T’aakshi

T’aakshi reached down and pried the tanae free of its place in the spear. Its misty-blue surface swirled and shifted faster now, as though aware of his desire to use it. He would do what must be done. That was all well and good to say, but how? His Father had never spoken about how to use the tanae, at least not in front of him, and he could hardly ask T’aallin if he knew.

He rolled the spherical jewel between his forefinger and thumb, his gloves discarded on the floor of his tent, and narrowed his eyes, trying to recall the times he had seen the man use it. T’aakshi wasn’t sure that touch was necessary, but most of the time Saamu had pressed his palm against it in order to access the memories he needed. Then, Shis body would stiffen for a half-second, eyes seeming to detach from what was happening around him, before he had the information he needed and was ready to press on with whatever challenge had required using it.

T’aakshi let the tanae roll into his palm, its edges catching the faint glow of his fire’s light. Touch might not be necessary then, but likely made the process easier in some way. He closed his eyes, slowing his breathing in an attempt to calm the violent rattling of his heart. The mental control he’d had to learn whilst teaching himself to channel self should make figuring out how to use the tanae more straightforward, but only if he remained calm enough to take advantage of it.

He tried to focus on how it felt in his palm. The glassy surface should have been chill to the touch after a day’s walking in the frigid outside air, but it emanated a surprising warmth that seeped into his hands and crept slowly up his arms in waves. T’aakshi concentrated on the feeling, curious. How was it doing that, and perhaps more interestingly, how hadn’t he noticed it until now? He could almost see himself following the sensation back towards the tanae in his mind’s eye, a bridge connecting him with it.

Without warning, the warmth took his entire body, as though his reaching out to investigate had been taken as an invitation. The chill of the Tagayan air had disappeared entirely, and T’aakshi could no longer hear the low hiss of his blubber-oil lamp, or the muted sound of the winds outside his tent.

T’aakshi opened his eyes, tentatively at first, before snapping them open as he saw where he now sat. Stone that hadn’t been there before jutted painfully into him, a path of muted yellow, red and grey stone cobbles ran into the distance, lined on either side by weather-worn walls built from brick in colours that, to T’aakshi, were reminiscent of several shades of dried blood.

He stood, eyes scanning his surroundings warily. Nothing here felt sturdy or natural, as though everything he could see might at any moment shatter and reveal itself made from sand or glass. He was clearly on some form of bridge, and as his eyes followed the cobbled stones to their destination, he sucked in a breath as what lay at its end filled his vision.

At the road’s end, a set of crumbling stone stairs, moss-smothered and weather-scarred, led to a gargantuan platform of stone. It was as though some God had lifted a mountain from the ground and hung it there, upside-down, its peak reaching down into the abyss rather than towards the sky. But it was not this that had stolen the breath from him.

The upturned mountain had created a plateau or sorts, and it was to this that the bridge led. The entirety of its surface was ringed with a stone wall that stood what must have been at least ten men high, its surface as pock-marked and coated in an emerald patchwork of mosses and algae as the stairs that led to it.

Directly in its centre lay what must have once been a grand gatehouse, a rounded tower with an arched entrance lined with flaking and worn away carvings. Above this, reaching upwards above the rest of the wall, the roof of the gatehouse split into three domed towers, each carved with a strange oval something, facing in a different direction. Vines reached around each of them, snaking in and out of their various strange protrusions, and grasses and small, vibrant flowers and grasses grew upon whatever flat spaces that had gathered enough detritus to sustain them.

With a start, T’aakshi realised these somethings had once been faces, the vines weaving in and out of stone eye sockets and wide-open mouths. Once, somebody had carved this to be a majestic and proud-looking; showing the full glory and power of whatever long-dead heroes they had built it in honour of. Now, he thought, suppressing a shudder, the faces had contorted and twisted themselves as though they had felt every second of what time and nature had done to them.

Beyond the gatehouse lay thick green, more than T’aakshi had ever seen in his life. Towering trees stood packed densely together on the small surface, ringing tightly around a central structure that loomed over everything else. His mouth hung open at the sheer scale of what he could see. Three stone towers with domed roofs, each large and grand enough that T’aakshi could have easily been convinced they were home to the Gods themselves.

Unlike everything else here, these towers were not crumbling or decrepit. Their colouration had stayed vivid and true; one of sun-yellow, another of blue, and finally one the same red T’aakshi had seen in the rubies that could sometimes be dug up around the wastes, and prized by the southerners even more than gold was. Immediately T’aakshi wanted nothing more than to press on up the stairs and explore them, to discover the secrets that they surely must hold, but he knew well to be wary of that feeling.

This place, for all its wonder, was not real. It reminded T’aakshi of the book he had created within his own mind to organise his own memories and access them easily. It was likely that the towers he could see in the distance were something similar. A construct designed to be large enough to store the memories of generations of his people, rather than just a single person. It was also likely that there were things here that guarded against those who didn’t belong.

Mist hung thick in the air on the other side of both walls that lined the bridge he stood upon, obscuring what lay on either side of the horizon. He tried to walk towards it and have a closer look, but it shifted and swam in front of his eyes, and danced away from the hand he stretched out towards it like a skittish animal afraid of his touch, all the while affording him no glimpse of what lay beyond. He turned back, and impenetrable black was all that met him, a wall of nothing that, when he tried to focus on any particular part of it, brought on a wave of nausea so strong that he had to turn away. That, he knew with a sudden, startling certainty, was the way out. Which, of course, left only one way to proceed, cautiously or otherwise.

He swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat and set off towards the stairway, stomach squirming as though he’d swallowed a mouse live and whole. It took the first few echoing steps for him to realise that other than his own shaky breaths, this was the first noise of any kind he’d heard in this place. Hesitating for just a moment, he stopped and held his breath, listening for any kind of sound from anything.

Nothing. Not even the faint ringing in his ears that dead silence usually brought on a calm, windless night out on the wastes.

T’aakshi shook off the sudden chill that crawled down his spine, and pressed forwards. He could not afford to let fear get the better of him now, and he did not know how time was passing outside of this place. His Father had always made this seem instantaneous, but how much of that was down to experience, T’aakshi couldn’t say. Either way, he had an unsettling feeling that lingering here for too long would not be wise.

He hit the stairs practically at a run, the stone steps so tall he had to half-jump up some of them. Despite their aged and ruined appearance, there was never a moment in the climb where his footing felt unsteady, or where the stones beneath his boots seemed as though they might crumble under his weight. In fact, he barely felt as though he was climbing at all. Seconds bled into minutes, each step remaining as easy as the first, and if not for the painless slap of his boot-soles on stone, he might have wondered if he wasn’t flying rather than climbing.

He reached the top, his breathing no more laboured than if he had been sleeping soundly, and passed under the rain-blackened stone arches, doing his utmost to avoid looking at the grotesque faces above. As he emerged on the other side of the arches, the first thing that he noticed was the clinging heat of the place. He had felt nothing like it in his life. It was as though the trees that arced overhead, with their reaching branches and thick blankets of rich leaves, had trapped in all the heat, and were pressing it up against him from all sides.

The air was thick and damp, and already he could feel the skin on his forearms growing slick with sweat under his furs. T’aakshi considered removing his jacket, but as he reached across to undo its buttons, there was suddenly nothing to remove besides his plain brown undershirt. He scratched at the stubble forming around his face, frowning.

When he channelled self, all he saw was the book in his mind—he wasn’t present as he was here. That he might be in control of how he appeared here hadn’t occurred to him. T’aakshi glanced around, checking that the dreadful silence around him remained, and that nothing lurked in the dark between the trees that surrounded him. Certain that he was alone here, he closed his eyes and imagined himself clean-shaven again. Then he reached up and touched his face. This time, his jawline was as smooth as the day he had been born. He grinned in triumph, before focusing his attention once more on the task at hand and the direction the towers lay in.

Years ago, he’d read a southern book that described a journey through something they had called a jungle. The place he was walking through now matched that description almost perfectly. A mixture of sodden soil and leaf litter lined the floor, soaking his boots and feet, and heavy plant-life blossomed in every conceivable nook and cranny. Vibrant flowers dressed in purples, pinks and blues dotted his surroundings like jewels, but more than anything, the sheer volume of green was utterly overwhelming.

T’aakshi never would have believed it possible to have so much green—so much life—in one place, were he not seeing it for himself. In fact, he still was not sure such places existed outside of the strange world held within the tanae. Yet, for all its vibrancy, for all the jungle seemed teeming with life; the further he walked, the more something tickled at the back of his mind, until the thought screamed at him in its urgency.

For all of its wonderful life, the silence remained.

His book had described a place like this, but seething with the movement of more creatures than the author could ever possibly describe. A thousand insects, buzzing and scuttling around their tiny worlds, and the hundreds of animals and birds, coloured as brightly as the flowers scattered around them, that hunted the insects. The larger beasts that lurked in the undergrowth, with lightning stripes and fangs like swords that would hunt even the people that lived there.

Here, there was nothing. Not a hint of movement troubled the corners of his eyes, nor had he seen any animal or bird since he had come. Even the countless leaves of the trees were deathly still until he brushed past them. T’aakshi found that the longer he walked in the insufferable stillness, the more his hands curled into tight-gripped fists, and the more his mind told him that the unnatural lack of anything meant that something surely lurked just outside of his vision.

Then, just as the dense trees he’d been travelling through parted, revealing a sparse clearing at the base of the central tower, a single piercing sound cut across the silence, shattering the illusion of isolation. It was a sound T’aakshi knew well: the baying howl of a wolf in the distance. He spun, trying to work out the direction it had come from, and his spear materialised in his hand without him ever consciously thinking he would need it.

T’aakshi scanned the surrounding trees, the long, haunting note of the wolf’s call trailing off, leaving the silence it had destroyed in its wake. There was still no movement, no more sound outside of his own panicked breathing.

“That toy will do you no good here, boy,” a rasping, nasally voice called out from beside him.

T’aakshi whirled, heart in his mouth, and lashed out with the spear wildly. He felt the shock of impact rattle his elbows, and found himself staring into a pair of pale blue eyes, like chips of glacial ice sat in dark hollows. They belonged to an elderly man with skin pale for even a southerner, wrinkled like cloudberries left out in the sun. He looked down, and saw his spear embedded in the man’s brown-robed chest, crimson seeping rapidly out into the heavy cloth.

T’aakshi’s mouth worked in silent horror and he stumbled back, fighting back the urge to be sick. He hadn’t meant to—

The man, T’aakshi’s spear still in his chest, cocked his head back and laughed. The shrill, bone-grinding sound filled the clearing, standing the hair on T’aakshi’s arm upright. His head snapped forward, and he aimed a toothless grin in T’aakshi’s direction.

“I told you, boy,” he said, grin never slipping, even as he yanked T’aakshi’s spear from his own body. “This won’t do you any good here.”