Black Halo

‘Gariath!’

He did not stop.

‘LOOK AT ME, PUP!’

He paused.

He turned.

A fist met him.

Grandfather’s roar was as strong as his blow. Gariath felt his jaw rattle against the knuckles, felt it course through his entire body. The silence was gone now. In the wake of Grandfather’s enraged howl, the wind blew and shook the trees, the water churned and hissed in approval. Four hundred and ninety-nine voices found a brief, soundless voice.

Gariath could hear them, but only barely. Grandfather’s roar drowned out all sound. Grandfather’s fists knocked loose his senses as they hammered blow after blow into his skull, as if the spirit hoped some great truth was slathered upon his knuckles and would drive itself into Gariath’s brain.

But Gariath’s skull was hard. His horns were harder.

Grandfather learned this.

Through the rain of fists, Gariath burst through, a cloud of red mist bursting from his mouth to herald his howl as he drove his head forward and against the spirit’s. It connected solidly, sending the ancestor reeling. He followed swiftly, going low to tackle the spirit about the middle.

Claws raked his flesh; he ignored them. Fists hammered his skull; he disregarded them. More than one foot found itself lodged in a deeply uncomfortable place; he tried his best to ignore that, too, as he hoisted Grandfather into the air and brought him down low.

And hard.

Gariath was panting. Grandfather didn’t need to breathe. The spirit continued to lash with a vigour and hatred better suited to someone young. Or to a Rhega, Gariath thought, feeling a faint urge to grin. But his admiration lived only as long as it took for him to recognise the disparities between them. Gariath was bleeding flesh and rattled bones. Grandfather was rivers and rocks. The ending of this fight was clear to Gariath.

And his heart ached to finish it.

‘You’re tired, Grandfather,’ he said.

And the spirit’s eyes went wide. He did not stop fighting; the ferocity behind his blows only increased, his roar took on a new savage desperation.

‘No, Gariath,’ he snarled. ‘I am not tired. I will fight you so long as I have to. I can’t let you throw everything away. I can’t let you end up like-’

‘Go to sleep, Grandfather.’

Blood leaked from a split in his brow, weeping into his eyes. He shut them tight.

When he opened them, nothing remained on the earth beneath him but spatters of his own blood.

He clambered to his feet. His body did not cry out in agony. Rather, his muscles sighed and his flesh complained. Cries were for proud battles, wounds that had earned the right to scream out. This was not such a battle.

He carried his bleeding and battered body away to recover. He wasn’t sure where the Shen came from, but he was certain he would have to be strong to reach it. The Shen were strong, after all. They were Shen.

And he was Rhega.

So were those who lay in the lake behind him. Their cries were quiet now, though. That brief spark of life that had surged through them had died, and the world had died with it. The wind was still. The earth was quiet. The waters were calm.

Silence settled over the clearing once again, as though it had never left. Gariath tried to listen to it, his distaste for it gone. It was preferable, he thought, for if he stopped long enough, if he let his ear-frills adjust to the silence, he could hear a single, solitary voice, not yet dead, far from alive.

It drew in a quiet breath. There was no breeze for its quiet sigh to be lost on.

He tried to ignore it.

There was ice.

Everywhere in the cavern, Lenk stared back at himself, his face distorted by the crystalline rime that coated the cavern walls, the dim light seeping through holes in the ceiling reflected upon its surface. At the mouth, it was mirrorlike, and he met his own worried gaze a dozen times over a dozen glances. With each step deeper, the rime solidified, became cloudy and thick.

His face became distorted in it: elongated, flattened, crushed, reduced to a pink blob, shattered into a dozen jagged creases. And through each mutation, each abomination, his eyes remained unbroken, unaltered, unblinking as they stared back at him.

As he continued down into the cavern, the ice became thicker, cloudier. He shivered. It was not the callous, emotionless cold that chilled him. Rather, the ice was heavier with more than just water, cloudier with more than just white.

Hatred.

It radiated off the cavern walls, a cold heavy with anger, crueller than any chill had a right to be, seeping through his flesh, into his bones and clawing at him with hoary fingernails from the marrow out. He felt it now, but while it was painful, it was not new. He had known this cold before. He had felt this hatred before.

‘This can’t be right,’ he whispered, fearful of raising his voice that the ice might hear him. It was why he kept himself from screaming. ‘There can’t be ice in this part of the world.’

‘There is.’

‘It can’t be natural.’

‘You forsook the ability to deny the unnatural long, long ago.’

He said nothing, staring deeper into the cavern’s rimed gullet. The light did not diminish, but it changed, shifting from the dying light of a golden sun to the dim azure glow of … something else entirely. He stared down it. He did not want to do more than that.

‘Go,’ the voice responded to his hesitation.

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘Going back is not an option.’

‘It could be,’ Lenk said.

‘They betrayed you.’

‘It’s hardly the first time. I remember once, Kataria was eating something she said was rabbit meat and offered me some. It turned out to be skunk meat. She laughed, of course, but it’s hard to feel bad when someone eats a skunk for the sole purpose of trying to trick you into eating it, too.’

‘Stop it.’

‘What?’

‘Stop trying to justify it. Stop trying to excuse it. Stop denying what is apparent.’

‘What’s that?’

‘And stop pretending you don’t know. I speak from inside you. We both know that they have always thought less of you.’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘You brought them together. You gave them purpose, gave them meaning. You never asked for any of them. They came to you.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘They used you. You brought them salvation. You brought them hope. You brought them reason. The moment they had those, the moment you required aid, they abandoned you. They betrayed you. They betrayed us. That cannot happen. Not again.’

‘Not again? What do you mean?’

‘Go into the cave.’

‘I don’t know if-’

‘GO.’