘I have never heard of it. What be it and where must I look to find it?’
‘It be medicine.’ She gave him a look as if she still thought him nothing but a big ignorant oaf. From where she lay, she looked about. And about. ‘A deep pond,’ she said. ‘A fathom down is where they come to rest when the moon beams of Great Keera hit the water’s surface and become instantly the stone of green-water.’
Great Keera? Gargaron thought. There be no such moon. Were she losing her wits now as well as her strength? ‘You require this substance?’
‘I fear I have been poisoned by that unknown beast that assailed me,’ she said anxiously. ‘Its claws punctured me. Its poison remains unknown to me. I must need eat of the moon stones. They are a powerful remedy, Mother Thoonsk’s cure-all. I must eat of them before morning or else I fear I shall perish at sunrise.’
Gargaron sighed heavily, looking about aimlessly; all he saw were thick woodland stretching away to all points of compass. ‘Let me find it for you then,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where to look.’
7
He found a pond like one she had described. It will appear as a natural well within the swamp, she had told him through grimace and groan. Surrounded by a circular bank covered in great tufts of wriggling worm-grass. The wells are vents the ancient water-horses once bored into earyth. These creatures are long wiped from history but their chimneys remain, flooded and submerged. Other things live in them now. Sometimes deadly. So be careful. The moon stones may be found a fathom from the surface, embedded in coral.
Gargaron gazed down into the deep clear water. His steed stood nearby, surveying the woodland, as if searching for any strange critters that might be sneaking up behind them. But there were no-one and nothing about. Gargaron removed his pack. Shed his boots and jerkin and shirt. Standing at the edge of the well he considered what he had to do. Then he took a deep breath… and dove in.
8
It were remarkably clear. He could see a long way down as he descended. The walls were lit with some sort of phosphorescent algae that gave off a soft green luminescence. But there were also large spreading patches where algae had blinked out, as if all of it were slowly dying en masse. Strange fish swam lazily about, on their sides, or upside down. Tired or ill.
A huge crustacean, a lobster all black and hard bony ridges, listed from some den in the wall of the well. Its body swayed in the wash of the current created by Gargaron as he swam by. Its eye-stalks did not see him. Its body, Gargaron realised, were limp with death.
On a shelf almost a fathom down Gargaron suddenly saw something strange. A cluster of glowing stones. Only when he grabbed at one it felt more like a fleshy knob of some sort. A bulb. Were these the objects of which Melai had spoken? He did not know. But the air in his lungs were waning. His chest were beginning to ache. He could swim no further down. He plucked as many of the bulbs as he could and kicked for surface.
9
Back at the ‘palm’ tree, Gargaron presented the peculiar bulbs to Melai, his hand and fingers sandy and wet. ‘Tell me these be what you seek,’ he panted.
She looked at the items he presented. ‘Aye. Th-this be them,’ she declared tiredly, again grimacing. ‘I-I were concerned y-you may… may not find them, that, that you would n-not recognise them.’
She squished one weakly in her fingers and slurped up its alien milk; moonlight, if he believed her claims, turned into this strange liquid substance through the magic of the well. She swallowed it down, her eyes looking dreamy, turning smoky and blue, as if she were snared in some rare arresting ecstasy. Her head swung back, her eyes rolled upwards, her toes and fingers contracted.
‘Melai!’ Gargaron called, ‘Melai, hear me? Be you well? Be you well?’
Had she mistaken the stone for something else? In his haste, had he fetched the wrong items? He gripped her with his huge hands, his grasp almost wrapping her entire body, and shook her as stiffly as he dared.
‘Melai! Melai, hear me! Please, do not perish. You must not.’
But she would not move. He watched for her breathing. He saw the soft rise and fall of her chest yet steeled himself for its eventual culmination, for it to grow softer and less apparent until it stopped forever. Like the elf girl who had inadvertently brought him Grimah.
10
The suns fell toward horizon. He watched them as he sat there beside Melai’s sleeping form. He found a natural platform in the bole of an enormous old oak, an area large enough to accommodate the bulk of his body. Then he built a fire out of reeds and branc
hes from dried deadfall clumped high above the water mark.
He listened out for bugs and swamp frogs and nightjars. He had heard tales of the various swamp realms of Godrik’s Vale. How at night you had to stuff feathergrass into your ears if you wanted to sleep, for the great cacophony of sound as the wild things kept up their mating and territorial calls would keep you from slumber and send you mad.
Nevertheless, the silence unnerved him. He heard the occasional lazy splash in the surrounding water. Something gurgling as it floated to the surface of the swamp, as it gasped and gargled and drowned in the air. Heard the dispirited cries of dying bugs. Otherwise the swamp night were silent as death.
Except near dawn when he awoke, Gargaron heard howl and swoosh of huge swift bodies sweeping through the swamplands. He sat up and looked about.
Dawn light hung pale in the east. A veil of mist drifted through the woodlands. And moving there like spectres he saw them. Dark Ones. Swishing by like black wraiths.
He lay low, his chin in water, gripping his great sword. Melai remained in whatever state the moonstones had put her in. And Grimah lay there on a trodden down bed of reeds and water brambles, eyes open, perhaps sensing danger and thus keeping quiet, unmoving but for his keen eyes.
Are they coming for me now? Gargaron wondered. Surely they would not spare him a second time. In some ways he welcomed it. To leave this world of dying. And if so then he would somehow have his spirit make its way to Endworld without the help of the Wraithbirds. Somehow he would make it there and live out eternity with his wife and daughter.
Yarniya’s words arose in him once more: ‘You have work here first. More than you can know.’
Again, as before, inexplicably, the Dark Ones did not come for him. Nor did they for Melai nor Grimah. They swept onwards through swamp and tree. Pressing westways’n’north, tearing any other still living creature to pieces.
IHETHA
1
MELAI awoke on sunrise, shivering, cowering from dawn’s light as it basked warmly against her soft green skin. She glared out into the forest where sunlight spiked through in long misty beams. She had heard birdlings the day before. But that morning the air were oh so dead and quiet.
She washed her arm through the sun rays, flexing her fingers. She crawled fully under the wash of Melus. And sat upright. She hung her head, shut her eyes, and breathed deep. When she looked up her eyes fell upon Gargaron.
She watched him for a while, curiously. There looked to be a tear in his eye. ‘You did not abandon me.’ She appeared mystified by this. ‘You did not assail me, nor violate me, nor cook me for supper.’
Gargaron frowned. Then laughed, wiping the rise of his cheek. ‘Cook you for supper? Take a look at yourself. I’m like to get more meat off a bare bone. If I were to eat anyone it would be Grimah.’
His destrier, munching on watergrass, looked around at him. Perhaps at merely hearing his name, yet, perhaps he understood fully Gargaron’s words. ‘Forgive me, Grimah, I do not mean it, of course. You have much meat on your bones but I have no taste for horse.’ He turned back to Melai. ‘So, how do you feel? I must say, it heartens me greatly that you look so well.’
‘I have not succumbed to poison or any other ailment, so, aye, I feel well.’ She flexed her wing. The torn membrane were almost healed. Yet the wing itself did not move with the same fluid grace that Gargaron had observed before the monster’s attack upon her. ‘My wing though be somewhat out of sorts. The bones have been strained. I shan’t be flying for a while. Though for how long I cannot tell.’ She grimaced as she folded her wing back behind her.
‘Well then, you shall have to ride with me then a little while longer it seems,’ Gargaron told her with a smile.
She eyed his destrier. But managed a small smile of her own. It were the first time Gargaron had seen her do so and he realised how beautiful she were. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘Seems I have little choice.’
2
They travelled all that morning. And by early afternoon they reached at last Thoonsk’s westways border. It were heralded by a vast curving line of sky faring monoliths, huge monstrous things festooned in red ivy whose leaves fluttered briskly in the unguarded wind and gave the impression that the mighty grey stones possessed a writhing skin. At their bases, where the earth were still soggy from the watery reaches of Mother Thoonsk the stone were thick with a ragged sock of green moss. And it were here that Melai abruptly ordered Gargaron to halt his mount.
The forest had thinned here. On these outer edges all that remained were ancient willows, their long, tired, sagging branches pushed gently to and fro in the breezes. The water around them were green but possessed a waxy, oily quality, and the floor beneath it were hard as if paved. And shallow too, swishing about Grimah’s hooves.
Gargaron looked about, wondering why Melai had so called for their procession to be halted, fearing she may have spotted some beast in the shadows stalking them. But when he looked down at her he saw that she were in fact looking wistfully back the way they had thus far traversed, before turning and eyeing the monoliths.
‘What be it?’ he asked her.
‘I just need a moment. Would you help me down?’
‘I think not. That there water looks poisoned.’
‘Aye,’ she said, ‘you guess well, for poisoned it be. To keep out such unsavoury intruders as Mother Thoonsk would wish not to permit. Though I am immune to Mother’s poisons.’
Gargaron gazed down at the water lapping around his steed’s ankles. ‘And what of Grimah? Do we need concern ourselves with his feet corroding?’
Melai leaned out and gazed down at Grimah’s lower legs. ‘I have no explanation. His legs ought to be burning.’ She gazed up at the monolith. ‘Perhaps Mother’s potency weakens with her demise.’ She sighed. ‘Would you lift me down, please?’
Gargaron obliged and lifted her from saddle, lowering her to ground, mere yards from where great Thoonsk came to an end beyond its border of towering stones.
3
Gargaron watched Melai remove her bow from across her chest and lower herself to her knees. Thoonsk’s poisonous green liquid lapped about her hips. She lowered her chin to her chest. Her hands and arms hung loose at her sides, her long froglike fingers dangling into the water. Her wings (as much as she could manage her injured one) were folded neatly across her back. And her eyes were shut. Gargaron thought he saw her lips were moving. Perhaps she were mouthing some prayer. Respectfully he refrained from further speech.
Melai pushed her arms out, swishing water before her in a gentle wave which seemed to generate some peculiar forward momentum of its own, surging with uncanny and increasing force toward the nearest monolith which stood a dozen yards from Melai’s position.
The wave crashed against the covering of moss where the oily water seemed to seep up into the vegetation, colours of green snaking up through the red ivy, spreading out like shard-sparks in a summer storm. Then it dissipated.
When Gargaron next looked at Melai he saw with alarm that she were now leaned all the way forward, her face submerged in the water. Thinking she had slumped there involuntarily he went to leap from his horse, to drag her face back into air. But then…
Her wings beat slowly. Even her injured one. And the tips of her long frog fingers danced in gentle synchronicity with the water ripples.
Then she arose and stood scarecrow like before the monolith, her arms held out from the sides of her body. As Gargaron watched he saw a face form amidst the ivy, the face of some enormous being, female in appearance, and from her immense mouth there flickered a tongue of green vines, snaking out in a flash of movement, and licking Melai, whip-like, across the face.
It were gone in but a sunflare and Melai sat again, this time as if from exhaustion… or perhaps elation. For she sat there, chin and nose turned skyward. And deeply she breathed of Thoonsk’s moist atmosphere. And upon her face she wore an expression of calm and resignation.
Finally she spoke in her Mother’s tongue.
‘I have never vacated your cradle, Mother Thoonsk. I have lived my entire life within your fold. I am one of your children, and your children rarely find need to leave your paradise. Yet, now I request your permission to cross your boundary and depart here. Alas… you tell me you are dying.’
She sobbed, staring up at the monolith, from where the face had appeared and faded. She did not wipe the tears from her cheeks. Instead she let them slide down her face and drip from her chin and they fell silently away without sound into the water. There they exploded, and the tiny droplets changed in an instant into a hundred tiny water nymphs that plunged deep into the liquid and swam away in a hundred different directions.
‘She has granted me leave,’ Melai said softly, ‘so that I may learn of what ails her and thus find a cure.’
Gargaron responded with a measured, respectful tone. ‘Then we search for the same thing. For what afflicts Thoonsk, afflicts the wider world.’
4
Melai stood beside the enormous boundary stone, gazing back into her homeland one last time—woodland nymph and monolith side by side together in solidarity, children of the water-forest both, staring back at their dying mother.
‘Ihetha,’ Melai whispered before she eventually turned her back on Thoonsk. For my love. ‘Ihetha thu’etha.’ For my love, I shall find your cure. And she turned and did not look back.
CLARAVILLE
1
FOR them both, the way onward seemed strange at first.
For Gargaron it were finally being away from the confines of Thoonsk that were strange, away from the endless walls of tree and bramble and towering lilies, the endless reaches of water. It were the feeling of being on firm, open country, where watery woodlands gave way to scrubby savannah, where he could look up and see the entire reach of sky with its white wispy clouds rather than a ceiling of leaves and branches and woody boughs.
