Chapter 8: I Need A Sword

The child poked its head out from behind a piece of rubble. Mold grew on its edges. Othomo saw a flower shaped emblem carved into an unmarred corner. He sat down by the child and patted its head. It could have sat on his palm, if it wanted, so small was the creature. The wreckage of the empress was gone, sent to the darkest of voids for forgetting, and once again he was drained of strength. The dowager had devoured much of the dustlands before she died. It could be that her own gluttony destroyed her. Even the Mighty have their limits. Even the old ones. He sighed.

"A friend of mine once lived near here," he said, his voice now free. The child cocked its head, and he laughed, eliciting a smile from his unbidden companion. His voice was a cold whisper that shook the land about him, yet the child showed delight. Unicus.

"I haven't spoken with anyone in a long time. Don't try to understand me. Just smile and nod."

He realized with surprise and slight embarrassment that he'd been expecting her to nod. Her? He looked it up and down. His piece of cape covered its waist and upper thighs, so he could not tell the creature's sex. There was a gentleness to it though that reminded him of Selenne. Before they knew her as the Pale Queen, Selenne glowed like a comet and darted about the expanse as it grew in the first days. Behind her trailed the silver light, half of the earthly luminescence. She coveted it, and kept it close to her at all times. Back then her and Arun were so young and so innocent. Othomo did not yet understand that they were truly afraid of him. He'd thought their flight from him a childish game, and that his parents were overly worried when they saw the young lovers running from their shadowy son.

In those days, Othomo had friends. Selenne and Arun may have run from him, sneaking off to kiss with the lights tethered above their heads. For hours they would stand under the lights and stare at each other. It made the other Mighty sick, but Othomo thought it sweet. Still, they never allowed him to come near, and he only found chasing them fun for a while. He favored more the company of the forgelords and the seedbearers. He watched the forgelords learn their purpose by tearing open stars and using their cinderous hearts to shape raw matter. The seedgrowers eagerly told him everything they'd practiced, and from them he learned a great deal about the growing of food. Once, after an especially long session with Niin, he went to Archimonde and asked him to make a homunculus and see if it would eat some of Niin's sprouts. Those were the things the forgelords made in those days. Mock bodies of Mortals animated by thought, and phosphorus mountains that floated in empty space. The seedgrowers would cover the mountains in forests and grass, and Othomo would cast his cape over them in semblance of night. And so the young Mighty learned the will of Thou Who Made Us All.

The child shivered. Othomo nodded, then stood and went to a grove of small trees. He had no hatchet, and Friend was far too murderous to be bothered with any sort of utility, so Othomo had to push a tree down by hand, and tear the trunk to burnable pieces. He piled the logs and as he wondered how to kindle them, a tiny spark was seen in their midst and within moments they had a blaze. The child sat near, then slept, and for a time Othomo allowed his mind to reach out for his love.

Not you, he thought when Noctis disturbed his inner sight.

Yuluru swirled about him in a dream, while he stood waking inside a hallway of warm light. Hands of glowing gold reached out to him and caressed his greathelm, ran fingers through the dark horse tail, and fondled the softness of his cape. Fire roared within a kiln.

Yuluru reached to him from the bottom of a crystalline pool. A woman, naked, with eyes like Suns and long black hair wrapped about her body, huddled around the inannis within the relentless shadow. Her belly was swollen with child. A hammer struck an anvil.

Yuluru folded her arms over her chest and turned her back. Rows of golden knights with red cloaks stood in front of her, shields up, spears out. She dropped one hand; black sand trickled out, a few orange embers flittered upward. Steam hissed out of a vat.

They made their way eastward, turning south at the ruins of a once large dust town. There was a domed building in the center, it's roof half crushed, and a bell tower shaped like Phosphora. The well was topped with a bronze sphere that wore an iron crescent crown. The houses had been trampled to splinters, and the sheepfolds and stables were broken down and cast in the air. Many rooftops were broken by the falling stones and timbers. They found no food in the town, but outside its borders were some vermin the child was quick to kill and eat. The child ate the food raw, and Othomo began to wonder at its origins. Its parents were most likely in the mound of death yonder, now forgotten in the vastness of time. The little beast held up a bone and looked back towards the battlefield where the matron died.

"No," he explained, guessing the child's question, "the consumed do not return."

The child's face was thoughtful, then it nodded. Othomo wished he could explain more, having dreamt the final shape of the world. The decay and disparity brought by the fear of the lovers was not a natural order, and could not be understood even by those sent to repair it.

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The nearby Pillar of the Seasons pulsed. This time he was ready, and turned the power away so that its meager energy could go into the land. The child soon fell asleep, and he himself remained still, as there was a watchfulness in the air. In the sickly light of evenday his heart reached out for signs of ohr. He sensed a presence to the south, a small ways east, enough to be one who might aid him. The battle with the spiders had taxed him heavily, as he was without a proper battlefield weapon. Friend was a worthy enough tool, but he would need his zweihander, or at least a substitute. Foe was a blade like no other. He hoped it was not beyond his reach altogether.

They set out when the child woke. It darted about as the land became less barren. There were dark crags and tall, stone like trees with high arched boughs. The child found more vermin to eat, and occasionally a gourd or shriveled roots. It seemed at all times to be preoccupied with food and water, which it lapped up greedily wherever it could be found.

Several turns of light passed as they're feet carried them on. The borders of the carrion fields were visible on the horizon, and now and then a green sprout pierced the crust of the dustlands.

Othomo followed the traces of a city. The empress must have fallen upon it when they first landed and attacked with rage. There were huge slabs of carved stone stuck in the ground, and amongst the natural stonefall of the sky were fragments of towers and houses embedded in the ground. The remnants of a wall marked the border of the city, and it was large enough that the child was too fatigued to walk before they reached its end. Othomo carried it in the crook of one arm, taking care to walk smoothly. At length he set his companion down in the hollow of a large crag. There was a cool pond in the hollow, surrounded by a grove of sparsely leafed trees, and a statue the relentless shadow had never seen.

How long had he been unconscious? Selenne had subdued him, using the power of her stolen light to toss him about so he could not maintain his footing. Then Arun pressed him with lances of golden heat. He remembered how beautiful and terrifying they both looked then; Selenne was so slender, a knife given the body of a woman, and Arun's hair flowed like flames from his dark and manly head. Othomo had disposed of an army of lesser spirits before succumbing to their strength; neutron hussars, catalyst archers, samurai of solar wind, all fell before him, but the lovers did not. Fiends who chafed at order, for reasons both noble and nefarious, but all misguided, he'd tangled with them as well. Some he understood, though he disagreed with them, and he wished he could help them finish their cycles of thought. Others had consumed themselves within themselves, and their rebellion was against nothing, and their rebellion helped nothing.

The faces of the Mighty swirled about in Othomo's infinite mind. Infinite; yes. Completed; no. He did not know the face of the statue. She was of Mortal height and proportions, the parts of her body in the ratio of the source curve, being the span of six and a half heads high. The pedestal was tall, so that her delicate brow rose to where a visor would be on a smithied greathelm, but on Othomo it was a solid expanse of dark iron flesh.

The child climbed the pedestal and looked up at the woman, trying to get a hold of her granite arms to climb higher. Othomo lifted the mongrel up and held it as he'd carried it. It looked to the woman's arms, at the baby swaddled and cradled within. It was an infant, indistinguishable from any other Mortal newborn. He thought that, but then the child fawned over the eyes, and looking close, Othomo saw the pupils had been carved to look like tiny Suns. There was something else about it, some detail that looked different, but it was a stone carving of an infant, and infants are microcosms of time, ever in rapid flux, so whatever it looked like then, it could not look that way now. Besides, the stone carved swaddling blanket obscured the features he wished to examine more closely. He looked again at the face of the woman. She wore a simple robe, and bore no jewels. Her face was nicely shaped, enough that she could almost be confused for more than a simple being. She wore a hood, so he could not tell if she were dustfolk or treefolk, but she must be one of those two.

They rested there, for the child's sake. The statue was masked from view by the trees and crag, and during evenday there was very little light. Othomo would have shed tears, were they among the gifts imparted to him. So close, but not close enough to be real. A promise, perhaps? Purpose.

Darkness rose amidst the bright of mornday. They walked straight through noontide and turned at a sign, then a gradual decline to a ruined wall where they found the sound of a mighty pound that shook the ground where they thought to find nothing at all. There were remnants of a compound that included a quarry and a smithie, and an opening to a subterranean domain. The doorway into earth was of a size for bulls to march down fifteen astride. The above ground forge was long empty and the embers in the furnace were cold. The tools seemed small as well, for greater Mortals or lesser Mighty. Thrond was below, ringing his hammer in the dark, and so Darkness descends.

The doorway was vast, the stairway immense, the first cave enormous. Tombs littered the ground, leaving narrow paths that Othomo could scarcely hope to tread. The child found the wider ways, and took his finger in its hand, guiding him through the beds of the dead. Othomo, moved by jaded impetus, dug a slash through one tomb with his sabaton. There were no bones inside, only a box with an engraving: Naramin. Another: Basin of the Blissful Plain. Another: Deep Woods of Melian. Another: Canyon of the Blazing Stars. Othomo sighed. He remembered an intimate friend, a proxy of storge, stop-gap for a flooded drought. The partial transcendence of the temporal, portioned out to the children of Oroboron, gathered in preparation for a stabbing of light into this adumbration. Times of comfort were ready to present themselves, times when the forgelords were learning and humble enough to believe, and the thieves had yet to steal.

The second cave was even more vast, and there was no light, save for a soft glow behind that was of no use to him. But his familiarity with his own unique biosphere gave him his own brand of sight under the flesh of the world. He bore the inannis after all. The walls of the grand space were rounded, but it was not quite a tunnel. Mosaics of suffering covered them. Upon close scrutiny, each stone proved to be a smaller mosaic of yet more suffering, the smaller stones made of scenes that transposed themselves upon the larger, so that the body was made of so many minute visages of the heart, but dressed as a mirror looking into a mirror, the figure within no longer sure which mirror they are looking into, if ever they even were. Over and over the motif of an empty well was found. Sometimes there were drained white bodies strewn about the ground outside, sometimes there was a single figure looking desperately into an empty vessel drawn from the well. Another scene that repeated itself, though less frequently, was especially disturbing to Othomo. An old man hammered his own infancy on an anvil.

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