James Davis - The Restless Shore

The wind picked up as the breaths increased. It whistled through the spires then changed into a whispering melody that rushed through the city streets like an army of keening ghosts. The thousand mirrored suns were halved by the dark silhouettes of their horizons, and Uthalion found himself breathing as hard and as fast as the unseen host in the city below.

“What in all the hells?” he whispered, slowing his breathing, though unable to calm the pounding of his heart. The song slid around him like an old friend, blowing softly in his ear as if it greeted him alone. Bits and pieces of the melody took on the form of the old wedding song it had sung to him in the Spur and in his dreams at the old farmhouse on the edge of the Wash. Alarmed, he looked to Ghaelya and cursed himself, recalling the song’s last words.

Bring her to me .

Bring her to me .

Brindani cried out suddenly, pounding his fists into the ground and inhaling sharply. Control of his faculties seemed to return as he sat still. As he stood, his trembling muscles slowed and his bloody knuckles dripped thick crimson on the dirt and vines. His tortured features calmed, though he stood against the shining columns as if he challenged them, drawing his sword and stretching his neck. He looked sidelong at Uthalion, his eyes reddened and ringed with dark circles.

“It’s coming,” he said. The words chilled Uthalion to the bone.

The reflections of the thousand suns were mere slivers now, thinly sliced by their horizons and broken in places by the city’s mirrored skyline. The haunting song grew stronger, flowing around Uthalion and then wailing past him into the city’s depths. Yet despite the eeriness of the singing, he mourned losing its attention, if only for the moment.

Low growls echoed from among the spires, and Uthalion turned, his sword leveled, as wolflike forms prowled through the crystals, their glassy eyes gleaming red and purple. The muscular dreamers appeared, pawing at the dirt threateningly and baring their tusklike fangs. They formed a wall of pale fur and flexing claws at the edge of the forest. Several snapped at the air, gnashing their teeth menacingly, but beyond their threatening postures, Uthalion could see several staring at him almost curiously. They crowded and nosed through the snarling pack, never leaving the edge of the stone forest, but trying to get a look at the newcomers. Those beasts sprawled on the ground, holding their noses low as they sniffed the air and regarded him with quizzical expressions.

He and Ghaelya backed away, forming a semicircle with Vaasurri. Brindani never moved, staring down the growling beasts from only a few strides away.

“What’s he doing?” Ghaelya asked quietly. Uthalion could only shake his head. He felt confused, as though he were caught up in someone else’s nightmare, a dream he might only escape by waking an unknown dreamer.

He flinched as the ground shifted and buckled, adjusting his footing as the network of vines writhed between his legs. They tightened like deep green muscles, and the broken wall at the clearing’s edge cracked a little more, spilling dirt onto the cobblestones. The tremors spread through the ruins, the stone splitting and crumbling as the vines pulled and twisted like a single living thing. An ear-splitting rumble shook the ground as some distant building gave way, crashing into the streets and sending clouds of rolling dust through the long avenues in waves of choking debris.

Amid the destruction Uthalion could make out tiny screams and wailing cries. But they were cut off swiftly, dying away as the dust settled and the vines relaxed. A hush fell over the city like a held breath, and Uthalion tensed. The dreamers had ceased their posturing and sat stoically at the spires’ edge as the last thin measure of sunlight dipped below the horizon.

“There,” Vaasurri whispered and pointed with his sword. “A path between the spires.”

Uthalion squinted in the deepening shadows, just able to make out, between the lithe bodies of the dreamers, a rough-stoned walkway through the crystals. Ghaelya started forward anxiously, and Uthalion grabbed her shoulder.

“Are you mad?” he asked as she wrenched away from him. “There’s too many of them!”

“Tess,” she whispered, fixing him with a determined gaze. “I can hear her.”

As if in answer to her, the tall crystals shook, hairline cracks forming in a few as the ghostly song thundered through the forest again. Wordless and haunting, it sang all around him, unleashed in a flood of tumultuous, screaming melody. At the core of the song was an unmistakable femininity that rippled with unseen fingertips over Uthalion’s skin, pushing and pulling him as he fought to remain standing. With soft, resounding whispers it clawed a deep pit in his mind, like a watery grave that promised peace if he would only lie down and submit.

He cried out and fell to one knee, swearing loudly, his voice swallowed in the maddening torrent of song. Vaasurri and Ghaelya remained standing, covering their ears as best they could and turning away from the crystals as the roaring melody shook the city anew. Brindani weathered the song, seemingly unmoved. His black hair was blown in a powerful breeze as he turned; his eyes as dark as a cold forge.

“Can you hear it?” he asked casually.

Vines writhed and twisted around them, erupting small nodules that grew and burst with flashes of crimson. The buds cracked open at their centers like sickly flowers, and the fleshy, red petals they bloomed throbbed and puckered like living tissue. They pulsed rhythmically like little heartbeats, tiny veins pushing to the petals’ surface as sweet scents filled the air. The flowers spread throughout the city, almost glowing in the deep twilight. As the blooms appeared, the dreamers growled and whimpered, their long mournful whines blending seamlessly with the song’s tempest.

Uthalion fell backward, catching himself with his free hand. He cursed as he looked across the nightmarish ruins, at the shadows of Tohrepur erupting with renewed life. The dark gaping maws of windows discharged sluggish, pale bodies that flopped into the night air. Doorways were crowded with white, slack-jawed faces that peered out into the bruised light of the day’s end. Twisted and hairless figures crawled languidly from their hiding places, huffing loudly as they awoke from strange slumbers to gather in the streets. They bared needlelike teeth and dark eyes to the sky, crawling over one another in a sickly mass.

Uthalion picked out several races among the throng, noting the bloated abdomens of large white spiders amid the groaning crowds.

“The Flock,” he muttered, horrified as they knelt and tore at the crimson blossoms. Red juices ran through their fingers as they stuffed the petals into their mouths and fed hungrily, the sticky red nectar dribbling down their chins and staining their thin lips.

“The Choir brings us,” Brindani said, a bizarre quality in his voice buzzing through Uthalion’s skull. “The Song calls us … The Lady dreams us … And her blood feeds us.”

“Blood,” Uthalion whispered, staring at the enthralled Flock. The bodies grew slick with bloody nectar, blending together as they slid and pulled themselves deeper into the restless press, the streets disappearing beneath them. Long fingernails caked with dark pulp scratched at the sky, as the bodies swayed with the terrible song.

Reluctantly, Uthalion studied those he could see clearly, moving from one to the next. He dreaded the sight of a bared breast or a curving, feminine hip, afraid of finding Maryna. But he did not see her-did not want to see her-and slowly convinced himself, for the sake of his own sanity, that she was not among the Flock. She couldn’t be.