Daniel’s tale spun down, petering into nothing. Fireworks had long stopped firing, and the only sound which had accompanied the latter half was the tiny, eager croaking of frogs in a nearby creek. For a time, there was awkward silence amongst them. For no perceivable reason, Daniel felt sick to his stomach, like it was filled with those frogs. He hadn’t meant to share so much.
“By Jaysus,” Robby said finally, almost too low to hear. “I never took ye for a gunslinger, Daniel.”
“I’m not a gunslinger,” he replied a bit too sharply, feeling heat rise in his cheeks.
“Aye. Cry your pardon,” his friend mumbled.
A few seconds passed, but the brief bloom of anger that had risen in Daniel’s belly passed quickly. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve never told anyone, is all.”
Little Gwyn was not quite old enough to have understood everything in poor Daniel’s story, but she could tell with ease that it was important to him. She thought on the story and how sad it was, and how painful it must have been to go through. Before long, though, she did not feel like thinking about any longer that night; it was making her sad too, and it was far past her normal bedtime besides.
“Daddy, I’m tired,” she said through a great big yawn.
That feeling of sickness came back to Daniel: a horrible, gnawing fear opened up in him, the worry that he had alienated this precious little girl.
Before those voices could fully make themselves heard, she did a wondrous thing: she got up and gave Uncle Danny a hug. “Did you ever see that man again?”
Daniel returned the hug fiercely. “No,” he whispered. “Not him.”
“Good. See you tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
Then they said their goodbyes, one with newfound respect and the other with newfound appreciation, and Robby took Gwyn home to bed. Daniel, for his part, sat for a while longer. The heat of the day went out of the earth, and he stared into the sky as stars winked at him as the summer breeze teased the acrid smell of sulfur away from Deepwood. The galaxy in its full majesty unfolded in the inky blackness, and other untold works of Gan wheeled overhead.
The rest of the year passed, Full-Earth flying by, and then before Daniel could scarcely believe it, Reaping had come again.
Then again. And again.
What idle time Daniel had was spent in Robby and Gwyn’s company as their friendship deepened over time. Sometimes though, he would go to Hob’s and listen to Fin play, or fish for gossip of the wider world. This latter was hard to come by, though the occasional traveler brought word. Most of it was bunk, but he couldn’t help wondering at times. He did hear one time that John Farson had been killed in battle, far to the south. That pleased him just fine, say thankya.
Seamus passed into the clearing at the end of the path shortly before Wide-Earth the next year, and seeing as he had no family to pass it on to, the Village Mother saw fit to give Daniel charge of his lands and flock. “Yer of good stock, Daniel Bryne,” she said to him, “And yer service to us these years has not gone unnoticed. I can think of no one—” she pronounced it ‘noon,’ “—more fitting to tend poor Seamus’s herd. His charge is now yers.”
By rights, Daniel was now a fully-fledged member of Deepwood.
A few more years passed in comfortable peace, though they were not without their problems.
For no reason that the villagers could see, their crops seemed to yield less and less each harvest season. Their cellars had never exactly been full, but since Daniel had blown, in each successive winter seemed harder and harder. The older folk arrived at each spring a little gaunter in the face, enduring the aching emptiness in their bellies so their children or grandchildren might have one more potato or carrot at dinner time. Reaping season each year was a relief… but desperation loomed over it like a dark cloud on the horizon.
A scant few weeks after the sheep were given into Daniel’s care, he suffered his first loss in livestock. No one in the village had ever seen a wolf, not in living memory, but those far-off cries in the night did not lie, and sure enough a count the next morning brought him a few heads short.
After penning the remainder up, he hiked through the surrounding hills on the off chance the missing sheep had just wandered off and gotten themselves lost. An entire afternoon spent trudging northward through the tall grass gave him a disquieting answer: one set of bones, impossibly clean. The sheep could not have been taken even a day prior, yet the bones were dry as if they had been roasting in the hot sun for months.
What’s more, the carcass gave no sign of ill-handling: there were no teeth marks anywhere, no limbs ripped away to lay apart from the whole. The entire skeleton seemed to be neatly arranged in a curled position, as if the sheep had simply died and rotted away while sleeping.
An ill omen, he decided after a minute’s thought. In the old manner, he found a large stone nearby and crushed the ivory-white skull, to release the spirit of the beast in case it still lingered. He gathered more stones and built a cairn to house the bones, all the while muttering a solemn prayer to Raf, to whom sheepherders and their ilk were countenanced. He could do little else except cast backwards glances the entire way home, though it felt to him as if the pressure that had weighed on him was lifted.
He elected not to tell anyone; there was little good that could come of it.
In his fourth winter, several of the villagers developed a strange illness. No fever plagued them as far as the Mother could tell, but for a full week they sweated viciously in their beds and moaned like newborn babes, eyes dim and unseeing. The younger victims seemed to recover without much issue, but many of those in their later years were never quite right again. Old Hob was among their number: though he continued to tend to his bar, his wit and notable temper had evaporated. When people spoke with him he seemed as like a dullard, speaking with a noticeable fog in his eyes.
People still patronized him, though one day out of earshot Robby shook his head. “It’s evil, what’s happened to him,” and he made a sign as if to ward off demons: his fore and little finger raised up together, with thumb clamping down the other two. Daniel felt as if he had seen that hand sign a lot more often as time went by.
These and plenty other hardships befell Deepwood over the years, but the folk there weathered them as they had for time out of mind. After all, what else was there to do? There were still crops to be planted and tended, children to be minded and provided for. For each tragedy that came to pass, they eventually shook it and moved on as well as they could manage, taking comfort in each other.
Gwyn, mercifully, had largely avoided these dangers, though she was old enough now to see how her father struggled for her, and when opportunities came she helped in the fields more and more with each passing year.
She was old enough, too, to grow curious about what lay beyond their little corner of the world. Whenever Daniel came to visit them both, there were not a few questions for him. On one particular evening, these questions became somewhat existential.
Autumn had come round once more: it would be Daniel’s sixth Sawain, and during the day children gathered acorns for flour again (ultimately, he had not cared overly much for the acorn cakes). This evening was unusually cold, and as the light turned steadily to chilly darkness, Daniel found himself in Robby’s living room. His friend was steadily working at his tools, grinding an axe head back to sharpness or fixing the mounting strips of his spade. Little odds and ends to make sure he was prepared when planting season returned.
A pleasant fire filled the hearth, spreading warmth and good cheer around the little cottage. Daniel sat in a chair opposite the fire, and Gwyn was sat cross-legged on the floor, on a rug in the center of the room. As the winter months came up on them, there was more time for discussions like this, and her sense of curiosity deepened. She was fiending for answers, and Daniel was all too happy to put up with her torrent of questions.
“So you’re saying… these Beams hold up the Dark Tower?”
“Aye, little one.”
“And there’s twelve Beams?”
“Not quite. There’re six beams, each with two points at the ends.” She tilted her head, hair bobbing slightly. “Have you ever seen a clock, by chance?”
She shook her head. “What’s a clock?”
“It’s a machine that can tell you what time of day it is.”
“Really?” She screwed her face up, perplexed. “Why would anyone need that?”
“Oh, it’s not like going out and looking at the sun or moon,” he replied. “Do you know your hours and minutes?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Gwyn said hesitantly. “Hours are long and minutes are short.”
“Yes. To be specific, hours are made up of sixty minutes. Without going into too much detail, that’s what a clock is for: it makes time specific.” He smiled as he said it. “It’s not as important in a place like Deepwood, though I bet if you looked in that old courthouse you’d find a clock somewhere inside it. Maybe we’ll go look one of these days.”
He leaned forward, thinking for a moment. “Hm. You know the wheels on your dad’s cart?” She nodded. “That’s how the Tower and its Beams work.” He held up a fist in the air. “The center, the hub, is the most important part: without it, the wheel wouldn’t work. But the center is held up by the spokes,” he held up his other hand, flat and straight, and rotated it behind his fist to illustrate, “and without them, the wheel would fall apart.”
“If the Beams break… the Dark Tower falls,” she said softly.
“Aye.” He nodded, sounding grim. “The Tower holds up all of creation. If a wheel breaks, the cart topples over. Do ya ken?”
“If the Tower falls…” Gwyn did not finish her thought, and her face took on a pale thinness.
Perhaps this lesson was a bit too much. Daniel looked to Robby, who set his backhoe down on the floor. The stout man did not know of these matters, having lived his whole life out in smaller places like this one. He doubted that even the Village Mother knew so much.
Whenever Daniel came by to talk and teach Gwyn, he found himself listening in though. He trusted Daniel as a font of information, and though he did not parse it all completely, he encouraged Gwyn to learn as much as she could—provided Daniel could withstand it, of course. Still, this kind of thing was a lot for a growing girl to think about. “You mentioned them Beams have protectors of some kind, yeah? Somethin’ to keep ‘em safe?”
Daniel’s face brightened. “Of course: each endpoint of each Beam—its portal, ya ken—has a Guardian watching over it, warding away anything that would do harm to them.” Preempting her, he continued: “Some say they’ve always existed, as long as the Tower and Beams themselves. Others say they were fashioned by the Great Ones thousands of years ago. Nothing I’ve studied says for sure one way or the other; we do know from older accounts that they take the form of various animals.” Daniel had no real facility for storytelling, but sharing knowledge came to him as easy as breathing.
“Animals?” she breathed. There was so much wonder packed into that one word.
“Animals,” he nodded. “Great beasts, powerful and wise beyond mortal ken. They work in pairs: rat and fish, bat and hare, eagle and lion, dog and horse, turtle and bear, wolf and elephant.”
“What’s an elephant?”
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“It’s…” he thought for a moment. “Well, they’re supposedly extremely large, as big as a house even. They have a nose like a tail,” he held his right arm in front of his face, “and deadly horns that grow from their mouths, like a boar.”
“Jesus,” was all she said, though it prompted a curt word from her father. “Cry pardon, daddy.”
“No one has seen an elephant in a very long time, I believe, though there are some stories of them from the time of my grandfather’s grandfather. It’s possible that they died out in the time since.”
Gwyn mulled over all this for a few minutes, eyes staring intently at nothing. Then she turned her face up towards Daniel once more. “Have you ever seen the Beams?”
He found himself caught up for a second. “Gilead was said to be near to the beam of the lion and the eagle, though I never had the chance to go to it myself.”
“Do you know where the closest one is?”
“Now that is quite a question,” he smiled again. “Thinking of going on an adventure, are we?” Gwyn said nothing, but she did hide a shy smile behind her arms. “Well, I couldn’t tell you precisely where it lies unfortunately. If my geography lessons were anything to speak of, though, there is a Beam that crosses through this part of the barony. Funnily enough, I believe it’s the path of the elephant closest to us, somewhere to the north and east, and on the other side of the Tower would be the way of the wolf.”
The girl seemed lost in her thoughts, and Daniel left them to her for a while as he enjoyed the warm crackle of the fire. Robby had picked his backhoe up some minutes ago, but he was transparently not working on it, not moving his hands as he ruminated alongside his daughter.
“You know,” Daniel interrupted the silence, “the Beams do run across the land entire. If you picked the right direction, you would probably run across one eventually.” Though, now that he thought on it, that might not entirely be true.
Robby looked at him with a peculiar glint in his eyes as if to say, you better not give her any ideas. “Though I should say,” Daniel picked up hastily, “they cannot be seen by the naked eye. You might never realize you had run across it if you weren’t looking for the right signs.”
“What would those be?” she started to say, but the end of her sentence stretched and turned into a gigantic yawn. Daniel and Robby both laughed, breaking the tension.
“I’ll tell you some other time, Gwyn. I believe it’s time I left you and Robby to your beds.”
But later that night, he lay awake in his own bed, sleep eluding him. He had not properly thought of the Dark Tower or the Beams since coming to this sleepy little village, years ago now. Gwyn’s own passion for learning reminded him of himself when he was younger, and it had indirectly reawakened some small passion in him.
He had grown roots here in Deepwood, enough that he thought he could stay here for the rest of his natural life without too much issue. It was as fine a village as still existed in these times where civilization seemed in freefall.
Why, then, could he not stop thinking about leaving?
Perhaps it was just the autumn season, he though dimly to himself. But deep in his heart he knew it could not be so simple. It never was, not with the Tower looming over him as it always had.
He almost wondered whether he had done Gwyn a disservice, filling her head with such lofty nonsense. But he put that thought out of his mind; a little daydreaming would hurt her none, as long as she did not get it in her to leave and find the Tower herself.
He shuddered at the thought. There were many tales of those who got wanderlust in them, leaving behind all they knew in this life to try and find the Tower. Some called them Seekers or Aspirants, although most just called them fools.
It would be better, he concluded, to leave those ideas behind. He had a place now, and a role he served for this quiet place and its people. He had grown to care deeply for the town and all those in it, with all their little oddities. It would be foolishness to leave that all behind to search for something he was not even totally sure existed.
Yet later in the night, as sleep gradually overtook him, he dreamed. He found himself walking through vast fields of flowers, as vivid in color and brightness as the rising sun. Roses, he thought, though he had never seen roses such as these. They looked spectacular, each one somehow more impossibly beautiful than the last—faintly he realized that he could hear them, too. From the center of each tender bud came a single voice, pure as spring rain, and the voices of all the roses in all the fields came together in an ethereal, holy chorus that he could hear through his very bones.
Amongst them, wrought of stark blackness, was a great tower that seemed to rise endlessly into the sky, far above everything that had ever existed or would exist.
Suddenly, spires of light—magnificent columns, seeming impossibly large even from so far away—exploded from on high where the tower’s top disappeared into infinite blue. They emerged one at a time on six axes, spreading out over the earth until they disappeared far over the horizon. The first Beam lit up the land, and then each after it seemed to intensify it: to Daniel’s eye, it looked as if the colors and shapes that surrounded him were deepening, the roses and the grass and the atmosphere and the sun all becoming saturated to the point that hues blended together and he was utterly filled with their splendor. Looking up, the curvature of the sky gave him the feeling of being encased in a colossal dome, cleaved into twelve sections.
Watching the land spring into this blessed vividness, he felt beset by a strange, complete sense of peace. He soaked in an unshakeable knowing that everything was right and good, that as long as the Beams were held aloft all manner of things would be well.
Then, as swiftly as they had appeared, they began to fade away. Terribly, the light and beauty that filled the world near to bursting began to leech out of it. The first Beam dwindled until it was just barely visible in the sky, a sick and spindly thing compared to its siblings.
Finally, it snapped. The Dark Tower shuddered, and the world was thrown asunder.
Underneath where the Beam had been, the land warped and twisted violently: roses were swallowed up in great clefts rent in the surface, or broken and thrusted into the air on new mountains. With every rose that was lost a little more beauty left the world, color and sound turning to ugliness. He tried to cry out for the death and destruction, but found himself frozen like a statue, unable to give voice to the horror before him.
Just as the earth seemed it would settle, another Beam withered and snapped, setting the upheavals off anew. Then another Beam went, and another, until it seemed the whole of the world was boiling with madness and death.
Daniel fell to the ground, shutting his eye so he would have to look no more. To his despair, he found that the ghost of his other forced him to watch on.
The sky darkened until it seemed near to pitch black, a void with nothing to fill it. The chorus of the roses gave way to screams, and their loveliness made their ruination all the worse to bear. Then, after an eternity, the rumbling underneath stopped, and the voices of the roses fell silent.
He feared to look up, but Daniel dared, and was filled with a sick relief to see that two Beams remained in the sky. Only two of six remained, but it seemed that was enough. Enough to keep the Tower from falling, falling and bringing this world—all worlds—with it.
Then he felt his heart stop as another of the Beams began to lose its size and brightness. He knew deep within that this would be the final break, that one Beam by itself could not hoist the Dark Tower. He simultaneously squeezed his eye shut again and looked on as the fifth spire of light became smaller… and smaller… and smaller, until it was but the size of a needle in the sky. He prepared himself for the end—
--and woke up, cold and sweating all over. For those first few terrified seconds he did not know where he was, flailing like a madman in the blackness of pre-dawn. Instinctively he felt for his right eye, and as his fingers found nothing there, he felt the world settle back into place around him.
He sat himself up in bed, feeling all over himself to make sure that he was in fact still there. In truth, he felt more like an apparition than a man, but as the seconds turn to minutes and the minutes stretched into the start of morning, he began to feel sure of himself again.
As the day’s first light began to creep through his windowsill, he fumbled for his smallclothes and looked out at his field. It was a brisk morning, the first of the year where frost could be seen on the fat tips of the tall grass. Winter was coming again, chill arms steadily reaching out to caress Deepwood in its soft embrace. The sun finally peaked over the horizon and cast its sleepy glow on the world: the frost melted instantly at its touch as it turned the grass to molten gold. There was goodness and kindness here, increasingly rare in a world that was moving on.
Daniel could not help but think for the briefest moment that, as blissful and comfortable as it was, he would have traded all the good in his life to see just one of those roses again.
He did not share his dream with Robby or Gwyn, though he pondered on it as he worked his flock out in the rolling hills over the next few days. He wasn’t used to lending credence to things like dreams, having always been fonder of those things he could touch with his hands and see with his eye. Still, the vividness of it all… there was a nest of doubt resting in the back of his mind, now. If it had been a True Dream, then its meaning was obvious. Painfully obvious. Was there anything he could even do if there was truth in it?
He came to no real answer, and as the sights and sounds of his vision faded (for a vision was what it had been, though he would not admit it to himself), the sureness that had filled him trickled away. Eventually he pushed it out of his mind and decided to come back to the village early; the days had been even colder than he expected—weather the people of Deepwood called “foundered”—and he was already tired from his time spent out in the rough.
After the labor of corralling his sheep was done and he had tidied about his house, he was positively exhausted. Yet, it was too early to sleep, and after an ill-fated attempt at rest that found him strangely restless, he decided to see if Robby would like a drink at Hob’s.
“A tad early in the season fer the good graf,” his good friend said, “but ‘m sure he has some old beer we could get at. ‘Mon then,” he waved.
Gwyn, being too young for drink by their reckoning, stayed at home (though not before securing Daniel’s promise that he would be by soon to tell more stories). The two short men, one burly and the other lean, ambled their way back into town against a slow wind that had picked up since Daniel had put his flock in.
The sky was blanketed in the soft gray of clouds that were pregnant with snow, making it impossible to tell exactly where the sun was. They traveled down a well-worn footpath, distantly linking Robby’s farm alongside a handful of others to the square of Deepwood. They wrapped their gray cloaks tightly around their shoulders, shouting to make each other heard through the thick, warm wool.
“Ye seem troubled, Danny.”
“Aye, a bit perhaps,” Daniel allowed.
“Well, get it off yer chest, if ye can bring yerself to.”
“Ah, it’s nothing I need to worry you about.”
“Maybe, but if it’s ailin’ ya all the same…”
“Well,” Daniel thought. “It’s just nonsense is all.”
“Nar, lad. ‘What one may not see, the rest see for him,’ as the Mother likes to say. I won’t laugh at ye if that’s what yer worried about.”
Daniel chuckled, “Say thankya, then.” He walked on in silence a bit longer, putting his thoughts into order. “It’s just… I’ve seen—”
(a rose)
“—some strange signs, these last couple years. Does it feel like things are getting worse to you, too?”
“Yar, that I’d agree,” Robby nodded sagely. “Ill bodings. E’ryone talks about the crops and such, at least. Then there’s all manner o’ things they don’t talk about. Jesse Green ‘cross the way was nearly kilt last Wide-Earth by that dead tree fell over, ya remember?”
“Yes, the one he kept calling a widowmaker?”
“The very same,” Robby laughed. “He got shit drunk one time and wouldn’t stop talkin’ about it. Swore up and down that tree had been alive and green, budding aplenty ‘fore it fell, like somethin’ sucked the life out of it as he was walkin’ by.”
“I never heard that part, goodness gracious.”
Robby nodded again, firmly. “Course not, he was well spooked by it. Not the only thing, either: Abigail was near gored by a mutie deer just this year. She claims she heard it talkin’ to her, whisperin’ evil things like t’were the Devil.” His mouth twisted slightly under the thick wool. “I don’ know how much stock I put in tha’ last bit, to be honest. She always were one to tell high tales, when we were youngins.”
“I don’t know, I’ve seen some strange things here and there,” Daniel said almost to himself. “Still, that does seem a tad far-fetched.”
“Aye. My point with all this bein’, that yer far from the only one here to see or hear or feel somethin’ wrong. Mos’ people just don’t say nothin’, they’re too afraid fer one reason or another.” Robby turned as he walked, looking straight on at his companion. “What’d you see, anyway?”
Daniel, oddly comforted by this shared weirdness, related his experience of finding the sheep bones out in the grasses, a few summers ago now. It had appeared oddly serene despite everything, the skull nestled into its chest and eyeholes unseeing. He shuddered at describing that part, surprised at how intense the feeling of filth and wrongness was even all this time later.
“Dear Man Jesus,” Robby muttered into the wind. “T’were it any but you, I wouldn’t put countenance to that.”
A ghost crawled over Daniel’s mind, and for some reason he could not quite remember he broke out in gooseflesh all over. “You can see why I was hesitant to speak of it.”
“Yar. It’s an evil thing, that’s sure as.” They trudged on through the grass, making little noise for a few moments as they drew near to Hob’s. “But,” Robby sighed, “as I said, yer not the only one.”
“Yes,” Daniel replied simply. They crossed over the last hill that obscured Deepwood’s square, the weathered belfry of the courthouse rising above it all and whistling softly with the wind. Hob’s bar lay on the far corner, warm lamplights spilling through the windows onto the dirt road outside. They faintly heard Fin’s crooning violin across the way and felt their spirits rise: their talk of fearful things was quickly forgotten with the promise of a jolly evening.
Robby roughly shouldered the door open, whipping his cloak off with eagerness. The sound of the violin increased sharply. Fin was playing an old favorite, a slow and sweet old folk song that he had heard as a child but long since forgotten the words to. Occupants at Hob’s were quite fond of trying to come up with lyrics of their own, but nothing stuck for too long.
Too wiry to hold much heat of his own, Daniel opted to keep his cloak on until the chill seeped out of him. He took his favorite seat, right up against the bar, and noticed out of the corner of his eye that there was a newcomer. He turned slightly to get a fuller look and felt his blood freeze in his chest.
The stranger sat in the far corner next to the broken tack piano. He was a tall man with sandy hair in denim jeans and a leather vest, covered up in a light blue fleece jacket against the cold. He sported a broadbrimmed felt hat and an almost comically large handlebar mustache.