Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (11 page)

If this is
death
, he thought,
then I fear it not
.

The notion of his own possible
death took his thoughts to the Great Precipice. A pang of sadness,
of guilt and anger, hit him. He thought of igniting his girls and
watching them trail away with Vurah’s Wraithbirds…

In moments the mountains were
rushing from him, hurtling northways’n’west. Fast.

Or, more likely, he were being
dragged southways’n’east. A sea-sickness gripped him. The world
about him degenerated into a murky blur.

2

He had a sense of turning. Not
spinning, but turning, changing directions. Instead of facing
northways, he were being reoriented, rotating to face eastways
while still being pulled southways’n’east through cloudy skies and
patches of rain.

The blur before him soon grew
brighter. But there came no refined detail, just a brighter blur,
as of a bright light beyond a fog, as opposed to a weak
light.

If this is death
then perhaps I am now on my way to the
Afterworlds
.

But just as soon as it had begun,
the sensation of movement instantly subsided and his belly stopped
lurching.

Again, as before, the light before
him started to find shape and form until he realised he hovered
high and higher above a vast, vast valley. Rimming this valley were
something of an escarpment wall that dropped away to valley floor
beyond sight.

At first he were uncertain as to
what he were looking at. Until he recognised certain creatures
hanging from caves in the cliff face. Hands of Teyesha. Native to
the Great Precipice. Though all dead they were, their huge vacant
eyes gazing down into Endworld, their wrists both wrinkled and
bloated, while rotting bodily fluids dripped out of
them.

It saddened Gargaron, although he
had guessed their fate when he had left this place. And now, in
some form or other he had returned. It both hurt and warmed his
heart. For here he felt close to his girls. Here he knew, to find
them, all he need do were step off the rocky lip… and tumble down
and down and down…

Considering the Lost Cities of
men, he gazed into Endworld’s depths, and before he knew it, he
were gliding down past Precipice’s Edge, gliding down and
down…

A ringing in his thoughts began to
bring everything to blackness. A ringing that burrowed deeper and
deeper into his mind the closer to Endworld he drew. Breathing grew
difficult. And then he did not breathe at all. He felt he were
holding his breath at the bottom of some deep black pond. He needed
desperately to swim up for air.

In his mind he clawed against the
cliff face, grabbing anything that would gain him purchase. The
ringing were now a wail through his skull. And still he could not
breathe, could not scream nor roar nor cry. Nothing. Just a simple,
awful feeling of suffocation.

If this is death
then perhaps I am being delivered to Xahghis.
Afterworld Goddess of eternal pain.

The rotting Hands of Teyesha
snagged against him, the fingers of rotting meat sliding over him,
as if this time they did not wish to aid his rise back up the wall
but to hinder it, to push him down.

He not only felt them, he could
smell them, the sweet rank odour of death and corruption. It filled
his lungs with every inhalation, every intake of breath felt like
sucking in hot gummy liquid that left a taste of bad, wormy fruit
in the back of his mouth. He heard himself gasping, spluttering,
gagging. He saw nothing in front of him but rancid flesh in the
empty root-toothed faces as they slowly smothered him.

He were beyond desperate now. He
were frozen with sheer panic. Before his eyes, winged angels arose.
Vurah’s Wraithbirds. Come to take his burning corpse…

Then he remembered…

Remembered where he
were…

…
sitting atop Skysight
Tower.

It took mighty conscious effort
but he saw himself reaching his hands to his head…

…
and wrenching off the helmet that
engulfed him.

3

Away from chair and its dangling
helmet, he lay upon cold platform sucking in fresh chilled wind,
gazing up into blue nothing, his field of view broken only by the
occasional drifting cloud. He pondered a memory. Something someone
had told him once. He could not recall who. His father? Some old
acquaintance? Something he had heard in some far off Inn on some
holiday or hunting excursion?

Those who sit beneath the Skysight
are no common folk from the street. They are trained in its
use.

His ignorance (or his
forgetfulness) had almost dashed him. He had presumed the Skysight
to be nothing more than a spyglass. Aye, one that stood a hundred
thousand times larger than those with which he were accustomed, but
a spyglass all the same.

His gaze strayed
back to its mast. He did not presume to understand its mechanics
any more than he had before he had joined with it. At least now
though, he knew something of its effects, and from that he might
deduce a little of how it may be operated, or “
piloted
”.

He had seen mountains first.
Somewhere to the north he guessed. He could not name which range
they might have been. There were several spines that crossed
Godrik’s Vale in that direction. And from his current vantage all
were out of sight beyond haze and horizon. At a guess he might say
he had seen the Firehound Range. Which, by steed, if you took Far
Trail all the way to its end point, you would pass through within
three or four days.

Even that seemed incredible. That
his sight had traveled so far.

His next
“destination” had been the Precipice overlooking Endworld. He had
merely
thought
of
his loved ones and somehow the Skysight had transported him there.
He could not explain what had happened beyond that. Sensations of
suffocation. The need to climb the Precipice and be away from
Endworld. The hands of Teyesha clawing at him, smothering him. And
the Wraithbirds beckoning him. Or had manning the Skysight altered
his mentality somehow, had the sheer act of trying to operate such
a device with an untrained mind simply been too much? That he had
perhaps lost consciousness and in doing so, had begun to
dream.

Gazing up at the Skysight he felt
it now gazed back at him, a teacher pondering a student after some
humbling lesson. Some living entity left behind after the
Watchguard had perished.

This contraption
could send one mad
, he
thought.

Unless one
disciplines the mind,
a voice seemed to
come back at him on the wind.

He would thus take his time. Give
the Skysight its due respect. His initial response after breaking
his bond with Skysight were to flee it. And perhaps that were part
of its maker’s intentions. If he had been up here on some idle
flight of whimsy then he would gladly have licked his wounds and
left. But his need to view other regional giant settlements
(Darkfort, Mount Destruction, Horseshoe of the Downs) ate at him
with such hunger that he would chance Skysight again. He would this
time however employ the patience of his honed hunter’s
mind.

And he would prevail or would be
sent insane.

4

Once more, he sat beneath
Skysight, helm and cup dragged over head and face.

Before this
second attempt though he sat and meditated. He were aware the day
were wearing on, and Gohor and Melus beginning to wane. He had
distantly considered the prospect of having to descend the tower
after sun fall with naught but his lantern to guide him. One saving
grace would be that, after the daylight hours, distance to ground
would be obscured and lost mostly from sight and mind. Well…
perhaps not entirely from mind. It would be there, he knew, in the
form of darkness, a gaping, beckoning lightless reminder of what
lay beyond the unwalled portions of skyramp. The prospect did not
warm his heart. The lonely tower would be a hundredfold more
lonelier at night he wagered, with naught but wind and dark for
company. And that gaping void like a soundless siren; and the wind
a whispering ghost, inviting him to stray closer to perilous edge,
inviting him to search for possible lights of settlement and
habitation out there in the lands about:
Come closer, come closer, seek kin or friend out there in the
night, I promise I will not reach up from below with cold bony
claws and yank you from safety. I promise, I
promise…

There be also the
prospect of those Dark Ones too
, he
thought.

He most certainly did not wish to
encounter such beasts in the wee hours of night, especially during
descent. Were they to scramble up tower they would make his
difficult trek to its base all the more treacherous.

But… for now he
would not allow himself consider the coming dusk or the night hours
crawling up behind it.
If need be I shall
spend the sunless hours atop this tower. I have company besides, a
steed I did not know a day or two ago, and therefore shall not be
entirely alone. But I will not chance a descent until the dawn
fires rise in the west.

And so he focused his
mind.

5

When he felt he were ready, he
invested a few moments concentrating on Mount Destruction. The name
did the place no justice he always felt. Of all giant settlements
Mount Destruction were most picturesque. The folk there had taken
trees for homes and pubs and shops; those colossal alpine boabs
that grew along the mountains in mighty woodlands had, in the area
of Mount Destruction at least, been tunneled and hollowed and
filled with bed chambers and larders, kitchens and dining rooms,
and fitted with windows and verandahs. Hundreds there were of these
enormous abodes forming lush tree lined streets and lanes, and on
winter days, smoke from warm fireplaces drifted out of chimney
spouts that exited the boab trunks high up near their canopies. And
the entire settlement, though spread out across a spacious vale,
had a feeling of being compact and cosy.

Mt Destruction’s animist cathedral
were no exception either. It bragged the oldest and grandest boab.
A mighty tree whose base were spread out across as much ground as
the entire village of Hovel. It stood at town centre and much of it
had been hollowed to permit worshipers, its mighty snaking root
systems forming natural arched doorways. And inside there were its
tall sacrificial posts, and a peace Gargaron had rarely experienced
in any other spiritual house the giants had ever shaped or
constructed.

Gargaron now visualised this
cathedral, and so too its surrounding boab-tree abodes and pubs,
and before he knew it there came that unmistakable sensation that
he were moving. Rushing away from Skysight, eastways.

Again he saw naught but a blur. But here,
unlike earlier, he concentrated his mind on the light beyond the
blur and slowly it refined.

Soon he bore witness to the world
sweeping away beneath him. Chandry’s Steppe came and went below as
if he were but a house fly zooming over the surface of a table map.
He were soon nearing Buccuyashuck River. And when he saw it he
noticed its waters had reverted from rot black to clear, reflecting
the blue of the sky. And here his mental visualisation of Mount
Destruction waned and he found instead pictures of Hovel had
overrun him. Thus his velocity decreased and he found himself
veering southways along the river.

If our river has
spat out its poison
, he thought,
then perhaps Hovel has done likewise. Mayhaps
folk from Mt Destruction or Darkfort have come by to check on our
welfare
.

6

Hovel loomed. And in seconds his
momentum ceased. Again came that awful feeling of his belly
lurching into his throat. He fought it. Would not let it overwhelm
him. This time it settled far more quickly than it had
prior.

Gargaron floated above his
village. He gazed down, looking about, longing for folk on the
streets, for shoppers at the market square, the sound of hammers at
the blacksmiths, the squeal of bleeding, dying moorhens in the
slaughter house. He desperately wanted to see Veleyal skipping down
the cobbled street with her friends, and Yarniya calling for order
where she sat aboard the rowdy council in the community
hall.

Sadly it were not to be. It were
how he had left it. Empty. Silent. Abandoned. He would have taken
hope even to sight Hoardogs sniffing about. Or carrion lizards. Or
buzzing sucky flies.

Still, he looked about in earnest,
even lowering himself to ground level, floating about the streets
as might some invisible wraith, looking for any sign that would
suggest someone or something alive, that Hovel’s mysterious demise
had been nothing but some wild nightmarish fantasy. Or perhaps
there could be a trace of someone with aid or answers having
visited Hovel in his absence. But no. It remained empty of life.
Naught but carcass of ornithen, gorbull, horse, and the charred
mound of ash and bone where he had set alight his fellow village
folk days before.