Four - Shade
Shimmer - Eillim
The remainder of the trek down the stone staircase was uneventful, if still a little unstable. Eillim stepped carefully around holes and piles of dislodged rock. Svanir floated about along side her, sometimes leading, sometimes following. When they finally reached the bottom of the stairs Eillim spoke. Her eyes searched over the oasis for a path that would allow them to cross the stream. “Is Enna dead? I don’t believe any of this to be truth, but is she really dead?”
“Whether or not your sister lives is her story, not yours,” Svanir answered.
“You don’t seem to mind that you have lost so faithful a follower.”
“Even the faithful fall in battle,” Svanir answered. “And she must not have been too faithful to have trapped me here.”
“So perhaps since she is the one who trapped you, Svanir should bow to Enna. She seems the more powerful of the two.”
“Seems to me she’s dead now,” Svanir said. “I won’t be following her anywhere.”
“So you are saying that she is dead?” Eillim asked.
“Dead or alive, she’s not here. You remain so the task falls to you. These are your lands, so you can still free me.”
Eillim crossed the wide stream by climbing across a thick trunk toppled in the recent shake. Svanir floated along beside her, but Eillim paid the god no attention. Once past the water she headed toward the pass that would lead to the burial grounds. She approached with trepidation, knowing that what had happened here had surely extended into the holy dry grounds.
The bone yard had been chosen as a place for families and tribes to leave their dead. The climate in the desert was perfection for mummification, where it failed to offer a means to bury the dead. The protection of the three surrounding sides kept the empty lake bed dry even during the short weeks of rain the desert drank in each spring. Tribes brought their dead and dying to the sacred place for rituals and honors. They laid the bodies among the countless others to disintegrate eventually too the dust of the desert itself.
This lakebed had once been the final holdout of one of the most tyrannical tribe elders. He and his people died in the full out tribal war that brought an end to his violent reign. They had been trapped in their last stand, surrounded and outnumbered. Though feared, the tribes had always revered him for his strength and determination in the face of defeat. To lie in death where he had gone to dust before them was a great honor.
Being confronted by the change was unbearable; a calm dry heat had been exchanged for an exotic, wet warmth. It hurt in Eillim’s very soul to see it so. Bodies that should be drying were instead decomposing. Huge, colorful flowers had sprung up over the densest of new bodies. The bone yard had become a jungle.
Eillim stood at the entrance and stared, seeing but not perceiving. The sadness over Enna’s sudden absence had been assaulting her in waves. The tide had come in, and threatened to overtake her. Standing before this monstrosity of an invasion into her holy land she could hardly begin to care.
“Do you know where the bones of your great murdering tribal king lie?” Svanir asked.
“Under the drop off,” Eillim’s answer was dull. She nodded toward the jutting rock overhang that had once been a peninsula stretching into the little lake. “The only place he was safe from the archers.”
“A single root feeds all of this,” Svanir said, gesturing with a robed arm and a hidden hand. “This root is buried in the soil at that spot, where the power of this place is the strongest. You must clear that root. You must let me free.”
Eillim nodded her understanding and started forward obediently. She wove her way through the foliage without noticing it, only bypassing stretches of reaching branches and hopping over patches of wildflowers and tall grasses. Her people had wanted to be one with the land in their deaths, but this was not a land they knew or could understand.
The sun had gone down even further since Eillim and Svanir reached the bottom of the gorge. The shadows had deepened; Svanir was now even more fully visible. The sounds around them changed over from daytime creature to those belonging to the night. With no sun and so much moisture in the air it was becoming chilly much more quickly. A filmy mist had begun to weave over the grass.
She found the resting place of her ancestor’s bones and stared at the root that bloomed thickly from the black soil. Thick, twisted vines rose from the gnarled root, and then toppled by their own weight had lay over on the ground. From the twisted lengths of vines, dozens of feelers, branches and spores spread outward across the ground. This single root transformed the entire riverbed, responsible for the devastation of the canyon.
It was bigger around than Eillim herself. She stared at it in dismay. How would she ever uproot it? Her gaze wandered in search of some tool she could use.
She saw nothing, only vegetation. Her eye lingered for a moment on a shape sketched vaguely on the wall of the canyon nearby. The shape reminded her of the arch she and Enna had passed through to get to this horrid place. That event had passed into a fog behind the veil of dark depression that shadowed everything now that Enna was gone. She did not bother to wonder at the arch, displayed where it should not have been.
“Get to work,” Svanir urged.
Eillim glared at the god, now nearly opaque in the low light. Her cloak seemed to float around her on an absent wind, her tail waved and snapped lazily behind her. Eillim could finally make out the ever-morphing form; shifting and changing, but never a hint of what Svanir truly was. Eillim felt wholly disgusted. She found no more deference within herself for this god. It had always been for Enna’s sake alone. Eillim felt torn between reveling in freedom and succumbing to terror at this thought of simultaneous loss and gain. For a long time she did not speak a word; did not move.
Shift - Enna
Enna and the Foxen watched the remnants of the bridge fall into the river below. Enna kept away from the edge as she bent over, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. The Foxen watched from the edge of the cliff with his arms crossed over his chest contentedly. He stared at the cascading rocks that fell into heaps around what remained of the support pillars. Three of those remained mostly intact. Enna thought again of broken teeth.
Enna turned her attention to the Foxen. His tail swished in excitement and his ears pointed forward, intent on the scene below. Without a second thought Enna made a dash for the tall, dark creature. She had every intention of bearing him over the edge with her. She didn’t know if she could kill a god such a way, but she intended to try. If she failed, there would be no more emptiness at her side. There would only be rest.
He turned at the last moment and scooped her up as if she had only been a child running to her father for a hug, hoping to be tossed in the air. The Foxen lifted her and turned easily away from the edge and any danger of going over. He dumped her onto the ground unceremoniously, uttering a little chuckle. “Can’t let you do that, my pretty little Preyling. My play-thing. With your sister out of the picture you’re the only one can help me.”
“I won’t help you,” Enna told him as she surged to her feet. “I don’t care what happens to Svanir or you, or the entire world for that matter. Not without my sister.”
“Well, you’re stuck here until you do what I want. I won’t kill you to ease your suffering,” The Foxen said. “And from what I know of your faulty little religion, you risk damnation at the act of taking your own life. If you’re damned you’ll most certainly never see her again.”
Enna glared at him but he only gazed back calmly. “We should move on, we are nearly there.”
The Foxen walked past Enna and continued toward the temple of Marbeth. Enna watched him go, refusing to follow. She prevailed perhaps a single moment before she hurried after him. She caught up as he passed through the first of the low walled outer gardens, overrun with untended plants and flowers. Enna had no mind to notice the wilt in most of them and the underlying smell of plant rot. She paused when the Foxen did, just outside the huge temple archway.
“It always intrigued me that you would carve your temple out of a rock and pray within it; you prairie folk who love greenery and the lush, complacent life.”
“The boulder of Marbeth is of the great eruption that created this very gorge a blessing from svanir for our faith. This earthy rift allowed water to flow from the mountains into the crater made by the blast. The warmth of the springs around the lake yielded life and the beginnings of our civilized culture. That this rock would land precisely here at the edge of this gorge it helped to create must be divine.”
“Or simply the combined laws of gravity, wind speed, trajectory… just another accident of nature.” the Foxen muttered.
Enna ignored him. “There are tunnels bored through the rock by the lava that created it. We have widened them, filled them with reflective surfaces to bring sunlight to the Temple depths. There is life within.”
“Then lead onward, little Preyling.” The Foxen gestured.
She stepped through the arch into the wide receiving room. They passed through the aisles of sculptures, ignoring the inscriptions and images carved into the walls. The prayer grounds lay just beyond this gallery, the garden of the Vicar at its center.
“Now, this is my kind of place,” the Foxen grunted, dropping down to all fours as he hopped into the bed of dry dusty soil that ran the length of the hall on one of four upraised platforms.
Enna stared in horror as he nosed and rooted through the brown carcasses of thousands of flowers, plants and trees. The only living plants here now were the razor trees and the water hoarding, prickly riztins. The normally cool, airy temple sweltered in a thick heat. The light came in too brightly from the tunnels above. Enna left the snuffing beast-god behind and moved toward the inner garden.
The Vicar tree, raised and tended and pruned in this space for a thousand years was nearly dead. Sapped to the brink of destruction by the winding, reaching bristle-vines; those first warning signs of dry desert land to come. Some old fools claimed the bristle-vines moved the desert ever inward, sapping the green and moving further toward the mountains. Enna was not one of those fool, but her thoughts changed when she saw the state of her temple.
The Foxen padded quietly to Enna’s side. “You have to remove the vine from the tree. It is growing strong in the soil of your holy place.”
As Enna glanced at him she caught sight of the arched shape carved on the wall to the right side of the chamber. It looked like the arch she and Eillim had passed through a thousand years ago to find this sad lonely facsimile of life. She regarded it with only faint curiosity. She could think only about the pain the holy tree must be feeling.
“Get to work,” the Foxen growled. Enna started forward to inspect the Vicar tree and its strangling predator.
Even the plants were predators in that desolate wasteland to the south. She thought to herself that she wouldn’t mind being rid of it and all the influences she’d gained from her sister’s teaching. Then she remembered her Eillim’s dark, predatory gaze and she paused. Enna glanced over her shoulder at the Foxen who watched her with unblinking interest.
Come Back next week for the Final part of Shade and Shadow - 'Choice'
update - part 5 uploaded as of 7/12
