Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (24 page)

She washed her arm through the sun
rays, flexing her fingers. She crawled fully under the wash of
Melus. And sat upright. She hung her head, shut her eyes, and
breathed deep. When she looked up her eyes fell upon
Gargaron.

She watched him for a while,
curiously. There looked to be a tear in his eye. ‘You did not
abandon me.’ She appeared mystified by this. ‘You did not assail
me, nor violate me, nor cook me for supper.’

Gargaron frowned. Then laughed,
wiping the rise of his cheek. ‘Cook you for supper? Take a look at
yourself. I’m like to get more meat off a bare bone. If I were to
eat anyone it would be Grimah.’

His destrier,
munching on watergrass, looked around at him. Perhaps at merely
hearing his name, yet, perhaps he understood fully
Gargaron’s
words. ‘Forgive
me
, Grimah, I do not mean it, of course.
You have much meat on your bones but I have no taste for horse.’ He
turned back to Melai. ‘So, how do you feel? I must say, it heartens
me greatly that you look so well.’

‘
I have not
succumbed to poison or any other ailment, so, aye, I feel well.’
She flexed her wing.
The torn
membrane were almost healed. Yet the wing itself
did not move with the same fluid grace that
Gargaron had observed before the monster’s attack upon her. ‘My
wing though be somewhat out of sorts. The bones have been strained.
I shan’t be flying for a while. Though for how long I cannot tell.’
She grimaced as she folded her wing back behind
her.

‘
Well then, you
shall have to ride with me then
a little while longer it seems,’
Gargaron told her with a smile.

She eyed his destrier. But managed
a small smile of her own. It were the first time Gargaron had seen
her do so and he realised how beautiful she were. ‘Aye,’ she said.
‘Seems I have little choice.’

2

They
travelled
all
that
morning. And by early afternoon they reached at last Thoonsk’s
westways border. It
were
heralded by a vast curving line of sky faring monoliths, huge
monstrous things festooned in red ivy whose leaves fluttered
briskly in the unguarded wind and gave the impression that the
mighty grey stones possessed a writhing skin. At their bases, where
the earth were still soggy from the watery reaches of Mother
Thoonsk the stone were thick with a ragged sock of green moss. And
it were here that Melai abruptly ordered Gargaron to halt his
mount.

The
forest had thinned here. On these outer edges all that remained
were ancient willows, their long, tired, sagging branches pushed
gently to and fro in the breezes. The water around them were
green but possessed a waxy, oily
quality, and the floor beneath it were hard as if paved. And
shallow too, swishing about Grimah’s hooves.

Gargaron looked about, wondering why Melai had so called
for their procession to be halted, fearing she may have spotted
some beast in the shadows stalking them. But when he looked down at
her he saw that she were in fact looking
wistfully back the way they had thus far traversed,
before turning and eyeing the monoliths.

‘
What be it?’ he
asked her.

‘
I just need a
moment. Would you help me down?’

‘
I think not. That
there water looks poisoned.’

‘
Aye,’ she said, ‘you
guess well, for poisoned it be. To keep out such unsavoury
intruders as Mother Thoonsk would wish not to permit. Though I am
immune to Mother’s poisons.’

Gargaron gazed down
at the water lapping around his steed’s ankles. ‘And what
of Grimah? Do we need concern ourselves with his feet
corroding?’

Melai leaned out and gazed down at
Grimah’s lower legs. ‘I have no explanation. His legs
ought to be burning.’ She gazed up at the monolith. ‘Perhaps
Mother’s potency weakens with her demise.’ She sighed. ‘Would you
lift me down, please?’

Gargaron
obliged and
lifted her from saddle, lowering her to ground, mere yards from
where great Thoonsk came to an end beyond its border of towering
stones.

3

Gargaron watched
Melai remove her bow from across her chest and lower herself to her
knees. Thoonsk’s poisonous green liquid lapped about her hips. She
lowered her chin to her chest. Her hands and arms hung loose at her
sides, her long froglike fingers dangling into the water. Her wings
(as much as she could manage her injured one) were folded neatly
across her back. And her eyes were shut. Gargaron thought he saw
her lips were moving. Perhaps she were mouthing some prayer.
Respectfully he refrained from further speech.

Melai
pushed her arms
out, swishing water before her in a gentle wave which seemed to
generate some peculiar forward momentum of its own, surging with
uncanny and increasing force toward the nearest monolith which
stood a dozen yards from Melai’s position.

The
wave crashed
against the covering of moss where the oily water seemed to seep up
into the vegetation, colours of green snaking up through the red
ivy, spreading out like shard-sparks in a summer storm. Then it
dissipated.

When
Gargaron next looked at Melai he saw with alarm that she were now
leaned
all the way forward,
her face submerged in the water. Thinking she had slumped there
involuntarily he went to leap from his horse, to drag her face back
into air. But then…

Her
wings beat slowly.
Even her
injured one. And the tips of her long frog fingers danced in gentle
synchronicity with the water ripples.

Then
she arose and stood scarecrow like before the
monolith
, her arms held out
from the sides of her body. As Gargaron watched he saw a face form
amidst the ivy, the face of some enormous being, female in
appearance, and from her immense mouth there flickered a tongue of
green vines, snaking out in a flash of movement, and licking Melai,
whip-like, across the face.

It
were
gone in but a sunflare
and Melai sat again, this time as if from exhaustion… or perhaps
elation. For she sat there, chin and nose turned skyward. And
deeply she breathed of Thoonsk’s moist atmosphere. And upon her
face she wore an expression of calm and
resignation.

Finally she spoke
in
her Mother’s tongue. ‘
I have
never vacated your cradle, Mother Thoonsk. I have lived my entire
life within your fold. I am one of your children, and your children
rarely find need to leave your paradise. Yet, now I request your
permission to cross your boundary and depart here. Alas… you tell
me you are dying
.’

She sobbed, staring
up at the monolith, from where the face had appeared and faded. She
did not wipe the tears from her cheeks. Instead she let them slide
down her face and drip from her chin and they fell silently away
without sound into the water. There they exploded, and the tiny
droplets changed in an instant into a hundred tiny water nymphs
that plunged deep into the liquid and swam away in a hundred
different directions.

‘
She has granted me
leave,’ Melai said softly, ‘so that I may learn of what ails her
and thus find a cure.’

Gargaron responded with a measured, respectful tone.
‘Then we search for the same thing.
For what afflicts Thoonsk, afflicts the wider
world.’

4

Melai stood beside the enormous boundary stone, gazing back
into her homeland
one last
time—woodland nymph and monolith side by side together in
solidarity, children of the water-forest both, staring back at
their dying mother.

‘
Ihetha
,’ Melai
whispered before she eventually turned her back on Thoonsk.
For my love
. ‘
Ihetha
thu’etha
.’
For my love, I shall find your
cure
. And she turned and did
not look back.

1

FOR
them both, the
way onward
seemed strange at first.

For
Gargaron it were finally being away from the confines of
Thoonsk that were strange, away from
the endless walls of tree and bramble and towering lilies, the
endless reaches of water. It were the feeling of being on firm,
open country, where watery woodlands gave way to scrubby savannah,
where he could look up and see the entire reach of sky with its
white wispy clouds rather than a ceiling of leaves and branches and
woody boughs.

But
this open
, alien world, a
place she had never seen, nor set foot, proved daunting,
terrifying, overwhelming for Melai. The vast unending sky, so high
above her head, so immense and unbroken, felt like an unbearable
weight upon her. That it might come crashing down without the
strength of her woodland home to hold it up. There were also the
sensation that, without Mother Thoonsk to contain her, she might
suddenly be yanked from the shoulders of Grimah and thrust out
there into the clouds. With either thought, she had to keep taking
deep breaths. And concentrate her gaze upon the ground; to look up
were to turn her light headed and faint.

Yet
, staring at the
alien ground also proved disconcerting. Where Melai had always
known water, where below her she had been familiar with small waves
of water serpents, or the bubbles of gupping fish, the ripples of
swimming frogs, the splash of swamp turtles, the eddies left in the
wakes of Buccas, here there were naught but rigid dry ground: stone
and thistle, rock and shrub, boulder and grass, all without the
comforting bowl of a lagoon to lie within. This were a world apart
from what she knew. It frightened her. She knew no comfort
here.
How do folk beyond
Thoonsk survive here?
she
wondered.
With no trees to
climb, no deep water in which to hide, to where do folk flee when
there is danger?
It
confounded her.

The
reaction of her new friend she found curious
too. He whistled, oh so jolly like, as if he had
just been delivered the most cheerful news.

‘
Should we not be
wary of predators?’ she questioned him hushly, as though any word
would call on some beast, or that they were being watched; she
could not stop scouring the lands around them. There looked to be
naught but scrubland as far as her eye could see; on their mount
they of course towered above the scrubby bushes that grew out from
bare sand and rock and weeds and wilting grass. But up there she
felt so conspicuous and exposed.

More
than once she wondered how far
Mother Thoonsk lay behind them, and could she, if she
turned and looked, still see her. Would Thoonsk be there like a
fretting mother awaiting her child’s return? Melai would not turn
for fear that she would feel an overwhelming and crushing longing
to flee back home. To see Thoonsk beckoning. Or to see she were no
longer visible. Either one might frighten her and quash her
resolve.

2

They
stopped
to take their
bearings on
a small hillock
where a warm wind swept across the
dry grasses, hissing at them as if it did not wish them
intruding.
The view overlooked the lands
westways and gave a good view as well of the way they’d come. Melai
took a deep breath and looked back. Thoonsk were vanished she saw.
Her body tingled with dread. And for several moments she could not
breathe.

It were the way forward however
that stole Gargaron’s curiosity. He had hoped that he might spy the
realm of Hawkmoth. But from the base of the hill, a land of barren
salt-washed sand and weed stretched off before them.

They had reached the shore of what
Gargaron knew once as the Claraville Sea, the great southwun inland
ocean, the largest of all lakes of Cloudfyre. Though an ocean it
were no more. The rivers that once fed it had long ago been
rerouted for irrigation and thus her waters had dried up and the
fishing villages that once thrived on her shores were abandoned.
Now it were a desolate lonely place of salt and death.

‘
What be this strange realm?’
Melai asked, a lonely wind lifting her hair.

‘
What used to be the great sea of
Claraville,’ Gargaron answered. He had never set eye upon it but in
his travels his father had recounted many a tale about its sad
demise. ‘It were brought to its knees by mismanagement. Greedy
regional kings, landowners of the surrounding shores, stole her
water source so that they might irrigate and maintain their lush
gardens while the poor fisher folk lost their livelihood and
starved.’

Melai cast her gaze across the
region before her. It were barren, dotted with islands and what she
guessed were the hulls of ancient ships—vessels she’d only ever
heard the trees of Thoonsk whisper tales about. But here were
Thoonsk, she thought, if the Rjoond had ever had their
way.