Morning light suffused the air, made the world vibrant in Joren’s vision. The dark mane of his steed lashed and gleamed, the grass swayed and flickered, Nahlia’s aureate hair performed a spastic dance as though in celebration of the dawn. It was a world of motion and life, which Joren, affected by the twinned inebriants of survival and brisk air, saw flowing together as one magnificent, robust tapestry.
Yet, a thread escaped its weave, threatened to pull away from the whole and spoil its beauty. Nahlia’s ragged breaths had shallowed, the Morriim slipped steadily into darkness.
Joren pressed his palm against her belly as best he could to stanch the blood flow. Nahlia groaned to the pain. A good sign. Feeling had not yet left her. He nestled his face into her golden hair in a gesture redolent of his past life, a memory whose emotions grasped vainly at this moment for redemption. “Don’t leave me, my sweet,” he whispered.
Ahead of him, the sky ripped open at the horizon, a cosmic scar tearing the heavens asunder. Flame curled away from the wound, blood-red and brighter than any aurora. Shaped like an eye, with lashes of smoke. Pupil, iris, and white replaced by terrible fire. Through it emerged the God of Death, feeding a thewy leg between the peeled edges, then bowing to slip his barrel chest into the Eldaviiran countryside. He stood, colossal, muscle naked on his frame, fiery, smoking skull streaking the sky with a black smear expanding into the distance. The grinding of bone against bone as the god’s maw fell opened. “Your hand to her wound will not save her,” Morrii said.
Tears stained Joren’s cheeks, brought forth by a confluence of memory, desperation, terror, awe. He glowered at the abomination towering above the landscape, dwarfing the expanse of terrain. “Have you come all this way to inform me?”
The osseous features could only register indifference. “Time is all that matters. Your palm does not hold back the seconds. The advances of Time are inexorable, steady, and constant, pour equally through your fingers as between them.”
The god’s sonorous voice filled the air, as if spoken inside every unseen molecule suspended in the ether. His power exceeded the natural world, which bent to his will. “A message delivered so uncaringly,” said Joren, “from a being for whom it doesn’t apply.”
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A subtle tilt of the god’s skull, a shift in the angle of its horns. “Time draws the first line across the universe. All others draft from its trajectory. You may experience its presence more acutely, but trust, warrior, that nothing escapes Time.”
Joren felt his gut wrench with indignity. “Do you know death?” he spat.
The god’s head swayed back. “You ask the God of Death if he knows the subject of his authority?”
“You’re merely its administrator, its lackey. For your services, immortality.”
A gust emitted from the furnace of Morrii’s throat. “What you know of mortality is an infant’s understanding of its world. None survive the attrition of Time.”
“How long have you existed?”
Morrii slouched, a gradual rolling forward of his broad shoulders. “What’s left of what began is a disfigured ghost image in the layers of a palimpsest, memories abrading memories abrading memories, subsumed, reshaped, emergent imposters dancing a masquerade in the ever-changing rooms of the mind.”
The god’s speech fell on deaf ears. The moment enslaved Joren, dragged him along as it passed too quickly into the next. Blood gushed from Nahlia’s wound, Joren’s hand only succeeding in dividing it into several runnels that snaked their way down her belly to the back of the mount. Red lines stained the barrel of the horse, driven towards the flanks by its tireless sprint. “No, no,” Joren groaned. Pressing his lips into her soft hair, he begged, “Please stay.”
She wouldn’t. As she hadn’t before. More cruel than its ceaseless march is Time’s fiendish collaboration with the past. Joren pinched shut his eyes and saw the union of present and past as a needle driven through layers of flesh and muscle, uniting wound and unfading bruise.
He opened his eyes and Morrii was gone, the tear in the sky sewn shut, only the long, black cloud left in the wake of the god’s visit. Beneath it, the village of Wenderton. And written under the image of its thatch-roofed homes:
Time: 1 week 6 hours 2 minutes 14 seconds
When he inquired what remained of Nahlia’s time, he saw that she had sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds before she would succumb to her wound.
Kicking the sides of the beast that carried them, Joren whispered to his fellow Morriim, “We’ll make it. One death was enough, we won’t suffer another.”