Gone is the Sea, far below.
Gone is the rime of cliff's gale.
Gone are the gulls and their crying,
And now does my wand'ring heart wail.
-Lament of the Sea Cliff Sojourner
Traces in the Knolls
His brother's fearsome helm. Held daintily. It felt as though at any moment the rough hewn ridges would, like a dozing beast's back, twitch violently and slice open his palm. Dropped it. A slit in the side of his forefinger. No blood, but a sharp ache. Uhrg… the ache. The ache of endless fathoms.
With muscles screaming, spurting liquid fire beneath his pallid skin, Oneid locked the helm in hand and gaze.
The trek endured as it had for days. But escape was necessary.
A hand not his! Such was the fright, his knees tried to leap up through his unprepared thighs. The ache was such that he scarcely realized he had quit and was standing still.
A woman's hand.
Aori's.
He relaxed from wild fright to guarded tension.
Thin and smooth and firm, she placed her palm on his shoulder. Hers was an absent grip, one more of a thousand previous grasps to drag her charge out of his sulky boyish laze or vacant reverie.
He had regularly accepted the dragging passively. But no! Not this time!
Before Aori could pull him by the tunic, he ducked intently, slipping her talon. Aori stopped hard.
It was not out of any willful disobedience that the boy dropped to the ground. He just couldn't leave that last piece of his brother sunken in the plain like so many other scattered and forgotten monoliths. His brother did not deserve that. None of them did.
He picked up the fallen war crown, its empty weight dangerous at all angles. The buck horns curled round the ears and made for appropriate handles, but even they, for all their smoothness, felt edgy.
Careful holding.
The architecture of the war crown was sprawling, labyrinthine in its micro mosaics, resembling dingy ruins stewarded by lifetimes of weathering. The rigid weight of the helm stamped its texture half into the sandy dirt and half into a thin mat of lichen. The face of it reflected as the smooth-curved lines of a fat scarab in flight.
All this careful observation was to postpone that inevitable moment when he would have to meet Aori's gaze. That pointed look. He knew it was on him. He felt it like a blade at his throat. He had once seen Aori accost the town's midwife chevon with nothing more than her stare. The coarse and voluptuous doe, for all its swagger following the event, never gave milk ever after. Oneid felt his stomach curdle. He never counted on giving milk in his life, so what was there to lose? He met her gaze and it was not as severe as he expected.
It was worse.
Though nothing characteristic of fury, her glower shone from earthen eyes like twin suns. Suns baking bare rock until it sweat. The boy wished for the fortitude of a rock. The gods paid eyes to creation to give that stare to Man and Aori, it seemed, had stolen it all for herself.
Onied may have relieved himself, but, thankfully, he was starving. Aori beckoned him to continue the hike without even tugging the frayed hem of his tunic. The pasty lad schlepped the last paces up the hillock to catch the rest of the group.
Aori turned her attention to the mild impression denting the soft moss and soil before smearing it away with the ball of her bare foot. It could not remain. No trace, or as scarce a trace as is possible with eighteen feet tramping together over knolls bristled with razor and lichen. She was paying close attention to this detail, the traces. Especially close attention to Uung's trail. For his breadth of size, his prints remained light. Perhaps he, too, was smartly minding the group's traces.
It would not be unlike him.
Since the Gray had stopped all had stopped. He squatted, creaked on his meaty haunches and smoked the air. His pipe had been lost. Dropped in the commotion. Or pilfered. If the latter were true, the culprit would be soon sniffed out. The pipe was too good not to use. For now he puffed air, squinting with toady regard at the snaking esker walling off the East with sandy stone shear cliffs.
Close now. Finally closer.
Cardinal direction culminating in a vicious tor, the summit of which stabbing the gray sky's bright flesh. It had been some days, but the little marching clan was finally sealing the gap. If it stayed still, they would be at the foot of the range in two days. So long as they could keep the pace. Ruot worried less about the boy's young legs, Fal's nursing babe, or his own infirm joints and more about the able bodied young and their habit of… distraction. Especially Erd.
Erd danced for a black lizard. A huge black dragon. Almost half the girth of the milkless doe! Oneid watched from behind Gray Ruot as the others milled around the shallow hill. Most collected to watch Erd's display. It was loose and mad, like his bones didn't exist, which was hard to believe when one noticed that Erd was nothing more than a pair of pants that held some skin and prominent bones. Mostly ribs. Now his gyrations had migrated down to churn of his hips.
Erd's reptilian audience stayed motionless, judging the performance as a statue might grade the wind. Just a little longer, the frenzied dancer wished.
Behind, inching silently, stalked Kekech. His arduous pace in such contrast to Erd's distraction, he appeared to scarcely move at all. The silent hunter painstakingly found grip of his hilt.
Quietly now.
A fierce arm of razor pained obsidian growled like smooth rocks sliding apart as it left the heavy scabbard. Kekech winced at the tiny noise.
Erd hazarded a murmur of song to cover the noise. His jig continued to enthrall the dragon.
The blade pulled, Kekech burdened it above his head, both hands gripping, muscles straining with the care of silence against the heavy weapon.
At the apex of his windup, aim taken on the creatures sprawled back, everything stopped. Erd, too.
A flicked white tongue and the scaly audience had disappeared into the ground, apparently finished with the distraction.
Erd was stunned still. He was sure he had the dragon with that hip thrust. He found Kekech still poised and shrugged at him, at a loss. Then he snorted and started into a high guffaw.
Fal and Aflo, who had also been watching the show, chuckled as well some distance away. Even Fal's unnamed kid giggled from the crook of his mother's cradling arm. Oneid almost laughed, but Ruot gave him a discouraging glare. The boy stifled his humor. He wasn't really sure what was funny, anyway.
Kekech darkened and growled his frustrations out against Erd and his levity over losing the much needed meat. Erd's starving belly gurgled to confirm this growing problem. There was no food left but what they could gather in the plains. Being plains, there was little more than dirt grass and the occasional monolithic stone dropped into the landscape. The farther along they hiked, the hungrier they became, but the more humored (and humorous) Erd became.
While Kekech sheathed his broad needle, Erd made a quip about his fellow's burgeoning severity since being so abruptly saddled with the weighty role of Sword Bearer. Kekech left the conversation and walked on. It had been a long, austere march for him most of all. And it would continue to be.
Erd, Aflo, and Fal followed after their sulking swordsman while, just behind Oneid, at the apex of the mound, Uung straightened to his full height, towering over the landscape, surveying it. Looking between him and the tor, he almost appeared the taller. Certainly the domineering presence, if only for that moment. Then he slouched and lumbered down the slope.
Finally, there was Aori. She still stood down the trail, appraising the distance with her mean glare. Scaring it back? Thinking of home?
No.
She was watching for something.
The hillock of Erd's dance had been empty a day and a night. All minor evidence of passage was blown away by the plain winds.
But there was a depression. A minute dent. Unnoticeable, save for the unnatural shape. The hard contour. An accidental design.
Above screams a brown hawk.
A gaudy, feathered hand caresses the hard contour in moss and dirt.
An ignorant army tramps onward in pursuit.
THY NEXT FOE IS…
THE BROKEN PATH
This game deserves better. It is THE game to play. So much communicated wordlessly. Anyway, I hope I did and continue to do it justice.