Alium, page 44
“I understand,” Elts murmured. “Well. I was born outside of the flow, in the darkness where Xeléd does not shine. At first I hated all sewers of the Fabric. It helped of course that the imperial sorcerers who came to Wyx were so vile. But here I am, a student of the wind, and I don’t think it is merely because of my mother’s gift. There was a part of me that always was interested in the subtle forces of life and the world. Perhaps we are all drawn to it, no matter how we see the Fabric or how it hurts us.”
The frozen face of Zelor seemed, if not to loosen, at least to lighten, as if those black furrows in his troubled skin had suddenly more shallow abysses. “You are wise,” he said. “If only I had not gone off to be alone so young, I might have met those Xol like your mother, like Xirell, who could have shown me the true nature of Xeléd.”
“Maybe our positions are not so different from the start. I certainly thought about abandoning Wyx. The idol might have found me first.”
Zelor looked back over the growing forces of his summoning, and it did not seem that he would reply.
“I see what makes Koloi powerful,” Elts said. “Their formation and action require little sewing, and so you might conjure hundreds very quickly. They seem quite small, but again—this is why they are so numerous.”
Zelor seemed to nod. “Numerous but easily dispersed, and not so quick to resume their form. They may overwhelm the enemy, but the warriors of Feox will finish them. They are Varaga, living flame. Not so easy to raise in this place, but in the end the power of a Zefloz is an awesome thing. It is a shame that he is limited to my instruction. If any of our company had a mind for war, it was him.” The sorcerer turned back to the fire and closed his eyes.
Elts came and sat beside him, placing one hand over his. The dark purple skin was hot as molten metal, and though at first she wished to pull away, she held tightly to the limp fingers. The purple flesh was impossibly thin and gaunt, as though it hardly held back the bone. “Zelor,” she said. “There is no forgiveness for what you have done. For many days, and none so critically as this have I struggled to divide in my mind your spirit from the Shadow of Duxmortul. This I have now finally accomplished. I see you, what you might have been, what you wish to be, what you hope for Altum. I cannot forget the pain, the darkness that has been wrought through your form; I will never see you as you once truly were. Yet I will stand beside you. I believe that you work for the good of this world, that whether your first alliance with Duxmortul was born of hate or justice, it does not matter now.” She quieted, and her grip loosened as the faint gossamer countenance of Xirell fell like a veil over her memory. There was a long silence.
“The old man; he loved you,” Zelor said at last. “There was no truth so clear in his mind when…”
“When the Shadow took him.”
“When I took him.” The sorcerer pulled away from her touch and resumed the sharpening of his weapon. The long, ringing beats cut the silent night as the ranks of elementals rose and ordered themselves over the starlit snow. But even as he had returned to his exercise Zelor hung his head, and the sword was too stiff in his hands. He turned to the side his chin, so that one eye was revealed, and not since the beginning of their journey into the mountains had there been such a clear and bright whiteness in that gaze. “Thank you, Elts,” he said.
The Silver Zefloz did not speak again for the remainder of the night, methodically preparing his weapon. Xelv and Feox conducted their work as though they would never sleep, and by the time that Elts lay down herself, it seemed that a vast army was prepared already for the dawn.
She dreamed that night of Zelor slain, white blood flowing as from his every pore, stark and pitiless against black robes, yet indistinguishable from the pure snow where it pooled. A purple blossom was on his chest, and in his hands stood the idol of Duxmortul, its six red eyes bubbling and steaming. But the host was dead, useless. Darkness rose up from Zelor’s body, slowly fading into immortal night.
*
At sunrise the army of flame and water was grown vast. One thousand fiery warriors strode clothed in hot smoke down the sloping plain, burning away the snow as they went; ahead of them and bursting at their flanks like a massive battering barrier surged a veritable sea of Koloi. The Varaga standing straight were tall as men and lean as blades, with long, powerful claws of fire, and snaking tails which smote the snow in gouts of steam. Upon their faces were masks of smoke and ash which trailed behind them like great blustery manes. The Koloi were much smaller, fluid and crystalline at once, like living beads flowing and gathering, variously shifting from liquid to ice and back again. It was quite hard to say what other features were consistent to their form, for they packed so close together and moved in such homogeneous bodies of work it was impossible to distinguish one single entity from the mass of others but for the trickle of stragglers and crown of leaders along the fringes of their host.
Behind the downward marching legion and its moving armour of changeful water followed Feox and Xelv, somehow more lifelessly than their own conjurations. After them went Elts and Zelor, poised, it seemed, together, on the precipice of battle. As far as they could see, further even than the frontmost numbers of Koloi vanishing into distance, were only great shifting curtains of fog, pleating, folding, expanding and contracting, so that they trudged cold and wet through an abyss of whiteness, the rufous auras of the Varaga like bleeding paints through the vapour thick with water.
At the apex of Caelare’s daily path, the fog cleared, and they saw now a grand forest before them which rivalled even Xoldra. Yet these trees were alive, and even without the curse of black immortality upon them were clearly more ancient than any known to Xol kind. They were of a race in even the oldest scriptures of the Xoloi untold, and those closest to the mountain—for the wood seemed to reach its very silver surface—stood taller than even some of the greatest and longest fortified elz fortresses of the Empire. The harsh climate here upon the roof of the world did not trouble the place, for only on the very top of the forest canopy did the snow lie heavy, and they could see drawing closer that far amid the trees there were lush and healthy greens and woody browns and the vibrant hues of mushroom and flower, where it seemed no frost bit or wind tore.
When they came within the span of their army of the first trees, Zelor held up his hand, ceasing their advance. A young woman stepped out from beneath the outermost boughs, a single Novare witch, lightly clad in a loose, blue cloak and wide-brimmed grey hat, bound in a ribbon of like colour to the noon sky. A slender bow of thin white wood was set upon her back, and with it was a quiver strapped there too. In the growing twilight the little shafts there snugly tucked gleamed white and clear. Beside her floated a diminutive creature green all over, of diaphanous fourfold wings and flowing emerald hair. It was clear to Elts and Zelor that a vast power went with the creature, ageless as the world, and they were humbled straight away. The hovering fairy looked long upon Zelor, far over his army as though she could see him with perfect clarity. Then she spoke.
“Shadowed One!” came a voice that boomed with impossible and lucid volume. “You will not cross this threshold. Turn you back, or meet the wrath of the trees!”
Zelor looked to Elts before he answered, shouting back as loud as could his withered voice over the heads of fire and living waters in gravelly desperation. “I seek the Alium lest it fall into the hands of a great evil.”
“You speak honestly,” said the fairy quite at once, and the Xol were astounded by her understanding. “Yet a malice owns you which no mortal can resist. You think that you last by your own will, but all that you do is the intention of the Shadow. The closer you come to Zenidow, the closer draws its time for action. It seeks the Alium, and will seize your being when the time has come to seize the object of its desire.” The old Piv lighted upon the snow and stood tall—for so little a creature—pointing her chin to the sky. Suddenly the great wingspan of Faltion kindled into being about her, and the enormous bird shook out its feathers, screeched wildly to the heavens. “We will protect our forest from that which goes with you, Zelor. Darkness shall not shadow this wood!”
“What will it be?” called the witch in blue. Her voice was more faint on the air, thin and high and not quite so sure as the stately command of her companion. “Do you turn back, or will you bring more death to these mountains?”
Zelor bowed his head. “Elts,” he said softly. “Now it begins. This is your chance. They will take you in, I know it. Leave me and save yourself.”
“I stay by your side.” Elts switched her tails. “If I can help delay the dominion of the Shadow, then I cannot knowingly join the forces which hasten its coming.”
“So be it,” said Zelor, lowering his black eyes, and so forth went his answer as the legions of fire and water crashed like a great rumbling wave towards Pivwood, though he knew not the name of the sacred place to which he now laid siege.
*
Pivwood as one leviathan organism of root, trunk, and leaf thrummed in reply with the grumbling of a long sleep suddenly broken. Out from under its layered canopy, speeding in dappled parties through the shade, now stark and clear charging and soaring against the sun-sheened snow and open cobalt sky, came its defenders. At first it seemed as though millions of leaves swept up from the forest floor in a ferocious gale, yet out of the infinitely different greens formed distinct fabrics of fluttering little bodies advancing in stunningly ordered hosts. Even as the first diminutive warriors streamed past Sylna and Muewa, the golden-white vision of the great bird Faltion above them cried piercing to the sun, and so began to reveal themselves many elder beings—each to their own Piv—similar and vastly different to herself, as every rushing fairy was enveloped in a unique cocoon of surging silvery aura, amorphous at first, quickening from their chests like liquid shoots of plants long dormant, trailing behind in the ripping, life-giving wind and sun, taking up now the distinctions of incarnation.
Born as from the deep memory of the forest were the spirits of birds and mammals and reptiles and insects and fungus and plants pouring out through the air and along the snowy waste and through the soil beneath it, diving and wheeling and banking as the extinct ancestors of septries or swarming from the fitful dark as leathery aborjays, bounding freely or mounted over the churning plain as pale voscas and lunions, crouching upon tiny shoulders or swinging from branches as ghostly chimfrees, coiling round waists and speeding like ribbons through the snow as serpents and lizards and salamanders, trundling as turtles, buzzing on machine wings as wasps colossal and fine or skittering as thousand-eyed spiders, writhing forth as currents of brush or mycelia unearthed, sending out wicked elder spores as mushrooms not seen for eons, stampeding upon roots uplifted as many great and powerful trunks from the days when Pivwood reached all to Ardua raising up long boughs with which to slash and crush, their valiant hosts the little Piv standing defiant and proud among their woody limbs.
Gyge the lunion leapt, mane streaming like white fire, beside the Piv Tesflind who lighted astride those supple shoulders drawing her slender grassblade bow, wings appraising the subtlest airs. The Euphran spirit Hortgav craned its neck of milkwhite cloud to pierce the enemy hordes with golden eyes, levelling its wings of light sliced from its scouting to the side of Yeuv who called that beast his familiar. The twin four-horned deer Iodon of barbed tail and Iadan of stabbing hoof went with the twins Huewn and Vanweu, galloping side by side as their riders readied the gleaming stems of their swords. Up from the ground exploded in a fountain of snow the armoured mole Donvlor beneath its master Wenve, who rode upon that muscled back and gave sight to blind motion. The largest mushroom ever to fruit in the wood was Vundred, whose companion Reluen rode atop that flowing tapestry of blues and whites and silvers that domed the sinewy innumerable hyphae which conducted its locomotion, calling as they writhed from the forest for a veil of spores which buttressed their allies yet choked their opponents. A tree to dwarf the greatest towers of men was Klind the Old, whose great uprooted network of nerves sprawled over the land to drag and propel him forth, Meu the scholar riding in a cozy hole in the heart of his godly cambium as if he wore an enormous suit of armour. Trond too could not be forgotten, the blue-barked, the white-leaved, with her diverging, many trunks, so that she looked as though twenty different trees had long embraced and grown together. Among her shady boughs danced that Piv who went always with her, Ue, second in age only to Muewa.
Among these beings and numberless more were six spirits wholly unlike the others, who showed in their coming a power far more formidable. They were the Great Ones, the eldest spirits of Pivwood, ancient even in a time when Oerbanuem was yet to develop that higher consciousness which would ultimately birth the Piv, the memories of which so distorted by distance that even the god of the wood could not say whether there had truly been a seventh in those days.
First to appear was Yisven Vir, a billowing nebula of golden fumes always entering and escaping orbit of her several white floating cores so bright as to reveal the infinity of transforming different colours deep within her changeful form. She bore up in thickest vapours her chosen Piv Luen through the sky above the charging hosts, and together they beseeched what few clouds there were to part and draw the sunlight upon the field, for Yisven Vir had always lorded over the vapours of this land, and none worked so closely with the winds as her partner. Far below, the brightening snow erupted as there reared from the land the thick masses of dirt and loam which were the spirit Granulen, master of soils. Riding like the smallest little weed atop the highest terraces of that cascading, rolling nutrient was Veun the gardener, the only of the chosen Piv whose clan had anticipated would befriend one of the Six. In the shadows of the swelling hills of Granulen sped the sable fractal of Ros, who is wherever there is darkness, whether under the slightest blade of grass or cast from the tallest tree. So long as he maintains in extending his form even the slightest connection to his origin, his shape can grow so far as there is volume of shade in the forest, and transport up from anywhere it lies, as through a discreet dimension of living shadow, the subtle figure of Treuwev his partner, the only Piv to wear a colour other than green. There was another like Ros too who could not sever its connection to the wood, though it could venture to massive distances by the plenty of its substance. Now winding through the hillocks of the soil lord came rushing and roaring the spirit of Aio, the meandering riparian consciousness of the forest’s waters, and floating upon its rapids-fluffed current in his queer little oarless boat was old Nuem the ferryman, leafy beard blustering with speed.
The mightiest of the Great Ones were two spirits so ancient as to have lost all form. For many thousands of years they would go without an avatar, yet the war for Pivwood saw them both embodied. Morviut was the spirit of death, father of decay. One hundred seasons past he chose for a partner the hermit Fuewav, whom few had seen before the coming of Zelor. Down from his remote bower among the treetops the old man descended, silent in his ropy rags, dark green eyes averted, twisted back bent with sorrows special to his condition. So old and frail was he, so slow to move and delicate boned that hardly could he enter the battle unprotected by the sturdiest of tree spirits and most vigilant birds and chimfrees keeping watch among their branches. But were he touched by any—friend or foe—in the state of true possessions, the very fibres of that matter so cursed would be instantly dissolved, as if never it had been, and so he was a terrible force, however unwieldy.
Last of the Six was the other of the eldest, the fickle spirit of life, Vivoen, the very seed of all that grew and flourished in the first garden which would age into the majesty of Oerbanuem and Pivwood itself. Most mysterious and rarest to appear of all the spirits of the land, her gifts as much as her powers not only varied depending on her whim, but her chosen host as well. In ages past she had blessed her hosts with flight and terrific radiance or vision even of things to come, yet also she was known to be the worst kind of trickster and might vanish from their hearts at some time of terrible need. It so happened that often she chose for partnership a Piv like herself who struggled to take things seriously, and so it followed that in this century, she had only very recently settled upon a silly little fairy called Wanuev.
And so together all the hosts of bird, mammal, reptile, insect, fungus, plant, primordial spirit, and Piv converged out of time and space upon the sloping open waste in a violent clash with the ranks of Varaga and the swelling storm of Koloi that threatened their ancestral home. The spirits grew only more lucid as they smote with their great wings and beaks, claws and teeth, stingers and mandibles, hyphae and spore, and branches and root the hordes of fire and water. Blown back was the army of the Zefloz by the winds of Yisven Vir; blinded and trapped were those disoriented in the sweeping shade of Ros; extinguished were many of the greatest flame sentinels by the lashing river of Aio; smothered and absorbed were countless Koloi by the sucking soils of Granulen.
Even as the first waves of Piv burst from the wood, Zelor saw that their strength was more than he had feared. With one hand he cast over the snow many jet black seeds taken from the pockets of Xirell, and with the other he drew up from the ground huge boulders which slamming together formed titanic many-limbed giants lumbering forward, swinging their powerful arms about as the routed companies of fire and water regrouped behind them. As the golems balanced the fray, behind them tremendous stalks burst writhing from the spot of their sewing, and at their ends huge bulbs bloomed and vivid floral maws splayed, gnashing spiral holes of thorny teeth. Ripping up their roots these creatures stormed to join the giants of rock, already who had crushed to death many a daring Piv, paring life from limb and gorging themselves on lumps of wadded bodies. Yet still more forces flowed from the wood, beating back even the enormous rock beasts and the ravening weeds, so that already Zelor set his most powerful weapons to work.
