Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

He would be beautiful again and forever young. The promise made to him so long ago would be fulfilled. This time, he had not been betrayed.

Beloved , he whispered with his thoughts.

Through that whelp of a sage, his god had led him to his own salvation. Drawing deep on his reserves, he turned his whole body corporeal and picked up the heavy orb, finally, after a thousand years. As his cloth-wrapped arms closed around it, he just stood there, and relief made him almost wearier than anything else.

He looked down at what he held and went numb inside.

In those ancient days, he never actually touched the anchors. Only the Children were so privileged. He had seen one on rare occasions when one of them carried it out for a purpose his god had commanded. But he knew of them, all five, each one an anchor binding one Element of Existence. Each one enslaved a different primal component for his god’s bidding.

Although the orb lay dormant in his arms, he should still be able to feel its essence. Through his Beloved, through his own nature as an eternal spirit, he should feel the core of its elemental nature and the spark of Spirit trapped within it.

The spark was not there.

Sau’ilahk stared at the orb in his arms. He sensed something from it, but its presence felt deeply ... grounded? There was nothing within it close to his nature as a pure, undying ... spirit.

He looked about the cave. Anguish returned, swelling into horror.

Those reptilian creatures must have dug into this place in the seatt’s bowels. The state of the bones suggested something else had happened here. Beloved’s forces must have tried to dig in under the seatt, to come in from beneath before anyone here realized. But in the end, they must have been discovered.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Beloved’s forces had died here, buried under the mountain along with their enemies. And here was the orb.

But what would the orb of Spirit be worth in this place? Nothing, now or then. This was not the orb of Spirit. It was one of the others, perhaps the orb of Earth? He had been following Wynn all this time ... only to find the wrong orb.

At that truth, Sau’ilahk began to moan.

Dust and dirt stirred as conjury-twisted air gave a voice to his pain. He began weeping, and his growing rage turned into a wail. His shrieks filled the deadend cave with so much wind that pebbles scored the walls and bones rattled across the floor.

Sau’ilahk screamed, Betrayer!

He had been cheated again by the half-truths of his god, as he had a thousand years ago with the promise of eternal life.

A hissing whisper rose in his thoughts. Do not despair.

Sau’ilahk was beyond caring if he offended his god, and he screamed back, Wellspring of lies ... of deceits!

He dropped the orb. Rubble and bones crackled under its weight, along with a metallic clang. Hope of beauty and eternal youth withered, and the pain of renewed loss was too great to bear. He screamed at his god once more.

The sage is dead, burned to nothing! What would you have me follow now!

The hiss assailed him again.

She lives ... but if you choose to no longer obey, servant, then seek on your own.

Sau’ilahk’s shrieking wind died. If Wynn lived, why would his treacherous god allow him freedom to do as he pleased? What could he do that he had not tried already in a millennium of searching? He was done with this place, and his misery made him wish to be gone.

That whisper like reptilian scales sliding over sand tore at him again.

Every anchor has its chain, its handle, by which to haul it, just as every portal has its key by which to open it. Did you not hear the key speak?

He was too anguished to care about more taunting hints, but Beloved went on.

Since you no longer hear me, servant ... perhaps you will remember having heard it.

Sau’ilahk stood still, suspicion growing within him. What was this nonsense about chains, handles, or keys ... for the anchors of Existence?

He looked down at the one he had dropped.

The orb just lay at his feet, but there had been a sound when it fell that was wrong. Not the dull crack of stone upon stone, or even bones, but a metallic clank. He crouched, forcing one hand corporeal again, and shoved the orb aside.

In the depression its bulk had made was a spot of ruddy golden hue.

Sau’ilahk quickly slapped away dirt and dust until it was fully revealed. Before him lay a thick and heavy circlet of a rusty-golden metal, neither brass nor gold. Its open ends had protruding knobs pointing directly at each other. Its circumference was covered in engravings, though he could not read those marks.

Sau’ilahk remembered seeing such an item before. Once when he had witnessed one of the Children departing with an anchor, an orb, it had worn just such an open-ended circlet about its pale neck.

He glanced toward the orb and saw something more in the tapered head of its spike.

There were grooves about the right size for the circlet’s knobs. Was this key, this handle, how an orb was truly used? Even so, what good was it to him? This orb was not the one he desired.

I need no key to a place I do not wish to go , he projected. Nor a handle for something I do not want.

This time, no answer came—and Sau’ilahk heard the footfalls echoing down the tunnel.

There was more than one pair, and both were too heavy to be Wynn. If one of them was Chane, Sau’ilahk was too weak to deal with that irksome undead.

Frustration made him hesitate, and then he snatched up the circlet. He had no way to carry it without remaining corporeal, so he turned to the cave’s rear wall.

The last of his energies fueled one final conjuration as a maw opened in the stone.

Sau’ilahk shoved the circlet in, to be retrieved later.

As the maw closed, leaving only raw stone, dormancy took him completely, and he vanished. For now, he was done with this place ... this tragically disappointing place.

Wynn was lost in loathing inside the memories of Deep-Root. She was shaken back to awareness when the elder stonewalker’s furious cries were suddenly cut off. The blackness of stone enveloped her again, and all she heard were the gale of whispers inside Deep-Root.

... they are coming ... not one but many ... soon they will find you ...

A dim glow rose all around as the leaf-wing pushed the whispers down once more.

Ignore them, and hear only me .

Wynn—Deep-Root—stood in the dim phosphorescence of the caves holding the honored dead, but he didn’t move an inch. He kept twisting his head rapidly, looking about, and the glimmering walls and shadows whipped too quickly in Wynn’s sight.

She didn’t understand what had happened in the hall of the Eternals. How had this mass murderer escaped the insane older stonewalker?

Deep-Root took a slow step, placing one foot carefully, and then another. He was trying to be silent. Then he crouched amid the calcified dead, placed his hand on the cave floor, and grew still.

Wynn felt—heard—distant sounds, as if his hand could pass them directly to her ears or her thoughts. She—he—was listening through stone, as Ore-Locks had in the tram tunnel.

Running boots pounded, and Deep-Root twisted to his right.

Wynn saw only a crushed wall beyond columns made of joining stalactites and stalagmites. More footfalls sounded, more running feet, and Deep-Root twisted farther around.

The sound suddenly cut off as he looked to the wall he’d come through.

“Honored Ones,” he whispered. “Give me sanctuary!”

Wynn wanted to scream at him for such a plea, but she had no voice. The leaf-wing came instead.