She was standing on a vast plain of black rock, rucked with ridges of shattered stone and scattered with smouldering rubble. The air rippled with heat, scorching her lungs, shrinking her flesh. Wind screamed past her, throwing dust and pebbles and pushing boulders end over end, making her clothes flap furiously against her body. It stank of sulphur and poison. At her feet, a massive chasm roiled with magma, underlighting the contours of her face in infernal red. Other chasms scratched their way across the plain, and the earth shook sporadically like the shivers of some sleeping leviathan.
Lucia was shocked by the panorama and the chaos of the gale. She knew, somehow, that she was not really here, and she believed it had no power to harm her; but her instincts said otherwise, and she stumbled away from the chasm, gazing wildly around for a rescuer.
The lava ran from a distant range of volcanoes, so broad and high that their tips were lost above the thick blanket of brown vapours that roofed the world. Muted red glows blazed up there, amid thunderous concussions as the volcanoes erupted endlessly. Other mountains, seemingly dead and cold but just as gigantic, loomed around her, and where she could see across the plain to the horizon it seemed much too near. Lightning flickered in the clouds and struck the earth, faster than she had ever seen, a dozen times a second and more.
'What is… what is this place?' she said against the howl of the wind.
((This is the home of your enemy, thousands of years ago, before it was destroyed. This is the moon which you call Aricarat))
The Xhiang Xhi's voice came from inside her head like a rattle of twigs.
((It is not a place for your kind. The air here would choke you. The temperature would melt the flesh from your bones. The wind would pick you up and dash you to pieces. The very atmosphere would crush you like an egg))
'Why have you brought me here?' Lucia gasped, her eyes beginning to tear in horror.
((To show you)) the spirit said again.
'Show me what?'
((Your enemy))
Lucia looked around helplessly. 'I see nothing.'
((You are hampered by the limits of your senses. Use the ability that makes you unique. Listen))
And so she did. With some effort, she began calming herself, sinking slowly down into a trance of stillness. Practice had made it possible, even amid the maelstrom that whipped around her, to turn herself inward and create a core of quietude to retreat to. She sank to her knees, only now noticing that her feet were still bare. She laid her hand on the hot rock, and listened to the heartbeat of the moon.
As careful as she was, the sheer violence of Aricarat was still overwhelming: the burning veins of lava tubing, the swirling core, the constantly changing surface that crumbled and was remade by earthquakes and volcanoes. The raging fury of creation stripped raw and made terrible. She retreated, drawing herself away in fear of being destroyed by the power of the sensation. She could not allow herself to be subsumed in that.
Delicately, she sank back into the trance and began again, and this time she was more tentative. Among the roar and screech of this awful place, she began to make out thoughts. Thoughts as slow and massive as continents, drifting beneath her, processes too colossal and complex for her to even begin to fathom. The ruminations of a god.
'I hear him…' she said hoarsely, tears spilling from her eyes. 'I hear him…'
((Now, look)) the Xhiang Xhi urged, and she cast her eyes upward to where a white glow was growing rapidly behind the clouds, speeding from horizon to horizon, growing from dim to unbearably bright in the span of a second.
'The spear of Jurani,' Lucia whispered to herself. Then something burst through the clouds, a sun flung from the sky, and there was a sound like the end of the world. Lucia screamed as the fireball of its impact hit her. When she came to her senses, she was lying on the tuffet in the Xhiang Xhi's dell, her face and hair dirty where she had fallen. After a moment to orient herself, she stood shakily, facing the spirit once again. It still hung in the mist before her, veiled from clear sight, a long-fingered wisp like some childish sketch of a nightmare. Drifting, shifting, its dreary emanations oppressing her.
She took a few breaths to compose herself, then raised her head.
'That was the moment when the gods destroyed Aricarat,' she said. 'When the army led by his parents, Assantua and Jurani, made war on him; and his own father, the god of fire, destroyed him with his spear.'
((That is your interpretation. Muddled with myth, but holding a core of truth, as many legends do))
She frowned. 'But I was told of it by the spirit of Alskain Mar.'
((The spirit of Alskain Mar is not old enough to remember nor wise enough to understand. Spirits know much, but their experience is narrow))
This was new. It had never occurred to Lucia that spirits could be wrong. She knew them to be wilful liars at times, but she had always had faith in their superior lore. To hear that even they were deemed benighted by this entity shook her deeply.
'And what is your interpretation?' she asked, almost fearing an answer.
((You would not understand mine. Your knowledge is built on the knowledge of your ancestors, slowly accreting towards truth. That is the way of your species. At all times you believe you know all there is to know, and that which you do not know you explain in other ways. Yet later generations will laugh at your ignorance, and do the same, and be laughed at in their turn. Understanding must be reached gradually, Lucia. What answers I would have for you, you would not believe even if you could comprehend them))
'Then what can you tell me?' Lucia asked, spreading her hands in supplication. 'What is it I must know?'
((You have learned much already, but not enough)) the spirit replied. ((You know that the fragments of Aricarat that fell onto your planet carried with it fragments of the entity that resided there. You know that this being had enough remnant influence to create the Weavers, and that they carry out its work with no knowledge of what controls them. But you do not understand the Weavers' intentions. You think they want to conquer. But conquest is not their aim, merely a stage in Aricarat's plan. They will not spread beyond Saramyr. They will not have to))
Lucia waited in dread. So many certainties were falling into ruin around her. The Xhiang Xhi loomed in the mist, becoming darker.
((They are changing your world, Lucia. They are making it more like their master's home. They are preparing it for his arrival))
Lucia saw again, suddenly, the blasted plain and brown clouds, tasted the sulphur in the air, and a weakness swept her. The buildings that the Weavers had erected, the machines, the pall-pits: these were the tools by which they would make the world dark and poisonous. From Saramyr they would spread a miasma over the whole of the Near World, and across the great oceans that none had ever crossed except the mysterious explorers of Yttryx; then even the strange and distant lands beyond would be swallowed, and Nuki's eye would never again gaze down on the world, for it would be forever concealed from his sight.
((There is no word in your language for what they are doing)) the Xhiang Xhi was saying. ((Other cultures in other places far, far, from here have a name for the process, but it would be meaningless to you. You need know only this: if you do not stop the Weavers, one way or another, your world will end))
Lucia's pale eyes were cold as she looked into the mist. 'Whether by Aricarat's plan, or by that of the other gods.'
((You are perceptive for one of your kind. The spirit of Alskain Mar was right in that, at least. Once, Aricarat was powerful, a great presence in the Weave. If he returns he will again make war on what you call gods. They fear him. The spear of Jurani may strike this planet too))
Lucia's jaw clenched. It took some time for her to realise that she was furious.