Glim pressed the shuttle button and tensed, waiting. He’d nearly given up. He’d spent his whole life summoning gruesome imagery to soothe his morbid thoughts. But Certe had shown him a darkness he’d never thought possible. It made a sick sort of sense. The flip side of an Icer’s logic is the certainty of inevitability. Everything dies. Everything decays, and becomes sand or soil. Nothing lasts.
With a shuddering groan of metal against metal, the shuttle rose into the air, much slower than it had fallen.
Relief sparked inside him at the shuttle’s ascent. But would it hold? Glim waited until the steady vibration of the shuttle allayed his fears.
In a darkness punctuated by the occasional flicker of wan light, Glim opened his pack and pulled out an apple. Its sourness reminded him of a happier moment, when the euphoria of phyr had surged inside him. It hardly seemed real, but he knew it has happened. He’d snapped fire from the air.
And also, he’d sparked the conflagration that had awakened Certe.
What have I done? he moaned to himself in his mind. For his voice had been lost. For now? Forever?
Choking the bites down, Glim ate a handful of apples. He concentrated on the tart juice, hoping to awaken more sensation to invigorate his mind. It worked, a little, which kept him from answering the urge to lay down and sleep the rest of his life away.
Fortunately, the shuttle held its course, the journey did not take long, and Glim emerged into the sunny light of the guard station. The opening of the doors gave him a hint of novelty, which sparked a shred of satisfaction. He ascended the stairs and walked into the light, looking around him at the unfamiliar guard station.
Water, he thought numbly. The lifeblood of all people, but particularly Icers. Water fueled everything. Not only their bodies, but their spirits.
He took the stairs as quickly as he could, then drank his fill from the scummy basin of water in the dining hall. Once he’d slaked his thirst, Glim sat on the floor and tried to form a plan. Obviously he needed to return home. But he’d never have the chance to be in this place again. What did it have left to offer? With one last glance around, Glim performed a quick checklist. Did he have everything? Did he need to do anything before he left?
He poked around the outpost, peeking his head into each room, finding nothing of interest. But when he walked to the observation patio, he cried out. Or attempted to. No sound came from his lips.
Below him, much closer than he’d like, Glim saw Certe. The confrontation with the hawk had apparently given the giant some of his energy back, because he’d climbed out of the cavern and started to walk, with stunning speed.
Directly towards Glim.
In that moment, a fear he had not yet voiced came to the front: Certe’s eyes matched Glim’s own. One of them, at least. The unique one. Silver, unlike any human eye he’d ever seen. In the cavern, Glim had subconsciously hidden his ability to ply algidon, like Ryn would have urged him to do.
But Certe seemed shrewd. Glim guessed that they both shared the same gift of plying algidon. And with the course Certe had set, directly towards Glim, it seems that perhaps Certe had been drawn to Glim’s essentiæ just as the hinterjacks had been.
He fled the patio, entered the shuttle, strapped himself in, and pressed the button that would return him to Wohn-Grab.
With a pop that Glim sensed through the shuttle floor, it dropped and hurled downward with a force that made Glim’s hair rise. The faster the better; Glim desperately wanted to put distance between himself and Certe.
After an hour or so, Glim started to relax. He’d probably be well ahead of the giant by now.
Relaxation became boredom, then a fatalism which lulled him with its inexorable pull. Just give up. The idea seemed logical.
Take care! another voice sparked inside him, the one he’d come to call flame, because it reminded him of the moment he’d gained the ability to ply phyr. Which he still did not comprehend, but had no desire to test in the confines of the shuttle. He might suck all of the life from the air, or set his own clothes on fire. He wanted to try it, but the idea seemed reckless.
Take care! the flame had cautioned him. Take care to do what? He took the warning as a plea to engage with the world. To not just give up.
He needed a distraction. Something to engage his mind.
Remembering the scrolls, Glim unbuckled himself from the shuttle seat and rummaged through his pack. Words had failed him. Perhaps reading would help get them back.
He took one of the scroll cases out and looked it over. Blackened silver, tarnished just as the staff he’d found. He’d forgotten what words meant. The squiggles of letters sort of made sense, but also did not. Part of him simply didn’t care. But the recently awoken part, one that seared him with its intensity, did. It inspired him to try harder.
At last he deciphered the title of this scroll: Lament of the Elderkin.
Glim used his knife to scrape the wax from the end. The brittle chunks fell away readily. Glim unscrewed the cap and tilted the case towards his palm.
A roll of parchment fell out and crumpled from the impact.
Careful, you clod!
Glim tilted the case back immediately to lessen the force, but the damage had been done. Much of the scroll had disintegrated.
Carefully, Glim unrolled what was left, hardly daring to breathe. Some of the parchment crumbled beneath his fingertips, but he was able to unfurl it enough to see some of the words on the undamaged side of the scroll. At first the script looked like a jumble of markings that made no sense to his mind. But the flame within him pushed back against the darkness, fighting to remember, until the words made sense to his beleaguered mind:
Lament of the Elderkin
Had we known what would come, we nev…
would have convinced the essent…
Had we known how bleak food could taste,
how wretched each breath could feel
as we dragged char across our lungs,
or how easily our voices would be silenced by fear,
our bodies contorted by …
our minds numbed to our own humanity,
our essentiæ claimed as tribute,
and our love for each other…
we never would have asked the land and sky …
Had we known that our adulation would …
we never would have asked the waters for wisdom
or allowed the passion of the flame to seduce us.
Had we known that our children would bec…
and their children would become …
we never would have plied essent…
The only true part of us that remains is vengeance.
Glim stared at the words, his mind struggling to understand. Some of it fell into place immediately, such as why the Elderkin relied so heavily on devices and physical manipulation: they did not trust the essentiæ. But what did it mean, convinced?
That suggested conversation. The Elderkin had communicated with the essentiæ? Had the essentiæ talked? How?
He reread the scroll, taking in each word. The last line chilled Glim most of all. Something horrible had happened. The Elderkin had an agenda he’d never guessed before: vengeance.
Even though you were raised in a fortress? You whit.
He pondered what he’d learned, frustrated by the missing words. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Much more carefully, Glim opened the second scroll case to read what he could of The Legend of the Trine Marauders. This scroll had been even further damaged. Not only that, but the words made no sense.
At first he thought it was the result of the curse Certe had placed upon him. But after many attempts to read it, Glim concluded that the bulk of it had been written in a script so old he could not comprehend it. The only piece that made sense to him was one readable block of footnotes at the bottom of the scroll. A translation, it seemed, in a language just barely recent enough for him to glean its meaning. The moment he read the words, Glim grew agitated. He saw immediately just how screwed he’d become.
# 4.77 Doom Scrolling #
Glim stared at what remained of the brittle parchment known as The Legend of the Trine Marauders and felt the darkness surge back. Perhaps his apathy had been right after all. Perhaps nothing did matter anymore. Even the Elderkin had struggled to face what Glim now faced alone.
1 - In times agone, when the world was still one land engirdled in sea, three giants roamed Æronthrall. These wyre named Certe, Phyr, ande Æolia.
2 - Certe wyre pale with quicksilver eyes. His legs mountains ande his fists hills. Certe was methodical; his mind not easily swayed ande his course could nae be wrested. Certe’s wit was ever consumed by consequence, cold, ande inevitability.
3 - Certe wielded a hammer. Its true name has sith been forgotten, but it was known as The Clapping Hand…
…rte’s coming was foretold by warped beasts, tremors in the ground, ande a wall of grey cloud that consumed ….
5 - Thay who spied his sorrow became mute ande listless, ande succumbed forever to apathy. Thay who heard…
Reading the words made him sick. Glim’s breath grew shallow, and came fast, until black spots formed at the edges of his vision. He vomited apple chunks onto the floor of the shuttle.
Breathe, he told himself. Glim switched to battle breath. He took a deep pull of air into his lungs and held it, then exhaled slowly and held that. A few more times, then a few more, each time checking in to see if his panic had abated. Eventually he felt calm return. Or some semblance of it.
Three giants. Two named for the essentiæ. According to The Lament of the Elderkin, people and essentiæ had once conversed. Not only conversed, but relied on each other. People had convinced the essentiæ to give them wisdom. And the essentiæ had somehow claimed the people’s essentiæ as tribute? That made no sense. But somehow it had affected the Elderkin’s children.
Which, Glim thought bitterly, meant it affected him. Because clearly, given the fortress he lived in, and the essentiæ in his blood, Glim had some connection to the Elderkin, no matter how distant it might be. What tragedy had befallen their children?
The best hope he had to learn that answer was currently climbing around on a mountain and had stolen his voice.
Could Certe be Algidon? The third essentiæ? He had to be. Something the giant had said clicked into place: My first spoken name, which I think I shall reclaim now, is Certe.
Suddenly, every curse Glim had ever heard or uttered chilled him. Garrick in particular had a way with cursing. By Algidon’s crinkled ball sack! How could Garrick know just how literal those words could be?
So Certe had taken another name at some point. Or the people had done it for him. Names have power. Perhaps the change had something to do with that. Glim did not know everything yet, but these scrolls were burying him in an onslaught of insight he was struggling to handle. The giant he’d awakened had been prowling Æronthrall since the dawn of the written word at least. Unless there were two white giants named Certe looking for hammers, which Glim somehow doubted.
And the Elderkin had obviously wanted Certe sealed away. The very essentiæ they’d sought vengeance against, perhaps? Certe had mentioned a war. Glim had a sinking feeling it had just been rekindled.
And he’d rekindled it.
Enough! his mind screamed.
Glim listened to the voice. Even if he risked succumbing to lethargy, he could take no more. Too much had happened in the past two days. He felt stretched to his limits, physically, mentally, and essentiæly. In a way, his numbed state had become a blessing. Somehow, his apathy was buffering him against these realizations that any sane man would break in the face of.
Glim sat in silence and tried to quiet his scattered thoughts. For hours he rode in the shuttle, comforted by its gentle vibration, which reminded him with each minute that he grew further away from Certe. He wavered between complete exhaustion, and anxiety about falling asleep, from which he might never wake. The only thing that drove him now was a need to warn the others.
That left him with one bit of unfinished business. The third scroll.
Glim stared at the cylinder with a sickening feeling. He had nothing left. No capacity to handle more truths. His mental bucket had filled to overflowing and leaked all over the floor. Whatever secrets the scroll held might actually break his mind. If it hadn’t already broken. Which seemed likely at this point.
Yet not opening it meant he’d be going home without all of the information. What if the scroll told him how to fight Certe?
The argument over whether to open the scroll or not finally annoyed him into action. He’d already become numb to the magnitude of the truth. What could another revelation really matter at this point?
Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, he chided himself.
The knife trembled in his hand as he chipped the wax away. The third scroll slipped out, as gently as he could coax it. Made of thicker parchment, and yellower, it looked much different from the others. Tattered, creased, and smudged with what seemed to be mud. It differed not only physically, but had been written in regular handwriting. Not like the carefully scribed letters of the other scrolls, this appeared to have been written in haste. Glim imagined the circumstances under which this had been written. Someone in a hurry, writing outdoors. Perhaps a scout sending a report?
Many of the words had faded away with time. Most of them, in fact, leaving only bits he could scrape together:
The Candle Proclamation
A candle raised in
frost’s breath,
…..
….
shall wake the Fathers.
…
….
bearing the eye of Certainty
to the eye of Certainty.
….
A candle awakens the unhearing.
The unhearing flee.
The unhearing hear no more.
…
The candle speaks only breath.
The children hear and wail.
The hammer unfalls.
…
The children tremble.
The heavens tremble.
The candle flickers.
…
…
Between the tatters, the smudges, and the faded ink, the rest of the parchment had become impossible to read. He could not tell what the words meant, but they definitely gave him clues. One phrase in particular stood out. He’d heard these words once before: the hammer unfalls. It had seemed like nonsense when Ryn had said it. But she’d seemed so flustered letting it slip that the phrase clearly meant something of importance. The look she’d given him had been so inscrutable, yet poignant.
Recalling that moment in the Elderkin tower brought something else to mind. Another phrase that had stuck out oddly in his mind: engirdled in sea. Both the scroll and Ryn’s lullaby had used those same words. Which meant two things: Ryn had known far, far more than she let on. And the lullaby she’d sung had not been mere nonsense, but had actual importance.
Glim tried to remember the words. It too had mentioned the three essentiæ, and arrows, and Certes. Which, Glim now guessed, meant Certe. The giant he’d unwittingly awoken.
Glim screamed in frustration, but heard only a rasp of air. He no longer had voice; one of the many facts currently terrifying him. Remembering something he’d read, he grabbed for the second scroll. Too roughly, because the brittle parchment fluttered apart under the strain of the movement. For a moment the pieces lay on the floor, like puzzle pieces, cohesive enough for him to read:
Thay who spied his sorrow became mute ande listless, ande succumbed forever to apathy.
The bits of paper vibrated with the motion of the shuttle. The pieces drifted further and further apart, breaking into smaller pieces, until he had no hope of assembling them again. Glim rescued what he could of the other two scrolls and tucked them back into his pack.
Ryn’s refusal to share what she knew had never been more maddening. But he knew of a few others who would know: Minerva and her two “gardeners.” And, Glim suspected, Master Willow knew far more than he let on. Whatever kept his tongue sealed, the time had come to loosen it. Glim would see to that.
The shuttle continued its steady pace towards Wohn-Grab. Time had become more precious to Glim than it ever had. According to the scroll, he’d soon give in forever to apathy. He had no doubt of the words, remembering his urge to lay down in the tunnel.
But the flame had intervened. Perhaps he had more time than he thought. In any case, Glim would not waste a moment of it. When he reached Wohn-Grab, he’d need to be efficient. He had no way to speak, so approaching anyone but Master Willow would be a waste of time. Of anyone in town, the Mage-at-Arms had the most likelihood of understanding Glim. Either through the grudging bond of communication they’d forged over years of daily study, or some device of the Elderkin, or some potion that might restore his voice the same way the mumweed tonic had silenced it.
The shuttle finally reached its upward ascent. Glim gripped his seat and urged it to hurry.