For ages I have listened, and for ages there was nothing new to hear. My time of listening is at an end. Now I will speak, and you will listen. Behold! A new song is sung in the land, yet there is no man left to hear it.
-The Nameless
Myrenthos
Styri drew up her knees to her chest, shivering in the warmth of the bonfire. She cowered behind her knees so that the other girls couldn’t see her fear. All the while, the glademother towered over the fire, swinging her arms and the pitch of her voice as she told her dreadful stories.
“If you find yourself in Xheng Yu Xi in the dead of night,” said Chrysephone, her voice quivering theatrically, “beware the gashagumo. Their name means dog men. They prowl woods just like these when Mother Moon is in her fullness. And do you know their most favorite food?”
“What?” “What is it?” came the giddy whispers of the girls.
“Well,” said Chrysephone, crouching, lowering her voice, “of course... it’s... you! All of you!” She bared her teeth and bent her fingers like claws. The circle of girls shrieked and cackled. It was a strange ritual, these nightly bonfires where the glademothers told them these stories. Most of the girls loved it.
Styri never did.
“What’s the matter?” Akona asked her.
“Nothing,” Styri lied. And her sister knew it straight away—and Styri knew that she knew.
“Tell me the truth.”
“Or in the remote jungles of Qarda,” Chrysephone went on, and the girls quieted again, “there are said to be evil spirits in the trees that wait to devour you. Only the light of the fires could drive them out so the ancient Qardish could build their cities, but they still lurk, even today, in the wilderness... The mahjeen!”
“We have fire,” said one of the girls in the circle.
“Right you are. But you know what that means? It means...” Chrysephone let the silence hang in the air. Mostly, Styri could only hear the shrill sounds of nocturnal insects; somewhere, an owl hooted. Aside from that, there was only the crackling of the campfire, coals popping and hissing with heat, the thump of her heartbeat in her throat. “...that the mahjeen... could be watching us... right... now...” Again, the glademother strung out the silence to her advantage. At least with screaming came the release of tension. This was so much worse. “...and even though the fire will keep them out of our camp... they’ll still be watching us while we sleep... waiting to see if our fire will go out... and if it does... the mahjeen... will... ATTACK!” Chrysephone roared again, and again the girls shrieked in terrified glee.
Styri flinched, tensing up by the fire. She shrunk into herself. “I’m afraid,” she confessed to Akona. She felt like such a baby, admitting her fear to her younger sister. The elder was supposed to be the brave one.
“I knew it,” said her twin. “Why are you afraid? They’re just stories.”
“But what if they’re not?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if they’re not just stories? What if they’re real?”
After the circle calmed down and the bonfire went quiet again, one of the girls spoke up. “Glademother, we know those already!”
“Yes, we know those!” said another. “Tell us a new one!”
“You want a new story?” Chrysephone answered them, sounding all too eager to oblige for Styri’s taste. “Well, have you ever heard the story of the Knights of Old?” No one around the fire said anything, but some of the girls looked at each other. Styri knew that a knight was a type of male soldier from the Stonish lands who wore a full suit of armor and trained diligently in the ways of sword fighting. “Well, if you should ever find yourself on the Stone Continent, beware of the creatures of the deep wood, the ones that come out at night like anywhere else. However...” Chrysephone took a sip from her wineskin. “...the ones you really ought to fear are the Knights of Old.
“The gashagumo, the mahjeen, and even the creatures of the deep wood can be dispatched with sunlight or the right metals. But the Knights of Old are said to come out mostly at dawn and dusk. Stonish fishermen see them sometimes lurking with their heads above water or stalking remote islands, even hiding among the barren rocks. The Knights of Old are sometimes also called faceless ones.”
One of the girls in the circle stood up, her hands folded in front of her. This was how the glademothers instructed them to call attention to a question they had. “Glademother?” she asked impatiently.
“What is it, Maesia?”
“Are the Knights of Old just knights?”
Chrysephone narrowed her eyes, raised a didactic finger. “Ah, that’s the scariest part. They’re called the Knights of Old because they’re said to be long dead, knights from the ancient past.” There were gasps and awestruck murmurs in the audience. “They’ve been dead so long that their bodies have rotted and withered away, and all that’s left is their armor. The Eidomene has rejected their spirits, cursing them to walk the earth until the Time After Time. So it’s the ghost that holds up the armor, causes it to levitate in the air—a ghost no one can see. Their crude armor helmets are blank, faceless, and none of them are said to speak or otherwise make a sound.”
“Do they eat people?” another girl in the crowd asked.
At this, Chrysephone couldn’t stifle a chuckle until it was too late, a momentary break in her scary storytelling. “Not quite,” she said, theatrical again. “You see, no one knows what the Knights of Old want. The only thing that is known is that it’s bad luck to see one. If you do... it’s said you may never see your family again.”
“How come?”
“It’s said that the Knights of Old will abduct anyone who lays eyes upon them except from a distance. Get too close... and they’ll whisk you away!” This story didn’t have nearly the same effect on the girls, who exchanged glances quietly, without the screaming fanfare of the earlier stories. “That’s all for tonight, girls. Ready for bed.” Chrysephone went to fetch more wood for the fire.
“Those don’t even sound scary,” said Akona.
“But what if the others are real?” Styri repeated.
Akona scooted closer to her twin, put on a serious grownup face. “I’m your sister,” she told Styri. “Even if they’re real, I’ll make sure we always have something silver, and we’ll only travel in the daytime, and I’ll be there to protect you like I always am.”
“Promise?”
Akona did a strange thing then. She reached out her right hand, hooked her right arm around her sister’s right arm. “This means I promise. All right?”
“All right.”
“We’ll always be there for each other, right? Promise?”
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Now it was Styri’s turn to lock arms with her sister in response. She squeezed tightly. “Promise.”
The girls readied for bed like the glademother told them. They lay down in one of the communal tents with six other girls. The twins stayed up late that night, whispering about the future and what it would bring. They talked about each finding a suitable boy to marry and take children from them, and how they would approve or disapprove the other’s choices, how their children would grow up close with their cousins, and one day, the two sisters would be matriarchs of neighboring towns, and their families would live together in a house in the woods between those two towns so they would never have to spend a day apart.
Styri drifted off to a sound sleep with her sister by her side.
***
The Great Unknown
When she awoke, her face was sore.
My wound, she thought, remembering the scorpion sting that left a crater in her cheek. Though the worst of it was healed, the nerves still prickled with pain sometimes. She cringed at the thought of the maggots eating away at her dead flesh. Her sister was a good soul to care for her so diligently while she recuperated. She was so glad to be out of that accursed desert.
She touched a hand to her face, feeling for the bandage. There was none. There was no wound; the skin of her cheek was smooth as the day she was born.
Styri sat up with a start. It all came flooding back to her then—Ka’Anui, the Grackenwelsh soldiers, the poison dart, the tidefall. Survive this. Promise me. Promise. It seemed she had.
But at what cost?
Styri stood up from her resting place. The ground beneath her was flat and unyielding. She wondered what had happened to the ocean—she remembered plunging headlong into it, along with Akona—until she saw the undulating surface of the sea far below her.
She flinched, lost her balance. Styri hit the near-invisible floor beneath her, head spinning, pulse pounding. She wanted to throw up. The floor beneath her was glass thick enough that it didn’t crack, even with her full weight thrown against it—even, she thought, if she jumped up and down and tried to break it with all her might. She was in a ball of glass suspended in the sky high above the ocean.
Is this death? Styri wondered. Am I going to the Eidomene after all?
She bit herself on the wrist. Bit until her teeth broke skin and she tasted iron. It hurt. That was the only proof she knew that she was still tethered to the world of the living, fraught with pain and impermanence. She fell to her knees and wept openly. Akona really was gone.
Styri raised her fist, bashed it against the glass floor. Again. Again. It only served to hurt her hands, bruise her bony knuckles. No matter how much she wanted to break her glass prison, to hurtle into the open ocean below where the waves would end it all for her, it was no use.
The glass ball hovered through the air as easily as something floating in water. There was no resistance, and she could sense no wind around it. It soared higher through the cloud cover—she always thought fluffy white clouds would have the texture of cotton, but up close, they dissipated like fog when the ball passed through them. The clouds streamed by silently below her. She felt like she was on a horse, or on a ship, only it was moving many times faster, and through the sky instead of land or sea.
A short while later, it descended through the cloud cover. It was bound for an island. In the center of the island, there was a great mass of white rock that caught the bright sun just right, obscuring her vision. She shielded her eyes for a time during her miraculous descent. When her eyes finally adjusted to the glare, she took her arm away and gasped.
An audience of people awaited her arrival. For one brief, cruel instant, she thought it might have been an island off the coast of Myrenthos... until she saw those standing on the shore. What they really were.
Her stomach twisted in icy fear.
Over two dozen of them stood on the beach, shoulder to shoulder, straight-backed, unmoving and with postures that betrayed only mild curiosity. They were as tall as full-grown men and all the same size and shape. Invisible ghosts in suits of armor—the metal plates floated in midair, only loosely connected. The ancient armor was smooth, polished, curved where there ought to have been points, joints, and edges, at least from the drawings Styri had seen of Stonish knights.
These were the Knights of Old. Faceless ones. It was just as the glademother Chrysephone had told her as a child.
The glass ball descended toward the island. It alighted softly on the beach, lighter than a butterfly landing on a flower. A circular window opened in the glass ball, a hole through which Styri could comfortably walk. It was all eerily quiet except for the waves sloshing against the hot beige sand. Once Styri had exited the transparent orb, it closed itself up again, ascending into the air with nothing but a low hum like the sound of a bumblebee’s flight. It moved with impossible speed up into the sky and then was gone without another sound.
The faceless ones stood and stared at her. They had no eyes—it came with the territory of being faceless—but she could somehow feel their gazes on her, and it made her skin crawl. “Am I dead?” she asked timidly. She thought she knew the answer, but she wanted to be sure this wasn’t all some dream or hallucination.
“No,” said a voice. “The Nameless had mercy.” It spoke in Myrenthian, sounding smooth and well-educated, not unlike an attractive, demure young man who knew his place in Myrenthian society. The sound of it put her inexplicably at ease. It was one of the Knights—she couldn’t discern which one was speaking. “Your journey was perilous. Your counterpart is no longer alive.”
Hearing those words twisted a knife somewhere inside her. “My sister,” she said, offended at the cold impersonality. “Her name is Akona.” The urge to cry again came and went; all she felt now was emptiness, like she was already dead anyway, but the earth was too stubborn to let her go yet. “Did you bring me here?” More silence. “Why? Why did you bring me here?”
“You already know. The Nameless had mercy.”
“Have mercy on my sister Akona.” Styri clasped her hands together in blasphemy against the Myrenthian pantheon. “Please. Bring her back and I’ll fall down and worship you. Or the Nameless. I’ll do anything.” Waves lapped quietly at the shore. A gull called its squeaking call as it glided down the beach. “Please, bring Akona back!”
“No. The Nameless does not intervene in these affairs.”
Styri shook her head. “Then why save me at all? What’s the point?”
“You will be given rest here until the time comes.”
The Knight’s cryptic words perplexed her enough to hold her attention. “Until the time comes for what?”
“The Nameless has its answer for humankind.”
“What answer?”
“No.”
“What was the question?”
This time, the faceless ones did not answer her. “Be in comfort,” one of them said after a while. “Be at peace. The end is almost here.”
Be in comfort, she thought bitterly. When a foreign sea had claimed Akona’s dead body so it couldn’t even be buried. Asking Styri to be in comfort now was like asking the sun to rise in the west. She spoke again, not even deigning to face her saviors, staring up instead at the mountain in the center of the island. “The end of what? Of my life?”
“Of all of your lives.”
“The end of the world?”
“Certainly not. Only the end of you and your people.”
She thought of her mother back home, of her homeland, and was reminded that Akona would never set foot on their soil ever again. Would Styri? Or was she trapped here for the rest of her days? Guilt and homesickness dredged up her despair again from the depths of her emptiness. “My people? Myrenthians?”
“Humans.”
The reality of the Knight’s words was finally sinking in for her, colored by her fresh grief. “What does that mean?”
“The Nameless has its answer as promised. This era is nearly concluded. Records of this time and the time before will be preserved faithfully. Then the next steps can finally begin.”
Styri fell to her knees and beheld the mountain at the center of the island. Only then did she see it was not a mountain, but rather a colossal monument carved of granite. It depicted four faces of men, three of them with sharp, angular noses, while one’s nose was broken away. Two of the men were clean shaven; one had hair on his upper lip; the fourth had a beard. Their stoic faces stood mightily above the tropical trees and looked out across the ocean with pride. Seeing them broke open the floodgates of her loss once again.
“Are these gods?” Styri asked, weeping.
“No. These were mortal men.”
“Ancestors?”
“This is an artifact from the Time Before Time. The people of that time called it Mount Rushmore.”
The name meant nothing to her. “Will these ancestors hear my prayer?”
“No.”
Styri prostrated herself anyway, clasping her hands together, hitting them against the sand. “Please... I beg you... Let her live and you can kill me instead. Please!” But the Knights of Old stopped answering her. The ghostly suits of armor walked inland, their gaits unnatural, their movements eerily silent.
Styri knelt in the shadow of the monument and wept. Tried—failed—to make sense of it all. The colossal, impossible monument, each of its faces ten times the height of a tall man. The faceless ones. The means by which she’d been carried here, like something out of a poison dream.
It all paled in comparison to the strangeness of life without Akona. She might as well have been cut in half down the middle, the left half of her body spared and told to go on living. The dispassionate faces of long dead men lorded over her.
But it wasn’t them, nor was it the Knights of Old, who had long since departed, that made her feel watched. It was the spirit of the Great Unknown itself. The land lived up to its namesake, raising more questions than it ever answered, gloating in its secrecy like the granite men standing silent watch.