Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (2 page)

Beyond the Hands, that distant
land so far below lay amidst a haze of faint blue and green. As he
had done as a boy, he imagined he could see empty spires of
forgotten temples, imagined he could see the silent, abandoned
sprawl of endless cities.

Endworld
, he pondered.
How easy might it be to just… step off… and
follow my beloved down?

Strange jitters fluttered up
through his knees and belly at this thought. The mighty drop seemed
to beckon him. Carefully he shuffled back from cliff’s edge, small
pebbles falling over and tumbling away into that vast open space
below. He let out a deep, slow breath.

4

Both suns were
pushing into the horizon and Gargaron turned and set out to hunt
down the squealing Mandragorus. He retraced his steps to sandy
ground not far back from the precipice. He had watched his father
wait for Mandragorus at Starbirth, when dust of cosmos began to
twinkle at dusk, waiting quietly, patiently for the wailing
root-men to wriggle up from sandy
earyth
to hunt the night
grounds.

And so he sat. Waiting. Patient.
Above him, through the overhang of clawtrees waving gently in cool
evening breezes, he watched Old Soor wink at him through vast, vast
leagues of Great Nothing. Southways he spied the Maidens of
Zerrunos, a tight constellation of stars, that in the blackest of
moonless nights would dance and glow in patterns of red and blue
and gold. And directly northwards hung the Cat’s Eyes, a pair of
bright red stars that never averted their gaze from
Cloudfyre.

He brought his attention back to
ground before him at sounds of stones and dirt stirring. The muted
wailing of root-men beneath could be heard. When the first of them
broke surface its cries screeched out through scrubby woodland and
away over the lip of old Precipice, away and away like birds into
twilight. He had heard strange myths that Mandragorus screams could
turn some folk to stone. If that were true then Gargaron were glad
that his own race seemed immune to such terrifying
effects.

He snatched this
first root-man in his large fists. Its ugly little demon face
glared at him as it squealed and kicked and fought, and rows of
deadly fangs gnashed at the crisp air. Gargaron were careful not to
let his exposed skin anywhere near that ferocious little maw. A
peculiar venom resided there in its spittle, much sought after and
milked by plain’s witches.
Deadsleep
, they called it. It
could put even the great Giants to deep slumber for many a day. And
would put most other races to death.

He held the Mandragorus at arm’s
length… and once more… he waited. As dusk progressed, more stars
birthed across Great Nothing. Jenadah danced with Lansador the
lover’s dance that Gargaron had watched since he were a boy, two
stars caught heavily in each other’s torturous gravity, endlessly,
endlessly swirling, swirling, swirling about the other.

More squeals now accompanied a new
round of wriggling and shifting in the sand. Gargaron waited with
his arm poised, and a second root-man broke surface and he grabbed
it.

5

Back by his campfire Gargaron sat
down and crossed his mighty legs as embers flurried up into coming
dark. Gohor and Melus were but mere glow trails upon the hazy
horizon now. And fireflies twinkled magically along the darkened
edge of the Precipice. Endworld, far, far, far below, had been
swallowed by its gods.

Gargaron held both root-men toward
his crackling camp fire, as his father had done, as he had done for
his parents, until their squeals faded. Now they sang, transfixed,
enchanted by warmth and glow. Gargaron then searched heavens for
Ranethor, great God of life, most prominent body in the nightscape
of the Great Nothing.

When he saw Ranethor’s stark globe
rise upon the north-western horizon he began to pray. For
forgiveness. For the souls of the root-men. Prayed that Endworld’s
Wraiths would hear his summons.

He waited… waited for a sign from
Ranethor.

Then it came: a yellow eye crossed
its surface, from east to west, a planetoid in orbit around the
blue gas giant, one that mysteriously could only be seen when loved
ones were being prepared for their Becoming.

Gargaron stood now, and held his
captive root-men against the searing, licking flame. As their long,
spindly root legs caught afire they sang, still under enchantment.
Gargaron kissed their small earthy heads… and then he tread
carefully to precipice’s edge and hurled them out into the abyssal
darkness beyond.

Their flames roared and flared
angrily as they fell—their angelic song floating up to him—and fell
and fell. Until, so far below him, their firelight gently faded out
under blankets of inky night.

6

Gargaron sat beside his wife and
daughter. He kissed them both. His wife first. Then his daughter,
another tear drop rolling off his cheeks, which fell and splashed
against her soft skin. As it did its many droplets underwent a
swift metamorphosis as tears on Cloudfyre will do when love is both
true and deeper than all of the oceans, sprouting wings and legs
and arms and small angelic faces, and they all took flight, these
tiny fairy creatures, flapping about Veleyal’s face, before
alighting gently upon her forehead.

Gargaron lay down between his beloved girls
and gazed up at the great cosmic void.

Then he slept.

1

HE had been asleep on the grassy
western banks of Buccuyashuck River when the first shockwave passed
over him. The large goggling eyes of his Nightface, the visage on
the rear of his skull, watched this shockwave pass over. Trees
shook and spat out leaves, loose stones and pebbles jiggled and
jumped, ornithens took for blue skies only to plummet like stones
back to ground as the wave pushed through them, smashing them
against bluff and ridge that banded the eastern edge of
Buccuyashuck. Swarms of pigmy deer burst from shaded woodland and
scattered in a hundred different directions, many dropping dead in
mid stride as if shot through their skulls by arrows.

The Nightface lifted its one
single appendage, a long finger like spike. And prodded Gargaron’s
neck. Though perhaps it were unnecessary—the rumble, shake and
groan that had besieged the ground beneath Gargaron, had already
begun to stir him.

He swished Nightface’s spiked
finger aside, thinking at first it were some big suckyfly come to
chew off skin for its nest. When a second prod came Gargaron opened
his eyes and looked around, shaking deep dreamy sleep from his
mind. As he yawned and looked about he tapped into his Nightface’s
most recent memories. Here he saw all that had just transpired. A
shockwave rippling madly through the rocky ridge across river.
Pigmy deer all bursting from breezy forest. Ornithens taking for
clear skies but finding only death as they splat against stony
ridge.

He gazed across Buccuyashuck,
wondering why the ornithens had been affected so. Presently he
noticed men-fish rising to surface. And giant lampreys wriggling
sickly about the rocky bank.

Naturally he reached for his
fishing rake. Lampreys were a delicacy but menfish were an elusive
catch. Hundreds were rising now to river’s surface. Of course, it
were forbidden to eat them. They were said to be the children of
the First Men, those who had inhabited these lands a thousand,
thousand generations gone. It were said menfish knew the gift of
speech. But would converse with none but their own. To hear them,
the Oldwuns told, was to hear deep magic of ages lost, tales of
epochs come and gone. But to catch one meant good luck, so long as
it offered you a gift of the Wetworlds, the drowned realms that lay
deep and down within Cloudfyre’s core.

But here with rake in hand, Gargaron
hesitated.

Few menfish appeared to be moving.
In fact all were afloat, and on their sides. Gills gasping for
breath. Their skinny arms reaching out to merciless, unkind gods.
Their mewling cries pitiful and sad. Gargaron could barely listen.
And could only watch, as one by one… they died.

He climbed to his
feet, looking about with goggling eyes.
What, by Thronir, is this horror before me?

The eyes of his Nightface looked
about in detached silence, feeling an odd sense of confusion, even
sympathy, for such an unprecedented number of dying
men-fish.

Gargaron watched more ornithens
come hurtling down, thudding into rock and river; their necks,
legs, and wings snapping and cracking on impact. Then clouds of
suckyflies began peppering his skin, dropping down dead from the
skies.

Next came a roar
as a thunderous tide of black water cascaded madly down river.
‘
Oh, to Old Wolven,
’ he gasped, ‘
what be
this?
’

Hot black water spread like oil,
dead fish tumbling and thrown about in its clutches… flashes of
their silver scales could be seen as wave fronts smashed and
crashed and heaved against rock and bank.

In a panic, Gargaron climbed
rapidly for higher ground, leaping up rock just as frothing waves
swept over the bank upon which he had only recently been asleep.
From his new vantage, he observed the carcass of half a hundred
beast and fowl, caught in this black tide, come rushing down the
wild currents, unceremoniously tossed and thrown and battered
against serrated rock. He saw limbs torn and broken, he watched
bellies be ripped open and intestines spewed into raging black
surf.

2

When the second shockwave struck
Gargaron thought it must be the sound of the Scarecrow Range
tumbling down. The range dominated the skyline northways’n’east.
But those snowcapped mountains appeared unshaken.

Instead a deep, hideous grumbling
noise could be heard rolling eastways in an almost sluggish
movement, some juggernaut rumbling through the high woodland
plateau toward him, shaking violently leaf, branch, trunk and
rock.

It were almost
upon him when, frantic, he threw himself behind a wall of shielding
rock. He braced himself as an odd sonic wave crawled across the
region, passing through
earyth
and rock and tree and air, and through even
Gargaron himself, pushing directly through bones and flesh and
organs, some powerful invisible force, causing him to shudder
violently, dropping him to his knees, making him gurgle, spit and
splutter.

Then it went
sweeping away, west to east, slowly across Buccuyashuck (surface
water rippling and jiggling and frothing) before it moved up over
rock shelf and away across the eastern stretches of
Godrik’
s
Vale.

From his knees, Gargaron had
watched in an almost catatonic stupor. But now he were off, running
in blind panic.

3

He charged through woodland,
astounded by hundreds of corpses that suddenly and inexplicably
littered the grassy forest floor. Foxes, angel-mites, sunflies,
squirrels, Gurbs, deer, ornithens, pixies, ground sloths, fern
weavers, rock dwellers, wood borers and grave dogs all. Sunlight
slanted down in wonderful warming beams but all it did were
illuminate the dead and dying all about him. All this sudden death
made him think of nothing else but that of his wife and
daughter.

He reached the top of Cahsteks
Ridge, charged through Hovel’s old stone gates, built two thousand
years before during the days of the Soonsk, when the Xideyysa Gods
rode down from the stars on stones afire, leaving the vast
continent of Godrik’s Vale pockmarked with craters.

Jagonard and
Corinarv, village sentries, did not stand guard. Matter of fact,
Gargaron saw them nowhere. Their absence alarmed him.
Why should they find need to abandoned
post?
Except as he pressed forward he saw
fresh puddles of blood, deep purple-black, cast across the worn
cobbles leading to a pair of bodies.

Here they lay. Jagonard and
Corinarv. Slain and dumped upon rocks, while the spidergrass were
already supping at their blood and intestines.

Horrified, gasping for breath,
Gargaron kept running.

He came upon Hovel’s village
square; the buildings here were arranged in a circular fashion
around a central clump of stone megaliths where animal sacrifices
were still strung up, rotting, slowly being eaten up by mulybugs
and fire-ants, chewed at by growing green mounds of
bonefungus.

Carcasses littered Hovel’s cobbled
streets. Those of his own people. Just this morning he had walked
through here on his way down ridge to river. Vonagar had been
heading out to the high plain beyond Buccuyashuck to hunt grass
lizards with his falcon. Henendar and Melinaya, young lovers, had
been rigging a wagon for journey to Waysville and Cidertown along
Far Trail. Sellers had been hauling open their market stalls,
Gorinth and Farbenay squabbling over positioning of olive jars and
strings of pickled toad.

As well, the Magers at Hovel’s
Temple Of Vruinthia had been about their daily ritual of merging
mind and body with tree and plant, to prey and meditate in order
that they may further unlock the secrets of the natural realm. The
great wooden form of Vruinthia, which from lore passed down from
Great Dawn (being the time of the earliest days) spoke as being
half tree, half giantess, still stood atop her temple.