51
FROM THE DEEP
PART I
🙜
The grand halls grew ever more alive as they ventured deeper into the labyrinth of the forgotten city—echoes of the many who had dwelt within the mountain, and vanished long ago. Fewer signs of battle and makeshift barricades awaited them, but Ember discovered a dark stain and shattered glass where a drink had been spilled, tattered scrolls, a book with half the pages missing, and even a nearly hidden writing nook in one of the central halls, complete with a polished desk and a jar of ink.
The wooden chair had been broken, but he stepped around its skeletal remains for a better look. Several leafs of paper rested beneath a layer of dust. He drew his thumb across a splatter where the runes ended, and read:
We lie here in the waking hours at first light, e’er Day devours
all the soft and pleasant things which Morning sweetly to us brings—
Scratched-out scribblings beneath those words marked the poem unfinished. The ancient ink seemed as fresh as the day it was uncorked, and retained all the properties of its past life despite the passage of time.
Ky entreated Ember to blot a few runes on the parchment. She requested his name in letters, and then hers (as best he could manage), and then the word she had recently learned: contentment.
He thought it presumptuous to marr the page, yet couldn’t help himself but to indulge her fleeting interest.
Occasionally their passing tripped strange spells both beautiful and terrifying, and each time he perceived it as a threat and retrieved Fishbiter; the runes sparked eagerly beneath his touch, and he couldn’t shake the notion that the little sword was somehow disappointed whenever he hid it away again.
Most impressive among these illusory encounters were a flurry of luminous butterflies which leaped up and swarmed to the ceiling when they stepped upon patterned tiles.
At first Ky snatched and grabbed at them, frantically stuffing her fingers into her mouth—only after she realized they had no substance did she stand very still, blinking rapidly in disappointment as they fluttered around her head, and then laughed, dancing barefoot across the floor. They sprinted through the hall together as a storm of colorful wings swirled around them, scattering into the darkness above.
That had been the last of their carefree moments, for his companion had not smiled since.
He plied her with extra food, saving a few berries or dried leaves from his meals, but she consumed his offerings with a disquieting stare. Not openly hostile, but something he could not quite grasp simmered behind her eyes.
That she kept mostly quiet during their walking hours, with only a nod or a shrug and her habitual lullabies, was the most unsettling. If she had been particularly cross that day it bled over into her siren song, for his visions—though they did not frighten him—were nonetheless woven of uncertainty and strangeness, dark and stifling depths or twisted, tangled woods… he wondered if some of these peculiar dreams reflected places she had been, but could never quite summon the courage to inquire.
She did stop him several times, abruptly, to ask if he had seen a spark of gold in a darkened corner, or heard the echo of a woman’s voice. Ember cast his glance about, but noticed nothing amiss; her questions left him more unsettled than the dreams.
“When we find a way out of this place,” he whispered one night, hoping to affirm their silent agreement, “you’re coming with me… yes?”
Ky buried her face in her hands, shoulders slumped, and dragged her claws through her hair. Her fingers fidgeted, and her lashes twitched.
“Ky?”
He half-expected her to reassure him with her old sing-song: No harm will come to you, Ember.
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Instead, she gave a weary sigh, and turned away.
“What will you have me say?”
“That… we’ll leave together,” he said, fighting the heavy silence which her words had pressed upon him. “That you’ll stay with me, no matter what.”
She rubbed her arm across her eyes and shrugged, as if his thoughts were nothing to her. “Is that truly what you wish?”
“Isn’t that what you want?” he pressed—hoping for a reply.
It was long in coming.
“There is a wisdom among my people, that men might better choose their wishes with great care, lest the flighty winds should hear them and grant them what they seek.”
Ember opened his mouth, but found he had no strength with which to protest. Her words were harsh and hollow, and his blood ran cold in the current which flowed beneath. Reminding him what she was, and what she was capable of achieving with her words alone.
One dark eye affixed to him as she peered through a curtain of tangled hair.
His spine tingled.
“Decide what you wish for, Ember, and do not speak upon it until it is firm within your heart.”
❧
They were near enough to the surface of the earth that Ky could sense the early morning sun. Warmth sifted through layers of cold rock above, the song of the chilled dew seeping into the cavern.
It was far away, a blurred impression lingering at the furthest reaches of her awareness, yet her senses were heightened beyond their usual ken, for all things distant she had slowly brought into sharp clarity—exploring the vast reaches of the mortal mountain stronghold with the taste of the dusty air upon her tongue, the polished stone beneath her, the drifting echoes of her absent humming.
For something new shivered the stagnant air.
Whispers.
Whispers which had kept her awake throughout the night.
But not the whispers of stone and bone, nor even the disembodied fragments of the drifting sparks which flashed at the edge of her sight now and then.
It was a resonance.
A chorus which called to her, pulled at that gaping hole within.
She closed her eyes, focusing all her powers of attention on the sounds and sensations beneath the mountain. Each time the whispers subsided she was gripped with an eagerness to hear those melodies once more—to be sure she had not only, in her ravenous desire, imagined them.
Yes.
Yes, they were real.
Ky had grown accustomed to Ember’s steady presence, such that his song had become almost secondary, an afterthought to his fumbling words and actions. The seductive hum of his flesh was a temptation she had endured in secret for many months, gorging herself on berry bushes and the fish from the river.
She was numb to it, now.
Yet all children of the ocean knew the cry of a human soul.
Most knew the taste.
Sil lusted after it. Her appetite was insatiable, her habits gluttonous. Many, many men had she devoured in her pursuit of satiation, and ever more she hungered. Ky could see an image of her sister then, as clearly as if she loomed before her, but this time the sinking feeling her presence usually summoned forth was supressed by a sense of delicious triumph. She imagined Sil growing smaller, weaker, crouching in the mud with a trembling stare of hopeless jealousy as her younger sister towered above her, strong and fearless and wise...
Having tasted the soul of man.
You once devoured everything I cherished, she would say, smiling down with the selfsame smile which Sil had so often cast upon her in the wake of a particularly clever or devastating lecture. Now, it is finally I who am the first—the first to know the sapor of true bliss.
Ky ground her claws into the stone.
Thinking.
Brooding.
Slowly, softly, a faint beatific smile pressed upon her mouth.
All these many moons my sister has drawn breath. Still she cannot see the possibilities which lie just out of reach, beyond her lustful whims. Yet I, the youngest, the one they cursed for a fool—I have endured—and in the end, I will know no hunger… for I shall become more powerful than them all.