Dark Spirit. Young Serib staggered and dragged herself having finally reached the mountains’ howling and competing summits, colder than any budding Spring should be. Known as Greatmount Nain’mahuin that mountaintop - where spirits gather and go since The First Shaman. Her stiff knees ached most of all, climbing a mountain that belonged not to the angel-wrought spines of Hadaeon but ancestral Ehl’yiteth.
Her journey of Somehow’s happenstance.
∞
Thunder’s hammers rattled her steps though no lightning was bright enough to pierce the deep clouds, and Serib felt she waded through a Timeless storm, misplacing and replacing as it whirled.
∞
She held her robes around her shivering, trying to be strong as were the plants she saw growing despite the cold, blown this and that way by voiced winds full of Nature’s words she had yet to learn. The mountain-halved, its last peak she walked now across - where earthen colours umber, ochre and bronze most still grew and gathered.
Leaving scorched woodlands in the acres below she climbed; woodlands that would not grow again fertile from their fires as The Spring-Sworn’s burning was part of no cycle nor system known to Truth.
∞
So loudly had thunder been hammering along her climb, such that when she could hear a voice for a while she did not believe and wandered the peak listening, looking out for where Ithuriya’s starspear-halved had fallen.
∞
She heard feet perhaps, bare slapping on the fragile stones. Turning and turning she saw no soul there running but knew she was not alone, a sudden lump in her heart imagining Iron-Chest and Ahlzvyr defeated, broken in the ravine beside the cracked carapace of Enanti’dromiya. The Spring-Sworn was with her.
∞
Listening and looking for the starspear showed no path, though with her hurried palm on the greatmount’s side she could sense its wounds, its craters natural and not. Layered craters as the petals of a rose though in stone. She shuddered grasping at her hand in pain, remembering something The Stalker had said about a throne of craters:
‘To the hollow tower where she squats in rest never long enough. Alas the throne of her dark making was empty when I found it, as her imagination yet exceeds the grasp of her power.’
∞
“It is yours, Serib.” The dark spirit spoke to her, its eight limbs she heard slapping and biting across the rocks dislodged, and she saw its form only in stolen glimpses, leaving inky runes behind in blasphemy’s crawl. “Yours, if have you heart enough for the task it begins... the duty I am mastering…”
Seeing those limbs Serib’s scalp began to itch, and an answer came to her without beckon from a question she dared not ask, one that all others had accepted though she still turned and turned away from, she asked at last in Timeless seams, stuttering and going unanswered:
“Am I The Spring-Sworn? Will I be… have I already been? And left all that behind…”
∞
Unsure if her revelation was hopeful or hopeless, she followed the pain of the mountainous world to find a landscape of craters. A rose of rows of impacts stretching further than a mountain’s summit possibly could, yet there it lay horizonless. There no Wind was breeze, only seething breaths. She peered over the edge of one crater’s rim and then another-many until at last - there ahead and downwards stood her aim and goal. Mist was parting from it a curtain deliberate, arms opening wider and wider into a grin.
∞
To her shamanic eyes it was a stone or steel rod or staff embed in the centre of the crater, and all the lightning of Nonillion storms was drawn to its askew. She could see only in glimpses through the cover of her arms and sleeves - such was lightning’s violence bright - the half-spear stood runed its hilt and the pit alike. Nail-marks lined the craters, excavated, clawed-at in desperation, this staff a thing long buried and recently unearthed. Untouchable and fled from in haste or its discovery was by those who had eyes only for despair.
∞
It leaned there in rite unheard of - for was Serib to walk over and seize it for herself? As would some common wizard of old vampiric for knowledge and power, purging relics from tombs?
There should have been an ancestor bequeathing it to her, congratulating her journey, having asked her questions the answers of which only the journey could have taught her - ‘as some truths can be taught and others we must learn ourselves’ - as too often she had heard.
With palm, bare foot and an ear to the cold earth, she could hear no ancestor calling out. No Spring-Sworn lurking. Only lightning less often, and thunder’s distance more and more. Receding from her approach.
∞
Serib summoned her courage to tread down the steep of the crater towards its centre, daring closer to the throne of scour where Ithuriya’s starspear-halved awaited. She slipped down the rocky decline. Down the layers and layers of impacts past, the once molten stone cracking against the cold snap as no temperature in Timelessness could decide its dominance. And the dark Spring-Sworn spirit slithered somehow from the somewhere of its making:
“It is the hilt of a once-great weapon to warriors, a shard of a far older totem to shamans. Herald its name! A line to be made loop: a crown of the greatest future no longer behind us.”
When it spoke of Ithuriya’s weapon, Serib sensed the spirit’s desperation, a fellow-shaman imploring far from grace for numb sense had failed. She felt unafraid of them as Pity took its momentary hold, as the spirit spoke mortally out of breath; Wind being the only element they The Spring-Sworn had not enslaved. For there is Spacious Air to keep a bloody machine alive, but what of the courage and inspiration to go on that best in second wind resides? What else is balm but wisdom when justice is unclear and only extremes are coward enough to clash and writhe?
∞
Their Spring-Sworn limbs slapped about as if far from home and element, as might a sea creature unsuited for the land, for what was this Spring-Sworn land forged by Love alone? Their words tempting but of little power. A dreamer unsuited for reality, a Love unable to Reason or Reason beyond what Love could return. It was there in the crater with Serib, though not in ways her eyes could yet understand into an image.
∞
Knowing Ahlzvyr’s task was not murder but to return home a wanted and wayward soul, Serib sought to find kinship with the dark spirit, and retraced how she had come here. If he was seeking goodness-common even in his foe, could she find it as well? Retracing she recalled drinking salves in Ehl’yiteth, drinking the same with Gadail on the steel pier, making possible their journey through the stars. Their spirits leaving their bodies behind. And so she asked:
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“If you are a shaman on a journey, are you weak, like me? Tired from the journey… of your spirit tripping far from mind and body… where is your body if your spirit is here?” she asked again, and again there was only a storms’ voice; as Ithuriya’s spear beckoned to its splinter the lightning sporadic and final.
“My body is in a meadow on Ehl’yiteth, with my master.” Serib further offered herself to whatever mercy or intrigue the dark spirit had. “…while my mind here roams with you.”
The Dark Shaman at last replied boiling with anger then gasping for air:
“Is this how you must imagine me, Serib? A spirit apart from you and not a part of you - inhuman limbed ghost - do you not know your own face, eyes filled with lightning? Will you not look at me?”
∞
Serib turned at last to face the crater’s rim she had just climbed down, and there barely standing in wheeze, The Spring-Sworn Minim’Syrib leaned grasping her mauling hammer taller. A dread silhouette though clear enough in that darkness of her heart made visible, fell to one knee exhausted clutching the grim totem, as old or infirm may to their aid cling desperate. Stranded, the hammer was a thing of chains to which the screaming elements were bound. Each limb of her hair independent, toothed and gnashing at the rest
Serib hid her tears shed for Iron-Chest and Ahlzvyr as The Spring-Sworn Minim spoke from her darkness:
“Will you not look at me, and all we have achieved…”
∞
“You are Syrib, The Spring-Sworn…” Serib shivered, far from home and self.
“You are. And I am Serib.” The silhouette managed to say.
And so her dread as ever was truth. She backed away from the crater’s rim towards Ithuriya’s halved-spear at its centre. As water through the air, being now fraudulent Lord by force of Spacious, Air and Water thus, Minim’s tall shadow melded and bled unclear, speaking as Serib could find no sure footing in the scoured pit:
“Here you begin the road I once began, and soon will be ending. It is a different space…” Minim paused, thunder filled where she had been, until she emerged from her deter: “…let the constants remain the same and let the variables be rearranged. Take up the spear and to your will it shall become this Maul I now wield. Go from here to Fire’s sand-snow plains as I did, and with your acid extinguish flame! Silence at your side not a force to fear. And with your new flame boil the Waters obedient as I have! I will be with you, not alone. This version of so many will become the one Truth.”
∞
Serib knew not if she should defend her back or focus on the weapon at the crater’s centre. Being metal, the half-spear’s element was Earth, an anchor for the other elements to be bound and follow. Just as Minim’s mauling hammer was, though power warped towards loving ends on an ill road. Unable to find the dark spirit again, Serib hid behind her arm from the lightning and tread ahead with ringing ears.
∞
Thoughts of Spring’s warmth were with her as she waded through and over all that Winter wished to keep. Graves Spring-Sworn-dug where snow and decay would forever sleep. Other mounds unnamed she has filled with decline and erosion that all she builds will never fall. Serib in her struggle questioned all Gadail had ever taught, and she had never felt closer to her mother she did not know.
∞
Where the thunder was loudest and lightning brightest, towards the humming metal in which she heard words somehow, the voice of a new friend-older she thought was clear. It was Iron-Chest - speaking from within the crater with words only for her, ghostly and separate with the ancestral resonance she had been seeking:
“Remember your name, Serib-strong! I cannot show myself here, or The Spring-Sworn shall claim me, too.”
∞
With strength newfound in the cold, that her companion - her apprentice-fellow - her friend had not met his end, Serib stood to take up the starspear-halved as her own. At first too thick to hold even with two hands, it shrunk denser to her size - its splintered edge smoothed over - its preordained runes disappeared, for her tale is still being written by her actions. No hurt nor harm did her heart intend and so in her hands it was a staff reformed. She held it close as all her senses were overwhelmed and she fell clutching what was hers into collapse and cavern.
No ancestor had she met proper at the end of her climb; she had only met herself.
∞
The craters around her closed into each other as petals at night, the mountain a craggy bloom of the earth where all the undesired of Summer, Autumn and Winter, of The Spring-Sworn’s fearful new world remade. Buried under that world with the rest, having been in its floating city, Serib had to remind herself, pinned by her totem’s earthen weight:
“Grounded. Hush. Grounding. Heed.”
∞
The tripping-salve and paste her master had prepared for her, making possible this astral journey of spirit leaving body, was fading thin, and she did not know where any of herself was. She lay inside the mountainside-craters waiting in meditation perhaps, as passed long ages and the drawn storms drifted away.
Holding her totem, all the earth was her skin. And she felt The Spring-Sworn toothing acid over it, looking for her. Emptying swamps of their humid life, sifting trenches-marine. Melting its hills and flowers. More craters across the heap-throne of scour.
∞
Spring drove its gentler skies into view and Night’s blanket was upon the world. All riverbed and cliffside were her eyes, and she felt as one blind, her feet wet in the sea and fingertips burning on the stars, face cooled by bright moonlight.
∞
From there the moons of Ehl’yiteth her world were close enough, and the cloud-waves rolling out just so, that one could pass from world to moon over the shallows and astyr’fields. How strange that even the moon’s surface was her skin. As though at cosmic low tide and all the cold dust in the universe she knew.
“What is Earth?” she asked herself in the deep nowhere of thought, as an ancestor should have asked her or revealed itself amidst her task and trial.
Yet, only Iron-Chest’s voice had she heard in a passing already gone.
∞
Feeling alone and uncertain, drifting as one through fevers she was crushed by a cratering world; she did not wait helplessly. Serib spoke from within the mountaintop, as below the lands full of Spring’s stretch and yawn were colourful, turning from Winter’s quietly beautiful gloom. Within the earth she feared not her master aging nor saw her parents tall with shadow, returning to their arms. Her older sister she could feel instead there with her in the dark, and all the braver felt. And she chanted as one calm:
“Earth is shaped and weathered. Home. Earth is sense. Binding. Certainty. Gravity. Footfalls and palms.”
An earthquake grinded and slammed, and an even deeper grave was dug for her. Hard she smacked into the lightless pit and all her totemic might it took to not be crushed completely. She tried again, fearing she had not asked or answered properly:
“Earth is Bravery. Accepting the weathering. Change only what can be changed.”
∞
She could hear the dark spirit replying, Minim’s voice uncomfortably similar to hers though older and in gasps:
“We can change anything. And why would Bravery come to mind?”
Serib answered quickly, in tears long a secret no more:
“Because I am afraid. Master Gadail is old and speaks of preparing me for when he is gone. I fear being alone, taking up his mantle, no longer hearing him… seeing him… our walks…”
“We fear.” The Spring-Sworn sighed, her own voice breaking.
∞
Laying there being crushed, her submerged subterranean surroundings coiling dry into the coal of future forests, Serib saw far. Into the feared futures of what would happen if her master passed away, and what could happen if he never did, for Time had been murdered and she knew not if it was once an arrow or a wheel.
∞
Within her ensued a duel of Truth and Falsehood, of heart against mind where love and reason writhe. ‘Writhing, as halved snakes’ an old poem goes. It does not need to be this way, alas:
“I can keep him from dying?” she pleaded with the dark spirit her own. “How?” she tried grabbing Minim in the stony shadows, and her hands returned covered in ink-soaked webs or threads.
“You have a part to play.” The spirit dripped. “Find The Lightning Crown. Become-me-stop-me-return-to-me.”
Serib looked closer into the crumbling dark at the spirit torn in two from battling with itself.
∞
“I have seen enough.”
She turned away from the dark spirit only half believing, ready to return to her sleeping body. She crawled through what scarce space existed in the constricting earth. Then - burrowing from beneath and around her through the rock, the spirit’s limbs pinned her wrists reeking of old seaweed and spluttering everywhere ink or acidic blood as it yelped for breath. Gasped for The Wind it could not find.
∞
“Will you not look at me?” its distorted shrieks were her own. “Do you not want to hear how he can be saved…”
Serib roared against the beast she could barely see, wrapping its limbs around her, pulling her close into squeeze and crush. Soon they collapsed together wrestling, surrounded by new and far fouler storms. Falling through nowhere. This could not be a world.
∞
Her wrists most of all were crushed by The Spring-Sworn: clasped and burning bitten or chewed under the constricting brand or spell being cast: a hex. For so Fate had said and Serib heard aloud a memory not her own:
‘…and you will meet yourself... your weaker self Serib… and you will hex her. You will hex your conscience and become unstoppable as I am.’
And so it was done.
The Spring-Sworn Minim had by force thrown Earth, Fire and Spacious to her feet - and began by that same hubris to force herself.
