What the….?
Time itself is no longer anchored.
Not strongly held together in the first place, my atoms are being dragged apart or smashed together.
No! Not dissolution! Not now, not again!
It’s worse for the eilendi.
They’re out of tune—each Circle running ahead or behind the next.
In one, the eilendi can no longer hold the rot at bay. Their members age at alarming speed. Their hair turns white and wispy, falls out. Their skin wrinkles and dries, sprouts age spots. They wither in an instant, collapse into brown dust. A glimpse of falling teeth and bones, and those, too, vanish.
In another, the eilendi are still shaping the first word, mouths stretching in slow motion, eyelids descending in a centuries-long blink.
They can’t do it. They can’t make it.
The ground shudders as two massive hands are thrust out from the salt, looming like trees, grasping at the sky. Huge and black, flickering as they blur from solid to gas and back, they sink into the shoulder of a melted mountain. The mountain sags and collapses into itself, taking an entire Circle with it. They hardly recognize their doom before they’re covered over with dirt and rock.
I whisper prayers for the dead, my eyes leaking mist.
The demon’s skeletal head, dark as midnight, rises out of the salt. Its eyes, burning with hate as hot as the sun and as heavy as a sledgehammer, rake over the world.
In that instant, every word is torn away from us. The eilendi go rigid with horror, and the greasy bubble ripples, expands outward.
In the central circle, all the eilendi fall to their knees, save for her. She’s still chanting, stretching her arms to the skies, and it takes precious moments to recognize what she’s doing, even as her body turns transparent.
“Watch ou—!” I yell, but my words are torn to tatters and flung aside.
I plunge into the midst of eilendi, scattered like cast-off flowers. I reach for her, but a fierce light pushes me back, acid heat stings even my fluid body.
And right before she turns to vapor and boils away, her eyes open and she looks at me.
Sees me.
Her mouth shapes the words I know you.
The changing world rushes into our own. My body does the only thing it can to protect itself.
It flies apart and flees.
The last thing I know are the screams of the eilendi, strangled in their throats.
I flit through empty corridors, and ghost over cracked tiles. Round and round I go, an aimless cloud of particles, pushed this way and that by breaths of air.
Oh.
I’m back in Kaal Baran.
I hover over the paving stones of the courtyard, buckled and broken in the battle between Kato’s ragged army and Highwind soldiers.
There are no eerie men. The cloaks are gone where even I can’t reach them. The flashes dissipated.
No Kato.
I mist through the outer gate. The rust leaves an iron tang in my mouth, a red streak across my soul.
I stand in the quiet valley and look at Tau Marai, a hunched shadow in the dying day. It’s better than craning over my shoulder and seeing the lurid light over the salt. The wrongness of it has hooked itself into my soul. It spreads slowly, but surely, like an oil stain across the desert.
Once the Dark Masters were the horrors of our world. How could we imagine the greater terror of the salt demons?
But there’s nothing I can do, save feel some measure of acceptance, even peace. At least I will die quickly.
A scuttle among a pile of rocks by the canyon wall. My muscles clench. “Come out,” I buzz.
It’s a mechanical spider the size of a dog, bronze and leggy. It stops just at the edge of my vision.
I can discern no eyes, but its attention is on me.
It waits.
“What was your role in all this?” My words are a dry whisper. “Not a golem, not a Garguant. You’re not something the chroniclers ever wrote about. Not a guardian, then, nor a soldier. But something else. A builder, perhaps?”
There are tiny spiders in Kato’s body, this I know. Is this one of their bigger cousins, a creature whose responsibility is to build and repair the guardians of Tau Marai?
And still it waits for me.
I take one step towards it. Then another.
The spider turns, movement slow and deliberate. It tip-toes into the darkened valley on delicate legs, like a wary child.
It’s trying to match its pace to mine. It doesn’t want to lose me.
I skirt the remnants of golems. Already there are fewer of them, as if they’ve been scavenged. Rocks are piled along the valley walls and I scramble over them as the spider leads me on. My palms sink into stone, and when I shake them loose, crumbs of mineral are lodged into my long, fragile mourning cloak bones.
Small caves riddle the walls, dark like eyeless sockets. Even though I am a creature of Deep Night, even though I see with senses that do not rely on the light, a tremor goes through me as the spider eases its carapace into one of them.
I… remember… As a small child, I was warned about crevices in the desert and the creatures who hid in them.
What can poisonous snakes and stinging scorpions do to one such as me? I plunge in after the spider.
The tunnels are circular and winding, as if they’ve been burrowed by giant worms. Shallow, round nooks are hollowed out of the walls at intervals. In them are golems: broken parts and detached limbs and half-built torsos.
So that’s the way of it.
There are other spiders here—a shifting in the dark, a click-clicking of legs over stone. Their attention presses upon me and I want to sink into the ground. My cloak trails into rock as I hunch; I lose atoms of myself with every step.
How much longer
