Kaleb’s breaths were coming in fast and hard. His heartbeat was like a raid siren, unceasing, unkind. There were those times in life where one’s heart, their anxiety, lied to them, enlarged their dilemmas. But his wasn’t like that. It wasn't an illusion. The siren was very real, very honest, and it was asking: ‘Is this it?’
There was nowhere to go now. The last bit of ledge was under his right foot now, and the monster was only barred from bombarding him by the small bend of the rocky wall he was behind. How long would it take to get to him? He wondered.
He remembered Judy’s words, and many thoughts came to him. The same that did when he had been a teenager, sure of his ways even when warned by those with more wisdom, and how he’d learned again and again why it was called wisdom. Would he make it back? Would he see Jane again? He even missed Judy herself. It hadn’t been two days, yet this longing for all those he knew, even the damnable Master Shabti, was getting stronger. Perhaps it was the fear, or the wish for safety and control once again.
It took him a moment to realize that he was shaking, his hands, his knees, even his chest was quaking somehow. His tormentor was getting louder. How long had passed since he’d gotten around this bend? Seconds? He wondered when it would roll along the wall like a crazed race car, and then he’d just find it right next to him, with all its lethal grace, with all its abhorrent ammunition. He’d never hated wood this much in his life. He’d never been more scared.
The torment demanded that he do something, for this was perhaps as they said, worse than a thousand deaths. So he poked his head slightly around the bend to get a glimpse of the monster that was closing in on the ledge. It stopped as it saw him, and he glimpsed recognition in its posture, as if it wasn’t stupid, as if it wasn’t mindless.
“Hey,” Kaleb said, desperately. “Can you understand me?”
The creature didn’t answer him, though the spinning of its head got shorter in its intervals and it was always directed at him, even if it decided to do so from different angles every few seconds. Could it hear him?
“Hey,” he said again. “Please, I’m sorry.” He gulped through a dry throat. “I just want to leave.” He paused, gulping again as it remained fixated on him, unchanging, uncaring. “I have a family. I just want to go back. My sister needs me. Please, please.” And he only then realized that tears were streaming down his cheeks, because he was begging for the impossible. He was begging a beast, and the incredulity of such a thought brought down on him the reality of how close to the end he was, and how far he was from ever making it back. Would Jane hate him for leaving? Would she think he was running away, avoiding his promise to look for their mom? Would she blame him for his own death?
As the last beseeching words came out of his mouth in the stringy voice of a weeping man, he saw it raise its four-fingered hand, and by some lasting instinct, even in despair, he flinched backwards before they were all loosed on him. The intruding stone of the bend protected him from all of it as he pulled his head back, yet the surprise managed to imbalance him as one of his feet slipped off the ledge and he utilized every limb and effort he had to stay stuck to the wall and away from the silently screaming abyss that was below him. He knew it wasn’t too far down, but he also knew it was enough to end him; and for a moment he wondered whether that would be a better end.
Fuck that.
He raised himself from his dip and righted his body, setting his feet properly on the ledge. “You wanna kill me?” he muttered. “Come then,” he said, louder, clearer. “Come. I’m waiting, you son of a bitch!” He pulled the axe out of his belt and balanced it against his body. “You think I won’t take you with me?” he yelled. “Then you know nothing about me. You know nothing about us. We’re spiteful fuckers. So come.”
He knew that it would oblige him soon. Even if driven by instinct, it wasn’t stupid. It wouldn’t stay there forever. Yet it was once again preoccupied by pulling its pieces back together. The arm and shoulder it had temporarily sacrificed to launch the fingers at him were quickly back in place, yet the fingers were once again down in the darkness, struggling to get back. He poked his head around again, waiting for another attack, but it seemed to be temporarily ignoring him. “Don’t you ignore me, you piece of scrap,” he yelled. It reoriented on him again, but it kept shaking and vibrating as it did when it was struggling too hard to pull back its parts.
Kaleb tried to pry any stone to throw at it again, but the axe in his right hand made any such attempts precarious. So he searched himself for anything, and he came up with the finger of his previous enemy and a flint. He threw both of them awkwardly with his left hand, and whether out of spite or just spiked adrenaline, they hit it hard, and it stopped shaking. Again, he’d prevented it from reappropriating its ammunition. The abyss below him was as much a death sentence as it was a savior. If he could make it throw all it had at him, and if all it had was lost down there, there could be hope.
It was dashed. Hope was that fragile, after all. The monster mounted the wall, not even bothering with the ledge. Its pieces rolled along the wall as if magnetized to it. It was coming fast towards the bend. Kaleb yelled and put the axe between it and himself, ready to poke or hack, or maybe even hook a joint with the pointy rear of the axe’s blade.
When it came to the bend, and before it could go around it, he poked his axe out with all his strength, hitting it. That seemed to be an appropriate action for it to react with a sudden stop. It occurred to him now that this thing didn’t seem to think or plan for the long term. It either acted or reacted, however useless this knowledge was now when it was this close to putting multiple holes in him.
As he poked it again from around the bend, while barely keeping himself steady, it grabbed the axe’s blade with the hand that still had all its fingers. Before it could get a decent grip on it, Kaleb pulled the axe back with all the grace of a panicked cat, almost throwing himself off the ledge again. He wanted to swear, but he was barely taking in enough air to persist in this struggle. The monster had hooked itself to the wall with the grotesque fingers on its feet, and as he heard it attempt to get closer, he lashed out with the axe, hacking at it around the bend indiscriminately. The blade bounced off its torso with an echoing crack. With one hand holding onto the wall, and two feet strained to their utmost, Kaleb had overextended himself enough, just enough for his head to be exposed. He then saw it, slower than ever, as the head of his nemesis flew off its groove and towards his own. He didn’t manage to react in time, and reacting might not have been in his best interest, considering how critically imbalanced he was. The strike was painful, yet it ended up rocking him back into place around the bend, his feet somehow persisting in their work and keeping him in place.
The vertigo was quick to leave him, but not without bad news. Blood was coming down his face, and his axe was no longer in his hand. The monster hadn’t thrown off any of its parts to give momentum to the head, so the strike was more of a throw than a cannon shot, yet it was close enough and hard enough to hurt. Before the wooden head could fall down the abyss and join his axe, it was pulled back to its hateful owner. Kaleb had barely enough wherewithal to keep himself away from that same abyss, and he’d had no time to grab for the head, however regretful that was now.
He stayed behind the bend, waiting for the next assault. Would it be the last? “I just want to go back,” he muttered to himself. “Just another chance. I didn’t–I didn’t…”
The dragging sound broke him out of his brief reverie. Kaleb had to wonder whether his mind was playing tricks on him. Had the strike to his head achieved more damage than he’d thought? Because he was hearing the sound of the monster moving away. He braved a glance around the bend and saw that it was going back. No, something was around it. Ropes? He heard the violent clicking of wood on stone as it struggled, and then he heard yells from beyond, living yells. Had someone survived and come for him? If someone had, he could hardly let them fight alone. It was win or die either way. He sidled his way back and towards the cliff, where he saw a group of four facing off against the wooden abomination. There were two sets of ropes around its body, being pulled by one of the four, and they were moving like snakes around it, trying to constrict it and go for its limbs and fingers.
The monster suddenly raised its still whole hand towards them, and a yell came out of one of them. He was one of that race that he couldn’t remember the name of, as they were rare in Echelon. The first time he’d seen one was during Arrival. That one had worked some magic and pulled the gun loose from a human who’d unloaded it into a guard. This one, however, was armed with a great hammer, and his yell came out with a name. “Yez!”
Another member of their small party stepped forward with agility that belied his size and equipment. He had a shield on one arm and a large axe in the other. He was in fact a quill even if outrageously large for one of their kind. He was instantly in front of the others with his raised shield, and Kaleb could swear he saw a shimmer come off him as four wooden fingers pinged off his shield harmlessly and the fifth pinged off his helm. It was surprising that he’d weathered such an attack as Kaleb saw how much effort the monster had put into it. Most of its torso and upper limbs were apart, and they were quickly pulling themselves back. But it seemed that the creature had also freed itself from the encroaching ropes in the process.
The rope manipulator gave up on constricting it again and instead went for the parts of it that his ropes were closest to. He ended up sweeping back a fingerless palm and the fingers that had struck the shield-bearing quill.
“Useless,” the lizard-like one said.
A broad headed arrow struck the monster’s head as it tried to roll itself back into its groove, and it only delayed it from doing so for so long.
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Their scaled leader yelled again, this time at the bowman who’d loosed the arrow. “Fool! Keep an eye out for the other one. You won’t do much good with those arrows.”
It was then that Kaleb stepped off the ledge in all his bloodied glory. The blood had thankfully spared his eye, even though it coated half his face. He was practically next to the monster however busy it was with its opponents. With no weapon, he was at a loss for what to do.
The shieldbearer hurried forward to close the distance between himself and the monster, sparing Kaleb the dread of being the closest living body to it.
The monster’s upper body scattered into pieces again, only it wasn’t throwing fingers this time, it was firing off its head. An echoing ping came off the quill warrior’s metal-coated shield as the wooden head collided with it with all the strength of an artillery shell. A pained yell came out of the quill’s mouth at the same time the shimmer that’d been covering him disappeared and the shield he held bent inward, its metal warped and its underlying wood splintered.
Kaleb felt something hit his foot and found himself looking at the ricocheted head that would undoubtedly try to roll back to its body soon. He quickly scooped it up, and it nearly pulled him into a fall as it wrestled its way back to its rightful owner. Without much strength left and with nary any will to match its own, Kaleb decided to surrender to gravity and just bury the head under his body.
More yells echoed in his ears as he closed his eyes and struggled with the shaking and sometimes spinning head. He wondered if said head could perceive him, or if the creature somehow had a more abstract form of observation. If he were to judge by the sounds of battle, then it was still fighting in the earnest.
Why was he not watching it? he wondered. Why was he hiding his face, closing his eyes, and just hugging the head in his arms? The blood on his face was a mix of dry and wet, cold and hot, and he realized that he wasn’t truly in his best state of mind, if he was in any at all. The battle passed in a blur of noise, and he wondered whether it had really passed so quickly or if his mind had been skimming the events around him now.
The wooden head stopped struggling and Kaleb discovered an urge to scratch and claw at his right wrist. It burned like the sting of a fire ant. And even though common sense said not to scratch such a sting, he did.
Someone turned him over and he was facing the open ceiling. He knew even though his eyes were closed, because the warmth his body had provided his face had turned into the stone cold dampness of the air inside the mountain. He opened his eyes and two of his rescuers were above him, one of them the shieldbearing quill and the other the rope manipulator who was also a quill if much smaller in stature.
Before any communication could commence, his eyes were naturally attracted to the burning wrist that he’d uncovered. There, right where it stung, was a dark blue star, as if tattooed by an artist. It was then that the world changed.
A meaning came into his mind. He didn’t hear it nor read it, but it registered somewhere inside: Awakened.
A waking dream took him somewhere he didn’t know, and he found himself navigating darkness and then he was in front of himself, or rather what could be him. It was a network of smooth spheres, floating in space. They were easily within his reach, small and perhaps controllable, yet a part of him also knew that he couldn’t fathom their true size.
Most of the smooth spheres were blurry or blank, and only the three closest to him were discernible, as if they were the beginning of his road to discovery. It took him a moment to figure out where he was, or rather what he was seeing. These must be his nodes, the ones that would give him power, the ones he’d been through so much for. Had it been worth it? Nothing could be. He might as well have died if not for luck. Wrestling a lion barehanded, as he’d put it to Diego, sounded like a tame affair now, however foolish that sounded in his mind.
Kaleb tried to focus on what he had on his hands, even though his mind was a whirlwind of chaos. There were three clear nodes upfront, easily visible to his eyes. One had a barely discernible human head with countless dots surrounding it as if spreading into infinity, though the dots seemed to have a waving pattern to them, and they moved back and forth within the image. The second node contained a very real and visceral human heart, enlarged, pumping, and almost bursting with blood. Even though the sight was a bit unsettling, it gave him a feeling of assurance for some reason. The third node had the outline of a man, standing as if in the rays of the sun and reaching for something that was far and not visible. His body itself shone with something, perhaps strength.
Kaleb moved his eyes between his licenses of power, and he became aware of his nakedness in this space at that moment. He looked down and the most discernible feature about him was the dark blue star on his wrist. In here, it was shining with radiating darkness however incredulous that was. He knew then that he had to choose.
They’d talked about it again and again. Blessed Body. It was the best. It was the healthiest option to choose, to get him ahead of everyone else, to give him an opportunity. Kaleb now wondered whether it would have made much of a difference against the abomination they’d faced.
The nodes in front of him weren’t easy to translate. The one with the head surrounded by dots was obviously not his target. The pumping heart would have been a candidate had he not known for certain that the node he was aiming for must introduce a ‘body’ for it to fit its name. That left him the last one. The one where a man was reaching for something far and unreachable. He found himself questioning the sight of that node, yet that same self decided to shut itself up, to stop thinking and just make a choice, because it was tired, so very tired.
Kaleb raised his wrist and met the node with his new star and a shock went through him, waking him up to the real world.
Above him were still the two quills that had turned him over. The rope-wielding one seemed to realize something as he extended a hand and pulled Kaleb’s wrist up, scrutinizing it. He glanced at the burly quill beside him, the one that had been called ‘Yez’, and said, “He’s awakened.”
“Now?” a voice closer to a growl came from behind them as their lizardlike leader came in sight. “There should still be another one. He must have been awakened from before.”
It took Kaleb a moment to remember the name of his race; gruck. It described them in a less colorful fashion than most other species, as it was the noise that their young produced in their early years. They didn’t cry nor talk. They only ‘grucked’, according to Maser Shabti at least.
The burly and previously shieldbearing quill was cradling one of his arms in the other, and Kaleb reckoned it had been broken during the last attack he’d witnessed. He gestured towards the broken apart monster and asked Kaleb, “was there another one?”
Kaleb nodded.
“Where is it?” The lizardine gruck demanded from the side, his deep voice naturally carrying a predator’s threat. He came fully into view, standing above Kaleb and gazing down with the command of an undeniable superior.
“We killed it.”
“Nonesense!” The quill bowman came from behind the other three. “You couldn’t beat half a twinwood in your dreams.”
There was silence as they all stared at Kaleb, and he realized that they really didn’t believe him. “There were ten of us,” he said.
“That could do it,” the ropewielder said, glancing at the gruck.
The bowman eyed his surroundings as if looking for Kaleb’s companions.
“It killed many of us,” Kaleb continued. “I don’t know if anyone made it.”
“Then you awakened just now?” the gruck asked.
Kaleb nodded then he remembered his bleeding head and sat up. His backpack should have been somewhere around here. The ropewielder gave him space as he attempted to get up, but only the humongous quill warrior helped him up with his healthy arm.
Kaleb hobbled to his discarded pack, even though his legs were uninjured. He opened it and grabbed his bandages. Then the gruck materialized beside him with his mace in hand, though Kaleb attributed the apparent speed to his own compromised senses. “What were you doing down here?” the party leader said.
“We were supposed to hunt a..a..” Kaleb stuttered. “Wapet? I don’t remember the name.”
“A wapwet?” the burly quill who’d helped him up asked from behind.
“Yes,” Kaleb said as his hands improvised a fix for his leaking head. “We came here to catch a straggler or two from the fall.”
“Were you all humans?”
“How many awakened did you have?”
The gruck and the ropewielder asked simultaneously and Kaleb realized that the two questions coincided in their inquiry if not in their words. “None.”
The bowman snorted a laugh that was harsh if justified in Kaleb’s mind. “So here we have the sole survivor of the idiot tribe.”
“Shut up,” the gruck said, staring down the bowman. “Did you come across anything else?”
Kaleb shook his head. “No, just the corpse of a dead wapwet.”
“Wapwets often move in pairs,” the ropewielder said.
“We only found the one,” Kaleb said. “But this other puppet.” He gestured to the monster that now lay broken apart on the rocky ground. “It wasn’t there when we fought the other one. Maybe it was killing the other wapwet?”
The gruck nodded. “Twinwoods stalk in pairs as well. The wapwets must have caught their attention, until a bigger group came along.” He nodded towards Kaleb.
“It came from outside,” Kaleb said. “We couldn’t run.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if it’d come from within either,” the ropewielder said. “Once those things favor you for a target, there’s no escaping them. They’re a menace to expeditions. They’re attracted to noise and numbers.”
The gruck nodded. “Running only makes it easier for them. You were lucky to meet only one of the twins at a time.”
Kaleb stared sharply at the party leader, even though he was scary. There was nothing lucky about this.
“It was your own folly that brought you here,” the gruck reciprocated his stare as he said.
“And also his own luck that saved him,” the burly quill said. He glanced at the gruck.
“We’re not taking him with us, are we?” the bowman whined. He sounded like the youngest of them to Kaleb’s ears now.
The burly one hesitated for a moment, and Kaleb could see the gruck pondering something. “Perhaps he remembers the way out?”
The ropewielder scoffed. “It’s a maze down here.”
“I do!” Kaleb inadvertently shouted. “It’s not far.”
The gruck eyed him sharply. Then he glanced at the large quill’s broken arm, hugged against the latter’s body. “We could use a pair of hands. Yez can’t pull the sled anymore.”
The ropewielder nodded. “I, for one, have enough to carry.” He gestured towards a pile of large packs and a sled near the exit of the passage they’d come from.
The bowman sighed. “I suppose we could use a mule.”