Weird willow. Serib noted The Stalker’s wording carefully:
“Converted, wayward. You think this ‘dark’ shaman can choose a different path?”
“A beast hunting another beast has only one aim in its mindless mind. When humanity hunts itself, death should not be the sole option else only murder or execution have been achieved. No matter how sanctioned by state. There is another, older landscape.”
“Hemloch’s shore.” Serib knew, and The Stalker continued:
“A stalker’s core mark is to return with prey alive; no longer prey at all but a comrade brought in shivering from the cold of Falsehood’s hypocrisy. To have turned a soul back from the Rabid edge is the stalker’s victory. To have to kill is a failure of words. Stalkers that can no longer distinguish are branded as Killers, the worst of them Rabid-deemed and the rest you know about that.”
There are few tales of such Killers, and in all but one they are hunted to an end by other Stalkers, rangers and wardens all.
∞
The Stalker walked on, his footfalls careful between fallen branches, choosing which his steps would break as a single snap can travel far, and in this percussion were words occult for Enanti to hear underground. His eyes watched for hidden runes and Serib was forced to follow him despite her troubled thoughts. She would have rather sat with the earth a while, chewy farbark between her teeth, lose herself in its smoke.
∞
Walking beside him she had been staring at the scalps of humans, angels and werewolves sewn across his chainmail swaying stiffly when she asked:
“By your words, then, have you failed the seven ‘limbs’ of Lillian; her followers loyal to her that you could not convince?”
The Stalker nodded: “And the eighth is yet.”
∞
“How are you tracking her? A shaman would leave healed the lands they passed through... you’ll find no branches disturbed.”
Ahlzvyr grunted that to eyes experienced as his there would always be a sign of who had passed through the wilds, though he understood Serib’s notion:
“Nay this one, an illiterate as you are; I know her portents. She leaves blood in Water’s place. Screams echo against Wind’s breeze. I say this for she is always gasping… The Wind has abandoned her. Flames burn longer than their fuel and into acid coil.”
Serib stopped walking as she listened, leaning on a tree as a spiritual tether, and The Stalker turned back to continue his dire narrate, his eyes blank under the dead stare of his wolfs-hood relentless:
“If you freeze at any sight or mutter of shocking things then you cannot be the one I seek. Broken cliffs and unnatural divides are common of The Dark Shaman’s presence, landslides muddying any tracker’s route though all leading somewhat the way to her Throne of Craters, to the hollow tower where she squats in rest never long enough. Alas the throne of her dark making was empty when I found it, as her imagination yet exceeds the grasp of her power. When you better know the wilds, you will know them apart.”
∞
An inhuman and far from shamanic force had he described. Disgusted or confused, Serib was unsure what leaving ‘blood in Water’s place’ and worse would achieve. What part could Nature’s misery fulfil in Lillian’s plan, in overcoming Time and Entropy? What command had this ‘dark shaman’ received? Serib asked Ahlzvyr in anger ill-placed:
“Why would The Dark Shaman do that to the elements? Enslave them, almost… pulling them from their destinies…”
“Why? To control Nature wholly, as is Humanity’s absolutist way if untampered by Truthdom’s ways - we have a full circle as Nature was once anthropomorphised until Reason took such reverence and named it as superstition - until all Reason could find was Love. Only when beast and pond and tree and breeze are treated as our mute equals can we say we live in the grace of Truth. Enslave is the word now, and the lands of her passing have become as her mirror.”
∞
The Hunter Lord ate his berries and eyed everything about Serib as she regathered her wits enough to walk again. More her feet, locked hair and shoulders strong for her age he eyed, to which she quickly frowned:
“Are you watching me?”
“Small details. Overlapping the repeating tracks for rue is all we can expect in leaving assumption to handle the fractals of our fates.”
∞
A while later Serib stopped again as to observe the woodland around them:
“Wait with me…” she asked.
And The Stalker did, crouching to the ground and patting his chunky hand over the roots, finding disappointed only the footprints in cold mud of those he had already slain or had no reason to harm.
∞
Meanwhile, Serib saw as she suspected: the land was stuck in the sunset’s Spring-Sworn sigh, dark with a Night-almost, never quite beginning its end. Remember that name, will you, of Spring-Sworn? Serib certainly will when first she hears it. A strange green smog or haze was over the lands. And these upon realising were her next words to Ahlzvyr, The Stalker of long-gone sand-snow:
“This forest is a cold trail to you… it looks nothing like what you have described, that would follow the wake of this dark spirit you are hunting. You speak with me hoping that we can find a way out of its strange green-fog maze a dream. To continue your hunt. Why me?”
∞
The Stalker stared at Serib and she knew from his sniffing and scanning that she was being measured once more, that Gadail had taught her well. The hunter could not read Serib so easily as he would a sand-scraped page, and had himself been read:
“See you any darkness here as I have described? There is only Spring and no dark shaman has hexed these shores; this growing labyrinth a farse. Unless - is Spring-without-end her utmost aim?”
‘Hex’ was another word Serib had never heard, and took what The Stalker had said as a question and an accusation:
“A farse? I do not understand… you think Hadaeon is unreal in some sense?”
Ahlzvyr set off once more, with Serib close behind and hanging on his words.
“Can we be sure this is Hadaeon? Is all we see not a shared illusion by light and shadow played? Do we and moths see the same moon? Are colours all the same to us as to pollinators? You and I and all souls are like her, The Dark Shaman. Have you not felt the same tug and tooth in your heart imagining as all of us will when we were suffering - to reset things we deem best in the urgent haste of our pain? In the Fancy of our thoughts all powerful, where, without consequence or recompense. Could this not be such a place, a child’s fathom rearranged from all that once was Natural? In Spring-without-end…”
∞
Ahlzvyr seemed mad to suggest that, yet Serib did not dismiss him. Down a steep path much weeded over, soon the paths led upwards again from their brief ravine. The Stalker held a branch out of Serib’s way to keep it from whipping back at her and together they passed into the mountains’ shadows proper; it felt the sun had truly set as he spoke his cold observations.
“The winds of this world feel designed to me - blowing as winds ought but not as winds do. As winds in poems. The rest? Down to the smallest detail I cannot tell even with my face to the grass.”
“She gasps for breath, you said. Gadail would never condone it, surely no ancestor would grant the dark shaman their imbue.” She knew all too well, her master loyal to Reality, while her heart still considered Fancy’s gifts.
The Hunter Lord did not disagree: “I visited Hadaeon in its more silver age and sensed no such design to its winds. And have you yet watched the stars by night since you first noticed Timelessness, moth? Too many moving parts up there for illusions to account for: all a giveaway.”
Serib shook her head, having found no chance to watch the stars. Since the lake, only daylight’s eyes had been open until she and Gadail reached the hall full of dead Werewolves, and though the roof there was ruined and stars stared in, not long enough had she stared back.
“When you do - see the stars spiral into strange orbits. Something has changed between my visits. My surmise is that Lillian planned I or others would be a fool here lost hunting her forever in these fabricated woodlands. How she or her Dark Shaman managed this maze of magic would be only a guess on my part. I have chased my tail through her Timeless Tayl enough - I picked for fur between blades of grass, made ledger of the shed claws among bark; a story of a Black Terror and a White Rat I saw without resolve and have turned my back on. I made pass eventually to Haven-upon-Hadaeon and from a perch with other falcons watched it rise to become Haven-o’er-Hadaeon, though the angels and Werewolves still are tied to a tale not mine. There I waited unable to die. It is the runes, moth, that keep me in these circles tied. Runes shaped as infinity once was. The runes that function in your presence for reasons I had not been able to align. Draw and scratch them as I might alone, I would remain lost. I have remained lost. Only with you near have the runes hidden in Haven’s walls been as portals, as found-pages retold they would. The runes, I believe, are how Timelessness can be navigated and may lead us to my prey without whom Lillian’s greatest reach out of her prison will be severed. I am leading you to the only rune in all this woodland that is out of place by my measure and practice, with hope alone that what was closed to me will open for you.”
∞
Serib had listened to The Stalker’s claim and still noticed no such distinctions - no winds blowing ‘as winds in poems’ or similar compare. If the earth they trekked over was of an all too human design, then it was grafted of some absolute power she could not comprehend.
∞
A willow tree grew crooked ahead, much out of place far from the lowland glades of its kin, growing unlikely from the crags of a cliff whose protrude from the mountain larger was as a horn jutting, when all other nearby trees were dry of sustenance at so high a craning.
The willow blossomed as such trees are not known for - with lavender sprigs and crimson poppy petals. Serib thought a human gardener skilled enough could have made it so, as no Nature she knew would have.
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∞
From this vantage some way up the mountain, the ruins of Haven-upon-Hadaeon were vast a crash from horizon to horizon - Haven-o’er-Hadaeon had been brought down from the skies by some force or fraud and lay strewn into landscape, cataclysm overgrown by Time’s display. The Gravestone Column lost or not yet built or amongst that dry mulch was one crumble the same.
∞
Having reached the weird willow, The Hunter Lord surveyed the mountain’s lands below and Serib could not tell if the lavender tree-scent was sickly or sweet to her:
“I am only my master’s apprentice, with my own task ahead of me to find my first totem… lost as you have been, I am now as well. Aside from the task my master has set for me, I want to meet this Lillian you are trying to stop… to know what, by helping you, I would be undoing. But if Gadail has sent you to me, it seems against all shamanic custom that a stranger to our rites would accompany me on a journey lonesome by tradition. How could a mere leaf say so much? Do you still have it? What favour did he ask of you - keeping an eye on me, making sure I do not stray?”
Ahlzvyr placed his halberd to rest against the willow and Serib saw the leaf there growing; it had since sprouted a vine wrapped around the halberd’s shaft. As some prey needs coaxing and calming with bait and prize, so the lord of hunters tried a different string:
“The leaf is not yours to speak of… I know where you may find a totem. You already know.”
∞
Serib drew all her separate attentions closer to The Stalker, seeing past the frenzy of scalp-happy flies against which no palm was swat enough - not that he tried much. Himself a scout and patriot of Courtdom’s search for Truthdom lost to Timelessness, from that place he spoke:
“Ah, all hair and nerves are alert now. Will you set aside all instinct you have about me and to the rune my escort? Then I shall help chart your trajectory to what you seek. Of all that is swirling and unsure I know that all tracks by chance or design have led me to you: to help or hinder your advance is my fate, if such a word I can still dare use. Whether your advance is to help the cause of Truth - the hope that Time still lives and Enanti though a grub now, may yet be heir and monarch returned to an age ended premature - or to finalise the irreparable downfall of all we know: you will need a totem your own to either achieve. Gadail’s favour? That I did not kill you back at The Winged Wall for all striking resemblance you bore to my Dark Shamanic prey, that I take a moment to remember where I am from, for seven failures had dulled my hope. An ancestral shaman should have met you in this woodland, this much of your rites I know must be true, and instead you met me by their mossy statue-grave. A strange aeon is ours aligned, illiterate, when I must accept such exchange as this: that with my helping you, extinction is assured. Though extinction of which side we have yet to see. We must accept Chance’s bludgeonings, whatever they may be.”
So spoke it is said, ‘a forthright instrument of The Truth’.
∞
The Stalker was right. Before their meeting Serib had been looking for any sign of an ancestor of Earth; as had always been custom when shamans go off alone without their masters, seeking task and trial to undergo and totem then to earn. Gadail’s words on the matter seemed far from recent to her clouded recollection:
‘…hold your fear by the hand, and take it somewhere gentler. This will lead you eventually to an ancestor of Earth, and your first totem.’
There was much for her to understand and accept, though keeping earth and task foremost, moving away from the uncertain magnitudes of which The Hunter Lord spoke, she asked:
“How do you know where this totem… what sensitivity would you have to its ancestral call?”
“None at all yet more than you it seems, as aimless you go without.” He threw at her a brief, grim laugh. “None at all had I not seen the one thread between two: one of these other-scalps I wear belongs to one of your kin; though a Werewolf she was a shaman as well, young an apprentice searching for the same object. Protecting its location. She was not one of Lillian’s eight, but a scalp is a scalp.”
∞
Serib grimaced at the lupine ears and brow drooping with dried gore. Anger simmered in her before Ahlzvyr explained:
“Her end was quick enough, illiterate, for fools as you and her guided from their Truthful path deserve no punishment as those that first had erred, and thus lead many more astray. Let this be clear to you - that I found her already dying from a duel and there was no malice when I took misery from her. A fallen star she spoke of in delirium, though none had I nor Enanti scoped in the skies on our long watch. Only when I watched a different duel as did all in Haven, when Ithuriya clashed with Lillian Grey - that the spear of Ithuriya was cleaved in half. Few arrows fly so hot and straight as that rod down to the earth angels left behind… and other clues tied together otherwise long and unconnected strides. I offer you this - that you may gain your bearing as to the half-spear’s resting place.”
Others would claim The Spring-Sworn duelled Ithuriya, though who can know?
∞
Half-spear’s resting place. Serib wondered back to the Lake Arruikikn, remembering a sharpness she had felt in its earthen bed. Though she heard all he had spoken, most she remembered the poem-rite Gadail had recited in Haven’s halls, surrounded by Were and angels dead:
“This young shaman you killed… could the vultures find her body? As would have been her wish.”
∞
The Stalker again tucked away a sandy page he had begun to read while waiting for her thoughts to run their quiet course:
“You have your moments, illiterate, coming and going as a wave. I have hunted enough Hadaeon-Were’s to know their custom and the shaman was left in the open for their rites. Was I not clear enough? I killed and scalped her as was best for us both, though another wounded her mortally. I ask you as may warrant your memory and to sharpen your straying focus - what does Ithuriya’s name mean?”
Serib answered quickly: “Truth, as do many other names and words tower-lost, from the ages before Courtdom.”
“As did many others… and yet there is a secret despite what should be bright. Less a secret perhaps and more something we have forgotten drowning in Timelessness. Ithuriya’s spear was not always her own, and it was not always a spear. The metal was melted down from a larger weapon and many are the shards, the splinters, all with tales their own. Though longer has one shard remained in the House Ithurian - and one such spear passed from one Ithuriya to the next. Not all have been angels, not all Wing Marshals, not all confined to such halls as Truth knows no borders.”
∞
A staff or a wand to a wizard, a spear or sword to a warrior, a totem to a shaman.
∞
This called to Serib how Ithuriya, Gadail and other angels had sealed themselves in another chamber of Haven - as though a decision was to be made among them - if a new Ithuriya needed to be chosen; who would lead the angels through Timelessness, who would hold the splintered spear and wear the damaged helm?
“You waver as before a precipice.” The Stalker, The Hunter Lord Ahlzvyr began: “What is your decision? I have all to lose while you have only a wish to evolve - a dream that all souls childlike keep until they shed and greatest emerge from young skin and shell.”
If her heart chose for her, would he not turn crossbow bolt or halberd to her throat and his knife saw at her scalp? The rest of her limp having failed his eighth and last. If her mind chose in her heart’s stead, would Gadail not rejoice? And so what choice would she have either made?
∞
She looked the willow up and down, how it leaned away from the mountainside of its growth, its roots and trunk alike in shape and texture - where even the roots with lavender and poppy bloomed - when roots surely should be bare and hidden, where even the branches suckled nourishment from the air’s soil.
∞
She placed her palm upon the tree, hoping her shamanic reach would help her understand. The lavender sprigs interwoven over its bark were rough and dry. Her fingers further tapped and knuckles knocked on the bark as she searched for the infinity rune. The Stalker waited.
Every path so far, the words of her master and this hunter, all against and away from her wishes and curiosity led, throwing her moulded and preordained, and in Time well would this have been. In Timelessness what could either say?
∞
“Where is the rune on this tree?” she asked, meanwhile The Stalker sharpened his halberd-glaive on the cliff a whetstone in method known only to him.
“Excuse my preparations… my prey may well await me on Another Side and if words fail…” He did not finish his thought and instead he summoned: “Dromiya, Enanti…”
Serib did not know if this grub of The Grand Scarab was called Enanti or Dyomiya, as Ahlzvyr had used both names so far as she remembered, though there it scuttled over from the cliff-face with all the menace of its royal line that ruled an age of Courtdom by itself. More massive than before, Serib could then and forever have fit inside its chewing mouth. Against the dark sunset its silhouette shifted through stances and symbols made with its pincers, scythe-claws and horns, its sinewy wings iridescent popping from its abdomen and retracting, stag-like in its lost regality.
∞
Serib stepped back as with a swift hack of his halberd Ahlzvyr sliced the tree-face of its bark and underneath there shimmered an infinity rune; a scar healed over, fresh with leaking sap. A wish evolved.
∞
Both Serib and Ahlzvyr felt the rune’s inscrutable pull made dominant by her presence, and she glared for his answer as to the half-spear’s location:
“My end is fulfilled…” she said to him, taking a step closer to the rune and it pulsed with greater life, its richness drawn by her desires.
The Hunter Lord gazed at the finally-pulsing rune he long ago had found useless. The only of many he ever expected to be significant. Neither his fear nor dread with enjoined onslaught could overwhelm his duty:
“And soon mine. Answer and be answered yourself. Where did all this begin for you?” he replied, his sandy beard roughing up the wind. “I saw you - standing on that steel pier that will be a giant’s spear. Near the lakebed once a mountain’s eyrie, waiting with Old Gada’il for Haven’s begrudge. All hunts and searches are patterns, moth - just as our celestials have their orbits… humanity has its habits. As to roots and to eggs and to the start with you - that is Where you must go to begin an ending. An extinction. Though in this Timelessness, Where is not enough and When becomes a question. And how can ‘When’ remain sturdy in Timelessness? We are reduced instead to landmarks consistent across the inconsistencies and impossibilities. To the length of our hair. To our scars or softness. To our allegiances swarth or strong. Even our names may be altered from one stage of our lives to the next. All these factors and semblances that change and do not require numbers to notice as all beyond eight have gone.”
The Stalker waited having laid out constants the same and variables rearranged it could be said; you may have heard such a phrase before. If you have not - then welcome - welcome to The Timeless Tayl.
∞
Serib tried to be cautious against the scope and sprawl of the hunter’s words. Could he be trusted with so many scalps sewn to him? If his age to us is ancient, did virtue mean to him what it meant to Gadail?
“So I must return to the lake where Gadail and I were waiting… somehow. Though what must I look out for, to be certain I am in the correct lineage of events? These landmarks as you have named them… how tall will the lake’s trees be? How tall is how tall… what season should I find?”
“In my seven failures it was not always possible to know with certainty, though your path while not easier on your soul shall be an easier one to find. The Lake Arruikikn is the filled pit and crater that was left in the earth when Haven-upon-Hadaeon rose into the skies, becoming Haven-o’er-Hadaeon.”
Serib was well aware and grew impatient, the rune bright with expectation. Ahlzvyr continued, his eyes briefly closed:
“And before the city at all shined a mountain stood; richly veined with silver was The Greatmount angel-mined into fragility and other decimations of Nature, though leading to the cure of all our Needs. What else is the knell and toll of progress?” he waited for Serib’s answer, though she only glared. “The halved-spear of Ithuriya returned to its whence in orbit drawn and magnetised. A return to a sense of certainty you and I both seek.”
“The other half of Ithuriya’s spear is on the mountain? The same mountain that Haven would become… has become… how is this possible, in two places at once?”
As Serib asked in frustration, Ahlzvyr cackled and spat out another seed from his berries he had been chewing over:
“Made possible by Timelessness, illiterate. By the lack of linearity. By Lillian’s whim of warp and weft. Anything permits itself now. Less two places and more the same place in different points of its lineage, I would say. Imagine if you now young could stand before your older self. Would it be yourself though another or otherwise? What would you say to you?”
∞
The Hunter Lord grabbed Serib’s hand to force it towards the shimmering rune: a wound reopened and a line of the story once thought resolved though always a thread undiscovered, a drop of ink escaped. All drops he had traced and threads followed to their nigh-fruition here on the mountainside, willow weird as the rest.
∞
Strong as Serib was she stood her ground still heavy with questions, wrenching her hand away from him. Though Ahlzvyr soon overcame her strength with old skill, and all of her weight was used against her. He hooked the hilt of his halberd behind her leg to thwart her balance and with a shove the back of her head smacked into the willow and with its wood she travelled-strange through Timeless Spacelessness - travelled with its wood destined for being carved - into a grandclock.
∞
At the centre of an angelic courtyard she stood frazzled and dizzy; a courtyard chiselled out of what was once a mountainside. A courtyard that would later be or had been a hall. The spacious close was hectic with souls shouting into ever louder and louder arguments:
“…not since Hemloch’s shores…” one shrieked without dignity, doing harm to all around them. “…whom among us is Alyoshian enough for this, the death of Time?”
Her dazed senses scanned around, hoping Gadail would be there. Instead a grandclock loomed over her, ticking rhythmless despite the fuss of experts all over it probing their useless counts, and The Hunter Lord as was his wish could not be seen.