52
INTO THE MIST
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The mist had grown thicker around her ankles, like a decaying fog. It reeked of dust and ancient tomes and ruins by the sea—the darkest and oldest places of the earth. When she glanced over her shoulder, a faint path remained where her dress had swept through the mist. She knew not how long she had been walking, for the voices called her onward and nothing else now mattered; she needed no light, nor any parchment inked with runes. The whispers were her guide. When they grew distant she retraced her steps, and when she reached an impasse, she found another path.
Occasionally her trance was disturbed by the scraping, skittering claws of tiny rodents scurrying along the stony walls, but they kept to the shadows and Ky kept to the road.
Soft lights overhead emitted faint currents of energy, illuminating a maze of cobwebs in the drafty hall. Ky brushed these aside, trailing spider silk and insect wings—they bothered her no more than the touch of moonlight, or weeds beneath the water. The leggy web-weavers scuttled into the darkness, and she hummed a few notes to warn away the ones that cursed her in their tiny insect-voices, brandishing their fangs.
Once she would have bandied songs with them.
Today they were a hindrance, for they stood between her and that which she desired.
At length, the echoes led her to a cold, dark hall—within the hall, a broad stone arch—and, set in the arch, a great door comprised mostly of petrified wood. Those voices swirled in the air around her. A whimpering, muttering, chattering cacophony of delirious, delicious noise.
And then a flickering magic rose above the chaos…
Ky halted, listening intently, as a glimmer of starlight broke through the shadows. It came and went too quickly to ascertain its nature, but then a faint ripple passed through the hall. Not a living song so much as the broken reverberation of a song which once was.
Flash.
A glowing shard of light hovered in the air for an instant, like a blown spark from a campfire, before snuffing out. Her lip curled as she recognized the presence from the hall of statues—that nameless entity which had haunted her since. Before she could dart past, two more sparks appeared, and then three.
As they brightened, a familiar face took shape against the darkness of the hall. It was a human figure, tall and austere, with the piercing eyes of a mortal and the soft features of a woman. She had glimpsed it before, several times now, though the spectre always vanished when Ember turned to look. Hissing, Ky fumbled backward.
If it was a spell, it was unlike any spell she had yet encountered, and how could she weave a counterspell to that which she did not know?
The mortal face furrowed with a deep, dignified sorrow—or rage.
Ky shrank away.
It was only a fragment of magic, a song which was quietly unraveling even as the figment stood before her… no more real than a shadow upon the wall. Yet the fair-haired woman lifted her hand: a message clear enough without words.
Go no further.
Ky observed this for another moment, shivering and twitching her ears as the voices beckoned her from beyond the door. At last, she reached out a hand of her own. It passed through the visage without harm, and she curled her fingers around the latch.
The woman's hair swayed as she drifted forward, frowning sharply. For a moment a bare foot flashed into view, as if from beneath an invisible dress, and then it was gone. Her golden visage sputtered, face contorting as many expressions splashed across her fragmented countenance: wide angry eyes, a grimace which might have been a trick of the vanishing fractals, and an unsettling sorrow.
Each glimmer of magic winked out like stars before the rising sun.
With a sigh, she vanished as silently as she had come.
Only a few blown sparks and a whispering echo remained, and as the remnants faded into the ether, a breath-like presence touched Ky’s senses. Soft, golden, and broken—like the vision herself. If man-magic it was, it was a delicate and beautiful sort, the arts of which were long forgotten by both Ember's kind and her own. Never before had it attempted to communicate with her in any meaningful way.
A warning?
Or perhaps she was only jealous—yes, perhaps she was guarding this place. Instinct and probability told Ky that if this entity had the power to harm her in any way, she would have done so long before now. Why she hadn't was a curious mystery which might have distracted her once, but there was no time to consider it.
The door was before her.
The voices beckoned.
She tried the latch at once, shaking in anticipation, but the door was barred from the inside. Perhaps Ember would be able to—
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No. Must not think of him.
To Ky’s inexpert eyes, it appeared to have been a storeroom of some sort, or maybe a place where those men who had made the wine and harvested the honey had once lived and slept. When she crouched down and put her face against the rough cobbled stones, she could almost see beneath the door.
Something glimmered within.
Ky rose to her feet and stamped them impatiently, sniffing and twitching. The whispers heightened, pulling at every fiber of her being until she thought they should tear her to pieces—and yet she could not leave. In truth, she wished it would never end, and if she were to be torn asunder it would be such a thrilling experience that perhaps she would not mind after all: it would expose the innermost parts of her being to those beautiful echoes.
The harmony of Ember’s ancestors.
Muttering words of obtainment under her breath, Ky brushed some of the dust from her skirts and examined the handle, trying to put the ghostly woman’s face from her mind. It was bolted from the inside, but the latch was rusted and one place in particular felt weaker than the rest. She whispered to the metal, wiggling the door back and forth as it seemed necessary.
After several moments of this quiet game, her hapless opponent let out a relenting creak.
Ky took a shallow breath, and lifted the latch.
The door swung inward—and the clamoring voices hushed.
Broken metal dusted the floor with a sound like shattered ice as Ky slipped into the cavernous chamber. A breath of cold chilled her damp face, calling forth the depths of a distant ocean, and the rolling mists of the rocky shores after nightfall. A sense of weariness thickened the air…
Muffling the echoes.
She still sensed within them that delightful melancholy which shivered her bones whenever Ember looked at her directly. When, for a fleeting moment, she could almost envision the rhythm and flow of energies which surged beneath his flesh.
The tantalizing glimmer shrank, fading from view.
Ky slunk across the stone on all fours and widened her eyes to take in more light—she was well-used to traversing the gloomy crags and valleys of the coast, but this cold, creeping darkness pulled at the edges of her vision. A faint plinking came from one corner of the room, where water dripped unseen from above.
Her hand strayed upon something unpleasant.
She hissed again, pulling away from the stickiness, and spread her fingers…
Dark ooze webbed between her claws. The texture was unlike that of her snail-skin—more like the tarry sap of a diseased shrub—and the sulfurous stench reminded Ky of a rotten egg Sil had once offered her for a trick and a laugh.
Loathe to soil her skirts, she wiped her fingers upon the stone floor instead, but the further she crept, the more of the black sludge she encountered.
No matter, for at last a subtle glow appeared.
She put out a hand as the ethereal echoes intensified…
Tink.
Ky blinked.
Glass.
A pair of glimmering black eyes reflected in a crystalline surface, and her own siren beauty distracted her from the cloudy light. She curled her cold fingers around a beveled jar. As the wavering luminescence rose and fell, so her heart thumped with it, thick and heavy and dripping with desire.
Her breath fogged the glass as she hummed; she wished to attain that exquisite melody—for therein lay perfection—and for the first time in all her memories, Ky’s song fell short.
Irritation tugged at her upper lip, threatening a snarl.
At first the light had appeared as a crackling ember, and now many embers which coalesced into a tongue of green flame, shrinking and elongating as if it drew breath. This was not the wild magic of the forested foothills, with its feral sentience.
No, this whispering light—it shaped its Self.
It was its own master.
A sweet harmony, like soft chimes, pressed upon her consciousness. Ky softened her mind as best she could, pressing her trembling fingers against the glass. But though she would have welcomed the foreign contact, there was no audible word, no thought nor joining of any kind between their minds.
The echo she held was the uncloaked essence—the soul—of a human woman.
Entirely bared before her, naked as one of the forest wisps below the mountain stronghold.
Hers.
Hers at last.
It had always been hers, ever since the Elder had regaled her with his beautiful, nonsensical stories. Why else would it be here, if she were not meant to have it? She had thought at first to take a little piece of Ember’s truest Self someday, as much as would never be missed, if she could only uncover the artifice of the Elder's elders—secrets now surely lost to dust and decay…
And yet here was better a thing by far!
The light flitted to and fro as Ky brushed away a layer of dust and grime, yanking impatiently at the cork.
The jar had been tightly sealed.
Before she could take a breath to sing, the stone floor trembled.
She sprang to her feet, scraping her knees in haste, and clasped the jar against her chest.
Smoky mist blew away from the walls, trailing through her oily hair and ruffling the hem of her dress. Scores of recessed shelves became suddenly visible—home to a multitude of clay pots, stone vessels, and an assortment of other jars. Myriad spirit-beings flickered within the translucent receptacles, their songs murmuring and fretting as the mist seeped into the darkest alcove.
There, it drew itself up to the height of a very great man.
Ky stumbled back, and then staggered sideways, cowed by a powerful instinct to flee yet rooted to the stone by the enveloping presence of a hundred human souls. The mist compressed into a black, impenetrable fog.
From it rumbled a sonorous groan.
“Graaahhhh… gruhhmmmm… mmarrrgghhh…”