Lakebed strange. Some recounted when asked - or so wrote in their diaries unearthed from the ruins that could not be found - claimed they saw Serib’s lightning though inaccurate in apprenticeship helped break the guard and phalanx of the sentinels, allowing Iron-Chest to pry their ranks.
Others claimed her lightning struck his sword deliberate and made him all the more fierce to face, blurring his movements in her light. Such are the stories we have from dignitaries-there who fled rightly as the fighting began.
∞
Regardless his curved greatsword was sweeping and swift for all its heft; in mastery of Defence’s art, Iron-Chest killed not one angel while keeping himself and Serib protected, as her lightning again twice from the darkening skies, for all its clumsiness struck down one angel quickly and with ease the forking spread a chain from armour to arms stealing two more of life.
Foul the stench of their boils on the suddenly stormy wind, their screams abrupt.
∞
Serib rushed through the broken line of angels, jumping over the smoke of one lightning-struck and fallen as Iron-Chest was close behind in prowl, his blade and armour thwarting spears from above.
∞
Finally Serib reached the doorway sure that Iron-Chest was behind her - alas she turned and The Stalker was there with the angels, covered in Were-scalps - halberd in hand and scarab-grub crawling massive across the columns. It seemed to Serib that The Sentinel, her fellow apprentice, had all intention of staying there fighting to cover her escape.
Her eyes flashed with bronze - her hands she raised with fingers gnarling in their conjure - the skies over Haven turned black with venomous stormcloud and relentless lightning reigned down onto the courtyard. Using his halberd-tall Ahlzvyr poled to safety while the angels flew and ran to what cover they could find. Enanti or Dromiya its name, the crab-scarab indomitable behind its shell repelled Nature’s force.
From that sight Serib ran.
∞
Greatsword in hand, Iron-Chest sprinted over using not only his hindlegs but his free hand-paw as well for greatest speed his bounding, and together with Serib leapt into the dark.
∞
She knew the infinity runes of the door's handles and hinges would take them far, though Iron-Chest was prepared for a corridor leading down where he could easier fight one by one those-many that came following them, turning from sweeping strikes to thrusting attacks in the narrow.
Instead after slipping through dimensioned pages - as all pages are bound by a spine - the curved portals of runes-infinity spat them out and a quiet Night greeted them both with a cold breeze against which their panting was hoarse.
∞
They had found themselves in the woodlands of Hadaeon, where only moon and starlight shone cloudless and blue. The moon in full bloom with oceans and plains celadon in their glow. The wind was cruel and bitter; those nights in Spring that still keep a remnant of Winter. A large beech they stood next to - pulsing with a rune scored into its ancient bark. Iron-Chest was most confused as he turned breathing hard with sword in hand to defend them both, seeing only an old tree indifferent to his growl. Though spat from one realm of space to another he had landed dextrously and strong.
“I believe when we pass these runes, it changes when we are.” Serib shared with him as she staggered up to her feet, and he thought back to the woven place, to the rune of odd he and The Spring-Sworn had passed crossing from the courtyard to The Gravestone Column, over the bricks of a maze.
“And they cannot follow us through… here?” Iron-Chest did not yet sheathe his greatsword as he pawed at tree and rune, full of bronze light almost a lamp in the dark forest, casting long its shadows as low sunsets do.
Animals had come to witness the human light disturbing their rhythms, as moths and bats made swarm and shadows all the more.
“Let us not wait to find out - and if not, I doubt this will stop Ahlzvyr for long.” As Serib stepped away from the tree-a-portal, the bronze of its rune faded and the ancient dark was quick to welcome its shadows back. “He must think I am Syrib, The Spring-Sworn.”
“He would know your head is full of hair while hers is halved, and odd that he entered our melee, giving away his position. Why not strike us hidden from afar…” Sentinel Iron-Chest sheathed his sword to his baldric-scabbard and in that nightly-quiet words returned to him that he kept to himself, words of ‘Fate’ spoken from the corners of a place all-woven:
Yes, you will defend her, Sentinel, though not here. Not yet. Do you see your layered destinies in these spindled walls of my making?’
And there he had seen indeed his layered destinies, where his greatblade-curved was wreathed with lightning-bronze.
∞
The Sentinel dwelled not on what strings could be pulling him, as he felt his will untouched was still his own. Yet similarly or not so, the bronze grace he saw around Serib and Syrib was clear, and that was the Truth to which he set the Autumn of his life, wherever a glow may lead.
The strings we choose.
∞
“Where next?” he asked her, and she soon knelt to the cool earth untouched by sunshine, that no days had come to banish a night too long.
A root of the old beech was there exposed, covered in moss older than her, all blue sparkling moist in the moonlight. Her palm there a while remained to see if her guided hunch was right, remembering the scattered words of Gadail and The Stalker, of her tale so far:
“I know what we must find, though not where to go.”
“Is that not always how it is?” The Sentinel’s long, hairy ears were alert at something nearby Serib did not yet see.
Then above and gone, a bird darted through leaves in the dark. Serib asked:
“Being of these woodlands, do you know where we are?”
Iron-Chest sniffed the winds:
“These trees are well known to me, though grow closer together than I recall.”
“In strange gravities with Time’s disappearance.” Serib supposed. “There is a lake nearby? With a steel pier for visitors to Haven.”
Iron-Chest nodded. “Arruikikn. Stay close to me.”
∞
Following Iron-Chest’s nose, Serib could feel the sharp wound in the world nearby had reopened. Once the lakebed left behind when Haven rose into Hadaeon’s skies - overgrown with Nature’s kelp and rainfall - had become the resting place of Ithuryia’s star-spear halved. Marine snow and sediment in a storm of currents under the surface she could not yet see, all this from senses she did not know she possessed without Gadail present, from instincts he had helped to train.
What need had she for these senses with him close? Only with distance would she find her own voice.
∞
Walking through moonlight’s woodlands she was drained from summoning her lightning, and imagined Iron-Chest must be moreso, having turned from a life long served:
“How do you feel?”
A while The Sentinel thought before answering, his hind paws rustling the night leaves of his homeland-world:
“With stronger focus than I can for a while recall. Heavy on my heart I have betrayed my fellow sentinels, mere in the face of oaths made to Truth; will Timelessness tell that they first betrayed themselves? I have been up there too long… Fancy’s Loft, my mother called it.” joy he took, walking through the wilds once again.
∞
Just as Serib had struggled to imagine Gadail with an apprentice other than her in an aeon before, similarly disconnected was the notion of Iron-Chest as a pup, a mother-wolf fussing over him.
“Was your armour smaller?” she asked, and The Sentinel barked amused.
∞
Some while later through the woodland, Iron-Chest slowed his pace to a growl and cautioned Serib: “We are not alone in these trees.” His hand-paw reached for his greatsword and the scars of his fur-strobed arm shined in the moon-glow night.
Through dense growths Serib could not see ahead if the lake was near or far. The trees all leaned on one another for support and made tight the way as braids almost. She however sensed the same presence The Sentinel had found through scent: “Leave your sword sheathed… it is a shaman ahead.”
He believed though with caution said: “Yet I see no such grace leading me to them…”
∞
Bitter winds after snapping twigs, getting closer to the open shore. It was not long until the sounds of a lake trickled through old oak and beech - those sentries of Nature that had seen the angels depart and ever older grown. Owls hooted further and further away. Iron-Chest spoke of when he was a pup as they walked:
“This is the sort of moon-bright night when the tribes all would howl together in festival, pyres across the forests. Rejoicing in the sight of Lillian’s shield, huge and round as the moon. Her hammer-spear… the line and the loop.”
Serib listened fondly, having so far not heard anyone describe Lillian in such a way. Imprisoned, involved in Time’s disappearance, though what villain could she be with a shield? And hammers being a long-divine symbol of building and breaking both.
Had Lillian broken what needed to be broken? And would she be the one to remake it? Had the inevitable only been interrupted?
These the hopes Serib kept close. Hope for one and so for all, that even Time’s apparent murderer could be redeemed, keeping in her heart what The Hunter Lord had said of failures:
‘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.’
∞
When Serib following Iron-Chest at last stepped onto the shoreline shadows, the vast water dark with mystery reflected Hadaeon’s moons and stars to themselves, as a mirror blurred and egress unknowable chopped by winds colder than those inland. The pebbled-shore almost frosty under her toes, shifting and crunching as she walked and to mind was called an old poem Gadail read to her and other students in a passing speech, of what Time gives and takes away, of how those hands both cruel and kind are worthy of praise.
∞
She had not realised how constricted she felt among the leaning trees and at the shoreside easier breathed, as though Gadail The Windlord himself had sent a breeze to find her. She smiled not long enough hearing Iron-Chest growl again: for a young werewolf was watching them. A shaman waiting upon a lakeside boulder.
∞
Mossy bark her armour and robes of leaves shining against lake-and-moonlight. A great nose ring swung from her snout and Serib knew the jewellery was a totem. For that ring glowed-etched with runes of Earth and Fire - clear to Serib’s eyes that this shaman had already received Imbues from two elemental ancestors, this apprentice-shaman on a journey long and her own. Though even in the dark her disdain of Serib was clear:
“I heard on the winds that Old Gada’il had come to Hadaeon at last, to give his counsel on this Timeless matter. See how strained the trees still grow? Disturbed by Haven’s heresy, twisted into sewn shapes by knowledge over wisdom. A tough road between the worlds, but we must make do. It is good to finally see The Windlord’s wayward apprentice here, long as I have waited in heed. Know my name as I already know all those you go by… I am Patinya, apprentice of The Earthlord.”
∞
Serib tried to ease her breathing, to find kinship:
“How can any of us know how short or long it is, in this Timelessness?”
And somewhat the young werewolf smiled, her tone no less severe:
“That is true. Iron-Chest…” she addressed The Sentinel with a raised voice, whose stance was ready. “I know your nature is first to defend - let me help remove her illusions from your sight. I will warn you well before I attack, for all the harm I mean is to your companion only, and the words I have yet to say will sway you from her side. Perhaps you will never again be welcome in Haven having twice closed your eyes to better judgement, but the woodlands of Ever know your name, you who long have served their frontiers. Do you not hear ever since you left - the howl of our Duke calling you home? Did he not spare you when you returned from your first ill journey with The Spring-Sworn?”
Iron-Chest sighed into quiet contemplation:
‘That our Duke calls himself Justice - home must now be strange.’ though little moment he had to his own thoughts before Patinya’s long-furred chin lifted in concern:
“Wait…”
The were-shaman stood from her boulder, her paws crunching the shoreside pebbles as she walked to Iron-Chest. Her robe of leaves all-blooming with flowers the moonlight could not clearly shape. She ran her claws through his fur and realised. He spoke for her, through her disbelief:
“I must seem too grey for it? Regardless, since Timelessness crashed around us a wave I know the ancestral call of your shamanism. Rocks will not move to my stare nor oceans sleep at my word as I’m sure to yours they do, but I see it heard - the grace-howl of our ancestors. An echo more: the present calls to me for a future best. My path lays entwined with young Serib, and it is her sunrise I follow.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“What hex have you pierced him with?” The moonlight found her fangs.
∞
“Hex?” Serib replied, having never heard such a word, though you may remember Fate speak of such a thing to Syrib.
That same moonlight made clear the torture in Patinya’s eyes, and Serib in kindness held out her hand to the were-shaman:
“What have you seen? How do you know who I am and that we would come by here? I will never mean you harm.”
Patinya’s jaws snapped: “Has sorrow even yet occurred to you, Spring-Sworn? For those angels you have slain? Of course not - those few sentinels against those many you yet will boil, and the ripples will be felt through all our aeons until Since and Yet become utterly meaningless.”
Serib could smell their skin again, those angels in the courtyard by her lightning charred:
“Why do you call me Spring-Sworn? Is your Far Sight unaffected, or strengthened by Timelessness? Iron-Chest since heeds the ancestors, and I since cannot See as once I did - into futures and what could be. To some giving and others taking away. How do you ‘know’ all of this and speak so certainly?”
∞
Patinya glanced between Iron-Chest and Serib before she replied, as her opportunity dawned:
“All know who can hear the winds: you are among those responsible for Time’s disappearance. Separated by my master on my totem’s-journey through Timelessness
I have heard shrieked poems, Spring-Sworn. And your master’s words as much upon his winds have said - pleading we of our kin search for you in our woodlands, lost by our streams. Masters have gone looking on the surfaces of frozen stars finding nothing. The winds of Old Gada’il, greatest of shamans reduced to a plea - that we be merciful to you he asks. You ran away, his gales claim, corrupted by a Dark Spirit. That is not what I have seen, caught in runed-loops, runes hidden as traps to trip us all that are not loyal to Lillian’s ways. How more lost could I have been not only without my master, but without Time’s support as well? The most common and unquestionable of all forces… the loops I tie myself into, falling back into assumptions forgetting Time is lost. And in remembering I despair; can this nonsense be reasoned with?”
Serib felt that some of Patinya’s words could be her own, as on she listened with quiet Iron-Chest under the Hadaeon moonlight celadon and serene:
“Well through it all I made passage despite all twist and turn to a nearby vale. A brief camp by the starlight of a colder eve I made and in the skies Haven drifted - I at last was not far off. Perhaps there I would find my master, or even Old Gada’il through words on the wind.”
You interrupted your totem’s-journey?” Serib asked, and the Earthlord’s apprentice confirmed:
“Then that great clash between Ithyriya and Lillian made bright the dark sky… Werewolves howled proud with betrayal loyal to her and even some angels wept with happiness.”
Serib stepped forward: “And from that duel the totem fell here into the lake… Ithuriya’s halved spear?” she named it though it was no totem yet, while Iron-Chest watched the woodlands.
“I followed the fallen starspear’s path here and yet, it has not arrived.” Patinya had long forsaken wondering or asking How, as Timelessness soaked all things she found. “I knew it would draw one such as you, mad for incomprehensible, reprehensible power. Is it an echo here we are hearing, of what has been or shall? Others have come and found their folly with my aid… others even waited with me swearing they would help me stop you, alas by Chance or Madness all were driven away and only I remain. I have halted my totem’s-journey partway, for only one of us may take the starspear-halved, Spring-Sworn. You were not corrupted as the gales of your master claim; you are the corruption. You are the darkest of all spirits. You have been taught Justice, Courage, Moderation and Wisdom, and these you twist for you alone. Tyrant.”
∞
Patinya’s own totem though only half in its strength, hung pierced from her nose. Serib did not know why her fellow apprentice would desire the half-spear. She had listened respectfully until now. She raised her chin and glare to meet Patinya’s growling scowl:
“Shamans never compete for their totems, this is not right…”
“Much is no longer right! And we vie for more than that. Your desires dark and unnatural, dreams foul - if the metal fallen or falling here is destined to be your totem, then I must keep it from you. For all of hope against your despair this matter is beyond our rites. We hold an age in each hand! We who are between Need’s passing and Greed’s rise. You have measured our duty and reeled from its weight afraid. You choose to forget all that came before us and risk all the happiness that could be. The future our masters have given their lives to! The future where there are no more shamans, for all are taught as we are. What mangled Unity have you to offer, over all that Chance's truth has ever made?”
Patinya’s eyes glowed as torches, one bright with starry flame the other in lightning’s flash, and inwards moved her summoned clouds shutting out most stars as claws and fangs she bared, plunging dark the lake that moments ago was bright in choppy blurs of wet light. There were bones then among those lakeside shores, of those who had waited with Patinya or refused to.
∞
In scarcer moonlight Iron-Chest’s sword shone, almost unsheathed when Serib yelled:
“No.” she held out her hand and The Sentinel ceased though still the clouds stiffened with thunder their brew, her lightning-robes an ensign in the now stronger winds.
“Lost as I may be, I will not kill a fellow shaman. A fellow apprentice the more.” Serib knelt and placed her palm to the earth, to the shoreside pebbles glistening. “I shall defend myself. I am not The Spring-Sworn.”
∞
Knowing she must be faster than the lightning soon to strike her away, Serib launched backhand a lone pebble directly into the sky above her. Further than sight could tell. Iron-Chest fled into the trees for no steel of his could settle the coming fight, as four great boulders from the shore too followed that pebble tossed, floating or held by force invisible, together forming a quick shield against the sinister clouds. Patinya’s furious lightning struck directly down tearing larger-made by the lake reflected, crashing into the stones Serib made fly and held strong. More and more strikes and bolts under which Iron-Chest shrank tiny as a pup watching the two storms from afar; then Patinya summoned to her own hand such a bolt, and from that deadlier angle sent her mightiest lightning.
∞
A horizon between the two apprentices.
∞
Serib’s strength fell and so too her boulders fell around her in last defence. The largest mass of stone - made weak already from Patinya’s rage - shattered into smaller shards against the final blast of lightning. The smack unreal with its reality. Serib hid behind her arms.
∞
The exhausted chaos had settled quietly. Stones had fallen onto Serib though none her strong arms could not throw off, and Iron-Chest helped her up from the rubble shoreside. Glowing rocks lay here-there almost molten with heat, near and far. Some spewing up bubbling hisses from the lake they had returned to in tumble. The sharpest shards had flown away from Serib and the woodland as was her last command to keep Iron-Chest from harm, felling some of the nearest trees despite and alas, there Patinya lay.
∞
Her summoned clouds began returning to their storms as the strength that had bid them come was fading. Serib ran to the were-shaman and saw her blood across stone and fallen oak was dark in the returning starlight, the moon horribly visible in such spurted streams pooling. Streams from her veins for shards of stone had torn through her armoured-bark, her leafy robes and fur. Sorrow had not followed Serib killing the angels though it sat with her now as she tried tending to Patinya, wishing she knew her master’s healing ways.
∞
Patinya however bit at Serib’s hands as she tried to help and her claws swiped the young girl away, making all the worse her heart pumping angrily. The Sentinel’s battlefield custom would have seen his mercy delivered to Patinya of his kin, alas she growled bloody at him raising his greatsword-curved. Serib could not find the words though Iron-Chest proposed:
“You have given her a good death; her own heart and vultures will do the rest. Now that your duel has passed the calm water will be her company under stars. Better than many deaths I have seen.” Hearing this, Serib wondered how it could be true. “With choice her own if she will not have your mercy nor mine and wishes no company - then let us follow the shore. No need for you to see this.”
∞
A while Serib’s heart remained there with Patinya, having had no intention of hurting her. Chance or madness had driven the were-shaman’s companions from the lake leaving her there to believe and fight alone, while her own elemental rage had burst Serib’s earthen-shield. A paw on a shoulder tender, and Iron-Chest’s voice was permission:
“Respect her choice of ending, and so all those of her life.”
A while Serib’s heart remained I have said - until it could no more - until ahead the journey demanded her attention parted as it was, and there Patinya lay at night in moonlight dying. Every step Serib took over the pebbled shore was more a toil than the last, and without Iron-Chest she may never have walked away.
∞
And who can know how many mornings-past Patinya rusted further away, for eventually despite Timelessness she did see the sun rising over the lakebed strange. Its wavelengths stark then clear. The green-blue moon a ghost and away. The sun was as all stars pulled along by others that by day we cannot see, she did behold as her remaining strength too was taken into those heavens by piece and part, her nose dry with awful thirst.
∞
Apprentice of The Earthlord - despite all she had been taught what lessons could prepare any of us for Timelessness? And so from wisdom to hate forspent. All the grief and goodness of her life bare for her if she wished to see it, how in her fight against total power had her own power struck without restraint.
Shaded owls slept through the daylight, and vultures of Andea owned the skies of their encircle, as Ahlzvyr with halberd-tall too late arrived to find a different Hadaeon of sorts; where the untethered isle of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon dominated peaceful clouds. The sand in his beard almost fiery as it met sunlight.
∞
Standing over Patinya he poured his eye into his spyglass to see on the far side of the lake, peering into the scene of our first chapter if you recall: a steel pier jutting out into the soft water - a pier from which Serib fearfully watched the angelic city floating. Even from such distance he could reckon her breathing - sweaty from the journey her scent upon the wind was musk - it helped him remember his prey from which he had been strayed by the designs of Lady Fate.
With constants the same and variables rearranged all this from our first chapter has already been said, here repeated, as to that mote and moment we have returned. The Stalker readied his halberd-tall, adjusting his grip while staring into his spyglass. His weapon stiff against the lapping shore was a declaration without the flag of Aner Ba’hyt it once flew in procession and ceremony, that same flag a cloth for cleaning off blood on a hunt.
∞
“I will not accept your mercy.” There was blood in Patinya’s cough, her words slow enough that The Stalker interrupted:
“Then you rather I take your scalp alive?” he did not take his eye from the scope. “You will not have my mercy though Mercy itself has seen fit to spare you from the path you had chosen.”
“Why take any scalp at all? Learned as I tried to be I am unsure what place that tradition of your age has in our age. Were-pelt and angel alike you wear…”
Sevenfold the Spring-Sworn gore she as well beheld sewn there into his mail.
∞
At last he lowered his fang-arched gaze and folded the scope into its segmented clicks, tucking it gone amongst the scalps as he said in his sequences of seldom pause, and did he give three answers or all-one Timelessly?
“In custom then as proof of kill and now to become as fear-walking to those that would swear loyalty to Lillian and her Spring-Sworn.”
“Will they think clearly when afraid?” the dying apprentice mocked.
“Are they thinking clearly now?” The Hunter Lord spat out the Time-blood taste in his mouth.
“A ghost returned. A reminder.” It seemed Patinya’s blood no more could soak the stones beneath the stones already soaked and pooled outwards from where she lay, reddening the shallow waters foaming ever closer.
“And they fear not me, not my halberd nor the still-hatching maw of Dromiya, their own conscience I intensify as conscience gnawing knows no boundary. My presence asks a question and the rest is their own. It is good you will not live to see Conscience itself rise from its nightmare-grave as I have, his gravestone becoming his claymore. Rest, illiterate, knowing seeds are being planted and beacons lit. Truthdom lives in us all. Even the worst of us can yet come home.”
Listening to The Stalker, Patinya felt dark inspiration, that her blood would find her veins again and she would rise from her mortal state. Alas. As she leaned forwards to perhaps stand her paws underneath her she began shaking and fell into a far dizzier depth. Colder and colder. Bleeding warmth in the high daylight, she relented at last:
“I say again. I will not accept your mercy, unless... will you hear me first… do you know what the Spring-Sworn is seeking? The fallen half-spear of Ithuriya…”
∞
The Hunter Lord listened well to these deathbed omens as he knelt by dying Patinya, while his companion known as Enanti in one version and Dromiya the next could not anywhere be heard nor seen:
“You are loyal to Truth, Stalker undead… brought here by twisted means I am sure. Hear me: this lake was not always deep… before, it was taller than you know. A mountain alone, taller than your sand-snow deserts were vast. Focus here your perches and wait in Timelessness as I have. Patience will show to you no rhythm nor reason aside from change. Endless change.”
“And what act would you have me commit? If I should wait here for change so endless as pages read and surpassed what then when Greatmount Nain’mahuin again is Horizon’s envy?”
“Nain’mahuin? No.” Patinya closed her eyes a moment, dreamt that she was still alive: “…that is a mountain peak of Ehl’yiteth, not Hadaeon.”
“The pages I know refer to it in a tower-lost language, plainer its name means ‘Here-There mountain’. It is a place with a will its own. The first mountain any shaman ever climbed and returned totemic and so its ancestry belongs to not one land but all lands. Before Timelessness crashed down upon us all there yet were timeless things. To be without time was and still is to be without space, outside of all we know.”
∞
Patinya growled in pain believing every word The Hunter Lord spoke, as the sand of his beard glistened on in sunlight
“Do not feel disheart at my knowledge beyond yours, for I have served many a shaman and hunted more than was fair. The true shame is that we both serve Truth alas in our own way, young shaman. Courtdom that once steadied us has gone Time’s way entropic and so I see that none of us can any longer agree what The Truth is. I likely will wait here, these woodlands my perch as you suggested, though it is not my aim to prevent The Spring-Sworn from attaining her totem. Your pain must be enough by now? What will you do with all these words of mine in death? Do you still abstain from mercy?”
After shifting aside his long beard allowing his chunky arm to emerge from the scrape he showed Patinya his formidable wrist, where a shaven crossbow bolt barbed for greatest blood-loss was primed in a metallic contraption of dire bands and strings. He took aim at her neck - from such distance the powerful bolt would sever her completely.
“I am not finished yet, Stalker. I hear Old Gada’il on the winds as you surely cannot. I have waited enough and seen Spring into Summer’s End - Autumn found its chilly place again. Frost hardened across my bark and leaves. Time lives on and this duel awry will not stop me.”
In her dizziness Patinya knew Ahlzvyr’s cheeks rose towards his blank eyes, smiling or grimacing she could not know such was the density of his beard thick almost to his gaze. He replied:
“For all your sight you do not see that we are on a course unstoppable from an event irreparable: the attempt on Time’s life. I measure that in your shamanism you still feel traces of Time… the humming ticks of grandclocks to me, the pass of seasons to us both. The way of the wilds untameable, be those wilds the stars or the birds. Nature preceded ours and will certainly proceed ours; these keep you hopeful to a corpse already lost. It is not a matter of stopping Serib before she becomes The Spring-Sworn; all at once these internecine things are happening. Two stories much entwined. It is a matter of dealing with the consequence of her rising-fall you and I both have seen. Let her fall that she can rise, for she has not fallen far enough. Or were you in a hurry to become a murderer yourself? If we both have seen who she becomes and believe it to be true then how can we seek to change that course? What sort of despair-stricken hope is that? You here have added to it… its worsening. And so you have done a great thing. For only when completely exhausted can The Spring-Sworn awaken from her fearful dream. We push her into darkness for she is the light, let her fall that she can rise, that Time will see and find its way home.”
The Stalker grunted and spat, foul a taste upon the winds. With a scalp’s dangling he wiped the sweat from his brow. Patinya tried to paw her lacerations shut. Even in the climbing sunlight she could not escape the cold: “You do not believe Time can be protected? Returned to us… or we return to it…”
“Do you taste that rust in the air? Not feel its stench clinging to your fur? The reek is worse in Haven-o’er though even here an aura permanent. My beard is rank with it… it is not only spilt blood I smell as from a wound but a carcass. Imagine a whale washed ashore and that bloat would be yet one fathom of the many left for waves to bring-in rolling. Time is dead - but hope is not - and that is your mistake. The same of many others. Should I not be dead here in an age not my own? Internecine these things. If I am here in an age not my own, then could Time return as well? Have you forgotten all of History’s fractals, illiterate?"
Patinya breathed shallower and vultures feathered their effortless circles, gliding always where lesser birds could only flap to stay aflight. She listened to The Stalker’s hope when all else was despair:
“Lillian’s rogue humanity may well have made harpoon of her hammer-spear… The Spring-Sworn may well have played foul part. I am not Justice but I have seen no Rabid eye in either Lillian’s nor Serib’s stare. Lillian and Serib yet can come home and atone with their lives long lived redeeming. It was unthinkable to me that my age would fall… that The Sand-snow would Sift their last… and yet I have awakened here to see those ages that came after mine. Unthinkable as Time’s depart may be, it is humanity’s way to find another path. To chaos chart and partition clear realms from what was unknown. And it is Nature’s way to proliferate despite Humanity’s absolutist trespasses. Look at us here in sunlight, see you any new things?”
The Stalker aimed his wrist-bolt between Patinya’s fading eyes:
“If I stop The Spring-Sworn outright and add her to my scalps, our damnation will be gone though too our salvation lost. Our lesson. All humanity played their part in this beginning and we shall see it to the end, and the divine will learn from us as we have learned from them.”
Next his voice shifted as to quote from creeds long adhered:
“Truth-willing with Justice your aim, speak Courageously to the ‘rebels’ when they rise and you will learn from their Wisdom where you have failed. And if both sides can be Moderate enough...”
It is said the last words of Patinya were ever colder mumblings, and that Ahlzvyr’s mercy she eventually accepted in the sunny woodlands of her kin having given more than most of us ever will. Yet before he could help her, she was already gone.
∞
As our first chapter also claimed, here we see it from a different angle or another view: soon The Stalker disappeared into the fabled woodland, leaving behind him a young werewolf dead, scalped and alone.