The night seemed frozen. The wind had stilled, and the whisper of waving grasses was gone, making the ringing that pounded in his skull all the more profound. Panicked, he rolled to his feet and drew his sword, searching for any sign of threat. Vaasurri was curled asleep near the dying fire as still as if he were dead. Brindani rolled and stirred just beyond the glowing embers, sleeping fitfully, but unharmed.
As Uthalion’s eyes turned to where he’d last seen Ghaelya, he caught the faint sound of a boot crunching down through long, crisp blades of grass. The genasi’s slender leg stepped beyond the circle of the dimmed fire, disappearing into the tall grass with a dreamlike grace.
Uthalion hesitated and ran a hand through his dark hair nervously. He tried frantically to recall the lost time, only remembering the bright flash of sun before it had disappeared in the west. Brindani moaned and mumbled incoherently in his sleep, breaking Uthalion’s line of thought and bringing him back to the present.
Leaping down from his perch, he glanced at Vaasurri and the half-elf, unsure if he should leave them alone, but already Ghaelya’s footsteps were retreating to the edge of his ability to hear. Quietly cursing, he rushed into the dark after the genasi, though the constant dull ring in his head seemed to grow louder the farther he progressed in Ghaelya’s wake.
Deep red lights drifted through the sky, islands of rock floating south out of the northbound storm, called storm-motes by the few who lived on the Akana. Their bulk was scored by strokes of lightning, and they trailed long plumes of white steam streaked with glowing bands of reflected crimson. He could make out the distant silhouette of Ghaelya, walking languidly through the grass, her fingertips brushing the stilled green tide that spread out around her. He almost called out to her, but stopped himself in mid-breath, struck by the dreamlike view and wondering again if he truly had somehow fallen asleep on watch.
Instead he remained quiet, keeping her in view as he stealthily followed in the thin trough she had made through the grass. The ringing he heard changed in pitch and tone several times, but never left him, always rising when he thought it might fall, drawing him along despite the ache of pain it caused him. He wondered if it was the powerful song, reaching out to him in some new form the closer he traveled to Tohrepur.
“Is this how Ghaelya was drawn to Caidris?” he whispered, wondering if the genasi were even awake. She had left her sword behind and made no effort to hide herself, walking carelessly out in the open with an almost preternatural awareness of her surroundings.
The land rose slightly just ahead of her, and though there was no wind to speak of, the long, dark mass she approached writhed and twitched. Uthalion quickened his step, lengthening his stride through the grass, but Ghaelya disappeared, engulfed in a forest of animated foliage.
Uthalion stood at the edge of the thick grove, the whiplike vine-trees growing tight against one another. The sudden, swishing movement of one spread to all those around it, causing waves through the squirming trees like ripples that hissed for long breaths, then would grow suddenly silent before starting anew. Dark thorns dangled at the ends of roping branches, glowing with a thin crimson light from above. Uthalion knelt low and made his careful way into the grove.
The ringing in his ears was joined by the constant whispering of the vine-trees, and he found it hard to breathe, imagining himself underwater, with the way the trees swayed. He flinched as their narrow roots moved beneath his hands as he crawled, the soft soil parting easily for his weight. A thick carpet of dried insects crunched against his skin, churned through the dirt, and was joined every so often by a fluttering newcomer, struck from the sky by an accurately aimed thorn.
He could no longer hear Ghaelya moving ahead of him, though her footprints were somewhat easy to track through the soft, heaving dirt. Crawling faster, he felt as though the ground might swallow him if he stayed too long in one spot. Breaking through the shifting press of thin stalks, he stood cautiously in a wide clearing. A glowing rock-mote drifted slowly overhead, illuminating the rising and falling sea of dulled green and flashing red thorns.
Hundreds of small, buzzing insects flitted through the clearing and over the tops of the living ocean, many swarming around a circle of large stones. As he approached the stone ring, he could make out worn, handmade lines amid the cracks and soft moss, bits of ancient architecture gathered together around the edge of a yawning pit of deep black. Thick branches snapped beneath his boots, but as he knelt to inspect the pit, wondering if Ghaelya had fallen in, he realized that he stood on a pile of bones.
As he looked down into the leering face of a dry skull, picked clean of flesh long ago, the ringing in his ears, the whispering vine-trees, and the buzzing wings of insects came together in a strange harmony. He wavered, leaning on the stone circle for support as the soft, beguiling tones of the song reached out through the myriad of sounds and left him gasping for breath on the edge of the deep pit.
Ghaelya descended slowly, her hands carefully finding holds on damp rock or making them in dense mud. Her body seemed to move of its own accord, and she felt more an observer than a part of her surroundings, watching herself drift, drowsy and calm, into flickering shadows and ghostly light. Dripping water echoed in a deep chamber somewhere below, the sound drawing her back to her senses for a breath. She wondered why it alarmed her so, but the feeling passed swiftly. She breathed in tune to the soft singing that led her down, her heart beating in time with the peaceful melody, only vaguely aware of her last descent into a basement in Caidris. Like then, it did not occur to her to be afraid.
Dragonflies buzzed around her, hovering and studying her with their large, flashing eyes before flitting away. A long, spiraling column of drifting motes stretched from the dark below to the open sky above, tiny graceful wings belying the hunger of hundreds of mosquitoes that did not stop to inspect her or feed upon her blood. The walls of the pit fairly hummed with the sound of so much tiny life in the air. As her boots found the soft, gritty floor of the pit, she pulled her hands away from the rock, her fingertips tingling from the exertion of climbing. Trancelike, she turned to continue her dreaming journey.
A thin layer of seashells, bones, and fallen insects coated the sandy floor of a wide cavern lit by some unseen source of flickering illumination. A bowl depression in the center of the chamber bore a still pool of somewhat clear water. A sour smell of stagnancy hung on the air along with other scents that touched lightly upon memories of death and possibly burning, but they did not remain long as she stepped forward. There were more bones set into the walls, most of them old and yellowed, but some still bore the rusty blush of blood upon them. They were set deliberately, forming intricately detailed designs and patterns. She saw a mosaic of fantastic sea monsters amid stylized waves, and symbols of an unknown language that nevertheless spoke to the water in her spirit somehow, like an alphabet to describe the tides.
The largest of the seashells fanned outward from the edge of the still pool, their well-polished, opalescent edges swirling with eerie light.
As she knelt down, little ripples on the pool’s surface caught her attention. Dark shapes darted and crawled in the muddy silt of the bottom. The smallest, with large heads and legless bodies twisting back and forth to swim up and down from the bottom, she recognized as the larvae of mosquitoes. When she was little, she and Tessaeril had found some of the larvae in an old water bucket and had taken them home as pets. Their mother had screamed in disgust, emptying the bucket and punishing them for bringing the creatures home. Ghaelya knew better now, but she still smiled at the sight of the larvae.