24

SHATTERED TRAIL

🙜

Insatiable voices ravaged her mind.

They descended like a flock of cackling crows, flapping and shouting and shrieking at her plight; from the bowels of the earth below her and the stale air above, pressing their songs against her delicate reasonings—that fragile nothing she had retreated behind—threatening to snap her sanity asunder.

It would be a fitting fate, no less than she deserved; perhaps now she would meet her own end, as she had so recently ended—

Forget.

Sturdy stone-voice, thrumming far underground; voices of the water all around, yet nowhere to be found; shrill beetle voices, droning on; serpentine voices whispering through caverns far away.

And all manner of confused echoes tangling together…

Remnant spells dropped from dying lips, hasty enchantments flung through the halls like spider threads. This was sticky, rotting magic—oozing from every crack in the stone floor and each chip in the polished door.

Its unsettling tenacity reminded her of the golden-eyes which lurked in deep waters, reshaping their globulous bodies and serpentine arms with a single thought, that they might disappear into the stony ocean clefts, where even the hungriest siren dared not reach…

And, once, she thought that someone called her name in the dark.

Ember’s voice.

She knew it was only a memory, for there was no song, no heartbeat to accompany it. But that was worst of all, for it brought into sharp clarity the accursed pedestal, as if she stood there still, staring at the Book—

Forget.

Forget.

She wished she could devour the fractured spells so that they would cease their chattering, but there was no way to swallow such voices; they whispered unabated. Songs of the seas and the earth were familiar to her, but these—these were man-wrought and siren-wrought, echoes of the past which pressed against one another in a torrent of ceaseless whispers, awakening memories not her own and threatening to unravel her reasons.

To Shape her into Something Else.

She shifted her cold-hot feet beneath her and touched the cold-hot wounds on her face. He had put them there, with his cruel words—

No, the Book had—

And then she—

Forget.

Forget.

Forget.

Ky smacked her palm thrice into the blood-soaked floor.

Her tongue was blistered.

The corners of her mouth cracked with every wince.

Each dry breath leeched more water from her lungs. She would need to leave her refuge someday—someday soon—to seek water…

Seek water…

But she did not get up from her place by the washstand with the broken basin, empty bottle, and the little ocean-tumbled shells.

She had reached up to take one of those shells, longing for its familiar texture.

It had crumbled to dust beneath her touch.

This was the cavern where fewer voices scratched at her ears, yet it had hardly welcomed her. Home to a single bed, the wooden stand, and several alcoves along the low ceiling, sheltered by small wooden doors. She had explored them all with hunger-shaken fingers, but her efforts yielded only cracked dishes and a few small fragments of glowing stone. This place did not deign to provide her with a light, or perhaps it no longer had the capacity to do so.

It was just as well; she preferred the darkness. It reminded her of the deep waters and ancient forest thickets where she had so often sought refuge. She licked the palms of her hands, wetting her cold-hot face.

Her misery knew no end. For now she would lie here, in the empty mountain-nest of ancient men, all alone in the ageless dark, without so much as a single drop of water to wet her tongue.

She should never have come here.

Never have brought him here—

Forget!

Ky dug her claws into her wounded feet, and cried out in anguish. The cry became a snarl and she dug her claws in deeper. When her roving thoughts strayed too close to the face-which-had-no-name or the thing-she-had-not-done or the reasons-she-had-forgotten, she must direct them elsewhere.

No matter the cost, no matter the misery.

For the alternative—to dwell, to remember—was far, far worse a fate.

"Forget," Ky hissed, gathering fistfuls of her hair and tugging angrily; she curled over until her aching forehead rested on the stone, and closed her eyes. "Forget… forget…"

Maybe when she awakened, the voices would be gone.

Maybe, when she awakened—

FORGET.

❧

Tell me, son of men: what have you done?

Ember hesitated for only half a breath, and then resumed his stride to the bed. Her fury gave him pause, but after so recently recovering from his frightful encounter with the well, he had little fear to spare for anything else which might dissuade him from his quest.

"Only what was necessary,” he muttered. “Maybe you could have helped me, but I can’t stay here forever; I did what I had to do… I had to.”

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Her low whisper came from all around him as he stooped to retrieve his shoes: "You disturbed the oracle's bones and brought shame upon his resting place."

Ember flinched, but he sat on the edge of the mattress, keeping one eye on the lady. "I apologize. Are there any maps in your books? Any maps of this mountain in particular? I need one, urgently."

Two brilliant blue eyes pierced him as he avoided her gaze, tugging on his shoes.

"How dare you ask me this. You have tarnished the legacy of man, and now you will make yourself a thief! Is it not enough that you have defiled my master and tricked his well?"

"I'm certain he would have helped me if he'd been here,” Ember murmured, surprised to find that he actually believed it. “About the map—"

"You desecrated our sanctuary, and you speak to me of books?"

Ember backed slowly toward the door, holding out one hand in a sign of peace and gripping his knife very tightly in the other; he would not be waylaid, but neither could he afford to offend the lady further and risk another magical setback.

"If you had trusted me, listened to me, maybe we could have found another way. Together. But you—"

"Trust?" Her face contorted, blinking rapidly from peaceful apathy to a terrible fractured wrath, and back again, as if battling the bounds of the very enchantments which had shaped her. "This is a place of refuge, a storehouse of knowledge! Have not the sirens cursed our halls and sacred rooms well enough without our own sons and daughters betraying the very cause for which they fight?"

"There is no one else."

"There are thousands—"

"There is no one else," Ember grumbled, sweeping out the door and appraising the stacks of books and scrolls. "They're all dead."

She was silent.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw that she stood frozen with her mouth partly open, staring at the space where he had been standing several moments ago. A knot of remorse lodged in his chest, and at last he offered her a gentle shrug.

"There are no battles anymore… the War is over. We lost."

Her ethereal form wavered in and out of view, like a star twinkling through tree needles.

"No one?" came the breathy sigh.

The sanctuary suddenly seemed very empty.

Ember glanced away again, his eyes alighting on a bundle of scrolls. "None that I have met. If there are, I don't know how they could have survived in this place. I think your... adversaries killed the men and women who lived here, or else drove them all away. No one has set foot in this mountain for hundreds of years."

He gently nudged one of the books with the toe of his shoe, watching the candle atop it sway accordingly.

"The magic has all gone wild. I came here with my—my friend. And now we're trapped in here, and I'm trying to get out again. You see?"

With a faint crackle, the lady faded away to nothing.

"I see.”

"Wait! You didn't tell me where to find a map."

But she did not reappear, nor did she answer him from the shadows.

"All right…" Ember frowned and ran a hand through his hair, making the tangles even worse as he scrunched his fingers. "Well, there has to be one somewhere."

And, as was his habit from his lonely days by the river, he fell back into talking to himself, muttering about things of little to no import as he sifted through the pile of scrolls near the bedroom steps.

Poetry, useless poetry, the lot of it.

He decided to clear one of the shelves and begin putting back all the tomes that did not meet his needs; he was in too much of a hurry to organize them, but he thought perhaps the despondent servant would appreciate his efforts, and it would at least keep him from confusedly rereading the same pages and wasting time. His occasional murmurings—remarking with mild interest on everything from the leather embossing to the legibility of the handwriting to speculations about whether magic had been used to pen a few of them—also kept his mind occupied on the task at hand, rather than his apprehension about opening that stone door…

Or wondering if it would open at all.

Every now and again he stumbled across an interesting illustration or some loose leaves within the books that looked as if they may hold some answers, but he was always disappointed.

"Hundreds of books," he muttered under his breath, sitting down to yet another pile of unread scrolls. The sunset had long ago faded from the sky above the atrium, and a few stars had already begun to appear. He relied on the candlelight to illuminate the pages. "There might be at least one with a map…”

As if in answer, he unfurled one of the larger scrolls; it rolled across the floor and a massive illustration appeared beneath his fingers, inked in black and green.

He held his breath, afraid it might vanish from the page, and brushed his fingertips over the ancient markings: it was certainly a map of something.

But not—he realized, with a crushing sense of disappointment—Sisters Mountain.

It was a seafarer's chart, marking the tides and a wavy coastline that Ember guessed was not too far from the valley, judging by a few of the nearby towns and cities.

He recognized some of the symbols from a similar parchment which a grizzled traveler had brought to Ember's small town long ago, but could not recall what any of them meant; though the memory itself conjured impressions of pipe smoke, a whiff of salt in the air, and a roaring fire in the tavern.

Still, where there was one map, there might be more.

Eagerly reaching for another scroll, Ember unraveled it and was met with a chart from a different coastline littered with names he could not pronounce, and the next seemed to be a map of the valley and the surrounding lands but not the inside of the mountain. The fourth concealed several elaborate landscape portraits; one resembled the walking path near the river, though it seemed both more and less overgrown in places, a few were of the surrounding mountains, and one depicted a great body of water with only a small spit of land and wind-tossed trees for reference.

He touched the blue and green paint stains, swallowing tightly as the water seemed to roll beneath his hand. It reminded him of Ky's living story—and the tales of weathered mariners—so brilliantly that he knew at once it must be the ocean.

An endless river, Hunter had once said. Too deep to fathom, too wide to swim across; a place for fools in tall-masted ships to prove their bravery… for there be no master of the seas among us, boy, and the stormcloud answers to no mortal man. Where wind and water meet—hah! There is no wilder and more deadly beauty than that.

Have you ever been to sea? asked Ember, fancying his own future to be full of similar tales. The notion had made him stand very tall indeed, though at that time he was still a good bit shorter than the wayfarer.

Long, long ago, and all the wagon teams in your little valley couldn't drag me back again… Heed my warning, Ember, and stay on dry land. The ocean is a tricky thing. And Hunter patted his barrel-faced horse on the neck as it nuzzled his pockets expectantly. Best admired from a distance.

Well, thought Ember, he had his adventure now… and he didn't feel nearly so brave nor so competent as his younger self had imagined.

One last scroll waited at the bottom of the pile—small, and somewhat tattered. Keeping his hopes reigned tightly in, Ember set it on the ground to have a closer look.

He grinned.

The trail that led up to the Sisters was plainly marked, and it did not take him long to find the door by which he and the siren had entered: "Vale Gate."

An endless maze of twisting corridors and carefully ordered rooms had been drawn within, and the writing was so small it was illegible in places. The topmost portion of the mountain kingdom was labeled Northall, and the lower portion Southall.

He held his finger over the corridor they had traversed beyond the door—grand in person, but negligible compared to the scale of the mountain itself—and the strange room where they had found the book. Hall of Justice, proclaimed the scroll. Ember's jaw tightened and he narrowed his eyes at the word, thinking of the sort of 'justice' which had so recently been doled out there by the rotting magic.

Beyond that he did not know where he had wandered, for there were many residencies marked out, but it did not take him long to spot a hallway labeled Reflection.

The hall of mirrors.

And there was the room which had given him shelter: the Oracle's Sanctuary.

The longer he examined the map the more confused he became, but after tracing and retracing the paths with one finger he thought he had finally found a way out—if magic had not sealed it off.

"Vale Gate" was, apparently, the southern entrance…

For there was another to the north which read: "Plains Gate."