Wander felt himself lifted from the water.
The water fell away, fleeing from his prostrate body and from the grass upon which he lay.
Grass? Indeed: green sward and moss cushioned his back.
Grey light there was, beyond his eyelids.
In the twilight between wakefulness and dream, his lids lifted, and he beheld his dear Mono.
She was sitting upon a dimly-glowing stone the shape of a human molar-tooth, which stood close beside others of its like, and thus increased the resemblance further.
He could not see her translucent contours clearly, as ephemeral as a sunbeam or a rainbow.
Nor could he hear her exclamation of joy as he woke and saw her; her smiling mouth was parted, forming words, yet nothing but deafening silence reached his ears.
She alighted her bare feet upon the green moss; she came toward him but then stopped short with intimidation: for three human-shaped shadows stepped between Wander and herself.
The near-unconsciousness that consumed him gave way to wakefulness, and both Mono and shadows faded away from view.
XXXXXXX
He coughed, expelling a lung's worth of brackish lake water. As he rose, his understanding expanded: he rode upon a circular island of moss, and that island was moving.
It was moving in steady undulations, far above the lake.
Reaching a standing position, he was able to take full account of his surroundings.
He discovered that he stood upon the crown of an enormous stone quadruped lumbering through the shallows: a colossus that most resembled a bull.
It had no eyes, as if its skull had been cleaved in twain, leaving only its gaping lower jaw and glowing horns spared.
Little could Wander have known or cared, but the beast's ancient designation was Pelagia.
The colossus tossed its horned head, in an effort to shake Wander loose and cast him down upon the sandy shore of the lake.
Wander held fast to the moss to prevent this. He took note of the glowing ring of blue molar-stones: a weak point, perhaps.
He swung the ancient sword at the stone, but to his amazement it was made of no such material; indeed, he had never seen its like.
The tooth did not split apart, nor did it answer the metal blade with equal hardness, but rather repelled it with a wobble; it shook with reverberation, and made a sound much like the village warning-gong when struck.
This took strange effect upon the bovine creature: the colossal head turned the way of the tooth-stone he hit, and altered its path in that direction as it stumbled away from shore.
Wander made the same assault upon another stone, to test his theory of how the colossus might be manipulated.
When Pelagia swayed in the direction of the newly-hit tooth-stone, his theory was proven sound: by way of striking at its teeth, the colossus could in this manner be steered.
But where to steer it? The answer came in the form of a disc of earth, which Wander espied from across the breadth of the lake.
Suspended it was over the water, atop a single stone spindle-tower pillar.
Far larger was the platform than the creature's sheared palate, and about level with it in height.
If he could but disembark this accursed creature onto the table of stone, Wander reasoned he would be in better position to assess and fight the beast.
Toward this disc Wander steered the creature; as it neared this obstacle, the dizzy and rattled stone bull decided to employ its power to destroy it.
Pelagia's horns lighted with an angry red-gold, and from the tips shot bolts of fire at the base of the stone pedestal.
The support pillar cracked, and the earthen tabletop pedestal tilted dangerously: one more strike and the pillar would not stand, letting the pedestal slide entirely into the lake.
It was only then that the ancient sword caught the light at perfect angle, to reveal a faint blue glow escaping the moss on Pelagia's mossy tongue.
Wander fell upon his knees and tore away the moss, revealing the sigil beneath.
Pelagia was turning away from the platform; with no time to lose, Wander stabbed the heart of the sigil.
The colossus bellowed, and fell into the shallows; before it did, Wander made his leap onto the listing earthen pedestal.
The tendrils of darkness that emerged from the body of fallen Pelagia in the lake entered Wander, and stole away his consciousness for a time too short for visions or dreams.
XXXXXX
Atop this platform was what appeared to be the rubble of fallen pillars, perhaps the remnant ruins that once supported yet another level of an ancient tower.
But nay: this pillar had carven eyes that lit with blue when Wander woke.
The eyes were bored into the stone mask of a stone man, which now arose from its slumber to contend with the small intruder made of flesh.
It propped itself up on pillar-arms, one long and shaped like a stone blade, the other shorter and shaped in the manner of a sword's pommel.
The man-like colossus rose upon stone pillar legs, and it was the tallest of the colossi that Wander had yet seen, a full fifteen measures taller than his tribe's tallest man.
The thick and weighty sword-arm alone could have swept aside any of his village watchtowers with ease.
Gaius, the warrior colossus, was he.
Wander held his ancient sword aloft, catching the sun's light.
The beam which formed from its edge led directly to the creatures' face, but there was no sign of the sigil.
Gaius pulled back his sword-arm, prepared for a mighty strike at his human challenger.
Wander ran, and the sword crashed down, shaking the earthen platform; for sure the colossus was slow to strike, but when its blows landed it was with great and terrible power.
Wander found himself at the center of the round arena, where he espied a circle of hard stone in noticeable contrast to the brown earth that surrounded it.
Like was it to the reinforced metal center of a buckler shield, used in lands far away from Wander's; indeed, this was how the very arena itself was shaped.
Wander faced the colossus with the defiant gaze of his sharp and keen eyes; he would flee no more from this monster.
He stood upon this central stone, and awaited another swing from the stone giant.
Waited, even as its shadow fell over him…
Even as it neared to crushing him.
The moment before it ended its downward arc atop him, Wander threw himself into a roll upon the ground and out of its way; the sword hit the stone.
The impact sent a shockwave of tremors through the colossal sword-arm, travelling even to his stone mask, which crumbled to reveal the hidden sigil.
While the stone giant rested stunned upon his stone sword-arm, Wander scrambled up its incline.
When the colossus lifted the sword it was too late, for Wander ran its flat length, and then leapt from it onto his fur-covered stomach.
Gripping pieces of stone armor, Wander made his ascent.
The giant colossus beat its chest with a pommel-hand, missing Wander only by a small margin; bits of the stone armor cracked and crumbled away, falling past Wander to the giant's feet below.
Wander quickly climbed to the creature's broad shoulders, and then 'round the neck to the thing's rather narrow head, where at the very top the sigil glowed blue.
The giant leaned forth to toss him from his furry scalp, so that Wander dangled by a handful of fur.
The blunt stone arm made its way to scrape him off, which surely would have spelled Wander's doom: but ere the arm reached him, Wander stabbed upward into the sigil.
The creature's head rained black blood.
Wander pulled the sword out of what would have been a fleshly creature's brain, and hastened to climb upon Gaius' head.
Gaius fell faceward into the earth, dead.
Wander laid back upon the furry hide of the creature's back, eyes closed and arms spread wide to embrace the hard-won moment of brief respite.
The tendrils of darkness from the sigil of Gaius' crown plunged into Wander's breast.
XXXXX
Darkness, and the tunnel of white light.
A soft, feminine murmuring, but 'twas distant and muffled, unintelligible.
Wander yelled desperately, but no sound from his throat emerged.
The form of Mono emerged from the light, her hair whipping her face.
Wander reached out to her, with grime-blackened fingers.
Mono reached out to him, with fingers pale.
She stepped out, a bare foot into the darkness.
But the arms of the shadows grasped Wander and held him fast, imprisoning him in their dark void abode.
Mono cried out, and one barely-audible word managed to push past the distortion of that limbo-world:
"...Wander!"
The shadows pulled him into the darkness.