Tim Lebbon - Dawn

Touch its heart and Hope fades away, the line in the book said. The only line. The rest of it was yet to be written.

HOPE WAS A young girl again, exploring north of Pavisse on her own because nobody wished to play with a witch. There were occasional friends, but they kept their distance, as if she really could plant some dubious spell on them. She asked her mother why they were like that, and her mother would smile, her green tattoos twisting around her neck like a snake tightening to withhold her answer. They’re scared of you, she would say. They know what you can do.

But Hope knew that she could do nothing, and her child’s brutal logic revealed the truth: other children did not play with her because they thought she was a fool. Even a child knew that there was no magic. Hope was a fool from a long line of fools, and children did not suffer fools gladly.

She had been to these woods many times before. They were familiar to her, and safe. It was a fine day, the sun was warm and kind on her face, and the first of her many tattoos was healing on her right cheek.

She paused and smiled, and felt the tattoo do the same.

The forest was small but few people visited. The people of Pavisse had more to trouble themselves with than walks amongst the trees, unless the walks themselves were toward something relevant. Once, she had been in the woods when a man ran past. She ducked down but he had seen her. His eyes turned left, wide and fearful, and he watched for a couple of beats before running on. Hope remained hidden for a while until she heard the dogs, and then she stood and revealed herself to the militia so that she was not attacked. They did not ask whether she had seen the man, and she did not volunteer the information.

Another time, she had stumbled across a couple having sex. The man was old and gray, the woman younger than her, and Hope had kept a guilty watch on them for over an hour while they fucked, rested and fucked again. There was real passion between that old man and young woman, and Hope felt sorry that they had to come this far to be on their own.

Later that day she had told her god about them, and it had given her its customary silent reply.

She reached her god in the ground and knelt before it, almost touching its surface, almost feeling its coolness or warmth, its smoothness or rough skin, the stillness of death or the invisible vibration of life. She had never touched her god, and she never could. Gods were not for that.

She began to mutter invocations she had heard her mother using, words and sentences in a language forgotten by most. It’s the language of the land, her mother had told her, and Hope’s memory did its best to repeat the words as they had been spoken: the same tone, same intonation.

It’s a machine, a soft voice whispered. It was her voice, but she did not like to listen. It told painful truths. It’s just a dead machine.

Something tickled her hip and she slapped at her clothes. Nothing changed.

She chanted some more, bringing her hands so close to the god half buried in the ground that she could feel its gravity pulling her closer and closer. One day it would move, she knew. One day she would come here and present herself before this god, and it would rise, and she would become the first real witch since the Cataclysmic War had stolen magic away. One day she would remember the correct invocation from her mother, mutter it in just the right way, and this god would shrug off its layers of rust and moss, bird shit and decay…

It’s just a machine, and you’re wasting your time. The only gods are the Sleeping Gods, and they’re just a story your mother tells you when it’s too stormy outside for you to go to sleep…

Another movement against her hip, grotesque and familiar.

Hope looked around the woodland glade but the light was starting to fail. Dusk isn’t for hours yet. A light blue haze rose from the ground, wafting around her knees. It shouldn’t be this dark. She was farther away from the god (dead machine!) than ever before, and then the smell of pine and wellburr trees faded away, replaced by the dust of ages.

I only wanted a god to give me magic, she said, and her young woman’s words woke her with their old lady’s voice.

HER FINAL WORD faded away, swallowed by the walls. No echoes here.

The gravemaker spider flexed in her pocket. Hope had been lying on her side, and the spider had obviously been crushed from its hedgehock sleep. She sat up and reached into the pocket, grabbing the spider by two legs and letting it dangle before her. Its other legs clenched, its body rose, but it could not bring its fangs close enough to bite.

“I’ve been away,” she said, and an endless amount of time may have passed. Nothing would have changed in here: the walls would still glow, the floors would still swim in that strange, opaque mist…and the thing on the pedestal would still be there.

She could not bring herself to look, in case there was an eye staring back.

Hope waved the spider before her, holding it at arm’s length. “Shall we stand?” she said. She stood, still clasping the disc-sword in her other hand. She was shaking. Still she could not look at the Sleeping God. She thought of that young version of herself, worshipping the hunk of rusted metal and cracked stone in the ground, and she was ashamed. So long spent kneeling before old magic, while the true gods were older still.

Her legs shook. Her tattoos writhed of their own accord as her face twitched, nerves jumped. She needed to piss, but the thought of doing so here terrified her.

She almost looked…

The spider curled around her finger and scraped her nail with its fangs.

“Almost,” she said. She dropped the spider, kicking it away from her, and watched it scurrying through the haze toward the pedestal. As it drew close, the Sleeping God entered her field of vision, and then she looked because there was nothing more to do, no more distance to travel, no more dreams to be had between that instant and the next.

She had spent so long imagining what this could be like, but she never believed it would be her.

“Wake,” she whispered.

She could make no sense of what she saw. Her eyes took in the shape but her mind could not translate the vision.

“Wake for me!”

The shape remained motionless. It was the size of ten people curled together, limbs and heads and torsos twisted around one another. She could see no eyes, hear no breathing. It mustbe alive, she thought, but she was too insignificant to understand. She stood in the presence of a god, and all she could do was ask it to wake.

She took one step forward and there was no scream of outrage. She could look at the thing now, and though she was unsure of exactly what she was seeing, at last she believed her eyes.

Another step forward.

The gravemaker spider crawled up the side of the Sleeping God and sat atop it like a disembodied hand.

Hope held her breath. Stared at the spider. Felt her pulse throbbing at her temple, her chest, her thigh. Her heart thumped, punching her as if to draw attention to something here, and here, andhere!

The spider reared up, baring its fangs, and Hope saw what lay around the base of the pedestal. The light in the huge cavern was weak, yet she could see the drifts of ancient dust. It was orange, like the flaking rust that had drifted from that old machine in the woods long ago, and fine as sand.

“No…”

The spider hissed as if it had heard her.

Hope moved three steps closer and nothing in the cavern changed.

Orange, like rust.

“No…!”

She looked around her then, because the cavern had suddenly become something else. Her mind tilted. She felt it, a movement that shifted her slightly out of this world and into another. She lost whatever precarious grip she had possessed on her own destiny and fell, slipping between the fingers of Fate and plummeting toward whatever end this new bastard world had ready for her.