CHRONICLER OF THE TITAN’S HEART
Anthony Martezi
Petros is a humble fisherman, and for the crime of fishing in the sultan’s protected waters, he is cast into an island prison whence no man escapes alive. But on the Isle of Shadow, nothing is as it seems—not the guards, not his cellmate, not even the prison itself....
Ilo Issurio, the Isle of the Shadow-city, cast its shadowy loom upon the turbulent waves like a snare. It was darker than the night; the day had fled in fear of it. Even against the midnight storm clouds—tearing themselves ragged upon the spires of the prison-castle, with a backdrop of enshrouded stars and an empty, hidden moon—Issurio was blacker still. At times, the clouds might release a bolt of lightning, only for it to be smothered and its thunder muted. Issurio caught these flashing darts of fire and swallowed them whole, sound and all, as space silences and as a dead star eats its living brothers. It ate voraciously. Its loom caught fishermen, too, and the island prison-city gorged itself upon their spirits.
Poor Petros could not see any of this but sensed the cold terror of monstrous forms beyond his blindfold. He felt the chill rain seep into the rope fibers binding his wrists—felt, beneath his tattered soles, the warm hum of the mistico’s wooden deck as its body thrummed against the sea’s night-waters. Above all, he felt the misery of his shackled solitude. All he had for company or cheer was the scattered chatter of his itinerant guards.
One had the baritone voice of a rough storm, ragged with drink, or the lack of it.
“Not much farther to go. Flame on fire, what could this poor soul have done to merit all this? Just him alone?”
This first man was clearly speaking to someone else but their reply wasn’t forthcoming until a breach of silence had been overcome.
The second man’s tenor was light but firm, like cold sunlight in winter.
“He probably did nothing. Or at least, nothing so terrible. Winds send rain on the lamb and cool the serpent’s belly.”
“Seems flaming unjust to me,” came the gruff protest of the first man.
“Ah, but surely the Kalitan is wise and merciful,” came the second man’s barely concealed jest. “And surely he would be mercy’s sole measure, if the Winds never winnowed.”
Petros noted the dim flash of a thunderless lightning bolt from behind his blindfold. The first guard grunted guttural again. “Might save some time and heartbreak if the Winds just struck the serpent dead with lightning and lifted up the poor lamb.”
“Anaphora,” came the second guard’s reply.
“A-wha...?” came the first guard’s confounded grunt.
“Anaphora. It means to bear up. Some confuse it for carrying back. Same idea, in the end.”
“Well I don’t exactly need a fancy word for it.”
“Savas, the word is the idea, as far as we can get at it.”
“There you go again, Peri—”
A tumultuous rocking motion interrupted the guards’ conversation. Concerned cries came from somewhere behind Petros as he fumbled to stay on his feet; he heard the boots of his guards clamber toward the cries. A great wave to his left crashed and threw him to the deck on his right. He was still conscious but figured this was the surest way to get any rest. So Petros lay there, still as stone, until his guards returned, lifting and bearing him to a prepared skiff.
“Time to leave, sorry sod,” came Savas’s deep grunt.
Petros had been rocked by the waves in his guards’ skiff for a gulf of time too dreadful to estimate. A torrent of rain had begun falling on his shoulders as the crashing tide sunk into his tattered soles. He’d been forced to stand the whole voyage on the now-distant mistico. When his guards and he disembarked to this smaller vessel, and he’d been set aright on his feet, Petros found his knees had turned to rigid rock. Had he the mind to send himself over the side and attempt to kick to a distant shore, he would not have made it for the immobility of his legs. He pondered the dark purpose in that. One might almost see in that dead night the pallid fear siphoning color from his face as he considered his new fate. He glowed white as a ghost, though his skin was the swarthy bronze of fisher folk and his full beard was as dark as the night-shadows of evergreens.
Savas snapped out of his reverie of nose and fingernail picking once he saw the revenant face of Petros, staring out at his doom between the threads of his blindfold. The guard grinned in mischief and tried to get his fellow guard’s attention, saying, “Ey, Peri, look at this one—”
“Who is this ‘Peri’ you speak of, Savas? I do not know him.” The other guard gave an exasperated sigh. This second guard was at the fore of the ship, nervously tapping his foot, arms wound tightly upon his torso. He gazed out at Ilo Issurio, minding the great spires of twisting rock that sometimes wound their way to the shoreline. His brick-red cloak frenzied itself upon the unruly westerly wind that speeded their ship onward, so he removed, folded, and tucked it into a crate adjacent the small foreship mainmast.
“Ey,” came the frustrated interjection of Savas. “Eyvah, you. Quit being a stickler about your name. Per—i—o—dos.” He strained each syllable to obscene lengths so Periodos had no choice but to grant him his attention. “Get a look at our friend. He’s got the Look.”
Periodos stole a quick glance at the prisoner. He then burned a gaze upon Savas, branding him of falsehood. Savas reflexed, puzzled by the gaze.
“What? Look at him. Paler than the First Moon.”
Periodos stood quiet for a moment. Then he stepped swiftly to the prisoner, looking him up and down in estimation of his spirit’s quality. The prisoner’s tan and brown rags had their mute nobility about them, the kind of quiet solemnity all workers of the sea have when tested against their chosen elemental foe. As though to confirm his suspicion, Periodos tore the blindfold from Petros’s face and grinned in sure confirmation. There in those stern, still eyes, brown as an age-old tree root—though Petros knew nothing of it consciously and would deny it were he accused of it—was rooted the firm fealty of a good man.
“This is not the Look,” Periodos said in proud, quiet awe.
“You’re touched,” came the irreverent tone of Savas. Petros himself nearly agreed, though not so brazenly; this “Look” likely betrayed his fear, which he felt to be real. “His knees are about to give. We needn’t trouble ourselves with watching him. At best he’d sink like a dead log if he tried escaping. More likely as a stone.”
With his eyes freed, Petros examined the skiff and his overseers. Periodos had looked at him with gray austere eyes and a face young, aquiline, and pocked with light stubble. Though he walked away with long, sure strides, he continued to tap his booted foot uneasily once planted at the ship’s fore. He wore the helm of the Karitaruk well; its high, smooth form, like his jawline, tapered to a centered point, at which height it was adorned with a spherical stud. Through interlocking plates of gold, his stately crimson garb peaked rather than flared, muted in the midnight, while silver steel pauldrons and chained mail flashed in the white fire of lightning.
Savas, on the other hand, had none of Periodos’s sobriety nor his bearing, though he wore the same armor and garb. His wrinkled cloak was cast over him like a makeshift blanket and his helmet was tossed to a distant corner. He splayed himself upon the ship’s various supply crates and casks. The only orderly thing about him was his person; his robust chin was shaved to prim excess and nearly glistened in the darkness, much like his blue eyes. Golden waves of hair were oiled and fastidiously coiffed, high and tight. The man kept a keen, observant eye for himself and was clearly irreverent of all else, and all others.
Wait, the crates! And casks to keep sobriety away for many moons. Petros estimated nine months’ worth of supplies for three persons, if they were packed as tight as his fishing catches. He came to a somber realization. These two were more than his guard: They were his keep. But for how long? And where would they keep him, exactly?
Petros looked ahead to their dark doom once more. Issurio. Its name held the correct portent: a city filled with shades. But even that seemed inadequate. From its deepness, Petros felt something more than his own quaking heart. He felt himself being appraised, like a slave at auction. Savas’s irreverence could not bear the weight of malice this feeling held over him, threatening as a bludgeoning mace. It was ancient and sharply intelligent, moved to its rendering purpose as a knife to fat.
And there! Along the shore. He felt their look.
Eyes. Dozens of them, glazing over in fear and warning: Leave! Go back! Die if you must! Their whites seemed to scream and shine like diabolic stars in the black rock of the island.
Triadis abbasis, elupatheri namani! Petros’s lungs were crushed within Issurio’s clawing purpose and could not sound his plea, so he mouthed it in less than a whisper. He felt beneath his shirt and clutched the red pendant that hung from his neck.
And at that moment—cresting the black clouds in a crimson dawn and silencing the storm—came the Third Moon. All the visible world was now cast in a subtle, ruddy glow from its peeking crown. Wine-red waters lapped gently against the ship. Rain had abated to a ruby mist. Profound stillness held sway upon the softened sea. Peace came with the red midnight.
Savas spat. “Bloody early Blood Moon.” Petros, however, hid the smile that glowed in his heart. Softly on the seawind, he imagined he heard his daughter and wife singing the simple verse of the nightwatchers, one learned by every village child nearly from infancy:
Midnight silver—fishermen shiver;
Dawning sapphire—ocean’s ire;
Red evening light—seafarer’s flight;
And the Winnowind’s Sea is porphyry.
Petros’s thoughts quavered hopefully at the word “flight.” The uninitiate had misinterpreted that lyric for ages, reading it as take flight before the Blood Moon. But Petros, like any good fisherman, knew its real significance. Uillo, the Seafarer’s Moon, rising early in the middle of night was an omen of good winds, upon which the seafarer would fly far and to his heart’s goal, and it came not long before “the Winnowind’s Sea,” which was an intense, rare calm that soothed the sea and sky alike.
Bless the Triune, he spoke in his heart. He clutched the red stone at his breast once more. Seafarer’s Sign. A sign for his deliverance. He would not do as the Issurian Eyes pleaded. He would not die. He would live. Petros promised himself he would live—for his daughter, for his wife. At any cost, he would fly.
At their disembarking, grumbling Savas felt about in the dark for the skiff’s landline rope. Periodos had furloughed the sail long ago and now readied himself at the fore to catch the small wharf’s bollard. The red wash of midnight still clung about their eyes, but the black island rock reflected none of its light. It was an ominous, titanic shadow, edged and piercing the skyline with jutting obelisks of spiraling igneous rock.
Out of that shadow, two human forms emerged, dressed in unkempt martial garb such as Savas wore. They were haggard, they were harried; they were like two members of a lifeless, living corpse still flitting back and forth after the spirit’s memory had fled. At first they stepped tentatively into the dim red moonlight cast about the pier. With each step, their pace quickened and gait lengthened, until finally they were a pair of flitting, hurried ghosts taking hold of the mooring from Savas. They fastened it to the bollard as though their lives were bound up in the knot.
Savas reeled back in complete bewilderment while Periodos’s eyes softened and widened in a look that mingled curiosity with confusion. They looked at each other and shrugged. “Huh,” was all Savas could manage to say.
“Hail...Karitaruk?” Periodos greeted them. It was less a hail than a question.
No response.
The two had sunken eye sockets, skin sagging and encircling their bright eyes as folds of dust in quicksand. Beneath their haggard beards, their mouths didn’t dare rustle, though the taut line of their lips stretched across their faces like knotted rope. Their hands worked quickly, and soon, they had exchanged places with the newcomers in thankless silence.
As the skiff departed, speeding the two mute Karitaruk away to the far-off anchored mainship—Periodos, Savas, and Petros left dumbfounded on the pier among their spare belongings and crates—Savas finally managed to ask the burning question.
“What spooked those two?”
Periodos continued his fathomless stare at their diminishing dot of a ship making swift into the night.
“No idea,” came his whisper.
With Savas on point and Periodos leading the prisoner from behind—satchels and sacks bound to Petros’s back as though he were a loaded mule—the three made their way into the pitch black of the island.
The road leading from the wharf was packed with black sand and small pebbles. They shone like ruby dust in the Third Moon’s light. But in the distance, Petros could still spy the Issurian Eyes, glittering amidst the deep dark far from their path. The road eventually sped up a smooth incline for some ways, winding off to the left of the travelers between rising cliffs. They went along this path for some time.
With strange suddenness, the three travelers found themselves beneath a torchlit standard, flickering softly in the still wind. Its light had not shone far. In fact, the three hadn’t noticed the firelight until they saw their own shadows traipse across it beneath their cautious steps.
They stopped. Petros dared a look at the torch from below his mound of fastened sacks and satchels. The torch was clasped atop a standard wrought of the same spiraling rock that twisted itself over the whole island. Contorted edges and sharp pricks rose to meet the night in mute agony. Petros felt the fear rise in him again. Does any light escape this desolate place?
He tore away his gaze, looked to his company, and gasped. His guards were just at the edge of the torchlight’s circle of light, utterly transfixed by the sight before them.
A stone figure of human proportion and scale stood just within view, frozen in space and time, with small, scattered flecks of light sliding across its icy black surface. Petros might have thought it some unnaturally placed statue, but for its uncanny sense of motion. Its arms were outstretched, legs folded midair in a running spring. It was motionless, yet seemed to move in place, perhaps caused by some trick of perspective.
His face—He’s alive! Every angle of that face was bespoke terror. He seemed to have been caught, turning about mid-stride as though to glance behind momentarily. Petros looked where the statuary had tried to look, just behind it. Complete blackness. Flecked about the man’s legs and back were sharp edges of rock, like impurities in hewn artwork. The island’s rock seemed to climb up to meet the human statue, not to suggest it was carved from the rock, but that the rock had...caught him. Caught in some great, terrible claw.
The three had trudged along, silent in the darkness. Savas kept asking questions in sharp anxiety. Periodos kept ignoring them, or seemed to. Petros felt that Periodos was hiding his fear, and well. Here was his chance: Now, bridge the divide. Petros spoke softly for the first time.
“Sorry to cause you both such hardship. This can’t be the best job you’ve ever taken.”
Savas grunted a laugh from ahead. “The mute speaks!”
Periodos tripped, kicked a stray black stone ahead, and grumbled from behind, “Now if only we could get some sight for these blind.”
Petros chuckled at that and shuffled his load of satchels. “I’d offer my services, but I’m a bit tied up at the moment.”
“What makes you think you could help with this blasted darkness?” Savas turned in the dark ahead to face the prisoner.
“Well,” Petros started, “in truth, I have this pendant around my neck...”
As swiftly as he’d said it, Savas had reached his hand beneath Petros’s shirt and yanked the rope necklace through his beard. Petros had anticipated such a move and hadn’t made any protest.
At the rope’s midpoint hung the small red jewel. Savas lifted it to his face for closer inspection, but as he did so, a bright beam of light emanated from the gem directly into his eyes. Savas stumbled backward, cursing between his teeth. “What in the blood-blasted moon is that?”
“Well,” Petros stifled a smirk, “I suppose it was in the blood-blasted moon at one time. It’s Uillo’s Eye. Seafarer stone. Moonstone.” He pointed up into the night at the red moon dancing. “That moon’s stone, to be precise.”
Savas opened his eyes and held the pendant up and away from him. The bright beam continued to flash into the dark, spinning about as the rope twisted in Savas’s hand.
“How does it reflect so much light in this dusk?” came Periodos’s interested query.
Petros answered, “It catches Uillo’s light, however small, and concentrates it like a prism. Depending on how you hold it, it redirects the light differently. Say, if you were to hold it face up to the sky...”
Savas looked dumbfounded for a moment, slowly realizing he was being asked to do so. He raised the stone well above his head, so as not to blind himself unwittingly again. As Savas turned the moonstone about in his hand, Petros looked out into the black unknown, preparing himself.
A soft red blanket of light spread outward from the moon crystal. All about the trio, the world seemed to come into newlit focus—blurred and misty, yet clearer than they’d ever hoped possible. But as soon as their hopes had risen, they’d plummeted back to the depths of their hearts.
Petros had feared such a thing was true, but the reality of this new vision was more than he could prepare for. He heard his guards draw swords from sheathes, panic rattling their voices. “Back off!” came Savas’s crackled cry. Periodos held a surer control of his tenor, but it still warbled with muffled fear. “Hail! State your allegiance and intent!”
Encircling them in a wide berth across a length of open terrain were numberless forms like the stone figure under the torchlit standard. With unnatural stillness, they looked out from faces frozen in a displaced moment. Their eyes glimmered as stars in a blank night. Petros realized that these were the Issurian Eyes he had seen from the island’s bay. Instead of their previous pallid shine, they now reflected the light red luminescence of Uillo’s Eye.
They too were held captive by the black rock. Periodos and Savas, once they realized the figures couldn’t move, stepped cautiously toward them. Savas drew his hand up to one graven form and indecorously rapped his knuckle against its cheek. A thudding sound of dense rock met their ears. Savas’s laugh was strained and exasperated, relief and release more than joy, as he repeated the act. Periodos was unamused and motioned for him to stop.
Above them, above even the high skyline where distant cliff faces met the sky’s starlight, Tol Issul, the Dome of Shadow, loomed as if bending over to watch. Periodos looked up at its broad-bellied hall and many twisting spires. He was both determined and obstinate, as if to deny the fortification any dominance over his spirit. “Come on,” he spoke quietly. He took point. Petros lumbered behind him. Savas distanced himself in the rear, turning about intermittently to verify the Issurian statues weren’t following. He couldn’t be sure they weren’t.
Their road led to a narrow split in the cliffs. The sky above, now clear of storm clouds, radiated the light of silver star and crimson moon, but the trio’s path only saw bare traces of that light. Uillo’s Eye was their only guide in the shadowy abyss. As they navigated the gorge, the prisoner tried his best to rekindle conversation with his captors. Most of his words fell on deaf ears—or they were more intent on discerning other sounds in the deepness. Finally, one question provoked a response.
“Did either of you know about this island?” Petros asked.
“Old wives’ tales, mostly,” Periodos responded from ahead. “Some of it, confirmed nonsense. Some of it—less so, it seems.”
“My old lady tells the stories often enough. Told me not to come.” Savas gulped. “I told her to bite a stiff wind because the job would net me a new rank, quickly. Now, I’m biting my tongue.”
Periodos reconsidered his previous sentiment. “However, there is one story I quite enjoy. The tale of Tol Issul is manifold and changes with the teller. The Shadow-city existed long before the Kalitanate, before even the Inmeriate that preceded it, in the Age of the Aions. Tanis, the Titan of the Underworld Mount, fell here, on this very spot, his skull shorn by the blade of Ismir. Some versions of the story relate that, though his body rescinded to the depths and became whalefood, the head floated aloft and became the island. Still another story says”—and Periodos paused to consider his next phrase—“that the heart of Tanis, black and terrible as a sun-starved cliff, remained after the body passed, heaving its blackened blood over the island. That heart is Tol Issul, the Dome of Shadow.”
Petros stared up at the great dome, awestruck and shivering. “Why’d you come here, Periodos?” he asked.
“Duty.”
Petros whistled at that and smiled.
“Don’t laugh,” Periodos responded. “If I hadn’t been volunteered, you’d be getting much rougher treatment, I’d warrant.”
Petros did laugh at that. “You have me stand for a whole day on a miserable wet voyage, saddle me like a dead donkey with all this”—he shuffled the numerous packs on his back—“and, to beat all else, land me on a veritable isle of the dead. Ah yes, quite the spa treatment. I feel like I’m being pampered at a hot spring.”
“Comparatively, you are,” Periodos returned. “What did you do to land yourself here and ruin our year, anyway?”
“Naturally, nothing at all.”
“Naturally.”
“Well . . .” Petros trailed off as though to quit hedging. “If you consider night-netting in the Kalitan’s quay to be criminal, criminal am I.”
Savas whistled at that. “Surprised he isn’t night-netting your neck from a tree this very moment. Though, all things considered, I suppose you got a rougher end of the branch. What’d you go and do a foolish thing like that for?”
“By accident, actually.”
“Accident, my foot,” Savas spat.
“Really, though,” Petros assured him. “The night wasn’t as black as all this, but it was unusually stark. I’d been sailing inland and was navigating blind. Found my way into the quay and, rather than ascertain where I was, found the fishing unusually good. I should have made something of that...Eventually, when the Kalitan’s guard came rolling out on the water with a mainship and fire arrows ablaze, I did make something of it.”
Savas turned about in the darkness to maintain awareness of his flank, then turned back to speak. “Here you are, mute for a day and night, then reveal all you’ve been nesting on for a week of being a prisoner. Blind me, you’re strange.”
“I have good company,” Petros lilted irreverently. “So how about you, Periodos? You said you’d ‘been volunteered.’ What exactly does that mean?”
“Between present good company only,” Periodos began pointedly, “I’m not keen on torturous prison sentences and overseeing prisoners, alone, for an entire deployment.”
“Surely it’s not your first time,” Petros stated.
“Surely it isn’t. But more surely still, I never asked to be Karitaruk.”
Petros stopped in his tracks and stared at the hazy figure ahead of him. Paedocast. Child-collected.
Periodos grinned to himself and spoke as though he guessed the prisoner’s thought. “Yes, you’ve got it right. I am Helian. But don’t think for a second that means you’ve got yourself a way out. You don’t. I am no traitor.”
Savas spat a laugh. “Pah! This man’s got more duty-bound bite in him than the Vicar, and all the bit heels at Kalighast would marvel at that!”
Petros did marvel, and fell silent.
In other realms and cities, in other times, Tol Issul was a dread name but held no fixed significance. For some, it was the portcullis marking entry to the underworld. For others, it was the dark mark left by a monster from beyond the firmament. The Kalitanate knew as much, or as little, or indeed perhaps less of this place than any midwife or oracle. All the Kalitan knew in truth was that the dread of Tol Issul could be used as armor to protect his dynasty’s rule. His ambitious Karitaruk could feed on the dangling carrot that was the promise of riches and social status for a year of service on the island; his subjects were held in the vise grip of being sent to this hell upon Nüun, should they offend their ruler. None questioned his motive.
Tol Issul was a great-bellied beast of a prison—a titanic, cavernous heart with twin chambers. One chamber functioned as a general mess and atrium while the other served as the communal cell for its prisoners. Spiralling tunnels encircled the main chamber like aortae, blossoming forth myriad tunnels that spun into webwork-like arterioles that draped over the secondary chamber. All the prison was blacker than night and polished smooth by unnatural nature, but for the craggy spires that fled to the sky in twining climbers of black coral honeysuckle.
Its doorway was the least natural feature of all. It was a mandorla-shaped fissure, a gateway that looked as though a great sword blade had descended from above to carve out a cross-section of the atrium. There was no door in its side.
The guards prompted Petros to relieve himself of his burdens inside the cavernous atrium, then led him down through it into a tiny hall that could barely hold two abreast, so the prisoner was prodded along in front. For the hundredth time, he considered smashing himself backward into the guards and running, but he knew he had no strength for it and hadn’t since he first stepped off the mistico. He barely had the strength to clamber through the darkness, even without his burdens. He would need to build up his fortitude, in time. In due time.
Their path climbed forward until it ended at a tiny, gated portcullis, which opened to an abyss of shadow: the second chamber. Adjacent walls and the floor were made of the same smooth-polished black rock, but for some impurities and fragments where fissures had been carved long ago. Several of these fissures showed mounds of black rock like snowdrifts at their bases, as though the rifts had been blasted up and in by fire rather than carved by the steady erosion of time and the slow motion of the earth.
The fissures in the walls rose, rose...disappeared into the haze of shadow above, where echoes of the trio’s footfalls only now began to reverberate.
Not a soul in any corner of this yawning chamber. Not a sound. Bare gray light could be discerned on the wall closest to Petros, but misty darkness fell over everything else. The guards led and left Petros to this frightening darkness. Crying metal announced that the gate had been shut.
Petros fell to the ground, numb to his new surroundings. He wept and slept the sleep of the dreaming dead.
Abba! Cast illiti!
Petros had to catch the kite. Little Nami had prayed so fervently for it. The funds for its craft had come by way of a miracle. Never had he caught so very many fish in the Atelian Sea. Every time he had pulled away the net, more had come, almost of their own free will. And now the gift they had bought was flying away on the wind!
“Ya ya, Mama! Casten tu!”
Petros had run so hard and blindly that he didn’t notice Melia had already caught the kite by the handle, just outside their home’s doorstep, as it whisked across her field of vision. She seemed confused by her discovery at first, but then turned a faux-malevolent grin on Petros that made him retreat his head into his shoulders. “Husband stranger! You certainly have a way with watching Nami. And with where you’re going.” He had run straight past her in his hurry.
“Nami! Little daughter stranger, never let go of this! It is a gift of great worth!” Melia bent down and handed the kitestring off to Nami, who had begun to pull at her mother’s white peplos in anxious anticipation. The child popped up on her toes with a smile as she grabbed the kite. Just as quickly, her face turned dreadfully serious, and she walked with intent purpose down the whitewashed sandstone street back to the pier, kite firmly in tow and tied around her arm.
Melia turned about and faced her husband with mock severity. “Now, were you about to let Nami’s kite get away after having paid Satiri a windswept fortune?”
Petros’s neck retreated into his torso.
“Come back here,” Melia said, strutting to his side and yanking his head toward hers. Her pillowy waterfall of midnight-black hair enshrouded them.
Petros assumed his normal stature and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Now,” he said, “hadn’t you warned me about watching Nami?”
“Mm, duty can wait.”
“My overseer is quite stringent, you know.”
“I’m sure all she needs is a firm kiss on the mouth.”
“Are you telling me to fraternize with my boss?!”
“No, I’m ordering you to.”
“This conversation has taken a turn for the strange. I don’t think Drachma will take kindly to me landing a large, wet kiss on his lips.”
“That big old fishmonger doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
“You are strange.”
“That’s why you married me. Don’t complain.”
“That’s true. It’s your most endearing feature.”
“A blessing and a curse, I’m told.”
“I’m blessed.”
“Not yet you’re not...”
They embraced in a whorl of Melia’s dark waves.
Petros returned to his senses. “You know, were one to espy our little romances from near or far, they might call them gratuitous—”
“—ly adorable. Yes, I know.”
“I love you.”
“Yes, I know.”
Petros pulled away from her for a moment. His look bespoke a serious turn, as one looks when attempting to hear a distant bell toll, or when hearing the crackle of fire or smelling its smoke but seeing no flame. He looked about him: at the sky hung delicate and pure blue, framed in whispers of cloud; at the full growth of distant olive trees on the cliff summits, their branches swirling like broad brushstrokes of some master painter. He smelled the high earth rising from the shore, distant grasses catching the sky, and the salt of the sea breeze flavoring the air. Beneath his sandals, the crunch of powderlike white sand against sandstone left his impression with texture. Silver sparks of sunlight pocked the ever-roaming sea. Nami stood proudly leaning against the small mast of Petros’s fishing boat, moored and gently dipping in the small wharf. And the rounded lines of their tiny home, white-plastered and humbly domed, eased the edges of his vision. He wept in his heart for such beauty.
Who had netted him such treasures? From what ocean’s depth had they been won?
“Love, what is it? What are you doing?” came the velvet tones of Melia.
“Remembering this,” he said. “Forever. I can never let this pass away.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
He fell deep into Melia’s raven whorl once more.
And there! Suddenly Petros was back in the bright sunshine, kicking his feet freely from the edge of the dock, watching Nami tie her kite to his ship’s small mast. She paraded about the ship with a wooden sword in hand, politely giving orders to an invisible crew.
Petros lifted himself and came to oversee his daughter’s play. “Nami, I’m surprised. Most ship captains yell their orders quite fiercely at their crew.”
“Mm, yes, but I don’t do that.”
“And why not?”
“It doesn’t seem very nice. And you never yell.”
He laughed a bit at that. “Oh, I can yell pretty loud if you give your mother trouble!”
“Yeah, but that’s only because I should know better. My crew is pretty new. They just need to know what to do, so I tell them: nice and gentle!”
Petros smiled. “Daughter stranger, that is very wise.”
She smiled a big toothy grin from under her overlarge captain’s cap. “Thanks! Want to know where we’re going?”
“Oh yes, very much I do!”
“We’ve gone to seek the lost island of At...Atala. . .”
Petros gasped. “Atalatea! From what direction are you making for it?”
Nami considered that question. She hadn’t thought through the particulars of her odyssey just yet. “Mm, well from here, I guess.”
“From Tellio?”
She nodded agreement.
“Ah!” Petros jumped up on the ship and unrolled his map across a wooden rail. “See here: This is the Atelian Sea just around Tellio. Atalatea is...well, very far south! You can’t even see it on this map; it’s close to the Windveil where you see these clouds, here. You’d need a secret, hidden treasure map for that.”
Nami’s eyes shone with awe as she looked up from the map at her father, then turned back to it with rapt attention. “The Windveil...is that where the Zephyrim live?”
“No! Very good guess, my daughter stranger. However, they guard the Worldrender Gale that severs the nations, and they contain it, so none of its terrible Wraiths leave and haunt us.
“Now,” he continued, “there is a great whorlrift that surrounds the island, so you need to be very careful when navigating. A narrow pass leads into the whorl from the west, but you want to keep on the east bank because the rift turns about in circles”—he drew a whirling pattern on the map in just the right shape—“clockwise on this centerpoint”—he jabbed the spot in the middle of his pattern—“and that is where you find Atalatea. But be careful! You’ll be coming on it from the south; beneath the waves, in a great whirlpool to its south, there waits a gaping Maw! It would swallow you and ten other ships whole in one go! So you need to make your way ’round it on the west, keep away from the western and northern rocky escarpments, then come to it from the east side. And there.” He made a chiasmus with his finger on the map. “You’ve made it.”
As they talked, the knot of the kitestring loosened ever so slightly from the mast.
“Abba, did you ever sail far away like that? Looking for old treasures?”
Petros nodded sternly. “I did. Long ago.”
The kitestring loosened further.
“Why’d you stop?”
“I stopped needing treasures.”
“Why’s that?”
The kite was nearly unraveled from its mooring.
“Well, you were born.”
A great westerly stormwind whipped across the ship’s deck, and with it, the kite was yanked and finally loosed.
Abba!
Petros spared not a second. He leaped to the ship’s forward, jumped on the rail along the bow and balanced himself, then sprung high and far to snag the kitestring’s handle as it bobbed and swung over the bay waters.
Cast illiti!
A great darkness like a thunderhead descended over all. The world became a dark blue, descending into near-black purple. Finally, all his vision faded as Petros motioned to snag the string and came up empty. He expected to hit the water hard and fast, but no impact came. He fell. Heavens know how long he seemed to fall. Petros cried aloud and, in his frustration, struck at the limitless air in desperation. Swipe. Swipe. Thud.
He struck at earth. Again and again he struck it. He continued doing so until the skin on his forearm became raw. He wept and wept for fear and frustration. He had been shunted from his dream; stark reality blinded him. He was caught again in the Issurian deepness of his prison chamber.
It had taken Petros some time before he realized he had struck earth, soft and almost tilled, rather than the igneous rock that even now shadowed his waking vision.
He lay there upon the soil, curled in a piteous ball, catching his breath and trying his best not to weep. To weep would be to admit he had no faith in Seafarer’s Sign.
“Tears are signs of good faith.”
Petros leaped to his feet from the dirt. He looked to the black abyss of the wide chamber, to its eastern awning. Around its bend, bare glimpses of moonlight still shafted into view from beyond prison bars. Yet he could not discern anything in this darkness. And certainly he could not see the person who had just spoken to him.
“Who are you? Where are you?” His words echoed into the spacious expanse. The words he’d heard had none of Petros’s strength. They were ragged and gnarled, whispers as of breath across a wine bottle’s mouth.
“Again: Who and where are you?”
As if in response, a circlet of faint gray light began to glow a foot or so from the ground adjacent to the bend in the eastern awning. A trick of refracting light?
Rustling sounds emanated from where the circlet of light had shone. That same ragged air of speech came forth, this time clearer and with newfound force. Still, it was weak, as though the sinew and muscle of a long-dormant throat were remembering the function of speech.
“A sign, I hope. Here I am.”
A faint motion of light, like one sees when a bright-colored object moves through a room just before dawn, beckoned Petros down to the spot beside the awning. He could not ignore it.
Carefully, and with the caution of a fox in midwinter, Petros walked with his back to the perimeter of the chamber. He discovered that, as he moved along the curved walls, they too were not solid rock as he had supposed before his slumber, but seemed to have the verdant growth of thatching. Fingering blades of grass swept across his back like fields of wheat. The floor, too, was nothing but sod, dry in many spots but turned, tilled, and even somewhat moist in others. When Petros had come close to the intended spot, his feet alighted on a cool, springy patch of fresh verdure.
“Careful, please. Careful of my garden.”
An old man’s face came through the darkness. The gray light fell within him and vanished. That face: It was the visage of long, slow life being drowned in darkness. Pale skin, folded over in manifold wrinkles, gave way to great billowing wisps of eyebrow and a beard left to weed in overgrowth. It trailed to the old man’s knees and was tucked in at his sash. All about him was a torn and tattered garment that must have been a gray tunic at one time. He wore a gray cloak about him too and its hood was thrown back to show a moderately kempt head of cloudwhite hair, windswept and tied at his back below the cloak. Every inch of him bespoke a new, seemingly starved aspect of a piteous soul left to die, alone and forgotten. Yet the old man smiled. Twin orbs of moonsilver, his eyes, glowed with that smile.
“How can you smile, old man? You’re nothing but bone and ash.” Petros came close to tears again. Just the mere outline of such a creature would stun anyone to sorrow. Had he been forgotten in this chamber? How long had he been here? And why was he here?
Again, the whispered wind of a strained voice quavered in the air. “My first words.”
Petros’s face, if it could be seen in that darkness, knotted itself into a look of puzzlement. “ ‘Tears are signs of good faith.’ What did you mean by that?”
A lilting cough struggled to make its way out between the old man’s lips. It must have been the closest he could get to a real laugh. “Only that I can trust you.” The old man rustled once more and seemed to swell up with some unheralded new strength. Drawing up his shoulders, he adjusted himself against the wall he’d been nesting against, sitting more upright. Full moonlight rippled past the awning beyond him. His voice too gained volume and depth. “Tears pour out the heart’s knowledge: knowledge of what is, what ought to be, and that the two are not the same.”
“Wise words, but there’s not much good they do for you here.”
The old man seemed to bristle at that. “They do very well for me, here, thank you. In point of fact, they are the best words for such a place. They remind me: This, too”—he raised his withered right arm half a foot and stretched out his pointer finger, as though to gesture at the darkened chamber—“will be made right.”
“Is there anyone else here?” Petros wondered aloud.
The old man shook his head. The faint gray light created a kind of afterimage in the wake of that gesture.
“Utterly bizarre. An entire prison for two people?”
“One.”
The realization struck Petros. One.
“They don’t know you’re here?”
Another shake of the head. No.
“No?” Petros’s eyes rounded themselves. Such strength, even in utter destitution. Where did it come from? “Who are you? How long have you been here? How did you get here? Where are you from?”
“Careful now. I have little strength as is. But maybe enough for that first question.”
“Great apologies, abba.”
Petros’s eyes fell to the man’s left arm, and for the first time he noticed the book it cradled. He could make out the barest gilded scratches of a title on its cover: Ankhios Aïo Mnimi Tou Chronikou.
“I’ve been gifted many names in many tongues: Niram. Aram. Raqib. Pravuil. But one name I keep wherever I’ve gone, and it is truer than all the others: Chronicler.”
Petros nodded. A historian of some sort.
“Now please, leave me to some feeble rest. I imagine you still need some, too.”
The abba was right. Petros felt his fatigue settle again. He couldn’t have had more than an hour’s worth of sleep, judging by the Seafarer’s light. However, Uillo’s strength also seemed to be fading, and the night deepened. Having no more ability to stand or even search the room for anything resembling a bed, he settled down in the spot along the sodded wall next to Chronicler, and his was finally a restful sleep.
The two prisoners had only recently awakened but the barest snatches of sky visible past the prison bars indicated a soft, misted afternoon.
The old man gestured his right hand toward the window apse. The day was gray and a bare curtain of light edged into the circular chamber, but the expansive hall still seemed dark, as though this were the twilit shore of evening.
“You came from...that part of the room?” Petros said.
The old abba grunted, dissatisfied. He was still splayed on the ground, just as the night before, but he did not look so pale as he did in the pitch of night. Some bronze color had returned to him. From what source, Petros could not discern, just as he could not discern the abba’s puzzle of an answer.
“The North? No, wait, the window is in the eastern face. The East?”
The abba’s hand lightly struck his forehead in bewilderment. He rolled his eyes, then considered what he’d just done. He inclined his head upward.
Petros looked up at the ceiling, too. “The...ceiling?” For a few moments he just stared at it, as though willing the vaulted heights to reveal their secrets. They too were thatched with grasses and dirt, much the same as the walls and floor, covering over that terrible pitch rock.
With a thought like thunder, Petros suddenly stood up, backed away, and looked at Chronicler as if he would burst into wind and flame all at once.
“From the sky. Zephyrim.” The word burst from Petros’s mouth as though it held the power to upturn the whole prison-castle—indeed, the island—and send it to the sea depths.
The old man coughed a laugh. All his aged features suddenly struck Petros with greater impact than before. No, this was no Zephyr. Kindly, strange, and deeply surprising, yes, but not one of them.
Chronicler leaned toward him, upturned hand gesturing him closer, and Petros knelt to bend his ear near the abba’s frail head. The words, despite their frayed texture passing in a quiet hush, came like a thunderbolt:
“I am from a distant star.”
Petros looked into the old abba’s eyes and saw how bright, round, and childlike they were, how genuine the claim was. And he pondered that in his heart while his reason utterly refused to entertain the notion.
As though bidden that moment by those very words, Periodos the Karitaruk rattled his gauntlet against the barred portcullis at the far end of the chamber. Petros kept quiet but moved adroitly to the gate along the prison chamber’s walls, once more like a winter fox. He couldn’t be sure of the darkness at the hall’s epicenter. It hovered over the deep floor like a shroud over a hunter’s trap, dug into the earth.
Clearly the old abba has lost his senses, Petros thought as he tread carefully. Strange. He seemed so clear-spoken.
Periodos said nothing to him but passed a meager tray beneath a low bar. A large clay vessel half filled with water; a torn scrap of bread; half of a slice of cheese. One tomato, no larger than a fingertip, tumbled across the tray as it exchanged hands. And well, well! A lemon wedge for flavoring the food; far likelier for digestion.
“All for the day?” Petros asked.
Periodos stood with his face in profile, downturned to face the black floor.
Petros frowned. “I see.” He didn’t know whether to mention the abba to the guard, so he kept the strange old man’s presence to himself.
“Presumably the next guard rotation will come bearing more rations. They gave us enough to ‘keep you alive’ for the length of our station here. One year.”
Petros looked over the meager scraps. If that was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, then the best he could hope for in mentioning the abba’s presence would be an execution. If they had no food for a mouth, the mouth was removed. He didn’t know what was worse: starvation in this terrible place, or an old man pleading in fear for his last moments before the sword descended.
“Enough for me to die. One meal of this for a year will leave me in a crate at sea, if I can hope for something approximating a seafarer’s burial. Any chance begging for more, or at least my moonstone, would net me anything?”
Periodos smiled and closed his eyes, head still hung. “Maybe an earful from Savas and a slug in the eye.”
Petros sighed in relief. “He still has the pendant, then. Who put a slug in his shorts?”
“I don’t know. He’s been...well, he’s taken charge, as was his rank-given right, though he never exuded much authority on the voyage here.”
That was an understatement. Petros was surprised to hear Savas could pull rank, let alone that he held it over Periodos.
He continued. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Overnight, it seems as though he’s taken to throwing his weight around.” Periodos frowned in shadow and whispered, “You’re being fought for, for what that’s worth.”
The paedocast turned on his toe and made his way back down the prison hall. As he turned, Petros caught a flash of something strange. His right eye had been facing away during their conversation, but when Periodos turned, Petros saw mounded purple flesh, swollen and tender, forming around that eye. He’d been struck hard.
Into the Issurian deep went Periodos the Paedocast, his footfalls ringing loud and clear as he paced down the narrow hall.
And this too Petros pondered in his heart. He stood a long while, still as stone in the apse of the prison gate, staring intently at the tray held in his arms. A swell of sorrow and anxiety filled his breast. Suddenly, he clutched the tray and motioned as though to throw it at the barred gate in frustration. He held back and shuddered with a tremor that would shake most mountains.
I—I can’t—can’t possibly—what do I do? I told myself I would live...for Nami and Melia! But how could I live, knowing...?
As Petros quarreled in his mind, he heard a sudden noise that may as well have been a sentence upon him, sounding the condemnation of his own spirit.
“Friend child, what was that noise?”
The abba’s question was as innocent as a child’s and as soft as a twittering bird at dawn. Petros hid in the apse of the doorway, clutching the tray of food in one hand and his breast in another, as though his lungs would collapse under the weight of his sinking heart.
“Nothing, abba. Just a rat.”
“Who were you speaking to?”
Silence fell like a stone. “It was a talking rat, abba.” The lie was such nonsense that Petros struck at his chest for having told it, let alone to this poor creature. However, the old man thought it was as natural an answer as any other.
“Ah! Well. Tell it good night from me.”
Wistful slumber took the old man into a peaceful night, for an early darkness had stolen the sunset.
Shadows swirled in the cell. Bare snatches of sounding, crashing waves lifted up from the seashore, but all else was as quiet as the tomb. A sob broke the silence and then was shuttered up like a window before a storm.
Petros had been wrong. The food had a kind of flavor. The small slab of bread, the shriveled tomato, the stale cheese, and even the water: All tasted faintly of salt. Weeping itself has a way of washing away bitterness. With it comes a swift, if troubled, sleep.
The darkness of nightmare and the shadow of waking life had merged. Petros did not know whether he was awake or asleep. But he thought he heard the faintest whisper of something—someone—whistling. Though Petros fell down again into the valley of his dark languor, another was awake and active.
The Chronicler was whistling, if only in breathy tones, to the patch of garden at his feet, clutching his chronicle about him. And the grass shone and grew.
Morning brought Petros back to life, but the Chronicler was already awake and as active as he could be, given his near-paralytic state. He seemed to be cupping his hands to the circle of grass about him and bringing them to his lips.
Petros shook his head to clear his vision, long curls of matted hair fluttering about his head. “Abba, what are you doing, there?”
The answer came in a kind of haggard, singsong voice, like hearing a distant bird intone in a rainstorm. “Breakfast!” Petros crawled closer and realized what the old man was doing. He was supping on the sparse morning dewdrops hanging delicately from each blade of grass.
Hours came and went, dragging Petros through the tortures of his own spirit. To deny the abba another meal would be murder, but he couldn’t let himself die here. The daily meal would not be enough even for himself; in less than a year, he would be a wasted shell of rubber skin and ashen bone. Hadn’t the Seafarer’s Sign been a promise of deliverance? Yet, how could he possibly be delivered from such a place? Even the days were merely a less oppressive darkness, with night air thicker than a mist of steam. Why was he sent to suffer here for such a mere infringement of the law? Was the Kalitan’s fishery really so important as to condemn a man, a solitary man without even the pleasure of a crowded prison, to this?
In the midst of the haze of time now enshrouding him, Petros heard the clang of metal on metal. It was Periodos again, clanging his gauntleted hand against the bars while clutching the day’s scraps.
The paedocast was in direr appearance this time. Bagged eyes told the tale of a sleepless vigil. No sleep at all. Not that a restful night could ever be the norm here. The mass of swollen flesh around Periodos’s right eye seemed to have doubled and shut the eye firm, but he spoke past it as though it didn’t exist.
“Can’t sleep. Something moves in the night. I think it’s the prison—in the floor, in the walls, sometimes even the ceiling. Or Savas. He hums all day and night. Haven’t seen him sleep, but he keeps disappearing to winds-know-where. Have you seen him? Has he come here at all?”
Petros shook his head. The tray was exchanged.
As Periodos left, he chimed in with a little snatch of some proverb lost to time and history: “Two leaves folded on the door, holding fruit in a secret store.” And with that he was gone.
Petros looked over the tray of scant morsels. All looked the same at a mere glance. But wait. There. In the wide clay cup, beneath the water, shone two verdant leaves. He sipped down the water and pulled at the leaves’ stems. Three spinach leaves; they were packed against something beneath them, which was also tightly packed to fill the wide bottom of the clay vessel. Petros pulled away the leaves and gasped.
It was a veritable cornucopia of olives and figs littering the bottom of the clay cup. By normal standards, it would constitute a decent lunch. But for the starved, it was extravagance.
Petros was stunned. What had Periodos done? Shaved more food stores from their catches—more than was allotted to this prisoner? Or from his own guard’s rations...? Snuck it below the spinach leaves and hid the evidence from Savas below a shallow pool of drinking water? Clever and, more importantly, kind. This was a feast. An absolute feast. And such a feast demanded company with whom to share it.
When he returned with the tray, the old abba was smiling but looked confusedly at the object in Petros’s hands. Before he shared, Petros laid aside the tray and fell on his hands and knees before the old man, crying tears of joy and sorrow intermingled.
“Abba, forgive! I did something terrible to you!”
The Chronicler waved his hands in dismissal. Petros placed the tray in the old man’s lap and exclaimed, “We share a feast tonight!” At first, the confusion wracked the abba’s face. He simply couldn’t believe, or remember how to identify, what was laid before him.
No radiance of sunrise or sunset, no jewel of the earth, no moon of heaven could be said to outshine his face: he with the moonsilver eyes in the moment of his euphoria. It would not do to tell of his ecstasy, his tears, his unspeakable sorrows all lifted up at once in sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. No one can tell of it without failing in word, and the peace and joy beyond description must be felt by him alone. I cannot speak of it. All that can be said is that the abba, the Chronicler, with great light in his face, spoke his beatitude with full-throated ease:
“Bless you, friend child! Bless you! Thrice and forever bless you!” They feasted on what otherwise would have been a meager meal; feasted, laughed, cried, slept, and dreamed.
In the deep, unyielding night, a set of footsteps echoed in the tall, broad hall dividing the chambers of Tol Issul.
Savas had not slept since arriving on the island. The last he remembered of sleep was when he dozed off on his duty aboard the mistico. Now, that seemed like a world and an age away.
Even if he could sleep, he wouldn’t desire it. Oppressive darkness had surprisingly little to do with that decision.
There was a voice. A voice in his head. Every hour it crescendoed very lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a throbbing buzz in the back of his skull. But it didn’t resonate in his head. No, that would be relatively normal: a sign of fatigue, or of paranoia, or clenched teeth. No, this blasted voice didn’t swim in his skull, but in his chest. Not his ears, but his heart swallowed the sound whole. It burned in his gut like an undigested rind of cheese that hadn’t settled, causing terrible visions of wailing statues in his sleeping quarters.
The first night he’d tried to sleep, the voice became very loud the moment his doze settled. So he neither dozed nor settled. He didn’t know what to do. Tell Periodos? The blasted paedocast would use that as an excuse to strip him of his leadership role. Not that he cared much for it, but the reason he took the post at all was to boost his rank for a job nobody else wanted. So what, then? Ignore the voice? Would it go away? Surely it had to.
So he walked. He walked all over that terrible castle, up every shadow-spun spire, down every night-woven hall. However, he avoided the prison chamber, as though it were hidden from his thoughts and distanced from his feet. Something kept him away.
The darkness of the tourmaline rock began to swim in his vision like black clouds sweeping through the night. He began to see colors in that darkness: deep blue at the ends of halls, simmering red at the fringe of his vision, white eyes reflecting off the diamond-polished rock. And every time he returned for some guard duty or another, Periodos reprimanded him with a sarcastic remark. Well, he’d shut the paedocast up good and well. Took the pommel of his sword and bust it into the right side of that sorry Helian’s face. He didn’t even protest. Just stood there and stared at him.
Savas would make captain yet. Rigor was what was needed. Good, solid discipline and authority. Then he’d bust in the face of any sorry sod who tried to talk quippy to him. He hated that. As though his intelligence were being questioned. His aptitude. His hygiene.
That night, after inspecting the prisoner’s food tray—he’d be damned if he’d let Periodos get a bleeding heart and swipe his food to feed the prisoner more—he walked to the rear of the atrium, a place he’d not yet been. There, he discovered a network of long, tall tunnels leading down and away from the main chamber. The shadows must have been stronger here because he couldn’t even see the streaks of color at the hem of his sight. Just blackness. He didn’t bother walking slower because these halls didn’t hold anything to strike his knee against. They were all long and tall and empty from wall to wall. It was infuriating.
Savas remembered the pendant he’d nipped from that prisoner of his. He rummaged through his right pocket. Nothing. Strange. His left pocket also was empty. Now, he was sure he’d put it in his pants pocket. But he checked his personal satchel to be sure. And as sure as midnight, it wasn’t there.
His anger boiled over and he was about to shout his frustration, but at that moment his foot caught no floor beneath him and he fell with a cry. It was a long, bruising fall; each tumble brought a spasm of pain and anger. Wherever he was falling, it wasn’t a stairwell, but the floor was hard and jagged all the same, and it kept inclining downward to some nebulous chasm. Savas tried his best to catch an edge or crevice in the rock, but his gauntleted hand had lost all dexterity due to his sleepless fatigue. Finally, he reached the end of his fall and rolled into a pile on the dark ground: motionless, bruised, and groaning.
The pain was terrible but for some reason he felt a strange calm come over him. He had thought immediately of Periodos, how the paedocast had probably stolen his pendant from under his nose at mealtime. But he didn’t feel any anger. And the voice in his heart didn’t bother him anymore. It wasn’t soft and quiet, but it didn’t scream at him. Instead, all he heard was a solid, steady thruum in the air. He couldn’t even hear his own groaning or breath. Just the thruum, thruum, thruum droning in the air about him, like a colossal machine bleeding oil in the walls. Gradually, he realized the voice was no longer in his heart, but in the enigmatic darkness all around him. It was warm. He pulled the voice over him like a blanket and fell into a sleep that could last a thousand years.
And as he slept, the Thing whose voice had spoken to him from near and afar these last three nights crept upon him from the abyss. Long sinews and tubes of black rock wound their way about his motionless body, removing his armor, then struck a sharp edge into his side with venomous purpose: stabbing like a spit through a lamb. But Savas did not die, nor did he wake. He was lifted up into the air, albeit painlessly and without knowledge, like a puppet on a string. And the great THRUUM grew and pulsed like the beating heart of a titan. And Savas’s body jutted with the pulse of its black blood coursing within and without him. The dark caved in and a crystalline wall sealed the poor host’s doom, to be pulled and held on heartstring.
And in that same night, small wonders of flitting lights pulsed within the body of the old abba, sleeping and recovering from his long dearth of nourishment. He had subsisted on the drink of grass dew for ten years in that terrible place. As hard as it might seem to an onlooker, for him, it was not impossible. Patient calm and a winnowing wind had upheld him in his long trial. His musing whistle had grown the grasses and nourished the soil, and all because he had caught a stray grass seed floating on the wind outside his barred window. He had grown this seed, this shield against the darkness, with music and breath and long, tender care. And now, the same was being done to the old abba by the flitting lights of wind and fire that coursed in his blood, spurred by the food given him in tender care.
The night grew long and pulsed with the light of the three moons: Allia the Silver, Dalvino the Sapphire, and Uillo’s crimson keep. By their collective shine, the island and all the ocean depths encircling it were illumined by august, festal porphyry.
A great commotion brought Petros out of his dream with a start. No middling morning sunlight had peeked in the window as yet. But the whole dark chamber now glowed with a faint purple sheen. Winnowind’s Sea.
A cacophony of clanging metal and hurried footsteps came directly to Petros’s ear around the corner of the door’s awning. Shouting erupted.
“Stay still.”
That was not the whisper-thin voice Petros remembered hearing. It was ringing, robust, like a cello string. He rose from his sleep-dead pile in a wedge of the chamber and looked in awe at the figure occupying the space where the abba had fallen asleep. He wore the same gray garb. Bright, moonsilver eyes stared out at the chamber door across the wide, black expanse. Those eyes were awaiting something.
But the infirm elder Petros had known was no longer there. Instead, a man neither young nor old but ageless as a river lay like a frozen waterfall in winter. His skin had gone from revenant white to swarthy bronze seemingly overnight, and the face was chiseled and scarred like fine tanning leather. He wore the same hair in the same fashion, but it was now dark as pitch instead of white, edged in dark brown with no sign of fray, and still the massive beard fell to his knees, neatly tucked in at the sash. In his left hand, he cradled his tome.
“Chronicler,” Petros uttered.
This was the one unchanging name for the figure he now beheld in full. Somehow the old abba had shed the blight of years and put on reborn flesh.
A cry came from just outside the chamber. The bars of the portcullis rattled and shook. “Petros! By the winds, help me open the door!” It was Periodos, shaken to his core by some unknown fear. His eyes were bloodshot and his pupils dilated. Parts of his gold and silver armor were torn from their straps, and his crimson garb had been ripped in places. In his right hand he held the key to the cell door, and in his left, the moonstone pendant, Uillo’s Eye, brightly gleaming in the midnight darkness. He tossed the gemstone to Petros, who caught it somehow in his dumbfounded haze, pocketing it by near-instant instinct.
Petros stood up and began to move for the door, but was struck motionless by the firm voice of the Chronicler. “Stop, friend child. Stay still.”
It happened in a flurry beyond mere motion. It was as if the whole outer hall had warped, coiled itself like a serpent, and struck like a thousand glass shards. An ocean wave of black diamond cascaded down on Periodos and smothered him at the doorway. It fell and swirled around him, then parted to reveal the paedocast, cast in a black tourmaline shell. His horrified face was all Petros could see. He cried out in anguish but couldn’t move for fear of the terrible Thing beyond, which now swayed and swirled like a sea in turmoil.
“Friend child, please step out of eyeshot of the door. It cannot get at us here.”
Petros faltered as he stood up, still struck with terror.
Chronicler eased the man’s fear with his temperate baritone. “It is near powerless at overcoming clean, tended earth. The Claw-heart of a Titan must first twist, burn, and break the earth to suit its black temper. Then it seeps into every crevice. Your friend will be all right; it takes centuries for the Claw to enter and maim a good heart.”
A horrible noise boomed in the deepness of the prison-castle. Issurio itself groaned, then spoke in a tumultuous quake of sound.
In the end, NONE resist me.
It was as though a thousand small voices were screaming in a bacchanal of agony: accompaniment for one monstrous, world-shifting rumble.
Meanwhile, the Chronicler was singing and chanting, loud and strong, in counterpoint to the raving carnival of terrific, thundering noise.
Petros remained paralyzed in place. The swirling whirlpool of black rock outside the door slowed, stopped...and laughed. In an instant, a pillar of darkness shot forth through the bars of the cell door. There was no time for Petros to react, except to offer one more silent plea in his heart. But the blow he expected to come never did. Thunder crashed, an explosion boomed above and below, and Petros was thrown back.
A great, sharp blade of wind had shot into the pillar of darkness, widened itself and carved through the pillar’s entire midsection, then blown furiously and with such force that the entire chamber filled with a gray gale. The two hewn blocks of the pillar of darkness had been thrust through the floor and ceiling, smashing into the foundational stonework, crashing below and sent flying above.
Petros only had time to realize that the Chronicler had run to him; suddenly, a swift whirlwind had enclosed itself around them. Then he felt a rush of intense motion outside the enclosure of galewinds. It was louder than a crash of thunder, swirling and undulating with pockets of furious airs. And all at once, everything stopped. The gray airs, flung out of their makeshift shell, spread to the prison hall, and swept out the windows. In their wake, the dark rock of the castle was no more, having been buffeted by the winds. Whatever this wind was, it removed any hint of that black ocean of rock.
Periodos, however, was still a prisoner in his statue’s cell.
“Come, friend child. We have work to do.” The Chronicler chanted a phrase in a language foreign to Petros, just as he had before the great winds descended and combated the black waves of Issurian rock. About his right hand, a pocket of silver airs twirled and formed a candelabrum of cloud. Seven fixtures in that candelabrum held small pockets of fast-swirling airs that seemed to burn as they flitted about in their small cones. The seven burning winds blew out a mist that shone with warm light. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Petros could see the full glory of real light, undiminished by the Shadow-city’s ominous presence.
They walked to Periodos. Petros took the moment to notice that the Chronicler was improbably tall, now that he did not lie infirm upon the ground, but he remained thin, his skin wound taut against his dense bones. The Chronicler stood and stared with pity at the poor frozen soul before them. He lifted his great book of chronicles in his left hand, knotted it into his sash, and let it hang from his left side. Passing his candelabrum of winds to his left hand, he extended his right and laid it upon the crest of the statue. Chronicler hummed to himself, intoning with few oscillations in a steady pitch. And Petros gasped to see a light spread down Periodos’s body, slowly at first from the top of his head downward, then swiftly descending the rest of his body. It peeled and blew away the encasement of stone like fine ash. The Karitaruk stood there, completely entranced, eyes wide open as if he never expected to be released from his standing tomb.
“Zephyr,” Petros whispered in awe.
All at once, Periodos wept great tears and embraced Petros like a brother. They were no longer guard and prisoner, but both brethren in newfound freedom.
Steadily, the three made their way through the winding arabesque of Tol Issul. The Chronicler seemed to know exactly where he needed to go, and the two onlookers followed in tight succession. All about them, wherever the warm mist of the candelabrum fell on the Issurian darkness, a great chattering of pained voices sprang up, fell away, and was silenced. The rock quivered and cracked, graying into an ashen heap that still held up the three travelers as they walked over it. Cleansing hall by hall like this, they finally came to the very rear of the atrium chamber where Savas had descended and finally fallen.
“Brother-sons, I must ask you to leave here. I will return to you shortly. All will be made right in due time.” Though he said this in full confidence, Petros noted the Chronicler seemed to be breathless, as though he had run a great race and was near to finishing.
“But you—”
“LEAVE.”
No response or rebuttal was offered. Petros would have to be addled to think he could convince such a being to change his mind. The Chronicler’s face had hardened in firm resolution, but softened after he saw Petros’s quiet nod of assent. He placed his right hand on both of them, one after the other—they flinched in worried recoil at first, as though they would be consumed in wind and flame. But the Chronicler only smiled.
With that, he began his swift, final descent.
Old memory returns to me, like terrible river water on a desert WASTE. Here is the Zephyr of great intent, whose body was BROKEN and is renewed. IDLE was my wait. LONG was the patient struggle. I CLAWED for you, hungry and needful for my own rebirth. And yet you come to me willingly, as a lamb to a SPIT. THIS one will not do.
Savas hung limply in the air, tossed on the giant’s heartstring like a ragged doll. With his limp form in its steely grip, the heartstring withdrew into the shadows.
Time and PATIENCE I have had. Now I require reward—a BODY once more. My Claw-heart beats with THUNDEROUS quickening. Now, it harvests the black FRUITS of its sewn seed. Step into the MAW of my heart’s chamber. Be ENGORGED with my blood.
The Chronicler held his wind-torch aloft and looked to the heights of the tall chamber, humming all the while. All the walls pulsed and throbbed with fleshy blackness, molten black rock descending the sides like waterfalls of blood or oil.
In the middle of the chamber, however, was the cause of the inexorable THRUUM that had ensnared Savas. A great, black heart hung from the ceiling along its aortae. Manifold tentacles hung from the heights like perverse vaulting. In its center, above a raised dais and encased in a transparent ventricle, hung poor Savas, broken and still. The heart thudded and hummed and thudded again, quickly, repeatedly, like a sickly organ bound for a swift death.
“Tanis,” came the Chronicler’s thunderous baritone. “Titan of the Underworld Mount. You are known to many in Nüun. But they speak of you in tales told to children, frightening them to chores or sleep. You are remembered and you have life, bare and fleeting as it now appears to be. But the fear of you will not last, for your name is not written here”—he gestured to the book hanging from his left side—“in my chronicle. And it never shall be. Your dominion is desolation”—THRUUM—“your kingdom is death”—THRUUM—“your memory lives not in the light of star and cosmos, but in their dark shadow of void”—THRUUM THRUUM—“and there is your heart. Listen to it! Thudding in its self-wrought sepulchre.”
THRUUM THRUUM THRUUM.
A cawing, screeching tumult rose as if a metal mountain were struggling to claw its way out of the depths of the earth, and in every direction, the pulsating flesh flung itself at the Chronicler in a maddened rage. But the Chronicler’s resounding song emanated from his spirit, and with each line a force of wind and fire and light struck out like a shield to parry and rebuff the darkness, until . . .
“Ennis navaris, na passi numa,
Kelli ne kavaa nevrosin;
Evthrosis sam ani navis suma
Ke anin palitev phrosin!”
...with the final word, a spear of wind shone forth and was thrust into the Titan’s heart. The feverish pitch of Tanis’s cry rose and fell and was silent. The foul rock was turned to brittle, gray ash. The Chronicler stepped, breathless and staggering, to the dais where the heart had fallen backward, stone and silent as the grave, cracking in parts and drying into dust. On the dais, Savas’s body had fallen, loosed from the heart’s veins and fallen from its ventricle. The young man was sleeping peacefully, though his torso was pocked with wide, dark openings in the flesh. The Chronicler raised him up and turned to make the long ascent back. The bleak foundations of Tol Issul began to crumble and quake.
The sky was on fire. Something was wrong, for its entire shape was small; encircled like an eye of flame in the distant darkness. Sounding crashes and cries reverberated in the deep night, as though the world were falling away from the firmament and all the Zephyrim of the Worldrender were weeping for Nüun. But the circlet of flaming sky wasn’t rising away. It was drawing nearer, growing larger as the tumultuous noise subsided.
Savas could not comprehend this. His voice had escaped him. Even the light of his eyes seemed to fail him. It looked as though eternity were stretching toward eternity—the sky, bounded in a circlet, bending down to reach a hand of wind-tossed rosy cloud to the fallen earth—and he feared it greatly. But the fear subsided as his understanding grew.
He could feel...they were not arms. They were strong and firm, but they felt more like the onrush of falling waters or winds, concentrated into human form and bearing him up. Up. He felt motion. The great jostles of a tall human gait. Savas was being borne up by someone, something.
He remembered the darkness, the horrid pulse of oily blood running through him, the black fire and its terrible heat; and over all, the overshadowing threat of a titanic claw hovering above him, drawing its longest barb across his chest as though to lacerate and spill him.
Savas could not move until he recalled that rendering nail. He struggled to pull his right arm to his chest. He used it to feel across his whole chest’s surface, drawing across it to his side. There, in his right side: a gap. It was like the ocean Maws that swallow whole islands, descending sheer into the sea, but this gaping hole descended into him. Though he felt no blood rush from him, he dared not place his hand inside that fleshy chasm. Yet, he also felt...
It was closing. The wound was mending at its edges and glowed with a faint gray light. He drew his hand across it as the flesh sinewed together. He might have recoiled in disgust had he been able to look at it from an onlooker’s perspective. Yet, the feeling was so intensely strange, and thrilling, and a steady stream of warm water issued forth from his eyes like a river that nourishes its people.
Raspy air drew itself from his mouth. “H-h-h-o-o-w-w-w...” came his tear-stricken voice. Had his body the strength to bear a sob in its chest, Savas would have convulsed with all the maddening joy welling within him. Instead, it spilled from his eyes. He could not hope to contain it, else it burst out of the waning wound in his side.
He looked to the figure carrying him. Garbed and cloaked in mute gray. A dark and tumbling beard. And eyes with the same color and light that flitted over his wound.
“Still, friend child. Be still.”
Savas stopped moving but couldn’t hold back his joyful cry anymore. It was more than he could take. He was alive. Alive! And there! Savas could see better now. The winds in the sky were descending to greet them. All the flaming night burst into morning light, and the darkness suddenly abated.
The man had gently risen from the atrium and out the gate of Tol Issul, bearing Savas’s still body in both arms. The castle crashed around them. Its terrible chambers smote upon the seawater, descending to the ocean depth, and its twisting spires crumbled to dust and were tossed on the four winds. All the black rock of the island, all of Ilo Issurio’s fell blood, was swept into the blazing morning sky, and a fiery dawn consumed it.
Savas held his arm over his eyes, for the dawning light was too strong and he needed to adjust. When he could finally open them, he saw Periodos and the prisoner, Petros, standing before him with utter amazement dancing in their eyes. Peri! Periodos! He had to tell him!
“A-n-a...” Savas barely managed to say. His voice cracked like the subtle crackling of wood fire. Again!
“A-n-a-f...” Blast his ragged lungs! Say it!
Periodos came to him, rested his hand upon the poor soul’s brow, looked over his tattered scraps of red and brown garb, and finished the word for him.
“Anaphora.”
The Chronicler cast back his cloak’s hood, stepped forward with ongoing purpose, and handed Savas to Periodos, who held him up under his arm. Periodos had discovered his legs anew.
The renewed abba, the Chronicler, went out to the island, to every corner of it, seeing the black dust rise and dissipate in the morning air. He went to every statue of that island, every person encased in the Issurian bloodstone. And upon every head he let fall his open palm. The rock fell away and the person was revealed.
An old fisherman in bonds.
“Anaphora,” came Savas’s ragged but full voice.
A prostitute and her progeny.
“Anaphora!”
An entire family. Men. Women. Children. Innocents. Condemned. One and all: prisoners no more.
“ANAPHORA!”
The day was long ahead of them but the newly created family of Issurian convicts had much to share with one another. Hours were passed telling seafaring tales, or narrating personal foibles, or relating old family stories. Each person was like an old relation to the other, lost to memory and newly found. None touched upon what brought them to the island, nor anything resulting from the Claw-heart of Tanis and his blood plague. Time beyond measure would be needed to heal those wounds completely.
The Chronicler took Petros, Savas, and Periodos aside as a bonfire was lit: a cask and crate of food had been discovered, salvaged from the shore rocks. The four of them would return for the feast, but questions needed answering, and no one else could bear the pain of reliving the Titan’s curse.
“Tanis was so immense,” the Chronicler related, “as indeed were all the Titans, that it took a twofold heart to engine his body. The heart you were trapped in, Savas, was but the second fold, an inner core. Tol Issul itself was the cavernous skeleton of his old heart, held in stasis by the second, which remained: alive, if only because of haughty pride. Although the body was cast to the sea long ago, the heart had not been dealt with, and so Tanis was in waiting for a host to renew himself; to build up a new body with his heart’s blood.”
Savas clutched at his side, which had been sinewed together completely. No damage had been done to his body, for it was a vessel that Tanis had prized. A sophomore offering to engorge with his own foul, sanguine fluids.
“Was I...was I weak? Did he choose me because I was weak?”
The Chronicler dropped to one knee and looked with stern sincerity directly into Savas’s eyes. “Not weak. Weakness would have availed you. Your failing was something else, something you must discover now, within you, and tear from your very chest.”
The question of what to do now still hung over the heads of everyone, but the Chronicler was not dismayed. He sat in quiet contemplation at the cliffside of an edifice of rock—good, earthy rock. Petros came to his side and sat down, looking out over the frothing waves and spirited gulls flying freely. “What do we do now? How do we get home?”
The Chronicler smiled and playfully tousled Petros’s hair. “You? You have done enough! You saved me. You saved everyone here. It is I who ought to prepare the means of our leaving. And I can do it, but it will need a day of time and good rest.” Petros looked at the Chronicler and saw how the aged lines of his decrepit form seemed to have returned somewhat. He was tired and worn from the exertion of his great winds.
A day passed and the island’s inhabitants crowded around the Chronicler, who had called them. He asked that they take hold of one another, and that as many of them take hold of him as well as they could. They all stood, feeling rather foolish at such a thing. The Chronicler looked up to the sky, as if to gauge something. To seek out some object on the wind. Or prepare himself, as though a great wave were coming. He intoned and chanted:
“Into this world, you gift us your wind,
The good and sustaining elixir;
Come and abide in me, all of my soul,
And spirit my heart far from here.”
With a force like a cyclone, the whole party of people was surrounded with a circlet of gray and white cloud, thrust at a perilous speed by tumultuous winds that enclosed around them. An onrush of motion sounded outside the enclosure of galewinds. A crash of thunder broke, rippling and surging with blasts of furious gusts—and suddenly, the storm ceased.
The swirling sphere of winds died away and the group was left standing in a field unlike any they’d ever seen. Everywhere between the sky and their feet shone billowing waves of crimson grasses, tall and dense, swaying and undulating in a dance of slow passion. Furloughed valleys were pocked with denser blades of lavender, pricked with spots of pink and flowering with yellow and orange tassels. Atop hills of swaying grandeur stood a few trees of deep pomegranate, their branching foliage extending in a flat horizon at gradients along the twirling brown trunk. Off in the distance, beyond the sharp orange mist of leagues and before a pink and purpling sunset, great pillars of mountains, rounded at their tops and jutting sheer and straight from their roots, towered over pillowing blue clouds. And wherever the clay soil showed forth, it glowed with a faint, white-red aura.
“What...what marvel of the winds...?” Petros could not help but smile and laugh in utter bewilderment. The smile gave way to consternation, and he asked, “Chronicler, where are we and by what power are we here?”
“Look to your pendant.”
Petros rifled through his tan pants, then brought it forth. Rather than emit any beam or further red mist, it glowed with a white-red light, like the soil of this place but brighter and crystalline.
“Where do you think we are?”
Petros felt his knees quake and he fell to the ground, sitting and staring. He knew the answer. It was impossible. It was true. It was mad and brilliant and terrible all at once. “Uillo. We are standing on Uillo. The Third Moon.”
“Indeed! And without a moment to spare.” The Chronicler seemed rather animated at this, awhirl with excitement. It was exciting, but Petros was so totally overcome by everything that he didn’t dare register a response. Off in the distance, some strange animal like a tall, long-necked lamb grazed upon ruby grasses. “But...” he began to ask, “But isn’t the moon a desert waste? The gnosticists declared—”
“HA. This place is alive and it flourishes. See. Taste. This world is alive, and good. And you, my friend, will be likewise, as will everyone else here. I’ll introduce you all to the Elledi! Oh such wonderful persons. Tall folk, good at fly fishing; bit pale, but love to lounge in the sun, go figure; very good at parties; can get too long-winded, but sharp with a turn of phrase...” And he went on like this for a while. It was strange how different the abba seemed now that he could finally move and talk without the looming threat of a monster, but through all that impish humor he still maintained wise acuity and childlike wonder.
Petros asked, “But why take us here and not home?” The Chronicler stopped talking, furrowed his brow, and frowned. “I had considered every possible plan to bring you all to safety, but...” A shadow passed over his eyes. “Nüun has been taken. It’s no longer safe for any of you.”
The words had no significance for Petros until he looked up into the fiery sky and saw something that stole his breath. His home, his world, Nüun. It was a shock to see it hanging in the sky rather than below his feet, surely. But even greater was the shock of seeing it...enclosed.
Blue oceans were muted and covered by some kind of fierce storm that encircled the whole world. Billows of tall, black clouds bustled around it like predatory lions rounding prey.
“That is why I came to your world, Petros.” The Chronicler had never called him by name before, so Petros could do little other than stare at him in quiet consideration. “Ten years ago I came here. I am not one of the Zephyrim, as you thought. Yet they are similar to me, and their strength is my strength. But they are under siege.”
“From whom? From what? Why could we never see these terrible storms?”
“The storms are as invisible to you as the spaces between worlds are to me. I pass across them like a pilgrim. But the deeper truths I see as though they were lit by a bright sun.”
Petros was in a sudden panic. “Nami! Melia! My wife and child are there! And everyone else’s families—”
“Will be brought here with haste. However, I must await the next anaphoral tide.” And the Chronicler looked to the sky as he had done on Ilo Issurio, awaiting the great storm of winds. Petros looked to him and knew it must be some great power that came through like an ocean tide that swept them here to Uillo. “I am bound to help you all, for I fear this is somewhat my fault.”
Petros laughed. “Your fault? How?”
The Chronicler laughed, but the laugh was not the throaty kind of jubilee that tousled his beard and erupted from his belly. It was a laugh edged in sorrow.
“I cannot say. For now, we will rest, and when the new day comes I will depart and bear all your loved ones here to your new home, though you must tell me where and how to find them.”
Your new home. Suddenly, Petros was struck with a new fear, but also a great hope and even joy. He had lived through a similar time, when he’d finished with his travels into the whirling gales of the Windveil and the Worldrender on Nüun and planted himself alongside his family in a new, strange place. A place where they’d built for themselves a new peace. He looked to his pendant, and then to the distant mountains rising in pillars of flame. Seafarer’s Sign.
“I’m coming with you.” The words were effortless, natural, like the breath of the wind.
The Chronicler appraised his friend’s great courage, but could not help closing his eyes in newfound sorrow.
“This is right and needful. Brother-son, Petros, you are needed for this final effort. But I wish it were not so. Would that none of this had come to pass under my wing.”
“I am afraid,” Petros said, eyeing the storms of Nüun. “Deathly afraid. But my land cries out—my people cry out—for release from this wailing storm, and from the hardness of terrible beings who have been formed by its foul wraith-winds. We can’t hear their cry from such distances, but I feel it within me. I must go.”
Petros looked to the distance in awe and readiness, as though he were absorbing the whole sight of Uillo and treasuring it in his soul. He imagined Nami barreling across the ruby-red grasses, kite in tow, smiling her toothy smile, and his winsome wife Melia making swift friends with a kind of tall, skeletal creature, white as bone but gentle as a doe.
The Elledi! He saw them in the distance, walking toward his friends and those rescued from the Titan. Some nervously bounded away, but Periodos and Savas walked forward eagerly to greet the tall creatures.
The Chronicler looked at him and smiled. “What are you doing?”
Petros pondered the question in his heart, then nodded to himself. “Remembering this.”
Such treasures. Who had netted him such treasures? From what sea did they spring?