The Sword of Light - Chapter 10

The bonfire burned brightly. Faolan passed around sweet cakes, hard cheeses, soft breads, and legs of steaming meat from his bag, and the five friends shared with him what was left of their golden mead. Soon, Faolan was nearly as drunk as the rest of them. All six men ate heartily and were merry.

Hjorin looked around at his friends, then up at the moon as it neared the pinnacle of the sky. “Looks about time,” he said. From a pocket of his breeches, he took a bundle of fabric. Unravelling it, he revealed a palm full of the mushrooms of the Gods. Browning yellow caps hung like spectres over long, pale stems. The mushrooms had been dried and readied for consumption at holy days such as this. To eat the food of the Gods was to be in their presence, to know their words and see that which they saw fit to show you.

How Hjorin came upon them was anyone’s guess. No one questioned it, though, as he passed the bundle around. Each man grabbed two or three for himself and placed them in his mouth. They had a musky, earthy flavour that overwhelmed the tongue. The dry nature of the mushrooms made them difficult to chew and left the mouth parched. Ferin quaffed the last of his skin of mead in the wake of the food of the Gods.

The mood became, momentarily, sombre as the six men bowed their heads and offered supplications to Dagda in their own ways. Despite the affronts of the day, it was a day of worship and celebration. The Gods deserved their due. Hjorin stoked the flames of the bonfire higher and higher as the men fell into chanting. Those who could stood and danced as they made their invocation, their bodies made eerie and distorted by the swaying fire and encroaching shadows.

Ferin could feel the energy of the moment rising as he leapt and swayed with the others. He felt like a mad creaturesomething distant from humanity. He heard himself howling before he realized he was doing it. The others followed suit until the sound was all around them, echoing off the dancing water of the lake and the standing stones that circled their bonfire. In that moment, Ferin wanted nothing more than to rip off his clothes, run into the forests and become somethingwild. He was an animal, attuned to the whispers and songs of the world. He heard the long, low flute of the forests, the ponding drums of the men around him as they jumped and stomped in their dances, haloed in his vision by the bonfire. Their resonating chants gave life to the music. They danced with the windfloating, falling, infinite. In that moment he felt wholly man and wholly beast.

His heart was beating like a drum in his chestfaster and faster, louder and louder. Blood was rushing in his ears, defeating all sound so that all Ferin could hear was the deafening drumming of his own heartbeat and the sounds of his own frantic breathing.

The ground swayed beneath him. He fell for hours, the world reeling around him. The earth came up to meet him, and made form him there a bed of soft grass and stones. Before him stood the vault of heaven, alive, breathing, with the twinkle of stars. Stories were told that the stars were the lanterns of the dead who sat amongst the branches of the world treewhich the living could not seewatching over and waiting for their loved ones.

Ferin wondered which one belonged to his mother.

He watched as the moon, full and pregnant in the well of blue and purple and black, reached the pinnacle of the night sky. Sound failed. Even the pounding of his heart and the blood that had rushed so loudly in his ears moments before gave way to the silent din that permeated everything. Ferin felt suddenly cold, and alone, detached from all he knew.

The moon and stars moved away from him as the earth opened up beneath him. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Shadows and earth swallowed him bodily, dragging him down, down, down. The last thing he saw before darkness consumed his vision was the scattered and fearful visages of his kith and kin. He was floating, falling, in an endless black void. Panic rose in his chest as he hurtled through the abyss, the gibbering, frightened part of his mind refusing to be locked away. Drink and mushrooms emboldened that part of him, overpowering whatever remained of his valour.

He cried out. It meant nothing.

In his fall, he passed by luminous stones that glowed with soft haloed of green and purple in the dark. At first they were sparse, then more frequent, and then all at once they were all around him. Jagged fluorite bit and scratched at him as he fell, drawing blood from every point of his body, lacerating him with fire.

He hit something hard and immovable, arresting his fall, driving the breath from his chest. A wave of dizziness washed over him, his ears ringing with a piercing, horrible sound. His head pounded with the beating of his heart. Each pulse sent a fresh wave of agony through his body.

Breathlessness gave way to a fit of coughing that wracked his body, sending him into convulsions. He tasted blood. He knew only anguish. He cried out and crushed his eyes tight against it.

Breathe, Ferin thought. He forced himself to inhale a long, slow breath. He held it. Released it. Breathe. With each inhalation, he conquered the panic that ran rampant through his blood. With each exhalation, he released the pain from his body. When he opened them again, blinking through the mist of tears, he saw a world of swirling greens, purples, whites, and blacks. Cubes of luminous fluorite struck out from sheets of rippling, colourful stone. The scattered hexahedrons illuminated a small cavern in which Ferin found himself like stars in the night sky. Above yawned the void of stone and earth through which he had fallen. Thin, stringy roots hung from the ceiling where patches of soil broke up the crystalline encrusted dome.

Niveous dust filled the shallow, cold air. Even in the poor light, Ferin could see his breath fogging before his parched lips. He shuddered, tasting death in the stale air. Dread ebbed at the edges of his mind. A horrible nausea coiled in his belly. There was something not right about this placea wickedness he could feel like a thick oil across his skin.

Out. He had to get out.

Move, he told himself, willing his body into motion. Something felt broken.

I can’t a small part of him replied, unable or unwilling to fight, to survive.

Do it anyway. Ferin clawed at the stone, struggling to rise. His legs would not obey him. He swore. Blood made his hands slick, and he slid forward on the bed of fluorite he lay upon.

That was when he saw it.

A face hovered beneath the crystalnear enough to discern its silhouette through the glowing stone, but not much else. Ferin’s breath caught in his throat, and he found himself going instinctually and suddenly still, mimicking the stone all around him. Even if Ferin’s body did not move, his blood did. It pooled from his many lacerations, shimmering bright like fire and gold in the semi-darkness. It dripped, thick and hot onto the cold stone. It sizzled audibly, steaming as it soaked into the crystal beneath him. It drank him in hungrily, shuddering disconcertingly at the taste.

Ferin felt weakdelirious. In his heightened state, it seemed the stone beneath him sighed, a long, low, sensuous sound. Something inside was moving, writhing against the crystal. It knocked. Ferin knocked back.

Beneath the stone, the silhouette stirred, and two lights bloomed in the spaces where the thing’s eyes might have been. Twin points of green flame stared out at Ferin, piercing him. He felt suddenly and strangely naked, as though the fabric of his being were under the scrutiny. Every thought, every action lay before this shadowy figure awaiting judgement.

The crystal beneath him vibrated. The surface rippled like a once calm pond, now disturbed by a hurled stone. The green eyes rose to meet him. A figure emerged from the fluorite beneath hima skeleton of blackened bone. It passed through the colourful crystal as though it were water. A glint of something silver flickered in Ferin’s peripheral visionsomething falling from the empty chest cavity of the skeletal shadow. All the while those horrible green eyes bore into Ferin.

He felt small, helpless, cold, and afraid. He felt cowed in the presence of the shadow, humbled in a way previously thought impossible. A dark, salacious laugh sounded through the chamber, bouncing off the crystalline walls and back at Ferin so that it drowned out all other sound. It was a carnal, erotic, malicious thing. It was the sound of triumph, of hatred, of revenge, and carnage.

Ferin would have screamed but for want of a voice.

A pair of long, skeletal hands cupped his face, drawing him upwards as the shadow continued to rise, holding him immobile, forcing his gaze to lock with the ghastly green flames before him. It bore him aloft, pulling him up and up and up, into the blackness of the soil, into the darkness of the night, and always there was the horrible laugh.

It stripped the dignity from Ferin’s flesh. It filled him with a horrid cold that turned his bones to ice. Only the fear kept Ferin’s blood movingit stampeded through him, tearing him apart from within.

The ground gave way to water, but even then the laughter did not stop. It sounded in his ears as though he stood in a simple room with nothing but the laughter to keep him company. Ferin’s lungs burned for want of air. He struggled in vain to break free of the skeletal grip of the shadow. It was to no avail. He was drowning. Dying. His life escaped him in a stream of bubbles.

His head was in a fog. His vision dimmed.

The water took him.