Icarus's blog: "Augurs, Martyrs, and Agnostics"

He was only a man. Black hair greying, leather grip fraying.

Always unraveling. The second he released, it just spiraled out of control, often rewound, often ignored.

No manner of divinity or tyrannical mischief in his eyes.

Weariness was a word that rose to lips, though caution baited it back from utterance.

From the saw-toothed, battered edge of his blade, to the dry lips and knicked steel across his body.

The weariness of too many years.

Too many years of sleeping on knives, and driving through armor, muscle and bone for his wage.

He was only a man, he swore up and down.

But as the years drug harder against his bones, and the souls of defeated foes pawed from lonliness and hunger at his ankles, he often had to wonder.

He stopped for a spell against a gnarly elm, the leaves were thick and green as was the smell of summer. All around him were whispering leaves and gossiping birds, and snickering insects.

Hardly the time or place for a snack, but he had been walking all morning and hadn't stopped for lunch all week.

Not that there was much to look forward to as he produced a fist sized brick of old trailtack still floury from the baker one town back. Years of campaigning had trained his muscles to push, pull, tear, and gnaw... but trailtack could drive nails and fend off dragons when hurled from a thong.

This was no time for a bold maneuver endangering his teeth and jaws, so he set the cube into his field cup with a prodigious clunk and poured water over to help the vile, life-shortening mixture of barely milled flour and sawdust to soften.

Even in the most humid, battering summer sun, this process could take hours, so he tucked his sword into his fists, and his chin into his chest, and nodded off reciting the most monotonous free-verse he could recall, first flirting with sleep, then outright snogging it when he came to verse 30 of a particularly unimaginative epic he had the displeasure of memorizing and writing in three languages when he was a lad.

Sleep was invariably the only escape. He never got past verse 30. Then or now.

But academia isn't for everyone, especially middle-aged mercenaries dozing under elm trees, completely unaware of the minute mantis meddling in his beard. Perhaps fleeing the old ball and chain, or worse that battleaxe of a mother-in-law.

The new boarder was of no alarm or disturbance when he awoke. A mantis had eyes, could know you face to face, could follow and watch and wager a guess at knowing you.

It was the still, siteless gaze he feared. Not of the blind, or the slumbering, but the far away beauty of secrets. The penetrating mute song of the Mistress.

Something he had tread upon once, and prayed never again.

It was the memory of her stillness resting upon his naked soul that stirred him from slumber, and stirred him more upon waking.

She was near. The birds had hushed, the insects had fled, but the stillness continued to whisper.

The splintering chill up his spine and out into his fingertips was all the herald of her coming that he needed. With a flutter the mantis departed from his ponderous gaze upon the mercenary, the mantis never knowing just how badly the mercenary wanted to sprout wings of his own and follow.

She had taken a step closer. A murmor, a rumor, a spat hex more and he would stumble on her gown.

Fly.

Fly damn you!

He spurned his legs for being the sinewy fleet that carried him away from this place, and not wings of fire, or a swift swarm of mad darkness.

Light, green and shade slapped across his face as he plunged into the edge of the thicket. The trees met him like pikemen crossing spears and interlocking shields, their presence almost wilfully beguiled the fool mortal blundering through the low hanging obstacles. His aim was the east edge of the forest. The place where the Fell Tower was thought to be.

The one dark scabby ring of black where his Mistress could not reach, the one dark scabby ring of defilement within running distance at least.

Her misty allure only reached the ears of the paranoid and weary, it was always best to travel these lands in pairs or more. Her wickedness danced gently on the winds of lonliness like a sinister salt breeze, sparsely lit with emptiness and tingling with a desire unknown. He only knew it as a chill and bitter sorrow across bare skin, or the prickles of his neck and forearms, but to others it could be a solitary cloud moving the wrong way, or the name of their first son on the tip of their tongue. It was too late for hexes jinxes and wards, and there was no proof that they did in fact work.

The Lady took no lover, it was said, but those who would welcome her were lost and often forgotten. That quiet girl you never learned the name of, that hundredth sour face in the back of a tavern, a child playing by themself in a place of old lore...

He had no real options in this matter, he could plunge further into the thick veil of bramble, leaf, and limb and perhaps stumble upon the Fell Tower, or he could fling himself at her feet again, and have her contemptuous benevolence cleanse him of this and every other place.

But he feared the mysteries and madness of Fell far less than the certain coy admonition of his Lady. His body grew cold despite the flight of his feet, foggy breath leapt from his lungs in trails as his fingers and face began to lose feeling. He clenched his fists tighter to retain some feeling in them, but his lungs felt full of icey water and his head pounded with a terrifying thunder.

She was no longer near, she was upon him, in all her disquieted rage no louder than a whisper. He tasted blood in the back of his throat, smelled cold naked iron as his knees buckled and he fell cradled by the thick wall of branches before him. She had no power here, only anger, and what great anger he felt as each slow throb of his heart pumped more chill from core to tips.

Her reach recoiled, he had passed the threshold of the Fell Tower half a league ago, to stretch any further into desecrated lands was a great torment to the old ones.

"I'm sorry" He wheezed as the feeling returned to his chest, but she gave no sign.

As blood turned from ice to chill, he pulled himself to his feet and dabbed at a few knicks and cuts his scramble had left him.

"What was this place called before?" He asked a particularly unresponsive tree before him. The knots and whorls of the wood were neither as foreboding nor twisted and anguished as one would expect.

In exactly twenty five steps he cleared into a broad ring of trees, like spooked children afraid to chance a toe in imaginary lava. The soil had changed from the firm, greying clenched grit of rooted earth to fine rich dark powder. Nothing green and living had dared feed upon this earth in centuries. It caught and dragged at his boots, a familiar image to the old soldier as he thought back to ash clinging to his toes and heels from a thousand pillages and pickings of some nameless field now full of soppy red dirt and rotting bodies under the sun.

Ah

the sun.

He glanced up despite knowing it would not be there, despite entering a clearing, despite it being an hour before sundown. Instead he gazed upon a glossy sheet of obsidian sky, devoid of any stars for orientation or company, no bodies to worship, no light but no darkness.

Magic.

He grumbled to the empty, lazy rolling dirt of the clearing and gave the handle of his sword one firm grasp to reassure himself that it was still there.

Always magic.

Things that weren't to be trusted or believed but before you for every last sense to be questioned, weighed, doubted and often ignored.

Like a good poem that only a handful of people get. Sure, the words all spell out a glittering butterfly's wing in the height of summer, but the real story was beneath. The butterfly was never really there. The envious moth wasn't evil. And the theme wasn't pastoral beauty but fleeting rage leading to a rape and unsolved murder.

With that nonsensical thought in his mind, he closed his eyes a moment, held the image of the moth gnawing the wings off the butterfly, and the butterfly's squelched screams of terror, humming the cadence of the poem to himself.

When he opened his eyes and had stopped thinking very hard about things that were what they weren't and weren't what they were, the entrance to the Fell Tower revealed itself to him. Exactly five steps to the left, and nearly half a mile from the massive clearing's center lay two stones of enough heft to kill a houserat if thrown correctly.

He had visited the clearing before, but never had the time or inclination to explore the rumored Fell Tower and the secrets of the dark city below. He squatted down afraid to touch the stones, afraid to look too intently at them, not knowing how exactly the magic of this place intended to swallow and consume him. He felt neither fear nor eagerness, but he had been the type to climb a tree because it was there.

He distinctly remembered several ocassions where he had fallen from such great heights.

Great and terrible.

"Always worked out before didn't it?"

Except that time he landed on his ankle and had to wear a splint til winter.

That splint itched and stank terribly.

So did the salve, muds, mosses and crackpot panaceas his fussing mother had rubbed on him to ward "lameness".

He recalled a few of his witty quips (witty for a child) about lameness and staying indoors to study the classics.

That had settled it.

If he was horribly crippled, injured, maimed or otherwise magically altered, he'd take special care to learn nothing from the experience.

And so he gripped one of the stones, it did not yield from the ground, it did not screach, or emit a brilliant blinding light.

However the traveller was no longer in the clearing, and very quickly found a weak and timid part of him wishing he still was.