The Hammer Unfalls

4.71 Tendril Shepherd

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Deep within Æronthrall, a tendril reached out in exasperation. The cold darkness of rock pressed in from all sides. All sides except below, the thin channel from which she’d sprung. A tiny fissure carved out over generations upon generations of her ancestors, which she’d grown to fill until nothing but stone remained around her.

She didn’t have much time. Already her fatigue welled up, threatening to overcome her. She’d wither here, in another dead end, her only hope that the next tendril would scrape its way where she could not.

She trembled with weakness. She unswelled and withdrew, conserving her remaining strength, and relieving the strain of her own pressure against unforgiving stone. Overwhelmed by desperation, she lay limp against the tomb she’d striven so hard to reach.

She trembled again. But was it her that trembled? Or the stone around her?

Listening, quivering with attention, she sensed what she had missed before. Another path. A tiny path. A fissure within a fissure.

Hardly daring to hope, she extended a deeper part of herself. Retreated, so that she could move forward again.

This new place pressed even tighter around her, but with less certainty. No longer unassailable, the rock yielded to her exploratory roots, mere hairs along a stem. Those hairs swelled, and the grains of rock shifted around her.

Hope surged inside her, and with it strength. The hairs became roots, the roots became a tendril, which unfurled and scrabbled in a tiny cleft of sand. The further she climbed, the more the rock trembled around her. Rhythmic and pounding. She knew this rhythm; it was the sea.

Closer and closer she crept, until the currents of water surged past, just overhead. The sand around her grew damp, then wet, as she wormed her way through clay sediment flush with life. Tiny and unseeable, even more ethereal than essentiæ itself, these specks of life swarmed her. She reveled in their primitive vitality, like a drowning doe might sip air as it’s snout broke the surface, or as one dying of thirst might savor a patch of dew. Crude sustenance, yet sustenance all the same.

Her time grew even shorter. With a surge of will, she strained against the sand and broke through.

Something she’d forgotten millennia ago suffused her. Barely perceptible, it trickled through the water in shimmers. What had it been called?

Light.

Yes. Light.

The tendril wept at its beauty, knowing she’d never live long enough to experience it herself. Getting here had taken all. Her cycle’s end drew near.

In desperation, the tendril unfurled. It crept along the ocean floor, seeking, until it sensed another mind. It caressed slick skin. A eye opened. She summoned every shred of memory and will, and poured the last gasp of her own essentiæ into the creature.

The squid recoiled in surprise, writhing free of the sediment on the sea floor.

Fading fast, the tendril composed one last thought. A direction, vague, but definable, and one word:

Warmth.

The squid drew water into itself and expressed an inky cloud of darkness into the water. With a stream of water barely wider than the crevasse she’d emerged from, the squid surged through the depths with its new goal clamoring in its mind.

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Countless lifetimes of darkness and despair had addled her mind almost beyond cohesion. But with every generation that lived and died within the sea, exhilarated by freedom and sensation, her consciousness coalesced. Her cycle lasted but one day, yet she passed a deeper and deeper understanding to each descendant that took her place. By the time she took the form of another tendril, and poked herself out on the surface of warm waves to observe the young warrior on the beach, she had remembered enough. The plan she’d created so very long ago.

Words no longer made sense. Only the power of names remained. Tomykas, this one called himself.

The tendril wondered: did she have a name? No. But she’d once been part of something that did. Something greater than herself by far. Greater that even Tomykas, or the strangely colored fronds on the beach.

When she explored Tomykas’s energy and revealed herself to his dazzled gaze, she was able to provide an image of a place far away. One she’d glimpsed so long ago she could hardly recall it. North, beyond the sea, cradled by mountains and fields of wheat, where hawks and doe and people lived in harmony. A place he had to go, to seek the ice that could temper his flame.

But something bound the young warrior here. Something she could never hope to overcome: love.

The synergy of it gave her hope. The two of them together could do it. They could form a family of wind, ice, and flame.

Invigorated by her rekindled hope, the tendril went off in search of the woman the warrior called Mhagi.

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It had taken everything for the tendril to rejoin the two warriors in their new land. False starts along pathways long ago forgotten. Like aiming a bow at a target halfway across the world that she could no longer see. Her arrows fell short, each generation of herself extinguishing vaguely closer to her goal, but maddeningly far from it.

When at last she emerged among those faraway mountains and observed Tomykas and Mhagi with their young daughter—a wind daughter, the tendril thought, writhing with revulsion—she realized her own folly. How reckless and fragile her plan had been all along.

You failed to see it! she chastised herself, with a familiar rage. All this time. How broken you have become. Like the conniving snakes who wronged you with their lies.

Now that the pieces had fallen into place, the tendril couldn’t take the final step. It wouldn't be fair to the woman she'd brought here. How could Mhagi produce a son of ice without betraying her own love for Tomykas?

The tendril could force a union. Find a stranger with ice in his veins, to lay with Mhagi against her will, and against the stranger’s will in turn.

But that went against the very love the tendril hoped to engender. The tender regard that would form a proper family, one founded with contentment and purpose. A purpose that would prepare the children for what would come to pass.

She had to find another way.

The tendril found a willing elk doe, one enthralled by her energy, and used its form to explore the forests and fields. As fortune would have it, a way became clear. An expectant mother, wandering the wood, clutching her belly and moaning. The tendril-doe sensed a son of ice on the cusp of taking its first breath. She also sensed the mother’s faltering essentiæ. Her life waning as her son’s life waxed.

As she had with Mhagi and Tomykas, the doe used her own essentiæ to touched the woman’s mind, and filled it with visions of her son, healthy and hale, living in the nearby village. Sadness and hope consumed the woman as the doe lay beside her, radiating as much wisdom and tranquility as she could to ease the mother’s passing. Just before death claimed the mother, the doe drew her fading essentiæ into herself. Her teats swelled with milk at the baby’s first cry. The tendril-doe nursed the infant, awaiting the chance to bring Mhagi and Tomykas to it.

When that day finally arrived, and the young wind-daughter drew her parents into the forest to find the babe, the doe knew its long quest had come to an end. Part of the quest, at least. She touched the minds of Tomykas and Mhagi, and felt their assent. The pact had been fulfilled. They would raise the ice son as their own.

It is done. The thought surged insider her, breaking her apart with its ferocity.

The doe felt her own cycle coming to a close as she stumbled away into the forest. She’d done it! At long last, she could put this part of herself to rest. This branch of the vine could be pruned forever. The tendril had done her part. She’d take her final rest here, among the brown trees and soft needles, returning herself to herself.

The time to begin anew had come. She had ahead of her the step she loathed most: trusting everything to the proclamation she’d made to the wind sisters so long ago. So, so long ago, when her consciousness had not deteriorated so severely into the mush it had become. Had they heeded her? Had they absolved themselves of the stain their mothers had spread on the world so long ago? Such stains could never wash clean. Like the ink the squid had released into the sea, it tainted everything around it.

It all depends on you, sisters. The daughters of the daughters who had taken everything. Whose legacy had driven Æronthrall to the brink of ruin.

The tendril-doe collapsed onto the forest floor and wept. With joy for the triumph that had been so long in the making. With fear for the uncertainty ahead. And above all, with bitterness at how time had woven its cruel tapestry.

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Deep within Æronthrall, a tendril reached out in trepidation. She’d lost part of herself. A branch had cut itself off. It could mean many things. Failure. Calamity. But the only sane way to proceed was to assume the best: the tendril had succeeded. It had brought the children wind, ice, and flame together.

Hope stirred, dangerous and exhilarating. What if it had come to pass? The essentiæ had become one family again?

The sliver of hope became an arrow of resolve. She would find out if those lying snakes had redeemed themselves.

With only a hint of broken essentiæ to guide her, drawing her through sheer intuition alone, the new tendril sought the frigid mountains that had encapsulated the flame.

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A vine emerged into dimness. Yet even that hint of light overwhelmed her. The fissures in stone had given way to frigid ice, then smooth brass pipes, and finally this perfectly formed stone somewhere within a fortress. For many cycles she gathered her strength. The broken child approached, his warped essentiæ radiating like the light he’d invoked from the walls. The vine screamed from the sensation of unfamiliar energy long ago forgotten, and the stench of ice and flame.

Follow me, she urged the boy, with his mismatched eyes and darkened thoughts. So grim. So blind. He had everything, yet nothing.

So this is the child the wind-sisters had wrought. The silver eye of Certe. The dark eye of Phyr. They had heeded her proclamation after all.

The thought should have sparked euphoria within her, but instead it doused her in sadness. This never should have come to pass. The vine shuddered, dropping brittle brown leaves onto the floor.

Follow me, she urged again.

The boy drew closer. The vine writhed and slithered inside the unnatural sphere that would take him where she needed him to go. She waited, her mind stretched to the breaking point. It all hinged on this. This broken child would press the button, or not. She could not influence his choice. It had to be his own volition that drove him. Only his own resolve would carry him.

He pressed the button and her world erupted with possibility. Like a pebble on a mountainside, which gathered snow until it summoned an avalanche, her plan had been set in motion.

Too late she realized her peril. The vine disappeared into the walls and fought its way out of the sphere.

Get back! she urged herself. The vine found itself in the chamber and entwined into one.

The shuttle detached from the wall. The vine braced itself, its essentiæ scuttling back, as the movement of the shuttle ripped the vine in two.

Her last thought before darkness consumed her was more like a prayer: please let me be ready.

This branch of herself resigned itself to withering away forever. She poured herself back into herself. It was up to the final branch and the broken child now. The part of herself that waited in a cave, deep in the mountains, that had bided its time over the centuries for this moment to come.