Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (23 page)

‘
This curse grips all,’ Gargaron
reminded her. ‘Both Thoonsk and beyond.’ And they pressed on,
steering clear of the plunge hole.

4

The hours drew on and the day grew
hotter; a stifling humidity hung about the woodland. It drew rivers
of sweat from both Gargaron and steed; Gargaron’s clothes were well
soaked. He cupped handfuls of lagoon water to douse his head. ‘How
do you bear this?’ he asked Melai, water and sweat dripping off his
lips.

‘
Bear what?’

‘
This unbearable heat.’

‘
I thought it obvious,’ she
snapped at him.

If it were obvious then he did not
know how.

‘
The suns,’ she
pointed out. ‘Have you not noticed? They are such as lovers these
days. They fall toward one another. The heat were never like this.
It be unbearable.
Thoonsk be
normally a cool, temperate place.’

‘
Very well. I shall take your word
for it.’

5

They made long
distance in good time. Until Gargaron noticed Melai grimacing. ‘Be
you well?’ he asked her.
Her
injured
wing were folded protectively
beneath her arm. She
did
not
answer.
‘Be you well, I say?’

‘
Yes.’

But she were
not.
The way she struggled to
speak.
The way she held her wing
and arm.
He
noticed
now
also a peculiar odour. Some weedy reek.
She were
bleeding
he
saw.
Yellow blood
dripped from her elbow,
running down his destrier’s sweating flank.
He prayed it were simply her wound
that were ailing her. Yet he could not push aside the idea that the
doom that had killed all else were now killing
Melai.

6

It were early
afternoon when
they entered a
part of the woodland where water levels were the shallowest
Gargaron had yet witnessed since his fall into this strange world
of Thoonsk. Here though trees of immense girth grew. And were
peculiarly shaped, as of a wrist thrust from water and its palm
upturned and fingers growing out and up as branches old and gnarled
with bark the colour of soot. At their bases, knots of twisted root
rose and fell over one another, and upon each tree there had been
gouged patterns of ghastly faces where white sap beneath had oozed
through and dried, and now, in the general wash of diffuse green
hews of the surrounding forest, they glowed like that of
moonlight.

Gargaron wondered if
the depictions of these tortured souls were meant to ward
off intruders by some long lost forest race. If so then it did not
work on he nor Melai nor Grimah for something else occupied their
thoughts. Melai’s injury. And by the time Gargaron had placed Melai
upon the ‘palm’ of one of these trees she were
seething between her teeth. Trying to swallow her
pain.

She sat there, a hunched and
pathetic looking creature if Gargaron had ever seen one.

‘
Will
you accept my
help now?’ he enquired of her.

She
would not look at him.
Though
pain pinched her face.

‘
You stubborn fool,’
he said. ‘You have seen inside my thoughts, you have seen I mean
you no harm, and yet still you distrust me.’

‘
Thoughts can be
masked,’ she argued weakly, ‘thoughts can be falsified.’ Yet, she
had touched his living blood, she knew blood manufactured no
lies.

‘
Falsified? Aye
possibly, but not by the likes of me,’ Gargaron gently argued back.
‘I lack both knowledge and ability to orchestrate such
tricks.’

She
said no more. Instead she turned over and lay down. Her ribs
pushed against the pale green skin
of her chest. She were terribly gaunt. She had not eaten nor drunk
since he had met her. She were weak, he knew, and growing more so
by the minute.

‘
Cast off your
stubbornness lest it contribute to your demise,’ Gargaron told her
as he rounded the tree (he could move more freely here for the
water level were barely to his knee) so that he might find a gap
through bough and branch to speak to her, face to face.

‘
Why should you care
if I live or die?’ she asked him rasping.

‘
Why should I not? I
hunt and I kill for a living aye, but otherwise I find life
precious. Now, even more so, now, with so much death, life seems
imperative. So, tell me, Melai of Willowgarde, what ails
you?’

She winced. Yellow blood continued to drip
from her. ‘I know not. But a cure all is what I need.’

Gargaron thought of his Lyfen
Essence. ‘I have medicine that chases away death.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘
You do not trust me?’

‘
No. I
need
Greenwater
moon.’

Gargaron frowned. ‘I have never
heard of it. What be it and where must I look to find
it?’

‘
It be
medicine.’ She gave him a look as if she still thought him nothing
but a big ignorant oaf. From where she lay, she looked about. And
about. ‘
A deep
pond,
’ she said. ‘A fathom down is where
they come to rest when the moon beams of Great
Keera
hit the water’s
surface and become instantly the stone of
green-water.’

Great
Keera?
Gargaron thought.
There be no such moon.
Were she losing her wits now as well
as her strength?
‘You require this
substance?’

‘
I
fear I
have
been poisoned
by that unknown
beast that assailed me
,’ she said
anxiously. ‘Its claws punctured me.
Its poison remains unknown to me. I must need
eat of the moon stones
. They are a powerful remedy, Mother Thoonsk’s
cure-all. I must eat of them
before
morning or else I
fear I
shall
perish at
sunrise.’

Gargaron sighed
heavily, looking about aimlessly; all he saw were thick woodland
stretching away to all points of compass. ‘Let me find it for you
then,’
he said.
‘Just tell me where to look.’

7

He found a pond
like one she had described.
It will appear
as a natural well within the swamp
, she
had told him through grimace and groan.
Surrounded by a circular bank covered in great tufts of
wriggling worm-grass. The
wells are
vents the ancient
water-horses once
bored into earyth. These creatures are long wiped
from history but their chimneys remain, flooded and submerged.
Other things live in them now. Sometimes deadly. So be careful. The
moon stones may be found a fathom from the surface, embedded in
coral.

Gargaron gazed down into the deep
clear water. His steed stood nearby, surveying the woodland, as if
searching for any strange critters that might be sneaking up behind
them. But there were no-one and nothing about. Gargaron removed his
pack. Shed his boots and jerkin and shirt. Standing at the edge of
the well he considered what he had to do. Then he took a deep
breath… and dove in.

8

It were remarkably clear. He could
see a long way down as he descended. The walls were lit with some
sort of phosphorescent algae that gave off a soft green
luminescence. But there were also large spreading patches where
algae had blinked out, as if all of it were slowly dying en masse.
Strange fish swam lazily about, on their sides, or upside down.
Tired or ill.

A huge crustacean, a lobster all
black and hard bony ridges, listed from some den in the wall of the
well. Its body swayed in the wash of the current created by
Gargaron as he swam by. Its eye-stalks did not see him. Its body,
Gargaron realised, were limp with death.

On a shelf almost a fathom down
Gargaron suddenly saw something strange. A cluster of glowing
stones. Only when he grabbed at one it felt more like a fleshy knob
of some sort. A bulb. Were these the objects of which Melai had
spoken? He did not know. But the air in his lungs were waning. His
chest were beginning to ache. He could swim no further down. He
plucked as many of the bulbs as he could and kicked for
surface.

9

Back at the ‘palm’ tree, Gargaron
presented the peculiar bulbs to Melai, his hand and fingers sandy
and wet. ‘Tell me these be what you seek,’ he panted.

She looked at the items he
presented. ‘Aye. Th-this be them,’ she declared tiredly, again
grimacing. ‘I-I were concerned y-you may… may not find them, that,
that you would n-not recognise them.’

She squished one
weakly in her fingers and slurped up its alien milk; moonlight, if
he believed her claims, turned into
this strange liquid
substance
through the magic of the well. She swallowed it down, her eyes
looking dreamy,
turning smoky
and blue,
as if she were snared in some
rare arresting ecstasy. Her head swung back, her eyes rolled
upwards, her toes and fingers contracted.

‘
Melai!’ Gargaron called, ‘Melai,
hear me? Be you well? Be you well?’

Had she mistaken the stone for
something else? In his haste, had he fetched the wrong items? He
gripped her with his huge hands, his grasp almost wrapping her
entire body, and shook her as stiffly as he dared.

‘
Melai! Melai,
hear me! Please, do not perish. You must not.
’

But she would not
move. He watched for her breathing. He saw the soft rise and fall
of her chest yet steeled himself for its eventual culmination, for
it to grow softer and less apparent until it stopped forever. Like
the
elf girl who
had inadvertently brought him
Grimah.

10

The suns fell
toward horizon. He watched them as he sat there beside Melai’s
sleeping form.
He found a
natural platform in the bole of an enormous old oak, an area large
enough to accommodate the bulk of his body. Then he
built a fire out of reeds and branches from dried
deadfall clumped high above the water mark.

He listened out for bugs and swamp
frogs and nightjars. He had heard tales of the various swamp realms
of Godrik’s Vale. How at night you had to stuff feathergrass into
your ears if you wanted to sleep, for the great cacophony of sound
as the wild things kept up their mating and territorial calls would
keep you from slumber and send you mad.

Nevertheless, the silence unnerved
him. He heard the occasional lazy splash in the surrounding water.
Something gurgling as it floated to the surface of the swamp, as it
gasped and gargled and drowned in the air. Heard the dispirited
cries of dying bugs. Otherwise the swamp night were silent as
death.

Except near dawn when he awoke,
Gargaron heard howl and swoosh of huge swift bodies sweeping
through the swamplands. He sat up and looked about.

Dawn light hung
pale in the east.
A
veil of mist drifted
through the woodlands. And moving there like spectres he saw
them. Dark Ones. Swishing by like black wraiths.

He lay low, his
chin in water, gripping his great sword. Melai remained in whatever
state the moonstones had put her in. And Grimah lay there
on a trodden down bed of reeds and
water brambles,
eyes open, perhaps sensing
danger and thus keeping quiet, unmoving but for his
keen
eyes.

Are they coming
for me now?
Gargaron wondered. Surely they
would not spare him a second time. In some ways he welcomed it. To
leave this world of dying. And if so then he would somehow have his
spirit make its way to Endworld without the help of the
Wraithbirds. Somehow he would make it there and live out eternity
with his wife and daughter.

Yarniya’s words
arose in him once more: ‘
You have work
here first. More than you can know
.’

Again, as before,
inexplicably, the Dark Ones did not come for him. Nor did they for
Melai
nor Grimah.
They swept onwards through swamp and tree.
Pressing
westways’n’north,
tearing any other still living creature to
pieces.

1

MELAI awoke on sunrise, shivering,
cowering from dawn’s light as it basked warmly against her soft
green skin. She glared out into the forest where sunlight spiked
through in long misty beams. She had heard birdlings the day
before. But that morning the air were oh so dead and
quiet.