His monument. The rune was not so incomplete as she first thought. The woodland much had changed from gold to bronze as Serib, disappointed to have been tricked or forced, opened her already frowning eyes. A final sunset was low against the horizon with its shadows long across the ground, and so her own shadow all the more was spindly.
∞
Standing bruised and brushing stray grass from her lightning-patterned robes, she dimly saw where The Hunter Lord and exterminated werewolves had been: there were instead strange angels among the trees, murmuring most of them, living among those twine-tops in buildings known to be made of oaken-stone; a branching marble to our eyes. As bees their wings, or butterfly or dragonfly, from insects much the same as she had seen on the other Courtdom-worlds of her travels with Gadail. The angels were humming void of any tune one’s ears could recite, for what can rhyme be without Time’s pass and contrast?
∞
Through rain and Winter’s snow the angels’ homes had not been tended to. Leafy branches rooted through glassless windows. Doors-overgrown could no longer open. The dreaming angels did not heed Serib’s passing as she made tentative way, nor answer her calling up to them for aid and direction. Even when she knocked on their trees and with a shamanic glare asked the branches to bend and sway, the angels - bearing no armour nor weaponry - could not be unsettled from their ghostly hum unsung. Few wore clothing at all. She climbed one such tree to find firm shroom and lichen Viridian in colour had begun to grow over the angels’ feet - across their wings and hands - they were perhaps deaf to Human Nature she thought, being of an age heavy with quiet having long gone unvisited. An age of Nature’s more and Humanity’s less.
∞
Concerned why The Hunter Lord would mention her totemless state, following the mossy way still downward through the flickering shadows of leaves overhead, Serib passed into an even larger shadow.
∞
She almost tripped over discarded bricks and stones, having found an odd structure jutting out of the uneven ground. It may have once been part of a massive gate or wall, though volcanic echoes had since ebbed and flowed so that rocks and woodland had longer thrown their tress-beards, leaving only the wall’s wind vanes and the featureless heads of its statues known. And to her mind was called The Winged Wall of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon, here perhaps upon-again. Returned to its whence and so reclaimed by it.
∞
The statues were of Werewolves and Angels aligned. Wolves though winged or humans fanged and furred. As all shamans are in part Historians, Serib understood what these figures represented - souls between Nature and Human Nature, ground and sky, Truth and its endless search - and the imperfect dance between. And so she saw them as kindred to her, herself being human though tusked, a shaman bridging Love’s heights to Reason’s depths, and Love’s depths so on.
∞
Half on the lookout for The Stalker, a while she examined these statues intrigued, again thinking of Gadail’s old potter friend in the desert, what statues they might have made or if tea sets for shamans were more their concern.
She could not see this next part as we can, for the grass and confusion were too long: the name ‘Iron-Chest’ was etched commemorative at the foot of a monument nearby, its features worn and unclear.
∞
From the rough-fur arms of that nigh-submerged statue however, Serib heard a sound at which she almost laughed - an angel was deep in snores. Nostrils blocked with pollen. Wearing fallen leaves and holding a bundle of wildflower buds, the sleeper was startled by Serib’s approach - stretching feebly from the statue’s cradle unable to stand:
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“Oh my…” the small angel had risen partly and in doing so, the mossy dust of ages fell from them. “I have been here in tradition only. I was told the last pilgrim had been and gone, though the penultimate was yet to come, and I must have nodded off trying to understand! Welcome, wretched, wingless thing! What tusks and locks so long… what a blessed number of locks you have… come and be not wretched, for are all not responsible for all? And are you the last of all things...”
Much of their musculature had withered in being so still for so long - Serib climbed and helped the angel down from their cradling statue. Their weak legs buckled under them when trying to stand alone and she felt foolish for not leaving them in those everlasting arms. Pollen or similar dust fluffed away from them, sparkling in the stray sunlight over Spring’s sunset-glade. They reeked of moss and damp. Behind the angel shone a signpost claimed by dew which read a word to the young shaman:
Orphan’age
∞
“What is this place?” Serib asked the angel who in their weakness, preferred with the young shaman’s help a seat among the weeds and their flowers. “What was this place…”
“Are you a refugee, the last of them?” the angel plucked their flowers and feebly tried through failure to throw the petals over Serib, who with her brow askew somewhat replied, bewildered in the angelic wilderness.
When the young shaman seemed unsure, the withered angel said:
“Speak louder, prouder. Are you a pilgrim at least, penultimate to see Lady Lillian’s cell? And walk into the smog beyond’t…”
“Where is that?” Serib’s focus narrowed.
The angel seemed disappointed, thumbing through ideas: “Are you… are you an orphan?”
The young shaman’s heart was sore as she answered, forgetting her pincered arm: “Not quite… but, can’t you hear me?”
The angel squinted and sighed, looking past Serib’s tusks and into her mouth:
“Dear pilgrim… you cannot hear me…”
“I think it is you that cannot hear me.” The young shaman also sighed.
∞
Serib heard no gigantic beetle, only relentless flies as The Stalker’s voice again gave his grim command:
“Nay, Dromiya.”
His pet was nowhere, though Serib turned to her right and there he was close to her - Ahlzvyr, Hunter Lord - his short legs did not dangle as before but were firm on the woodland ground as he sat. The once-Winged Wall of Haven he sat atop was more a fence, to a walled garden forlorn with eroded partition.
∞
Flies came to bother the stale scalps sewn to his blond pelt and faded tabard. He stood from the walling stones with help from his halberd thrice his height was tall for hunting mighty prey indeed, and Serib feared it could butcher her easily. The lightning of her eyes flashed as in the halberd’s grievous sight and curve she saw the ending of her dark desires. She had not feared fully for herself before, perhaps always aware that Gadail was never far and so her worries had been for him.
∞
“Dim your storm or I’ll snuff it for you. Save your mettle.” The Stalker spoke lighter after that. “This is close enough, eh? Seems I have learned somewhat the mystery of these runes… each of us hurtled to other ends of the woodland, but in the same woodland nonetheless.”
Serib growled and the weakling angel stared cluelessly at The Stalker.
Though only an apprentice, rocks and lightning were names Serib knew and would have readied her defences, had The Stalker not already called off his pet and said through his sandy beard:
“Come with me - away from this angel. These gatekeepers have forgotten human sound and hear only Nature’s songs, thinking The Ending has already come. Mess of a lineage you’ve found yourself in, moth.”
The Stalker set off into the trees. Her words followed him before her feet:
“You kicked me into it…”
∞
At first reluctant to leave the helpless angel, she relented and ran to catch him up. Though young she was taller and he was much the wider, with a boulder’s subtlety his free arm waded through the thick forest, his other hand for his halberd. Yet with all the grace and care of a fawn he placed each footfall leaving scarce trace he there had passed. Serib’s bare feet thumped far clumsier behind him.
∞
Before leaving the hill-buried wall completely our shaman turned back to see the massive, crab-scarab Dromiya, clicking, clacking and bubbling at the angel, and that simpler soul tried prancing to dream elsewhere as it long had. Prancing with arms and giggles only, their legs without reply. She did not hear the angel say to the giant grub, though we can if we like:
“You are here to send the smog away? No, this is blissful…”
∞
And Serib guessed that Dromiya hungry a grub as it was, had appetite only for the enemies of Time. Despite Time and Truth being the forces - or so Serib thought - that had ended the age of their lineage of the Sifting Sand-snow, Dromiya was loyal. As Ahlzvyr no doubt had raised them to be: raised to see in Time and Reality no Evil deliberate, only Tragedy to accept forthrightly.
As the angel tried to prance, it fell, and the massive scarab carried them back to their cradling statue: ‘Iron-Chest’ the monument’s overgrown name.