A Chronicle of Lies-Book 1- The Dark Sculptor (High Fantasy/Isekai)

Though the expedition appeared to travel at a leisurely pace, their speed was deceptive. They covered a lot of ground in a matter of days. The La'ark wanted to waste no time getting to Crefield. The plan was to travel Admoran's North across the Sulan Hills, then cut West and cross the interstices to the Marow Plateaus. The plateaus were geological formations that reminded Vincent of the Badlands, only their rocks were shades of blue and green. The place left dizzying after-images of orange and red. They cut southward and the Marow Plateaus eventually softened before giving way to dry moraines. As the expedition camped in those deposits, the schizophrenia returned.

Vincent held true to his word that he would not cure it unless it was absolutely necessary. Phantom whispers danced in the wind and licked softly at his ears. Rocks sprouted eyes and demanded his attention. Sometimes madness was a balancing game. One had to learn which phantoms to ignore and which ones you had to address. Dave appeared alongside him riding a horse with no head, reminiscing about the wars he had fought in, before abruptly warning Vincent that the Falian soldiers were planning to kill him.

As soon as Vincent began to manifest visible symptoms from the “Bane”, an uncomfortable stillness came over the company he was traveling with. Naturally the phantoms tried to project the soldiers' unspoken thoughts.

“He is mad. We should kill him.

“Why is he traveling with us?”

“He hears us. Be quiet!”

The soldiers stole glances in his direction when he looked away. Their banter was also more subdued. He sat at the edge of his cot and rubbed his forehead, deciding it would be better to address it than ignore it.

“Listen, I can see you guys are trying to pretend you don't notice what's going on with me, so let's get this out of the way,” he said, “yes, I hear voices and yes, I have the 'Bane'. If...” He waited for a rather irritating phantom to stop repeating his words. “If...if it looks like I'm talking to somebody that isn't there, that's normal. If you ask a question and I yell the answer...it's because there are voices screaming at me and I have to yell over them. I see things that aren't there, and I talk to people who don't exist. It's a complex neurological disorder and it's just...something I have to deal with.”

It was Akhil who answered. “So we will,” he said, “however, I advise you not to flout it. It is proof of what we have all been told: Falius is not your birthplace. No groundwalker nor flier can survive the Bane. It would be no less unsettling to witness a man walk around after being decapitated.”

“Yeah...you don't have to worry about me 'flouting' it. I spent years trying to hide this shit,” Vincent said, “but since you all are babysitting me, it's only fair you know what you're in for.”

There was an irony in the fact that his malfunction was definitive proof to these people that he was human or at least, not one of them. They had read Thal'rin's missive and had taken his word that Vincent was an outsider. But it wasn’t until the Bane manifested itself in his eyes that they truly seemed to see the trapped entity behind the flesh. The thing that made Vincent an outcast of humanity, was verification that he was an unwilling ambassador to a world of inhumans.

“It’s different,” Vincent said one day, standing at the edge of a watering hole while the landriders drank. Rivers of blood, crimson and human, gushed forth from the hills and cascaded down their slopes. Rain fell from the sky above, only the raindrops were eyeballs. The gelatinous orbs struck the ground and flailed around, using their optic nerves as tentacles. They fled into the brush, squealing.

Tuls, who was standing nearby, didn’t see any of this. None of them. “Vincent?” he said, “what’s different?”

“The ‘Bane’,” Vincent was distracted by the hellscape his hallucinations were conjuring. “It’s unpredictable. It’s chaos.”

He watched as an eyeball burrowed into the ground. The dirt quivered in revulsion. The Bane was far more unpredictable and less coherent than the schizophrenia he was used to. It did not follow a particular theme. Throughout his life, the delusions went through phases, and the transitions between one phase to another was gradual. The themes of the hallucinations were usually consistent and often repeated themselves during each phase.

If one day, he saw phantom bugs in his cereal, then he could expect to see them quite frequently whenever he poured cereal or ate something else in a bowl. The hallucinations could be vivid, yes, and there was the occasional waking nightmare that came from out of the blue, but for the most part, the hallucinations had a constant theme. When they changed, it was a gradual process. On Falius, they were far more chaotic.

As the land bled and eyeballs rained, cockroaches erupted from the backs of landriders and spread across the ground. Sometimes he unwittingly narrated these living nightmares as they happened, trapped between a half lucid state and a burnout. His voice was flat and emotionless, unconcerned with what imagery his words imparted. Sometimes he was amused by the horrific sights he was bearing witness to, tickled by their outlandish morbidity.

“Do you ever think you have been cursed, Brother?” Tuls asked, half-joking.

“No such thing,” Vincent said, kneeling down to pick up a stone. "I don't believe in curses."

"I am a rock!" the stone said.

Vincent rolled it in his palm, before chucking it. The stone screamed as it soared through the air.

Vincent had his stretches of lucidity, where the voices were reduced to barely audible sighs and where only the slightest of hazes obscured his mind. His companions learned he could be spoken to then. And though they initially had been more distant and reserved, their discipline would not allow them to be intimidated by his symptoms.

One night, when they were clearing brush for the encampment, Vincent was determined to do something productive, so he started tossing branches and sticks into the woods while the soldiers did their thing. Menik noticed what he was doing, watched for a bit and sighed. After finishing up a knot to hold the canopy down, he joined him and started chucking branches into the darkness. Eventually, he stopped and gestured to Vincent.

“Cordell, come over here a moment,” he said.

“Uh...yeah? What is it?”

“You are wasting your movements,” Menik said, “you have four hands, not two.”

“What do you mean?”

“These.” He grabbed one of Vincent's hands. “And these.” He tapped one of his wings.

“That doesn't come naturally to me. I was born with two hands,” Vincent said, “which is all my brain knows. I can't control the wings unless I concentrate.”

“Ah...I see...you are like an infant then," Menik said, “then allow me to demonstrate a technique we use on our infants to connect them to their wings.”

He took Vincent's silence as a “yes” and grabbed the base of one of his wings. Then he gave it a firm pull, putting enough tension on it until Vincent felt a strange tugging in his chest.

“You feel that? The wing is anchored on your keel, right here.” Menik drummed lightly with his free hand on Vincent's torso, right where the xiphoid on the sternum should have been. “It starts as the kalc, the arm inside your chest, that is attached to the keel. Then it runs under your arms and runs up your back until it becomes your 'hand'...does that hurt?”

Vincent, who had been wincing, shook his head. “No...it just feels incredibly weird.” A few phantoms snickered.

“You have fingers–” He felt Menik tug at his digits and pull at them one by one with just enough to put pressure on the limb, but not enough to hurt. Just enough so that he could feel it stretching muscles in his chest and side. “–and a thumb,” Menik tugged the last digit. “Now when I let go, use your wing to pick up that branch. Don’t think about it, just do it.”

“Okay...”

Menik released his wing and to Vincent's amazement, he was able to use a few of the digits to scoop the branch off the ground and sort of “cradle” it between his wing and thigh. It was far from a perfect technique, but he was able to finagle it into bizarre grip by pinching it between two of his digits.

“Whoa...why did that work?” he asked, baffled.

“Eh...perhaps your mind was not made for wings, or perhaps it simply needed to awaken. Look...” Menik did the same thing to the other wing. Vincent could almost feel the neurons overloading as his brain was forced to cope with such an alien calibration. By being forced to feel the tightness against his chest and sides, his mind began to familiarize itself with the concept of a third and fourth arm, each located beneath his regular arms. Before, he could exert some control over them if he made a conscious effort, but this technique, by using tactile touch, by stimulating all the muscles used to move them, seemed to override far more barriers.

“That...works,” was all Vincent could say as he flexed the wings, their nerves still fresh with the tension Menik had applied to them.

“Shekali...” Menik said. Vincent didn’t know why the word failed to translate, perhaps it had no English counterpart. “It does not come as easily to us either. We did the same thing to my infant daughter when her wings unbound from her back.”

“Do you have to do that for all your kids?”

“We do. Otherwise, they won’t learn how to use them.”

“I didn't know that. I just assumed it came naturally to you guys.”

“No. Sometimes we have to do this to ourselves if we don’t use them enough.”

It was surprising to learn that Falians had to do such a thing. Control of the limbs was one of the first things offspring of nearly all species learned. But biology was both diverse and strange, he supposed. Perhaps some imperfection in their evolution necessitated such weening.

“Do you have any children of your own back on...your world?”

“Huh? Oh...no.” Vincent was taken aback by the question. He picked up a stick, nearly dropped it, then shove it into the bushes. “I dated a girl for a few months a couple years ago...but it never got serious.”

“Been with mine for seven years,” Menik said, “she gave me a son and a daughter. Seston and Zash, those are their names. Zash is a little back climber!”

“Seston and Zash, huh?”

“Aye. And Zash is the youngest, she only knows a few words. But she knows how to be a back climber!

“Back climber?” Vincent repeated.

“She will climb your back if you sit still long enough. Doesn’t matter who you are. If she sees a back, she wants to climb it.”

“Oh.”

“She’s a precious thing.” Pride filled Menilk’s voice. “She’ll climb up my back, plant her feet on my wings, and poke her snout out between my horns.”

Menik continued to show him how to utilize his wings. If his arms were full, use his wings to hold objects. Pin them between the digits and his sides. If his hands and wings were full, lay a burden across his back so it sprawled across the bases of his wings. He could carry logs this way. He could even hang objects from the tops of his wings if he wanted to.

Vincent felt a bizarre mixture of appreciation, gratitude, and discomfort. The technique was a breakthrough no doubt, but it also felt like another attack on his humanity. Why did he feel so disturbed and degraded simply because he could feel foreign muscles at work in his chest and sides? He put aside this discomfort and committed himself to learning how to use the wings if he could. Menik told him he would probably have to use that calibration technique again and again until his mind made a permanent connection to the limbs. Vincent didn’t like the thought of that one bit, but he was tired of being clumsy.

A few days later, the expedition came upon another interstice. There was dire talk of a forest called Pearl Wood, which awaited them on the other side of the range. Sperloc described it as a graceful forest whose squat trees had leaves the color of gold and bark as white as bleached bone, with a sheen reminiscent of pearls. It was a sight to behold, or at least it used to be. A zerok had informed them that a black storm had passed through it a few days prior and destroyed the entire forest. When the expedition crossed the pass and saw the devastation for themselves, they went silent.

They overlooked a large valley of splinters and upturned roots. Stout trees whose glassy trunks with the girth of banyans, had either been pulled out of the ground or steamrolled. The autumn-colored leaves had been stripped from their branches and plastered against the ground and rocks. Vincent's madness added agonized groans to the wooden corpses, and he saw Dave walking among them shaking his head. No sign of the stormspawn could be seen among the remains of forest.

The sheer force of the gale surpassed the destruction Vincent had seen on Tulian's Waypoint. He could even see places where the wind appeared to have gouged at the ground itself, spraying the surroundings with mud and dirt. His madness transformed the silence into the wail of a tornado siren, and he stared out with a blank expression, looking over the grave of the forest formerly known as Pearl Wood. Sperloc began to speak, perhaps to express his grief, but Vincent was numb and unresponsive.

They continued downward into the carnage. Vincent bobbed his head to the landrider's motions, only vaguely aware he was riding among corpses. Eyes opened up in the remnants of the forest and followed him. They judged him with their unspoken thoughts. Several streams drifted through the trees, their waters clouded with disturbed mud. Time passed in spurts as he fell in and out of his burnout. They were paving their path through the devastated woods one moment. In the next, they were following the remnants of a road.

Between one second and the next, they stood over a gathering of collapsed homes. Schizophrenia reenacted the sounds one might have heard had this village still been occupied: horses whinnying, people talking, and carriage wheels squeaking. He was just beginning to come out of the burnout when one of the kiolai scouts came riding toward the expedition. He had not come alone. A passenger rode with him.

“Hey,” Vincent said to Sperloc as he tried to shake off the haze, “what did I miss?”

“Did you go somewhere?” the tuhli asked with his usual snark.

“Yeah...I kind of did. What did I miss?”

“You missed the devastation of Pearl Wood, one of the former wonders of Mid-Admoran.”

Vincent looked around and seemed to notice for the first time the glowering in the eyes of all the soldiers. The storm had wrecked a forest of porcelain trunks, had badgered the trees until they snapped, spilling their guts in the form of beige splinters and needles. Exposed grains stabbed accusatory points in all directions. The phantoms’ whispers hid among the wreckage.

“Our enemy can do this...” It was Tuls who spoke, his voice, normally cheerful, sounded haunted.

“Do you feel anything, relos?” Madrian asked.

“Remnants.” It was M'kari who answered. It was one of the few times Vincent heard him speak. The channeler plucked a leaf off the branch of a fallen tree and seemed to caress it.

“Yes...remnants,” Tuls said, “but they are fading, friend. If we had arrived a day later, I might not have been able to detect anything unnatural.”

“Other than an entire forest being destroyed overnight.” Sperloc grumbled as he wrote down what he saw.

“Lumberjacks.” a phantom whispered.

“I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay...”

"Use your powers to defeat them. You can do it.”

"Be quiet!” Vincent whispered.

“Hmm? Did you say something Cordell?” Sperloc asked.

“Not to any of you,” Vincent said, watching the kiolai and his passenger. The La'ark, along with Oris and Akhil had run out to meet with him. “Who's that?”

“Survivor I suppose.”

“Of what?”

Sperloc turned around to gawk at Vincent. “Is your brain with you? Look around!” he gestured with a wing, “he survived whatever did this. Are you here?!”

He seemed to get the answer just from looking at Vincent's eyes. Shuddering, he returned to writing. Vincent watched as the kiolai lowered the newcomer to the ground. His hands and feet appeared to be bound. As soon as the kiolai let go, he curled into a fetal position and tucked his snout into his wings as if to hide. The expedition stopped and waited. Whoever this newcomer was, it warranted bringing the journey to a halt.

“He has the Bane,” Madrian said after a while. He was holding a seeing-eye. “Whatever he witnessed broke him.”

Vincent strained to get a good look at the newcomer, but they were too far away and Oris kept getting in the way.

“Are you sure?” Menik asked, also trying to get a better view.

“I saw him too,” M'kari said, “he's another gloweye.”

“Gloweye?” Vincent repeated.

“Channeler.”

What relevance such a thing had, Vincent didn’t get to find out because he saw Akhil coming straight for him. Schizophrenia projected the creature's thoughts, and he heard the shandan's voice calling for his death.

“Vincent Cordell,” Akhil rasped, “the La'ark requests your presence.”

“What?” Vincent asked.

“Your knowledge of the Bane surpasses ours. The kiolai have found a survivor who is afflicted with it, and he remains deaf to any questions we ask.”

“I'm not sure what you want me to do about it.”

“I have been told there are more of your kind in your world,” Akhil said, “'humans' who walk with madness. Your people know this affliction. We know nothing of it. We do not know how he can be reached. And yet we must know what he saw.”

The creature's force of demand could not be denied. Vincent sighed and withdrew the bottle of Triasat. If he was going to do this, he wanted to do it with a clear head. He hopped down off the landrider before dosing himself. Akhil caught him as he seized over from the elixir's brutal expulsion. When the last wisps of black smoke cleared, he thanked the shandan and got back to his feet.

The haze was lifted and now he could think, unfettered by the obfuscation of insanity. He heard Sperloc dismount his landrider with a grunt and follow behind. Vincent learned from the creature that they viewed with great importance, the documentation of expeditions such as these. So, Sperloc was constantly logging even insignificant details. His script was dense enough to blacken an entire page.

“I'm going to tell you up front, this is going to be useless,” Vincent said to the shandan.

“All we ask is for the attempt,” Akhil said as he led him forward, “he does not have much time left.”

By the time they made it up the hill, several more soldiers gathered to stand guard while a few tuhli waited to observe and record whatever went down. At this, Vincent felt a flair of irritation. The La'ark looked as she had several days ago: severe and fixed with glowering determination. The newcomer, a groundwalker with seafoam-colored flesh, remained curled up with his face buried in his own wings. He could be heard whispering softly.

“Akhil has told you about our guest?” The La'ark asked.

“It spoke with her voice,” the newcomer whispered.

“Yeah.” Vincent looked at the tuhli, who were scribbling down everything he said. “You need to get those guys out of here or at least have them back away so your guest can't hear their 'thoughts'.”

“'Hear their thoughts?'” The La'ark repeated, demanding an explanation.

“Audio hallucinations. This guy’s probably hearing things that aren't there. If he's surrounded by people, the 'Bane' could make him think he is listening to their thoughts and overwhelm him.”

“It...spoke with her voice. Please...stop.”

The La'ark considered him for a moment. “They stay,” she said, despite his recommendation.

Something dripped from behind the newcomer's wings, droplets the color of azure speckled his pants. The creature sniffled and pressed his snout against the membrane of his wing. Through its translucent webbing, Vincent watched as a lacertine bust dragged its nose across, leaving behind a faint blue smear. There followed spitting, like the sound of one trying to free something from their throat. He airbrushed the webbing with blue-tinted spittle.

“There were no sightings of the stormspawn,” The La'ark said, “no signs of corruption. The storm alone could have caused this man to break, but it does not explain the absence of bodies. If this is a new threat, we must know. If you can reach him...try.”

These creatures knew nothing about schizophrenia, so they had no idea how useless this was going to be. Vincent reached for the vial of Triasat, but The La'ark stopped him. “It will not work,” she said. So, he put it back away and approached the man.

“Careful,” the kiolai who brought the newcomer warned, “I have him bound because he tried to attack.”

As Vincent approached the sniffling creature, he could feel ice settling into his gut. It was true that in this world, he was the leading expert in madness. But to expect him to have some sort of special knowledge that would enable him to reach this creature was just downright naive on the part of his hosts. That's not how it worked. But he humored them anyway.

“It...spoke with her voice.”

“Oy.” The kiolai put a hand on the creature's wing and it tensed with anticipation. “We just want to talk.”

“No...no...I don’t want to see them...” the newcomer whimpered, “I don’t want to see...rot...rot...it spoke with her voice...”

“We won’t hurt you. Just lower your wing so we can speak to you.”

At first it didn’t seem like the creature would obey, but then it lowered its wings with careful deliberation. Though the symptoms had been described to him in detail, Vincent was not fully prepared for what he saw. The creature stared at the ground with eyes so dilated, he could have been a feral animal, cornered and trapped. Only the weak rings of luminescence bordering the voids indicated that he was a channeler. The flesh on his face was pulled taut across his cheeks as if he were entering the early stages of rigor mortis. It stretched his mouth until he appeared to be on the perpetual verge of a snarl.

His ears turned and flickered like antennas trying to tune into a weak signal. Streaks of azure blood wept from his nostrils and from the corners of the mouth, mixing with his spittle. He would frequently close his mouth and chew, then hawk up a globule of saliva and blood onto the dirt, leaving his teeth limned with blue. Stringers of slime hung from his lips. Every time he took a breath, Vincent could hear a wet, phlegm-filled rattling in his throat. Cursing under his breath, he got down on his hands and knees so that he was at eye-level with the channeler.

“Hey,” he said, “do you hear the ghosts too?”

“It’s all rot...” the channeler whispered, “it’s all wrong...it spoke with her voice.”

“What did?”

“It got up and...no...it didn’t speak...” He traced a trembling claw in the ground, several large drops of blood pattered into the dirt. “But...it had her voice.”

Vincent felt an unfamiliar squirming in his chest the longer he looked at the channeler’s face. By the second, it became more corpse-like, a face whose lips began to curl until the pointed canines slowly exposed themselves. Small rivulets the color of portable latrine wastewater pooled in his lower lip.

“Hey, listen...I know what you're going through.” It was a lie. Vincent did not know what he was looking at or what was going on inside of that face. “I...I can help you. I have special powers.” It was bullshit he hoped the creature's madness could latch onto. Sometimes when he met another schizophrenic, their delusions would feed his own. If they saw demons on his shoulders, he would see them too.

“It spoke with her voice.”

The channeler didn’t hear him, it didn’t even recognize he was there. The pool gathering on his lower lip poured over in a mixture of blood and spittle, joining the streams coming from his nostrils. Good God...this wasn’t schizophrenia. A brain disorder didn’t do this. The more Vincent watched the creature deteriorate, the more his stomach squirmed. Even a regular case of madness would most likely be beyond him. This was far beyond his comprehension. So, he called it, got up, and headed back toward The La'ark.

“You are done?” she asked.

A surge of anger swelled up in his chest, but he shoved it back down, only allowing a few flames to fuel his response.

“Why...why in the hell are you just standing here, not doing a thing to help him?” he demanded, “don't you people have medics or healers?”

“It is the Bane.” She spoke as if it were an irrefutable fate. “If you try to staunch the blood, it will fill his lungs and he will drown in it. There is nothing that can be done except keep his snout pointed downward. We can try to make his passing as painless as it can be.”

“Well...I got nothing from him. He's gone. You people need a professional, not me.”

“And yet you are the only one who lives with this,” Oris said.

“I don't know what that is,” Vincent gestured toward the wheezing creature, “but it sure as hell is not what I have. However, for the sake of argument, let's pretend he does have what I have. I'm still going to tell you it's a waste of time. I can't reach him. He's in some sort of dissociative state. His mind...the very thing he thinks with, the very thing he uses to string coherent thoughts together, is falling apart. It's turning against him. I don't care if I'm the only one on this damn planet who can survive being a lunatic, that doesn't make me some sort of professional. I can't help him, and I can't get anything out of him...I'm sorry.”

“It spoke...it spoke with her voice.”

The nameless channeler kept repeating that mantra to himself in the same, flat, detached tone.

“That will be all,” The La'ark said and sent him back.

Shaken by the encounter, Vincent pulled himself up onto Sperloc's mount. He was getting better at using the wings for stability.

“Did he say anything interesting?” Menik asked.

“No. He just kept saying 'It spoke with her voice'”.

“Could be describing a threat,” Jeris said.

“Of course, he is...” Vincent said, “I'm sure there will end up being some freak wandering around here speaking with 'her' voice...whatever the hell that means.”

They watched and waited as The La'ark sent her soldiers to look through the ruins of the village. Using all four limbs to their advantage, they were able to scale the debris effortlessly, swinging from rafter to deck with their wings. Vincent tried to imagine what the village must have looked like while it was still standing. Several flattened lamp posts crafted from wood and stone lay across the cobbled street. Dislocated roofs of reeds and slats leaned against the sides of their houses. But any building that wasn’t made of brick or stone was nothing more than shattered tinder. Stray siliths ran about the rooftops, chittering nervously. No bodies were found, not even a single drop of blood.

Though the channeler they found remained unreachable, some of the soldiers proposed that perhaps he sensed the storm coming and had warned the villagers to flee. However, no zerok reported sighting any sign of the villagers nearby or in the surrounding region. There were no footprints, claw marks, nothing that indicated their presence, nor the presence of stormspawn.

After scouring the village and finding nothing, The La'ark gave the order to continue onward with the expedition. They brought the newcomer along with a healer to attend to him. This mostly consisted of keeping his snout held downward so he didn’t choke on his own blood. Vincent didn’t know why seeing this creature unsettled him, but he avoided looking in its direction.

As they walked among the remnants of Pearl Wood, he was trapped in a story, a machine whose parts worked to both seduce and manipulate him into stagnancy. This beautiful forest of porcelain trunks that lay demolished in every direction, seemed to be part of a bigger stage, one set for things to come. What was the connection between his lost memories and the stormspawn? What was his role in this stage-play of dragons and monsters? Even now, as the expedition followed a cobbled road, he thought he felt the eyes of the dead forest follow him.

The forest and mountains receded in the distance and the land gave way to foothills. By the time the sun set, they were traveling across more rolling meadows whose hills were cut by dull trenches. Only the crimson planet, Tarn, was visible that night. To Vincent's eyes, it seemed to bathe the hills in the light of blood. The channeler they brought with them was still alive, but weary. He had to be carried to a cot that somebody had set out for him. In the bloody light, his manic grimace looked hellish. He wore a bib of blood, snot, and spittle on his shirt. Black streaks covered his wings and arms. He had been using them to wipe the drippage from his snout all day.

The rattling and wheezing spread throughout the entire camp that night. The soldiers were clearly able to block it out, but Vincent was left agitated. It brought back memories he would rather forget. His mother, frail and corpse-like, gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, her head bald from the chemo. He stood by her side and...static. More fog, more amnesia hid that memory from him. He wasn’t sure he wanted it back.

“We get to ride a cleft-strider two days from now,” Tuls said in what was a clear attempt at a distraction. Vincent realized he was talking to him.

“You sound as if you never rode one,” Sperloc said.

“I am a marsh man. I have never seen a surge-beast before, much less a cleft-strider.” Tuls managed to force a smile as he sat on his cot. But it was clear he was also disturbed by the stranger's suffering. “I have only read about them.”

“Surge-beast?” Vincent repeated.

“Beasts of stone, crystal and alloy,” Sperloc explained, “'living liacyte' some call them. They can only be found near massive surges. Cleft-striders are such beasts. For generations they’ve been under the care and control of the Walaki. Hmmf...used to be that their ancestors worshiped the things as gods.”

Sperloc laid down on his cot, swearing as his bones popped. “Now they use them as beasts of labor and they won’t share their secrets.”

“Their secrets?” Tuls asked.

“How they control the damn things. They won’t tell anybody. But a cleft-strider is the only way an expedition as big as ours is going to make it across the Clash-Mounts. Once we cross, we get to traverse the domain of the Gash and the Stillwater. I am not looking forward to that.”

Before Vincent could ask more about either, Akhil and Oris entered the canopy. He looked away from the both of them and lay on his cot. The stranger must have been at least a hundred or so feet away from them, but he could still hear his struggle. When Vincent shut his eyes, he could see the channeler’s rabid bleeding face, skin stretched over triangular bones like roadkill. It was offensive to him.

“How is he doing?” Vincent asked without looking up.

“He will not live the night.” It was Oris who answered.

“Try music.”

“Music?” This time, it was Akhil.

“Music. Folk songs he might know. I don't know how similar your brains are to ours, but there was a study on Earth that showed that music has an effect on memory recall. It's a shot in the dark...but maybe it's worth trying.”

For a few moments, neither of them said anything. But then Oris spoke. “Friend, we welcome your advice. But he is now past the point of speaking. Whatever he saw broke him. All we can do is wait until he passes.”

Indeed, the channeler was dead the very next morning. They wrapped his body in his own wings before his corpse stiffened. Remnants of the blue rivers still marked his mouth, eyes, nostrils, and ears. Blood had wept from every orifice in his snout, leaving his flesh taut against the bone beneath. Vincent stumbled upon a dead dog in the woods once. It was during the winter, so there was very little stench. But he remembered the way its lips had curled back, and its eyes had sunken into its head. It resembled the grinning corpse the soldiers were now burying.

As he watched them work, Vincent wasn’t sure how he felt. Deceased, this creature resembled an animal that somebody had dressed in clothes. The glow had dissipated from its irises, and it no longer showed any signs of sentience. His bloodless face now looked feral. Even his blue tongue draped over the side of his mouth, making him look like vermin that had just been struck by a car. Light played tricks with the creature's geometry as the soldiers dug the grave. Their motions chased shadows across the reptilian textures. Though it was dead, Vincent thought he saw the creature tilt its snout a little to face him.

“It spoke with her voice.”

Five soldiers, using weapons and spades, dug at the ground. The grave formed quickly and when they were finished, one grabbed the channeler’s feet and another grabbed the head. They took just a few moments to press the tongue back in so the channeler could at least look half-dignified. Then they tucked the snout under the wings and brought the knees up to the torso. They threaded twine under the knees and tied both ends around the creature's horns so it would be held in a fetal position.

“It is symbolic,” Tuls whispered to Vincent, “this is how we look when we are born. This is how we must strive to be...when we are...when he takes us. So, when we pass, we are posed like a newborn before being put into the ground.”

They worked with the same efficiency they had demonstrated during setup and breakdown. As soon as they had the channeler bound, they lowered his body into the grave with as much respect as they could afford and laid him on his side. They curled his tail around the front and used another length of twine to bind it to his feet. When they climbed back out, the channeler was left lying in his grave like a winged lizard curled up in his slumber, snout tucked comfortably under the folds of his wings. The La'ark recited a short prayer, wishing the unknown channeler to find peace in the next life. Then they departed. As they rode out, a zerok swooped in to finish the job, kicking dirt over the grave.

Vincent could not shake the feral images from his mind. As they rode through soft hills with warm grasses, drawing the eyes of long-necked grazers who resembled brachiosauruses, a slideshow of carrion played through his head. It showed him festering corpses whose eyes rolled back into their heads, emaciated bodies whose ribs were draped with bristled fur. It showed him maggots eating away at cataracts, flies nibbling the gums off of teeth, processions of ants carrying away bits of meat. The Bane was a grinning corpse who wept blood from every orifice and drooled strings of saliva. It was a jabbering creature afflicted with a strange strain of rabies.

It was a little before noon that The La'ark came running toward his group. Above, a black-feathered zerok circled, its shadow racing along the hills. Before she even reached them, Akhil, Oris, and the other soldiers snapped to attention as the messenger projected omens. The La’ark brought her landrider up to them and pulled it to a stop.

“You both will take your men with you and follow Madeen,” she said to both Oris and Akhil, “grab what you need and kick the dirt! I will lead the rest of the army to Heldair to defend the port. Take Cordell with you.”

“You are aware this will bring them after us,” Akhil said.

“We have no choice! We cannot lose the cleft-striders! Or worse...risk having them turn.”

“Wait...the hell's going on?” Vincent asked. The La'ark shot a glare at him.

“A black storm hides within the clouds of an even bigger storm. They both head toward the port of Heldair,” she said, “I am sending you to intercept it before it reaches the Clash-Mounts.”