JET 8.5: FAREWELL, MUND
“I did not write these words. I only spoke them. I do not know your tongue. It is your Mother-tongue. The speech of demons. Do not decry the translator. How might I speak to you, but in your own voice? There is no untranslated speech.”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 13:270-277
The landscape below was a tapestry of shadowed farmlands, winter-blasted fields scarred with naked hedgerows, shivering animals longing for the dawn. The frost-eaten meadows were pale, sparkling sometimes under the moonlight as we passed overhead. I already had all three of us enwraithed, invisible, and on the road – so to speak. The moon was only just waning, barely less than full, and it felt at times like we were swimming through silver water. Rath had said to leave a clear twenty miles between us and the Plain Road as we headed north-west, so I’d fixed our height at around about three hundred feet as he’d recommended, the road running almost along the horizon.
My skin tingled. It was like that first night, flying in Hightown – flying with the platinum-haired wizard who never loved me… But it’d felt like love, hadn’t it? It’d felt real, flying there before the Maginox?
I felt it again now. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was a surprisingly-similar sensation: freedom. Unbounded freedom. The night was alive in ways no vampire could perceive, but I could. I flew across a plain, a plane of potential. I had only to fix my mind upon some purpose, some calling…
But what? It was impossible to think clearly. As much as my nethernal flesh enjoyed the predawn flight, my mind was preoccupied.
Everything was not okay in the House of Mortenn.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The light-globes fastened to the posts along the Plain Road’s route stood out, even from here, the white beacons designed to shine across the dark expanse doing their job superbly. We had a map, but none of us were experienced at map-reading, obviously, beyond tracing routes on those clearly-absurd things in the first pages of story-books. Our collective lack of skill with maps being the case, my arch-arch-diviner advisor said that keeping the road in sight was the only way we’d avoid getting lost. Apparently getting lost would run us into even worse issues before we reached the mountain-pass – the delightful-sounding ‘Irontooth Gates’, as the map would have it.
Even worse issues. Yeah, that was what he’d said. His choice of phrasing had been ominous. Truth be told, I’d had no idea what I was letting myself in for – just getting out of Mund, getting here with the twins and all my stuff, had been a trial.
But flying in silence like this? For all the blissfulness, I felt little or nothing of the relief I’d expected. No, now it was all apprehension at what trials might be lie before us. What more I’d have to do to keep us alive, keep us in happiness and health.
“Keep up, guys,” I called softly – not to my brother and sister, whose hands I had to keep hold of, but to the invisible entourage following along behind us.
“But it is heavy, Master!”
“If that’s you, Bigbum, you know where you can put your complaints, don’t you?”
“Please, Master must not be so literal, or the Bigbum will suffer much…”
That got Jaid to laugh, but it was a brief snatch of sound, quickly stifled by her mood.
“You’d better stop writing them down, then, hadn’t you?”
“Y-e-e-e-ssssss, Master.”
I looked across at Jaroan. He was staring over his left shoulder, out towards the sea, little more than a faint wall of smudgy greyness against the horizon.
Goodbye, Salnifast-by-the-Sea. Goodbye, the Bay of Mund.
Of all the things I’d thought I’d have to say goodbye to, my brother wasn’t one of them. But he was different now. We were leaving the old Jaroan behind, perhaps forever.
Gilaela, or that thorny king who used her as a mouthpiece, hadn’t been wrong. ‘Return to the nightmare… from whence you came.’ The words lay heavy on my mind, anchoring me to my worries.
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