The Hammer Unfalls

4.76 Left to Lament

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Glim pressed the shuttle button and tensed, waiting. He’d nearly given up. He’d spent his whole life summoning gruesome imagery to soothe his morbid thoughts. But Certe had shown him a darkness he’d never thought possible. It made a sick sort of sense. The flip side of an Icer’s logic is the certainty of inevitability. Everything dies. Everything decays, and becomes sand or soil. Nothing lasts.

With a shuddering groan of metal against metal, the shuttle rose into the air, much slower than it had fallen.

Relief sparked inside him at the shuttle’s ascent. But would it hold? Glim waited until the steady vibration of the shuttle allayed his fears.

In a darkness punctuated by the occasional flicker of wan light, Glim opened his pack and pulled out an apple. Its sourness reminded him of a happier moment, when the euphoria of phyr had surged inside him. It hardly seemed real, but he knew it has happened. He’d snapped fire from the air.

And also, he’d sparked the conflagration that had awakened Certe.

What have I done? he moaned to himself in his mind. For his voice had been lost. For now? Forever?

Choking the bites down, Glim ate a handful of apples. He concentrated on the tart juice, hoping to awaken more sensation to invigorate his mind. It worked, a little, which kept him from answering the urge to lay down and sleep the rest of his life away.

Fortunately, the shuttle held its course, the journey did not take long, and Glim emerged into the sunny light of the guard station. The opening of the doors gave him a hint of novelty, which sparked a shred of satisfaction. He ascended the stairs and walked into the light, looking around him at the unfamiliar guard station.

Water, he thought numbly. The lifeblood of all people, but particularly Icers. Water fueled everything. Not only their bodies, but their spirits.

He took the stairs as quickly as he could, then drank his fill from the scummy basin of water in the dining hall. Once he’d slaked his thirst, Glim sat on the floor and tried to form a plan. Obviously he needed to return home. But he’d never have the chance to be in this place again. What did it have left to offer? With one last glance around, Glim performed a quick checklist. Did he have everything? Did he need to do anything before he left?

He poked around the outpost, peeking his head into each room, finding nothing of interest. But when he walked to the observation patio, he cried out. Or attempted to. No sound came from his lips.

Below him, much closer than he’d like, Glim saw Certe. The confrontation with the hawk had apparently given the giant some of his energy back, because he’d climbed out of the cavern and started to walk, with stunning speed.

Directly towards Glim.

In that moment, a fear he had not yet voiced came to the front: Certe’s eyes matched Glim’s own. One of them, at least. The unique one. Silver, unlike any human eye he’d ever seen. In the cavern, Glim had subconsciously hidden his ability to ply algidon, like Ryn would have urged him to do.

But Certe seemed shrewd. Glim guessed that they both shared the same gift of plying algidon. And with the course Certe had set, directly towards Glim, it seems that perhaps Certe had been drawn to Glim’s essentiæ just as the hinterjacks had been.

He fled the patio, entered the shuttle, strapped himself in, and pressed the button that would return him to Wohn-Grab.

With a pop that Glim sensed through the shuttle floor, it dropped and hurled downward with a force that made Glim’s hair rise. The faster the better; Glim desperately wanted to put distance between himself and Certe.

After an hour or so, Glim started to relax. He’d probably be well ahead of the giant by now.

Relaxation became boredom, then a fatalism which lulled him with its inexorable pull. Just give up. The idea seemed logical.

Take care! another voice sparked inside him, the one he’d come to call flame, because it reminded him of the moment he’d gained the ability to ply phyr. Which he still did not comprehend, but had no desire to test in the confines of the shuttle. He might suck all of the life from the air, or set his own clothes on fire. He wanted to try it, but the idea seemed reckless.

Take care! the flame had cautioned him. Take care to do what? He took the warning as a plea to engage with the world. To not just give up.

He needed a distraction. Something to engage his mind.

Remembering the scrolls, Glim unbuckled himself from the shuttle seat and rummaged through his pack. Words had failed him. Perhaps reading would help get them back.

He took one of the scroll cases out and looked it over. Blackened silver, tarnished just as the staff he’d found. He’d forgotten what words meant. The squiggles of letters sort of made sense, but also did not. Part of him simply didn’t care. But the recently awoken part, one that seared him with its intensity, did. It inspired him to try harder.

At last he deciphered the title of this scroll: Lament of the Elderkin.

Glim used his knife to scrape the wax from the end. The brittle chunks fell away readily. Glim unscrewed the cap and tilted the case towards his palm.

A roll of parchment fell out and crumpled from the impact.

Careful, you clod!

Glim tilted the case back immediately to lessen the force, but the damage had been done. Much of the scroll had disintegrated.

Carefully, Glim unrolled what was left, hardly daring to breathe. Some of the parchment crumbled beneath his fingertips, but he was able to unfurl it enough to see some of the words on the undamaged side of the scroll. At first the script looked like a jumble of markings that made no sense to his mind. But the flame within him pushed back against the darkness, fighting to remember, until the words made sense to his beleaguered mind:

Lament of the Elderkin

Had we known what would come, we nev…

would have convinced the essent…

Had we known how bleak food could taste,

how wretched each breath could feel

as we dragged char across our lungs,

or how easily our voices would be silenced by fear,

our bodies contorted by …

our minds numbed to our own humanity,

our essentiæ claimed as tribute,

and our love for each other…

we never would have asked the land and sky …

Had we known that our adulation would …

we never would have asked the waters for wisdom

or allowed the passion of the flame to seduce us.

Had we known that our children would bec…

and their children would become …

we never would have plied essent…

The only true part of us that remains is vengeance.

Glim stared at the words, his mind struggling to understand. Some of it fell into place immediately, such as why the Elderkin relied so heavily on devices and physical manipulation: they did not trust the essentiæ. But what did it mean, convinced?

That suggested conversation. The Elderkin had communicated with the essentiæ? Had the essentiæ talked? How?

He reread the scroll, taking in each word. The last line chilled Glim most of all. Something horrible had happened. The Elderkin had an agenda he’d never guessed before: vengeance.

Even though you were raised in a fortress? You whit.

He pondered what he’d learned, frustrated by the missing words. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Much more carefully, Glim opened the second scroll case to read what he could of The Legend of the Trine Marauders. This scroll had been even further damaged. Not only that, but the words made no sense.

At first he thought it was the result of the curse Certe had placed upon him. But after many attempts to read it, Glim concluded that the bulk of it had been written in a script so old he could not comprehend it. The only piece that made sense to him was one readable block of footnotes at the bottom of the scroll. A translation, it seemed, in a language just barely recent enough for him to glean its meaning. The moment he read the words, Glim grew agitated. He saw immediately just how screwed he’d become.