Chapter 2 #2
Aron stopped her again. After one more glance at the darkening sky, she looked about them for a place to spend the night.
In the distance, she could see what looked like the ruins of a hamlet.
But the horse seller beyond the mountains had warned her—Venture not into where people once lived.
For the past two nights, there had been large red rock outcroppings in the shape of arches under which she could set her tent and light a fire, but there were no such structures in sight tonight.
Sleeping in the open fields with no protection had to be avoided as much as possible.
There had to be a hillock or something that could block this infernal wind.
Arienne gave a firm tug at the reins as she walked on.
Suddenly, she lost all control of her body.
Her lungs filled not with air, not with water, but with something else as her vision turned to white and then faded to black—then her whole body dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings were cut.
A feeling of helplessness and despair overwhelmed her.
Her right cheek hit the ground, her arms refused to move, and her mind refused to think.
This place might have been absent of life, but there was a presence of something that should not exist. A chill of the soul.
A spiritual hunger that permeated the air like fog.
Mersia until that moment had been mere wasteland; now Arienne was reminded that it was where the Star had unleashed a massacre.
The invisible fog of chill and hunger began to take on shapes around her, a crowd of people forming in thin air.
Figures like unfinished sketches, scores of them, hundreds, passed by in the dark wastelands.
The hooves of the phantom horses made no sound, and the lips of the phantom people wearing wide-brimmed hats mouthed inaudible words.
Curled up on the ground, Arienne used all of her might to bring both of her hands to the orb around her neck. She rubbed the cool glass, feeling its scratches and cracks. Nothing happened—her Power wouldn’t flow to it, no matter how much she willed it to with what little strength she had left.
The ghostly crowd walked on by, the hooves of the horses piercing her innards with ice whenever they passed through her body.
Arienne wasn’t sure how long it had been before one of the horses stopped and its rider dismounted.
The rider wore tattered leather clothes, charred in places.
As the ghost approached Arienne, she saw that he was a man, his head hanging from his neck at an uncomfortable angle.
The ghost bent forward and gazed down at Arienne.
Terrified, she tried to bury her face in her knees. She silently begged for the ghost to stop paying attention to her and to continue on his way. But the ghost kept gazing at her. Unable to resist, Arienne looked up slightly, and their eyes met. A face with a short mustache. Empty, sad eyes.
“Child, what are you doing in this place? No longer do we have leather or meat.”
His words were as cold as ice. Arienne, barely able to breathe, tried to say something, but the only word that escaped her was “Why…?”
The ghost’s face instantly began to melt. His skin—mustache and all—slid off, revealing his cheekbones, then the rest of his skull. Breathing was now impossible.
The skull spoke.
“Why has Mersia become what it is now? Or what became of the great green steppe and the herds of oroxen, the beautiful city of Danras?”
She barely managed a nod. Clumps of hair from the hanging head of the ghost dripped down to the ground and vanished where they fell.
“Are you an Imperial? Did you come here because there is still something you haven’t destroyed yet?”
At the mention of “Imperial,” the hundreds of ghosts passing by suddenly stopped in their tracks. The riders, even the horses, turned their heads her way.
Unable to speak, Arienne shook her head, again and again. The skull-ghost stared at her for a moment before turning away and mounting his horse as if they had never spoken.
“O Grim King!” he called out, almost like a sigh. “We have come. Late it may be, but accept our offerings!”
The ghosts suddenly broke out in wails, vanishing one by one into the invisible fog. When the last ghost was gone, Arienne expelled the breath that had been locked inside her lungs.
She had to go back the way she came. She could not spend even one moment more in this place. Mersia would kill her.
As soon as the first scintilla of strength made it back into her body, she began to crawl.
She grabbed Aron’s reins. As she bore her weight down on them, Aron brayed and began to walk backward, dragging Arienne along, but she dared not let go.
If only Aron could drag her all the way back to Arland.
The ground scratched her cheek, but the pain was nothing compared to the desperation she felt.
A shriek, inside her mind. Arienne screamed out loud as she was suddenly deluged with Power as if a dam had broken. Her whole body came back to life as if she were a fish tossed back into the ocean.
She let go of the reins. Aron, freed of her weight, stopped backstepping. Arienne unsteadily got back on her feet. She could breathe. She could move her arms and legs. She took a deep breath. The sky was darker, but the winds had ceased, and the shrieking continued only in her mind.
Opening the door into the room in her mind, she found that it was only the baby who was shrieking.
Babies were supposed to cry often, but this was the first time Tychon had really cried like this.
Arienne didn’t know how to comfort a baby—should she comfort him?
It was his cries that had saved her from the paralysis, like a spell broken.
“It’s all right, Ty, I’m all right now. Thank you for saving me. Now shhhh.”
Tychon’s cries grew softer and then ceased.
His grimace disappeared and he was his happy, adorable self again.
The walls of the room still seemed to echo with his cries, though, a sound her ears couldn’t hear but she could feel nonetheless.
It almost felt like the thudding of faraway drums, directing soldiers to march on.
There was pain in her right cheek where she had scraped it along the ground. Aron stood at a distance, looking at her warily. Carefully approaching the donkey, she took hold of the reins with her left hand.
Her hair fell over her eyes when she lowered her hood.
She gripped a lock of it and noticed that the dust of the winds had made it almost impossible to discern what the original color of her hair had been.
She gently tugged the reins. Aron followed obligingly.
The desperate feeling from a moment ago was gone, but something pressed down on her heart.
She felt uncertain about whether she’d be able to call upon her Power when she needed it.
Arienne fixed her clothing and gathered her wits. This mission was hard, but it would be harder to give it up. There was a long way to go, but even longer still should she turn back. Focusing on the thudding drumbeat left behind by Tychon’s cries, she continued on her path.
As night continued to fall upon Mersia, Arienne thought about what had happened and tried to rationalize her experience.
Countless souls had vanished in the blink of an eye here, and any such massacre would leave a trace.
Sorcerers were especially sensitive to this trace.
And Arienne had to admit that this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to her.
When Arienne was a little girl, her parents had once taken her with them to Kingsworth to sell their goats.
What had left the deepest impression on this country girl wasn’t the people on the street in their colorful clothing or the loud and fanciful performances of the traveling troupes in the squares—it was the slaughterhouse.
A shapeless, ineffable presence saturated it all around.
Little Arienne had stared at the slaughterhouse as if haunted herself.
That was when her magical talents were first suspected.
Then two years ago, in a fortress destroyed by the Imperial army that had come to suppress Arland’s rebellion, shadows that just barely retained the outlines of what they used to be, specters that Arienne could only call ghosts, had roamed among the ruins.
They seemed invisible to the people Arienne had been there with.
Sleep eluded her for days. Months later, when she got up the courage to go again, the ghosts were gone.
A hundred years had passed since the fall of Mersia, but the traces of the people who had lived there still lingered. The ghosts she had just seen—had they grown any fainter in the past hundred years?
She took a lantern from the donkey’s burden and lit it. The light was only just enough to illuminate a few steps around her; else she was lost in a world of pitch-black. Without the light, she might as well have been standing in the middle of the night sky.
There was no point in seeking shelter in this dark.
Arienne put down her lantern and took off her glass orb—it still might have its uses, but it had utterly failed her tonight.
She hung it on the lantern, before turning to take down a long staff and blankets from the donkey’s back.
It would have been good to raise the staff and hang the lantern on it, but it was too dangerous to go looking for a stone to support the base in this darkness where ghosts roamed.
And there was no point in making a fire—what few dead plants could be gathered around here would burn out long before the night was over, and there were no beasts around to menace her anyway.
The only defense against the cold was to cover up with as many blankets as possible.
She hesitated as to whether to extinguish the lamp to save the oil, but in the end, she left it on to burn through whatever fuel it had in it.
In the narrow bit of ground that the light of the lantern touched, Arienne put down her staff and pallet. Winding Aron’s reins around one arm so he wouldn’t wander away in the night, she lay down and wrapped herself in her blanket as warmly as she could.
She closed her eyes and entered the room in her mind once again.
Tychon was asleep, his breathing making slight whistling sounds.
Careful not to wake him, she gently lifted him from the crib and carried him to her bed.
She slipped into the silky velvet sheets.
Inside the room in her mind, Arienne was not covered in the filth of travel.
The cold still seeped into her bones despite her thick blanket, but in this room, Arienne could lie down on a comfortable bed and cover herself with luxurious bedding.
She could fall asleep to the peaceful view of a slumbering baby.
Whether it was a dream or simply a drifting thought before falling asleep, Arienne thought of Danras, the city as it was before it was devastated by the Star of Mersia. She had never even seen its ruins, but she imagined what it might have looked like.
In these imaginings, Danras, a city made rich from leather and meat, was an impressive fortress surrounded by log walls.
Outside the walls, tall grass made a sound like the ocean’s waves as the wind rustled through it.
Children played in the grass, laughing, their heads popping in and out of view.
The paths to the wall didn’t need to be mowed, as the oroxen kept the roads trampled.
As the gates opened, the city was revealed.
Leather was more common here than cloth, and the windows had rolling blinds of orox leather instead of drapes.
The streets were crowded, with the occasional person in Cassian velvet among the leather-clad crowd.
The people seemed to have gathered for a purpose, their gazes fixed in one direction.
Through the crowd, a tall woman wearing tasseled leather chaps rode a tall horse toward the leather gates.
Her hair was woven into a single long braid, and she wore a leather hat with a wide brim.
There was a sprinkle of freckles on her tanned face, which exuded good health. Arienne wondered who she was.
A large carriage followed the woman. The crowd made way for the horse and carriage, applauding and cheering, and shouting something. A language Arienne had never heard before, and yet she understood.
“Yuma! Chief Herder! Bless us again this summer! Bless us!”
There was the sound of a horn being blown beyond the gates. The rumble of countless orox hooves on the ground came closer. The sweet smell of grass wafted on the breeze. The year’s herding was about to begin.
Arienne fell asleep.