For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives. You can stand on them and stare out at future’s horizon, or you can be crushed beneath their weight. You can take a pick in hand and break them all apart, until you’re left with nothing but rubble. You can crush that down into dust and watch the wind blow it away. Or you can worship those wretched stories, carving idols and fascinating lies to lift your gaze ever higher, and all those falsehoods make hollow and thin the ground you stand on.
Stories. They are the clutter in our lives, the conveniences we lean upon and hide behind. But what of it? Change them at will – it’s only a game in the skull, shaking the bones in the cup to see if something new shows up. Aye, I imagine such games are liberating, and the sense of leaving oneself behind is akin to moving house. A fresh start beckons. A new life, a new host of stories, a new mountain to build stone by stone.
‘What makes you happy, Withal?’
Long stretches of time, Sand, free of alarm.
‘Nothing else?’
Oh, beauty, I suppose. Pleasure to caress the senses.
‘You play at being a solid and simple man, Withal, but I think it is all an act. In fact, I think you think too much, about too many things. You’re worse than me. And before long, all that chaos gets so thick it starts looking solid, and simple.’
Woman, you make my head ache. I’m going for a walk.
Rubbing at his bruised hip, he brushed twigs and mud from his clothes, and then carefully made his way up the sinkhole’s side, grasping roots, finding footholds from the blocks of cut stone hiding in the gloom. Pulling himself clear, he resumed his journey down to the Shore.
Twenty or more paces up from the strand, the forest edge had been transformed. Trees cut down, trenches dug in banked ripples facing the imminent breach in Lightfall. Figures swarming everywhere. Weapons in heaps – swords, spears and pikes – with Shake and Letherii crews busy scrubbing the rust from the ancient iron, rolling new grips from strips of soaked leather. The wood of the hafted weapons seemed to have been unaffected by the passage of time, the black shafts as strong as ever. Hundreds of helms formed vaguely disturbing mounds here and there, awaiting oil and refitting.
Working his way past all this, Withal reached the strand. He paused, searching among the crowds. But he could not find the one he sought. Seeing a familiar face ahead, he called out, ‘Captain Pithy!’
The woman looked up.
‘Where is he?’ Withal asked.
She straightened from the leather map she’d laid out on the sand, wiped sweat from her face, and then pointed.
Withal looked in that direction. Saw a lone figure seated atop an old midden, facing Lightfall. With a wave to Pithy, he set off in that direction.
Yedan Derryg was taking bites from a lump of cheese, his jaws working steadily as he studied the cascading light. He glanced over as Withal approached, but only briefly. Boots crunching on the ghastly white bone fragments of the beach, and then the slope of the midden, where amidst larger pieces of bone there were husks of some forest nut, more recent gourds and pieces of pottery, Withal reached the prince’s side, whereupon he sat down. ‘I didn’t know we had any cheese left.’
Yedan plopped the last bit into his mouth, chewed a moment, swallowed and then said, ‘We don’t.’
Withal rubbed at his face. ‘I expect to feel the salt, the freshened sea breezes. Instead, the air feels as close as the hold of a ship.’ He nodded to Lightfall. ‘There is no breath from this, none at all.’
Yedan grunted. ‘There will be soon enough.’
‘The queen was wondering about that.’
‘Wondering?’
‘All right. Fretting. Well, more like a cornered cat, come to think of it, so not fretting at all. Snarling, all claws out, fear blazing in her eyes.’
Yedan’s jaws bunched, as if he was still chewing cheese, and then he said, ‘Is that what you wake up to every morning, Withal?’
He sighed, squinted at Lightfall. ‘Never been married, have you? I can tell.’
‘Not much interested.’
‘In any of that?’
‘In women.’
‘Ah. Well, among the Meckros, men marry each other all the time. I figure they see how men and women do it, and want that for themselves.’
‘Want what, exactly?’
‘Someone to be the cat, someone to be the dog, I suppose. But all official like.’
‘And here I thought you’d go on about love and commitment, Withal.’
‘No, it’s all down to who lifts a leg and who squats. And if you’re lucky, that goes back and forth. If you’re unlucky, you end up trapped in one or the other and life’s miserable.’
‘Your winning description of marriage, Withal, has fallen somewhat short for me.’
‘Sorry to hear that, Yedan.’
‘Something to do, I suspect, with the lack of sincerity.’
Withal grinned. ‘Anyway, the queen is eager for reassurance. Do you feel ready? And how … how soon?’
‘There is no true measure of readiness until we are engaged, Withal, until I can see what my army can do, or is willing to do. Of the two, I will take the latter and hope for the former. As for how soon …’ He paused, and then pointed at Lightfall. ‘There, do you see that?’
A strange dull spot formed in the descending streams of light. It bled outward like a stain, reaching down to the very base, before the brighter edges began soaking back in. ‘What was that?’
‘Dragons, Withal.’
‘What?’
‘Soletaken, or allies. The sorcery of the Eleint that some call their breath. They assail the barrier with that chaotic power, and with each breath the ancient wound thins, the skin weakens.’
‘Mael save us, Yedan – you mean to stand against dragons? How?’
‘When the wound opens, it will be at the base – to open the way for their foot soldiers. A beachhead will need to be established – we need to be driven back from the wound. For a dragon to physically come through the breach will take all of its power, and when it does it will be on the ground, not in the air. And when a dragon is on the ground, it is vulnerable.’
‘But if the beachhead has driven you back—’
‘We must in turn overrun them.’
‘To reach that first dragon.’
‘Yes.’
‘And kill it.’
‘Ideally, halfway through the wound. And not killed, but dying. At that moment, my sister and the witches need to … pounce. To take that draconic life force—’
‘And seal the breach.’
Yedan Derryg nodded.
Withal stared at the man, his angled profile, his dark, calm eyes fixed so steadily upon Lightfall. Beru’s sweet piss, does nothing rattle him? Prince Yedan Derryg, your soldiers will look to you, and now at last I begin to see what they will see. You are their own wall, their own Lightfall.
But are you wounded, too?
‘Yedan, can it be done? What you describe?’
The man shrugged. ‘My sister refuses to kneel before the First Shore. It is the act that sanctifies the queen of the Shake, and she will not do it.’
‘Why ever not?’
His teeth bared in a brief grin, Yedan said, ‘We are a contrary lot, us royals. A queen who defies sanctification, a prince who will never produce an heir, and what of Awakening Dawn? What of our Sister of Night? Gone, for ever gone. Yan Tovis and me, we are all that’s left. Have you ever been in a Letherii city, Withal?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Have you ever seen a Shake walk through a Letherii crowd?’