4.80 Touch of Grey

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“Let’s arm the barrier,” Captain Jarl said to Garrick. Glim numbly watched them run for the guard’s quarters. Several minutes later he heard a horrendous sound of metal wrenching against metal. When his father returned with the quartermaster, one look at their faces told the story: the ancient defenses had failed.

Glim heard another sound. Hinterjacks howling from the woods. He looked down and saw them racing towards the fortress walls. They flickered like shadows along the snowy ground, dodging in and out of the trees.

The first jackal ran from the woods with a desperate, hopping gait, yipping in panic. It nipped at its own hindquarters. At first Glim thought it had been attacked by another animal that still clung to its haunches. Then he saw that the jackal had a second head emerging from it’s back. Snarling and howling at itself, the two-headed hinterjack leapt against the ramparts, bashing its two heads against the wall until it fell still.

The soldiers cried warning along the line and tightened their grips on their spears. A few looked up at Glim's father with dread.

“Warped beasts!” the raven said. “Wawl of grey!”

More hinterjacks ran from the tree line, also with odd gaits, and Glim noticed they had six legs. By the difficulty of their movements, he guessed the jackals were as confused as he.

A flurry of screeches announced even more creatures. Owls hooted and flapped from the woods in droves. One of them flew directly at Glim's father and opened its beak. Instead of a tongue, a snake writhed out and snapped at him. Glim's father sliced the snake-tongue with his sword and watched it curl up on the rampart, hissing and biting the air. As it writhed, the snake turned into a thorn branch, then withered to dust.

A sob stalled inside Glim's chest and tears stung his eyes. He set his sword on the ground and stepped on it while the raven croaked from the cage.

“Fawther. We cannot fight Algidon. We are lost. All of us, lost, if you do not flee now.”

The men paced the rampart uneasily. They looked to his father for guidance.

Glim also watched his father, Captain Jarl, the bravest and stubbornest man Glim had ever known, who looked at Glim’s sword on the ground, and then right into Glim’s eyes. They wavered, with something like fear, or resignation.

He raised a whistle to his lips and gave a call that clearly pained him. Three short notes followed by one long. The call of surrender. Other guards picked up the call and echoed it throughout the town.

As one the men fled the ramparts.

The ensuing chaos roused Glim from his apathy, reminding him of his purpose to save the people of Wohn-Grab. Guards ran from building to building, urging townspeople to gather in the square. Garrick waded into the crowd, shouting instructions. Their collective desperation loosened something within Glim. It connected him to the world once more.

He picked up the raven cage and headed for the merchant’s homes. He saw Gyda, flanked by her parents, already clad in woolen cloaks and riding boots. Glim followed them to the stables and helped Gyda mount her horse. Glim also found a steed, but had trouble figuring out how to ride and carry the cage.

“Ride hard!” the raven said, with a gravelly voice. “I will catch up to you.”

But he never got the chance.

As Glim lashed the birdcage to his saddle with a bit of rope, a wall of storm fell over Wohn-Grab. The sky seethed in a whorl of ice and bitter wind. Thunder rumbled in the sky. Or was that Certe’s breath?

The southern gate opened, but Glim could not see the path beyond it. Snarling hinterjacks leapt from the gray, ripping into the horses. He heard screams on the wind.

The thunder rumbled again. He mounted up and urged his horse forward.

From within roiling clouds which obscured his face, the giant Certe called out. “Faction of Symmetry,” he said, “return my hammer and all will be forgiven. You’ve no idea what you’ve done.”

Nearby horses shied and bolted. Some of the townspeople fell under their hooves, and lay still on the ground.

Glim's horse panicked, and ran hard. As it trotted, he heard more screams and a sound on the wind like boulders grinding together. The voice in the sky rose to a crescendo.

“Return the hammer now, or my sorrow will consume you. You’ve weakened me too much to stop it.” Certe’s tension permeated the air, as tangible as heat or rain.

Glim’s horse shuddered beneath him. He urged it to settle, firmly handling the reins until it slowed. He guided the horse through a jumble of bodies, both human and equine, some of which were being ripped apart by six-legged hinterjacks.

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Glim recognized one. He leapt from his saddle. His sword rang out. With precise thrusts he ended the warped creatures who had ripped Garrick’s throat from his body.

Garrick quivered once more and lay still. Glim sunk to his knees and cradled him, sobbing silently. The body still had a warmth and scent Glim recognized. The intimidating bulk of the man Glim held in his embrace seemed familiar. Garrick, the quartermaster who could outfight, outcurse, and outdrink any other. The man who’d taught him what it meant to be brash yet bashful. The fiery bluster which balanced his father’s evenhanded patience.

Garrick was but one of many who had succumbed to Certe’s sorrow. By the looks of it, they’d simply lay down wherever they were and died. Rows upon rows of townspeople lay quietly in the snow, eyes vacant, victims of their own despondency.

Glim spied fine woolen cloaks among the wreckage of horses and people. Cloaks he’d just seen. His fears were confirmed when he grew close and saw neat brown braids, and blue eyes staring lifeless at the sky. Part of him broke in two at the sight of Gyda, her light extinguished forever in the snow. Part of him knew it was inevitable.

Sorrow attempted to break him. But there was nothing left to break.

A squawking fervor roused him. The raven threatened to bash itself to death inside the cage, so Glim released the bird. The black form circled into the sky and swept away into the whirling gray.

With great deliberation Glim mounted up and turned his horse around. Men, women, and babes scattered the ground at odd angles, unmoving. The remaining soldiers of Wohn-Grab banded together to make a stand. A shadow in the sky fell upon them.

Glim started to ride to their aid, but a wind kicked up, startling the horse. Glim heard a woman’s voice soothing it into submission.

You’ve really done it now, haven’t you, Glim the Raven Song? But there your voice goes.

A trickle of dread ran down his spine. The wind’s words stunned him. He hadn’t thought of her nicknames in years, when she’d claimed to be helping him choose his arcane name. She’d called him many things that day, and some since. Glim the Silent. The Smothered Cinder. The Eye of Certainty. Glim the Putrescent. Glim the Raven Song.

Smothered Cinder? Had the wind known of his hidden power even then? But how could she? It meant the wind knew things he did not even know about himself. Not only that…Eye of Certainty? Did that refer to Certe? And The Raven Song? The wind had glimpsed things that would come to be. Impossible things.

The voice on the wind no longer struck him as whimsical. He’d often wondered why she never spoke to anyone else, and had concluded—though he never officially admitted it to himself—that the wind’s voice had merely been his own imagination. A way to amuse himself in the face of loneliness, or to work out arguments in his own mind.

But what could explain this prescience? She had to be real. Not only real, but powerful beyond anything he’d ever known.

With a clarity he hadn’t felt since Certe’s eye swallowed his soul, Glim sat rigid, looking at the impending arrival of Certe. His heart pounded in his chest.

The wind sighed. I suppose I have no choice. You’ve no hope of surviving Certe without my help.

The pressure in the air dropped. A whistling gale rose, stirring snow into a pillar that swarmed around him.

I will miss our conversations. You’ve confounded me to no end. And that is something I never thought possible.

The wind ceased. The moment she vanished, Glim’s ears hummed. He clamped his hands over them, but still heard sounds from afar. His father, encouraging the guards to stand strong. Yipping hinterjacks. And Certe’s imminent arrival.

He’d run out of time.

Glim urged his horse forward, rushing towards the remaining defenders of Wohn-Grab. They’d gained distance, and he could barely see them in the storm. But somehow, Glim knew where Certe would be in the next moment. The giant’s eye would soon descend, and that would be the end of all who saw it. Unlike him, they had no buffer of flame to preserve their sanity.

In desperation, hoping to divert Certe’s gaze, Glim invoked an icicle cloud. Or tried to. But instead of the shards he'd grown accustomed to, massive ice splinters exploded from his hands. He gasped at the magnitude of his own power. Swarms of ice filled the sky and rained down like javelins.

Glim had never, in all of his wildest imaginings, thought such a display of essentiæ possible. Much less seen it erupt from his own hands. He watched the unexpected lances of ice descend. With the certainty of the sword that had fallen from its precarious perch between a tower’s merlons, Glim knew the ice he’d cast would soon land on his father and the guards. But he had no way to protect them this time.

His father, sword drawn, yelled impotently into the wind in challenge. Glim tried to warn him, but the raven had fled with Glim’s voice. The heavy javelins of ice that Glim had thrown at the approaching giant took an unexpected trajectory, and flew instead towards his father and the remaining guards.

Their bodies crumpled as the ice impaled them. The red of their insides stained the white ground. Glim blinked, denying what his eyes saw plainly.

Wohn-Grab had fallen.

Garrick and Gyda’s deaths had already frayed Glim’s fading attachment to this place. Watching his father collapse severed it completely. Glim’s inner turmoil matched his silently screaming voice. A white hot anger blossomed inside him.

His own essentiæ had betrayed him.

The shadow in the sky grew closer. Swirling clouds parted as two black horns sliced through, then a brutish nose and two silver eyes that could swallow a man whole.

The few guards still standing collapsed to the ground at the sight, writhing in silent desperation before falling still. The enormous mouth split wide like a chasm in the side of a mountain, and the boulders ground out a low, rumbling bellow of sadness.

Glim had already seen the depths of Certe’s sorrow. Nothing was left for him here, among the dead. The Living Tomb had lived up to its name. Millennia of watching, training, and wondering had finally come to a brutal end. These ramparts would never be patrolled again. The dining hall would never feed another. The garden would wither and the thatched roofs would collapse. Everything Glim knew or loved had been claimed by Certe.

He forced his eyes away from the emerging horror. He turned his horse and set heels to it, leaving the dead townspeople behind.