The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“I am a messenger,” he said. “I swam through the poisoned tunnel to bring you a message from those who were lost when the earth trembled and drowned the tunnel through which they traveled. Some among them are still alive. Can you find them and help them to escape the trap they are in?”

His words brought silence. He listened. He heard his own breathing, nothing more. If they pulled air into lungs and let it out again, as did humankind, he could not hear it. They were as silent as the stone around them. They seemed more than half stone themselves.

Finally, when he thought there would be no reply, a rush of clicking and stamping and rubbing and tapping swept through the assembly. After a long while, the noise subsided. Pale-skin had retreated, and in its place one with a gold sheen and a dozen crystalline growths mottling its skin shuffled forward to confront him. It wore draped about its body a number of chimes and charms that rang softly. With a deft movement, at odds with its clumsy body, it stripped the armband off its own long limb and held it out for him to see.

“You wear a talisman,” it said. “But the talisman you wear lives. The talismans we wear are long dead.”

A sigh of grief shuddered through the assembly.

“Is it true that the shining city existed in the long-ago time? Is it true? Or is it only a story we tell.”

He nodded. “It is true. I saw it. I was there.”

“Tell us! Tell us!”

He told them what he remembered, which wasn’t much, only flashes of sights and sounds, a memory of a vast city glimpsed deep in the earth, of pillars clothed in jewels, of a marketplace that lapped a river, of caverns streaked with veins of gold and copper and wagons that moved without horse or oxen to pull them. But as he spoke, the words took on substance, as though he were weaving the city right there before them, as if their listening and his words were the hands and the clay out of which a pot could be formed.

He created the world they had lost, and they believed him, because they wanted to.

“But it is gone,” he said. “It was all gone. They destroyed it.”

Adica destroyed it.

The pain struck, doubling him over, because he could not see or hear with the lance of guilt and grief assaulting him. Adica had destroyed it, but she had died in a wall of blue fire and after that he recalled nothing. Only her, death, and the destruction of the world.

He fell forward onto the floor, body pressed against the stone, hands clenched and teeth gritted but the pain did not cease. Adica hadn’t meant to do so much damage, surely. She hadn’t meant to kill innocents in order to save her own, had she? Hadn’t it all been an accident, a misunderstanding?

The magnificent cities of the goblinkin vanish in cave-ins so massive that the land above is irrevocably altered. Rivers of molten fire pour in to burn away what survives.

Adica had seen the skrolin cities. She had known they existed. Perhaps she and the others had not comprehended the scope of the destruction they would unleash. Yet if they had known, would they have gone ahead anyway? He could not bear to think that she might have, so it was a mercy that pain blinded him, hammered him, until he could not think.

But he could still see.

Rivers run deep beneath the Earth, flooded with fire. This is the blood of the Earth. These are the ancient pathways that mold land and sea and weave the fabric of the world. Far away down the threads woven through the depths of the Earth by the fire rivers lie intelligences of an order both keener and slower than his own, sensing the measure of time in whose passing a human life spans nothing more than the blink of an eye.

Their minds touch his down the pathways of fire. Their thoughts burn into him.

You. Are. The. One. We. Seek.

The toll of their words rings in his head like the clamor of bells oh so slow, slower than the respiration of the skrolin.

Tell. Us. What. You. Know.

They peel away his memories, which are opaque to him but somehow clearly seen by these ancient minds for whom the unfolding of a tree from sapling to a great decayed trunk fallen in the forest flies as swiftly as a swallow through a lady’s hall at wintertide. He catches glimpses of their sight as they pillage his memories: the glittering archway that Adica wove; brave Laoina with her staff; wise Falling-down; crippled Tanioinin; the veiled one and the fearsome lion women; doomed Hehoyanah and Hani’s mocking smile; dying Horn; the camaraderie of Shevros and Maklos who took him across the white path which marks the border of Ashioi lands.

He weeps, because he knows all that he loved is lost to him not just because it is fled across the span of years but because the old ones are tearing those memories away as they search. They are not done with him yet.

Will. The. Weaving. Save. Us. Or. Doom. Us.

They meant well, he says, but they killed more than they saved. They caused immeasurable devastation.

Ah!

They speak. They confer for hours, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, or for an instant only. He can’t measure them.

This. Is. What. We. Needed. To. Know. Now. We. Can. Act.

They withdraw. On the wind of their leaving he sees beyond the borders of the Earth where the cosmos yawns, immense and terrifying. He cries out in fear and wonder because this abyss is both beginning and end, a circle that turns back in on itself. He hears its voice, not male or female and as vast as eternity: I am what I was and what I am now and what I will be.