Like mounds of dust, Onin thought. The mountains were barely big enough to be called so, and twilight turned their rust-brown slopes to grey. Some snow might’ve helped. It didn’t matter.
Onin ran a hand through his hair again as the approaching footsteps morphed to squelches in the mud.
“Done yet? Please say you’re done.” Bron’s voice was hoarser than usual; he’d staved off his thirst for a drink or two for this. Onin looked back over his shoulder at the farmer, shaking his head. Bron sighed.
“It’s late, wherever it went it’s probably settled down somewhere for the night. We – I could look first thing in the morning?” Onin suggested. Bron made a loud, cringing snort and waved a mud-caked hand dismissively.
“You bloody better. We might be a big farm but it don’t mean I can afford to be a sheep down cause a’ your incompetence. First thing. An’ if not it’ll be outta your pay.” He turned, boots making that godawful squelching again as he aimed for his house. Onin suppressed his groan.
It was a shit farm, a shittier job… but Bron was right. Farmhands couldn’t afford to lose animals, even if it were only one out of a hundred sheep. But getting up at five in the morning was its own, special sort of awful. Onin pulled his feet out of the loose earth and began walking in the other direction. It was twilight; he had at least a little time left to keep searching.
The brush just beyond the farm was a decent bet, he supposed. Other than the barns, the house, or the forest, it was the only place he could think of where a sheep wouldn’t succumb to the cold.
He hated that. Those, blistering winds that came down from the Koroken Mountains. Memories of a childhood flittered back to him. There had been some warmth in Dawnlathen then. Warm summers, tame winters. The Grasslands had been true to their name.
Now it was all gone. He’d heard people say they’d come back one day – those warm seasons, the colour in the ground. Once the land had recovered. But the land had never endured a war like the one four years ago. Some note of scepticism at their claims still resonated within him.
The brush came into view then, just past the heaps of dirt piled high at the end of the last field. They were a prime example. Ugly, Moorish ambers like poisoned honey. But it had one advantage at least. A sheep would stand out like a sore thumb, no matter how entrenched it was.
Onin picked up his pace, the wind getting worse. The ground ever looser under him. The shadows didn’t help. They might be small for mountains, but this close to them, the Koroken’s silhouettes spun out endlessly, engulfing the land below them in a deep maw of empty-hued gloom. He needed to get away from here, move somewhere warmer and cleaner…
He slowed, grinding to a halt as he crested the last dirt mound. A white spec sat among the tangle of leaves and brambles. He smiled at first. Then it faded.
It was a sheep, a lowly farm animal, and he’d been around them enough to know how they felt. Bron had always been sceptical about Onin’s claim to have any magic proficiency, despite having seen the same more than enough examples during the war. But Onin knew there was some sliver of light in his veins. Enough at least to feel the energy of other creatures, the power their presences exuded. A sheep should not have more than any other animal.
This was strange. The energy stronger than it should have been. He cocked his head as he closed in. Was it definitely a sheep?
He’d practiced a little with his own power, just enough. Onin rallied it towards his fingers, uttering incantation by memory, uncertain why, entirely, he chose to do so.
He stopped again at the lip of the brush. Waited. Wool, definitely. Very clearly wool. But it was clean, not a spec of dirt, not a caught leaf or strand of bramble. He had seen snow filthier.
It moved then. Toward him. He backed up. A step. Another. His hand was hot then, flame beginning to manifest, sharpen into a single, silent blade.
It emerged.
His flame snapped shut. For a long minute Onin stared at the albino sheep, dull red eyes watching him. Certainly not his lost sheep. Yet there was a familiarity about it still, something he couldn’t explain, something that pushed at a quiet, curled up memory far in the distant plains of his mind. It kept pushing. Pushing and pushing. Heaving until there was no sound left in his head.
He didn’t hear the wind. Or his feet squashing the mud beneath him as he walked away. Not a thing until he was in that house again, until Bron turned and looked at him and furrowed his brow.
“Took your time. Any luck?” He kept a calm voice, but the concern still slid through the cracks.
Onin found he couldn’t speak. Or move. His magic recoiled inside him, seizing up his arms and legs. The power was stronger here. That same exact energy. It wasn’t coming from Bron, no, the source was still outside, but it had just… grown.
Bron looked at him with strange eyes, reading the wrongness in his farmhand’s own.
“Look like you saw death,” he said, placing a hand against Onin’s shoulder.
“I’m not sure what I saw. I found a sheep that wasn’t ours. Albino, and it had this sort of… feeling about it. This magic power that shouldn’t belong to an animal so small,” he replied, words slipping out at last.
The hand dropped away. Bron drew back to full height, something grim on his face. “Urban legend. That’s all that is. Get off with your stupid jokes an’ go to bed.”
There was a quake in his tone. A shivering uncertainty. It was something Onin had heard rarely, a quiet scar that Bron had brought back from the war. All those old tales and dark myths that had turned out to be true had changed them both forever. Now here it was again, the same tone, that same creeping realisation.
“Legend?” Onin croaked, still dragging it up from the back of his mind. “I don’t recall.”
A glancing terror shifted across the old man’s face as it sank in – he knew Onin wasn’t lying. He mouthed two words. Words which almost made sense, that so very nearly brought lost memory flaring back.
“Dark Shepherd.” Bron left the room. Then returned a moment later with a sword strapped to his side, weathered bronze glittering in the candlelight. Without another word he headed back through the door, out into the cold. Onin followed him.
It should still have been twilight, yet the moon shone through the open space among the clouds, lonely and large.
“Come on!” Bron hissed. Against the sudden thrashing of his own power, Onin obeyed.
He steadied himself as he came out to Bron’s side.
The farm seemed emptier. Maybe it was the air, stiller than an underground lake. Onin scanned behind them, their left, their right. His eyes fell frontwards again.
And there it was. Bron swore something in another, older language.
It was stood among motionless crops. Looking blindly at them. Bron moved a step closer.
That’s when it began to trickle back into Onin’s mind. The legend locked away and forgotten. But it wasn’t the sight that caused the knowledge to surge back.
Nor was it that albino sheep, half shrouded in mist, now a mass of mottled wool and viscera heaving at him under the moonlight.
It wasn’t the form behind it either. The dark mass, immune to the moon’s presence, where shadows spilled like oil, congealing and twisting up into a tight, pulsing mass of ink that barely pressed out from against the backdrop of an empty night. Eyes its only hard feature, burning scarlet pinpricks.
It wasn’t the sheep. It wasn’t its master. It was the power. It was the magic power, so desolate and cold against the fire in his veins. Overwhelming, and rancid. And familiar, though he didn’t know why.
Onin met Bron’s gaze as the old man glanced back They stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder. The albino sheep watched the farmer, but the Sheperd’s gaze seemed fixated on him.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“I’ve felt this before somewhere,” Onin muttered. The old man nodded, neck stiff, body grinding to a halt. “But from where? And why did I forget it?”
He remembered the chilliest winters he’d ever lived through, and yet he’d lost his memory of the blizzard?
“I don’t know,” said Bron, too much stillness in his tone. There was more than a memory of an old fairy tale, wasn’t there? More than a memory of a strange power. Onin shook the thoughts from his head.
He raised his hand, incantations barely a breath as he flexed his fingers in sequence. Sparks coiled into biting tendrils, which whirled into glowing air, which ignited into a raw manifestation of his magic power. The last syllables left his lips as he took aim. Onin grunted, the fireball exploding outward from his grasp, barely controlled and certainly not coordinated. It spiralled towards the entity.
Onin blinked at the rush of heat. By the time his eyelids lifted, the flame was gone, dead long before it reached its target. Bron swore again. Then stepped back. Then another step, and another.
But Onin barely noticed, his attention transfixed on the thing at the end of the field. The lightless form he recognised, somehow, but had never seen before in his life.
“We need to get out of here,” he said, finally glancing sidelong to Bron.
But Bron was gone. Onin craned his neck, eyes scanning the path to find his fleeing friend. But Bron was not there either.
He felt it then: a void of energy. A negative imprint on the space the old man had been a moment before. A rancid, sour pocket of dark magic. Bron was gone. And it had only taken a second.
Onin turned his eyes back again. Slowly.
The field was empty. Too late. It wanted him. No idea why, but it wanted him. More fragments of the legend seeped back, but nothing certain, nothing of a revelation.
He was moving again. Moving over cold, empty ground. No sight, no scent, the moonlight a dull flicker.
“Onin!”
Onin didn’t halt. Not for Bron’s voice.
Bron was gone.
That was not his voice.
It called again, louder, echoing over the plains. A close mimicry, but just a little too perfect.
Some part of him dared to think, dared to hope that he was wrong, that if he turned and ran to it, he’d find the farmer doubled over in a ditch.
He blinked hard.
And yet again, the world had changed when he opened his eyes. Clouds strafed over the path of the moon as still air tumbled into a howling wind, the lights in the farmhouse winked out one at a time; an icier blackness consumed the farmland. Or whatever remained. No stalks of wheat blew in the wind, no mud squelched. It had all turned rigid, frozen in a moment of time forever.
He tried to stop it. Really, really tried to stop his eyes from blinking shut, even a moment. They fell and flitted up. Far in front, as he tripped into a standstill, red eyes watched him. A desire he didn’t have a name for beamed from them.
Onin backed away, not breaking sight with the Shepherd, rallying his own magic again. It wouldn’t ignite, wouldn’t so much as spark in the presence of this smothering, death-like power.
Some thought it was the reaper of souls. Some a demon that had crept into the world before the war. It didn’t matter. He knew it was… not wrong, but off. Off, because there was something else hidden within its folds. Something else about its truth, about the way it moved without moving, existed without ever needing to be there. Onin felt a scream build in his throat. And then die out.
Finally, the Shepherd made a sound of its own. A long, wet gasp that rippled through the air that was certainly supposed to be a breath.
He tired a third, final time. But it was gone. The power in his veins was gone. Onin backed away again. Again. Again. Over and over, the distance never widening, the wraithlike form sauntering, slipping towards him as its laboured breathing turned heavy. Desperate.
The barn was behind him, straight down the path, then a hard left. That was the only way. He couldn’t escape this by running.
Onin charged backwards, that sound louder and louder, followed by a fleshly, mellow mimicry of Bron’s voice, muttering a mindless jumble of words. Onin’s legs cried out as he pushed harder, steps bounding, form flying through the farmland towards his refuge.
He crashed through the barn door and sped into the blackness. The blinding, empty space at the far corner amongst the hay bales. And he waited there.
Waited.
Waited.
The voice was distant, but he couldn’t pin down its direction anymore. It seemed to be coming from all around him. This had been a miscalculation, a horrible mistake. Too little light - he couldn’t see.
And then he heard it again, louder than ever, those rasps of air through ancient lungs. Onin closed his eyes.
The smell of hay was a useless illusion, broken by an odour of rot. Not wood, not food. Flesh. Rotting, stinking flesh. So many people had died in that godforsaken war. Was it perhaps one of them? Had the carcass of a soldier come back to a half-life? Made the stories a reality?
The breathing paused, searching, holding itself before it leapt. He could feel it again, that suffocating, cruel magic. It would enjoy this. It would savour it.
Onin pulled himself in tighter, forcing himself deeper into that corner, into the straw, dry filth stroking across his face as he nestled in it. Dared not to breathe, to move, to think.
It didn’t work.
That breath came closer. Until he could feel it caressing his skin, cold as ice. Until he could hear every palpitation, every twitch and spasm in its body as it drew in on him, as it leant down.
Onin prayed. Prayed to every god he knew the name of, in every language he could think of, chanting a whisper into the dark, over and over and over and over.
It was so close now. It was right in front of him. He could feel the crimson stare as it melted through his eyelids, tightened on him.
Onin shrank into nothing, prayers still tumbling from his lips. His native tongue, the Fawnwood dialect, Feiki.
He felt a change in the creature without opening his eyes. He knew now – he was certain of it – the Shepherd was smiling. A thin, long, curved white split in the curtain of black. Teeth a mottled army of knives, oozing with blood.
He cried out, voice weaker and weaker. Arkisian, Xykattan, every odd word he’d heard Bron fashion into curses.
Something old and slender wrapped around his wrist and tightened its grip.
He uttered his last. Strange, foreign words that Bron had picked up during the war.
The grip on his arm vanished.
The breathing stopped.
The smell dissipated.
Silence thicker than water settled in the air. Onin cracked open his eyes, strands of hay eclipsing his vision. He sat up.
The Shepherd was gone.
Nothing.
Onin doubled over back into the hay and vomited.
~
Aerikian. He’d asked the next day. An old neighbour had told him that word was Aerikian. And now it made some sense.
Onin pressed one hand against the fencing, steadying himself as he stepped out of the farm. What was left of it, at least.
He looked back, expecting some to feel at least some sting of sadness, regret, or guilt. But he felt numb. The soil was rock now, stone tendrils of wheat rising out from it. The house’s paint was bleached white, its windows opaque. Every patch of mud, every stretch of brush, all of it was frozen grey, and cold to the touch.
Onin shook his head and moved on, keeping a weary, quiet demeanour plastered on his face. No one around to see him, yet he did it anyway.
The Koroken Mountains rose up, towering over the valley, casting a shaded, colourless expanse before him. Still so distant, yet he’d never been this close to them before.
And now that he looked at them with fresh eyes, they did seem different.
There was colour in the stone, just a little, where veins of sandstone jutted out across their surfaces, slithering down their length.
And he felt a certain quietness about them he’d failed to notice before. It was a windless day, but that wasn’t the source of the silence. All parts of the world had a feeling to them through magic. Just like life, only it felt a bit different. Not a flowing kind of energy. No, the earth itself always thrummed, a steady, timeless drumbeat calling out from the core, travelling through valleys, through hills, through mountains. But you had to be close. You had to concentrate to feel that sort of energy.
And he needed to know.
It took him hours. The sun was past its peak by the time he had reached the nearest mountain’s foot, where those tracings of rock emerged from the grass. Onin pulled in a breath, waiting as his magic pooled. It was still weakened, and still shaken, but it could do this much at least.
He knelt down and pressed a hand to the stone. For a moment there was nothing, no connection between him and the world. Gradually, something began to change, as his magic probed through the mountainside, explored to the peaks and crags. The connection stabalised. Little by little, a sound grew inside him, echoing through his mind. Almost enough to unlock those last hidden memories.
There was no thrum here, no sense of ageless magic. But there were screams. Buried so, so deep within the mountains. There were screams coming from within. And Bron’s was among them.
Onin stood. He looked up at the mountain. Then he walked away. Two sounds would stay with him forever. For the rest of his life, they’d probe hopelessly at lost, forbidden memories.
The screams within the mountain were one. The word he had uttered the other.
Aerikian was the language used for casting spells. A deviant language spoken by people, derived from another, older one that the mortal tongue couldn’t pronounce.
It was called Aemoran. It was the language spoken by the Angels.