a self-pity he didn’t let anyone else see. Post-binge melancholy didn’t help. Such self-indulgence struck him as pathetic and made him feel worse. Instead he watched the whirling phantoms molded from steam from the hot water and listened to the muffled sounds of the outside world. At one point he found himself wondering again who that woman in the tavern had been—her dark hair tied back, her gray-green eyes glinting clearly even across the smoky taproom, the way her hands moved with an elegant expressiveness as she talked.
If I search hard enough, he wondered, will I be able to find her again?
As his mind numbed and his eyelids got heavier, Tashnark heard his brother singing gently in the room above. The words filtered into his mind as an undercurrent to thought and settled there like a sediment over his day-dreaming.
“Where are you going?” spoke a man I met beside the
bay.
“Along the road and out of town,” at once I tried to
say.
“Where are you going?” again he pressed, that man so
thin and gray
“Beyond the last house, out the gate, still further on
my way.”
The tune was slow and measured, soothing on the surface yet somehow unsettling at a level below Tashnark’s conscious thoughts. Verse after verse described the determined questioning of the thin, gray man. More, it charted the narrator’s growing terror as the stranger’s words took on darker meaning. Tashnark found his mind drifting into a landscape full of hazy light, as the song’s narrator begged the strange man to leave him alone.…
His “Where are you going?” laughed at me, his eyes
said plainly “Nay!”
His hand stretched out and touched me, and he wraith-
like went away.
The winds sigh “Where are you going?” Dark waters
in the bay
Breathe the words like sleeping beasts; “Where?” the
brambles say.
Trees whisper “Where are you going?”, “Where?”
chirps the lonely jay.
A cursed soul, I wander lost, in exile, old and fey.
The accompanying lute mimicked the sound of wind. Tashnark stirred restlessly in the cooling water as, again, something monstrous formed in the empty spaces of sleep. He felt it coming and groaned, tossing about in sudden terror.
Words burst from his lips. “Hanin! Hanin!” There was an intense red glow that blinded him and stunned his mind into dullness. He squeezed his eyes shut.
* * * *
When he opened his eyes, a vague uneasiness came upon him, making him feel displaced and lonely.
He was called Bellarroth. He remembered that.
He remembered the name ‘Tashnark’, too. But who was Tashnark? Bellarroth had no idea.
What was he doing then? Bellarroth couldn’t remember that either.
He looked around at the near-dormant serpent-trees and the grainy haze of the sky beyond, and another name came to him. Hanin! He was searching for Hanin—that was what he was doing.
The first signs of the Fire-beast Lucishnor had appeared on the few scraps of horizon visible to him. Lucishnor’s imminent arrival heralded a new day—and the possible awakening of the trees. A touch of fire in the sky silhouetted their still forms. Bellarroth began to run, his awareness of Hanin’s call renewed and strengthened. But the sky flared suddenly as the monster Lucishnor sped into view. The heat of its closeness battered him.
Movement made him glance up. A shadowy mass towered above—a mountain moving with life. He was close to the base of Koroom, so close the monster-head lost appreciable detail and was simply a solid, incomprehensible hugeness. Hanin’s call hounded him on. <Hurry, hurry!>
Bellarroth’s breath came in gasps and his chest heaved against the rough, hair-woven garment he wore, while the heat of Lucishnor burned across the back of his neck like a swung fire-brand. Sweat rolled off him and thirst tore at his throat, but he didn’t stop beneath the shade of denser forest nor when he came to water leaking out of Tammenallor into a gentle rivulet. The water began to steam.
And then the winds grew fierce. There was movement among the serpent-trees that was not a product of their perpetual squirming. It threw them into a simultaneous swing to one side and their hissing swept into Bellarroth’s ears as though they cried out in alarm. Hair-grass whipped about his feet, making him stumble as a blast of wind hit and scalded his already-reddened skin. He fell to his knees.
Now the sky was on fire. As he glanced up, Bellarroth’s flame-blurred eyes discerned in that instant the shape of Lucishnor’s fiery wings even through the forest of serpent-silhouettes between him and the sky-beast. He turned away, praying that the monster would fly around behind the enormous head of Tammenallor, so that Bellarroth would be running in shadow. Battle between the monsters seemed inevitable and this perception fueled the panic already barely under control in him. If the monsters were to fight, there would be no possibility of survival for him on Tammenallor. Gigantomachy would annihilate the delicate balance of existence, his life consumed in the holocaust.
He knew instinctively that time was shortening. Yet it was not despair that rose in him, but determination and heightened awareness of the urgency sent from Hanin. Fatalistically, he stumbled on through the mounting chaos, crouching low to reduce the push of the winds. Heat ate at him like a predator.
How long it was before he reached the limit of his endurance he didn’t know, but reach it he did. And acknowledging that limit brought a swift and unwelcome end to his flight. The call speared into his mind with a sharp, almost hysterical intensity. He saw ahead a tangle of shapes materializing in the stark glare—his mind grasped to that tangle as though linked by some ethereal bond. Momentarily the haze on his eyes cleared, showing him a thick mesh of smaller, vine-like serpents and clinging, fibrous strands. In the midst of this, held and shredded by insensate fingers, lay Hanin—a bloody corpse being shorn of its flesh. A moan escaped from Bellarroth’s lips and his limbs stiffened with sudden fear. Darkness overwhelmed him.
* * * *
Tashnark awoke to the sound of dim voices, chattering frenziedly in dark. A hand gripped his arm, pulling him up. “Hanin!” he cried, weak with ghostly terror, “I saw you dead.”
“Dead, no.” The thin, wrinkled lips released words as though they were precious jewels, “but you find me dying. Tammenallor has broken my defenses and Its body takes me to Its own. Soon I will be dead. You, Bellarroth, have been born to save. Act now! Awaken!”
His skeletal finger bent to Bellarroth’s forehead and touched him there.
The contact jolted him, filling his bones with fire.
“I’m not Bellarroth!” he yelled.
Tashnark’s voice echoed
