Black Halo

tremendous earthen roots extending into the lapping waters of a great pond.

An Elder, the familial rock from which all Rhega began and ended, loomed over him. He surveyed it, unmarked and unadorned as it was, and felt a smile creep across his lips. The Elders were the basis, the focus, the stability behind any Rhega family. And, judging by this one, it had borne many burdens of many of his people.

His people.

They had been here in numbers great enough to raise this rock and call it their earth, once.

Once … He felt his smile fade at the words echoing in his head. And a long time ago.

The scent here was faint; that couldn’t be right, he thought. The Elder was titanic. The scent of the Rhega, of their memories, their families, their children, their wounds, their feasts, their births, their elders … he should have been overwhelmed, brought low to his knees by the sheer weight of the ancestral aroma.

But the smell was one of stagnant rivers, moss-covered rocks. Not alive, not dead, like the rot between a dying winter and a bloody newborn spring, barely faint enough for a single memory, a single statement to make itself known.

But it did make itself known.

Over and over.

Ahgaras succumbed to his wounds and died here, the scent said.

Raha bled into the earth and died here.

Shuraga fell and, his arms ripped from his body, died here.

Ishath held his dead pup in his arms and ate no more …

Garasha screamed until his breath left him …

Urah walked into the night and never returned …

Pups fell, elders fell, all fell …

He drew in their scent, though he did so with ever-diminishing breath, his heart conspiring with his lungs, begging him to stop smelling the memories, to stop wrenching them both. But he continued to breathe them in, searching the scent for anything, any birth, any mating, any defecation, anything but this endless reeking list of death.

But he found nothing.

He felt them, each one of them, in his nostrils.

And in each expulsion of breath, he felt them, each one of them, die.

‘Five hundred.’

At the sound of the voice, he turned without a start. His body was drained, a shell of red flesh and brittle bones in which there dwelt no will to start, to snarl, to curse. All he could do was turn and face the grandfather with eyes that sank back into his skull.

‘Exactly,’ the grandfather said.

‘What?’

‘There were five hundred Rhega that fell here,’ the ancestor said as he walked wearily to the water’s edge. ‘I spent over a year taking in their scents to find their names, Wisest. I doubt you have that long.’

‘I don’t have anywhere to be.’

‘You do … You just don’t know where yet.’

They stood, side by side, and stared. The waters of the pond lapped soundlessly against the shore. The wind in the trees had nothing to contribute. The Elder was the grave into which all sound was buried and lost, so inundated with death that even the great sigh of the earth was nothing.

‘How did you find this place, Wisest?’

Grandfather’s voice brought Gariath back to his senses, his attentions to the heavy object dangling from his belt. He reached down, plucked it from the leather straps that held it there, and held it up.

Grandfather looked up into empty eye sockets beneath a bone brow.

‘I asked the skull,’ Gariath replied.

‘You went back to find it.’

‘I needed to know what you wouldn’t tell me. The skull knew.’

‘The dead know.’ Grandfather stared out over the pond. ‘I had hoped you wouldn’t have ears for their voices.’

‘It didn’t say much,’ Gariath said. ‘I could only hear fragments of words, like it was talking in its sleep. It knew where the Elder was.’

‘All dead things know where the Elder is.’ Grandfather sighed and made a gesture to the pond. ‘It speaks because it can’t remember that it should be asleep. Do what is right, Wisest.’

Gariath nodded, kneeling beside the pond to let the skull fall from his hands into the water. In its empty eyes, he saw a kind of relief, the same kind that followed an important thing remembered after having been forgotten for so long.

Or maybe I’m just seeing things.

It did not simply vanish into the water. Instead, it remained stark white against the blue as it fell, still vivid in his eyes no matter how much it shrank. The sunlight caught the water’s surface, turned the blue into a pristine crystal through which he could see the muddy bottom and the stark white that painted it.

He stared into the water.

Five hundred skulls stared back.

‘This was a pit when I brought them here,’ Grandfather said. ‘When it was all over, when I was the last one alive … I dug the earth open and lay them within. It rained — a long time it rained — and this pond formed.’ He nodded. ‘Rivers and rocks. The Rhega should lie in water.’

The sunlight was chased away by clouds. The water masked itself with blue again. Gariath continued to stare.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘Same way everything died on this island,’ Grandfather replied. ‘In the great war.’

‘Between Aeons and mortals? I thought the humans fought that.’

‘They did. Would it surprise you, Wisest, that we fought alongside them? In those days, we fought along many creatures that you would call weak.’

‘It does not surprise me. The Rhega should have been there to lead, to inspire, to show them what courage is.’

‘And you know courage, Wisest?’

‘I know what the Rhega are.’

‘So did I, back then. So did we all. We thought ourselves full of courage … That was reason enough to fight.’

‘To hear the humans tell it, the Aeons threatened all mortals.’

‘They did,’ Grandfather said. ‘But the Rhega were made of stronger things than crude flesh and bone. No matter what the humans tried to tell us, we were apart from their little wars. If we died, we returned to the earth and came back. Let the humans be concerned with heaven.’

‘Then why did we fight?’

‘We had our reasons. Perhaps life was too good for too long. Perhaps we needed to remember what pain and death were. I don’t know. I’ve thought of a thousand reasons and none of them matter. In the end, we are still dead.

‘But we fought, all the same, and in that day, we became a people obsessed with death. When the first Rhega died and did not come back, we turned our thoughts to killing. If we did not kill, we died. If we did not die, we killed. Over and over until we were the red peak upon a mountain of corpses.’

‘And you died in battle with the rest?’

‘No,’ Grandfather said. ‘I should have, though. When the children of Ulbecetonth marched against the humans and the earth rattled under their feet, I marched alongside everyone. I climbed their great legs. I shamed the humans and their stupid metal toys by splitting their thoughts open.’ His eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. ‘I leapt into