Zachary Jernigan - No Return

Of course, time would prove these fears ungrounded. Over the next two millennia he tested the limits of the divine armor, growing stronger and stronger until even the elder magic could not restrain him. He walked the Clouded Continent, grew to know its slumbering people through their beautiful artifacts. Cities that spun slowly like leaves on water. Crystal windmills half a mile high. A stadium seated for millions with a lake at its center. A field of glass war machines whose angular surfaces glittered in the sun.

Fearing the elders were the source of Eloue’s true voice, he took one of their number to a secluded island and allowed the sun to revive it.

They battled like old enemies. The elder’s aggression surprised Adrash, as did its expression, which so closely mimicked a man’s. Perhaps the creature had sensed Adrash’s intentions all along, knew it could not match him, and so spent its final energy on hate. This pride suited the creators of such breathtaking monuments.

Yet for all of its vitriol, the creature was easily overcome.

At no point did Adrash hear anything other than the sound of its breathing. It was not an enchanted being—merely a strong one. The realization was little comfort, for he had come no closer to understanding the nature of Eloue’s magic.

And then, three thousand years after her death, he heard the voice again, calling from the bottom of the world.

‡

He came to the largest of the southern islands curious. He remembered cracking an iron egg on its cold, weathered rock surface, sure the men who spilled forth would perish in the harsh land. To find its people not only surviving, but thriving, after five thousand years heartened him. After all, the ocean was no friend to man, nor were its inhabitants. Oft-times, the world itself seemed inimical to man, especially those who lived on the islands. Air currents sent locusts, dry weather, and disease. Volcanoes and earthquakes returned the islands to the sea.

Eighteen-year-old Tsema had never heard of such things. If the people of his land had ever suffered, he did not care. He heard music in his dreams and on the wind, and re-created it. Not for money or fame did he play. He played because it hurt not to.

A creature born of the island’s exotic magics, the smooth, long lines of his body revealed a peculiar heritage. Eyes flashed orange to match the short fur covering his whip-thin body. His fine-boned face looked more animal than man depending on the angle. His hands were large and calloused. The seven triple-jointed toes of his feet helped him adjust the innumerable gears and cogs of his musical instrument, a four-story building of driftwood and stone, thin slabs of transparent crystal and glass. He called this machine The Element. He carried two wrenches curled in his tail, and from his belt swung a collection of lesser-used tools of odd design.

It took one hundred men to haul the creaking instrument at a snail’s pace across the stepped rock surface of the island, and another fifteen men to feed them. People claimed the boy’s closest attendants lived on his music alone, but any fool could have smelled the mythmaking in this. For all of the magic virtuosity the boy displayed, Tsema was no miracle worker. He had no interest in redemption, yet the people read much in his tales. He became a prophet. Even the island’s king listened to his cryptic lyrics with a keen ear.

When Adrash heard the boy’s voice for the first time, the world ignited and blackened in the corners of his eyes. Underneath the rich tenor and the clanging cacophony of The Element, the boy’s true voice shrieked at a stone-shattering pitch. He was not as strong as Eloue had been, but in time he surely would be. Adrash had become sensitive to the voice after so much reflection.

Other things he had always seen. The auras of most men radiated tones of grey and barely rose from their bodies even when excited, but the boy’s flared violet and orange, coruscating in wild arcs from his body when he sang.

Just as with Eloue, Adrash could not fight his attraction.

They lived together in the top floor of The Element, where the boy proved an excellent lover. He clearly did not live only for music, yet he sang often during their lovemaking. The otherworldly timbre of his voice aroused Adrash’s libido, focusing his awareness of pleasure as it had never been focused. The boy’s confident touch reminded Adrash of Eloue. His body responded as hers had. The armor—which Adrash still wore as a glove—fascinated him, though he knew nothing of its reputation.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“Does it have to do something?”

The boy spread Adrash’s armored hand palm down on his thin, furred thigh. “Can’t feel where it ends, where skin begins.” He turned the hand palm up. “Can see no lines under it. No heart line, no love line. No age line! Man can hide that, powerful doing.”

Adrash shook his head and moved his hand up the boy’s thigh. The boy had not seen him covered by the armor completely, and Adrash did not intend to show him. “I acquired it in Loreacte,” he lied, referring to the halfmythical land he had claimed was his home. “A clothier had it under the counter, and I saw it. He would not let me try it on, but I convinced him. I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake, but in the end it is harmless. I have even grown to admire it.”

“Love it.” The boy covered Adrash’s hand with his own. “Want one just like it.”

The subject came up again and again. Adrash recognized the boy’s desire to possess the armor and fed it, though he could not say what compelled him to do so.

He woke one night to find the boy rubbing oil on his wrist, where the armor fused with his skin. It burned slightly, but not enough to have woken him. Instead, he focused on a low sound that came from inside the boy. It reminded him vaguely of the crash of surf on rocks, wind rustling the leaves of a tree. He had never heard it before.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The boy’s head jerked upwards. His eyes were solid yellow-white. A growl began low in his throat, rumbling down through the register, into the depths of the earth below them. Before the command had been given, the armor tickled on Adrash’s wrist, began rising up his forearm. He placed his palm upon the boy’s chest, tried to push him down, and found that he could not. The boy gripped his forearm in steel fingers, as if trying to stop the armor’s advance.

“Want it,” the boy said. “Off. Now.”

White rose above the boy’s fingers, and Adrash felt a surge of strength flow through his limbs. Cold purpose flooded his mind. He took hold of the boy’s free arm and threw him from the bed. The furred body crumpled like a stuffed toy as it hit the sharp teeth of the giant gear projecting into their room. Vertebrae snapped audibly as his head ricocheted off the metal.

Adrash stood and regarded the body. For several seconds, it seemed to him that the world was mute, that all sound had been cancelled.

He had listened to the boy’s voice for so long he had ceased to hear it.

He vowed never to let this happen again.

‡

He encountered the voice of the prophet many times after Tsema. A thousand years passed between occurrences, two thousand—never more than three. Adrash heard it more clearly each time, but grew no closer to understanding its nature. For twenty millennia, the voice announced itself across the face of Jeroun, inhabiting the bodies of young and old, male and female and elderman. Its avatars were heroes and sometimes villains, but they were never ordinary.

Each attracted and repelled Adrash. As he grew ever more powerful, testing the ultimate capabilities of the divine armor, the fiercer those who spoke with the voice pursued it.

Sleum Edylnara, who wielded the crescent aszhuri blade with a dancer’s grace and made love like an animal, tried to decapitate Adrash during one of their practice sessions. Adrash caught the blade in his hand, broke it, and strangled the woman. She did not beg for her life or try to tear Adrash’s fingers from her neck. Instead, her eyes had slowly turned to golden fire as her true voice singed the inside of Adrash’s skull.