She shouted for a day and a night and never heard a thing. No answering calls. Not even her own voice. At the beginning of the second day the block still [held] her fast. As if her clothing was a welder's filler brazing her skin to the granite. One foot still touched the black slab, and she could bend its ankle and wiggle its toes, and she could move her eyes and tongue and lips, and she could breathe. And she could shout. She shouted for Khaz and the old woman and her Henry. She shouted for somebody. For anybody. Her throat gave out from thirst and use but she couldn't tell because she couldn't hear her own words so she never stopped trying.

The second night she watched the stars trace paths as old as the world and wished she could see the white mountain. The blue and green moonslight glowing off its icecap like phosphorescence. She faced the wrong way. There were only the black stains on the block and the black slab and the black jungle and the bluedotted sky. She was going to die there. Alone. No one should die alone. She had left her da alone.

She closed her eyes and felt the granite. She [heard] its sullen whispers. It hurt more than she, for eons longer than she. She [sang] to bring it comfort, and she [listened] to it tell of what it remembered. Of its growth and settlement over millions of years. Of the soft kiss of the sun and the gentle caress of wind and sand and ice. Of implements blasting its face then cutting it apart. Making one out of everything and everything into one. Of cold shard of the sky planing its roughness and warm dwarven hands worrying its sharp edges. Of its journey from places sounding strangely familiar to her over ice and rock and ice again and over rich soil and living things who left green imprints on its facets and onto the black slab of metal alloyed with matter not of this world. Of further shaping and cursing and danger. Of a great mass placed in its center and the exactness of the joining and its tempered attraction. Of the years spent in the warmth and the pitter patter of rain and sun and rain and sun giving it a new identity. Finally of the conjoining and the events the [armiger] described. She [listened] as they unfolded in its memory. The liberation of the dwarves. The viciousness of them. She wept. How did no dwarf remember such things? Why did no stone in dwarfdom tell of them?

She shouted again for Khaz. Perhaps shouted. Perhaps only mouthed his name. He should have come and found her. He hadn't. The [armiger] said he wouldn't. There was only one reason for that.

Everything hurt. The sun rose and passed overhead. The moons rose after. The sun set. The moons set. The sun rose again. She watched it go. She remembered the granite's memory of the eclipse and of the day its gods were slaughtered by children who would not be ruled.

Where was Khaz? What had the [armiger] done?

The sun burned her face. She hadn't sweat in a day or more. She was so thirsty. It would be the end of her.

Her da came. He waited for her at the edge of the slab in the shade of the jungle. Small and old and out of place. Trees grew up around him and got sick and their dying bequeathed the next generation. He was gone by dusk. The next morning the tall orc came. He laid her da's [alpenstock] on the block and looked into her eyes and placed his face next to hers and said, "So we might die together." Then Khaz finally came. He pressed his hands against the block to push it into the shade but it wouldn't budge. The tall orc tried to help him. They pushed together but nothing moved. She told them to use the [alpenstock]. Smash apart the block. Cut out the material that bound her. Cut out its dark heart. They didn't seem to hear her. Then they moved around to the far side to try pushing it the opposite direction. She never saw them again.

When Daraway arrived she was ready to die. She looked up at the woman, at the proud way she carried herself, the assurance and confidence of one free from expectations and obligations. At the perfection of her face and neck. At the cloak held up against the sun and its ratty ends and the stains from the flood and the wounded girl. At her black fingers as they disappeared and reappeared with her canteen, removing the cap, drawing close to her face, and the water, blissfully cool as it poured into her mouth and over her cheek and head and neck.

"Can you hear me love?" said the woman in a voice to lull the sun from the sky.

She didn't try talking. She just drank, and when the water stopped coming she wanted to scrape her tongue over the granite to collect the moisture there, but she feared it would seize to the block as the rest of her had. She smelled the ancient iron wetted by the water and radiating off in the tropical sun. The blood of gods.

"Ask it to release you," said Daraway.

She tried to say, "Did that," but still heard nothing of her voice. "Water."

Daraway stood and in a motion she swirled her cloak off of her shoulders and laid it over Mym's body and face.

Through a hole in the fabric she watched Daraway run across the slab to the jungle's edge and disappear in the very spot her da had done. The shadows shifted. The granite dried in the sun, then it dried in the shade of her face. She feared Daraway was as false as the others who'd come. She stared at the place where she had vanished. She would never return.

Then the foliage shook. Daraway burst from the undergrowth. Mym would've wept again but her body spared no water for tears.

Daraway had to make three more trips to slake her.

"Where's Khaz?" said Mym after.

"I don't know."

"How'd ye find me?"

"Mastering seaway's end has made me a few friends. The kind with weather eyes and a pound of salt in their veins. One knew you had gone with the armiger. Another that the whaler watered here before heading on to the end."

"The bastard left?"

"Yes. My ship's well gone by now too."

"How long I been lyin here?"

"I don't know, love. I've been up and down every path in this jungle and half the trees besides. I thought maybe the armiger threw you overboard and I'd need to boil the ocean away, maybe even started to do it when an old fisherman stopped me. His wife had heard you shouting from the crater. He showed me the path here. I think they would've come along if they were twenty years younger."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

She felt Daraway's hand run down her back.

"Your face is badly burnt. We need to get you out of here."

"I can't move nothin but my toes. I can't hear my own voice. I can hear you but I can't hear myself."

Daraway looked down at the block and backed away to look at its sides and started to walk around it.

"Oy. Please stay where I can see ye."

Daraway laid a hand on hers and said, "Don't worry love," and kept it there as she made a circuit of the block.

"Not much for lookin at. Granite from the valley. Couldn't figure how it got here. Thought it was older than dwarves til I learned otherwise."

"Tell me what happened."

She told of the [armiger] and what he said and what he did. The days since. Daraway listened to all of it and apologized because she needed to hear it again, so she told it all again.

"I am going to touch it."

"Ye best not."

"I must measure its attunement."

"Yer speakin another language now. Listen te me. It's liable te stick ye like me. Ye won't be able to get away."

"That makes no difference. I wouldn't leave here without you."

Before she could protest Daraway flattened her palm against the granite. Then she drew it back again. She looked at her hand then at the block. "Strange," she said.

"What?" said Mym.

But the woman didn't answer. She placed both hands on the block. She swept them over its surface. Then down and across its sides. She closed her eyes and did it again.

"I can feel it. The weight of it. The flow of the weight. The way it warps the rock. The way it warps the air. I can't explain it. Wait."

She ran her hands over Mym's back and traced two fingers along the seam where her body met the block.

"My goodness."

"What?"

"It's heavy. As though the entire world is contained within the block. All the weight of it, the mass compressed into it. There's something else inside the granite. A point inside a point. Can you hear it?"

"Can't even hear myself."

"But can you speak to it?"

"Don't know what I'm speakin te."

"Hidden in the granite. Like the crystal inside a geode."

"Don't hear anythin there."

Daraway squatted back on her hams. She reached forward to adjust the edge of her cloak across Mym's face, then she held her hands out as if in a gesture of welcoming. She closed her eyes. She held the pose for a long time.

"I'm going to try something,” she said.

"Please do."

"It might hurt."

"Fine."

"It might damage you."

"Get on with it."

Daraway tipped onto her knees with her hands still outstretched and eyes still closed. Crowsfeet folded at the edges of her eyes and her brow came forward in effort and concentration. Her lips pinched inward. Sweat beaded on her face. She inhaled sharply and she groaned slightly as if she sought to move the block by the will of her mind alone.

Mym's ears popped. She waited for the pain to come.

"Get up," gasped Daraway. "Hurry."

Mym pushed away from the block. Her joints screamed from disuse and her muscles felt as if they were ripped from a dusty old corpse and stuffed into her body. She managed to roll off the block. She fell onto the slab and knocked the air out of her lungs. She was free.

Daraway opened her eyes and all at once lurched backward as if blown over by a sudden gust of wind, but when she looked at Mym she was smiling. "That was fascinating," she said.

Mym sat up and looked down at her wrinkled coat and the bright red backs of her hands. "Maybe for ye."

"He was right. This was made by dwarves, but not dwarves alone."

"What the hell is it then?"

"I can't say. Truly. I've read of such imbued powers, but nothing like this."

"Why didn't it latch onte ye or the armiger?"

Daraway pulled her cloak from where it'd fallen on the block. "We aren't you. Whoever made this, whoever engineered this, didn't care to bind humans."

"It was dwarves usin it on their makers. I witnessed it."

“Their makers.”

“Aye.”

"So you're a believer now?"

Mym thought about that. About what the block had [told] her and what its power meant. About Daraway's handling it. "Are ye a goddess?"

Daraway laughed and the seas swelled to her opposite the sun and moons. "Only to you." She looked at the block and at the stain there. "I don't know what you saw, but I do know no gods made us. Fact is we made them. They're our creatures. Crippled by our rigidity and mercilessness. No gods exist apart from us. Those living in our minds have no place else to exist, and they are subject to our influence."

"Well ours were murdered by dwarven influence."

"I know some whole sects of priests who deserve some dwarven influence."

She smiled so wide her sunburnt cheek seared from it. "How'd I go twenty years without ye."

"I've been wondering the same thing.

"I'm glad ye came back."

"I always was."

"I thought ye mightn't with Cousins and all."

"Love I cannot guarantee I'll always be here, but I do know whatever splits us will weigh more than an eight year old girl."

"Did ye find her folks?"

"She has none."

"She was tellin the truth then."

Daraway nodded. "They died in a mining accident of some kind. No one I talked to could tell me straight."

"A mining accident."

Daraway swung her cloak over her shoulders and drew up its hood. "By all accounts."

"She healin up?"

"Better than I expected. A benefit of youth."

"Where is she then?"

"I put her up with the king's men."

"What? At that tower in that first place?"

Daraway adjusted the dress under her cloak. "Here First, yes. I have pull there, being a lady and all."

"I'd say."

"They promised to keep her on in service. Mucking. Working the kitchens."

"Oy a girl like that's got more in her than servin."

"Yes. They all start out having more in them. Sadly they never end up that way. I wish I could do more for her, but our road is no place for a child."

"Well ye never know. Maybe she'll be runnin the place next time ye get out that way."

Daraway smiled a little and it collapsed to a slight frown. "Probably not."

"No. Suppose not."

"God I hope I never get out that way again."

"Aye."

Mym stood up. Her weight felt strange on her feet. She arched her back and swung her arms and craned her neck this way and that, and she saw the tooth of the white mountain. The thin blue line of a crevasse opening across its face.

"Can I tell you something?" said Daraway.

"Aye ye can tell me anythin."

"I did not stay behind on account of the girl. It was the fighting. You fighting. And Cousins, shot just like that. It could've been you just as easily. Then what would I do?"

"I won't get shot."

"I don't know what I would do. I don't know."

She remembered Khaz's words. "You'd do whatever needed doin."

"Yes. And I'd burn myself up doing it. There wouldn't be anything left of the world that wasn't ash and glass."

"My turn te tell ye somethin."

"I am not finished. I need you to promise you'll not run off without me."

"Aye I can do that easy."

"When I say what I have learned you might act without thinking and I don't want to chase you across another continent."

"What? What'd ye learn? What're ye talkin bout?"

"Promise."

"Fine. Promise. Now tell me."

Daraway grabbed her hands as if it might help her keep her promise. "Your folk and the orcs weren't on the span that night by accident."

"What do ye mean?"

"I mean the orcs didn't escape the camps."

"Course they did."

"No." She shook her head but kept her eyes on Mym's. "The armiger set them free."

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> +1 [Vengefulness]: At that moment everything changed... (5/10)

> +1 [Stonespeaking]: She didn't have anyone around te teach her when te listen and when te stop listenin. Ye keep yer stone ears on too long and ye risk not knowin where yer thoughts end and theirs begin... (8/10)