Chapter 16 #3
Torver rolls his eyes, just in time for Winander and Bassen to return to their makeshift camp. Torver discreetly pushes Winander’s tools behind the log that is his seat.
The next morning, when everything is packed back up again and Torver has redeposited the shaving tools where they belong, Winander takes his turn to drive the ponies.
He doesn’t comment on the beautiful, boyish smoothness of Torver’s face, which Torver finds rude, but forgives. If only to concentrate on the route the man is taking.
They venture into unfarmed land—wilds that are untouched.
For a long time, at least. There is a stone sheep shed, but it’s roofless.
A while later, they admire abandoned cottages whose grey stone walls have been given to time, flung and lost forever into the knee-high grass that the wagon is fighting through.
All of it is interspersed with long stretches of green hill, flowering bushes that butterflies flit from, waterfowl pecking the edges of plinking streams. The land flattens slightly and they pass a plum orchard, and Torver quietly plucks the sweet fruits from spindly branches as they pass, putting them in a bag for later.
The tree branches hang wide and low, raking down the wagonside.
The ponies begin to lather in exertion, heaving them between rocky outcroppings.
“I see something on the horizon,” Lavellin leans slothfully over the side of the wagon, exposing the skin of its waist with its reaching.
Torver concentrates on Lavellin’s pointed finger.
“There’s nothing there.” His face contorts into a grimace, like squinting might improve his human vision.
“Looks like woodland to me,” Winander adds.
Lavellin frowns. “Can you really not see it?”
“Let me guess,” Torver leans back. “Your eyes are better than mine.”
The fae angles its head, as if pleased.
“Everything of mine is better than yours,” Lavellin replies in an even tone, before turning to Winander. “Point the ponies west a little and we should be close enough for your human eyes in no time.”
“What is it?” Torver asks. “Something bad? Enforcers?”
“Nothing like that,” Lavellin soothes. “Just go that way, Winander.”
Winander obeys. Soon, a path reappears—some semblance of an ancient road, overgrown and unmaintained but more traversable than the raw land. Rotten piles of wood, overgrown with plants—once upon a time, they might have been signposts; now, they merely punctuate the journey.
Until they see it.
Distant red stone, rising upward like claws from the ground. Thick trees reaching into the sky with spindly arms and bony fingers; either dead or precognizant of looming autumn.
“It’s a temple,” Lavellin says, voice low and awed. “To the gods that your people outlawed. The ones that sent the Beast.”
Lavellin’s jaw is ticking as it looks skyward for a moment, making strange hand motions. Torver remembers with a start that Lavellin is a believer.
“The gods?” Bassen repeats the two syllables uncomfortably.
“Yes,” it says, flashing the white of its smile as it gazes ahead once again. “An abandoned temple, once built in their honour.”
Torver doesn’t think that abandoned is the right choice of word. But he doesn’t know quite what the right word would be. As usual, he isn’t sure what happened. Only that there were gods, and now there aren’t. Their temples left to decay, the prayers forgotten. No gods, no kings.
“Well, they certainly taught us a lesson,” Bassen folds her arms. “We’re a fraction of what we were, if the tales are to be believed.”
Lavellin makes an interested sound.
“Humans used to be powerful—I think,” she says. “We were so powerful, the gods smote us with the Beast—”
“They smote you with the Beast because you thought your power exempted you from the necessities of faith,” Lavellin interjects with a raised brow. “But, go on.”
Bassen tuts.
“Well, they won in the end, didn’t they?” she says. “When King Dunmail defeated the Beast and trapped it below the cairn, the effort reduced all human magic to one power each. A shadow of what we once were.”
“Yeah,” Torver agrees, putting his feet into Lavellin’s lap without thinking. “And most magics are weak as shit.”
“Sacrilege, young Torver,” Winander chides.
“I mean it!” Torver laughs, knocking the toes of his boots together absently. “Like what even is watermancy? I can move water too—it’s called a cup.”
The wagon chuckles, even Lavellin. It looks at him steadily, its hand coming to rest on his ankle.
Its fingers sit on the fabric of his trousers but its thumb—its thumb skirts underneath.
It touches his skin, works a small circle into his leg hair and he won’t look at it.
He won’t look at it. But he frowns when it stops, retracting its warm little hands into its lap.
“A cup,” Bassen repeats, the barest chuckle under her breath.
Rounding the side of an almighty tor, they enter a clearing from which ancient ruins peek above the treeline.
A quiet settles over them, their jokes fading into heavy silence. Lavellin withdraws its feet from next to Torver and sits up, alert.
The temple is a skeleton. Both in that it is a dead thing, and in that only the barest bones of it remain.
Arches like ribs curve into the sky at fantastic heights.
Pillars drive down into the dirt, the overgrown greenery seeming to devour them.
The ground is pocked with fallen stones, the intricacy of their carvings dulled by the winds and rains, save for only a few places where they’ve been sheltered by angle or happenstance.
They get closer and closer and the aching structures, shattered by the eons, continue to grow up around them. Until they’re in it, in the thick of it, where their inconceivable smallness takes them each by the neck.
Beetles gathered beneath the hulking mass of the boot.