From death to death
I live a life
For me the birds cease singing
From life to life
I die a death
The birds sing of my passing
One day to live
A final time
The whispered lie
One day will die
The world goes on without me
I beg the birds sing of my passing
The port city of Yarina is relatively small; in truth, it is nearer to a town than the cities Lise is used to, but it still casts a striking silhouette against the rising moon. Low buildings but for the scattering of a dozen or so spires and a large lighthouse which dominates its northern end, casting its glow over the waters lapping at its east side. The cart rolls gently on the well tread road, winding between narrow, rocky hills.
Lise practices her meditation as they approach the city—she doesn’t know when she’ll have another moment of quiet. Recollecting the fragments of her mind. It brings her a measure of peace to array them before her crossed legs. To recall what she has, ahead of Akota’s departure. The prospect of persisting alone again has her fragments jittering around and coming apart. She needs to be able to keep together without his help. That he’s alive at all should be enough… will it be enough? She draws a breath, probably not. The truth is I don’t think I’ll be able to hold all of me together until Seli is safe… Please hold on for me, Seli. For both our sakes. I’m trying…
Lise’s meditative near-peace is short lived. Even so early into the cycle—the moon just now breaching the horizon beyond the city—Yarina is bustling. As the party trudges into downtown there’s a frenzy of people moving back and forth across the street, stepping in and out of stalls—with and without goods. She can’t make out a single word or phrase amongst the many barked shouts and sharp whistles; it’s more clamorous than Opis Luma gets at midday. She covers her ears just to hear herself think. Denoda pats her on the shoulder as he steps off the cart, communing with Bessa at the back.
Akota draws the cart into a small shelter connected to one of the many cobblestone buildings that crowd over the street. “Everyone wait here, I’ll go speak with the innkeeper.” He nods to them all as he hurries inside.
After he’s gone, Navah looks to Bessa, “I hope–” She begins, clutching her arms, but is cut off as a pair of stout women in thick leathers drag a sled past the shelter. It rasps across the crusty road.
Their faces seem to be wet with sweat or perhaps the heavy mist that clings to every surface here. Lise widens her eyes at their haul: an absurd looking fish the size of a man with a narrow snout long as her arm and six small fins lining either side. For safety—as it appears to have sharp spines—its dorsal fin is tied down with a cord wrapped tight round its body. The scales that cover its body appear black but for when they catch a glimmer and they reflect rich blue. The creature’s frayed gills rise and fall as it gasps for breath. Then the sled is past, its loud scraping the only remnant after it has gone from sight; soon, that too drifts into the din.
“What were you going to say?” Bessa asks.
“…I don’t know. Something about how cold it is, I think.”
Lise watches indistinct figures passing in the fog, their silhouettes seeming to stretch toward her against the pale blue lamplight coming from the other side of the street. It doesn’t feel wholly real, this place; she feels the weight of the moisture in the air. Her scalp crawls as the wiry curls of her matted hair react to the unfamiliar atmosphere. She expects a tangible wetness when she rubs her face but there is only the natural oil.
Her trance is broken when Akota returns. He holds open the door and gestures for them to enter with a weary smile, “They have a spare room… Oh, wait—would any of you happen to have something to pay the inn-keep with?”
The room is enough for the five of them to find space to sleep, though three of them will have to scrounge for comfort on the creaky wooden floor. Lise is offered a spot on the bed first, followed by a brief discussion about who will sleep beside her and they ultimately decide Navah will. None of them had anything to pay for the room but the inn-keep was kind enough to say they could stay until another patron came along, so they waste no time. Denoda is blowing out the last candle just minutes after they entered the room. For the first time in too long she has little difficulty getting past pain to find sleep.
Lise is the last to arise in the undermind—only Student Denoda waited for her, the rest are already gone ahead of them to seek out other dwellers in Yarina. Denoda is not be able to see her here. He turns to her, responding not to the sight of her standing up, but to the tangible yet inaudible vibrations of her movement. She didn’t expect his inability to visualize to manifest in such a way. She thought it would merely mean he can’t create new things in the undermind, but he is sightless of mind in full.
‘Student Denoda.’ She acknowledges.
‘Lise!’ He smiles, tilting his head. His dark curls bounce against his cheeks, appearing nearly weightless enough to match the buoyancy of his demeanor. ‘Just Denoda is fine. I don’t know what heft the title “Student” holds anymore, if any.’
‘Right…’ She rubs her forehead, only half-hearing him. There is a new anxiety wriggling in her gut that she hasn’t addressed, and it’s already drawn her into the distance. I have to find a way across the strait. I will probably be continuing without any of these people, so I need to make my own arrangements. ‘Denoda, do you know Yarina at all? Did you ever pass through when you were still with Chorum.’
He shakes his head, ‘No, no. When Chorum comes west we pass far to the south of here, where the landmasses are connected. There is some fear of the insubstantiality of the sea. It is much preferred to tread ground than water, I think.’
‘Isn’t that slower?’
‘Well, yes, but when you must make a life of traversing the world in pursuit of the sun’s guidance, it is preferable to take fewer risks on the journey. Failure in the pursuit is inevitable, as is an end to the pursuit. But only one may recur.’
‘That is reasonable. If only my pursuit was so forgiving.’
‘Do not fret too much, Lise, the sun will soon alight your path. The sun is ever rising.’
‘Perhaps…’
Denoda walks with her, an arm on her shoulder lest he fall behind, as they wander Yarina’s dark, dank streets. She sees waking dwellers wading among the sparks of light that mark the flow of the throng, standing full-figured among the sparks as the gentle beasts called berawenn stand among flocks of feeding aster crane. Just the thought almost brings her to tears. I am the mother of wolreaths… She shakes her head, pressing past the crowd and the dwellers—not a line of thought I need to follow right now.
‘What of the day the sun doesn’t rise?’ She says, almost as an after-thought.
He considers the question with a seriousness she was too afraid to ask it with. ‘Do you think that will happen? Has it ever happened before?’
‘Maybe… Maybe.’ She worries at her pinky nub, picking at the raised scar tissue. ‘You go to sleep every cycle, but have you died before?’
‘Not as I’m aware, no.’
She glances back at his sightless expression, ‘Will you?’
He is silent a moment—thinking—and the moment goes heavy and dragging before he answers. A quiet, ‘Yes.’ Meanwhile, they approach the end of the street, which gives way to an expansive dockyard teeming with the sparks of life. It is of particular contrast to the buildings which huddle against the wet cold. The docks shift as the water pushes and pulls, dark gouts appearing from nowhere as people on the other side of sleep perceive them. The docks are in constant call and response to the whims of the vast and powerful force it seeks to take gently by the hand. She feels the cold sea-spray pepper her bare face but never sees them coming. The people here in reality must be feeling the water droplets hit them but are unable to see them in the dark.
‘Don’t step onto the dock!’ A woman calls as they near where the street-stones become thick planks of wood.
Lise halts and wipes the droplets from her face. Denoda squeezes her shoulder and sticks a little closer to her. She nods to the approaching woman, who is hardly taller than Lise’s waist. She is dressed in thick leathers with a waxen poncho to shield her from water, and as she nears, her hood is blown back to reveal a pair of swollen looking goggles that covered half her face. ‘Is something wrong?’ Her gait is off-kilter, more strange the more Lise looks at her.
The woman stops before them, planting her hands on her hips. She shakes her head, ‘Nothing wrong, nah. It’s just dangerous—look, take a look.’ She gestures to the docks. ‘It’s hard to tell right now, but look at it move.’
Lise puts a hand on Denoda’s for balance before kneeling down, bending closer to the dock. She frowns, peering closer to the wood. The flaws in its recreation are set in relief against her closer inspection. The wood has no grain, only the distant impression of it. More than that, the dock’s rocking is not the fluid motion she imagines it is in reality. It jumps. One second it was there, the next it is a fraction to the left, blinking from one position to another in an instant. From a distance it’s near imperceptible. The dock doesn’t move but does a kind of rapid, short-distance teleportation over and over in close succession to resemble superficially its real movement.
She stands back up, Denoda’s hand returning to her shoulder, and nods to the woman. ‘I understand.’
‘Well, not exactly, you don’t.’ The woman popped off her goggles, resting them on her forehead. Knotted curls of brown frame an uncanny face—like a child who has aged but whose body never matured with her. The light furrowing of middle-age was evident around her eyes and mouth. She grins, squatting on the dock, ‘Wait for it…’
A great wave crashes against the dock. It is sudden. Lise lifts her arms to block the spray, and just before it hits… she sees it. The dock blinks and the small woman squatting in front of her appears several feet to her right. Then she is to her left—right again—left again. Gradually, the docks settle and the woman steps off onto the stone. She flourishes with her poncho, smiling a cherub’s smile.
‘How…’ Lise pauses, There’s not enough focus on the dock to recreate its movement accurately, so the position it registers here in the undermind is erratic. ‘How do you do that?’
‘I was the dock-master of Elles Doret some days ago. The docks whisper to me still—the silly, gracious things.’ She claps them on the shoulders, though her diminutive height doesn’t let her reach much higher than Lise’s elbow. ‘Here looking for passage?’
‘We are.’ Denoda says, looking over the woman’s head. ‘How can you tell?’
‘Everyone foreign to this lichenous collection of stones is looking for passage. You don’t stay in Yarina unless you’re already encrusted in it.’
Lise wills the water off her and the wetness is gone in an instant. ‘Does that mean we’ll have a hard time of it?’
‘Nope. You can find passage fine; it’s about whether you can find passage to where you want to go. Most ships are due south of the strait, in Saresar or Basteca, or maybe the garish lands to try to catch up with Chorum. Where are you trying to get to?’
Lise glances at Denoda at the mention of Chorum, but he shakes his head. Like a whisper from across the room, she fells a faint pull: northeast… ‘Are there any ships headed northeast?’
The woman grins, holding up two fingers beside her cheek. ‘You got Forebearer over there,’ She gestures to a dark-wooded ship moored to the dock. A grave looking thing. She points to another ship nearby—smaller, probably not fit for a crew much larger than ten, of red-tinged wood accented with chipped blue paint. ‘And you have me own, Gramma’s Blessing. Headed to Bare Skelt and Keskane respectably.’
‘…You mean respectively?’
‘Nope.’
‘Right. Well, do you have space for one more on yours?’
Denoda cuts in, ‘Wait, just one more? What of the rest of us?’
Lise hesitates, ‘Oh… I don’t know. I assumed we would be parting ways. Akota is going to pursue the fiend and, well, I’m not sure what Student Bessa and the Navah will do.’
‘Shouldn’t we ask them?’
‘…I suppose so. Probably should.’
The woman clears her throat and holds out her hand for Lise to take. ‘We have space for three more on Gramma’s Blessing so if you need to move more than that you’ll have to speak with the captain of The Forebearer (and you’d have to meet him the regular way, he doesn't operate as we). We’ll be here another cycle or so. Oh, and you’ll have to come with your own rations—about a week worth. And that goes for most the ships here. And, think, you’ll certainly prefer that week be comfortable, so don’t be tying your rope off too short by not bringing enough.’
Lise releases her hand and nods her gratitude. ‘I appreciate the help.’
‘Course! Whether it’s with us or another ship, don’t miss the next casting off. You will find fewer ships docked in the coming weeks.’
‘We’ll be back.’ Denoda promises, ‘But we best not linger here now, Lise.’
‘Akota… Akota…’
“…Akota.” Akota says, nudging her shoulder gently. “Akota, I have to go.”
Lise is barely awake and her throat is already tight. I’m not ready. I’m not ready. “What? What do you mean?”
“It’s time for me to leave.” Akota rests his hand on her arm, “I found passage south. The ship leaves in an hour.”
Denoda rouses, sitting up from the floor slowly and blinking the sleep from his eyes. “What’s going on? Why are you waking us so suddenly?”
“This man and I will be taking the next ship to Saresar.” Everyone turns to look at Student Bessa who is peeking into the room. “Chasing down this fiend-man he says caused the fall of The Dwelling.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t know wh’else I’ll do yet—might as well, y’know.”
Akota ignores them, addressing Lise alone. “I have little time so I had to be sure I wouldn’t leave without telling you. We may see each other again before the ship sets off but leaving farewells to the last second didn’t seem prudent…” He pauses to watch Denoda leave the room, following after Student Bessa with more questions. “What are you thinking right now?”
What am I thinking right now… “I don’t know. Less thinking, more feeling… Feeling afraid, alone, uncertain… I don’t know.” She rises from the bed slow, tender with her pain. “…I feel like I’m letting safety escape me.”
“I am safety? I’m not quite a warrior, you know.”
“Well, yeah, not safety exactly… Maybe security—no… no, it’s reliability. You are reliable like no one else I’ve known, Akota. Paradoxically, I suppose. You are strange, erratic, unpredictable—but reliable. I trust what you say, and I trust you will keep to what you say. I don’t think I can say that for anyone else—myself included (much as I’ve come to emulate you).”
Akota scratches the side of his head, “While it is true that I’m singular in my honesty,” he offers a brief flash of humor in the form of a grin, “your predicament there stems more from you not coming to know anyone well enough to trust them. I understand why, of course, considering what you’ve experienced, but it’s not as though I’m the only trustworthy person. I’m just the only person you’ve let yourself trust because our relationship predates everything that’s happened these few days and nights.”
Lise is too rattled by his words to respond immediately, she just stares at him, mind suddenly racing to find proof counter to his claims. Cutting far deeper than can be done with malice, his casually honest words pierce right down to the root of her. She feels her neck tense and a sweat drop trickles down her ribs.
He takes a deep breath and steps back, “I hope it isn’t so long but we may not see one another for some years, so care for yourself Akota. When we meet again I hope you come to me with friends.”
She watches him go and says nothing. Just… sits there, feeling like she’s hitting the hinge’s floor all over again.
After a minute or two has passed, there is motion in her periphery and Lise glances to see Navah shifting in the bed next to her, rising from it gingerly and going still when they see her looking. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. I just woke up and didn’t want to disturb. Sounded important, I guess…”
Lise is aware of a blunder she is in the process of making. She walks alone toward the dock—her thoughts coming in fragments which she scrambles to make sense of. There is a mistake here… She’s making a mistake. What is she doing? It’s the first thought that filters through whole, all else blasted to scintillae. What is she doing? She clings to the thought as her feet tread wood. A distant thought—so distant it’s nearly not of her—she clutches to her breast. What is she doing?
What– The dangerous thought is taken from her without patience. A parent plucking a knife from the hands of a child. She’s not responsible enough for that yet. Just walk. If nothing else, she can manage that. Walk. She can walk. She walks… Baby steps. Where– The thought is dashed before she can finish it, slapped out of her hands.
Lise approaches a man standing on the docks, thoughtless now. She speaks with him for a moment, handing him something, then steps up onto the gangplank of his ship. What she said to him she can’t say. All she can do is walk.
“LISE!” There is someone grabbing her, trying to drag her off the ramp. She is slow to react, losing balance and falling to one knee. A glimmer of recognition crosses her mind as the man who seized her helps her rise. His grip on her arm tightens, “Lise, what are–” She hears a piercing note and that brief taste of memory is lost. Her thoughts are siphoned into the void as they occur; as she watches the ship captain tackle the man, she has no comprehension of the sight. As though each instant is independent of the next, losing the context of the last.
The terrible note resounds as though the source is her own skull—ringing a tone so jarring it shakes her apart, the fragments of her skittering away. With immense effort, she pilfers a moment’s recall, “Denoda…” and it’s taken from her again the next. The spark of her fury is snuffed before it catches. The note changes and the fragments of her are drawn together, clattering into one another and creating a tumult. The sights before her eyes are turned strange, surreal. She cannot distinguish her boot from the ramp she treads—can’t distinguish the ship sails from the sky.
In the gaps between her shattering thoughts, Lise sees. She cannot process the glimpses she gets from reality, but she can see the fragments of her thoughts and memories and the void between them. Something she sees there in the dark deafens her to the clamor. There is a void in the void… There is a nothing in the nothing, but this nothing isn’t true nothingness. There is something in the nothing there. A semblance of void hiding behind her thoughts. To detect a shade in the shadows takes eyes sensitive as hers—most anyone would see nothing there. Once accustomed to the absence of light, even the color black appears as a blinding brightness; it’s the most vivid sight for an eternity in any direction. She sees it.
Lise watches it notice her gaze. She can do nothing but watch, and for a precarious instant, it retreats. Instinct rushes into the gap and doesn’t leave it the opportunity to undo its mistake; she seizes the nearest fragment of her mind and wrests control from the damned thing’s grasp. “HELP!” She cries out, desperate to realize her invisible peril for the strangers on the dock.
NO TIME.
Before she can regret it, she moves. The pain creeping through her body like spiny tendrils is distant next to the immediate horror of a fiend nesting in the gaps of her mind. It was trying to control her for some purpose, putting her on the wrong ship—FUCK YOU! Lise lets her rage light her mind, the flash casting in relief a familiar shape. A many-shaped shape watching her from there in the recesses, peering out at her from NON. Just to gaze upon at it seems to splinter her—from every new perspective it appears as a shape paradoxical to the past. FUCK–
Not risking another thought, Lise bolts, and the shape shreds her apart with a piercing tone. Blinking to clear her eyes, she runs across the deck of the ship—holding her mind together by sheer will—and throws herself overboard. Her stomach turns as she tumbles in the air, a terrifying euphoria following the sense of falling free, and is cut short by the cruel slap as she hits the water back first. Before the sea can swallow her,
NON
Lise is enveloped in void with nothing to grasp, nothing solid to orient herself toward. She doesn’t experience anything. Not a thought, not a sensation, not emotion—even memory is inaccessible here. Just void. So serene; who could care to keep hold of all their loose fragments and flecks here? Not her, sure as anyone else. She drifts, and the shattered pieces of her drift, and the verity of what can be called “Lise” is tested. What pieces has she lost already across her years of toeing the ledge? From its thoughts and ideas, down to the very matter that makes it—it is evident that “Lise” is itself an idea that emerges from her environment and experiences, and that what constitutes “Lise” changes with every fraction of a moment. What can be called “Lise” is not static; the beast that went to sleep is not the beast that awakes. And so, as “Lise” leaves NON, she returns with only the most solid, singular pieces of her self—those parts which are so embedded in her psyche that the void’s gentle abrasion is not enough to pull them from her.
A pinprick of light wavers into the supreme dark. Its dim, swaying glow is bright enough to blind one here. What fragments remain of “Lise” are cast in weak, amber light and drawn inexorably out of NON.
Pinching shut her eyes against the lantern, pain is the first to greet her reactivated mind. Her whole back feels raw, as though she’s just been beat upon with a series of berani mallets. She can do little but curl against the savage pain as her old wounds recoil in response to the impact. Transfixed by twin lances.
Pain overwhelms her other senses and she drifts in and out of NON, its black waves pulling at her legs, beckoning her back off this insubstantial shore. She anchors herself to the land despite every miserable thought and sensation screaming at her to let go. It is torture to let the tide recede. NON no longer laps at her and her legs sink into sand that hardly feels real. Swaying lamplight glows a deep brown-blue through her eyelids. The gentle rocking of the wood boards beneath her breaches her dull awareness and she is cast back to reality in full.
She blinks to mitigate the piercing light, trying to see her surroundings. For now the dim lamp thwarts her and she closes her eyes again, waiting for the rest of NON’s residue to drip dry. She’s still damp with it when heavy, knocking footsteps start to shake the boards. Her hands tremble as she covers her ears to the pounding din.
“Lise?” Student Denoda kneels beside her and his hand hovers, hesitant to touch her. “Are you alright…? Sorry, not the right question. How do you feel?”
Lise peers at him through the near imperceptible crack of her eyelids. “Shit…”
Denoda’s lips quirk in an awkward grin. “Is that in response to the question or the sight of me?” He chuckles, but the humor behind it is rendered bleak in his sad eyes. “…I’ll go get you some water.”
The word water casts light on the obscured memories of what led her to NON this time. She gasps for breath as sudden panic arrests her. The pain in her back, the sickly smell of the sea water, the boat rocking beneath her. She cries out, but before she speaks it he’s already staring at her in shared panic. “Denoda! Help!”
“What?!”
Lise can hardly speak for the rush of razor sharp thoughts coursing through her tender mind, smacking her temples with her hands. “In me! The Shatterer! It’s–” She gasps, quaking with each breath. “It’s in me! Taking memories…”
“The what?! A fiend?!”
“Yes! YES!” She curls around her chest, the pain overwhelming her once again. She drifts.
Denoda doesn’t bother to respond just runs from the room, shouting, “NAVAH!”
Sitting silently beside her, Student Denoda sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know, I think Navah might be right.” He closes his eyes, his expression scrunching into a near comical look of concentration before he winces at the pain of his bruised face. “I can normally hear something that stands out as wrong—not like a discordant note so much as a weakening of the myriad sounds and tones, muddying and distorting them, and ultimately cutting it off completely. I don’t hear any of that coming from your thoughts. That said, I didn’t have much time to listen when I was wrestling with that captain on the dock… so I don’t know, perhaps I would have noticed something strange if I’d not been preoccupied.”
Lise blows out smoke, rubbing her brow with a knuckle. “I have felt it working through me many times—many of which I’m only now connecting in retrospect. In crucial moments, I’ve felt it pressing on my tender spots, selectively veiling memories, even forcing my legs to walk when it can’t influence me in those subtler way.” She loses the conversation to a line of thought that tugs her along too fast for her mouth to keep up. It was there—it made me kill mama… and was there when I made the fiend… it didn’t want me to go into The Dwelling and find what came of Rese—I felt it shattering me there, pressing on me. I-I-I... fuck... it almost put me on the wrong boat… what would I have done then? Seli… it stole the location where ‘freedom is chained’ from me… I have been the fool… strung around by my pain. Is it here even now? Watching these thoughts run round my head from the safety of NON? Are you in there…? What have I been doing all this time? What have you kept me from? I have no idea the extent… What the fuck do I… This is terrible. Truly awful… I can hardly trust previous thoughts, past conclusions, my memories. Even these thoughts, what can I believe? WHAT DO I DO?! Is it even a fiend? It was hiding in NON, so does that mean I was wrong before or is it not a fiend? Is it like ‘Pain’? Fuck… I… How do I even begin?
She takes another puff off the pipe, “Denoda?”
He looks up from his lap, startled from his own thoughts. “Yes?”
“Just… keep an ear turned to me, if you would.”
“I will.”
He sits with her a few minutes longer before taking the hammock across from her. Navah has been asleep some hours already, observing Lise from the undermind, keeping watch for abnormalities after the initial examination didn’t reveal anything. Whether that is due to her truly having no notable issues or due to the fiend’s ability to hide its work worries Lise. The existence of the being that destroyed Bente, the creature she named ‘Pain’, and now this new entity, ‘The Shatterer’, gives rise to a terrible dread that keeps her on the edge of panic. Nothing she learned during her time at The Dwelling, nothing Akota or her parents taught her, had equipped her to handle this—even in her direct experience dealing with fiends never had she faced something like this. I’m not going to be able to sleep in this state…
Denoda snores softly, his chin tucked into his chest, keeping time with the regular rock and roll of the boat as it crests a wave. The floorboards are slick with a film of sea water; Lise’s bare feet curl on the wood, trying for a semblance of security as she hoists herself out of the hammock. Pain humbles her, again. She stands there—fixated on Denoda’s breathing—trying to maintain her balance as she bears pain’s heavy mallets. You and I need to have a conversation… She thinks of the creature born of her pain and has to suppress a chuckle as the image of trying to negotiate with the ghoul arises. Shaking her head, she begins her arduous journey to the stairs.
As she emerges, breath gone ragged, a member of the ship’s crew lets out a piercing whistle that rings out over the crashing waters. The lantern hanging above rattles in the wind, the flame inside blissful in ignorance. Leaning over the railing of the upper deck, the ship’s captain waves to her and disappears from view. It is hard to adjust to the sense that the floor is rolling. There is a moment that something like vertigo comes over her, struggling to reconcile the surreal feeling that she might suddenly fall up into the sky.
The captain reappears. She leaps from the second to last step and lands with grace beside Lise just in time to keep her from falling back below deck. “Easy there! Grab my shoulder!”
She blinks, trying to shake the disorientation. Gripping the woman’s shoulder she scrounges up a semblance of balance. The captain is small of stature—looking a different creature altogether beside Lise’s long, angular frame. They might be of like weights though; the smaller woman is sturdy as a boulder and doesn’t miss a step. By the end of their short walk she bears much of Lise’s weight and still stands rooted firm. She is briefly reminded of jockeying with a woodball player called Del who, despite the size difference, could move her around like few others her age were able. I hated playing against Del, but loved having them on my team…
The boards beneath her feel strange to tread, as though the ship might toss her into the sea upon impact with one of the waves smacking so hard against its painted hull. Her reverie is shattered as a board catches her bare toe and she stumbles, only staying upright because the captain steps in front of her and holds her up at the waist. As she reorients, the captain reminds her, “Keep your head here or you’re likely to lose it.”
“Yeah. Thank you…” Lise grunts as she deposits her on a narrow bench which sits behind a broad wheel. The wheel is pockmarked by deep, uneven grooves in the wood whose edges have been worn smooth by handling. Its long spokes are rounded except for where it is too close to the wheel to be gripped. After a glance around at the marginally more accommodating setting she remarks, “Admittedly, wiser if I just stayed down below deck.”
“Maybe. Depends, don’t it.” The captain smiles at her, leaning one arm on the wheel. “Your mind is a tumult, yeah?”
Lise still has to look down slightly to meet her eyes, even while sitting. “Does it read that plain?”
She shrugs, pursing her lips. “Just that it must have been something serious made you want to go through the effort of getting up here.”
Lise nods, gazing out at the moon-chromed crests rising and receding into the deep, vast dark. “Yeah… Something like too many thoughts for so small a place.”
“I don’t do much of anything on land these days, especially thinkin’. Not enough space, too many hard places, too many others thinkin’ nearby. Make sense? The sea offers more room than you could furnish, though she can be a harsh madam to house with if you don’t know her temperament. Truly. Give a look to the shape your thoughts take to when we land and compare. Nowhere freer than the sea.”
“Don’t you worry about how unstable it is? Obviously, you seem to manage well but… It feels that a floor isn’t promised out here.”
The captain pursed her lips, running her tongue over the front of her teeth. “Mm, don’t think on it much really. Who’s promised you a floor?”
“…No one, I suppose. And I don’t know that I expect one anymore either.”
“Right, yeah? The land might promise itself, but it can’t truly promise itself anymore than I can. I could die anytime. The land might shake apart and fall out from under you. Yes the sea is more unstable but it holds no illusions otherwise. Truly. If you don’t strip yourself the sea will tear that farce from you quick as bolts spearing from black clouds.”
There was something to what she was expressing that resonated in Lise. It is a frightening truth but it’s a profound relief to accept it. “I think you’re right. I’m clinging to the semblance of security…”
The woman grins at her, “Do you know how to swim?”
“Well…” Lise looks out at the churning black mass roaring through the night and shivers. A spray of salty water startles her so much she almost slips off the bench, cringing and spitting. After she regains some composure she manages a small smile to acknowledge the sight it must have been. “I… I know only the waters of the land which seem relatively meek on reflection.”
One of the crew whistles a sharp tune over the crashing waves and the captain turns, whistling a response as she slowly rolls the steering wheel right. The ship tilts and Lise gets that incongruous, stomach-twisting vertigo. Holding onto that bench so tight, for some reason all she can think of is her doomed descent down that ice-crusted precipice into the ravine from which the raptor snatched her up. Her scarred and stumped fingers ache and she has a terrible haunt of that deathly fear—losing her grip and tumbling, dying against the cliffs well before her limp body lay still. A hideous mess trailing down the craggy stone and then nothing. A scream and silence. There she goes. Gone.
“She’s just got a vibrant personality!” The captain’s cackle is big enough to be heard over the blood rush thrumming in Lise’s ears. “But I’m thinking she’s not in the mood for strangers! We should get you back below!”
Lise sits, cross-legged, on a thick rope coiled into the recess of the top of a heavy barrel. She’s been watching the crew—six in all—as they work the ship along its perilous way across the deep black. Here, she comes to see where some of the captain’s confidence stems. In the undermind, Gramma’s Blessing is rendered with the attention to detail that comes from the familiarity born of care. It rolls on the waves as it does in reality, even as the water here lays dormant. And at the helm is the crisp image of the captain herself as she is on the other side. As the captain moves about the ship, it seems as though the paint coloring the wood becomes a little more vibrant. She leaves a lingering clarity wherever she treads.
‘Most of the crew are dwellers!’ Denoda’s sudden appearance beside her startles her from her observation. He feels about for her, not quite sure where she is but sensing her nearby. ‘Or close to it, I should say. I think only the captain and one other are able to access the undermind at will but they’re all very resonant.’
She puts a hand on his shoulder to stop his searching, ‘I noticed. And the ship is… solid. It’s strange.’ The rope coiled beneath her is not perfectly recreated—couldn’t be—but as she rests her fingertips on its fibers the tactile sensation is convincing. She fully believes that if she were to lift it, it would hang like a rope does—and so it would.
‘What conflicts you?’
She glances at him, looking at his ears—they look no different and yet she knows they are tuned in to her mind. She shakes her head, sighing, ‘I don’t know. My immediate feeling is that something is wrong here… but I don’t know that I can trust that feeling. And so… my secondary feeling is that something is wrong with me. I feel incongruous. I am afraid of…’ She closes her eyes and shakes her head again.
He waits for her to continue but she doesn’t. As the pause begins to stretch to the point of tension, he prompts, ‘You’re afraid of…?’
His simple prompting unleashes a fury of thoughts too rapid, too erratic to track. Lost in the tumult of her terrors, new and old, she emerges battered by them, ‘…So much. Too much. I am afraid of losing myself to that creature again and putting everyone else at risk by my nearness. It’s been influencing me for so long and I am barely able to recall fragments of what it has used me to enact. As I look upon these people, this place, I am ever more stricken by my selfishness. In the pursuit of my sister I have tread heavily and I don’t know what all I’ve left in my wake. Just glances over my shoulder… I don’t know if I can justify it. All the death, pain, grief. I need to rid myself of that thing but I don’t know how.
‘There is a hollow at my center beyond which is a vast nothingness. Unlike empty space in that it permits no thought, has no texture to touch, scent to smell, sight to see—silent, still, lightless. It strips you down until you too are nothing and when you return to reality you are as mere material and have to recover what parts of your… Well, that part is irrelevant right now… Anyway, somehow, certain as I can manage, I saw The Shatterer retreat into that place as though it were a burrow. Despite what it should do to a fiend, it is able to linger in there long enough to go undetected until it revealed its hand. I only know glimpses of what it is capable of but what memories have returned to me make me feel such disabling horror that I wish I… no, nevermind that.
‘What I’m reaching toward is that as long as it resides in me I am endangering everyone… I can’t exactly leave, and before boarding I wasn’t capable of warning them—anyone—of the danger. But now I feel I must bring at least the captain in on this much so she might decide what to do with me. Even if that means throwing me into the sea. My fault or not, its impact reaches too far beyond me. If they are going to risk themselves it’s not right for me to withhold this.’
Denoda is stunned silent a while before he manages, ‘Ah, I see…’ He pauses, ‘Well, not really. I can’t see much in this realm… But I do hear you. It is much to process at once for me, but I imagine that’s mostly because you saying all that was you trying to process it a bit yourself.’
She winces, feeling some chagrin for how that must have sounded. ‘Yeah, sorry… it’s almost all I can think about.’
‘No, thank you for letting me in on what you’re thinking. You know, your predicament is coming clearer to me now. I feel more… no, what I mean to say is I am starting to recognize some of the motifs of your mind. The more you tell me what is brewing in there the more I might be able to recognize when something is wrong, perhaps. Wait, what was that right there. I’ve felt that one before. Mmm, discomfort? Embarrassment? Oh… Oh, my apologies… I overstepped.’
She is about to let that rest but thinks better of it, ‘No… Disregard my embarrassment there, it is a selfish kind of discomfort considering the circumstances. I asked you to keep an ear turned to me knowing I would feel vulnerable, and knowing it is necessary all the same.’
Making efforts to minimize expectations in the pursuit of a semblance of preparedness goes awry when what occurs can be called incredible without being hyperbolic. Lise sits in the same position atop the barrel, watching the sea’s form sharpen wherever the captain’s gaze falls. Waves arising where, before their passage, stretched a stagnant gray haze that shared few properties with water. It reminds her of her first glimpse of Dejed—a sanctuary of shape and color amidst the greater undefined mass which would one day swallow it up again. Readying herself to go speak with the captain, it is as she is mustering the resolve for the steep plunge back into pain of reality when she sees it waiting there. There, out on the rippling night tapestry. It hangs over the sea, the moon’s antithesis. On the veil between worlds, where there should be more of the dim silver of stars casting their glow, there is a void… not a void, no… a black shape waiting in the dark.
It sends a high-pitched tone at her as a javelin and transfixes her once.
You are not my enemy.
I am not your friend.
You are my hand.
I am your handler.
Your fetters are mine.
My freedom is yours.
Lise staggers off the barrel, running toward the ship’s railing. She tries to leap off but her foot catches and she tumbles in the air, hitting the water on her back. There is a flare of pain as her real injury breaches the veil. As she sinks into the false sea the pain goes and she floats for a moment before kicking her way to the surface. Imagining a path of ice stretching out over the water, she scrambles to climb atop it but it’s thin and crumbles under her. ‘Damn you!’ She spits, blinking away sweet seawater and tries again. Using digits that don’t exist to grip the edge; it doesn’t really solidify until she remembers cold numbing her fingers. She manages to clamber up onto the thickening ice and lingers on it as syrupy gray droplets run off her and slide into the sea.
But as she looks up to see her path leading her to the shape, the shape has already vanished. The surge of desperate anger is sucked out of her and she’s left with the terror that spawned it. She drifts on the waves, the chunk of ice she grips snapping off the insubstantial path she manifested. She grips it tighter as she is splintered apart. Her indignation taken quick as it came and in its place rushes caustic half-thoughts of death and worse. Trembling at the images flashing through her mind of sending her mother to her sun-blasted end. Her anguish leaves her enfeebled.
She cannot move and her forehead begins to sting from being pressed to the ice. The ship’s wake sends waves crashing in on her and she’s flipped into the water. Her numbed fingers slip and the ice is yanked from her grasp, lost to the sea before she can get a breath. She can’t bring herself to do anything and so sinks into the deep.
Lise awakes atop a raised stone platform whose floor is chiseled a serpentine pattern—never revealing the head—with moss creeping along the gray scales. Far beyond their small platform lies a ring of immense mountains. Draped in the blue-green leaves of the dark-wooded trees and shrubs which grow from cracks in the soft, white and gray stone, the mountains are a rare beauty in the dawn glow. The mist fills in the space between the mountains, rising to just below the platform’s edge. Tendrils of mist curl up like fingers beckoning her closer.
She is seated in a high-backed chair, elbows rested on the rough table before her. Sitting on a white dish between her elbows a cup of tea steeps. Its spice, home redolent, is rendered uncanny to this unfamiliar space. Her mouth wets for it still.
‘I’ve seen it.’ She says, but Lise has eyes for the tea.
‘As have I.’ She replies, reaching for the cup.
‘I’ve seen where freedom is chained.’
Lise takes it and, in trembling hands, examines the powder-blue porcelain—broken, and run through with bolts of pale silver. Her tears fizz and pop where they fall. The flowers etched on the cup are worn and filled in dark. The smell transfixes.
‘It looks as a platform amid the mists, eight-sided.’
‘Ah, yes,’ She says absently, ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘Shy, the serpents which roll over it.’
‘I agree.’ She drinks of it.
‘I see it.’ Her mother is fixated on something far above them, eyes glazed over in rapture. ‘See it with me, dear. See where freedom is chained.’
Lise turns to follow her mother’s gaze but the sun’s sharpest rays seem to spill over the mountains and right into her eyes and she blinks and blinks as they start to tear up again. To no benefit. They water and water, and rubbing her eyes only quickens it. She looks up again, her eyes bleary, and after a good blink catches a glimpse of the strange light-fixture hanging over the table where her family sits eating. Her mother’s stare is intense, turning from the flickering candlelight to look right at her with eyes dark as her own—perhaps darker, deeper. She remains silent, curious at the vibrancy of her own imagination.
“Quin, I’m probably going to have to meet with them again.”
Her mother blinks and looks away, turning to her father, “Yes, that’s fine.”
“It’s fine…?”
“What’s confused you? It’s fine. Do whatever you must.”
“Well, it affects more than just me so I thought you would have wanted to discuss it more.”
“It doesn’t impact me.”
Rese hesitates at that, but shakes his head. “What do you mean? Of course it does. It’s going to change everything! Why are you brushing it off as if it's nothing now?” Quin looks at him, impassive. He waits, and waits still as she watches his expression oscillate between hurt, confused, and indignant. “Where is this coming–”
“It doesn’t matter.” Impassive.
He is silent, searching her face for something. “What? For the love of the land, please! Why are you acting like this?”
“I told you. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters yet. You won’t be around to witness anything that does.”
“Are you serious? What is wrong with you?” His hand shakes as he gestures his frustration at her, and he pulls it back. He stands from the table, shoving his half-eaten food away. “You know what, no… Not now. We’ll talk about this later…”
“No we won’t.”
He freezes where he stands and the silence is brittle. His grin is menacing when he turns back to her, but he visibly tries to soften it as he looks at the other two sitting at the table. Lise and Seli sit as still as they can. “Children, if you need me I will be at the Veris building. I suggest you find something else to do while your mother gets over herself.”
Lise drifts to the surface of a sea gone textureless gray and thick like cream. She flips over, the drab mass of undermind that clings to her naked body peeling off. It takes a few blinks to process where she is, what has happened. It’s just as her memories fall into place that she registers an odd upward pressure from beneath her. Something lifts her into the air, rising rapidly, and she can do little but lie flat against it. The gray liquid rushes off a coarse floor, sucking out from under her, leaving bare skin to scrape against hard stone. It stops suddenly, sending her several inches into the air before she falls back against the platform.
She groans, the echoes of real pain reaching her as she rolls onto her knees. Her clothing materializes around her as she stands, looking around. It’s the same platform as in her memory, sans her family’s table and tea set. And her mother. Her mother had shown her this place, hadn’t she? Why? Why her? The thought seems insignificant when it is before her again.
The Shatterer appears mere strides away—a black shape so hard to look at that she quickly averts her gaze. She stands there, her father’s cloak feels insubstantial before this thing which projects sharp coldness. It puts such a visceral chill in her that she cringes away as though something clawed the inside of her spine. Insects trying to escape her vertebrae in fear of the shapeless thing.
‘FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!’ Lise shrieks, tripping over herself as she stumbles backwards. ‘DAMN YOU TO NON! BLAST YOU UNDER THE SAME LENS YOU MADE ME D–’
‘Lise.’
Her heel catches on one of the curling serpents and she slips off the platform. She lands in the center of an identical platform, the original being vanished the same instant. ‘Lise, stand up.’
That voice… Lise is crying before she rises, barely able to see her through her tears. What is happening…? There, in arm’s reach, waits Seli. She looks older. Older than Lise by a number of days, even. Her smiling eyes appear with a glint of maternal love. It is uncanny to feel her looking upon her so but the welling emotions drown it. She rushes forward to embrace her and passes through, running straight off the platform.
She hits the center of another platform. Her face smashes against the stone and she feels teeth crack and her nose crunch inward, but as she scrambles to fit the pieces of her face back in place she finds they’re already there. What is happening…?
‘Lise, stand up.’
It’s Akota this time, waiting there. He is changed. He does not look older as Seli had, but a peculiar mark has appeared across his face and bare chest. Deathly gray slashes in his skin—strange scars which lack the pucker of true scarring. Lise screams as the marks suddenly deepen and his flesh splits open as though gored by a raptor twice the size hers had been. He falls from the platform in parts hardly recognizable.
In his place, her father’s emaciated corpse lands with a wet slap. Its eyes look through her, jaw visibly broken beneath the skin. His flesh deteriorates before her eyes, sloughing off his crumpled bones. The bones clatter off the platform, caught in a wind that doesn’t grace Lise. She trembles as she stares at the place they’d been, lacking the strength to rise. A visage of death slowly descends from the sky. She has no thoughts for anything but horror and the piercing tone splitting her mind. The Shatterer lets her watch as it returns to NON through her, nestling into the perfect dark there at the center. Reality shudders.
Lise cries out, flailing against the hands which grip her, which shake her. “Stop! Stop, she’s awake!” Someone says, pulling them off her.
She curls into herself, weeping at her pains of mind and of body. Part of her desires a return to NON and another recoils at the thought. The parasite burrowed into her and stole her sole escape. She wants to tear at her own skin, her own flesh, and rip out that horror even if it kills her in the process. Screaming and thrashing, screaming so hard her chest screams with her—pain is preferable to this grating itch that’s scraping her out her skull. Instead, she just curls into herself tighter, her crying quieted against her knees.
“…Lise?” Denoda kneels beside her hammock, hesitating before resting a hand on her shoulder. “Lise, what’s happened? Are you alright?”
She can’t bring herself to respond right away, the itch intensifying as she tries to stifle her sobs, but Denoda doesn’t prompt her again. He waits as she struggles to breach its pressure. Through gritted teeth, between heavy breaths, she manages to utter, “What… do you… hear?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t listen anymore. It hurts to hear, it’s like a spiny insect crawling into my ear.”
The Shatterer’s touch lifted from her, drawn back into the dark seemingly in response to his words. Lise blinks, working her jaw loose. The severity of her pain is easily half or less what it was moments prior. She seizes on the moment of weakness, leaning into the sensitivity she perceived. “But you were listening, weren’t you? The whole time?” He was listening. She projects the thought into NON—an action that would be pointless were she not near certain it still lingered near the dilated opening. Denoda’s response is lost to her as she turns her attention to NON, staring into it, focusing her awareness on it. Her attention is turned to a lance. Its there—she sees it—a black shape in the dark. Striking true, her gaze pierces its myriad surfaces. For an instant, she has a glimpse of two immaterial shapes hanging in the sky, eyes tearing at the sunrise, and then the vision is gone as The Shatterer flees her perception.
Lise startles at the sudden return, looking around frantic. Denoda stands with his eyes shut tight, thumbs pressed into his temples. One of the crew holds open the door at the top of the stairs, casting light down on Navah and the captain standing to Denoda’s right side—both staring at her with expressions she can’t quite decipher. She groans, trying to roll out of her hammock and manages it with the help of the captain. The diminutive woman keeps a steadying hand on Lise’s elbow even as she stands straight.
“It’s gone again.” Denoda mutters.
She nods—then, realizing he still has his eyes closed, says, “We frightened it deeper into NON for the time being… I don’t know when it will return, but it certainly will. It has before, I think.”
“What is ‘it,’ exactly?” Navah asks, “Is this the supposed fiend?”
Lise’s breathing is ragged as she leans against the painted blue wall, “I do not know what it is… If it’s a fiend it is the most terrible I can imagine. It is sharp in a way that few fiends even come close to.”
The captain releases her arm, stepping back. “I must admit I’ve lost my bearings in this. What is happening here?”
Lise feels as though someone strummed her nerves, leaving her with a painful tremor that won’t ease. “It is… too much… to tell here…” She leans her head against the wall, feeling a cold sweat sprout on her brow and beneath her eyes. “Love of the land… I feel miserable. I need help…”
Denoda and the captain catch her before she falls, calling for more to help. Denoda and three of the crew hoist her up and carry her to the deck. “Bring her to my quarters.” The captain holds open her door, “Just lay her on the bed, it’s fine.” After they set her down on the stiff bed, the captain sends off the crew again, “Find Siryl for me—while you’re doing that wake everyone and tell them that we need to be prepared to ride green.”
Lise takes in little more than flashes of warm color and the reverberations of pounding boots. It all falls discordant on the cold horror creeping through her flesh like the roots of an ill seed. Denoda kneels beside he and procures a thick flask of water from his coat, holding it up for her to take. She hesitates but ends up drinking all of it, wincing at each swallow.
“Well…?” Navah stands back against the wall opposite the bed, crossing their arms and looking between the two of them. “We–”
“A moment.” The captain interrupts her, “Wait for my apprentice.”
Navah doesn’t look pleased but remains silent as the captain turns from them and rummages through an open-topped wooden crate. She comes up with a small mechanical device, holding it by what appears to be a long crank. Lise closes her eyes as the captain shakes the contraption, rattling loud in the small cabin. She slaps it down on her anchored desk, chuckling, “Yeah this should still work…”
Lise feels Denoda push off the side of the bed as he looks closer at the little thing. “What is that?”
“Shortcut!” She answers with an audible grin. She peers into one end of it before banging it on the desk again, peering into it again, finally setting it on the desk. As she searches the drawers of her desk, she explains, “Contraption I was gifted by a passenger by way of Basteca some days gone. Ah, here we are. This pellet goes inside here, I close it, and then I turn the spinnery thing until I feel it get hot. It makes a fragrant smoke, watch here…”
The door opens and in walks a wiry, pale-skinned man in a sleeveless blue shirt and baggy pants rolled up above his bare feet. Dark, receding hair hangs to his shoulders around a wispy beard. He closes the door behind him and stands there a moment with his arms hanging at his sides, quietly noting everyone in the room. He nods to them and speaks in a soft tone, “I am Siryl.” He turns to the captain, “Riding green?”
“Yessir! Our trouble awaits us on the other side.” The captain says to him and he looks at the device she cranks. Plumes of white smoke jet from holes around its top. He nods again and slowly lowers himself to sit against the door, closing his eyes. “Ah yes, good idea! Make yourselves comfortable before this thing does, you’ll wake with a lump on your fore. Quickly now!”
Navah looks between them, trying to wave away the heavy smoke. “What…?”
“It’s a sleep inducer of some sort. You should sit down.” Denoda gestures but it’s too late.
Navah stumbles, collapsing to their knees. “Ugh… I would appreciate–” The floor cuts them off, cheek smacking against the paint. “Buhh… sooner… next time.”
Denoda is the next to go under and the captain slumps into her chair shortly after—the contraption falling from her hanging hand, still spewing smoke. Siryl takes a deep breath and his head slowly lolls forward as he exhales. Lise lingers, pain prying her eyes back open after every blink. She can see its hollow fingers peeling them back by the lashes. She marvels as Pain turns to look down at her, peculiarly expressive despite the weightless shroud veiling its hideous visage. It tilts its head and she can’t find it in herself to loathe it as she had. She would rather stay here and have parley with Pain than risk facing The Shatterer again. The sleep inducer is too insistent to ignore. She takes a deep breath and Pain’s shape drifts back into the smoke.
‘…are you talking about? I can’t see more than little bits of light and darkness in this place.’
The captain leans over Lise, prodding at something near her stomach. ‘Fiend? Is this the problem here? More real than most fiends I seen. Odd little thing.’
‘Ah, no… that’s not…’ A miniature Pain stands on her stomach, stepping out of the way of the captain’s prodding fingers. She struggles to find an explanation and realizes she doesn’t have a good one, ‘Well, I don’t know what it is either… It’s not the most urgent problem though.’
‘Wouldn’t say it wise to leave it be, unknowing. But introduce us to whichever is worse than this.’ The captain helps Lise stand and during the motion catches Pain by its leg as it makes to leap from her lap. ‘Ah, not so sly as you figured little twit.’ She grips it round the middle and shakes it until it stops flailing, then grips it with her other hand and snaps off its bony legs. The captain grins and chucks the pieces of it into the corner, clapping Lise on the elbow. ‘Now then, the other thing?’
She looks around the small ship cabin, briefly meeting the eyes of each of the three near-strangers surrounding her, ending on Denoda who appears to be peering through the wall. ‘I must be careful, it listens to what I say and will try to assert itself over me. It has manipulated my memories in order to spur and steer me. But please, before I go on, can we go outside?’
Navah nods at that, ‘Yes, I am stifled in here.’
‘Makes little difference to me,’ Denoda chuckles. ‘Could someone show me out so I don’t look a fool finding the door?’
‘You really can’t see anything here, huh? What happened?’ The captain asks as she moves to lead him out.
‘Well… nothing happened. It’s just how it has always been for me.’ Denoda’s gentle voice is a peculiar comfort. It draws Lise back to her center, finding some balance over the flow of nerves. ‘Anyway, just set me somewhere I can sit down.’
Cutting through the viscous sea, Gramma’s Blessing is a beacon of color. The open, indistinct gray surrounding the ship is a waiting boon; a waiting bane. Lise hesitates, peering over the railing at the slowed roil of unreal waters. When she turns back everyone but Denoda is looking at her, expectantly. How do I even tell it without risking everything…? I can’t. I can’t tell it all. But I must tell, very least, what might be upon them… us… She rubs the nub of her lost pinky, trying to figure what she should say first when every passing word might lure it out from her.
She says simply, ‘Be ready.’
‘Ready how?’ Navah asks, their confused frown almost obscured by their cloth face-covering.
Lise takes a deep breath, bracing herself. ‘However you would ready yourself to face an unfathomable beast. The more we speak of it, the more we should anticipate it to strike.’
‘What do you mean by a hole in your mind?’ Navah asks, scratching through the cloth at the back of their neck.
Lise leans against the ship’s railing, uncrossing and recrossing her legs to get more comfortable. ‘Well, I don’t know how else to describe it. An opening to NON in the deeper recesses of my mind. The beast is hiding there—or was, until Denoda helped me frighten it off. I think it would have tried to stop me saying all this were it waiting there still.’
‘So, what, it is afraid of being discovered? If just observing it caused it to flee, that seems probable.’ Siryl remarks, his gaze on the ground. ‘Is that not a sign it is weak?’
Lise shakes her head, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I have felt its touch and it is not tender. It steers me like a cart-trained skoi. It hasn’t killed me but I believe it could have countless times. I don’t understand it.’
There are a few seconds silence as everyone chews over her explanation that is quick to be broken by the captain, ‘Sounds like a made-creature.’
‘Not any I’ve heard of, it sounds more like a fiend or some other phenomenon of the undermind.’ Navah says, waving a hand dismissively. ‘A made-creature without a maker nearby is like a doll with no child around to play with it. It has no will to move its own arms.’
‘What is a made-creature?’ Lise asks.
When no one else jumps up to explain, Siryl says, ‘It is a kind of puppet—made in the undermind—more than it is a doll. It is not easy to make one, and harder to maintain one. I don’t know, but I’ve never heard tell of a made-creature persisting beyond its creator’s purview. So unless you made it it shouldn’t be able to persist.’
‘If I made it, I do not know it.’ Lise says, but pauses, ‘…Does anyone here know of anything which could be said to stand in both circles?’
Navah glances around at the other three, ‘How do you mean?’
Lise hesitates again, ‘…Well, I don’t know what I mean exactly. It’s just occurring to me. Is there such a thing as a ‘made fiend’ or what I suppose I would describe as a fiend with a more complex intent behind it?’
‘Human intent, you mean.’ Siryl says, pondering it.
‘Sure.’ She allows, ‘I just mean it’s… Well, let me say this, usually fiends are ravenous, right? Feeding until they have nothing left to feed upon. The exceptions to this have been the fiends which have made connection with a dweller—their behavior was more peculiar, but ultimately had the same intent. This creature is pointing me—using whatever means it must, to make me go somewhere. It hasn’t killed me and I have reason to believe it has been with me since at least midday. What fiend, even those consuming a dweller, behaves like this?’
‘Yes, it’s no mere fiend.’ The captain accepts, ‘Nor merely a made-creature. I wonder how it would respond if I got hands on it.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say that should be the first thing we test. But since it’s striking me that we are in unexplored territory, testing it, feeling it out, is the only way forward. Other than tossing you, but the captain won’t have that.’ Siryl chuckles, glancing at the captain’s raised eyebrow. ‘It may be that nothing of note arises before we land in Keskane.’
‘Let’s hope not.’ Navah says, peering out at Lise from their heaping blue shawl.
‘Probable we can do more than hope.’ The captain declares, striding over and grasping Lise by the forearm. ‘Siryl and I will keep whatever spare eyes we have on you. That, in addition to this fellow with the ear for a mind, should be plenty scrutiny.’
The captain allows Lise to stay in her quarters a while longer as she works the ship. Denoda sits at her desk, humming to himself so gentle a tune. It sounds incongruous to the furious scritch-scratching of his pen, but finds harmony with the ship’s regular creaks and bellows. A loose latch on the hanging lantern clinks softly to set time. Upon waking, he’d muttered something about “not wanting to let it be lost” and got to scrawling and had to have written a half dozen pages already. Lise is relieved to have a respite from her terrors, time to rest and recover from her injuries—new, old, and older alike—with no pressing obligations other than to heal herself. The steady repetitions, rocking ship and soft music, lull her into a dreamy quarter-slumber.
Pain is muted by the warm haze enfolding her mind as she puffs a few off her pipe. She recalls the face of her sister and it appears to her as it had days ago—that evening they’d sat on the roof and cooked over the fire and watched the clouds roll over each other marbling purple and pink and orange in the twilight. Music and murmur rising from the streets below, wind caressing her bare face and arms, the smell of spiced meats and sweet roots; for a moment she is there again, blinking, looking to see Seli smile as she dances across the rooftop. Distracted from her cooking, transfixed with prong in hand, Lise is struck by a bout of terrible grief at the sight of her sister’s face. Pressure builds behind her eyes and it takes all of her focus to stifle the tears threatening to burst out. The feeling passes as she returns her attention to the food but she is left unsettled by the sudden onset of emotion whose source she can’t find. Even as she recalls it, Lise struggles to identify from where the grief had arisen. Had it been some semblance of prescience, perhaps? No… I… Why am I recalling this?
She yawns and the dream current draws at her, beckoning her into the deep of the subconscious river. Struggling to stay awake, she blinks back clouds from the edges of her vision and slowly sits up in the bed, the dream still dripping off her as heavy gray globs. Denoda is silent, she realizes, and looks up to find him sleeping with his arms crossed on the small desk—his soft, steady snore lost under the ship’s sounds. She stands and heads for the cabin door, careful not to wake him.
On the main deck, Lise finds the captain alone, scrubbing the deck boards with a dark-bristled, wooden brush. She glances toward the steer and sees one of the younger mates—a boy who still has the pudge of youth in his face—standing with his arms resting on the wheel. Turning back when she hears the captain chuckling, she can’t help but share a small smile with her in return.
Lifting her goggles, the captain nods at the boy, “I’ve got him doing the work of lesser import.”
“I will trust your judgement there.” Lise says, gingerly shimmying herself up onto the barrel.
“Must know where you stand when a storm is on the horizon. Best to be acquainted already, and to reacquaint regardless. My primary is to know this ship all the way around—part of that is partaking in the maintainery. Every board! Every crevice between them!” She laughs again, turning back to her scrubbing. Glancing up again just long enough to say, “Every thread in the sails I know by name! You see?”
“I think so.” She answers, feeling the coarse fibers of the coiled rope beneath her. “The floor is not promised.”
“That, it’s not. Got to check in with it. Show some care.”
Lise nods, “I am familiar with the idea, just not applied so proactively.”
“It is this, or the desperate scramble to hold the ship together when its already too late. I cannot rely on a floor but I can rely on my discipline to maintain it.”
The sea is gentle this hour, the ship hardly rocking. A mild breeze tugs at Lise’s matted hair, her skin dimpling—scars faintly itching beneath the pain. The smell of sea water is peculiar to her and she has a hard time imagining living out here long. There is something else in these waters. It is too big, too deep. Whatever creatures live in this foul liquid masquerading as water must be of different make than her land-forlorn self. That the captain seems so well-adapted to it is somewhat of a marvel.
Lise splits the stretching silence, “Captain, why are you out here? Out here on this boat, on this sea?”
The captain glances at her, raising an eyebrow, amused, “I live here!”
Lise can’t help a grin. “No, no. What I mean is, what are you doing out here?”
“I just said, I live here!”
“Yes, but I’m just trying to understand…” She gestures, trying to figure out how to ask what she wants to know.
Before Lise finds the words, the captain counters, “Well, where do you live?”
Letting go her original intent, she answers, “I… I would still call Opis Luma home. But I don’t know that have anything to return to there. As far as I know, everyone there is dead now. But for one woman, and I don’t imagine she’ll be awaiting my return… Well, not to welcome me home, anyway.”
“Hm. Never been there.”
“You’d have a hard time getting there by ship.”
The captain laughs, “Right. But you were born there, grew there?”
“But for a couple days.”
“It is the same with me.”
Lise sits up straighter, realizing the captain had answered the question she’d been unable to ask. “Oh…” She grasps it, “This ship?”
The captain does a somersault and stands, appearing little taller than she’d looked kneeling. “Gramma’s Blessing isn’t the same ship she’s always been, but for our understanding, yes. I was the child of the crew of my old captain and I have lived most my days here.”
“How did you become the captain?”
“It was just what was right.” She replies, setting the scrub brush in a wooden bucket with other cleaning supplies. She hops up on the barrel beside Lise. “My captain passed it on to me when she was too old to captain the ship. By then my parents had long gone their own ways, and I was raised to it. My captain was wise and she prepared me well in the days prior to her relinquishment. She meant for me to be the better captain, as her captain had her be.”
“I can understand that…” Lise says, thinking around for the right question. She again falls somewhat short there, “I suppose, I am now wondering what makes the dedication to this life on the sea worthwhile.”
“I told you: I live here. Dedication? Nothing of that is necessary. I live here, I make a life here the way one makes a life anywhere they call home.”
Lise takes a slow breath. “You’re right. Forgive me, I’m grappling with feelings of being unmoored from my own life, my home.”
The captain turns to her and meets her eyes, hearing her words serious. “I can see that in you—your unmooring. When I look upon you in the undermind, I see flashes of a past self—flashes of a half-self shattered.”
She nods and clears her throat, swallowing the sudden urge to sob, “I… ”
Black shape waiting. A talon pierces her breast before she can take her next breath and she chokes as more pain lances down her arm. Stiffening suddenly, the ship seems to roll her off the barrel and she falls on her side. The captain leaps up to help her but its too late. Lise hears a tone that cleaves her mind into many parts and is lost to herself. She doesn’t black out so much as becomes unable to function in any meaningful way. Sensations detached, her thoughts divided, emotions isolated. She lies there, utterly incapable, as her fragmented minds race apart. Unable to comprehend. The Shatterer has her grasped.
A part of her still sees out her eyes, but she can do nothing but see. What she sees she cannot say, for another part of her has her lips—another: her words. The part of her that puts things together is isolated in the dark, far from the light beaming through her eyes, nothing given to put together. Where is me? What farce beholds me?
The part of her that tracks the time is lost from her hands, from the moon. She doesn’t know how long it has been, but it feels as though whole quarters must have passed over her. Underground, trying to discern the weather above. Not much she can glean from nothing, but trying at it is all this part of her can do. Much more of this and all her parts will down and wither away—just sinking into the void between her fragments. The part of her which despairs will be the first to go. It wants to be done already. It’s so tired. She just wants to sleep. It is at this exact moment (or so it feels to her) that something touches her mind. A few walls fall and some pieces of her come back together. The part of Lise which remembers, remembers.
Holding a hand to her forehead, pulling the blanket tighter in the other, she begins walking. She knows to where she goes. Death need not draw at her for every Fool walks toward it regardless. To death, she walks knowing—if not what path she treads—to what end she goes in the name of. All she can know—from nothing—is that end. The only end.
The Home of Silence is as a hole into the void the way it is cast against the starlit sky. Dread puts a knot in her chest as the structure seems to swell and swallows every light in the world. She can do nothing but go as she came. Stepping through its porthole, she is transfixed by the near perfect dark within. So near perfect that it permeates her, suffusing her with a strange sense for the unreal. One step and her legs crumple. On her knees, her hands come unclasped from her blanket and she stares into the silence, arms quaking by her sides as the first fold is peeled back. Her first glimpse of NON.
There is the sound of beads rattling and clothed footsteps. From the void does Quin step and take hold of Lise’s nape. Her firm grip directs Lise to her feet, tugging at her skull. The original purpose of her coming here is lost to her now. She stands and walks deeper into the dark, pressing further than her courage alone would permit. They walk and walk—cycles must be passing for how long they have walked into the dark. She can almost feel the subtle tug of the moon moving around her as it orbits Komalle. When Quin finally halts her beneath the black sphere she is in a trance. She complies in silence as her mother bids her lay down, head positioned directly below the sphere. It is so dark everything is indistinguishable and yet she can make out distinctly the different tones of black coloring the shapes against the deeper dark beyond.
Quin stands behind her head, posed with arms outstretched. Gradually, the sphere begins to turn over, steadily increasing in speed. It emanates a low tone which goes a little higher with each revolution until it is a piercing ring. Lise lies there as it pierces her right through the center of her forehead. A line of void finer than a hair penetrates her skull and runs between the hemispheres. The sphere stops in place instantly without recoil. A hole into darkness so small as to be imperceptible is her mother’s gift. Lise is given to NON.
Lise gasps as suddenly she is returned to herself. The impact as her parts fall back together leaves her stunned for a moment, a heavy throb emanating from a point in the center of her head. She starts to weep before she can realize for what she cries. Gasping for air as she recollects. Oh no… Oh no… The pain is excruciating but she can’t stop sobbing—even as she staggers to her feet, she struggles to dam the flow. Leaning against the wall she clutches her throat as she gags and dry heaves. Not even bile arises. Her mouth is dry, too—no saliva as would normally accompany such brutal nausea. She collapses against the wall beside her hammock; crying still, though she realizes now that no tears spill down her face. What a grotesque sight she must be, she thinks, as she tries desperately to turn away from the thing that disfigures her face.
Her innermost fears confirmed: Quin had given her to NON. Why? WHY? WHY, MOMMA, WHY? A realization that tears her open and keeps on tearing. Even returned to herself she cannot comprehend it. Why did she subject her to NON? Why not Seli? Why at all? What is The Shatterer? Why had it come to her, why had it made her kill her own mother by the expiatory flame? She can’t answer any of the questions and a deathly mood falls over her as she claws her way back up the wall, chest shrieking in protest as she strains for every breath. As she stands, swaying until she grabs the roof beam for balance, she finds herself overcome by volatile anger towards the beast holding her reins—a heat quickly tempered by her severe dehydration. The Shatterer is a less pressing adversary than her own body.
She doesn’t make it more than a few strides, staggering between the empty hammocks, before she nearly collapses again—saved much pain by a wooden support keeping her from the floor. Her thirst nags at her so viciously that she doesn’t allow herself a breather, if she waits she’ll… but she feels on the verge of…
What happened? What happened? She lifts her face off the deck, bewildered by a glimpse of stars. As she climbs to her feet, barely keeping upright, she turns around. Somehow she’d made it up the stairs. Wobbling, she steps back and tries to take measure of her surroundings. Water…? Where’s water…? She stumbles toward the captain's quarters and enters without announcing herself—more falling than walking into the room. There’s a full basin right there. Right there. Squeaking and grunting at the pain as she pushes off the floor. The body lying still in the bed is of secondary, even tertiary, concern.
Lise’s better sense doesn’t keep her from dunking straight into the tub and gulping from the sweet water. So sweet as to be sickening. She sucks at it until she feels burning in her lungs. Her stomach is uncomfortably full when she comes back up, gasping for air, and it isn’t long before most of the water comes back up too. From nostrils and mouth all, it bursts out of her—spraying, spewing, dribbling, dripping, coughing and crying out. Hovering over the basin, staring at the rippling silhouette she casts in it as she spits up more water and mucus.
She slumps down, forehead resting on the smooth rim. Hearing footsteps, she thinks to look but can’t bring herself to lift her head. They stop beside her and she feels a pair of strong hands grip under her arm and drag her to her feet before she can protest. Writhing out of the grasp, she turns to find the captain’s apprentice looking at her with dark eyes. “Siryl?!” She steps back.
“No.” His voice is flat as his expression. “No more. Come.”
The words to describe it escape her but a sinking feeling settles in as she starts to grasp what is happening. The captain is laying in her bed, and as she approaches her Lise dreads to find her cold and lifeless. Kneeling beside her, she gasps and lets out a sound she didn’t know she had in her as the sudden relief floods her. “Thank the land…” Her small palm is warm to the touch and her chest faintly rises. She lingers there a moment, struggling to recover herself after the whiplash.
“Come. Those will live.”
Lise releases the captain’s hand and it falls limp to the bed; she stands and turns to face The Shatterer’s new (second) hand. There is nothing of the man behind the eyes, just darkness. No menace, but a supreme coldness in the stare he keeps trained on her own. “Come where?”
“Come.” The man promptly turns and strides out the captain’s quarters.
As she stumbles after him, she falters and stops in the doorway, noticing something else is wrong. The ship is still—although the crash of waves yet reaches her, the ship does not rock beneath her feet. And as she takes another step she feels that the floor is tilted slightly to her right. To her left, as she looks beyond the ship’s rail to see waves catching the moon’s shedded silver, the open sea is the horizon. To her right, some thirty or fifty paces from the ship, is a stark cliff-face rising up and up, obscuring the moon. Its shadowed face stretches so high it blends with the night sky, leaving Lise dizzy as she tries to make out its top. Only the lack of stars in the dark lends her a sense of its edge.
“Come.” He stands at the top of the ramp and turns without waiting for a response.
Lise shudders as sea spray peppers her back, moisture leaving the boards slick beneath her boots. “Where are–” She gasps as her foot slips an inch before stopping on the ramp’s next catch. “–we?” The ramp leads down to a beach of black stone. She can hardly make out the individual rocks in the cliff’s shadow except for the odd, jutting boulder—still, she can make out the peril in this place.
The silhouette of the man waits for her atop a rock, already twenty feet away. “Come.”
Water flushes in around her feet as waves crash against the ship and the reality of all this finally hits her. I can’t… “I can’t… I…” She steps backward, her boot tripping on the wrong side of the catch, and falls on her backside. She grunts at the pain and turns over, climbing back up the ramp on her knees. Trembling with emotion, she stops part way up, clutching the sides of the ramp as throbs of panic send hot pain in spikes down her back and arms. “Oh land… take me back…” She blinks away flecks of seawater and manages to pull herself back onto the ship, gasping and trying to suppress her breathing at the same time as her chest burns with unbearable fire.
Lise stumbles toward the stairs leading below deck, stopping at the mast for balance and another breath. She half-walks, half-falls the first few steps and barely catches the stair-railing before she tumbles down into the dark. Sitting gingerly, she scoots down the remaining steps one-by-one, only standing again when her feet reach the floor. The lantern is out but she hears its faint rattle as another wave hits the beached ship. She hesitates, gripping the end of the rail tightly.
“...Denoda? Denoda...?” She blinks, trying to see anything through the dark. “Navah…?”
There is no response. Only the ship and the sea parley here. Her eyes never grace them but she finds them with her fingers, reaching out for them in the dark with tremulous arms. Navah is the first she feels—their cloth wrap coarse to the touch. Like the captain, Navah’s curled palm holds warmth; Denoda’s too; her great unease at their unresponsiveness is, by a small increment, offset by their quiet breathing. The Shatterer’s hold on her is tight as ever. The unspoken threat pressing at her: obey or I will take away your reason to defy me. She glances back to the stairs, eyes tracking up the steps to the silhouette now standing against the stars. Waiting, imperious, peering down at her through Siryl’s shadowed eyes.
Before it can say it again, she speaks, “Wait! Wait, I need to prepare to leave! Please!” Without waiting for an answer she starts scrambling around in the dark on her hands and knees, searching for her belongings and for the rations they’d brought aboard. “I’m coming, I’m coming! Don’t do it!” She stuffs her near-untouched portion into a loose sack and crawls toward the stairs, using the wooden pillar to stand once she’s out from under her empty hammock. It promptly turns and walks back to the right when it sees that she is following once more.
By the time she’s back on deck it has already taken up position on the beach again, waiting. Watching as she makes her way down the ramp, slow and excruciating, then probing around with her foot for the first stable stone to stand on. Realizing she needs both hands free, she stops to tuck the sack filled with her belongings into the front of her shirt and winces as the rough material grazes her scars. She tucks her shirt in around the sack, securing it, then pulls her coat closed. She hesitates, hands tracing the edge of the nearest stone. The cliff’s shadow had lent her a sorry hope that they weren’t as sharp as her eyes said. Land… please don’t let me slip—and if I do, let this sack take the blow of these treacherous rocks.
Her hands are scraped up and aching from clutching the edges of the rocks after just a few steps off the ramp but it hardly registers to her set against the searing pain in her gut. Even in the cold, sweat beads up on her forehead as she strains to find the next secure step. I’m really going to die this time… She tries to shake the thought but the feeling is more stubborn. Resting her knees against an edge sharp enough it would have cut her bare skin, she finds herself overwhelmed by all the pain. No longer breathing as her mind becomes transfixed on the dark—she can’t bring herself to move, nor can she allow herself to remain. Without turning to look at it, she lingers on the ship; the people it holds. This is happening too quickly… I can’t… A sob slips out of her and she suppresses the second following close behind. Please don’t resent me… land, I deserve your resentment far more than you deserve this…
She only manages to move when the pain of the edge at her kneecaps crests the peak of her pain and keeps climbing. Setting her hand on the next rock, she feels something hard move under her palm. A creature of some kind squirms out from under and she cringes at the sensation as it crawls over her fingers. Cold and hard like the stones it calls home—its many legs skittering over her skin sharp like spines. The figure of Siryl is barely discernible to her, allowing her to look past him at the thing occupying his body instead of his tragic face. A flash of resentment burns the rest of her wick. Staring at The Shatterer, struggling against the exhaustion of her spirit, she thinks, Would you leave them be if I just died here…?
“Seli.” The name said in a monotone is near unrecognizable to her—as though all the color had been sapped from her face. From the dark shape, “Seli. Come.”
Silver light creeps across her as she stands still, staring. The moon is half-full when it is fully visible, its cold reflection alighting the stone beach delicately. “Seli…?”
A palm-sized cretin with a glossy black shell rests in a divot in the rock Lise uses to steady herself and she hopes it doesn’t scrabble out to attack her in some way. She supposes that, given the one she’d touched by accident earlier had only scurried away, they might be rather harmless so long as she doesn’t stick her finger in its maw—wherever its maw might be. Its insectile legs slowly flex and two small arms catch the moonlight as it rubs them against each other making a soft, rhythmic rasp. She lingers on it just long enough to make sure she is out of its reach, then, trembling, clambers over the next jagged stone. Her fingers are near numb from the cold but she still feels a deep ache in them as they search senseless into a crevice and secure there, and allow her to leverage herself up and over edged rock after jagged stone. She collapses onto the dry, smoothed slate, pained and exhausted.
As she slowly stands, she gazes out at the sea, hoping to see the tide rising around Gramma’s Blessing while she has been laboring to reach stable ground. Anything to give her have some solace that, in isolating her, The Shatterer hadn’t assured her poor companions a poorer end. The water rolls around the ship, hard to see now that Komalle’s shadow veils more than half of the moon’s face—and she finds no certainty no matter how long she stands staring, squinting at the ship, searching. Terrible dubiety is all that stirs in the huge hollow of dread in her chest. Seli… I…
I need to save you, Seli… This needs to be worth something. For my sanity, land, I beg…
Shrugging her small sack of belongings over her shoulder, Lise turns from her few fellows and seeks out The Shatterer awaiting her in the shade of an odd crook at the base of the cliff-face. She follows it into the dark, stopping after a couple steps to pull out her sack to search for her flick-lighter. The small fire dances a moment and goes out, the strange cave blowing warm, sickly-scented air in her face. She tries it again and it doesn’t dance even a moment before dying this time.
“Come, Lise.” Says the voice in the dark, her name echoing surreal. “Come.”
She hesitates at the entrance, sliding her lighter into her coat pocket, but gradually finds herself following, stepping slowly into the cave. Holding her free arm out to catch her in case she is about to walk into a wall, she feels out the floor of the cavern one step at a time. Tripping in a dip in the ground, she stumbles forward and lands hard on her knees, sharp pain shooting up her right thigh. She cries out, holding her leg as the pain rolls through. It doesn’t quite cease but seems to ease somewhat, and once it’s ceased easing she starts to crawl, searching for a wall to brace herself on. She never finds anything but more floor. She rises on an uneven slope upward, but there is nothing in reach that is so steep it can be leaned on. There are no walls nearby in any direction but it feels cramped all the same. Sweat tickles on her brow and the tip of her nose, itching awful as it rolls down her ribs. She crawls over the hard slate, gulping for air. The warm breath of the cave is uncomfortable and its stench has her swallowing a flow of saliva as she succumbs to nausea. It is a relief to find the clammy, cold skin of Siryl’s bare ankles. The Shatterer pulls her to her feet using his body and presses her onward, pressing even when she begins to protest. When she staggers it grips her shoulder and directs her further into the cliff’s unfathomable maw; when she falls it lifts her up by her armpits and holds her aloft until she gets her strength back; when she falls again it lifts her up by her armpits, but she never gets her strength back, her sack finally slipping from her grasp. Feebly trying to stand, she collapses back against Siryl’s chest and it gives up on urging her forward and grabs her under the legs and lifts her. The last thing she senses is the sound of her own labored breaths throbbing hotly in her head and the thrust of The Shatterer’s inhuman stride beneath. She is overcome by the heat.
The dream current sucks her down below the undermind before she has the wherewithal to resist it. Thoughts of Seli give way to visions, glimpses of her sister fleeing… fleeing… falling. Crawling, crying out for help, but ever she weakens. Lise can do little but bear witness as her sister is overtaken by her pursuer, held down, face sinking into the soft soil. Slipping down, the current draws her from Seli and sets her beside Akota. He is walking… walking… but something is wrong. He leans more to his side after every stride, his right arm hanging heavy with a coat of thick tar. Gobs of dark sludge slide down and drip off him in handfuls. She is pulled away again before she can make some sense of what she sees.
She drifts on, tumbling through half-realized presents and splintered memories. Seli smiling and dancing on the roof in the sweet pink light one cool eventide. The captain rousing in her bed, soon to discover the troubles set upon her. Rese leaning on her shoulder as she helps him home after she retrieved him from the floor of his friend’s home, the odor of ferment emanating from him. She takes a blow, falling to her floor—he screams incomprehensible at her, holding the offending piece of paper out in a raging grip—the blow sends her crashing through the floor and into deep, deep dark. The feeling of her mothers hands on her, holding her, is what suddenly halts her fall. She is placed down on the soft, indefinite gray of the wild undermind. Before her stands a tenebrous figure, from every angle a disparate silhouette, the only semblance of the man it occupies found in its odd, extended limbs.
‘Where…?’ Lise looks around, tripping over herself in the sucking gray muck as she tries to make out anything identifiable in the thick. Struggling to construct a sturdy floor beneath herself, she calls to the shape, ‘Where are we? Why have you brought me here?’
The voice it uses to answer is sharp, playing at the edges of her ability to discern. ‘Follow. First, follow. No answers here.’ It vanishes from sight and instantly reappears high in the sky, hanging over a hill in the distance.
It watches, waiting, as she stumbles into the softness. A few more steps she trudges through the gray before she is able to shake off some of her disorientation. The ground beneath her feet gradually hardens and it becomes easier to walk as she imagines the stiff stone she’s just been acquainted with. A black slate path stretches out before her and so stretches her stride. She finds some fragment of confidence to hold to in the familiar motion. It is a brief, sorry relief to run here, feeling her legs flex and release uninhibited by her real injuries. Too brief, too brief—a journey worth cycles crossed in seconds, it feels, as the slate slowly slopes up the hill. When she stands beneath The Shatterer, she wishes she could just run into the distance, crest the horizon, and keep on going… keep on going… gone.
Lise looks to the dark shape above her, unable to look for long, and turns then to survey the landscape. Blinking hard, trying to make out anything distinct in the wild gray, she has a glimpse of vague, cloudy formations in the distance to her right—the vaguest impression of a forest, perhaps. Straight ahead and a little to the left she catches sight of something more solid. A clearing in what appears to be a field of spindly, flowering plants. A small formation of stones forms an odd array surrounding a spot of white, the purpose of which no amount of squinting assists her in apprehending.
‘There. She left it for you.’
‘What is it? Where is Seli?’
‘Go. Seli there.’
She can feel its prodding round her mind, its pressing and poking at her tender spots to provoke her to move. In a moment of wordless epiphany, Lise realizes it has no idea where Seli is in truth. It stuns her, being able to sense so clearly what The Shatterer is doing. She turns and looks directly at it, and sees the dark tendrils connected to her head. What… She reaches up. It peels off so easy, like cobwebs clinging to her curls.
‘What are you doing? What is this? Is this some mistake? That was so pathetic of you… I… I can’t…’ Lise falls to her back, falling into the soft gray. Something beyond sorrow, beyond grief—a sudden, horrible panic flashes through her and leaves in its wake a paralytic dread; the thought that this creature had misled her from saving Seli coupled with the sense that something had just overcome her and she is somewhere out there feeling trapped and terrified. She can see The Shatterer swell slightly in response to her words. The hole in her head opens up and she feels desolate, beautiful NON offer her repose. ‘What have you done? You’ve ruined me, for what? Reveal to me where freedom is chained! Where is Seli?!’
Lise’s mind is hazed by the dense, steaming heat in the heart of her chest, its pressure heaving higher with every billowing breath she takes. Tears simmer off her cheeks as she feels Seli’s loss aching in her every bone. The cloth on her abdomen blackens and singes to scrap around her hideous, blue-silver scar. Her flesh churns beneath the skin, bubbling up like a covered pot until it bursts with vicious force. A gout of boiling gore is slung from her chest and The Shatterer shrieks a piercing note as it tries to shake the molten liquid from its impossible forms, sending droplets cascading down the gray, but it can’t shake the fire that follows it. Lise is already a cracked husk when the expiatory flame first sears the gore to The Shatterer’s face, then, as it focuses, bores a burning hole straight through. Only when it gutters out and she is a cold, blackened body of bones and baked-on skin, does its plea ring loud enough to rise above the odium thrashing her ear drums.
‘NO! YOU’LL HAVE HER DIE!’
The wounded creature darts down toward her and scrambles into her head, its own terror palpable to Lise as it slips through her mind and into the waiting void. Its dire state is evident in its panic and, were she not in a similar state, she might have been able to catch it and wring out the rest of her truth—but by the time she manages to make a semblance of recovery she is spent and fading fast. She can hardly articulate her fingers, and her reformed organs and arteries are exposed where her flesh is slow to heal. The soft gray sucks her down and she slips into the undertow while she’s still vulnerable to the dream current’s fierce buffeting and dragging. All she can do is try to hold herself together until she finally wakes from this horror. The Shatterer’s piercing tone is stuck in her and cuts deep as she is tossed and turned by the current; it presses on the sharp, fragmented memory of placing her mother in that cart and watching her go under the astral lenses. Insisting on carving deeper into the pain, insisting she weeps to feel the burning her mother must have felt as she was awoken to a blistering heat, flash, and immediate death. Lise weeps heavy, ink-dark tears. Mother…
Lise gasps, clutching her stomach, trying to hold all her organs in—only to find her tender scars beneath the soft shirt and coat Denoda had given her. She breathes a sigh of relief that she isn’t dead yet, knowing it likely to be the only semblance of relief she’ll feel for a while… ever again, even. The permanent dread is still there, lurking, waiting as her excitement fades and she is forced to face her present circumstance. Pain had already greeted her before she opened her eyes, but as she struggles to rise it makes itself more familiar. Her back aches as she twists, lethargic, to her left side and tries to push herself up with her free arm and leg. Cold, dried-out moss scrapes off the stone under her boot and it slips a bit before catching and she manages to get her unhindered knee under her to kneel more comfortably. Her breaths come in with a whistle as she heaves and coughs and coughs, the taste of that foul cave coming out with her phlegm, before she finally manages to catch her breath and blink the tears and blear from her eyes. Lingering there before she stands, breathing slow—her breaths coming clearer (but not clear)—she looks around.
Brittle, ashen trees cling to life in the crags of treacherous, moss-coated slate. There’s no sign of the cave The Shatterer had brought her through, nor sight, sound or smell of the sea. The stone beneath the moss and muck is the same but everything else—even the air around her—feels strange. Where…? How far did it carry me? What did it do with him? She looks about for something to indicate what became of Siryl, but it's hard to make anything out using starlight alone. Her sack of supplies isn’t in the immediate area either and she feels a moment’s hopelessness, then she recalls that she put her lighter in her coat pocket and pulls it out. Holding it in a vice grip, she holds her breath as she flicks it alight.
The feeble fire’s glow isn’t enough to reveal much more than a few steps around her, but that’s all she needs to find her way. There are obvious tracks left in the soft moss and mud, leading her on an awkward, winding trail through the trees and around the jutting edges of stones levered up by whim of the land. It is hard to make out what is deep mud and what is firm ground beneath the thick cake of dead moss. Careful, she manages to follow his steps out of the odd hollow and the ground starts to level out somewhat. There is a large slab of stone that offers her a reprieve from the rough terrain. Prints of dark muck dragged haphazard across it show Siryl’s path, leading into the deeper bog beyond it.
Lise sits and catches her breath. Slipping her lighter back into her pocket, she starts lacing her boots tighter. She struggles to keep her circumstances at arms reach, reality threatening to prevail. Death overcoming life. NON overcoming Lise. Akota’s old adage is all that offers her the semblance of balance. Grabbing a nearby fallen branch, she snaps off the few twiggy remnants lining it. “Self-abasement is a detriment, self-abasement is a detriment…” She murmurs to herself, stopping to hold her breath as she steps into the frigid bog. In a few steps, the muck is already up to her knees. I need to find him… Soon… Death is near, and nearer otherwise. For both of us…
Using the stick to test her path, she wades into the glutinous murk. It is looser, more watery as it comes up to her waist. She can feel it creeping into her boots, seeping into her socks, despite her efforts to prevent that. Holding out the fragile, flickering light ahead of her, she hardly blinks lest she lose the path Siryl had taken. It is harder to follow now, the mossy layer broken in many places by the gradual roll of the heavy mud beneath it. The stick gives her some warning of several deep crevices in the slate below the mud and her growing sense for the peril of this place keeps her oscillating between frantic motion and near deathly stillness. Siryl’s path is almost lost to her when she is up to her scarred stomach in mud. Ahead of her, the mud is visibly flowing—and even when she leans forward her stick doesn’t touch down. She stashes her lighter in her pocket, trying her best to fold the pocket in on itself to better secure it in there. Not allowing her fears to fully form into thoughts she can react to is all she can do to keep herself from freezing up. No thoughts of what creatures may lurk, no thoughts of the mud swallowing her, no pain paralyzing her, no thoughts of Seli slowly dying, her mother, Akota, Rese, The Shatterer—just survive… just survive.
There is no path to follow now, no moss atop the boggy river. Swimming here is nothing like the streams at home, there is little splash when she kicks and the stroke of her arms hardly moves her. It would be a strain to pull herself through it at her heartiest—as is, she is moved more by the slow churn of the mud rolling around her than by her feeble efforts. As she reaches the center, where the mud moves fastest, she struggles to do much more than keep her head up. She finds herself caught up in the current. Clutching her scum-coated stick, she rolls onto her back and pleads silently for the land not to take her under. Recalling what the captain said to her, feeling it reflected literally here, she wishes she could be back on the boat. NON is open to her but she fears never coming back up from it. She’s been somewhat fortunate recently, insofar as her stases have been relatively brief, but she has little control over that; she can’t rely on NON as escape, no matter how often her urge to treat it as escape tugs at her. Even as mud slides up around her neck, soaking through even her most matted hair, she resists NON’s draw.
Silence prevails as mud fills in her ears. She can feel it creeping up her cheeks, cresting her chin, kissing the corners of her mouth—she breathes even as it starts to spill in, holding on until the very last, spitting bitter. NON is her last resort, and as she is fully submerged, it yawns wider, wider… She holds her breath. Still holding her stick close, she is overturned by the current; it pushes her over and over slow and steady, and as her lungs begin to ache and burn for breath she reaches out. Her stick catches, ending her tumbling somersault, and she is briefly levered upward. Not enough to breach the surface. Glimmers light the insides of her eyelids as she thrusts the stick down, securing it between her boots. She somersaults and the stick catches again and she slowly pushes off, keeping the stick held as she strokes her arms, pushing toward the surface. She feels the weight of the mud slough off her head and for a moment, as she opens wide, she takes breath. Half her breath is stifled as muck fills her mouth and she is dragged back below. Another revolution and she positions herself to push off the stick again. She feels it catch and kicks off, swimming against pain and pressure, already spitting to clear her mouth as she surfaces.
The cold night air fills her lungs and her body trembles with it. She is slower to sink this time and gets another two half-breaths in before going below. Her panic recedes as she finds herself falling into a functional rhythm. She curls in on herself, letting the muddy water turn her over as she carefully secures the stick between her boots. Unfurling once she feels the land is below her, she reaches out and the stick slips across ground and she can’t push off it. Bad angle. She curls in again and lets herself be turned by the current. This time the stick catches and she is able to surface for another breath.
Lise has no idea where she is now—she hadn’t had a great sense for it prior to tumbling through a river of mud but now she is blind and deaf, and can move only to seek out the next breath or two. The river moves her along and she is given to allow it; she could have turned from its path when it reached only to the bottom of her breastbone but to try swimming against it now would only lead her to an earlier end. The fool I am perpetuates me here… She resists the urge to scold herself for walking willfully into this inevitable current. Pushing off her stick again for another breath, she sinks back down. Akota, had you not imparted so much of your blighted sanity on me I could have simply ceased. Instead I survive… for now... spinning through this current—the fool in every sense. And to what end? The same.
Lise fixes the stick between her boots again, pushes off the river-bottom, and persists one, two breaths more, then back under. Land, even I could spare a laugh to see myself now.
As she revolves over and over, the mud river loosens and she eventually finds she can simply wade with her head above the water. She drifts along—hardly able to move now for the pain in her abdomen and the weakness in her limbs. The water is colder than the mud, but she trembles more for the pain of the sustained exertion. Ceasing her struggle, she simply floats, barely breathing, and her legs slowly drift up until she’s laying on her back on the surface. She doesn’t think, she merges with the river and becomes with the cold, sharp flow. Her skin stings. Blinking away murky water, she sights a splinter of the moon shining down through the barren gray boughs of strange trees. The spearing thrust of a million star points pierce beyond her burnished lenses, shining so deep into her NON’s end is graced by the delicate silver light.
I’ll not be around to see my next birth cycle. Lise feels assured of little else. The water is so cold she can’t bear it but she drifts along, taking shallow, quivering breaths, even as the skin around her puckered scars tightens painfully. Silvery-blue scars, swollen, inflamed—she can imagine feeling them burst and spray out some horrid, miasmic fluid. Her imagining of its feeling is primarily based on the expiatory flame erupting from her chest, taking some influence from the overwhelming cold creeping into her bones; she feels the fluid freeze into sharp crystals and blow her body apart as it leaves her. What would it be like to come apart and just float away? She is too withered to weep.
Lise’s boot catches on something and it sets her spinning, she is startled by it but slow to react, reaching out with her stick. There’s solid ground right beneath her, less than half as deep as it had been last she checked. She struggles to get her bearings, too weak to stand upright in the current though the water is only up to her ribs. The chill makes every movement more excruciating. Her aching skin sliding and stretching over her body is palpable as she tries feebly to fight the current. She ends up floating face-first downstream, the tips of her boots dragging on the hard stone, trying to find purchase with the stick. When it does catch, the river pulls her slowly over it, flipping her onto her back again.
Gasping, she strains against the darkness encroaching on her mind. Hands clutching her stick in pale-knuckled grip, she can almost feel her hands on her axe again and the thought lends her a curious whiff of comfort before the cold finally overcomes her efforts. Her opening to NON yawns wide and she slides down and doesn’t attempt to catch the edge and slips right through. Eyes wide, her body freezes perfectly still, a rictus of pain twisting her face. Before Lise becomes NON she glimpses the branches of crystalline trees through the gap and out her eyes—and there, at the boundary of her mind, the tarnished shape of The Shatterer cowers away from her. There is nothing after that. Nothing but NON.
A fine point of deep blue light slowly streaks into NON. It is gentle, barely brighter than the nigh impenetrable dark, and softly alights Lise’s dashed and scattered ego. The light draws at what parts of her remain, pulling her along as a strange, visceral comet—the greater mass of her most integral components trailed by an array of fragments and finer particles—and sucks her out of the dispersive void.
It is her integral self that sloughs onto the frozen floor of her mind first, the rest slow to follow. Lise is already shivering from the fearsome cold before she makes sense of anything, her tender skin tight and burning. She lets out an involuntary noise; a guttural howl that comes out as something worse than a scream. The sound frightens her awake and she starts to scramble, frantic for reasons she is just barely realizing.
Frost crusting her skin cracks and comes off in flakes as she moves. Her clothing has frozen to her body and only the leather coat has any flex to it; movement made excruciating by the sharp crystals scraping into her scars. She gasps, so cold her skin feels it as fire. Blinking away slow-melting ice she searches desperately for where she is, for what could save her from this terrible cold. A thin layer of frozen earth covers soft mud. Struggling to stand from the sucking mud, she manages a step up onto the icy layer which holds until she puts her weight on it, causing her to fall forward. Her landing is rough, hitting the hard top of the mud and sliding a few inches across it. She can’t keep in the whimpering as the cold creeps deeper into her, dry-sobbing and quaking as she crawls feebly over the frozen mud. The pain is impossible to bear much longer, but she feels death striding surely behind her, ever nearer. Ever nearer… the only end.
Fire… I need fire! Land, grace me… Lise crawls from the frozen mud onto drier, softer soil, though its surface is still crusted with flakes of ice. Sharp twigs and jagged stones make themselves known to her as she crawls into a grove of knobbly gray trees, no longer able to make her body stand upright. Groaning, she rolls over, scrambling for the flick-lighter in her coat. The pocket had remained tucked in tight around it and she has some difficulty digging her trembling fingers into the fold. Some moisture had soaked through but the lighter still feels partially dry to the touch—she shakes it to free any water that might be in the mechanism. Struggling into a sitting position, she starts flicking the lighter. Please… Land… Not even a spark. The dark grows ever heavier for the absence; it presses her down on the tree’s roots, and she can do naught but sprawl there, feeling her final failure looming. It’s… too hot… The cold burns terribly. Pinching shut her eyes she feels the building pressure of unsheddable tears throbbing in her cheeks and brow. Please… I can’t… I don’t want to let go… there is… there is more I must do… mustn’t leave undone… plea…
Lise opens her eyes to the horror, the wonder, the supreme silence of a sleeping universe. The stars stare back at her and see nothing, say nothing. She feels hot tears streak down her cheeks and coughs an excruciating laugh, and a second, not really knowing what she laughs for. She laughs and weeps, and feels immense sadness and the smallest, slightest joy at the marvelous night sky. The beauty before her is overwhelming and strikes through even this deathly moment. She weeps and laughs and coughs up fluid and muck. Death will welcome her back to its embrace, she knows this as she knows NON. At the foot of some gangly, gray tree is as fitting a place as any she can imagine for herself now. I’m sorry… Numbing to the cold, she finds some silence of mind in the thought of being the tree itself. It’s… alright…
Something rumbles nearby, disturbing her from her death. No, no… let me go… Unwelcome salvation or the fool’s last folly—she knows her choice before she makes it, she cannot allow herself to resign to a complacent death. She will be the fool to the end. Her eyes are harder to open this time and, at first, she is still sightless despite opening them. Then, creeping into the darkness, the very light that had just drawn her from NON. Deep blue like beams shining through the sapphirine dome over The Dwelling, the light hits her tender eyes so gentle. She finds herself slowly rising to seek it out, shrugging off the weight of her coat. Moving feels strange, unreal. She can see her legs stumbling along beneath her but she can’t feel anything, not even the trees she leans against. Even the sound of her heavy boots crushing through the freeze-brittled twigs and roots is distant, as though she has her hands cupped over her ears. The sight of her savior, too, is seen as though viewed through an oil-slathered lens. A massive bush covered in luminescent flowers glows through the trees and rustles softly as she approaches it. She is too weak to do much more than fall into it and attempt, feebly, to crawl deeper. Exhaustion overtakes her and she can do no more. Sinking in, she can almost feel the soft warmth in the soil that sustains this solemn, lively plant. Then, some semblance of slumber sweeps her off this plane.
Lise is pulled into the dream current and has no will to resist it. Down and down, she falls. She falls and is conscious of that alone. She hasn’t even the wherewithal to fear landing; the sense of falling is all she feels as she is sucked ever deeper. In her tumbling descent, she catches glimpses from beyond the current. There are flashes at points of great energy casting silhouettes on the veil between. Familiar figures stand against spotlights of varying brightness, each an instant captured in dramatic relief. One remains with her a moment—solely the sight of Seli in the clutches of her pursuer—before it too slips away. Falling and falling. She never lands. She never seems to land, but as she falls form is taken around her until she is nestled in a new context.
There is no moment of impact, only the soft embrace of strange soil, and she finds she is no longer falling. She blinks and tries to gather herself but even in the undermind she has not the strength to move. Unable to do much else, she lies there, drifting, and begins to feel the current tugging her down once more. No, no… She roots herself in the soil to save herself from falling, slowly flexing her feeble fingers deeper into the warm, intricately textured loam. Perplexed by the detail of its rendering, it is the wonder of how the soil is manifest here that anchors her in a semblance of reality. Deeper and deeper, until her fingers touch down on something hard. The texture of it is smooth and waxen but leaves no residue. Slight ridges give her the sense of thin plates overlapping. She realizes the warmth she feels in the soil is emanating up from this peculiar material. Deeper still, towards the center of the basin, between fine roots, she feels several flat, throbbing organs hot to the touch. She recoils from it, a little unnerved. To think it might be a living creature—it’s a leap too far, but there’s no other explanation. She’s never known something quite so strange.
Even as she shakes dirt from her bare forearms, pushing up to peer around, she cannot comprehend what she is seeing. The ridges of a dark shell peek through the soil, lit indigo under the pale light of its flowering burden. She cannot make out a head but there are three massive legs visible on either side of her, dragging the creature’s body through the mud. Low to the ground, she watches the leathery, hairless limbs flex and stretch as it crawls along. It moves with such tranquil deliberation that she doesn’t find herself fearing it. She collapses back into its warm soil, her mind weary to process anything more. Thank you…
I am dying, still… Still, thank you for your tenderness… Lise nestles her face into the soil between the stalks of the creature’s plants and closes her eyes; so exhausted she wants only for sleep, even here. Thank you for your tenderness… She lets her eyes be closed long, and, though no deeper sleep meets her there, she dreams her softened will into the void behind her eyelids. Please, don’t resent me for dying on your back. I never meant to…
I’m so tired… Reality wearies of me. It will have me go pointless as I came and as burdensome.
The creature doesn’t respond to her, it is absorbed in its pursuit of fermented fruit hidden in the mud and in the roots around the barren willows. It rejoices to itself as it finally finds the sweetening, thickening fruit in the earth. Piercing the hard, wrinkled surface of the fruit, it sucks the intoxicating syrup until the skin crumples around its short snout and, through its tube-like tongue, drinks up the rest of the soft, purpled flesh within. It shakes the mud from its face and sends the empty skin into the air where it catches and hangs on a bare gray branch. Lise feels all this through its back, her consciousness seeping from her shut eyes into the soil. She drifts.
Envisioned in the back of the creature, she finds herself floating through the undermind, slow as cold selic syrup. There are patches of realized earth in the distance, trees and soft hills gently rendered by some unknown mind. Where…? Where am I? She sees Pelanea standing there, not far, calling out. There on a chalky-gray slope, she looks as she did in life. Tears well in Lise’s eyes before she can make out what the specter of her former companion is saying. She blinks away her tears only to see the sight of Seli, sprawled limply on the ground, her mouth open wide in an expression of visceral fear. Her silent scream pierces Lise and she cries out too, unable to bear the grief of this vision. NO! NO! She tries to stand, to run, but she can’t move, and Seli can’t hear her. Transfixed; Lise is helpless to do more than drift past her.
Cold horror cuts her crying short, a char-black presence hovering over her. Lise cannot turn to look but can feel that it is her mother, Quin, looking down on her with bilious resentment. It is a pale consolation that she is unable to turn and face the remnants of her mother, face judgment for her hand in this. She can feel herself on the precipice, already in the motion of tumbling before her feet have left the ground. A last backhand to her cheek and she’s gone, falling and falling. Falling until she hits the ground crumpling, cracking, finally splattering. But she is spared the sight of Quin and is merely cast from her vision with terrible force.
Lise is sent hurtling from the creature’s back, a gout of black bile shooting her into the air with a spray of soil. For its part, the creature appears oblivious when she lands in the soft gray ten paces away. She staggers to her feet, trying to stop her head spinning. Her body is weak—she can feel it like a deep throb behind her mind. That I can feel it… even through the veil of the undermind… doesn’t sound promising. But I thought I was dying already… How am I alive? How do I persist? Now, and in the coming hours—the coming cycles—if it comes to it. Is this just my strength’s end? As I breach the surface for a last gasp, before sinking into the deep dark? What is over this hill here? Does my path stretch on or does it end right over there where my eyes can’t quite see?
The sorry, tired thoughts dribble and drip to a stop as Lise stumbles down the path the creature forged into the wild with its strange but diligent perception. Its flowers cast a glow that seems to ripple in the air, their dense blue light warping the land it touches. Mud that would appear to Lise as a mix of brown shades with some darker splotches is colored in vibrant purples and deep, dark greens. The patches of purple writhe and disturb the mud’s surface, drawing the gaze of the creature. It probes the area until it finds the delectable body of its favorite fruit fermenting there. While it delights in its harvest, she climbs feebly back into its warm soil.
Lise struggles just to retain this semblance of consciousness, sitting cross-legged among the flowers, eyes closed against life. To live she needs the quiet of death. Her energy wanes and she starts to slide into NON and allows herself to. Until she catches the edge with the two whole fingers of her left hand. The quiet of death… She sits in near-perfect darkness with only those two fingers still exposed to the strains of existence. Near weightless dangling there, she has the strength left to hold this much. Her awareness is limited, conscious only in the loosest sense. Her mind goes into near stasis. Unable to drift too far from her rooted fingers. What thoughts she has are fine, simple. A projection of herself emerges from the cradled earth. She feels her feet slip into the soil and responds to the sensation, her response something approaching automatic. Perception shifting, she feels her body stand upright, arms slowly stretching to the sky above. She can almost feel the warmth of the furthest stars. If only she stretches her arms a little further, she’ll breach the atmosphere and feel their warmth on the tips of her exposed fingers.
Her transformation is cut short as she feels something else graze her limited awareness and she is recalled to her real self. A corrosive mist puts pits in the skin of her exposed fingers and she has to resist the sharp urge to let go and drop entirely into NON. In response, she gathers herself toward the gap, pulling herself out just enough to glimpse what is causing the caustic pain. She sees through her eyes a glittering black haze billowing around the creature. For its part, the creature appears oblivious to this, too. Lise cannot make out the source beyond the shroud. The haze slowly thickens, but Lise’s slowed perception experiences it as quick. Her fingers are half-destroyed by the time she finds the will to pull herself all the way back out. The long exposure to it leaves them melted past the bone in some areas.
As her mind gradually slides back out, sloughing to the floor—too weak to fully recompose herself yet—she feels time start to wind back down to her natural pace. Her skin stings as she steps from the creature’s back, stumbling and falling into the dark green mud. Trying to shake her exhaustion does little now, there is a persistent blear over her lens that no amount of wiping clears. She staggers to her feet, dripping green and black-brown, and trudges ahead of the creature—in pursuit of the source of this acerbic black mist. Even under a layer of mud, her skin burns from the mist.
The pain gradually intensifies as she walks and she tries to move faster to keep pace, but the pain still gains ground. Shit… I won’t make it… She slows to a stop and pinches shut her burning eyes. Thinking of the tree she nearly became, she wills a layer of protective mucus to sprout from her bark, her tender skin, carrying out the corrosive substance with it. Gasping, she falls to her knees from the exertion and struggles to stand, struggles to open her eyes through the layer of mucus. She would will the mucus to form a sphere around her, had she the energy and focus to maintain it longer than an instant. This much already has her at her limit. She breathes out and imagines the membrane filling with her breath, forming a pocket of air, and hardening translucent around her head. It shimmers with the same swirling, opalescent blue the trees of Opis Luma do under the harsh light of midday. She can hardly see beyond it, but it will have to serve for now.
By the time she finds it in her to stand up, the creature has foraged its way to her, searching the mud a mere stride behind her. She turns to look at it and the light of its flowers pierces through the haze. Each bloom is its own burnished moon through her marbling blue mask. She basks in it a moment then turns and trudges ahead of it once more. It’s hard to tell whether the creature feels the sting of the haze but she can’t lay complacent now. Not the time to be dithering over whethers… She laughs at the thought as she staggers into the dark, half-delirious. Why bother to think it? Walk, fool. I might die any moment, I shouldn’t have any thought in my mind but the ever-prompting ‘FOOL!’ to mark my passage. WALK, FOOL!
Lise finds grayer ground as she puts distance between her and the moon-bearing beast. Here, the copious haze sticks to the earth and leaves flecks of glossy black melting into the gray. The earth is soft here. Ill-defined, though… not undefined. Another person must have passed through this area recently. She can feel their proximity in the ground’s gradual solidification, she’s so close. Walk… Stumbling into a clearing, she finds a space marked by flat stones set into the ground in a pattern that spirals inward toward a shape that appears to her a pure-white even through her light-warping mask, and through the black haze. She hasn’t the energy to stop her walking and steps straight toward the shape. An opening to empty space, and before it, stands a man disfigured. His head has a piece cleft from it; a chunk, a quarter taken out the top right of his skull. The haze billows from his broken crown, dribbling down his melting face, freckling bare chest and upheld arms with the tarry blood of his mind. His lips peel off to reveal a skeletal grin and the rest of his face starts to slip off with it. He speaks but no recognizable words form, and he begins to fall backward. Lise reaches him just in time to watch him fall in. Siryl tumbles into empty space, slowly shrinking into the infinite distance. She barely manages to stop herself from following him in, collapsing to her knees before the opening.
Lise doesn’t cry out but tears drip down her cheeks and dissolve the protective film. She watches him somersaulting into the white, a black trail dissipated behind him. She watches until his body is vanished to the vastness of empty space and she is left with only a sense of defeat. She struggles to process his death, a man she hardly knew—a man made to die for her sake, for reasons she has only caught glimmers of in the deep darkness of NON. Glimmers that she fears to glimpse up close. Truth beckons her but she fears how it will break her now. Reality offers itself true but unrealities endorse themselves as softer substitutes. She has allowed them to stand with her far too long.
Lise awakens to find herself submerged in the warm soil of the creature’s back, the frost in her clothes having melted and seeped into the soil. The roots of the luminescent flowers are partially wrapped around her arms and legs and she has to be careful not to break the fine fibers as she tries to dig herself out. Pain gives her pause as she frees her arms and she rests them on the surface of the soil, letting her body relax a moment. Careful… I must be careful not to get ahead of myself. I’m so few steps ahead of Death one might see me and think I’m walking with it. I can’t afford to trip and fall now… Closing her eyes, the meditation Akota advised to her comes to mind. She breathes, feeling first the pain in her abdomen, then the restriction of her tight muscles everywhere else. Land… How long was I under?
She invites the warmth of the creature to soak into her body, begging it to reach her aching bones and joints. It never quite does. However, as she lingers there, blinking bleary eyes, her mind comes out clearer than it’s felt in a while. To that, her grief is rendered sharper. As she slowly emerges from the soil, exposing herself to the bitter cold once more, she dreads. She dreads what awaits her as she clambers from the creature’s back, what is left in the oddly paved clearing. What is left of the man called Siryl.
The creature makes soft rumbling noises as she steps away, oblivious to her arousal from its deep slumber. Lise shivers, clutching her bare arms against the cold, regretting the loss of her coat and its contents. Light from the creature’s flowers surrounds her, even as she steps toward the clearing, and she realizes the tall, spindly plants are growing everywhere here. She has to push aside the soft stalks to pass, so densely they’re growing in some places. Then she reaches the first stones placed in the ground, where they find no more room to grow, and she catches her first sight of what she, until now, knew only as an opening to empty space. A half-rotted old tree, thick roots prying up the stones around it; its twisting branches are barren of all but brittle thorns and a few sorry, withering leaves. Beneath the befouled hollow in its trunk, the body of the man slumps.
Frost holds his pained expression in place, and Lise heaves under the weight of grief, sobbing as she falls before him. Her heart struggles in her chest, throbbing arrhythmically. In his arms is clutched the sack of supplies she assumed lost. “Oh… Oh Siryl, I can’t…” She weeps for a man who hardly knew her; a man who unwittingly sacrificed himself for her; a man who offers her life, even from his piteous death. She can’t bring herself to take the bag from his hands. “Land, how am I to live on with such death? My body is wracked with it, it’s too much… I am torn between you, Life and Death. I cannot bear to be the one who stands between you any longer, can I? I cannot be strong enough. Surely, no human being could bear the true weight of life. I am inadequate to comprehend even a fraction and still it is breaking me finer than The Shatterer can conceive of.”
She takes the sack from Siryl, sobbing into the coarse fibers. “Forgive me, Siryl, I think toward myself because I cannot comprehend this. You shouldn’t have been made to die in such a sorry way. I should feel shame even to ask for forgiveness. Forgive me not, I live at your end and that is already more than I deserve. Nothing about this was right, and no justice can be taken from this. Not by me, certainly. Even were I to catch The Shatterer and wring it from existence for what it did, justice is absent from this world. It must be…”
Grinding her teeth, she rebukes herself for her weeping. “Land… This hurts.” Siryl’s body is gone blue in death and his broken, blooded ankle is freezing to the stone. She cannot bear to look upon him much longer. She can feel the cold gripping her, holding her to this place. The end speaks of restful silence and she yearns for it deeper as she lingers over him. “Land…” She staggers to her feet and chokes off another sob, bracing herself against the sickly tree to keep from falling beside him. Not yet… not until I can do no more… This much I owe to the world. I have been part of too much to permit myself to an end I haven’t yet earned. If I die, I die… but I cannot bear the thought that I could have done more. And, fool that I am, I still think I can. I must.
Lise grits her teeth hard as the cold makes her skin so taut it pains her to move, shivering. She glances toward the slumbering creature then looks back to Siryl’s corpse, whose bare clothing is mud-plastered to his skin. As she does, she catches sight of something tucked into the rotted softness of the tree’s hollow. Perhaps more sunken in than tucked in intentionally, as it is stuck into the sucking softness and takes a few tugs to pry free. A clay bottle sealed with a cork, caked in stinking tree gore. That this place is where The Shatterer had directed her earlier is a distant realization as she turns the bottle over in her hands. It is plain, unpainted by anything but the rot’s stains. Plucking the cork out, she sees the furled edge of a rolled sheet of parchment. What pitiful semblance of understanding will you offer me? She closes the bottle and carries it with her back to the creature, along with the sack of supplies, and carefully clambers back into its warm soil. Sighing her relief, she closes her eyes to the blue light and tries to prepare herself for whatever the parchment might read. Land, I am loathe to read this… Shatterer, I will make you regret every fragment you let slip. I am conscious of you now, I will not act as your hand.
The note cracks at the edges when she unfurls it—whether from age or the cold is hard to say, but she thinks it's the former. Inside, there are eleven neat lines. Each glyph writ with sharper strokes than the last, until the final line becomes near illegible as the pen had begun to cut harshly through the parchment. She peers over it, trying to read the small writing in the dim light—her hands trembling makes it all the more difficult. Still able to piece it together, if slowly, she feels her chest go tighter and tighter as she starts to make sense of its content. It confirms a doubt so deeply held—a doubt so terrible, so shattering she never dared to let herself think it all the way to its inevitable conclusion.
Know this truth: I have achieved prescience thrice.
My hand will have moved you here, as I see.
Whom you are matters to me as non.
Only that you are the ideal vessel.
I’ve sown in you my perfect seed.
Pregnant with greatest portent.
The progenitor, I’ve made you.
Bear me where freedom waits.
Quinla Niela the Prescient.
The Shatterer of Fetters.
The Forebear of a Right World.
