Read Garamoush Page 3

Stenn thought it was a dream- it had to have been. He didn’t really go into the shell of a god. All he had done was slip and hit his head on a rock. That was all. Tania and Bart must have carried him back home. When he opened his eyes, he would be lying on his bed and the sunlight would be coming through the open window like it always did. Tania would be sitting next to him, a mixture of concern and good-humor spread over her freckled face. She would take his hand in hers and run her fingers in-between his and tell him with sarcastic graveness that Eym laughed at him all the way home. Then Stenn would smile and the world would be as it should.

  Where Stenn was laying was cold. When he opened his eyes, there was no warm sun and his big hands had no other hands to grip. He groaned as he sat up and stretched. The living nightmare was his reality and the world he thought he would have awoken to was, in the end, the dream.

  Stenn would have lashed out then with all of his might into the bizarre nightmare world he had fallen into, but good sense stayed his hand. I’ll be needing all of my strength, Stenn thought, as if he was scolding the less-rational parts of his mind, punching a wall won’t get me anywhere… if you can even call these walls.

  Stenn blinked, the strange new world slowly coming back more into focus. Glowing patches of blue and green grew like boils out of the red walls. They cast a strange, eerie light that made Stenn uneasy, like the light was trying to almost burrow under his skin. His hand and feet found steady footing by the patch’s light not long after he awoke and he finally got a good, clean look at exactly what kind of madness he had gotten himself into.

  In one direction, the cave was getting steadily thinner. Stenn reasoned that he was bound in that direction. He remembered right before the Stirring that he could feel both the walls of the cave when he couldn’t before. In the other direction, there was only cold and unwelcoming darkness. The heavy rasping of Stenn’s breathing was all he could hear.

  Knowing full well that his original path for escape was unusable now, he shook the rest of the ringing and fogginess from his head and started walking.

  In the unearthly quiet of the cave, Stenn’s thoughts were impossible to ignore. They had moved from the warm, sunny dream of his family to the true gravity of his situation. True, he was now trapped inside the shell of a god, but he still had enough optimism and confidence to stay true to his promise to Eym. He would be coming back to her and her mother. But after he escaped… what then?

  Stenn might have avoided being seen by the men and women of the Ministry as he entered Garamoush’s shell, but there would be no avoiding them as he escaped. As a Knight, Stenn had guarded Declarers for years- the Ministry always wanted to make sure that their most valuable members were well protected and only the Declarers could be in any direct contact with Garamoush. Even so, by sacred edict, no human being could pass into Garamoush’s shell, no matter what the songs or fables said, unless they wanted to be marked as a heretic. Heretics were only punished with death, but a heretic that went into Garamoush’s shell… Stenn actually felt a bit better about Samuel Ennet’s fate. It would have been much worse if he was ever captured by the Ministry.

  But, there Stenn was, inside of a god’s shell. Stenn let himself smirk. He had half a mind to saunter into the Ministry’s sacred Granite Citadel and gloat about his little misadventure up to high heaven, just to see their pursed, jealous, hateful little faces. Then he would probably be hanged as a heretic. His fantasy paused as he squeezed through a particularly narrow part of the tunnel.

  A different Stenn might have found the image even funnier, and one absolutely worth it in the end. But that different Stenn didn’t have a wife and young daughter. With that, Stenn shut the thought out. If, no, when, he found his way out, young woman in tow or not, it might be best to flee town or maybe even the whole damn country. He knew how the Ministry worked. Heresy, in their minds, spread like a disease. The only way to ensure that it was stamped out was to stamp out those who were infected with it. They wouldn’t spare Tania and little Eym would probably be shipped to a faraway orphanage.

  Stenn shook the though from his head. He locked it away with the rest of the filth that wasn’t worth his time to think about. There wasn’t a force in Garaheim that could keep Stenn’s scared and old hands from those of his wife’s. He could still feel their softness and their deep inner strength now and he latched to the feeling. He used the feeling as an anchor and an extension to the vow he made to his daughter.

  There is nothing in Garaheim that can keep me from them, he thought, his steps becoming more confident as he walked, not even Garamoush Himself. Stenn’s mind immediately started to run through different possibilities for what came after he escaped His shell because there was going to be an “after.”

  Maybe Tania’s father can shelter us, Stenn thought. Bart did say he wanted a son like me, didn’t he? Well, I guess we can meet him halfway by living in his house. But that might also… put… him in…

  Holy hell.

  The thin tunnel and Stenn’s mind both had eventually given way to a brand new environment. He had to be dreaming now. There was simply no way it could have been real.

  Those are stars. Stars.

  Stenn’s neck craned until it started to become painful. Then he just craned it some more anyway. Far, far above, specks of light were glowing light blue. It was like looking up at the night sky, there was simply no other comparison Stenn could draw. But he was inside a shell. It was almost too much to take in. Stenn only shook himself from his stupor when he realized that his mouth was becoming dry from it hanging open for so long.

  His mind concocted a plan to rationalize. He tried to trace out all of the constellations he knew. The Clockmaker, the Black Chariot, the Great Spyglass- none of them appeared in that strange sky. For the first time, Stenn looked around him, rather than above him. Small patches of silver-blue light, similar to the ones in the cave were spread out on the floor, reaching far into the distance. Their distribution spoke of a round shape to the room.

  So, Stenn realized, not a sky at all. Just a ceiling. An extremely odd ceiling. A ceiling that was probably once a floor not too long ago thanks to His Stirring. Strangely, though, the walls were complete devoid of the glowing patches. His eyes scanned above him with new knowledge and a new purpose. Stenn frowned. A ceiling with as many entrances as the floor. The light cast from the patches showed dozens, if not hundreds of entrances to caves similar to the one Stenn had just come from.

  She could be anywhere, thought Stenn, his frown deepening. For all he knew the young woman could have moved with much more speed and grace than an old man like him and was still conscious while Stenn was lying passed out on the floor. Hell, she might have even gone into one of the caves that would now be part of the ceiling.

  Stenn’s knees started to disagree with the indeterminate amount of time he spent staring at the ceiling. So, Stenn sat. Stenn sighed. Stenn thought.

  He thought long and hard, about both the strange new world he found himself in and the old world he had left behind. His eyesight was finally adjusting, at the very least. The starry ceiling shone clearer and brighter, almost exactly like the real night sky. A pang of guilt hit Stenn’s heart. One week ago he made a promise to his wife and daughter that he would take them to a plateau not far from the Granite Citadel. It was the best place in all of Garaheim to see the night sky. As a Knight-in-training and a fully-fledged Knight, Stenn loved the mysterious night sky, but he had always taken his nighttime trips to see the stars alone. Now he had a chance to share the experience. I’m going to see the starry sky, the real starry sky again. And I won’t be alone.

  By then the strange boney contours and warm, sinewy flesh was starting to come clearer to him. Even the corners of his vision were starting to light up, despite him not being even within spitting distance of any of the bulbous patches of light.

  Perhaps in a vain hope, Stenn left where he sat and started to walk towards the far side of the room, his adjusted eyes open all the while, looking for anyt
hing that might be construed as a clue to the young woman’s path. The walk was long, lonely, and unfruitful.

  In the quiet dark, an unwelcome part of his mind started to remember in earnest Stenn the Knight, not Stenn the father. As a Knight, it was his job to be cynical- to guard the Declarers from any threat, even imagined ones. His eyes were trained through the decades of looking accusingly at crowds, even though they often full of people he knew would do no wrong.

  It felt like rusty plates rubbing together when Stenn brought those old skills of searching and identifying to the surface. Each glowing patch became another face in a crowd. He looked for patterns in them, for anything to stick out as different. Whether that different thing was going to be dangerous or helpful, Stenn couldn’t tell. He didn’t think his expectations would be valid here in this bizarre world. His eyes rolled over the strange patches until he started to lose track of time. But then, he stopped.

  It wasn’t something that he did notice. Rather, it was something that he did not. He could see a consistent cover of the glowing patches across the entire, except for two. Two were dim and, more unnervingly, popped like boils and their dull-colored contents had spilled out onto the fleshy floor. Stenn didn’t suspect that they popped naturally; someone must have damaged them as they moved about.

  Stenn spied one of the patches near him and placed his boot against it. He cringed at the feeling, at the sensation of thick and strange fluids moving beneath his foot. Stenn pushed all other thoughts out of his head and stomped down hard. As he expected, the patch burst and it lost its light almost instantly. Also as per his expectations, his boot was now well and stained with the curiously warm viscous fluid.

  Stenn couldn’t repress a shiver, despite the warmth of the room. He resolved that a bath was the first thing he would do when he escaped Garamoush’s shell, bar hugging his wife and daughter. He was able to nod, though, secure in his intuitions. The young woman was leaving a clumsy trail to follow indeed, just perhaps in not the most traditional sense. He followed the trail of darkness between the patches on the floor and quickened his pace when he saw footprints made from small feet but a long stride were weaving through the patches, the dull goop from the patches evidently clinging to the young woman’s boots like Stenn’s. He ended up at a particularly large cave entrance. With the patch directly in front of it extinguished, it was hard to even gauge the height of the cave’s mouth. Stenn only shook his head. It’s no wonder I didn’t see it. Without any light it’s as big and as black as the rest of the walls.

  There unfortunately wasn’t much light within the cave either. The dim light of the stars did not penetrate far in. Stenn only felt his way along, keeping his breathing and feet quiet. He reached a wall, his hands blindly groping out at its fleshy material. He stood still for a moment, hoping that eventually his eyes would adjust to the almost unnatural thickness of the dark. A light caught his attention from the corner of his eye. At first, he thought it was just his racing mind playing tricks on him, but the light stayed. It floated dimly at the edge of the tunnel.

  When Stenn reached the light, he noticed that it was coming from another series of glowing patches. The area of the cave he had entered was a bit taller and wider than the last. Why does it feel so odd to be standing like this? Stenn turned to look over his shoulder. It was subtle, but now that he was apparently on flat ground, the tunnel he emerged from seemed to be sloping downwards.

  Stenn groaned. “I meant to be finding a way out of here. Not a way to get deeper in.” He stopped and got down low, his fists raised. It was probably just the way his voice echoed along the strange cave walls, but he swore he heard some kind of scuffling. He began moving forward slowly- almost painfully slowly, but his eyes were sharper now and he wasn’t about to let anything sneak up on him.

  Stenn sighed and stood up, straightening his back. There was no place for something to hide in this straight tunnel, so he stopped himself from worrying any more than he already was.

  Besides, he thought, there’s nothing for it. Stranger things have already happened. Maybe it won’t all be bad. Still, Stenn knew that he was lost in a dark and truly alien place. It almost seemed impossible that benevolent Garamoush’s shell could be so unnerving and unwelcome. It was contrary to just about every song and tale told about the god. Stenn started to search his mind for one such song, as if to prove to himself that Garamoush was still the caring god he had always heard about.

  …He would pluck the stars

  Down to the ground for us

  If we asked…

  Stenn rounded a corner, his mind feeling a bit more at ease with the familiar words circling in his head.

  For He is good

  And He will care

  The Finder of the Lost

  The-

  Stenn wondered why his breath wasn’t coming in like normal. He no longer had to wonder once the pain from the kick to his gut set in. He stumbled back from the blow, his watering eyes trying to find the attacker and his head bashed with a thud up against an outcropping of bone. Stenn’s attacker quickly had their arms around his waist and flung him to the ground.

  The young woman’s face was familiar, even if Stenn had only seen it from up on a cliff. The girl who he had come to search for was now on top of him, her knee pushed against his chest and a knife of heavy grey iron at his throat.

  Stenn ground his teeth at how easily and completely he had been beaten. Whoever the young woman was, she knew what she was going. Maybe she doesn’t need my help after all, Stenn briefly considered.

  “How did you get here? Who the hell are you?”

  “Same way as you did, I imagine. And my name’s…” Stenn feigned a cough and flailed in the way an aging man was probably expected to when a knee was pressed against his chest, “my name… would be easier to say if I could breathe normally.”

  The young woman jerked her head in closer, her rough and wild brown bangs splashing into Stenn’s face. “How stupid do you think I am? Tell me who you are or it’s going to get a lot harder to breathe.”

  The knife hovered just below Stenn’s throat like a viper with death in its eyes and now her knee was actually starting to grind into a painful position on his chest. “Not at all,” Stenn coughed out. “You seem to be smarter than most.” Stenn’s head shot up, the knife blade just a tiny bit too low to actually cut him as he did so. He stopped his head-butt so close to the young woman’s forehead that he could feel her gasp in surprise as she jerked off of Stenn and stumbled away.

  She regained her composure remarkably quickly and adopted a clumsy defensive stance. Stenn stood, content to let his thick frame tower over and intimidate the young woman. “You’re just not smarter than me,” Stenn added. He noticed that she was crouching down now, like a cat about to pounce. Stenn, by instinct, adopted the traditional and feared bare-knuckle brawling style of a Knight. He had no doubt that if it came to actual blows, he could defeat his young and stubborn opponent in a few choice moves.

  But…

  Stenn dropped his stance and smiled the best smile that a man who nearly had his throat slit could. “My name’s Stenn,” he said.

  “There’s a lot of Stenn’s out there,” the young woman growled, “which one are you?”

  “Stenn Fenner. I was born in the manor of Lord Samuel Ennet over Smallslip-on-the-Hills. My current home is in the Dehry Township, six or seven hours from here by horse. I have a wife and daughter and live in-“

  “Shut up.” The youth was starting to circle Stenn now. The few times she had to look down to check her footing were the perfect times that Stenn could have disarmed her. He had been trained to see to take down trained assailants, but this wasn’t an assailant. This was a young woman. Stenn didn’t think she looked hardly a year into womanhood. It, by no means, meant that she wasn’t dangerous or skilled in her own right, but she was no trained killer. “I don’t care about any of that. What do you want? Were you following me?”

  “You know,” Stenn said, ??
?it’s usually tradition to tell somebody your name once you have been given theirs.”

  The girl only spat. Stenn’s mouth began to twist and his brow furrowed.

  “Yes,” he said, the patience starting to drain from his voice. “I am, er, was following you. I saw Garamoush Stir and saw you slip under Him. I wanted to check if you were alright.”

  Stenn wasn’t entirely sure what kind of reaction he was expecting to get, given how odd it must have sounded to claim good intentions when he sounded like he was on the verge of possibly strangling the next person he saw. But, he certainly wasn’t expecting the youth to stow the knife and straighten up.

  “Well,” she said, her voice in something like normal conversational tone for the first time Stenn had heard her speaking. “Thanks and all. But if you can’t see, I’m tops alright. So you can just turn around and leave me alone.”

  “Unless He starts Stirring again,” Stenn said, tapping one of Garamoush’s bone growths with his foot, “I’m stuck here with you. The way we came in isn’t exactly open anymore.”

  “Well hell,” the youth said, readjusting her satchel attached to her belt, “I knew that. But there’s dozens of caves and tunnels back there in the big star room… place I’m sure one of them leads outside. Probably. Eventually.”

  Stenn was nodding along until it struck him. “Wait a tick,” he said, his thoughts rapidly catching up with him, “you came in here without knowing how to get out?”

  “Didn’t you?” The young woman spoke much in the way people talk about the weather or the idle goings-ons of humdrum everyday life. She even began walking away from Stenn, down the length of the boney tunnel before he could respond.

  “I-“ Stenn started to say, “I suppose so. But I was coming after you. I thought you might have gotten scared and ran in here or something. It’s not like I expected Him to start Stirring just then.”

  “So, what you’re getting at,” the youth said, carefully navigating the bone beneath her feet but choosing from the various branching tunnel paths seemingly at random. “Is that you need my help now.”

  On one hand, this girl’s cheekiness was working its way into the cracks of Stenn’s old heart. On the other hand… “What are you doing here?” Stenn insisted, his patience little more than a façade now.

  The young woman sighed so heavily, Stenn could practically see her rolling her eyes in his mind’s eye. “Alright, firstly, I’m Anna.” She spun on her sharp heel to stare up at Stenn. “I don’t like being talked to like I’m not a person. Anna. Not just ‘you’.”

  Stenn nodded. At least he was able to put a name to a face now.

  “And I’m going to find Garamoush’s Wellspring.”

  Anna turned again and began to saunter away, her head held high in the eerie blue-green light. Stenn, however, was rooted in place with his mind spreading out in each and every way like a storm’s squall. Stenn knew, anybody with a brain knew, that what he and Anna were doing at that exact moment was essentially the highest heresy in the eyes of the Ministry. But the legions of inquisitors and Knights of the Ministry were sweet spring flowers compared to the sheer cliff of suicide that Anna was so casually walking towards.

  Stenn’s voice started off as a whisper, but turned into a full-blown shout of panic and near-anguish by the end. “You’re going to find Garamoush’s Wellspring? The source of all of His divine wisdom? Just like that? You’re going to go steal the knowledge of a god… from inside His own shell? On your own? What in the world are you thinking? If you’re even thinking at all?”

  Even as Anna stood well down the tunnel of flesh and bone, Stenn could see her sharp brow bending like a bow. “Anna,” she corrected Stenn. “My name is Anna, old man. Not ‘you.’” And then she walked away, again.

  Stenn groaned and before she got far, Stenn’s hand was on Anna’s shoulder. He spun her around to face down his large blue eyes with their tiny black pinpricks of pupils. “He’ll tear you to pieces, Anna,” he said. “This is a god we’re talking about here.”

  “Good,” Anna said, her head cocking to the side, as if everything Stenn said was something so trivial, so insipid. “Because only a god can help me now. And if I don’t wake the lazy bastard, how can He be of any help to me anyway?”

  “That’s not how it works- help you with what- hey!” Anna, slipping away from Stenn, evidently found another random path that was much to her liking. She quickly darted down it. “Would you just stop for a second and listen to me?”

  “Why should I? People like you have been trying to stop me for years.”

  “People like me?” Stenn asked, his voice starting to carry some of the irritation he was feeling, as he dipped underneath a low-hanging branch of bone. “All I’m trying to do is keep you from doing something dangerously stupid.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that before, too. But me not doing this is even more stupid. Believe me.”

  “Believe you? I’m only, what, thirty-some years older than you?” In the random patches of good light, Stenn could see Anna’s face a bit more clearly. Her dark brown hair was long, but now tied back with twine. Its frayed edges spoke of the quick decapitation of its loose ends with a knife. Probably the very same one she still carried. Beneath the locks, two pairs of eyes, thick and brown like a wolf’s, peered out. But despite her less-than-youthful hair, her face still had some of the telltale roundness of childhood. Stenn had placed Anna at around fourteen- tough for her age, but still a child in the end.

  “What does that matter?” Anna asked, still not having the courtesy to face Stenn when talking to him. “All of the adults I could have listened to would have just told me to… well, not do this.”

  “You mean your mother and father?” Stenn said, the pain and frustration of the day boiling up with him scarcely noticing, “I suppose if they were stupid enough to let you and your siblings play near Garamoush with only some old woman to watch you all, then-“

  Stenn’s old Knight senses were the only thing that kept Anna’s vengeful fist from connecting with his gut. Both had a look of surprise on their faces as Stenn’s much larger hand clamped down on Anna’s muscled wrist. The young woman recovered first and tried to pull her hand free. Stenn didn’t bother denying her.

  “My mother and father…” Anna said as she rubbed her wrist, sounding as if she had heard the words for the first time in her life. “I guess they would have said something about it. But corpses aren’t much for conversation.” She laughed then and it was the loneliest laugh Stenn had ever heard. “Believe me; I’ve tried to talk to them. They’re just so… stiff.”

  Is there anything worse in the world than the life of an orphan? Stenn thought. It was that very same thought that forced Stenn to finally leave his life of a Ministry Knight with some help from the Ennet family. Eym needed a father in her life, a father who gave up his job at being the local monster that mothers told their children about to frighten them. Stenn wasn’t so sure that that same father was also the one who ran into the shell of a god looking for a young woman and a dead lord. But Eym’s stuck with me, Stenn assured himself, and I’m stuck with her. I’m coming back for you. I promised you.

  “Those weren’t your brothers and sisters with you on Garamoush, were they?” Stenn edged.

  Anna shook her head. “Just other orphans. I don’t think I ever even really learned their names.”

  “Aren’t you a little old to still be in an orphanage?” Stenn asked. “Most young women your age, with or without parents, usually are employed somehow.”

  Anna scoffed. It was a blunt, almost hostile noise. “Yes, I can’t wait for ‘employment’ as a whore or a nun. It’s about all I had to look forward to after the orphanage. And yes, I am a bit old, hence why I came here today. They would have kicked me out eventually anyway and the old woman we came with is just the sister of the orphanage owner. She’s a bit… touched. I said that other children had played on His Shore before and they said it was fun. We’ve learned by now to not ignore something fun.
” The more she spoke, the more she recovered. What small slouch of discomfort had worked its way into Anna’s spine had been expelled. She was standing more like an adult again and presenting herself in a similar way. “I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen to them. I wasn’t even sure it would work at all.”

  “They’re all fine,” Stenn said, creeping ahead in the tunnel to look down some of the other dim paths. There had never been any legends or stories about monsters or evil creatures roaming about inside of Garamoush, in fact it seemed rather contrary to His nature, but caution dictated caution. “They all ended up with your caretaker. They’re safe there.”

  Anna nodded and pushed off from where she stood on the wall. “Oh, and, I’m sorry I tried to kill you. I didn’t expect you to be… uh, you know… not bad…” With that, she began to wander down the boney halls of Garamoush’s shell yet again, but this time at a much more reasonable pace. Stenn followed shortly afterwards.

  Somebody else thinks I’m a decent man, Stenn thought, allowing himself a small, tired smile. That number seems to go up the longer I stay away from the Ministry.

  As they walked, the puzzle of the fiery young woman who possessed the worst apologies in the world tried to unlock itself in Stenn’s mind. Her tenacity and determination had certainly seen her through this far but it was foolish to think that those traits alone could carry a person up to the fount of a god’s knowledge.

  By force of habit, Stenn had already grown accustomed to stepping over the odd flesh-and-bone flooring of Garamoush’s halls, though one hand always rested on the walls lest Garamoush start to Stir again. His feet still made a subtle, but noticeable squelching sound, but even that was becoming less noticeable to his ears. In short, the silence the two were walking in was quickly becoming unbearable.

  Luckily, Anna was the first one to work up the courage to speak. “He knows everything, right?”

  “Garamoush?” Stenn responded. “Of course. He can see the whole world as He sleeps. That’s how He knows all that He does and all He imparts to us.” Or, so the Ministry tells us, Stenn reminded himself. No matter how many times he had been on His Shore, hardly an arrow’s flight away from a Ministry Declarer taking in Garamoush’s incomprehensible god-speak, Stenn had never been quite sure that what was coming out of the god’s mouth then and what would be coming out of the Declarer’s mouth later were one in the same. But it only made sense, didn’t it? A god that large with that many legends- and a god among mortals no less- yes, it only made sense. If anybody knew the truth of things, it would be Him.

  “He had better,” Anna said. She sighed as she continued to walk. It may have just been her newfound sense of calm or perhaps she was starting to actually piece together the eldritch environment, but her choices in paths seemed to be more thought out than before. She would stop at junctions and appear to think about her choices before making them, which was a welcome change from her earlier random wandering. She would even examine the outcroppings of bone and comment on if she had seen them before. Stenn thought it equally impressive and improbable that Anna was able to keep the bones straight in her head- they all looked the same in Stenn’s head. “Since you asked so nicely…” she paused, as if debating once more if she really wanted to keep talking. Evidently, she did, “I’m going to ask Garamoush where my brother is.”

  The amount of relief Stenn felt at that honestly surprised him. At least she isn’t totally alone in the world, he thought. “He’s alive?” Stenn asked.

  “As far as I know. We were separated when my parents were killed. Ministry’s orders.” The last two words were said with such venom that Stenn’s skin crawled.

  Stenn swallowed. “Your parents were heretics.” Stenn had thanked Garamoush every night for a year and a half the day he learned he was assigned to become a Knight in the Ministry and not one of its feared Justices. They were zealots that shared more in common with stones or lumps of iron than other human beings. Frankly, they reeked of evil. They had been molded, mostly through pain and doctrine, to carry out the Ministry’s orders with unwavering fanaticism: “The words of Garamoush shall not be denied. Those who denounce His words denounce their right to life.” Needless to say, Justices took their assignments very seriously and they never failed to complete them.

  “You don’t get to choose your parents.” Anna said, sounding as if she had answered the question many times before.

  “No,” he said. “No you don’t.” Stenn flexed his aching, many-times-broken and many-times-breaking fingers and thought of the gentle, delicate hands of his daughter.” I wonder if she would choose me if she could have, though.

  The two walked in silence for a few moments. Stenn still couldn’t look at Garamoush’s flesh without eventually starting to cringe. He wondered if Anna was the same way. He wondered if she was just as revolted as he was. Or, maybe she was fascinated by it all, the way that young people are.

  Stenn swallowed and resolved to break the silence.

  “Though god He be

  Though god He stay

  Gods must rest

  In their own way

  Hours, days

  Bands, parades

  Pass in front Him

  Pass and fade away

  Yawn

  Stir

  Speak

  You see we men

  We women

  Are not so different

  From gods

  When we duel

  On even ground

  On the battlefield of

  Beds

  And dreams-“

  Anna groaned and made her footsteps louder, as if to drown out the noise.

  “Sorry,” Stenn said, cracking a small grin. “You were too slow. If you really hated my singing, you could have stopped me a while ago.”

  Anna turned to him as she walked. “I didn’t stop you because I thought you got hit in the head harder than I thought.” Stenn pointed and Anna barely avoided knocking her own head on an outcropping of bone. She tried to walk it off, holding her head up higher. Stenn’s smirk grew wider. “I thought maybe you were going mad and you’d just drop dead eventually.”

  Please, Stenn thought, I’ve been through worse.

  “Do you know of Lord Samuel Ennet?” Stenn asked.

  “Is this another one of those bloody fables?”

  “No, actually. In fact, he’s one of the writers of fables.”

  “How can he write about things like that if he’s not there to see them happen? Hell, I’ve heard some stories that are about people who haven’t lived for hundreds of years.”

  “He just does. He was a Declarer too, which probably helped. And he writes other things. Theses and dissertations and… those words don’t mean anything to you, do they?”

  “I’m just waiting for you to make your point already.”

  “He came to Garamoush as well. Well, he was last seen with Him. He always had this particularly strong obsession with Garamoush, even going so far as to take up painting and etching just to draw Him…”

  “Point,” Anna said.

  “Alright, alright. He went into Garamoush’s shell and hasn’t been seen since. At least, that’s what everybody’s been saying for the last five years.”

  “Five years is a long time for somebody to live in here,” Anna said, at least sounding a little bit interested. “Interesting story, but how is it-“

  “People with more experience and who have been better prepared have ventured into Garamoush’s shell. None have come out in one piece. None outside of the old legends, of course.”

  “Are you still on about that? I’m not giving up.”

  Stenn sighed and rolled his shoulders. Everything felt… heavy. “I suppose I knew that already. I realize that ship has sailed and is halfway around the world by now. I only mean to offer it as a warning. If this place took apart such a noble, brilliant lord with an equally noble and brilliant mind, we need to be extra careful.”

  “Did you think I came all the way here and wasn?
??t planning on being careful?”

  “I’m just saying,” Stenn said. “It’s just that… well, conventional wisdom seems to not be very valuable here.”

  Stenn’s boot hit the ground hard, no harder than usual, but hard enough to punch right through Garamoush’s flesh. He turned around with wide eyes and saw Anna in the same state. The ground, now that Stenn was closer to it than he would have liked, was speckled with black spots that smelled like death. The flesh of the ground peeled away more as Stenn and Anna struggled.

  They gave each other one more look before the ground broke completely and gave way to open air.

  For a moment, the world was nothing but a strange blur of foreign sights and smells. Stenn didn’t fall for very long, but before he made impact with the ground below, he saw that it was glistening as if it was sweating gold.

  It was a hell of a sight to see right before a man died, but his mind was ranging to far brighter, cleaner places in his memories. He saw Eym’s blonde curls and the way she curled up like a cat when she fell asleep in front of the fireplace. And he heard Tania. He heard what she had always told him whenever he had left the house.

  “Be safe,” she had told him.

  “Always,” he would say. He never really realized that eventually, what he said would turn out to be a lie. Be safe. The least safe place in the entire world was quickly rushing up to meet him, its glistening surface ready to embrace him with flat, bone-crushing arms.

  Stenn met the ground with a splash.

  Wait, his thoughts came, still surprisingly clear and coherent. A splash?

  It felt like his body was still plummeting downwards and everything blurred as a false sense of gravity pushed him down. A sudden and much more real weight from above made him cry out, but he found he was braced on hands and knees and his stubborn old bones refused to buckle. Another heavy-sounding splash came afterwards and Anna’s high brown boots fell into Stenn’s view. His shoulders ached and burned and his head swam in a curtain of confusion.

  His still-racing mind didn’t see a deeper part of Garamoush’s mysterious shell, but instead one of the many halls of the Ministry of Fate. The white pillars of a distorted shape became the towering marble columns that had been erected about two centuries ago. The wide and flat boney slab some dozens of yards ahead was the central podium where the Declarers would give their addresses and impart the wisdom of Garamoush. And the floor… the… deep, mucky, thick floor…

  Every last inch of Stenn’s body retched in revulsion. The amber-colored fluid he was braced in slopped and crawled like lantern oil. The stifling stench was a clear enough indication that Stenn’s body was practically swimming in some kind of bodily fluid. Its purpose, or origin, however, Stenn did not allow his mind to consider. He merely kept it as far away from his mouth as possible and tried to shake off as much of it as he could.

  Stenn counted every lucky star that he had ever known that he was able to catch himself on his hands and knees. Even when he fully stood up again, the liquid was still high enough to swallow his feet completely and even work its way up the lower part of his legs.

  The greater pool of the liquid practically vibrated with joy as the stray droplets of the viscous… stuff returned to its larger form. Anna, who unapologetically wandered about the pool’s odd white towering outcroppings, didn’t even seem to notice as Stenn shook himself like a dog who wandered inside after a rainstorm.

  Now that Stenn could get a good look at the outcroppings he began to understand their unearthly appeal. They all shot upwards, to the ceiling, which again glowed with the blue-green patches of the tunnels and caves. The shape and texture of the outcroppings looked closest to bones in Stenn’s mind- he had certainly seen many of them broken or jutting out of tender red flesh in his time- but they grew and twisted like trees, as if they grew straight up from the ground.

  “Stone, no, that’s not right,” Anna thought for a moment. “Stenn. Yeah. Stenn. Come here and look at this.”

  The horrific orange liquid bubbled and squished as Stenn forced his legs through it. Stenn followed Anna’s finger as it traced what looked like a carving on the bone outcropping.

  “You wanted me just to look at some chicken-scratching?”

  “Look harder, old man.”

  The dim lighting made it hard to examine exact shapes, but the cuts into the bone were too methodical to have been purely accidental. Forms twisted and bent through shallow cuts made by a hand with good intentions but very little skill. At the very least, the four-armed tortoise-like shape of Garamoush was legibly carved into the pillar, but around him wound a long coil that Stenn couldn’t quite place.

  “It’s a… vine?” Stenn guessed. “Thick ivy? A really thin river, maybe?”

  Evidently more interested in the mysterious carvings than he was, Anna brought her face close enough to the pillar so that her nose touched it. “It looks more like a snake to me. See, it’s got a head right there?”

  “It’s too head-shaped to be a snake head.”

  “That’s because it’s not a snake head. It’s the head of a man.”

  Stenn studied the carving as best as he could. From what he could see, it ran the length of the outcropping with the strange thick, winding creature being copied throughout. The further the worm ran on the carving, the thicker it became and the more haphazard the etchings became.

  “Or maybe,” Stenn said, “it’s just a bunch of random scribbling made by who-knows-what. But it’s probably not something pleasant if it felt the need to carve while it was still almost knee-deep in all of… this.” He motioned to the mire of orange liquid that still swallowing part of his legs.

  Anna was seemingly lost in thought, her hand running along the carved lines. Stenn thought he was going to have to nudge her onward, but she broke from her spell of concentration. Once free of the unmentionable orange-ish muck, Stenn left his heavy and soaked boots on the flat boney slab, which served as a shoreline of sorts. By the light of the patches on the ceiling and walls, Stenn could see other holes in the floor similar to the ones that Anna and he had fallen through dotted the room and the pool of liquid extended so far that the dots of light on the distant walls seemed like stars all over again.

  “I have to ask,” Stenn said, still trying to comb the rest of the sludge off of his person, “when you decided to risk your life by crawling into Garamoush’s shell, did you expect it to be anything like this?”

  Anna seemed perfectly content to let her pant-legs and boots stay drenched. All she did was kick some of the free-hanging slop off, but otherwise remained firm. “I didn’t come down here with any expectations at all. It’s probably why I’m handling this all a lot better than you.”

  “You had to expect something if you did the research to know how to get into the shell in the first place, right?” A new cave mouth presented itself; the blue-green lights were actually starting to grow on Stenn. He did realize, however, that his affection might have been because he somewhat forgotten exactly what the sun looked and felt like. In fact, even normal reality seemed to be slipping away from Stenn’s memory at that point.

  “Research?” Anna asked. Stenn hadn’t ever considered how some of his words might have been flying right over the youth’s head for some time. However, she continued to say, “I don’t know if I’d call listening to or reading fairy tales and legends counts.”

  “You’re saying that you used something that was told to you as a bedtime story as your guide to sneak into the shell of a living god?”

  Anna shrugged, and walked with head held high into the new cavern, enjoying her own audacity. “It was all I had. Besides, you managed to get in alright, didn’t you? I’ll bet you heard the same stories as a boy.”

  “I did,” Stenn admitted. But I also worked with the Ministry of Fate for decades. That helped a bit. “I do remember one old legend, about Cross-Eyed William. Actually, that story’s one of my favourites.”

  “He sounds like a real hero of legend with a name li
ke that.” The new cavern was considerably more spacious than the last ones Stenn had traversed. The bone was growing thicker and, to Stenn’s disgust, not only was the horrible orange liquid pooling in some dark parts of the walls, but something new clung to the walls. It was somehow even more revolting. It was black as bile, hung like tar, and splatted onto the ground like a waterlogged body hitting earth. Luckily, it only appeared in spots and was relatively easy to ignore.

  “You’ve never heard of Cross-eyed William?” Stenn asked, “Good Garamoush, I thought you children were all told that one. We told it like it was breathing in my house.”

  “I’m not a child,” her voice had that familiar, abrasive edge to it.

  “Alright, alright,” Stenn said. His big, clumsy feet weren’t accustomed to walking on eggshells like this. “Young women are also usually told that story. At least twenty times. It’s only proper.” Stenn had to scoff. When inside the shell of a living god and when almost entirely covered in mysterious bodily fluids, there was probably not a less-fitting time to use the word “proper.”

  “I’ve heard it before. Maybe not twenty times, but I know it. A man is crushed by Garamoush’s shell but he comes out of His shell alive two years later and he could speak to the god. And then he became the first Declarer or something. Bullshit, I say.”

  “Bullshit indeed,” Stenn agreed. He had read the histories; it was part of being a Knight, after all. When the Granite Citadel was being constructed before Garamoush went to sleep, there was a mention of an architect named William, but nothing beyond that. The first Declarers were just able to hear Garamoush. There was never really any reason given, though they were able to pass down their knowledge to new generations all the same.

  Stenn had to smile as he recounted. Before he was thrown into the hell of being a Knight, there was hope for Stenn’s life. He had learned to read at eighteen, just one year after he joined the Knights, not bad all things considered. Floor after floor of the Ministry libraries filled his head like how water fills the ocean. Histories dating back to the first true Declarer might have been seen as dull and dry to most but to Stenn, there was no greater pleasure in moving into past, future, and myth without ever leaving a chair. From His Words, recording every Stirring and all of the words of Garamoush to Lord Ennet’s On Natural Forces, when he learned to read, he knew that his life became worth living. He was hardly even daunted when he saw the first Ministry book-burning. He never really asked which books they were burning or why. They weren’t burning the books he was reading, so he mostly ignored the burnings altogether.

  But now, he knew better. He had moved past looking into books for purpose and happiness. Now, Tania, Eym, and even Anna were making his life worth living.

  “But you’re not really wrong,” Anna said. “It was the stories I was told that at least gave me hope. Hope to try.”

  Sometimes that’s all it takes, Stenn thought. Leaving the Ministry might have been more complicated than just having hope, but it was certainly an important first step.

  “Does this cave rub you as being a little bit… strange?” Stenn waited for Anna to answer her own question. “Okay, stupid think to ask, I know, but really look.” She had stopped walking now and was running her hand along the boney protrusions that served as both pillars and vaulting. “These shouldn’t be this… big.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, look at it. The bone, that is. Look at how much it sticks out. It’s almost like the rest of the flesh… stuff… whatever you want to call it, has been carved away by something.”

  Anna had given words and life to a suspicion that Stenn had been carrying for some time now. The thick black tar he had seen before was even starting to become more and more common. At some points, it practically ran the length of the tunnel. He pushed the idea out of his mind that the tar and the caves were related. His clothes still hung heavy on his tired body and the smell of the mysterious amber liquid was getting forcefully wedged into Stenn’s nose and memory. If he could avoid thinking about sludge, oil, slime, bile or anything of the sort, he was going to avoid it with pleasure.

  “If it has been,” Stenn said, starting to walk again, more quickly now, “and I’m not saying you’re right, but if it has, we probably don’t want whatever made it to find us in here.”

  Anna’s light footsteps were quick to announce themselves behind Stenn. After a moment of anticipation, she squeezed past Stenn’s large frame and once again led boldly and aimlessly from the front.

  “You think it was something living?” The accentuation of that last word sounded like something between terror and amazement. Then again, that emotion was beginning to sound like the norm in Stenn’s ears at that point.

  Stenn couldn’t deny his own worries about if, in fact, the tunnel and its bizarre black slop had been created by something that lived and breathed. It was bad enough being in an entirely new world with new laws of nature that seemed inclined to destroy intruders. He didn’t want to think about what it’d be like to have to contend with something living, living and malicious, as well.

  “I doubt it,” Stenn said for his and for Anna’s sake, “I haven’t seen anything living in here yet, aside from you of course. Besides, if there is anything down here, I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it.”

  Stenn smiled as he practically heard Anna’s mouth twisting in disapproval. “I already apologized for doing that to you, you know.”

  “Oh, you apologized, that makes it alright then.”

  “It’s better than not saying it.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. When you apologize, you’re admitting that you were wrong. If you didn’t think you were in the wrong, you have nothing to apologize for.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So, was that a real apology?”

  Anna just shook her head in her usual insolent way.

  “I don’t suppose you thought ahead enough to bring any kind of food or water down here, hmm?” Stenn’s stomach was grumbling and his throat was parched, but he knew that Anna must have been worse off. He worried that she could collapse at any given moment. She didn’t deserve to pass out from hunger in such a place as this. And she’ll be a pain in my back to carry, Stenn thought with a sarcastic smirk.

  “I did,” Anna said. She pointed at her satchel. The bottom of it was splashed with thick, amber-colored liquid from the other chamber. “I don’t think I’ll be eating of it now.”

  For some reason, Stenn felt a little offended to hear Anna talk only of an “I.” He knew she needed any food more than he did, but it irked him nonetheless.

  “Then we’ll have to find the Wellspring quickly,” Stenn said. “As if it wasn’t already obvious. We should take things easy in the meantime. We don’t want to use more energy than we-“

  “What is that?” Anna shouted, cutting him off. She broke into a run and rounded the nearby corner.

  “Goodness, how many times can a person say that in one day?” Stenn mumbled as he followed after Anna. Before he could round the corner, she returned, looking… different.

  She must have seen the confusion on her face because she said, “What, you mean you don’t see it? I’m standing right in the middle of it.”

  Stenn rubbed his old eyes and looked harder. Now that he got the chance to look hard and look, Anna appeared to be… glowing. Like there was a kind of halo around her entire body. The kind of halo a person gets when they have their back to the sun and the daylight seems to surround them.

  Sun, the word rang in Stenn’s head. Daylight.

  Anna’s impatient sigh snapped Stenn back into the present. She left as quickly as she had before. This time, though, Stenn was much quicker in following her. A way out! Stenn’s thoughts chanted. Sunlight and wind on his face, his daughter caught up in his arms and his wife’s hands in his. Maybe then all of them together could talk this brave, foolish girl out of her quest, no matter how noble it was. It wasn’t worth waking a god and overturning a civilization for.


  In fact, the prospect of it all seemed almost too good to be true. And, indeed, it was.

  Stenn found himself in another hollow- one larger than any he had seen before. Even the star room paled in comparison. Grass covered all of the walls and ceiling, as if a plain had been rolled up into a sphere. Small rocks and patches of dirt even showed through the sea of gold and green. It was beautiful, no doubt, but it was ugly as sin compared to the outside world Stenn was hoping to find.

  Stenn ground his heels to a halt atop a little hill. Anna was a lanky, long-haired shadow just beside him. She looked much more pleased than Stenn was. Dirt and grass were just more parts of the real world outside of His shell that Stenn had never really thought about ever missing. He had never thought about it until it was gone, of course. Now, however, he wasn’t sure he wanted them back- the grass underneath his feet felt different. Like an imitation of what Stenn actually wanted to see. It made him pine for a return to the real world even more.

  There was no real sun above Stenn and Anna’s head, but it certainly was a different caliber altogether from the patches of mysteriously glowing patches on the walls that they both had become uncomfortably well-acquainted with. Instead, the light almost literally poured out of a sphere that hovered about midway in the air of the enormous chamber.

  “How do you suppose He’s doing that?” Anna asked, finally sounding like the wide-eyed and curious youth Stenn was expecting her to be.

  Stenn shook his head at the question, still a little downtrodden about his dashed hopes. The sphere looked as though it were made of the last rays of sunlight at dusk and the first at dawn- melding them all into one ball. “To be honest,” he said, “I have no idea. At least up until now I’ve been able to at least somehow reason that things in here have existed as they are because they’re a part of Garamoush’s body, but… this?” Stenn shook his head again. “Magic. That’s what I’ll say. It’s magic.”

  “Magic doesn’t exist,” Anna said.

  “We’re in the shell of a giant sleeping tortoise god.”

  “And? That’s just what He does. It’s not magic.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Anna said, crossing her arms. “We’re just little specks compared to Garamoush. Gods work how they want to work.”

  “Perhaps,” Stenn said, laying his hand on the strange soil and grasses. “Perhaps.”

  Obviously taken by the odd sphere, Anna began to proceed forward, relatively speaking. Like most of the larger “rooms” in Garamoush’s shell, as Stenn was finding out, cavern entrances and exits dotted the whole length of the room. But they were on the ground as they knew it, so that was good enough for now.

  Stenn wanted to cry out, but he was too late. The rock had already left Anna’s hand before it could say anything. He started to count the seconds before the apocalyptic explosion that he was sure waited in the very near future. But, instead, the hurled stone only sailed upward, into the sphere, and came plummeting down with no horrific repercussions… none that Stenn noticed, at least. There had been no legends about a second sun (or a vast open plain for that matter) inside of Garamoush’ shell, so, despite the light in the room, Stenn was in the dark.

  Anna quickly scooped up the stone and called out to Stenn, “It’s not fire, whatever it is.”

  “How do you figure?” Stenn said, quickly catching up to Anna, but keeping an eye on the sphere above him.

  “The rock’s not warm,” she said. “If it was regular fire like a candle or a hearth, it would have gotten warm. I heard that’s what rich people do when their beds are cold. Hot rocks, I think they’re called.”

  Stenn took the rock and tossed it between his hands. It was indeed only as warm as any stone that had come before it. “That’s right,” he said. “As a child I actually had to do the heating and changing of the hot rocks more than a few times for Lord Ennet, particularly in the winter. One stray snowflake or shiver could have probably broken that man into little pieces. How in the hell did he think he was going to make it in here?”

  When next Stenn looked to Anna, he saw that she had taken up residence on a sizable rock atop a gentle hill in the same part of the field. Stenn sat on grass (at least, his mind was telling itself that it was grass) away from her- he was still slightly sopping from the horrible amber bile, but the non-sun’s warmth was already making him feel a bit less disgusting. Still, Stenn felt a pang of uneasiness just looking at the uncanny vastness of this plain that felt so real but he knew was still many different kinds of wrong. It was different than the glowing and swaying fields and plains leading up to His Shore. This land still had outcroppings of bone to remind Stenn he was still trapped. In essence, it was a cage. A stunning cage, but a cage nonetheless.

  “That’s… an interesting thing to remember from your childhood,” Anna finally said. Again, the ethereal quiet of Garamoush made itself known in the empty space between words. No wind, no birds, no sea waves. Only quiet breathing and quieter thoughts made any real noise at all.

  “Believe me, it was one of the most exciting things to happen to me until I learned how to read. Oh, and I suppose until I became a Ministry Knight. That was fairly exciting too.”

  “Then you made a career out of protecting important people,” Anna concluded. “But the first time doing something new is always… special. Were you really a Knight?”

  Amongst many other questions, Stenn had gotten so used to hearing that one asked about his job that he had an entire answer etched into his mind he could spout out whenever the situation demanded it. But this situation was different. He went off the books for it. “No,” he said, chuckling, “the old knights in the stories, you know, the men with lots of land in shining armour on horses who saved the peasants and the fair maidens from invading hordes-“ Stenn was cut off by Anna’s sarcastic snort of laughter. “Exactly,” Stenn said. “Bullshit aside, Ministry Knights are nothing like them. They didn’t like us enough to give us horses or land.” He laughed again. Anna joined in that time. “I suppose the Ministry just thought they were being clever, calling us knights.” But we were just their thugs. “We weren’t very ‘knightly’ at all.”

  “No,” Anna said, “I don’t really know why I expected them to be very ‘knightly’ in the first place.”

  “Because chivalry is a load of overblown horseshit?”

  “Because they’re part of the Ministry.”

  Stenn had to concede that one with a nod. Those scarred and worn hands of his found comfort for the first time in what felt like an eternity in the field’s peculiar grass. Stenn might have simply forgotten what real grass felt like, but it would suffice for now. All of his limbs were thanking Anna for the chance to stop and rest. As Stenn stretched out, he also yawned. If I’m not careful, I might not want to get up again, Stenn thought as he fought back another yawn. The feeling of utter exhaustion wasn’t exactly foreign to Stenn, his years as a Knight had taught him to live with the feeling like it was supposed to be his default state of being. But that was a different Stenn, a younger one.

  Anna, however, was thanklessly free of the curse of an old body. She stretched and bounced on her heels, perplexed in that youthful way at everything around her. “I’m honestly a little bit surprised that we made it this far,” she said with her eyes still skyward but her grimy boots digging, in a vain attempt to get clean, into the grass.

  “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  “I said before that I had the hope to try, didn’t I? Well, I never really tried hoping that I’d actually succeed. Maybe I thought I’d die trying and this would all be a big, noble sacrifice. That seems the most likely thing to happen anyway.”

  Stenn frowned. He had, perhaps against reason, been thinking that the fire inside of that young woman didn’t need to be stoked. But, she was like everybody else and Stenn wasn’t entirely sure why this bothered him so. Maybe it was the fact that the words of a cynical fatalist were coming out of a young woman’s mouth. Mayb
e he thought that there were people in the world who weren’t like him, people who one day would give up their fiery love for life for an existence of pure jaded stubbornness. Maybe…

  “I thought you didn’t like chivalry and heroics,” Stenn finally said. It was a pitiful attempt to diffuse the tension in his head, but pleasant conversation was still a skill he was blowing the dust off of. It had been shelved the day he donned the Knight’s gauntlets and armour.

  “You don’t.” Anna roamed at a leisurely pace around the hill, occasionally picking at the alien grass. She scoffed after a bit. “You’re lucky you know how to read,” she said. “Not just, you know, in general, but because then you could actually read how full of shit the old legends were. Me, though, I was just told them and accepted them as they were.”

  “It’s not as great as you make it sound,” Stenn said. “The world’s a lot less interesting once you realize that all of the great heroes and kings either just got lucky or were enormous pricks in the end.”

  “Or when you finally realize just how long death is,” Anna said, a clump of roughly-picked grass frittering away and blowing gently away, “You never figure out how long forever is until you have to live every day knowing that you’ll never see somebody’s face again for all that time.”

  Stenn wanted to stand up then. He wanted to stand up and place his hand on young Anna’s shoulder and tell her that, as a man who knows a thing or two about pain and death, that anybody can make it through anything fate or nature or, worst of all, other humans could send their way. But something stayed his hands and legs.

  What, Stenn asked himself, am I expecting she’ll snap like a cornered wolf if I touch her? Now that Stenn heard it said aloud in his head… it sounded even more probable. Stenn sighed. I’m going to make a shit father at this rate.

  “Wait,” Stenn said, a spark in his mind finally catching. He sat up to the tune of popping and cracking in his back, “is that… wind?”

  For a moment, Anna didn’t react. She was probably still in her own world and sorrows, but when she saw the aged Stenn moving with speed that would outpace even her, she was quickly back in reality.

  Anna’s smile looked a bit forced, but it was a grin nonetheless. She picked up another handful of grass and let it free. The blades were cradled by an invisible breeze and take just a few paces before falling to the ground again.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Stenn said. He tightened the belt around his tunic, slime-encrusted as they both were, in anticipation of Anna’s next move.

  Instead, the young woman only said, “We’re not damned just yet.” Then a truly genuine smile flashed across her face before it was replaced with a familiar determination of pure iron. Stenn smiled too, as a result.

  No, he thought, we’ve still got some life in us yet.

  “Look,” Anna shouted, her finger pointing with the authority of a compass’ needle. Stenn hurried up the hill as quickly as his legs could carry him. Wind meant a connection with the outside world. It meant that somewhere nearby there was finally a way out of His shell. Stenn vowed to himself that he would make this all up to Anna somehow. He might still have access to some Ministry records on the grounds of seniority, come to think of it. If he could avoid getting killed by the Ministry Justices, he might be able to track down her brother. With an escape route so close, there was no way in hell he was going to let her just continue on with her little quest. He wasn’t going to let her die all alone, even for noble intentions.

  Stenn followed her finger and Anna was indeed pointing at yet another hallway of Garamoush’s shell. The mouth of the new cave was enormous in comparison to the cramped quarters of nearly all the others. Two fully-laden carriages could have rolled through side-by-side with still room to spare. Or, at least they could have rolled through if not for the barricade that had been erected to close most of the mouth off. Confusion was mixing with excitement on Anna’s young face. When she looked up at Stenn, he could feel his own expression changing into something very similar to hers. She idly wiped away a bead of sweat that had been forming on her forehead. “What do you suppose that is?” she asked.

  “For once,” Stenn responded, “I can answer that.” He continued to speak as he walked, straining his eyes to get a better look. “Well,” he said, “those sharpened wooden stakes are part of a palisade. They’re a kind of wall used to protect camps and villages. It’s a bit old hat, but it keeps wild animals… or wild people away pretty well.” He strained his eyes again to make out the rest of the wooden shapes. “The rest just looks like logs and planks roped or nailed together. Overall, it’s a half-decent barricade.”

  Stenn rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t until then that he had ever taken the time to realize just how exhausted he was. His eyes were starting to sting and burn as he stressed them further. He was about to repress a yawn when Anna let one loose first.

  “You think somebody built it?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t see what else could have,” Stenn said. Now that they were a bit closer, Stenn could see the woodwork a bit more clearly. The barricade probably hadn’t been tended to in a few years. The ropes holding the boards together were slackening and the crude iron nails were starting to turn brown from rust. Also, shattered bits of timber and board seemed to be littering the area. Stenn reasoned it to simply be the remnants of the barricade’s clumsy construction.

  “I wonder if they made that to keep things out like you said.”

  “What else would it be for? When I was a Knight, we used to use palisades, or ‘stake-walls’ like that to keep camps safe. Never really did anything else but keep things out.”

  “Have you seen anything in here that needs keeping out?”

  Stenn shrugged, starting to scrutinize the obstruction with renewed attention. Whoever made the cumbersome thing must not have had the best of tools, or materials for that matter. The ropes were frayed; the iron of the nails lumpy, and the wood itself was thin and at places nailed to other pieces in an attempt to create one flush board. Still, at least the builders seemed to have remembered His potential for Stirring and the builders had driven long, thick posts into the ground to steady the whole structure.

  “Maybe we’ve just been lucky.”

  Anna snorted. At least she was still keeping her sense of humour. “Maybe rather than keeping something out, whoever built this was trying to keep something else in. I’m just thinking out loud, I suppose.”

  “Don’t suppose you could think a bit more quietly? I’d rather not worry about thinking that something could be lurking in there.” Especially when the only way out might be this way, Stenn thought.

  Anna rolled her eyes and started to meander around the structure. Stenn’s disapproval at the builder’s choice of materials did nothing for the fact that the barricade was still almost certainly strong enough to resist pulling, pushing, or bashing by hand. Climbing over wasn’t an option either, twisted iron barbs had been affixed to the top of the highest boards. At that point, though, he was starting to think that maybe just bashing his head against the damn thing would be the best course of action. Either the wall would break or he would.

  Stenn, by instinct, almost struck out with his arm when an unfamiliar hand touched his back. He stopped himself, though, when he saw Anna clutching a pair of metal objects in her arms. The spark of surprise slowly died in her eyes like a candle flame against a winter breeze. She unceremoniously presented the metal items to Stenn. “These look useful,” she said. “Just found them all tangled up in the grass and dirt over there. They might be kind of small, though. You have monster hands.”

  “They’re not monster hands,” Stenn said, defensively. “They’re proportionate to the rest of my body.”

  “Then you have a monster body,” Anna said. Then she busied herself amongst the sights of the peculiar grassy sphere.

  Stenn turned over the objects in his hand, clearing away the dirt and tangled grass. Some of the grass looked brown and dead, like it had been sitting in
the item for some time. But before long a very familiar shape began to form. The objects were gauntlets, hands wrought of steel and old companions to a Knight such as Stenn. A punch that could stun a man could suddenly cave in his head like a ripe melon when fists of flesh were replaced with fists of metal. It was with some hesitation that Stenn pulled the gauntlets on. Hesitation at the fear of him becoming something else entirely once his hands started to feel the power and protection of a metal shell that had so long defined them. He feared the Knight that lurked within him. Curiosity or desperation, or a combination of both, pushed him onward.

  The metal had a good amount of denting and rust, but Stenn knew high quality steel when he saw it. Anything less than the best would have probably would have broken under all of the abuse that the gauntlets had apparently endured. Even so, the metal was in a much better state than that which was found in the barricade. Stenn found that the gauntlet had three or four more straps than usual; his forearm alone was wrapped with four straps of strong leather. Stranger still was that the end of the metal fingers ended in hooks that were still caked with dirt. And yet, every time Stenn found himself looking over the new equipment, the only pieces of tangible good luck that had come to him and Anna thus far, he kept looking at the barricade.

  It wouldn’t be impossible to bash through the cracked wood now.

  “Stenn,” Anna said, her hand tapping impatiently on his back again, “look,”

  Stenn followed her finger upwards to the grass-covered ceiling of the room. His eyes trained the length of the dome, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, relatively speaking. The bizarre non-sun still hovered in the open air, obviously to its impossible nature. “What am I looking for?”

  “Not for,” she said, tilting Stenn’s head so that his eyes met perfectly with the thick black shadow being cast along the ceiling. “At.”

  “I still don’t-“ Stenn stopped, his eyes began to move on their own as they traced a speck of black that fell from the “shadow” down to the ground. The “shadow” was dripping. It dripped and ate light in the same way as the black filth in the cave. Stenn’s eyes followed the dark trail across the grassy ceiling until it was nearly directly above where he and Anna stood. The trail remained highest on the ceiling, but snaked all the way down to the barricade. Whatever made the trail must have traveled on the ceiling and went right over the barricade. Dark drops were still leaking down onto some of the wood, turning it a sick black color.

  “Are we sure we want to be breaking this down?” Stenn asked. “Maybe you were on to something about this keeping something locked in rather than us locked out.”

  “Maybe…” Anna said, her voice heavy with doubt. Then her whole body snapped up, like she had just been awoken from a nap. She started looking around like a startled bird, her eyes going between the black sludge and the barricades. “But as you said, we’ve really only got one option now.” She added, “Unless we want to wait for Him to Stir again… or wait for whatever made all of that sludge to come back. Then we’ll know for sure what we’re dealing with.”

  “I do hope you’re being sarcastic. Besides, who knows when He’ll Stir again. I’m secretly hoping that He doesn’t anytime soon. I’m still feeling the effects of the first time He did it when I was in His shell.” The pain in Stenn’s head had mostly gone away, but he could almost feel the lump beginning to form where his head hit the bone. Besides, now his head was aching for a different reason. It had probably been hours since he had last had anything to drink. “I suppose we’ll find out what’s behind this soon enough.” Stenn said, refitting the gauntlet to his hand and landing more heavy blows to the boards. The wood cried out in pain as each blow landed and the closest thing to music that Stenn had heard in some time came from the choir of metal striking timber.

  The wood started to come away in clouds of aged splinters, the wood beneath the top layers more laden with rot that Stenn first would have thought. Out of the corner of his eye, Stenn could see Anna busy herself with digging through the wooden wreckage. He couldn’t help but think that as a poor orphan, Anna already had some experience with foraging and looting. Maybe she can put those skills to good use now, Stenn thought. He delivered another shattering punch to the crumbling wall with the newfound metal gauntlets.

  The feeling of crushing and destroying with his own two hands was one like a gnawing hunger growing inside of him, one quite unlike the feelings of real hunger that he had been ignoring for some time now. He couldn’t ignore this craving. Every hit he landed was a flash of lightning in his head, the silhouette and crumpled features of some nameless man or some defenseless woman burning an imprint every time. Stenn clenched his teeth, his mouth shaking in pain when he landed a new punch. He was almost on the verge of screaming to shutting up the invasive thoughts of a Knight.

  Instead, he decided to fall back into the past.

  The blows started to all meld together until Stenn was no longer aware of them.

  His mind took him into the past, to the study of Lord Samuel Ennet.

  “Are you getting enough rest?” Lord Ennet once asked Stenn. About seven years ago, Stenn found the time to return home and away from his life as a Knight. It was the last year he would be a Knight in the Ministry. Tania was already very much on his mind then and Stenn was prepared to shed his old life for a new one with her.

  “I think I forgot what that word meant,” Stenn had said. He was invited into Ennet’s own library then. A respected member of the Ministry’s sanctioned thugs needed to be treated with proper decorum, after all. The room was usually well-kept, conservative in decoration, and open to plenty of light, much like the man who owned it, in fact. But on that day, a tornado would have done less damage to it than Samuel Ennet did.

  “Now Stenn,” he said in his friendly, gentle tone, “getting plenty of sleep is important. Not just to a Knight.” Ennet himself looked like he needed some rest though as he pulled book after book off of the shelves and separated them into piles, acknowledging Stenn with only sideways glances.

  “I get plenty of sleep,” Stenn said, trying to make sense of the piles of books. His memory was fuzzy in that regard, though. “But I get no rest.”

  “The life you chose was a hard one. When the recruiter came to Staringsun, nobody forced you to leave. You knew that when you left my manor’s service.” Stenn remembered Ennet’s voice there. It sounded almost accusatory. Stenn was only a servant in Ennet’s huge manor. He never quite figured out why Ennet seemed to care so much, let alone why he cared so much when Ennet himself was a man of the Ministry. True, even back then Ennet’s days of being a Declarer, at least in its strictest sense, were over, but he never stopped busying himself with research.

  “The life of a blacksmith or a mason is hard as well,” Stenn remembered saying. He also remembered just how pathetic it sounded, even back then. “But this is different.” Stenn’s spell of illusion broke as a board did under his metal-fisted assault.

  He tried again to lose himself in his thoughts, but this time, only the voices remained.

  “Have you ever considered retiring?” Ennet asked.

  “That and more,” Stenn responded. He remembered clearly then and still now that he was once told that it was remarkable that Stenn had been a Knight for so many years and was still alive. But it wasn’t because Knights were killed during their time on the job. It was because most Knights had killed themselves by then. Apparently the ghosts that haunted Stenn’s mind and nightmares had no particular grudge against him. Instead, they seemed to haunt all the Knights equally. How considerate of them, he remembered thinking.

  “It might behoove you to do more than just consider it.”

  “What would I do if I did? What life do I have to live? I’m one of the best Knights the Ministry’s got. Other than that, I’m not much else.”

  “That’s up for you to find.”

  “Not a very convincing argument.”

  “It’s the only one I need to make. And the only o
ne you need to think about. If you could truly be anywhere else in the world but with the Ministry, than you’ll find that life eventually.”

  So Stenn, in all his confusion and rage and doubt brought a new kind of zeal to his job as a Knight after that. A kind of zeal like that comes only when somebody is running from something, and running quickly. It’s not like it mattered anyway, Stenn bitterly recalled, there’s no retirement from the Knights. You join and then you die. Stenn struck the boards one final time. At least not all of me died. I guess that makes me lucky.

  The wind came to greet Stenn and congratulate him for his efforts. The wood was peeled away enough to see the deeper parts of the tunnel. The light that came from it was bright blue and seemed to be almost leaking out of the far wall, which itself was mostly still covered in darkness.

  A deep rumbling ran underneath Stenn’s feet.

  “Bloody hell, Stenn,” Anna said. “You didn’t have to overdo it so much. You made the whole ground shake.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Anna was about to respond when the rumbling came again. It was louder this time. Pieces of broken wood bounced about like ants thrown about by a passing stampede.

  The two of them looked at each other.

  “He’s Stirring,” Anna breathed.

  Stenn grabbed Anna by the wrist without even looking at her and he started running, his legs throwing him forward as quickly as they possibly could. The hole he made in the barricade was more than large enough for them to both fit. It was hardly a step away. Then it was two steps away. Then three. Then five. As if fate was laughing at them both, the barricade only moved further and further as Garamoush continued to roll. To Stenn’s growing horror, He didn’t seem to be stopping any time soon and even appeared to be picking up speed.

  Anna cursed in frustration, loud enough to be heard over the rumbling that seemingly smothered everything else. Stenn wanted to rip the gauntlet off of his hand. He knew that getting rid of such a small amount of weight wouldn’t have helped him move any quicker- maybe it was some kind of evil totem or it had a curse on it. But then, the dirt on the gauntlet’s claws made sense. What was once the floor was now quickly becoming the wall, so Stenn threw himself against it chest-first and dug the metal claws into the floor-turning-wall’s soil. The steel hooks latched in deeply to the soil, which was harder and tougher underneath than Stenn had expected. Secure now, the barricade stopped moving further away. Instead, it was Anna who was moving further away.

  Stenn’s efforts kept his head in place, so while he couldn’t see Anna, he could feel her tugging against his arm as the room continued to rotate. He could feel and hear her running, trying to keep up with the rotating room. Stenn knew he was her anchor, so he only dug himself in deeper and clung on harder.

  A pain like hot coals festered and grew in his shoulder. Anna was growing heavier and heavier the more she drifted away from him. The wall, which was once the floor, was now becoming the ceiling. Garamoush was rolling completely over and was probably completely ignorant to the little human insects that were inside of Him.

  If this keeps up, Stenn thought, I’ll be lucky if I can keep just myself from falling. The strain on Stenn’s arm only continued to get worse. Adding Anna’s weight will be a different matter entirely.

  Another curse shot out of Anna’s mouth, but it was cut off half-formed and replaced with a shriek. Stenn forced himself to look down. He promptly wished he hadn’t. The more Garamoush rolled, the more Anna hung in open air. The two of them were steadily losing any kind of ground that they could cling to and now, where Stenn was clinging was almost the ceiling of the entire chamber. As he neared the top of the sphere, he soberly realized just how enormous the whole chamber was and how far a fall it would be down to the bottom. And yet, non-sun floated as it always did, in the middle of empty air, ignorant to the tiny specks of flesh and blood that dangled above it. Stenn could feel Anna’s legs start to kick and she struggled for any kind of solid ground to latch on to, but despite her efforts, the ground only moved further away.

  There was a shaking, one with such force that it ran through Stenn’s gauntlet and into his body, making him tremble like the leaf at the mercy of a hurricane that he knew he was. His breath caught in his throat when a loose piece of the barricade came free and tumbled down towards him. The remnant passed so close to his face that he could smell the dry scent of timber.

  Anna, however, wasn’t as lucky. Stenn caught sight of one of her thin arms as it came up to defend her from the shrapnel, but the force of the blow only served to knock her free of Stenn’s grasp and she fell away with a grunt. Stenn slammed his eyes shut, trying to shut out the grim reality of what it meant to truly be small; to be a mere human compared a god, a creature that could kill lesser beings simply be existing.

  He felt Anna’s arms grasp around his leg and the weight sent him swinging towards the wall to which he clung as if Anna was the weight to the bottom of a pendulum. For a moment, he thought that the queer feeling of weightlessness mixed with a burning pain would be one of the last things he felt in the world.

  He expected his leg to fly right out of its socket when he felt Anna latch on in one final, desperate attempt at survival. But there was nothing, only the feeling of clutching arms. The rumbling and rushing of air still shoved against him.

  Am I falling? Stenn asked himself. Am I falling and just haven’t noticed yet? Did I let this lonely orphan girl die? He braved another look down.

  This time, he regretted not doing so sooner.

  Anna’s feet were dug into the ground-turning-ceiling. Metal boots of the same workmanship and steel as the gauntlets on Stenn’s hands had their metal shovel-shaped extensions driven far into the dirt. Between them and Stenn’s gauntlets, they defied death and death itself let out a wailing, frustrated shout in the wind and shaking of the world. But Stenn jammed the hooks of his other hand into the wall as death continued to howl and rage in vain.

  Stenn and Anna wordlessly stubbornly clung on, desperate to spite the murderous intentions of fate. When the world fell quiet again, Anna was the one who started laughing first. Stenn soon followed. Nothing else seemed as fitting at that moment in time.

  With the world almost entirely upside down now, the metal claws and boots dug and pulled their way along with steely determination that was matched only by those wielding them. The hole that Stenn had made was still wide enough for him to climb up into. With Anna still clinging to him, Stenn reached into the breach he had made and gripped the floor of the interior of the cavern with his gauntlet and the remaining wood of the barricade with his free hand. He closed his eye from the effort as he strained to move his body awkwardly upwards.

  Then suddenly, he found himself on his chest with his face to the floor. He heard and felt Anna plop to the ground just as gracelessly. Stenn rolled and nearly swallowed his tongue at what he saw. Stenn was sitting, but by rights, he should have been falling. Looking out from the hole in the barricade, he saw that giant grassy sphere was still upside-down. He and Anna were sitting on what was technically the ceiling, though it was only recently the floor. Much like the mysterious non-sun, the two of them seemed to be defying gravity. Or maybe gravity is just ignoring us, Stenn thought. It made about as much sense as everything else he had seen recently.

  When Anna picked up her head, she looked just as panicked at the strange sight. But then, just as suddenly as she started, she stopped.

  “Are you okay?” Stenn asked, panting.

  “What kind of a question is that?” Anna asked. She rolled onto her back and started laughing again. She kicked her feet into the air. The metal boots were almost certainly of the same workings as the pair of gauntlets. Stenn had to admit that together, they made a clever defence against Garamoush’s dangerous Stirrings. It seemed that not only were there once people in Garamoush’s shell, and relatively recently by the look of it, but they were well-equipped and knew what they were doing. “Am I okay? I’m here aren’t I? I w
as just dangling for my life and now we’re in a cave that spits in the face of gravity, but here I am. Still alive. Does that answer your question?”

  “I know you’re here,” he said, an exhausted smile appearing on his face, “I’m more worried if you’re here.” Stenn pointed to his head.

  Anna was sprawled out on the tunnel ceiling-turned-floor. Dense, packed earth replaced the usual flesh and bone of the caves. The distant light was still bright enough to see the beads of sweat that sat on her forward. “I don’t know,” she said, “you seem to not think so.”

  Stenn smiled. “If you’re not, then I’m not either.” Before Anna could say anything, he added, “Which means you’re fine.”

  Stenn stood and helped Anna to her feet. They both just stood there for a moment, collecting their breaths. Now that he could see it more clearly, Stenn thought the cave was one of the most comforting things he had seen in His shell. A plant that looked almost like ivy lined the walls and, aside from the black sludge that stuck to the ceiling, it looked almost inviting now.

  “I never thought the phrase, ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ could be so literal,” Anna said. She had her hand on the rock wall and Stenn soon joined her. The blue light that streamed from small slits in the rock intensified and the pieces slid apart, seemingly by their own accord. Light and fresh air came out to meet them both and they sighed in relief.

  Part 3