Roger Taylor - Ibryen

Even as he pondered these ideas, the blustering mountainside slipped into the echoing distance and he became aware of the floating emptiness that he had entered when he separated the spirit of the Culmaren from Isgyrn. But this time there was a rippling disturbance moving through it – something calling, thrashing helplessly, like a drowning man. It jerked him back to the cold mountain. He opened his eyes and spun round to look towards Isgyrn. The tent had been crudely rigged and Rachyl was approaching.

‘Thanks for the help,’ she said caustically, but she did not pursue the observation when she saw the look on Ibryen’s face as he strode past her. He crawled into the tent, motioning the others to follow. Rachyl and the Traveller could not enter the tent with Isgyrn kneeling in it and Ibryen settling himself on the rocky ground as comfortably as he could, but they were able to squat in the entrance out of the worst of the wind and rain.

‘Tell Rachyl what you just told me,’ Ibryen said to the Traveller. ‘I understand none of it, but I think you’re right… no, I know you’re right. I can’t leave him there, he’s utterly lost. I’ll try to fetch him back. I don’t know how long it’ll take, or what you can do. Just keep us both warm, I suppose.’

‘What’s he doing?’ Rachyl demanded of the Traveller fiercely, but the little man lifted his hands in a plea for silence, as did Ibryen.

Then, with no more thought than he would give to the taking of a single step, Ibryen was in both the cramped, rattling tent and the world beyond.

Though he knew that Isgyrn was immediately beside him in the tent, the emanations of panic that Ibryen could feel in the world beyond were elsewhere – distant from him, in so far as distance existed in this place. The fear that he felt in them chilled him, so primitive and awful was it and he had to steel himself before he could move towards the disturbance.

‘Isgyrn,’ he called, though he had neither body nor voice… such things had no meaning here. ‘Isgyrn. Be calm. There’s no danger here except what your fear makes.’

The fear shifted and changed but did not diminish. Ibryen moved steadily towards it, though even as he did so he could feel it infecting him. He repeated the call, this time as much for his own benefit as for Isgyrn’s. ‘There’s no danger here except what you make for yourself.’

Then he was proved correct, for the danger that Isgyrn had brought was all about him. Tales flooded into him of men drowned as they had sought to rescue others, weaker by far, but given an adamantine embrace by primordial fear. Such was his position now. Isgyrn’s fear clung about him, thrashing and clawing, beating out a battering rhythm which echoed that of the wind shaking the tent in the world where Rachyl and the Traveller sat watching, as helpless as they were unaware of what was happening.

Ibryen found himself resisting with weapons and skills he did not know he possessed. He reached into the very heart of Isgyrn’s terror, for he knew that the Dryenwr was no coward. He was a man, already desolated by events beyond his understanding, who had woken to find himself in one alien world and had now entered another, even stranger. A world that was vast and empty and dead and at the same time teeming with life and circumscribed by the merest mote. A world in which time did not exist yet in which it also flickered and was different in all directions. He was a man too, burdened by the lore of his people and by a lack of the sight that was needed here, Ibryen realized, as he contended with the corrosive contagion of the Dryenwr’s terror. For though he saw this world with a strangely cold eye, he knew that Isgyrn could see it only as through a cracked and distorted lens.

Yet still Isgyrn was whole. That which had made him Warrior Caste and had made him stand fearful but unflinching before his greatest and most feared foe, high amid the clouds, sustained him even now, though it was failing rapidly.

Ibryen spoke, imbuing that which served for his voice here with such calm as he could muster, though Isgyrn’s struggling was taxing him grievously. ‘Isgyrn. Hold to me. There is nothing to fear here. Nothing can harm. What you see are but shadows.’

‘Who…?’

‘I am Ibryen. The Traveller tells me your people would call me a Hearer. I see this place more clearly than you, and I see your pain. Hold to me, I’ll take you back to the world where you properly belong.’

Denial washed over him and, for a moment, Isgyrn’s fear threatened to sweep them both away.

‘It is so, Dryenwr!’ Ibryen shouted. ‘Even now, Rachyl and the Traveller are watching our bodies, waiting for our return.’

But Isgyrn was barely listening. Then, for the first time, Ibryen began to feel a fear which was other than that which was rising in response to the Dryenwr’s. He had no words for the knowledge, but he knew that Isgyrn’s wild thrashing must be contained or harm would be done that could destroy them both. Such as time was in this place, it was moving against them. Bounds were being strained which could tolerate little more. The very fabric of this world seemed to be groaning under Isgyrn’s onslaught.

For a moment, Ibryen teetered on the edge of panic himself, then, the ancient legacy of the battle-hardened transmuted his fear into anger. He blasted contempt into the Dryenwr’s frantic spirit.

‘Is this the Warrior who led his Soarers against overwhelming odds and prevailed? Is this the Warrior who faced your white-eyed usurper and his screaming mount? Or is it some mewling child, fearful of the dark?’

Briefly his mind was filled with a vision of Isgyrn’s Soarers Tahren carried beneath their arching, many-coloured wings, as they swooped and dived upon the black ranks of their enemy, like great fighting birds. Though the vision was fleeting he saw the order and discipline and courage which sustained the fighters. He saw the long-trusted tactics of this extraordinary arena forged anew by vision and desperate imagination to turn the hitherto irresistible tide of the enemy. His heart both soared and cried out in pain as he saw too, and heard, the all-too-familiar consequences of battle as the sky rang with war cries and death screams, and was streaked with skeins of blood and gore. And he felt the deep injustice of the insult he had just offered. Then, the vision was swept away – his baiting had proved as effective as it had been crude and it was an unknown reflex that protected him from the first flush of Isgyrn’s anger.

It came to Ibryen that perhaps he had made a mistake.

Isgyrn might not have understood the nature of the place where he now found himself but he understood honour and insult, and he understood fighting. And now, as Ibryen’s fear had become anger, so did his – an awful, berserker anger – the anger of a man who has only death before him and who, with no further fear left, will carry as large an entourage of his enemy with him as escort into the shades as his strength will allow. It was also an anger re-doubled by shame for what he perceived as his previous cowardice and it seized Ibryen with a crushing power, threatening to extinguish him with a single monstrous effort.

But just as Isgyrn’s fear had threatened to infect Ibryen so now did his fighting frenzy, for Ibryen was no stranger to wild and desperate combat. Further, this was his world. Defeat was unthinkable.

Thus, while Rachyl and the Traveller sat in the mouth of the tent huddled against the driving rain, and nervously watched the silent, apparently sleeping men, that part of them which existed in the world beyond wrestled in a manner that neither of them truly understood.

Ibryen, the more aware of the two, defended himself while he sought for a way to overwhelm Isgyrn, though it was no easy task against the Dryenwr’s primitive but battering attacks.