Haur barely lasted two days before the horrible headache had him accepting Abbot’s offer and lighting up a few herbs in his own pipe. Thar was tempted to join them, wanting some relief from the icepick that had settled between his eyebrows and not shifted a hair since, but the herbs Abbot smoked were too strong. Just their smell was enough to lessen the pressure but also make his eyelids heavy.
How Yaling and D’Argen, not smoking but always around Abbot, could handle it, was a wonder. Lilian was a whole other story.
“One of the scouting parties reported a group of animals, not too far from us,” Nocipel was reading out a list, taking charge once Haur had turned to narcotics to help with his headache. “Nothing any of them have seen before but I have approved for them to capture one to see if the meat is edible.”
“Nothing any of them have seen before?” D’Argen perked up, showing more life with that simple action than all of the others combined had shown since coming across the pillar.
“Yes, D’Argen, you can go.” Nocipel waved him off with a hand in the air. It fell back down to her face and she rubbed her brows.
“Let me,” Thar offered quietly, holding out a hand towards her.
Nocipel, thankfully, did not question him. Instead, she handed over the wooden tablet and scrawled paper then proceeded to rub her face and eyes harshly, as if trying to wash herself.
“Anything else?” D’Argen asked, his legs already bouncing from where he sat.
Thar tried to ignore the attention that D’Argen called to his body and instead focused on the report Nocipel had tried to give. He was not sure to who since Haur was barely paying attention, Yaling and Abbot were sleeping, and Lilian may as well have been in another realm with how far their gaze wandered.
D’Argen was listening, even though he did not look it, but Thar suspected that Nocipel was reading it aloud for her own benefit. He tried to ignore the ache inside his chest but found his arm shooting up and rubbing right at the centre of it. The report. Thar skimmed the words quickly, trying to find any information that would be relevant for D’Argen or something to keep him with them, but nothing stood out.
“Aim south,” Nocipel said through a groan. “I have the feeling we may not be that far from the coast.”
“Got it!” D’Argen saluted and jumped to his feet. He fidgeted, dancing on the spot, and looked at Thar.
Thar waited, skimmed the paper one more time, then put it down to look at D’Argen and give him a firm nod. The fire in the middle of their small camp was almost completely extinguished by the gust of wind when D’Argen opened his mahee and ran. It remained, but only because Nocipel started prodding at the embers under it.
Thar stood up and walked away, further from the flames, while he focused on the report. They had sent off multiple scouting parties since making camp. No matter their size, every single one of them was delayed in either leaving or coming back. Thar knew they all stopped at the pillar.
He felt it.
The reports all mentioned the pillar as well. The water around its base was freezing again and soon they would be able to get close enough to touch it once more. Lilian would be able to touch it again.
Thar glanced around the small camp where all of the Never Born were, sticking together and away from the mortals since they first arrived on solid ground. He wondered if they felt the same pull that he did, the one that made him sit right in front of the hot flames with them.
“I will be back,” he told Nocipel, the only one paying attention to him, and handed her the report sheet. Without waiting for a response, he walked off. Barely a few steps out of their campgrounds and he felt someone following him. He did not stop.
When he was halfway between their camp and the pillar, his shadow decided to catch up to him. He only glanced down and to the side where Lilian was taking long steps to keep up with him. They said nothing. Thar decided the silence was welcome and did the same.
The ice around the pillar was, indeed, coming back. Thar felt it grow under his feet the moment the ground disappeared from under the ice. He walked a slow circle around the stone structure, not looking at it and trying to ignore it. Instead, he focused on the ice under his feet. One step to the right and it was crystals and snow over dirt and rock. The next step to the left was jagged and sharp ice that only formed when salt water froze too quickly.
It was a perfect circle, an unnatural hole that cut the edges of the earth to go deep below. Thar reached for the ice and the cold water under it, opening his mahee and using his hands to guide it into one of Nocipel’s spells rather than his own. He followed the water down, down, down—it went so deep that his natural mahee of controlling the cold wanted to touch back. A break in the wall of earth revealed a stream, an underground river, he followed the current for so long that his mahee could not stretch that far anymore. He let it go with the taste of salt on his lips.
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“Did you feel it?” Lilian asked him as soon as he opened his eyes.
Thar startled but he kept the reaction from showing physically. Then their question registered though he did not understand it fully. “I think I felt the ocean.”
“I meant the pillar,” Lilian almost interrupted him, speaking so quickly it felt like they ignored his words.
But then Thar realized. He took to the ice and followed the water down. His mahee circled around the pillar as if it was not even there. He frowned and looked to the water where the black stone peeked out. It was carved. There was a pictograph that looked like a figure kneeling in front of an empty chair. The icepick between his eyebrows shifted, digging deeper.
“There it is,” Lilian said and their voice was not carried on the air between them but entered through that hole burrowing into his forehead from between his eyebrows.
“What is it?” Thar asked and closed his eyes. He rubbed at them first, trying to relieve the pressure, but it did not help. When he touched that spot that was hurting on his forehead, it felt like his fingers were made of the same ice that he controlled and had turned into claws, digging through his skin and bone and right into his brain. He pulled his hand back with a flinch and stared at it as if he could find what caused the pain.
Lilian was standing so close to him, peeking up at him right past his open hand. They had never stood that close to him before. Thar startled and dropped his hand, focusing on them instead. Something was wrong. Lilian was not acting like themselves at all. Even Thar, who knew them so little, knew this was not the norm.
“Is it calling to you or is it trying to make you ignore it?” Lilian asked, ignoring his earlier question.
Thar looked back toward the pillar and his eyes automatically shifted, focusing on the snow and trying to find the horizon line between the white ground and the white sky. It all blurred together in the distance, impossible to tell where—
“Ignoring it will not make it go away,” Lilian’s words interrupted his thoughts and he looked back at them. “Focus on it.”
“What are you doing?” Thar asked. Lilian was acting strange. From what he had seen, all the Never Born, himself included, did not feel comfortable around this pillar. Yaling had said it sang and Abbot had said it shone. D’Argen did not say anything but it most likely vibrated in his eyes the same way how it flowed for Nocipel and Haur could not even think about it without getting a headache.
“I want to touch it again,” Lilian answered with a shrug. It did not feel like an answer.
Thar looked down when he felt his feet move. He had not planned it. The water that was under him a moment ago was solid ice. It did not reach far but it was solid and latched onto the edge of the strange hole. Maybe the pillar had punched the hole when it fell from the sky?
Thar took a hasty step back and looked at Lilian with wide eyes. That was not his thought. That was not his voice in his head giving him that idea.
“It fell from the sky?” he asked them.
Lilian looked confused for barely a moment before they grinned. “You heard it too!”
“It? No. That was you.”
“No.” Lilian quickly shook their head. “One more step, come on,” they prompted and only then did Thar realize he was once more standing on top of freshly frozen water. “Good. Now, reach out and touch it.”
It felt like his body was not his own. His hand rose up, fingers reaching for the black stone. It was carved with words and pictures. If he stretched just a bit further, his fingers would touch what looked like an eye in the middle of a simple face. Or it could have been a cloud, hanging to the side of a pillar.
“I do not want to touch it,” Thar said though his body moved forward.
“But I do,” Lilian replied and that was not their voice. It was not spoken in the air between them. It was something else, grating at him from inside his chest and up his throat, escaping through the entrance of his mahee as if he was the one to say the words.
Thar registered that something was wrong but it did not matter. His fingers touched the stone.
It was cold. Colder than the ice under his feet. Colder than the thin air atop Sky Mountain. Colder than the dark abyss below where the black stone sank so far it had no end. It was so cold that Thar felt a shiver run up his spine and stretch his shoulders back before forcing them to hunch in. His bones shook, his teeth clattered, his head was pounding, and all of it was because it was so cold that he could not even breathe. His lungs froze on an inhale and there was no air to escape. The black stone filled his vision and each crevice in its markings disappeared, turned into a dot in the darkness.
He knew this darkness. He knew this black. Those dots should not have existed. Not out here where it was so cold that nothing, nothing at all, could survive. Not where the cold killed without a thought and extinguished even the largest of stars eventually.
There it is.
It was not a voice. It was a scent that made no sense because it was too many things at once. It was white freckles on black skin and lavender spirals that faded to greens and blues. It was a black void that needed to be filled with swirling galaxies and—
Thar opened his eyes to look at a stone pillar in the middle of a field of white snow and surrounded by a short wall of ice. His hand was held in a tight grasp and when he looked down it was to see tan fingers, a silver bracer, and black, black, black studded with white snowflakes. When he looked up though, he saw blue. A dark blue that was so comforting that it was frightening.
“What the fuck just happened?!” D’Argen practically yelled in his face.
Thar thought that was a very good question as he looked around him for Lilian. They were not there. There were no footsteps in the snow other than Thar’s own and the skid mark D’Argen must have made when he stopped his run and pulled Thar away from the pillar.
What the fuck just happened, indeed.