And his eyes turned back to the pool, to the dark shapes rising from the water. Great webbed talons reached up, dug into the stone. Their emaciated bodies were hauled up, glistening with the water that slithered and danced across their visible ribcages and over their wide, white eyes. They rose on their long legs, their jaws gaping open as they stood, unmoving but for the claws they extended, dripping with something thick, something glistening with life.
“And someone will listen to you, too.”
The Mouth rose up, looked out over the sea of humanity. Their faces rippled, some twisting from fear to revulsion, some quivering with curiosity, others bubbling with awe as they looked upon the Abysmyths ringing the pool, as they looked upon the glistening substance dripping from their claws in oozing bounty.
“But this is a choice,” he said. “Your life belongs to you, for now. If you choose to take it and leave, then do so. Take your life, savor it while it is yours. Savor it before it’s taken from you by the armies that claim to protect you, by the priests who swear it is theirs to take, by the people who take it simply because they want it. Take up your life. Hold it in your mouths. Leave. .”
He opened his arms wide, gestured to the beasts that stood behind him in silent, monolithic stoicism.
“Or give it to Her. To the only one that listens. Give it to Her. . and feast.”
There was an eternity before they stirred, a familiar eternity he had felt when he had been presented the same fruits. The moment in which he stood bound and free at once, beholden to no one but himself and shackled by the tremendous fear that such freedom came with.
It had taken him an age to make a decision back then. But he had made it.
And, as a single soul rose from the crowd, a single woman with no more tears to give and no face that he knew, a single woman with an empty space beside her that someone should fill, he knew what their decision was, too.
In silence, they came forward. In silence, they walked past him. In silence, they took the Abysmyths by their claws, given no resistance as they let the gelatinous substance slide into their craws.
And then, the silence was over, yielding to the sound of smacking lips and slurping tongues, to the gentle moans of unexpected delight, to the wet gagging sounds of those unprepared. The silence was gone. The Mouth had been given an answer. The Mouth heard it.
It was Hanth who lifted his hands to his ears, trembled a moment, and then let them fall at his sides.
They were there before.
When light and sound meant things. Before song was bastardized with words. Before light knew how to cast a shadow.
They saw those things taken away.
By mortals. By stone. By heaven.
They had learned to live without them.
There was no light down here; the fires of the stone city above had been snuffed out and the moon turned its eye aside. There was no sound down here; the water did not know what sound was.
But there was life down here.
They watched it from four golden eyes as they swam in slow circles about him. The faithful moved over his great skin with their hammers, driving arm-long nails into him with soundless strikes that blossomed in fleeting sparks.
He did not complain. He sat there, amidst the rocks and the sand, free at last. Yet his heart was weak, beating faint. Free he might have been, but the years in his prison had left him with pain. Pain that left him numb to the nails driven into his skin and the sparks blooming across his body.
Far away, something stirred. Far away, someone spoke in a song without words, a language without meaning. They turned their twin heads to its source.
“Can you hear it?” they asked him. He said nothing and they frowned. The pain had left him deaf. “They did this to you. Shackled you in silence, with nothing but the thunder of your own heart to listen to.”
He spoke. His voice the last star falling out of the sky and leaving a black hole above the world.
“Ah,” they said, smiling. “You do not care about them. Only about Her.”
He demanded. His words the burbling and bubbling of the muck from which living things crawled.
“We hear Her. The faithful hear Her.” Their voice brimmed with sorrow. “And you do not.”
He asked a question. Somewhere, grass withered and an infant cried out in pain.
“We will wait no longer,” they said, swimming around. “We will not let Her suffer longer. The faithful must hear Her clearly. The world must hear Her rise. Let it be done.”
Somewhere within the mountain that was him, a light bloomed. A red light that the darkness did not understand, growing larger with each ominous beat of his heart until he was all sound, all light, everything.
“Rise,” the Deepshriek whispered, “Daga-Mer.” The faithful fell off of him, their white bodies and their hammers shaken from him like snow and ash as he stirred. He rose to his feet, the rocks shattered silently beneath them. He drew in a deep breath. He opened his eyes.
And the world was bathed in light.
He walked, over reef and rock, over sand and stone, the crush and quake of earth silent against the storm that thundered within his chest. He walked, and they followed.
In shadow, in whiteness, in a sea of blue stars, they followed. The Shepherds, the Sermonics, the faithful. His sons and his daughters and his followers, betrayed by the Gods, loathed by the earth and the sky. They followed him as he followed Her.
Daga-Mer walked with his flock. To Jaga. To Mother Deep.
And earth cried out without language behind him.
ACT TWO
TEN
The Aeons’ Gate
Reef of Dead Men (might not actually be reef name, but much more impressive sounding than whatever lizard trash they call it)
Fall. . summer? I really can’t tell anymore
I think the voice in my head might be lying to me.
And this perturbs me for a few reasons.
The big one is that I’m finding the fact that a giant red lizard who respected me enough to say my name like it wasn’t a curse being eaten alive by a giant sea snake is not as joyous an occasion as I had hoped it to be.
I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Of the many profanities I would use to describe Gariath, “reliable” was never one of them. Though he might have limited his attempts to actively murder us to the single digits, he never really gave a damn about whether we lived or died. Couple in the fact that he came with us to seek out the Shen and this paints a rather bleak picture.
Summation: a lunatic dragonman who once threatened to reverse-feed me my own lungs, who abandoned me and left me to die at several occasions-most of them recent-and who sought contact with creatures possessing a vested interest in jamming pointy things into soft parts of my anatomy is gone.
And this isn’t making me happy.
Maybe I just miss his conversation?
Or maybe the prospect of going into a forbidden island of doom from which no man has returned without the benefit of having a murderous reptile at my side is proving daunting. I mean, there certainly are giant, murderous reptiles out here. They just happen to be lurking in the mist.
Along with Gods know what else.
The mist goes on forever and the walkway goes with it. Or rather, walkways, since there are just a few more than way too damn many of them out here. Barely any of them go anywhere, most of them leading to shattered bridges, pillars whose tops are littered with bones, or shrines with statues long smashed.