Wing Marshal. Serib saw the choir was many choirs, preaching their dirge across the skies of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon as those with leaders no more. Dotted across the higher and lower towers, visible by their bundles of candles or their gaudy, artificial torches beaming from devices once capable of far more.
∞
She thought some were in favour of whatever had been lost, in rapture bittersweet paying all due reverence and respect. The rest sang shrieking and bellowing that an ending had come, beating one another with their fists and others all against all, and the armoured angels escorting our shamans sighed. Those guards leapt from the edges in flight to other posts, replaced soon by others more grievously armed, their spears bladed at both ends less regal, less ceremonial.
“Look, what it is they do with their freedom…” one such guard baulked.
A return to an older, more violent age when none understood the other. The scrubbing and cleaning had ceased and Serib winced against the pungent, rusted wind, against the beating sun that would not set. They walked on, always upwards as things only worsened along the climb, unlike all she had ever read or committed to memory, where heroes of speech and thought always ‘came down’ from high places. The angels more gruesome in their speech and manner, grotesque with bulk and size Serib thought impossible unless:
“I have seen sketches, master…” She whispered. “When they look less like their statues and more like their monsters…”
“Cannibalism.” Gadail nodded, his tone blunt in regard to the only custom that can produce such specimens. “You already knew. Strange they did not look like this when we arrived… stay close to me.”
∞
Mangled architectures, with all the incoherency of new structures all glass and steel creeping around more ancient brickwork. She found it pleasant to look at materials so opposed, the varied technologies at once, the candles or torches in the same scape as discs that float and go without strings to run along or combustions visible. She kept her questions to herself through all this, as ‘what was missing’ became clearer yet less believable.
She readied how she would answer her master, serenaded by dirge and choir on those rusted winds.
∞
Nearing the end of their ascent, Serib and Gadail were climbing stone or metal steps far older than all the slippery steel that had been so far, winding around one of Haven’s taller spires.
She leaned constantly to her left as no railing or wall stood to her right - only the fall was waiting. Each step creaked as wood under her heels as she never would have expected, as her eyes told her it all was steel cold even in sunlight high above the world.
∞
Strange the stairs, winding outside the tower rather than inside. Choirs in the city below were being violently silenced or encouraged. Unrest at best, at worst a civil war beginning.
“Can we not help those souls?” Serib if winged or with Wind’s knowledge would have leapt down there already to lend her aid, and Gadail smiled:
“We are helping. No matter how wilted a petal may be, the roots should be your aim if tree and flower are to bloom again. Attend the petals only if you can. The glory less, the virtue more.”
∞
Over all the noise of the groaning buildings, their once compact and buried ores melted-stretched into sheets wincing in the sporadic sunlight, the creak of those high steps captured Serib as she tried to turn her mind from ‘leaves and branches’ to focus on the ‘roots’:
“What material is this?” she asked Gadail, who was walking slightly ahead of her, his tattooed clay all dry in the higher sunlight.
“It is oakenstone; oak an’ stone it might be said.”
Before he would elaborate or Serib could ask further, walking and turning another cycle of the stairs winding around the final tower, a yet larger column appeared from its own nowhere blocking gone the sun and stone, and Serib gasped enough to stop walking altogether.
From where the apprentice thought - had that behemoth-tower burst with immediacy’s announce, taller than the volcanoes asleep with age - its crown-tall declaring into firmament’s thoughts? Before she could, her master asked:
“Now, having gone around and around this tower, why has one turning in particular caused that to appear?”
∞
The deadly angels turned back to the shamans, covered in bruised armour, their wings feathered or fluffy as moths ruffled for balance. Emaciated they appeared now, with muscle and vein alone their purpose. Blood around their toothy mouths. Not one of their grim number reacted to the behemoth-tower, familiar with it. The armour of their wings had been torn from them. Bruised and battered angels - it is noted - having fought in battles Serib had not seen between there and the steps left behind. As though with each revolve around the winding Hadaeon-tower these soldiers of Haven had braved an entire aeon, while the shamans travelled only a step of oakenstone.
∞
Much to her seemed removed from the linear and the known. Separate aeons without gravity to one another. What was missing, and so had made all else so strange?
∞
A moment aghast Serib stared at the sudden structure most of all; behemoth-tower I have said - its stone crust engraved with the events of a story in separate scenes and tiles-relief. She had seen similar commemorative columns though none so extreme, as far below - far beyond all vision crafts with light she peered over the walkway’s edge - she saw the tower’s unfinished base still being constructed while its peak was almost complete. All the rest - defaced with blood and worser filth.
∞
“Where did it come from?” Serib asked as her stomach churned and rolled, as not only had the largest spire in all of Haven appeared from nowhere, but Dusk was also deep across the city and the skies were nodding with the fires of the stars. “How can the peak be finished before the base…”
Finally had Night come to end an endless Day, and the angels’ candles tried to rival stars as none of their bulbs would shine.
∞
“We’re just behind you.” Gadail assured the angels, who turned their barbed eyes away and led on. “Come along, and let us speak.” He took Serib by the shoulder, her lightning robes dimmer in the starlight.
In the dark, the slap of her bare feet helped Serib not feel so far from the ground and all of sense - so too the creak of old wood - climbing the cliffs or mountains human-made of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon, and at last the outside-steps spiralled inside the angelic tower.
With the angel’s permission and a gentle word Gadail set a torch on the wall to spark. Serib was relieved with walls here-there around her, a ceiling and floor.
∞
Therein her breathing was a loud echo lapping against the sides of the small room. She was waiting for Gadail to speak, and glad to be free of the steel maze of towers and climbs not meant for those without wings. She did not notice the infinity rune - the same shape as she had seen on the disc which had brought the shamans to Haven from Lake Arruikikn. It was etched in the shadows above the doorway. It was reacting to Serib’s presence - pulsing with Bronze light - though webs had been spindled thick across it as to hide-discreet the hidden rune’s glow. Hidden by a force we are yet to meet.
∞
Gadail said to her, kneeling to rest his weaker knee after their climb or better speak at her height:
“I must first apologise to you.”
“Why, master?”
“For any clumsiness in this next lesson of mine, as you and I find ourselves against a truly unique problem. I wish my own master was here. Strange as a dream all this - not since the beginning on Hemloch’s craggy shores has there actually been something new under the sun - yet here we are with all our wonder under strain. The strength of our usual mantras meek.” He paused. “Hush and heed. What is missing, I asked you before and again as I say this: do not think of where The Gravestone Column could have come from, that lumbering of grotesques we have just seen.” He brushed webs from his clay armour and picked them out of his hair. “Ask not how its peak is finished before its base has taken root. Ask when. See the angels change, did you? And where did daylight go quick as a virtue-vanished temper and candle out, replaced by Dusk’s stolen blanket? What replaced it… and how. And why would it.”
∞
The angels were less fierce than they had been - there they stood deliberating in quiet murmur with one another, their shields larger and spears with clearer points. Stepping through the doorway had reverted or altered them - unaware of their weirdness - and left our shamans the same as they had been.
∞
Serib had her answer for Gadail though she waited with it unsure, for now unable to fully comprehend as she noticed: any sense of linearity had left long ago, and she could not count if few or many had been the moons, sunrises or sunsets since they had left their hut and home on Ehl’yiteth journeying to Hadaeon. Unable to count such basic landmarks for reasons to Reason unknown, Serib instead turned to fathom the odd by other means:
-Flying to Haven-o’er-Hadaeon disc-bound from the lake, when the sun would not set.
-The Were-hunter, a Stalker present from another aeon long past when sand was all. As though death had come to his aeon, and not to him.
-The angels armoured on one walkway and cruelly barbed the next. Devolved.
-When at last the sun did set, it brought with its darkness The Gravestone Column, tallest of all Haven’s pride and shame. Quick as a page can turn.
Her answer was not only unchanged but affirmed by all she had seen and remembered. Her next thought was not her own, from a voice or voices similar to hers darker and more desperate, young for all its age:
‘Is Time missing?’
That voice made a sound much like speech as it could manage through its hisses and moans, having long waited in those shadows her own. All this Serib thought to make the voice something other than her own though her own it was, else she would have felt no such revulsion.
∞
Holding her answer that was itself a question, she hid her confused smile as she imagined what could be if she was right, if Time was missing. Smiling at the thought of impossibilities made possible, in a mouldy little room high in the city she waited with Gadail as the angels, their deliberations apparently spent, went on through large iron doors into a hall obscure and the doors shut of their own design. And all beyond that echoing was quiet, as Serib could only hear her breathing.
“Master…” she whispered. “Where is Time?”
“That same old and afraid look in your young eyes…” Gadail though smiling, gently shook his head, his shadow huge behind him a spectre up the wall. “Your mind is right yet your heart is wrong - though a shaman’s task it is - to align Love and Reason where we can.”
“Are you disappointed in me? Am I wrong?”
“What teacher would I be, expecting you to understand already?” his tender voice was a breeze against the room’s close mould and over her nerves. “A totem in your hands will help ground you to that earth. Chin up because you are right, Time is missing! And what are we to do about that? Though such a fact and state of things should not bring you lasting joy. A passing comfort for souls like us, inclined to Wish and Fancy, until second thoughts more dread.”
∞
Serib was absorbed by her comfort not yet passed, floating off and aloud:
“Can you imagine it, master… if Time is gone… how much of Suffering depends on Time’s structures…” She saw the seasons leaving each other behind, in Life and Death’s eternal dance: “All can change as it never has before.”
Her master leaned in, shifting the weight from his knee: “How easily you slip down that tongued slope all-teeth away from duty and responsibility, for are words not the most internecine things of all? Away from love towards a strange love. If Time is gone, you will not need to take my place, as instead I wearily wade on forever having never begun. A breathless wind undead.”
∞
“No.” As Serib replied Gadail saw lightning in her eyes as one beholds such wrath behind their window in a storm and he hid his horror. “Just as you have nurtured me to be: my Far Sight further sees than my own wishes, though I see now why it has failed me since the lake… or even before...”
“Further than your own wishes? If you say so.” He chuckled. “But yes - without Time’s presence, what thread can our Far Sight follow?” he enunciated the word ‘thread’ strangely: “History itself is harmed and so, how can our understanding of it not also be, as effects cannot be traced to their causes?”
Serib smiled as she explained, admitting to him: “It is not fear of being lord in your stead I carry with me; I fear losing you. My friend and guide, I never wish to see that ending where begins my every thought since I was old enough to understand that Forever cannot last. When vultures breathe and you do not.”
And there was more she left unsaid, of his scent the winds carry, of how his steps shape the grassy earth, his counsel varied and wide a sea-bound estuary and for all that and more was existence greater than it was before him, and would lesser be without those souls among us whose lineage is the mountains.
Whose breath from the first can be soft or storm.
Whose blood is wave calm and river clean.
Whose fire gives light to our torches.
∞
Gadail was for a moment quiet, his eyes up and down the brickwork’s linking:
“How did sand and shore become if not from mountains ground small? Think of roots and origins and of thereafter sprawl. There are and will be worse things than death.” The master shaman replied strong, though his old heart was soft to have heard Serib’s fears once his very own. “Let this be a test between extremes - far from the ground, up here Fancy lives easier in the fantastic realms of loft and cloud closer to our dreams. I have imagined what you imagine, longer than you know. I have exhausted those plains and paths and gone through the mazes that only Truth can trudge a way into and out of - following as all shamans must: with the grace of Alyoshian strength. I have considered - is Time not the friendly enemy of all things? And how Entropy with Time is Ever? Both The Divine Twins unreachable for all our strive. Well indeed - but that is not the end of a shaman’s reckoning - for ours are the hands of Nature and Human Nature both. The reach of our hands extends not to grasp at power absolute as wizards in Falsehood; who once brought themselves to their knees. Instead our reach extends to influence. To inspire. Now - there are some truths that can be taught and others must be by one’s own lonesome learned, or so I am sure you have heard before. Let us see if you come to my same conclusions, or find something I never could. If you can ground yourself here in Human Nature’s halls furthest from steady ground, when we return to Nature’s cliffs and meadows where vultures prey, more than you ever need will be yours, and you will spend your life giving what you have taken; what you have been gifted. And you will be the gift you are.”
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
∞
Without knowing why, Serib’s throat was full of words that would break her voice if she spoke and her eyes with tears were shy. The mouldy little room had moved away as Gadail spoke, and now that mustiness was all Serib could smell in its confines. Faster than she would have chosen, the iron doors screeched deeper into the long hall beyond their rust, and the angels - now wounded and splattered in blood their own and not - none seeming proud, bid the shamans to follow. Serib wiped away her quick tears.
∞
She had to step over dead werewolves, some-their claws as daggers long, most of them broken upon the angels’ Hadaeon steel. A number of the fallen tribe - Shattyrspear their thorny flag - were robed in vermillion fabrics or with leaves sprouting from their fur braids, while others lay in wooden armour hacked apart. Moss-clumps across the bark of their armour had shrunk - blooms had wilted. There too were many angels slain, their wings slashed or altogether torn off, discarded about the indiscernible floor. One wing alone still flexed among many lifeless, trying to remain in skies it once had known.
∞
It is said of precious Hadaeon steel and silver that there are no tougher or lighter metals, and both to most blows are impervious, though Werewolves themselves were of Hadaeon-earth, and so a match in each other met.
Some thinkers even believe they are the ancestors of these angels, and too possessed their own mythic strengths.
A unity until a schism saw some werewolves sprouting wings, shedding fur.
∞
“You did not need us, I see.” Gadail grumbled.
“We did not think you would approve, Master Gada’il.” A more gruesome angel replied, retrieving their spear from a skull or some mass of bone; Serib was unsure as she looked on with sorrow.
“That we would not…” Gadail brushed his clay-gauntleted fingers through and over the fur of one fallen Were, and of theirs he knew a poem well enough to speak it an echo through the dead-claw hall:
‘…when I my last -
lay me riverside
under vulture skies,
in Moon-woodlands-old of Gap’elyhond.’
Gadail, Lord of Gale and Breeze sighed. Such weight his breath that the hall leaned slightly, against winds outside that he deemed should be calmer, and all in the tarnished tomb thought a tremor had come to the floating city.
“Throw them from your high walls, would you?” he asked the angels. “Let them rest not so far from woodland-home… burn them not as Rabids-spent for your furnaces… let the vultures return them, as these-your heights few of Nature’s wings can reach.”
And to that the angels saw. With a grimace all imagined the corpses falling without grace to the earth-returned, though Gadail had deemed it the best of worser things, knowing the angels would agree to nothing more.
∞
Serib thought some of the fallen looked asleep, and others more clearly lay butchered. While on the other side of the iron doors she had heard no battle, no tearing and rending as there had taken place and she walked over or through, some veins were still spurting almost fresh, hearts completing their last routine.
More infinity runes she had not seen were responsible for the strangeness - hidden by the spill of bodies and Gore’s debris, their function far more than she yet knew. Markers once of passing shamans, reminders to return, that have in Timelessness changed.
And in the strength of powerlessness accepted, she allowed her building tears to fall.
∞
The angels spread out their formation through the hall to do as The Master Shaman had asked, their spears and shields an array leaning wherever space allowed. Gadail was uninterested in the other rooms - their ruins bloody and decrepit; he knew what secrets or none they kept - reaching as branches from the main hall all strewn in gore the same.
∞
Dusk’s falling light and subtle stars were visible through the broken ceiling, and Serib saw no sign of what had caused such damage. Rainbow-coloured glass crunched under all boots and she - preferring bare feet as some shamans do - passed unharmed, the soles of her feet hard for one so young. A wanderer of journeys she does not yet recall, Timelessness as it is, and her master knowingly mumbled another poem to himself from a different age:
‘hard-sole -
soft soul.’
She walked past Gadail to follow the angels slowly through the grim mess, as her master took a closer look at splatter-wrecked paintings and statues. Remaining starlight gave the sharp windows a passing glow; images once arranged in ornate pane had lost all lustre. Serib felt the rusty stench of Haven laying heavy on her skin, under her neck somehow. An air unclean.
∞
At the end of the hall a greatly armoured angel knelt before a crumbled altar, or so Serib thought. The angel’s wings were those of a bee perhaps, without mothy fluff or avian feather and full of dusty pollens. The choirs there were loudest as though yelping from just outside the windows, and as The Wing Marshal stood and turned away from the ‘altar’ behind her, it was to Serib’s knowledge instead a grandclock, decapitated and gutted, its bronze innards scattered about that one in haste and panic had searched those gears, hands and their numbers she no longer recognised, and ink-black blood had pooled long dry around the tall clock’s final state. She could not fathom why ink or blood would pour from a broken clock, or even what a clock was, though knowing she once had known.
∞
The Wing Marshal held only half a spear. No wood tipped with steel but steel completely, clean of blood - that perhaps her foe had evaded her, Serib imagined - its shaft was splintered and its other half nowhere yet to be seen.
∞
Much of The Wing Marshal’s silver armour was bent from blows, still blessed by bronze inlay, and eyes visible through her jagged helm pierced at Serib sharper than all shatter and splinter near. The bleak, brilliant angel looked at the young shaman for answers. Stiff and afraid Serib easier breathed as Gadail’s footsteps thudded closer to her side, as Ithuriya, Wing Marshal of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon, spoke:
“From horn and bell I summoned all lords of Ehl’yiteth and only you have come, Windlord Gada’il with a fledgeling, whose fear of Truth is of no use to us.”
Ashamed as Serib felt, her fear was true, and Ithuriya continued her report:
“Scouts tell a myth of our brood attacked The Firelord - wounded they fled from that duel and no patrol has found blood nor corpse across the sand-snow of D’neath. The lords of Earth and Water, whereas, we have of them no sight nor rumour at all.”
“A myth no longer. Dear Anaxagyr…” Gadail paused, knowing The Firelord well.
“You already know of what I speak?” Ithuriya raised her gaze through her broken helm to The Windlord, and Gadail nodded.
∞
“Lay’d Ithuriya! I too have lost the trace of my fellows…” The Master Shaman paced, observing the dry pool of ink or black blood around the sundered grandclock. He crouched and sniffed, and pulled a twig from his hair to prod the stodgy scabs about.
He stood and returned to Serib’s side, leaving the twig soaking where it lay:
“Ehl’yiteth is no sensible globe as Hadaeon, Wing Marshal. It is not in one place, its acres are a storm all its lords can traverse to or from on such tides. Its mountains separate, all are one adjoined.” He smiled at Serib, and she borrowed a breath of his spoken strength. “The reason I suspect my lord-fellows are not here, is due your prisoner… due the murder she is accused of committing somehow from her cell. How many Were’s and angels here lay dead, who can say? The same reason we can no longer count all these numbers on your grandclock; or discern why the hands would point at them. I could once have told you how long this blood has been dripping just by eye or prod. What can I say now? ‘A while’ or ‘less than that’ or ‘longer than it takes a wolf to become a dog’.”
What else could Gadail’s words mean if not confirming Serib’s previous suspicion and measure was accurate? Time was missing! Though murder was another range insurmountable to her. How could Time possibly be murdered? By who or what force would have such reach? What flesh would Time have or blood at all, or was that butchered grandclock bleeding across the hall Time somehow, an emblem of?
∞
Ithuriya, breathing heavily as though reliving whatever duel had rent her armour and made a splint of her spear, asked Gadail:
“Then you believe? Time has in being attacked been made flesh..."
"And that effect is untied from its cause."
"...and these their grandclocks in Timeless aftermath…”
∞
Serib thought of belief, of Truth and all its grounds of base and rules. Smelling rust from human metal she missed the earth, the mountains and their misty-Spring woodlands ancient with fresher air and quiet. A quiet far - from all that confusion - those walls containing that upheave. The quiet of wind through leaves and grass under fingers idle. The sweat of a journey. She was unprepared for what Gadail would say next, his hands weighing the winds he knew:
“I am not sure which of these to believe, as any could be certain in an aeon strange as ours: either Time is dead - wounded - or missing. I would be interested to know what The Were-hunter in your employ has found, across your frontiers and foundations. If Time indeed is no longer present it would explain much, and complicate what is already well known, what has always been well known! We may need to relearn what once was assumed and granted without our effort. The work of our ancestors comes unhinged. A miracle that we are still here at all, in Timeless aftermath as you say, when surely Here and There are words with lesser meanings than they once possessed.”
After Gadail spoke, all eyes averted to their own dark, cornered thoughts. Comprehending the magnitude of his shamanic reckoning. And though no stretch of moments would ever be long enough to those that knew Time and its lost directions, its now vying dimensions, Gadail waited for their eyes to return to him, patient for their courage or curiosity or despair, and he asked:
“May we meet with your prisoner?"
∞
The other angels in attendance began to flap a discord throughout the ruined hall. Gadail smiled at Serib's alarm. Ithuriya raised her splintered spear and all under its height was calmed:
“All Lillian says is secrets, woven into lasting lies. She would bereave us all of our freedom… too many of the angels guarding her have fallen.”
Serib looked at the dead angels around her, transfixed on that word ‘fallen’, and The Wing Marshal elaborated:
“Fallen to her allegiance, fledgeling. What Truth do they see in her Falsehood… what dreams has Courtdom not granted them? In Heir Scholar Gargarensyr’s words - is Truth not enough for them?”
Serib was sure she had heard that name before. Gadail replied:
“Is Gargy about? How long has it been…” The master shaman jested for himself, unable to answer such questions. “Are you so sure what Truth now is, as the impossible ripples all around us? And, bereave you of which freedom, To or From? Double-edged are all our once-clarities.” He smiled though determined in his sadness. “If the same… fate… catches every soul tasked with keeping watch, then how do you now guard her?”
“It is well we are not angels, then.” Serib added through her tusks, somewhat late.
Both Gadail and Ithuriya paused to look at her.
“Your fledgling has a brave beak. More than I thought.” Ithuriya’s eyes were lighter, almost lifted from the sorrow that sat across her shoulders, her pauldrons once a proud silver and bronze of Haven alloyed, burdened by the same conflicted sorrow heard in all the choirs fighting or singing, and Serib wondered what could have brought the flying warrior low.
The damage a duel can do, her weapon halved from it and lustre asunder, as the windows-once-a-rainbow all around.
The damage made lighter, that perhaps the young shaman could help despite her fear, that all of Youth’s rebound and vigour was not lost.
∞
The Wing Marshal of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon returned to the posture of her past and bearing: “I have summoned you hopeful, shamans… yet despair has grown in me while I waited, and I know not dark from light. I have not graced you as visitors, symbol as I should be.”
Her eyes cast down to her halved spear-shaft, that beacon passed it is said from one Ithuriya to the next, and so too the name would pass from one to another, becoming more symbol embodied than individual soul. “What is your guidance, Gada’il? When all we once thought is not…”
∞
Serib silently agreed that they had not been greeted as guests. She glanced over to see if the other angels would find weakness in Ithuriya’s beseeching, prideful-lot as angels were, though in most of their faces she saw only ardour and respect, having heard their Wing Marshal admit that the way and Truth was no longer known as it had been. When perhaps, in other angelic eyes, the young shaman did see Hubris sniggering, Gadail shrugged under his clay pauldrons from one uncertainty to another - as Humble considering all it can - often does:
“I will not join you in that despair. Look at us each: not all we once thought is lost. Well, I have never advised on an event so indescribable, and fundamentally upheaving…” he smiled at Serib and walked closer to Ithuriya, his sabatons squelching into the paste of scabby blood. “Time, murdered. No shaman could imagine it, less imagine it condoned by Lillian from her cell. If she is your villain, I sense she was misguided in her aim.”
For a moment the angels halted their redemptive work in carrying the dead from the hall, hearing Lillian’s name.
Veteran of the last battle with Falsehood, Lady of Haven and once an Heir-contender it is said, ‘whose home has become her prison’, and Serib knew finally her name incarcerate; the prisoner those guards back at the lake’s steel pier had whispered of. The same that ‘traitorous’ werewolves had tried to free.
∞
Watching him step uncomfortably into the crackling pool of darker blood, Serib saw scratched into the grandclock’s oak a symbol she had recently learned: the infinity rune. She would never see others were scrawled about the room as preparations made in haste and in haste abandoned, as gore and moved paintings - moved by whom? - covered them all.
The grandclock’s rune glowed - with bronze lightning-small and quiet in the star-dark hall.
∞
“Wait here.” Gadail said softly to Serib across that fallen hall, the breeze his domain, carrying his voice. “And try not to touch this… without holding your fear by the hand, and taking it somewhere gentler. This will lead you - eventually - to an ancestor of Earth, and your first totem.” his hand hovered by the gutted grandclock, before he and cleaved-Ithuriya stepped away towards another set of iron doors that creaked open to their approach.
His words still on the wind, only for her to know:
“As it is for all apprentices, you have been trained and will now go alone being your own master, your own student.”
One other angel went with them as Gadail bid them to - one of those that had sniggered with Hubris. An angel unarmed - totemless, Serib thought. Just as she was.
∞
She did not wish to take her eyes from her master. Would he soon be gone forever, or some cruelty visit him quicker than she could defend against? In that uncertainty of Timelessness she had found herself within, her heart froze as before. She did not flinch nor blink and eventually Gadail with Ithuriya among other angels closed the great doors behind them. Rust scraped on itself against Serib’s every will. She wished immediately she had run after him, splashing through the thick blood, though so it is for some of us when our heart and mind are not aligned.
Could he not have said farewell? If he had, would she have let him go?
∞
With Gadail’s departure, Serib’s quest had begun - away from apprenticeship and into shamanism proper.
A totem-Earthen her own to find and thrice imbue with Fire, Spacious and Wind. Then her totem would be as the hammers of Old Gada’il. Weapons only in direst need, and in all other instances a symbol to Humanity, a tether to Nature, and she the bridge between.
∞
The Windlord had asked Serib to avoid the grandcock knowingly, quite sure that eventually her youth would overcome her, as his own had once overcome him. She traded pleasantries with the dutiful angels that remained to carry the dead werewolves away, guarding the door Ithuriya and Gadail had passed through.
∞
Walking among blood that would not dry or had been dry too long, Serib sketched with her fingers the various artworks, the statues in particular. She imagined the shapeless chunks they must once have been. On the spirit-journey from Ehl’yiteth to Hadaeon, she and Gadail had rested in a desert scarce of shade where an old potter-friend made their home. The two shamans stopped not long enough for Serib to learn such arts, only long enough for her to become intrigued, to wish they could have stayed longer.
∞
Waiting for Ithuriya to return, angels asked Serib what the future held, alas she could not answer as they wished, as Timelessness had broken a power once strong, as Far Sight on the patterns of History relies. She tried to explain that patterning - as it is known by some - the way of looking to the past to divine the future or how the present next should move to virtue, while reliable was not exact.
What interest had they in limit, nuance or context?
Further with Time missing, History had been among the first to fall. Hindsight was still a tool she possessed, though as she tried recounting to the angels, it seemed to herself and them she spoke of events which had not yet occurred. Events long old to her youth. In Timelessness would these ever come to pass? Thus among their number some thought her confusing, and therefore assumed her to be credible.
∞
Meanwhile the ceiling had its charms, Serib was sure, and she searched for those charms as she waited to know what she should do next.
When has she not followed and been as her master’s shadow?
∞
Waiting for herself, always in the corners of her eyes and thoughts the broken grandclock waited alike.
∞
Timidly she approached it at last, shuddering at the sucker-covered limbs hanging limply out of the coffin, feeling the blood thick between her toes. The limbs inside reeked as would an ocean’s carcass washed ashore. She looked over to one of the barbed angels expecting them to step in and stop her, though as her brownish-bronze eyes met the strained, bloodshot stare of the armoured angel, the Hadaean said to her dismissively:
“What more harm can be done?” they joined their winged kin who each were listening to the dirge outside in the streets below.
Some hummed sadly along; veterans enjoying Respite’s presence. Serib felt that she and Gadail were too late to dispel what human Despair was cloudy over the city above all Nature. Or too early, it could be said, that only when it seemed too late to turn back, could they finally do so. By tome’s end such thoughts of extremes shall make more sense, I hope.
∞
The clock’s cold blood once warm, rich with the minerals of the earth. Veins among veins. A chill tinging red the hem of her robes. She almost tripped on a step hidden under all the mess and innards. With firmer footing she stepped and the broken grandclock was taller than any sensible soul; still it loomed despite its sundering.
To spite its halving.
∞
There was foamy blood where the creature had tried to breathe. Lifeless from what motion she imagined it once possessed. Clinging onto its faded numbers that can no longer be read. The infinity rune, clearly to her reckoning added recently, was no longer bronze. It pulsed instead an unsettling meld of colours: here crimson and violet there. Its mechanisms of wood and flesh. Her master’s words still a weight:
‘…try not to touch this… without holding your fear by the hand, and taking it somewhere gentler.’
∞
A while her hand waited, unsure if she should reach out to touch the dire thing or walk away; what would happen if she did or not. Where else would she go?
“If Time is dead…” she whispered to the broken construct, to the fallen creature. “…then can Spring be eternal? And Youth forever… and Suffering banished never-born…”
If Time was missing, no force of Nature had made it so. Only Human fear would dare that far and high, a fear such as hers she knew its shape: a fear of all Future brings and love of all that is or was, a love sworn to Spring’s replenish and return.
She only reached out slightly and slowly yet with full intent to touch the butchered grandclock, and that was all The Prisoner Lillian required.