Further grove. Steadily they made a rough way through the thicket. Glimpses of the steppe Serib had between trees showed her she walked with Konisoki through an oasis. Beyond the trees a rocky desert was seething, its dusty heat claiming the oasis back from its isolation as in the endings darkness-all shall envelope the last of stars.

  ∞

  Konisoki’s earlier talk of secrets helped ease or distract Serib’s other thoughts:

  “Do you know anything about a ‘Lightning Crown’? The Spring-Sworn is looking for it, or looked for it, when she was young like me. She was tempting me to follow her path.”

  “And the dark Spring-Sworn spirit that hexed you was already wearing such a crown, I would think?”

  “She was. The hex, what do you know about this?” She showed her bruised, branded wrists to Konisoki. “I do not know how it has damaged me… I have been confused by Timelessness since Haven; that has not changed.”

  They smiled together in agreement.

  ∞

  “Though hexed, I feel no less powerful. I feel powerless all the more just as before. What does it mean to be hexed?”

  “There are many hexes. I have seen this one before… written in cave-art on a lonely asteroid. In this variation, our masters were among those that sealed it away until they learned secrets cannot be kept; they have a weight, gravity might be the word, as those old stories of rings with wills their own. Timelessness has reverted these and not those, some things and not others, and so the secret designation of this hex has come and gone. Was it originally our masters, or other shamans past? In Time I could have known. What else has Timelessness brought back and washed away or altogether undone…”

  “Why would it be so forbidden?”

  “The shamans forgot with age that secrets cannot be kept, or they were made to forget. There are other hexes I know of that were never forbidden, that I would think were more deserving. Perhaps if Greed’s age truly shines, nothing will be forbidden ever again, as all citizens will be equal in their virtue? With all the tales I’ve gone through, this is the hex Soki’ne. In your more primitive tongue, it means mirror… half…” he thought for a while. “…broken bridge or bridge breaker. All this it means and less and more. Shamans are often described as bridges, no?”

  “Primitive?” Serib felt like she’d been called an ‘illiterate’ again.

  ∞

  “When all languages but the one you and I are speaking became tower-lost, much was lost along, when many were translated into one. Though simpler with beauty less. Lillian and I watched it… much of human misery came from misunderstanding one another. ‘It made sense’ they said. And all though lesser, was common good thereafter.”

  “Reason won over Love.” Serib knew The Emancipation and Eradication of The Languages less than she thought.

  “It did. What even is the name for the language we speak? It is ‘Language’.” He shrugged. “After all languages but one were tower-lost, there was no need for names. Scholars held on with interest, but History stretched too long for the fewer and the fewer still. Your hex. With Soki’ne upon you, if you spark a fire you will be burned. If you conjure water, you will feel drained more than the water can nourish you. Harming another will harm yourself.”

  "And if I help others?"

  "Is the line between so clear?"

  Serib smiled thinking of poisons and medicines, of powers well-meaning, of the young setting their separate worlds to rights in good company with words, teas and cakes alone.

  ∞

  “Then Minim’Syrib fears me, why else would she brand me with this?”

  “With all her power, you are her bane. Your feet are very heavy.” He observed along their walk as a child might blurt out, while he moved light as a shadow through the dense trees.

  “Just as Gadail’s affinity is Wind, I believe mine is Earth.” she stated proudly as to explain her stomping strides. “…and yours is Fire?”

  “Quite in this life.” He clicked his fingers and his hand opened as a flower, holding a gentle, struggling white flame. White as mighty stars as though with distance ignored. Making a fist afterwards only smoke remained. “Water more in others.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  ∞

  Watching Konisoki’s smoke waft away with the breeze Serib noticed shadows across the thirsty tree roots, moving and gone. As the shadows of birds go. She leapt over to a tree and began climbing, making a ladder of the branches and leaving her totem-staff with the grass to keep. Her knees stiff from climbing Haven and The Greatmount Nain’mahuin, even more The Gravestone Column she would not remember, each step twofold.

  “Do you not see that?” She asked Konisoki who was slow to jump after her, his eyes captivated by her staff on the forest floor.

  ∞

  She peeped through the tops of the trees, keeping herself hidden from the winged horrors scraping across blue skies. Not vultures as she usually feared waiting for Gadail’s passing, instead she saw grim angels similar to Silence, not black stone but grey-lighter and gray-darker with only two wings, in phalanx their shields and spears patrolling in flight untouchable.

  “They’re looking for us?” She asked, as Konisoki also had a look, the two of them with their heads poking dark out of the parched-pale leaves. “They’re made of stone… why are they made of stone? What happened to them?” she knew somehow they were not statues given terrible life, but angels smothered in stone.

  Konisoki was troubled. As to better hide his everywhere-flowing hair longer than himself, a blackness startling against the yellows and the ochres, he descended down some of the branches to say:

  “Once we’re out of his thicket and back onto the steppe, The Boiled Angels will spot us easily, so-” he was quickly interrupted.

  “Lord of Shadows, Secrets and Illusions.” Serib mocked him playfully. “They spotted you straight away. Should we fear them?”

  ∞

  Serib watched as shamans should. The angels had their militant moments she observed, moving orderly and in unison, though some would drift from their formations, sit by the sides of dry once-lakes or other unknown dreams across the steppe-land; remembering what once was. There were other pockets of life throughout the rocky, scaly desert. Though not long was her pity and pause as a small formation of these ‘Boiled Angels’ had turned its phalanx towards the oasis she hid inside with Konisoki. She grunted, rushing back down the branches:

  “Should we fear them?” She urged.

  “It is best if we hide. I have seen this somewhere before… these skies. They are invading… if we have alerted some there will be others. Give me a moment to spin an illusion…”

  ∞

  Alas if Time was strange then Space as well and all its distances, and what had from the dry treetops seemed far away was without explanation far closer than before. The gargoyles were soon with the beating of their heavy wings breaking the fragile canopy. Without warning their spears stabbed down - Hadaeon steel that had survived whatever befell their wielders buried yet airborne.

  ∞

  Serib knew if she retaliated her hex would weave her harmed as well, though brave she took up her staff from the yellowing grass, flared her tusks and cast her totem into the earth. With quick rumbling the sky darkened bleak from Summer’s light. Konisoki was nowhere, and before Serib even wished it to lightning flashed about the skies and wanton bolts soon crashed down to the world. Even the sight of her lightning striking here and there inaccurate was enough for the stone fiends to flee. In a moment we shall know how it is with such ease she banished them; before that, one of those angels with more wings than the rest and darker stone - unarmed - was fully struck terrible in the back by Serib’s lightning, and from there began its own retreat barely able to fly.

  ∞

  The landscape was so dry that flames were born from her lightning, though mere tufts here-there and bushes far apart were all that could burn on such a scaly land, and such fires lived short with vaster smoke.

  ∞

  As the angels fled, in their fleeting shapes she saw pasts not yet, futures long gone, a flood of water. A vision of seas boiling under acid rains. She heard their drowning screams as they fled, echoing throughout Timelessness. There was a blinding, deafening flash tremendous and she fell slammed to the cracked ground. Thunder was all she heard, quieter and quieter.

  ∞

  She sat up with the help of her staff and Konioski, unusually drained by her efforts. All around her the closest trees were scorched black, char stained the air and embers glowed through the ashes with sunlight watching everything.

  “What is wrong with me…” her hexed wrists she moved from one soreness to another.

  “That knocked you down for a while…” Konisoki stared blankly.

  “A while?” Her vigour returning, she gazed vacantly and supposed: “My staff took the worst of it.” Thankfully ‘made’ or meant for such things.

  ∞

  Konisoki helped her up from the earth.

  “That is not ideal.” Serib spoke lightly or lightheaded, feeling Woid’s words through her and Shay’s surmise: “Konisoki… seeing the angels flee, striking at them, I saw Far… do you have Farsight, too? Or has Timelessness taken it from you?” she asked with some strength regained.

  She had wondered away with Farsight, seeing floods not yet or long gone and the Earth underfoot had grounded her back; as a tide in and out.

  “I have a little too much…” Konisoki smiled. “Though, what did you see?”

  “A glass lighthouse or observatory, and the ocean around it.” She placed her palm on the burnt ground still warm. “Angels not boiled but flesh as you and I, all being cast into the waves. Banished. Punished for betrayal… they were trying to fly away but my lightning was striking at them, striking the ocean giving its waves scald and bubble, and the angels…” Serib could not speak for a while, reliving The Boiling and the darkness of her own heart. “I saw my future? Or a variation of it… The Spring-Sworn created them. Swinging a mauling hammer, not a staff.”

  ∞

  “’And foul was known.’ Is that Farsight true prophecy, or a memory returning to you? I will answer as best I know, but we must go. Are you well enough?”

  The two set off into the wider plain leaving the oasis behind, exposed in brilliant sunlight keeping an eye on the empty skies. There was no path leading to nor from that place, a brief respite known or revealed to few and are those few chosen by Fate, Payn or Chance? She said to him:

  “If Minim’Syrib, if I created those angels… then I am responsible for Silence? His stone darkest having longest burned… responsible for what you become.”