The Stalker and The Sentinel. Iron-chest watched The Hunter Lord hold a palm of sand-snow up to whatever light still remained under The Spring-Sworn’s oppress, divining from the falling sparks wasted or fulfilled. A small empty pouch of human leather by his side flapped in the wind. The spot of his chosen seat was a place of strange gravity he since surveyed in his waiting as the sand in all directions flowed and to Dromiya he muttered inaudible:
“Accretion has of our sand-snow a loopy mountain made.”
The grand grub clicked its maw and clacked its claws in approval. The Stalker too watched Serib go, watched her lightning-robes catching the dwindling light as his sands, the eight thick locks of her hair that will become vicious eels in silhouette unspeakable never far from here.
∞
Since we last saw The Stalker, the flies had done as they will to the scalps sewn to his mail. Dried, shrivelled and sagging domes remained. Reminders grimmest of why he must go on, why he must not fail the last as he had the rest. He replied to The Sentinel:
“And you, soldier. I thought it a shame you both had chosen treason in sight of me back at the courtyard ‘before.’ Though - long it has been for me and perhaps - short for you? You look unchanged while I have seen much since. Lost in forests beyond all of Reason’s reckoning until a young shaman happened by. We are more aligned than I thought, and I realise our dealignment is Fate’s intention.”
Iron-Chest scowled at the sewn-Were-scalps:
“Is dealignment the word you choose? Why would we ever replace Truth?” He growled wary of the small crossbow mounted on Ahlzvyr’s wrist and his giant beetle-crab far from coastline or desert sands: “If you are to fight with me or against me, for the sake of vultures, I hope there is meat under all that beard, Stalker.”
∞
“Both to die, are we?” The Hunter Lord let out a grievous laugh in Serib’s direction, who had already put angry distance between them. “What authority have we in each other’s worlds and lineages overlapping? Time was the authority we all knelt to in the end and not even that height is tall any longer. Alas that in Lillian-faced Entropy - infinity has met its match. I have tracked The Spring-Sworn here through the runed maze that first from a mistaken guide appeared ruined. Mountains do not harm themselves and Ithuriya’s halfspear returned with no impact such as this. The Spring-Sworn is searching for it as I would, tracing and calculating, for it does not call her name. Excavating the life she could have led.”
“It calls her name.” Iron-chest looked for his new friend and surrogate master but he could no longer see Serib, and he gazed up higher to the Greatmount’s fragile peaks. Vultures circled its last remaining spire that the desolation was of their making or an ending they had seen before and we all are but intruders infant to their world we have named. “Shall we stand together, then, Stalker and Sentinel as foundation and frontier, and a better chance afford ourselves against this… dark shaman. I know I will not live to see my Winter, regardless or otherwise…”
The Stalker laughed heartily again and Iron-Chest growled.
∞
“I laugh not at you, Sentinel, but at Fate’s ungoverned nerve. Your ages though warlike defending bloody walls far from the frontiers have not equipped you for lies, padded in Courtdom’s soft reserve. How else did The Spring-Sworn first slip past you, with you no less?”
Iron-Chest felt more and more a pup himself:
"You believe Fate’s tapestry is false… sewn deliberately as to convince me? And from there - my own undoing I complete for her.”
“Serib said as much and you would not hear her. I doubt you or I are considered as threats to Fate’s silk. Not your undoing I measure, but to leave Serib alone by sending you off more likely. Using your faith in Truth against you. Be it chasing your tail as I’ve chased my own plenty through mazes-woodland or into a duel as this headlong from which one does not return lightly or at all. For you and I both realise overlooking this human-spread ravine we have no choice - what horror would visit young Serib if we turned back now? Is everything already predetermined? Or is the coming maelstrom one of many wills at once?”
“How do you know what I have seen on Fate’s tapestry, or words shared?” Iron-Chest’s sunrise blade glowed on.
“If it concerns my task then I have found it out by skill or chance or even through swarth allegiances. Heh.” He laughed madly at this, at pages tucked among his beard. “In your future and yet my past your master gave this to me, Sentinel. Said you’d understand.”
∞
“My master?” Iron-Chest set his glowing blade to rest on his Hadaeon-steel pauldron - its curves with leaves engraved - and the light seemed a halo about his head.
From the rummage of his beard Ahlzvyr found and tossed to Iron-Chest a pebble. Upon catching it The Sentinel saw it was clay-formed, a potter’s creation etched with infinity’s rune though upon that rune a fang was scratched at either end, as though to give infinity a beginning and an ending unbelike. The clay pebble was warm as spent coal holding on. He sent his gaze ahead of him up the mountainside, to its ashen horizons clouding over with cloggy mist.
∞
“Serib was right. This is not my end… I have been misled.” He set the pebble to rest in his fur under one of his steel vambraces.
“You foresaw dying alone, did you? On threads and in dreams.” The Stalker asked The Sentinel and did not allow him to answer. “I have found some of the runes to my advantage and destroyed those which saw me closer to my end narrowing all ways here. Our goal is aligned in his moment, Sentinel. I have set my traps for The Spring-Sworn… in a new-formed glade not far from our position through which she must pass. Will geographies again define everything as they always have? Will the tales make much of that? Giving herself only one route in remaking the earth as she wishes has made her path simpler, more dangerous. What need for adventure in the world as she sees it? What purpose in a landscape sprawling? And so we can draw her attentions there and we together may manage what neither of us could alone in our stories separate and obscured: you, strung by amnesia, while I chased nothing in a woodland unreal.”
Iron-Chest barked and adjusted the great-blade resting on his shoulder. “You do not seek to kill her?”
“History’s fade has eroded noble Stalkers into simple Shadows.” Ahlzvyr stared through Iron-Chest, sighing. “Oh the lessons I would teach if my pride outweighed my loyalty to truth - perhaps set in place a lodge where our forgotten sand-snow-ways can be remembered by this forsaken age. Let this suffice - many are the tasks of a Stalker always behind enemy frontiers. A dead target is almost a failure, a prey converted or wayward returned home is my mark. And though not all can be returned and number among The Rabid, I see no such despair for The Spring-Sworn. I seek to nearly kill her, for this tale of ours is one of brinks and extremes, opposites and reversals. Are those not the sorts of truths that cannot be taught, those found at the edges of ourselves?”
∞
The Stalker eyed the giant scarab Enanti and threw a seed to the ground, patting it buried in the troubled earth with his boot for what would come after he had gone. Further than Serib, Lillian was the true ‘wayward’ Ahlzvyr sought, though he could not bring her home - her home already her gravestone and her cell. And what permanence can a mortal hope to mend Entropy with? Even Serib dear to this tome was but another step closer to understanding Lady Lillian Grey, The Great Freedom, Heir to Courtdom’s Heirarchy:
“Despite Timelessness I see Enanti growing linearly; the age of The Grand Scarab ended premature when Lillian invaded our sands. Breaking seals that would reveal to her Time’s ‘location’, and make flesh what had always been ethereal in paracosmic desire and inability to see what is over one’s wish.”
Iron-Chest sniffed the air, unsure what ‘paracosmic desire’ was, his ears low and listening to The Stalker that had been alone too long:
“We of Aner Ba’hyt thought Truth had deemed us insufficient, yet Love over Reason won that battlefield. Enanti when fully grown will need a shaman to advise and lead them as Courtdom comes under new reign. A shaman that can navigate this Timelessness as Old Gadail’s apprentice is beginning to? Now there’s a dynasty that Humanity needs out of this mess. You and I shall if we can, leave Minim’Syrib nearly dead and enough, so that when The Spring-Sworn passes our corpses at worst it will be in a state weakened enough for Serib to stand against. And the rest will be up to her, not a matter of defeat nor victory but of assimilation.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The Stalker and The Sentinel heard on the wind a voice or tune as a cloud approached from on high the burning skies, and atop that cloud Master Shaman Old Gada’il, The Windlord, sat as we all might in grass
“More than standing strong… to stand brave shall be her ending.”
∞
When seen closer, the cloud was as steel and gemstone hard no cloud at all, but a boulder made light by gales, wrapped in soft clouds hiding its harder shape. The boulder kept its burg merely a hands-length away from the earth, and Gadail raised a clay cup hot with tea to both The Sentinel and The Stalker:
“I would apologise for almost being late… though in Timelessness I doubt it matters! Tea for either of you, before The Spring-Sworn arrives? Or farbark?”
He was busily giving a strip of bark a fair chew between his words, a secret stash never far.
∞
“Master Gada’il.” The Hunter Lord stood to bow, holding his halberd-tall.
Across its haft a vine was long all growing from the leaf Gadail had returned to Ahlzvyr, atop The Winged Wall not far from here in space though to the turning of pages, long ago. “All tea and no bark for me.” He grimaced at the mention and afterthought of farbark.
∞
Iron-Chest similarly bowed at last before a master of shamanism, one of the four lords of Ehl’yiteth no less, where The First Shaman ‘tripped on their trance enhanced’ as an old story says. He thought such a lord would be neater, The Windlord himself whose myths and tales he knew well, though there he was in clay armour scratched with cave-art, and hair where weeds took happy root, fresh as sea wind or weed his scent. Soon, Iron-Chest could imagine a true shaman no other way. Traveller of the shores, grace his weight and mote alike. The cave-art across Gadail’s clay breastplate at first had a scarred look, figures were there etched. Iron-Chest realised: a stick-or-blocky likeness of Gadail himself was in that art wrestling a Dark Spirit. His burned scars itched and staring at the art he spoke a tower-lost name:
“Akin to Jaq'ob.”
“Ah, the winds know your name well, Iron-Chest, sword-bulwark of The Winged Wall and The Woodlands Old of Gap’elyhond both. Let me see you…”
Iron-Chest took a step back from the floating boulder so the old master could better give his say:
“Yes indeed, a Werewolf wearing Hadaeon steel from Haven’s forges, the blacksmith hammered leaves across their craft for you. To honour you, Iron-Chest of two worlds-Hadaeon… this is you in Autumn’s youth? Then the ancestral-rest is no wonder, that the grace of our kin calls to you, the future yours to guide. Looking back you will see it ahead of you, and rest you shall have earned.”
Iron-Chest little understood the shaman’s strange words or were they prophecies, though humbled he remained that no ill had been spoken.
∞
“I was not expecting you, Windlord.” The Stalker raised his beard to Gadail.
The Sentinel had taken up the master shaman’s offer of farbark and handed a piping clay cup of tea to Ahlzvyr, passed to him by Gadail who would not leave his boulder. The master began to explain:
“Quite! Best if The Spring-Sworn does not sense me just yet. The winds are unknown to her, avoiding her command of Spacious Air and heeding mine, so my breath and words she cannot hear across the ravine. The other lords of Earth, Fire and Water lost or fallen, so all other elements are hers to reign…”
“Your foot upon the ground shall alert her.” Iron-Chest gnawed gracelessly through his own farbark, while Ahlzvyr sipped his tea by the massive crab Enanti.
The coleopteran-crustacean partook of no bark nor tea despite the shaman’s offerings, understanding his words yet fusing deeper into its glyphic meditations. The old master smiled:
“Good to know you are well, elden friend.”
A claw opened and closed twice in reply.
∞
Gadail agreed with The Sentinel:
“My younger though still-old self searched for her, and now she searches for me.” A while he contemplated that, smiling sadly. “Our young Serib by contrast, is about to journey back to Ehl’yiteth in a sense, for this mountain is a place of nonsense, and so I’ll make quick my own journey off the momentum of her runes all in place that she has not yet carved.”
The Sentinel and The Stalker looked at one another in shared confusion.
“Crush and discard the teacup’s clay when you’re done - and be ready for your duel. Before I go, Ahlzvyr, I must ask which Lay’d do you stand with? I have my suspicions, you see… not regarding you.”
The Hunter Lord turned his back to Gadail and Iron-Chest, giving his last survey to the world’s destroy. Following another sip he said:
“Both planting seeds are we? Neither, for Lady Fate and Lay’d Payn believe Time has been murdered but not I… Stalker they long have said but I am a tracker and pathfinder foremost. Time is out there dreaming or scheming as it never has had to before… its murder has mutated it, and it always was a higher being beyond our beliefs. A Dimension embodied by harpoon wounded and made by force to hide among us that it could be found, and I know not which of these events was first.”
“In paracosmic desire.” Gadail echoed, his eyes on Enanti, whose claw again clacked twice.
∞
Iron-chest raised his brows, and Ahlzvyr still facing away consulted the bright sand of his beard as Gadail offered:
“Then you have seen as I have… paying attention to all that is Black or White, to starlight afar and the fires we make; the element Serib is next to explore on her totemic quest, and may even see your own and old homeland. My dear friend from and of The Sifting Sand-snow, if you believe Time is not dead but dreaming or dreaming in death and ways to our senses strange, then be on the lookout for Konisoki, whose name reversed is Ikosinok. Spare him and so the world.”
Enanti’Dromiya stirred, pulled its scythes back towards its shell. From his surveying of the unmade land The Hunter Lord turned back to face Gadail, alarm wide across his buried eyes under his pelt-scalp hood, while Iron-Chest knew the tower-lost language, having read a history or two in those ages guarding seldom-quiet walls with little else to do but read and wait between sieges:
“I know of the tribe and its people, I know that word. Ikosinok reversed is Konisoki, it means eight? Eight being the highest I can count since Time was lost and very much the same rune, regardless of its angle, that reacts to Serib’s presence.”
∞
“Interesting to know Serib and I are not the only ones…” Gadail admitted, and to Iron-Chest showed his respect, sharing, throwing to The Sentinel’s paw another strip of farbark. “Never too many. Ahlzvyr, it seems this ‘embodied dimension’ of yours has developed strange humours, or in its tailless wake has left a clue - wishing to be found by allies. Or, a trap has been set for the rest.”
Ahlzvyr’s eyes widened further with delight, as before only through hunches and conclusions from conjectures drawn had he believed Time survived the attempt on their life, and here Gadail spoke with proof of a sort. A witness perhaps:
“You agree with me, Master Gada’il? Time is alive?”
∞
Enanti to these words receded through its stances posing at The Spring-Sworn’s desolation over continents deconstructing themselves. Receded its beetle-plating to uncover its spread wings, an oily rainbow their span fragile, and scythe-pincers tighter tucked to its burly sides. It advanced some steps closer to the ravine’s edge as Gadail did not answer from his floating boulder, but the great work of cloudy rock and his command he sat upon made quick its ascent towards the mountain’s last spire, leaving The Sentinel and The Stalker as they were and had been.
∞
Iron-Chest sighed in the quiet and The Stalker spoke again to winds that would not answer, to Gadail drifting further away at speed:
“Then you fear Chance may yet deem your apprentice irredeemable. Rabid. Damnation only.” He shared again his gruesome laugh with what remained of the colliding worlds falling further from each other. “Leave her to it and forget not your place, you fossil hanging on.”
So he spoke undead, seeing Love hold Reason where it was.
∞
The Sentinel finished his chewy farbark and waited with The Stalker. He heard as he had been waiting for, for Ahlzvyr to slurp his last sip of tea. His beard tangled enough that he could tuck his cup there to rest in a nook, and so he did to ready his self and weaponry. He sighed into his words from his last sip relieved:
“Ah! I’ll cover your charge.” he grabbed his halberd-tall, wrapped as it was with vines, and the hard metal softened almost bent to his touches, then eventually curved indeed until as a bow taller than himself it stood, having strong fibrous stems as bowstring he tied from end to ending.
“From sand to snow.” He pondered, as the duel-tripartite was soon to begin.
As he spoke, Dromiya’enanti crawled forth into the ravine with sticky legs climbing down the steep. Its second armour-plated husk sprung open-flared and soon after the buzzing of its wings grinded on the still-free air, and the giant crab flew as a beetle into lightning’s dark skies, its legs or arms hanging from its great body as axes or scythes.
∞
From his vantage, The Stalker - though arrowless to Iron-Chest’s eyes - had full range over the narrowing ravine and the boiling ocean bay beyond.
Beyond, where bloody rivers as veins from the earth ran deeper, yet more as halved-snakes those estuaries writhed hot, unable to settle in their rocky beds. The halberd-bow though changed in shape was far heavier than it had been and could not from its mount be moved, making all the more potent its throw to come. The Sentinel’s sword aglow with bronze light shone against Enanti’s shells flying further away, himself a new star as the old were fading.
With bow at the ready wedged in hopeful earth, Ahlzvyr held the empty clay cup to his companion:
“Sentinel?”
∞
Iron-Chest sprinted off down the ravine’s sheer drops and rough angles with speed few could counter. Over foundational rivers that as solid limbs began lashing out at him. As eels though rooted and disturbed. Dromiya’enanti skirted the burning skies.
∞
Ahlzvyr crushed the clay teacup in his hand, the dust and pieces falling to the earth he watched, just as he would divining from falling sand or snow. Only Wonder would ever know what he saw in those last shards. From below the earth a tremor shot through the moment, as the teacup’s pieces - clay touched by Gadail - mingled with The Spring-Sworn’s rubble. Pulling back the giant bowstring of vines an arrow of sand and air there formed between The Hunter Lord’s fingers pinched. Quiet his divination as he took aim at the silhouette afar acting out its blood-rites foul to which Iron-Chest was headlong and Enanti’dromiya o’er:
‘For Sain’ T’yeorgya by Summer’s-Moon,
Two-Hunters; Both-Prey.’
And it is beyond dispute that Iron-Chest howled for all the free winds to hear as he sped, greatsword in hand, as from Serib’s tears still glowing a Bronze lightning flashed across his sword as he ran, and The Dark Shaman’s lightning from above was drawn to his weapon and not to him, summoned by his weapon for him to wield.
‘…when I my last -
lay me riverside
under vulture skies,
in Moon-woodlands-old of Gap’elyhond.’