Poem: The Rivers of Ai

In the Wastes, the unnumbered dead shambled restlessly
Sixteen angels wept in their chains, rattling across the dirty sky
The hoofbeats fell as a long rolling thunder, kicking up ash
Over the static dial, the children wailed

Chasing the raindbow, distant fly
Craggy peaks aftar glinting white
The hollow groan of the engines of the Machine
Songs of sparrows departed spiralling in the deep

Shimmer of the mirage, heat rising off the sand
Dusty sky and dirty loam, the meadows of the Dead
Madness ringing in the ears, the droning of the hive
Locusts of the unborn wild, fecundant

Yellow glare of dusk, the poached brains of zombies reeking
The endless jingle of the bells of distant Hell
Those doors swung wide and broken
The meadows lost and broken

The patter of bloody rain on the dunes,
Nightfall cold and dear
Calming the ghosts of nightmares far
Twelve hours out from the spire of ash

Cracked bones bleached dry
Skeletal metal groans in complaining despair
Visions shattered glass eyes in the Wastes
Inferno of the arrogant, shelter of the lost

A thousand horses galloping across the cosmos
A million stars spread as jewels, diamonds flickering
Spiral dance infinite, the smoke of entropy
The lantern bloody in the night

Echoes in the deep, monsters waiting
The fluttering of the midnight butterfly
Pale flutter of the ages, tattered
Flags billowing in the wind

The lonesome snake slithers in the dust
The Spire empty and wanting
Gates only passed through in sorrow
Orchards of the empty dawn

Shards of the times before strewn in ashen streets
Windows empty of candles, no feathers on the ground
Only the shuffling memories, the rosy cloak of nepenthe
Gardens of the blackened waste

III: The Temple of the Sun

The night stretched into velvet infinity, sprinkled with twinkling diamond stars.  Beneath the glittering, starshot sky, the deep forest murmured to itself, whistling and cracking with life.  Under the looming lush canopy of sleeping trees, the land rippled and swirled, formed into rolling hills and sunken gullies.  Mist sighed and crept through the foliage, turning the space between ground and canopy a damp haze, laden with the scent of flourishing night flowers.

The great elk, the grandest of the grand kings of the primal lands, strode through the blurred landscape.  His great horns were an impressive thorny crown atop its mighty head.  The mist collected to droplets between the spaces on its rack, where the moon spider had spun her special web.  The glittering stars, even through the thick and dark verdure shone within the droplets of captured dew.  With the mist caught in the web, the spider's structure shone like silver, sparkling and glittering with the stars above the wild place.  It was as if the stars became her web, and her web the stars. 

This was no ordinary moon spider.  She was Mother Spider, the weaver of fates, and ever she spun them as she weaved her starry dewdrop web, tangled amongst the cosmos and its diverse inhabitants.  

A wind made the strands tremble, and Croene spun on...

---

He had walked seventeen days and seventeen nights, aimlessly in the empty desert. During his lonely trip he passed not a single living thing, and no sign of anything dead, either.  His shadow his only companion, he cursed the soulless, berating sun, and wondered at not being hungry or thirsty or tired. 

The heat was terrible.  It beat upon him in an endless fury during the day, temperatures rising past the point where his skin registered it as warmth, and only as blasting, burning heat, baking him to the core.  Distorting his vision, he had the constant daytime illusion of walking upon a still mirage of reflective water at distance.  Around noon of every day, when his shadow was small and still below him, he went delirious until the sun had disappeared below the horizon.  His mind swam with visions of bizarre places, of figures alien yet somehow familiar. 

He lay awake on the parched clay at night, the clinging warmth of the day radiating still through his body as he watched the stars twinkle into sight above him.  From a day of blinding white ground and wild blue sky, and beating golden sun, he would lay and watch well into the deep blue, purple, and silver night.  He was awed at the array of foreign stars above him, as they seemed to dip and drop close to the flat emptiness, and fill his visions with glittering jewels.  Around midnight, when the bone pale moon shone its brightest, illuminating the desert in its chilling glow, he would resume his trek. 

And so it went for every day and night of his journey.  Walk north from the time of awakening around midnight, start having visions when his shadow cowered beneath the blazing sky, pass out in late afternoon and have fever dreams, convulsing silently in the empty desert.

On the eighteenths day the terrain began to change as he trod stoically, thinking sun-twisted thoughts all the while.  The cracks in the thirsty earth grew wider and deeper, until he was leaping atop islands surrounded by worn gullies, deep from erosion and time.  By mid-morning he was weaving his way down between the islands of unstable dry clay.  He was covered in dust that stuck to his skin, and cracked after drying into a baked layer, cemented on by his apparent endless supply of sweat.

When he awoke under stars becoming increasingly familiar, he found he was stiff with dried on clay, and broke it off of himself.  He had deep red lines where the sun had tanned him, yet even in the waxing moon's pale glow, he could see that the skin that had been covered was healed of more than a fortnight's worth of torturous sunburn, and even his darkly etched lines no longer burned.

He found the temple just before dawn, when the gullies had become dusty mountains covered with a ghostly peach fuzz of dried grass.  The air chirruped every few minutes with the calls of insects, and the fine dirt had evidence of small creatures.  The air began to smell of something other than his own flesh cooking, of the creeping tendrils of life.  His spirit lifted, slightly.

It was of an eclectic design, built of several large pale blocks of stone, rising in twisting curved towers in a walled courtyard around a stepped pyramid.  The outer walls were bare, and seemed untouched by the elements.  When he passed between the tall entrance arches, a burning chill slithered up his spine, and he fell to his knees.  The sensation made his vision blur, and his stomach turn over, and he reeled for a long moment, sickened.  He did not flee from the arches.

Collecting himself, he crawled beyond them, into the courtyard, which through clearing eyesight he could see was surrounded with small gazebo buildings amongst stark pillars.  Before the grand stepped pyramid and its altar-top, a wide open area.  A long pool of water, edged by twisting feathered serpent statues, wings spread, with a row of dark and pale obelisks lined straight up to the pyramids peak.

He got to his feet, and stared in awe.  The dawn light was glinting off the zenith of the great building, showing the untarnished glow of gold.  Looking around, he saw that gold edged the feathers of the serpent statues, glittered in the glyphs upon the obelisks, shined from the intricate designs etched into the pillars and tops of buildings contained within the great block wall.  Despite himself, he reached to the nearest pillar, and felt the strangely warm metal beneath his hand. 

As he watched sunlight roll swiftly down the pyramid steps, he saw the forms of the serpents glow gold from the walls, from the pillars, graven into almost every surface.  Golden feathered serpents, eyes like sunbursts, and graceful serpentine coils.  Before long, he found that the entire temple itself was shining gold, the pyramid, its pool of water, the buildings and monuments, all of it. 

Dumbfounded and awestruck, he knelt and drank from the pool of water, soothing his throat and stomach.  Reflected in the light shining off the pool he saw himself, wrinkled, haggard, and worn.  As if he were a walking dessicated corpse of the desert.  Looking at his hands, he saw them as plump and full as ever, his skin youthful, though the reflection deceived him.  A new wave of nausea swept over him, and he vomited into the pool.

Looking past the surface of the water, pale amongst the dark bottom, he saw the bones.  Hundreds of them, cracked human skulls and great bones, the twisting curve of smashed ribcages, broken orbs of eyes crushed inward.  He leapt away from the edge of the pool, reeling with fresh sickness mixed with horror.  He heard the pattering of many feet on stone, the rustling of feathers against each other as his vision faded to bedazzled blackness. 

[[Felt like a really nice write. ]]

II: The Altar of the Vulture

He dreamt first of the rain, falling in fat drops from grumbling grey skies, falling through treetops and running down leaves to drip in fat drops to the thirsty loam below.  He dreamt of rain, and forgot his troubles, washed away in the cleansing waters from above, lost within the soft rumblings of the dim and glittering clouds.  The sound of the falling rain pattering on the ground, tapping on the leaves, splattering in puddles drowned out his own thoughts. 

For a while he floated in cloudy forgetfulness, his mind diffuse and empty.  He felt he were the rain.  Rain cleansing.  Rain washing.  Rain falling.  Rain flooding.  Storms raced across his mind, scattering lightning and shocking peals of thunder.  Mountains eroded and mudslides rolled into valley bottoms flooded with torrential flow.  Trees hung under the ever-dropping moisture.  He ebbed and flowed, pooled and evaporated.

He, the rain, the storm, the wind, the thunder, the grumbling, weeping clouds.  He raced over the landscape, galloping with the speed of the winds over vast meadows with wild grasses, and over jungle-engulfed mountains.  He swirled to hurricane force over spreading and violent oceans, and battered the shore in primal fury.

He then dreamt of the feathered woman, her plumage glittering as if it were of made of precious jewels in the light of hundreds of flickering candles.  Her colours were strange, and she shimmered with all of the hues of the rainbow, and then some.  She looked at him, imperiously through the mask of a bird-face, and spoke his name.

---

Consciousness was slow to return to him.  It seemed to slowly fill him, spreading warmth through his aching limbs.  His mind felt foggy, and he had a throbbing headache that seemed to radiate all through his body.  When he opened his eyes, the light hurt him, and he felt all crusty, as if he had been sleeping for quite some time.

The silent statue of the obsidian vulture loomed over him, its carved wings spread protectively over the stone altar he lay spread upon.  Golden desert light filtered through the gaps in the intricate figure, mottling across Vasa's skin, already tingling with the warmth of the day. 

With aching limbs he sat up, shielding his eyes from the penetrating desert sun, and squinted at his surroundings.  HE sat on a cool grey stone altar, apparently guarded by a rather large and lifelike black obsidian statue of a vulture with its wings spread and head poised and ready to feed.  Beyond the altar, a ring of standing, dark stones, worn by the trials of time and sand.  Beyond that, empty desert, stretching impossibly far in all directions, covered in a tangled spiders' web of parched cracks and etched with furrows caused by strange, standing boulders.  To and from all horizons, there was only the blue-gold sky, the beating sun, the endless desert, and nothing else.

Nothing else aside from him, and the strange shrine.  No wind ruffled the dry sands of the desert, and no birds flew in the sky.  He was completely alone.

Surveying his possessions, he found he was wearing some dirty clothing covered in crusted-on city grime, his shoes, and all of six dollars and twenty-eight cents worth of money.  He had his cell phone, however there was no reception, and the battery flickered into death after a moment.  He pocketed it, just in case.

In bewilderment, he spent some time sitting atop the altar, under the spread wings of the vulture.  The sun sank into the distant horizon, filling the sky with orange and gold.  He watched strange stars twinkle above him, in constellations completely foreign.  There was no moon, only the glittering diamond stars.  He watched, and waited, and wondered.  He had not become hungry, nor thirsty, nor too hot or cold.

After sitting for a day and a night, at the dawn, realization came to him.

"I'm dead."  The words broke the silence of the desert.  The shadows falling across the features of the stone scavenger seemed to mock him, so he repeated himself.  He repeated himself many times, and each time, it seemed to make more and more sense. 

"I'm dead and this is Hell.  This is Hell and I am damned.  I'm dead.  I was murdered!  And now I'm in Hell!" No reply came to him of course, no wind, no sound, no sudden flashes of understanding.  He cursed the sky and shook his fist in sudden anger, and paced some more. 

Reluctant to leave the safety of the vulture's spreading wings, he waited until the afternoon before he set off on foot across the desert.  He could feel the days heat radiating off of the cracked earth.  He chose the direction of what he figured to be 'North' and walked that direction, figuring it to be as good as any, given the circumstances.

I: The Falling Rain

The great forest loomed above him, wild and green. Animals screeched and called in the distance, lost somewhere in the mist. The handle of the sword felt sweaty and sticky in his grasp with blood, and the mud sticking to his boots was slowing him down as he ran. He could hear the beasts behind him, howling and cackling in glee as he fled. He was starting to feel weak and the trees and bushes started to blur together into a single green-brown mass spinning around him, making his eyes hurt.

That's when she appeared, the bird-faced woman with the iridescent blue snake scales. The woman that held a great speckled egg within her clawed hands, and watched him with keen, predatory bird eyes. Silently she held it out to him in offering, and wavering on his feet, he reached towards it with a single, bloody hand...

---

He opened his eyes to the shadows of the thick, grimy rainfall spattering across his window in a slow, steady drizzle. The sounds of the street below his tiny, mouldering apartment were muted and even the constant wail of police and ambulance sirens sounded as if they were travelling across a great distance. He watched as a single chip of avocado green, out of style for at least thirty years (and questionable even then) fell from the wall across his bed to the small mildewy pile on the floor where so many others before had fallen over the past several months. Flashes of orange neon light reflected from outside pulsed across his vision. A lone cockroach ambled lazily across the baseboard.

Vasa groaned and wrestled his tangled bedcovers off. Somehow in his sleep he had turned himself around entirely so that his head was at the wrong end of the bed. He sat slowly, wincing from the fresh bruises on his body, and rubbed his face, feeling the prickly three-day stubble of his face and stared at the crumbling wall. For a moment he thought he saw the cracks like a great tree sprouting up from the baseboard, the fallen portions like white leaves, and the mess of deterioration were as the boughs and branches.

He shook his head to clear it. He had dreamt of the forest again. The forest and blood.

Sighing, he glanced at the clock, flashing 5:36 am. Outside and one story below, the crash and groan of metal on metal erupted, followed shortly by the screaming of people in the street. The neon sign outside of his window proclaiming the bottom floor to be a sex shop buzzed as it shut off on its timer, seven minutes late.

---

He stood alone in the rain at the crosswalk, the greasy drops coating his jacket with city grime. The woman next to him under her headache-pink umbrella chattered loudly on her cell phone about trivial matters that somehow had him feeling resentful. The radio in the battered car nearby suddenly blasted forth some horrible white noise that reminded him of harpies screeching before tuning to the local news channel. From the overly loud, yet drab, voice of the announcer, he heard that yet another catastrophe had occurred in some distant part of the world to claim the lives of thousands, and more terror from the middle east. He tuned it out as he strode across the crosswalk with the crowd of others there. The grey sky continued its steady drizzle upon the sad, grey buildings.

Heading for the restaurant where he worked, he wandered down a nearby alley, trying to avoid looking too closely at the contents of the dumpsters, and the collected detritus at the edges. Escape ladders dripped heavy drops to oily puddles below. A lone pigeon sitting in some dry nook under a windowsill watched him. He was thinking about mist and forests.

A noise startled him from his reverie, and turning to face it, he found himself confronted by a group of three men, teenagers really, each holding a battered looking pipe. All of them were covered in percings and tattoos, and seemed heedless of the rain dripping down their greased mohawks. In unison they grinned wolfishly. He had a moment to realize their intent before they advanced on him en masse, their bludgeons raised. The rest became a bloody, painful blur and the hooting cries of his attackers as they ran merrily down the alley, leaving him broken and barely concious amid the rubble of the alley.

A short while later, he watched a cockroach crawl across the dirty bricks across the alley, heard the soft cooing of the pigeon as it returned to its dry nook to watch him. His breathing came in ragged, painful gasps that shot fire through his chest and made his vision blur. He watched his blood mingle with the water around him, and felt the slow, steady fall of the rain erode away his mind until there was nothing left but the sound of the rain pattering against the cement, splashing in puddles, and dripping down the sides of lonely, forgotten buildings.

And, eventually, even that was gone.

Story: A Tale Told In Tarlas

A legend is whispered in the taverns and streets of Tarlas, sung in song, and passed down as revered folklore to children around warm winter hearths. It is a tale of the early days of Su, when the gods still walked the world, having not yet fled into seclusion or torpor.

It is said that many years ago, long before the Spire of Ashen fell, when the world was young, and even the creatures of the great Dream walked the world, the goddess Croene, the moon-spider, weaver of fates, fought Apoctli, the golden dragon of fire, in a duel for possession of the Sunsword. It was a battle so tremendous that their fighting made the land dark with eclipse for half an age. The sky howled as if being torn asunder, and the mortals wept in fear, for it seemed the End Of All Things had come. They battled furiously, Croene never tiring with her eight poisoned blades, and Apoctli never faltering in defence with his great rending claws, and sweeping golden coils.

In the great battle, Apoctli's claws rended a gash in the flesh of Croene, and three drops of silver blood fell from the wound, falling to the world below. One drop fell into the forest, and made the trees grow lush and feral, and the beasts savage and strange, creating what is now known as the Moonwood. One drop fell into the burning maw of the volcano Angkarrak, freezing its magma temper and solidifying into the Bright Pillar, the eventual glowing center of the Stone People's city of Sharrid-Khar.  The third drop fell so far away from the world that it fell into the Dream, and became the seed of the great pale tree of Ansmassar, whose roots and boughs are so great that some of Ansmassar can be found in Su and the Nightmare, as well as the world of Twie.

It was Apoctli that won the duel, sacrificing his left horn, shorn from his head by Croene's terrible blades, and fell to the land of Su, the world of mortals. Winning the Sunsword, and dominion in day over all the land of Su, he became the Lord of Day, and Croene the moon-spider, spinner of fates and keeper of the elder secrets was dethroned. In his mercy he granted her the Crown of Stars, giving her dominion over the night sky, and all the lands lit by the silver moon.

In sorrow, and humbled by the dragon's mercy, she retired to her silver temple to sleep, and so she rules from the great Dream the nighted lands. However, ass the Crown of Stars is a lesser artefact, her power is weak during the shrouded moon for her channel to the Dream is weak and twisted, and the Nightmare draws close to Su in its shadowy cycle.

So great, so terrible, and so long was the battle between the silver spider and the golden dragon that even the people of the world were divided. The tall and noble Khirre abandoned the darkened world and fled back to their ancestral home of the Dream, leaving only their lesser kin, the pale Estarra who sided with the silver fate-spider, Croene, and the Kumorrah, who sided with the golden sun-lord Apoctli. 

Of Apoctli's horn, the tale goes, it fell into a deep wooded glade in remote wilderness, far from all the elder peoples of the world, out of the reach of the Estarra, the Kumorrah, the Feng-Aessa, and the Guldorrach who would become the Stone People. There, the horn took root into the great tree Maydassen, that had leaves of golden yellow tinged with bloody red, and bore burning red fruit more of fire and sky than earth and water, which would grant great powers upon those that ate it. Its bark was gold and brown, and the tree was gnarled and twisted as the horn of the great dragon Apoctli was.

Legend tells that the Star-stag, Thanenir wandered beneath the boughs of the tree and ate of the burning fruit by the light of the empty and shrouded moon, and witnessed only by the glowing ember-bugs and the night creatures was transformed into a new creature, the first Human. Like his former form, the first man was strong and noble, with a wise bearded face and long golden brown hair, and a body strong and athletic. Thinking to grow another such tree as Maydassen, he took three more fruit from the tree, and went into the wide world to plant them.

In the north he planted one fruit, and the tree that grew was as pale as snow, but had leaves that shined as gold, and sap that ran red like blood. It was named Dammadar, and its first fruit bore for Thanenir the second Human, the first woman, and her name was Elsanna, wife of Thanenir, the Lady of Winter, and both became the creators of the races of men.

The second fruit planted was in the burning desert of Kelgorass, and grew into the great tree of Gassu-Tokka, a thorny creation of gnarled boughs and roots, and the center of the lost garden of Ai, and whose viny boughs wrapped around the ancient Spire of Ashen, now fallen, and whose merest remnant and cousin still dwells, black and gnarled in that damned place.

The last fruit was planted on the shores of the deep mountain lake of Creiss, which is said to be from the massive footprint of the giant Tanor, who strode across all the worlds above and below in the first of all ages. The tree was called Teneiss, and was as a great weeping willow, with long draping twigs, and leaves that glowed as golden fire in the dawn and dusk. Its roots ran deep, and drank well of the pure waters of the cold mountain lake, and bore a single glowing fruit after many years.

The story then tells that the fruit was plucked from the tree by Sotros, a wild and feral creature of the Dream, known for running and fighting in the lonely places. So enamoured by the magical glow of the fruit that he tied it as a talisman around his neck, and took it with him on its great travels, to eventually become lost to him after a battle on the bank of the river with the great morning bear Koumourou, to drift downstream and come to rest in a small pond deep in the Elder Mistwood, the deepest part of that dark and thick wood. The fruit then grew into a red-barked tree, and from its trunk after many years, was borne Zoel, the noble, cousin of Thanenir.

Zoel travelled the world, and eventually founded the bright city of Anzebesharran, uniting the tribes of men, those first and many offspring of Thanenir and Elsanna. It was a great and glorious city of men, and as Zoel was not of man himself, and was something somehow different, he ruled for many years. Eventually the trials of rulership took their toll on him, and he left the city of Anzebesharran to travel the worlds once more, eventually dwelling in Dream as the Shining Lord, ruler of the Great Halls, where the race of men dwells after death.

It is said that Zoel in his travels once slept with an Estarran queen, whose name is lost to time, and she bore in his absence a son. Her enraged husband, the Estarran King Saiell was shocked at the strange and unaccountable appearance of the babe, and slew his queen for her adultery by making her drink the nectar of the deathly poisonous Flower of Sorrows, which grew in the hanging gardens of the palace. He then ordered the illegitimate son cast out into the wilds by his highest captain, Kolras. Kolras was a kind and honest Estarran, and was merciful on the child, and instead sending it through magic to another time and place to be cared for there. King Saiell soon found out about the treachery of his highest captain, and banished Kolras, cursing him to damnation and anguish, transforming him into a hideous monster to dwell far beneath the soil of Su in darkness.

In time, the city of Anzebesharran lost its lustre, and its new rulers fell into chaos and revolution. The great kingdom of men was shattered, and the tribes of Humans scattered across the world of Su, forgetting the location of their shining ancestral city, now left in ruins and decay. The races of men fought and struggled, building kingdoms and fighting wars that destroyed them. Eventually, the races of men dwindled. For survival they came together in an uneasy peace with each other and the peoples about them, dwelling still in their old cities, and losing touch with their roots as the sun-touched grandchildren of the Great Stag and the Lady of Winter.

And so is the world today, as they say in Tarlas. The race of men lies in ruins and eventual damnation, eroded by the endless Nightmare War. Those whispered folklore tales of the noble half-Estarra son of Zoel sent across time and space gives the people of the old city hope for a new and proper king, and the return of the glory of Humankind, united against the Nightmares.