Fly low ye carrion crow
seize my body for the debt I owe
drop me high into the depths below
for the things I’ve seen no one else should know
- Two Gallants
seize my body for the debt I owe
drop me high into the depths below
for the things I’ve seen no one else should know
- Two Gallants
74th of Winter, 511 AV
They’d been watching him. That he was certain of, from the flaying of the ragged, inky patina of their wings, to the ubiquitous cawing that kept sloughing away in a slither of augury. There weren’t any whispers, just guttural cacophony. The blue ridges veined by icy crusts, crested by ruddy hues in the breaking of a topaz dawn. The sprawl of purple just lower, turgidly defying shreds of a darker gray. They plunged sharply, broken by a jumble of canyons. Their cliffs were direly vertiginous. Everywhere, a scatter of boulders. The fading edges pocked vaguely by ravines. The jut of ascendant birches, of aspens with a few, shaking leaves of molten gold, ever congealing before the empty coals of his vision. There was a thunder of rushing water.
Below, rising spears of rock forced from the milky fog of these cataracts, solemnly yielding before tracts scabbed by melting drifts. The ledges clung by briars, patches of gorse, heather. They were like thrones, hanging devoid of monarchs, of any usurper but him.
Ulric’s eyes flung out from his stony roost, scrying over a feral tangle of squat pines, nearly devoid of color, while nearby tufts of grass swayed in the skirls of a somber, inveterate wind. They’d make a fine pyre, he scowled, envisaging the dourly leaning stack of oil-soaked timbers, just biding for the conceit of ceremony. The sham of ritual, for dead was always dead, nothing more. Harshly, he furled brawny arms over the bulge of his chest, covered by the layers of creaking leather, scraping scale, and jangling plate. The frost clung to him, making him shiver. The fire was dead, just ashes and char, a ring of rocks streaked by flint. He expected that he stank of its acrid smoke, the headier stenches of sweat, metal, and dirt, though these prideful folds of granite didn’t care for his reek. They just stayed, hushed and obdurate under the lash of rain and gusts and the numbing passage of time, slowly crumbling to the dust of dreams. The dregs of that cloying grit clung to the corners of his eyes. Hesitantly, he chafed at them, using the coarse pads of his gauntlets.
He’d roused from a dreary slumber, and now, as he pondered the far reaches beyond the seemingly impenetrable curtain of these lofty crawlers, he kept thinking of their progeny. The passed, the spurs of broken crags, ringed by drab trunks, seamed by yawning gorges. They called to him, infusing the spark of a larger desire in the betraying depths of his chest. Though he was caught by the cage of japery, suckled by the bronzed circumfix of brutality, he knew why he was here. These peaks were like the embrasures of a dying land, towering up as the final rampart of the artisan whose long fingers deftly shaped a jar from wet clay, the gauntest symbol of culture. They kept at bay the inexorable delvings of savagery, perhaps wilting under a futile burden. The verge of nothing is always empty. There they stood, veined by discord, and he knew they sought to engulf him in their prideful temerity. The jigsaw of a broken dreamer, the god he’d never known. The marbled temple, the cruel vagary of his fate cast asunder. There wasn’t any use, but he had to try.
They’d exchanged whispers in the hushed moments of another revelation. The squall of the young, the sweaty interval in their arguing. They were illusory, yet it was far beyond the border his thoughts, the tang of copper always on his cracking lips. To regain what he’d lost, he’d have to dance in the crazy throes of confuscation, ever desiring to separate insanity from intellect, to comprehend the most insistent of the whispers. The wine hadn’t done anything. The harshly sour, vinegary cup of his sorrows, the doubts of a raving skeptic manifesting, dispensing with his burden of lead. Though clung by hawsers of his own lashing, he’d hardly forgot what he’d become. The clank of chains, the shackles that he’d imagined to bind himself to the specters of what might’ve been, they wouldn’t go away. The pipers were playing, their melody like a whirling top, laughing with the dervish of his conceit. The yawn of every canyon evoked the juncture of tawny thighs, sticky with dark, cloying seed, the nectar of betrayal. That was his curse. The jealousy, the fear, they’d made him a man, clad his bones with flesh. The day was long faded when he’d aspired to vengeful divinity. The crows spoke otherwise. Their vision ruptured the dreamer that he’d become.
Ulric resented it.
Forcing back a shiver, he jerked his bristly chin at the lower, shadowy defiles, thorny and laden with shifting banks of shale. They were sundered and folded over, like so many sullenly contorting gargoyles, buttressed by the lazy scarps of boulders. The creepers of the night, baking to confusion. The dream eaters.
There was no other way.
Dawn’s blanket clung over his face like a cowl. He hefted his heavy crossbow, a brutal, blackened monstrosity of twisted metal that was ever unfurling its demonic wings, and began to clank away. The jolt of every stride pricked at his joints. The slog of weary eyes, probing over the broken, bumpy jumbles, over the subtle treachery of undulations, judging their peril. Through crags he trudged, over crests of ruddy, bare rock, carpeted by purple lichen. They’d lied to him, every crevice and fall of dead timber, the subjects of a dream that’d already ceased. The grotesquery of every jut in the rocks, ever whorl of wispy cloud. The musket balls of flint dislodged by clumsy toe, skittering past a lizard, leathery gray scales defying the frost. Caw, jabbered the crows. Caw, caw, caw.
Raving like inebriated mendicants, all hairy limbs and livid, saggy cheek, the crinkles of a brow speckled by liver spots. They held the answers.
Caw, caw.
Their mockery forced the scar of a grin over his lips, the coals of his eyes flaring inexorably. “Caw,” he grunted. “Caw.”
