These figures of moving stone surrounded him, crowding in close. They slipped slivers of their limbs beneath him and lifted him into the air. His weight shared among a number of them, they walked with him suspended above the earth. It was a feeling similar to floating. His head lolled back and for a time he watched the motion of an upside-down world. He thought that they might have been speaking, but again he could not say for sure. There was something passing between them, but it was more like exhaled breaths than any language he knew.
He had no idea how long or how far they carried him. He did understand that the earth spun beneath him. He saw the sun pass by above, watched stars flare to life and careen away, but he did not ponder such things as the passing of time or meaning of movement. It was not an experience measured in passing moments. Rather, one instant of time flowed so smoothly into the next that there was constancy to it all. There were no future and present and past. All of these things were the same. He forgot who he was. He felt no burdens whatsoever. His life and all the pressures he lived with had no substance. This, more than anything else from his introduction to his saviors, would haunt him afterward, a promise dangling at the far side of life.
When he awoke to true consciousness again it was with the aid of another’s prodding. Somebody spoke his name, his first name and then that of his family line. The voice asked him if he would wake now and explain himself. He had come to them-why? He felt a pressure on his sternum, a force strong enough to push a moaning breath up and out of his mouth. He opened his eyes.
Above him was a night sky. A black ceiling beneath which a gauze of high cloud rippled, rimmed in by the lip of a bowl of pale red stone. He wanted to take in the world around him and to figure out where he was. This might be death, after all. He sat up with slow effort. Somebody sat just beside him, cross-legged and still. It was, at first glance, a humanlike shape, worn and aged, carved of stone and perhaps so ancient that ages and ages of windblown sand had smoothed its features and pocked depressions into weaknesses, causing bits and pieces to drop away over time. The eyes were smooth and had about them the slightest indication of color, as if they had once been brightly painted and a trace residue of brilliance remained. The statue was near enough to touch, and Aliver flexed his fingers with the latent desire to do so.
The eyes of the figure blinked. It pursed its lips, like a carp sucking water, and then fell still again. Aliver felt a thought enter his head, and it took him a moment to organize it into words and a few moments more to make of them phrases that he understood. He knew-without grasping why-that the message had come from the living stone before him. It said that it was pleased he had awoken. The others would come now, for they all wanted to know.
Aliver opened his mouth to speak. The figure snapped an arm into the air, a quick flash of a motion that placed the palm in the air before him, stilling him. Wait. The meaning and then the word that signified it formed in his head. Let the others come.
A chill spread through Aliver’s body. He watched an otherworldly scene that he simply could not believe. The enclosed rock chamber in which he sat gradually filled with more and more figures like the one beside him. They were the same as those that had carried him here. He knew that; yet they were different also. Their movements were hard to pin down. As physical beings they seemed never to move, and yet the air was filled with motion, as if so many ghosts trailed their incorporeal bodies through the world and only became solidly visible when they ceased moving. Even when they sat still around him, Aliver could make out their individual forms or faces only when he stared directly at one of them. When his eyes drifted, however, they looked like the weathered stones he had first thought them to be, egg shaped and ancient. Thus he sat surrounded by moving ghostlike stone beings, all of whom had faces if only he stared hard enough, masks that betrayed life only intermittently.
Forgive us, but we must know…Have you the book of the Giver’s tongue?
Again, this formed first as meaning that he had to order into sentences to interpret. It came from a collective of voices, but Aliver already had some grasp of how to make sense of them. He began to respond, “The book of…” But the words sounded monstrous, like the grinding of boulders, as if he had shouted them at the top of his lungs. He could see that the figures around him thought so too. They seethed back from him, like underwater plants swaying as a wave passed over them.
The one who had been beside him at the start suddenly had a hand on his shoulder. Our king, please do not speak like that. Speak with your mind. Think what you wish us to know, and then release the thought to us.
The fore portion of his mind thought this a strange thing to ask, but Aliver knew he had already been hearing their thoughts himself. That was why the place was so silent. That was why their words seemed to originate inside his own head. He fumbled to formulate a response, afraid now that each thought, each misstep and confusion, would pass from himself to the others. What a jumble he would reveal himself to be! But they waited, calm, their faces unchanged, hungry. They were blank, and it was clear they had no access to his thoughts unless he allowed it.
Finally, he formed a sentence in his mind, thought it with clarity, and then projected it outward. What is this book?
The faces staring at him all rocked again, but this time they swayed toward him. He received a response from more than one mind. The book, they communicated, was The Song of Elenet. It was the text Elenet wrote with his hand, wherein he defined each word of the Giver’s tongue.
Please, they said, reveal it to us.
Aliver sat for some time in the silence after this. What was happening here? Part of him wanted to smack his face until he woke up from this dream. Another part of him wondered if these beings were the craven folk of the afterdeath and this the reception they gave to those newly arrived. It felt like they were asking him the secret to regaining life, knowledge he knew he did not have. But beyond all this he had another thought. He pushed past everything else and gave shape to it.
Are you the Santoth?
In a single motion every head around him-perhaps a hundred or twice that, the number growing with each passing moment-nodded. The stone faces cracked smiles.
That, they said in a chorus, is the word that means us.
All right, Aliver thought. That’s the word that means you. But, by the Giver, what happened to you? He did not let these thoughts escape him, and the grinning faces, frozen as they watched him, showed no sign of understanding. They simply waited for what came next. He wondered if he had the energy for this. Shouldn’t he eat? Drink? But his body did not trouble him. He was no longer starving or dehydrated, though he did not remember when he had last consumed anything. He looked about and proceeded as best he could. He could not take it all in. He just had to start someplace.
The Song of Elenet. Tell me more of it.
They did, most gratefully. Aliver would later not be able to say just how long his discourse with the Santoth lasted. It was not so much a back-and-forth communication as it was a spiraling communion. He did not learn the things he did in any linear fashion. But once he had pieced them all together, he had a story right out of legend. It was a tale, he would once have said, spun from the fancy of idle minds to entertain themselves and explain away the world’s ills. That’s what he would have said in his youth. But from the moment he saw stones walk upright, his youth was irrevocably behind him. This is what he learned from the Santoth.