Uncertain paths. Let us leave Patinya to the vultures as she would have wanted. For Serib and Iron-Chest, it was still by moonlight that they skirted the lake’s bluish shoreline.
∞
The young shaman hoped Patinya would survive her wounds, occasionally looking back as she made quick pace with Iron-Chest over the pebbled shore with difficult footing. A strange hope to have with our selfishness, though many of us have at least once been guilty of it.
∞
The Sentinel’s experienced ears heard first and Serib not long afterwards knew: someone was yelling. A different battle was beginning nearby, though neither could tell clearly any particular weapon or voice, nor which direction it came from.
“Was that The Stalker?” Serib asked, and Iron-Chest gave a soft bark in agreement from the language of his kin tower-lost.
Following Conflict’s grating tunes far from Patinya’s resting place of daylight and vultures, on the other side of the great lake, apprentice and sentinel in moonlight reached the steel pier where this tome began.
Yet the sounds of battle were no more, gone quick as they had come; our two apprentices found only evidence of a forgotten fight spotted around the pebbles. Discarded weapons thick with rust; a curved greatsword similar to his own Iron-Chest leaned to touch, though it was a mere prop of an unknown stage he found, thatched cleverly together with silk and strings. Blotchy with old blood and so the rusting smell. A while speechless he stared without resolve at it.
∞
Serib and Iron-Chest had little moment spare to wonder where that unseen fight had wandered, as both their attentions were taken by the sight of the serene pier, of angelic and therefore human pride piercing into the soft lake Nature-made, replacing Haven’s loss.
∞
The pier in starry moonlight was more the tip of a giant’s spear, half-submerged in the cold waters. The hammered mass of silver had slanted as though from an impact, and all the ancient woodlands were its oaken shaft, a line and a loop again. Iron-Chest spoke to it:
“How many have shared with you their boredom and trepidation? Not much good for waiting anymore.”
Infinity runes pulsed weakly across its broad and crooked length, for something had scratched through the runes leaving them incomplete. New or existing runes had been formed in this haste with effects at once multitudinous and mute. Brighter their lights as Serib neared. There at the pier’s toppled end - by Night obscured until now - she could see still spinning a disc large enough for many souls to climb aboard and be carried to Haven-o’er-Hadaeon. The city yonder seemed other-moonlike in how bright it shined among its cloaks of dark clouds industrial and natural both. A poet of little skill would later go though it is all we have:
‘Steel radiant, adrift -
through starry ink.’
∞
Iron-Chest watched Serib go about her shamanic questions and rested his greyness, sitting slanted on the slanted pier where infinity runes once shone, where the moon always will. The chill night-breeze ran its calm through him or he in his practice eased himself focused where others would shiver and wane.
∞
Serib placed her palm to the icy platform, to the halved-runes, distracted by the stars. With a numb hand she recited to Iron-Chest what Ahlzvyr had claimed beside the willow tree on one of No Longer’s many cliffs. After, she added:
“I thought there would be a mountain… Ithuriya’s spear fell here, though not yet.”
Timelessness had her saying strange things. Iron-Chest knew her meaning:
“Had I less sense, I would say we were stood right atop her weapon. By day it is a pier, though by moonlight this wharf… its edges are sharp a spearhead fit for hafts greater than we can wield. A fine totem I’d say, if only your journeys would come to you, instead of you to them. Unless you’re even stronger than you look…”
Serib smiled imagining that - a totem so large as a sort of lighthouse for pilgrims to visit. She told her fellow apprentice:
“The Stalker asked where all this began for me, and when I answered he said to come back to this place. Near the lakebed once a mountain’s eyrie, he said, to begin an extinction.”
“Sounds as something he would say.” Iron-Chest grumbled at a hunter’s words, himself a defender sworn.
∞
“Reduced to landmarks…” Serib muttered to herself recalling, walking over the straight-slant pier and scattered pebbles the waves had brought or taken, the metal and stone of Hadaeon-earth. “…consistent across the inconsistencies and impossibilities.”
Constants the same and variables rearranged, it could be said. Through it all Serib rummaged, for The Stalker had listed scars and hair, the lengths and lacking of, as things she can keep track of without Time and numbers, to clearer tell Where and When she was while traversing Timelessness.
∞
“He spoke of allegiances, how they strengthen and fade into rivalries. Far simpler than all of his tracking, I expected a mountain to be here in place of the lake.”
“That long has passed?” Iron-Chest scratched his chin. “Is nothing the same? Or different? Missing?” he thought of old tactics and battles won to see what aid could lend, and with ambushes on his mind he watched the trees, the skies, his ears more feline in their rotations.
“The sharpness…” Serib answered quickly. “…when I was here with Gadail the lakebed though far from me, felt sharp. Wounded. Before I did not know why, now I wonder if Ithuriya’s spear was embedded there. And now I can do little with that wonder, for I do not feel that same sharpness. Now, the lake is calm, its bed untouched.”
∞
Iron-Chest cleared his throat with a growl, glancing up to Haven: “As though in this lineage, the great duel of Lillian and Ithuriya has not yet taken place. The spear is still intact… a symbol-yet in Haven’s halls.”
“What are you thinking?”
∞
“Spring as my steps into shamanism may be, Autumn’s age I know well.” He winked and so the moon’s reflection in his eye. “The owls may have left these nearest trees to the swoop of vultures, but we still can wonder what the sharpness means… I feel it even if you do not, despite the duel of its breaking being as yet unsheathed.”
He was certain Lillian and Ithuriya had not yet fought, remembering well the events leading to that encounter he explained:
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I feel it cutting into the flesh of my thoughts and spirit, that my bones were those of the earth, of the lakebed dark and cold. Is this a shamanic omen I am far from used to? Or something of Timeless-way?” he mused. “This is your first step away from apprenticeship? Hmm. And my first step towards. A silvery mountain once towered here, how can I remember its depart in an age never once my own?" he thought of the sword across his back. “I would think it is wonderful for metal to return to its home, a blessing hung not on our walls. There is an aura here in moonlight… a curse where blessings should glow.”
∞
Jumbled as Iron-Chest may sound to you and I, Serib had caught his notion and praised him:
“My first steps were the same… difficult to make sense of your new senses. The earth’s lessons. The wind’s warnings, as through quarry and ruin alike they pass.”
“All of it history. Rather I would hear that from a master, though you will do.” Iron-Chest barked happily. “I know little what to make of my feelings here. In shamanism that is Earth’s domain if I am not mistaken? To know oneself firm in a cloudy place.”
Another breeze made its mighty nod through the ancient trees.
∞
“You are not mistaken.” Serib encouraged the veteran of battles older than her ages. “Sit as you are and touch the pier - know its earthen metal. And here.” She threw something to him in the moonlight-dark. The slap of it caught in his palm. “Hold the loose stones and pebbles. I do not know enough of Gadail’s ways as I wish to… but letting your feet go bare on grass after a long journey, or carrying pebbles of home in your pocket as you go… it helps to keep you from drifting away.”
Rough even for his furred hand-paws, as Iron-Chest held stones and placed his own palm to all that was earthen, he felt as a pup gathering Spring’s buds long ago, and gathered so his ungrounded thoughts. Serib’s own thoughts were centred having guided The Sentinel, teaching herself in teaching him, and she gasped having realised:
“Your arm… are your burns still there, or scars?”
∞
Before they had shined in the moonlight under his loose bracer, now only fur there flowed
“Where…” Iron-Chest searched, patting his arm and feeling under his armour, through his thick hairy coat down to the skin. “I am healed, or I have not yet fought that duel…”
The Spring-Sworn dwelled in his memory-to-be, acid in her flames. Iron-Chest gave all his frown and ponder to it, though no answer satisfied him as to how any of this was possible or plausible. The definitions of here and there were lessening, frontiers where foundations should have been.
“I think you’re right.” Serib said, giving it less thought. “Lillian and Ithuriya have not yet clashed; nor have you fought The Spring-Sworn.”
“What sort of sense are we making? Yet here we find ourselves…”
Iron-Chest laughed into his yowl and Serib quietly agreed. The Sentinel went on: “Little I suppose has changed, exchanging Truth’s strange ways for those stranger ways of Timelessness; us mortals caught under and between forces only our faithful trust can ease, letting go of our need for absolute control.”
∞
Always a multitude to accept for what it was, those forces not beyond our imagination, but far from our reach and grasp. With intuitions aligned, Serib and Iron-Chest looked to the end of the pier where still the dual-disc spun on, awaiting their feet and paws. Its underside spinning always, while the top half remained fit for transport despite its debris.
∞
While wondering how many journeys it must have made or will yet, Serib saw on its last remaining pillar an infinity rune still flickered. Either left unfinished or it once had been whole from afar she thought, though as she drew close the truth was clearer: a chunk in the oakenstone had been chipped away - leaving the rune broken. Unable to complete itself and as a portal or window through Timelessness glow. She leapt aboard the disc and began looking for something.
∞
“We must go back to Haven-o’er-Hadaeon.” Serib had grounded her thoughts: Ithuriya’s half-spear, a totem perhaps, was her utmost aim - with that in hand the rest could follow.
“Or wait as Patinya did.” Iron-Chest called from where he sat on the wharf-edge.
Soon he stood and leaned against its incline, steady his stride towards its end where Serib continued her search.
“You could be right - though if this disc shows signs of battle, I would not like to wait for that battle to come to us.”
“A trap, I wonder.” Iron-Chest pointed back to the shore. “The weapons were made of silk, I saw… props as for a stage, I’d say. Distracted - and then an arrow from the dark or blade in our back.”
“I suppose we have only our theories… we need to meet with Lillian to understand her side of this divide; it is not shamanic to view a conflict only from one side. Approaching Haven from another road could work, moreso if I had a totem in hand and a blessing from an ancestor of Earth, though that road seems to have met its end here.” She paused to smile: “Unless you are the ancestor I was to meet?”
“Who can know without Time? Perhaps I will be eventually.” He laughed and barked at the moon. “Alas I know Autumn well and my Winter must not be far off. Not long enough to be an ancestor, I’d say, or a shaman proper at all.”
∞
No soul survives their Winter, though master shamans can in their death become ancient if there is dire need enough, an ancestral spirit and guide having rowed with Pale Death along his river-known, ever since The First Lad that said no to Death.
Such myths of fireside, as even those ancestors eventually, from Death receive their second visit and final summons.
∞
Serib’s mind was more and more her heart, with dreams going ahead of themselves as you may already have seen, and Minim The Spring-Sworn most of all was much the same.
Timeless and strange as that would be - if Iron-Chest indeed was to be an ancestor in his future - Serib took comfort in imagining it, that her part though small could help him on such a grand and unlikely journey.
∞
She poked about in the rubble strewn across the ferry-disc.
∞
The infinity rune had been placed by someone taller than her, though one by one from the rubble she tried holding each handful-sized rock she could find up to the pillar - to eventually, she hoped - find a final puzzle piece to mend the rune’s shape.
Such a rune had saved her and Iron-Chest from the courtyard, could it again progress their quest?
∞
Finally she found something; holding a marbled piece in her hand and eyeing up the rune she could tell from a distance it was perfect. She refrained from fixing the rune immediately with second thoughts prevailing, ‘fixing’ being of course her best guess at what would happen.
As in Timelessness internecine, who knows.
∞
On and on the rune pulsed frail. More so as she brought the chunk of oakenstone closer, testing and retesting to the same result. After, she kept it folded in her robes, her palm stinking of rust having handled the stone.
“Why not mend it now?” Iron-Chest asked; having stepped aboard the disc himself he had begun to watch closely. His hind paws scratched on the dusty marble as he paced about: “Perhaps we will find the silver mountain of old... find ourselves taken there to its highest age and can begin our climb. I imagine in any age of Haven’s-whenever, Lillian will be under heavy guard, or be too young to know anything of use, or abroad living out that life of hers worthy of being shaped into The Gravestone Column.”
∞
Serib thought it over unsure which path was best, to find Lillian or search for Ithuriya’s fallen half-spear. In the mountain or the city where would the spear be in either? In what state, of ore or mould unfinished? She knew Gadail and Ahlzvyr would want her to seek the totem that Ithuriya’s spear could be, that all their words and actions had pushed her towards that aim, though many were her questions about Lillian, a prisoner locked away in her home, atop The Gravestone Column of her accomplishments. The hero of her own age. The villain of ours.
∞
Serib was again unsure what choice she had - to board the disc seemed the only option - and surely Haven was its only destination by destiny or design. Did these runes transport the objects they were carved into, or us passing by, and is that the question at all? What control had she over where rune and disc would land them? As her journey so far made sure to remind her, she would fare far stronger with a totem in hand. Patinya would not have overpowered her with such ease, nor would her own summoned lightning be so wanton and uncontrolled. She could begin to better withstand Fire next with Earth understood, as Water and Wind the last seemed too far to ever be close:
“I will mend the rune when we need it. I am sure we would both prefer the disc take us higher, and if the mountain appears… if the disc stops…”
“Ah. To its peak past all defence to save our legs the hike, we could already be halfway.”
Serib affirmed: “I imagine Gadail and our ancestors would prefer a more traditional climb! The lessons our spirits learn when our bodies struggle and all that - though what Timelessness had they to contend with?”
“A circle is an exhausting road.” Iron-Chest agreed to which his young friend smiled:
“When I and Gadail rode this disc or its ancestor, it had a route and mind its own.”
∞
The Sentinel barked, eyeing the scratches across the disc’s column.
“You might be able to steer its course?” Serib inferred.
“Fortunately for us, such angelic constructs have but one purpose: to ferry the wingless. We can keep that worry from our thoughts. I am sure it will take us to Haven.” He grumbled then, for nothing was certain: “Though what temper shall it be in… city or mountain… ruin or jewel…”
His gaze was fixed on the angelic city in outermost dark, that anti-crater drifting through conquered skies.