The First Tree
Athosvid reached for the sun that no longer nourished it. It wasn't on a mountain so much as it was the mountain, an imposition on the skyline from miles away, jutting out of hilly forest of still-living lesser types of trees. The sky was impossibly blue and the sunlight pierced through Athosvid's leafless branches to cast skeletal shadows over their side of the path. The sun was out at full brightness, and it obscured the features of Athosvid, leaving it a dark titan that loomed over them. The day was beautiful, but the fossilized tree left Arikes cold inside.
Perhaps once it was living, if legend rang true. It seemed as if the nightmares were true-- the Trokals, the destructive force of magic. There were scars on the landscape, jagged gaps in the alpine canopy that revealed bare rock beneath, where impossible force had instantaneously stripped a thriving ecosystem away. Kryneans had many legends that arose around the Athosvid, tales of deities and creation with the tree at the center of it. But Arikes knew it as a rock, hardly remembered from a childhood before the Vukash came and took this place for their own with blade and spell.
This time, the trek was no traditional pilgrimage to make an offering, but he'd brought an offering along out of respect for his grandfather rather than the spirits it supposedly went to. Those were the dreams of a society that wanted to believe in something beyond what they could see. Arikes could understand it; reality was awful, fantasy was a comfort. He didn't believe in miracles, but magic existed in a horrifying, sanity-breaking way and benefited the Vukash only. That realization beat the hope out of him. He wasn't even sure to hope that the Madman's Seed was real, even though he felt the unnatural warmth, and a shiver of fear and wonder mingled as he touched it. Loras died handing it off to him, and so he carried it at his hip, but he tried not to think of it, even as it made it's presence felt with heat at his side. He found handholds, along the climb up, in the rough, barklike rock of Athosvid's exterior.
If it weren't for watching the false prophecy of Bozander lead them all into folly and destruction at Trona, he'd perhaps have been broken by watching the expedition, bedeviled by a new type of Trokal, fierce and more intelligent than the other troop types and scorched by magic when the pursuers caught up to them. They turned, they fought and were overwhelmed by the surprising new foes and a cunning Vukash battle-mage that herded them into ambushes with the creative use of fire. The bastard seemed to know the tactics and countered them -- the baited path was poisonous. There was no turning back, they were being run down.
It took a degree of ruthlessness to leave those behind who could not or would not keep up, but the ones that could still move had to. They moved along the stream bed of the Cycander river all the way up to the slope of the heights that Athosvid sat on, in an attempt to deter the scents. All the way up, Arikes was left thinking, in a silence marred by splashing and grunting as they struggled with their individual loads, that they'd gotten too complacent and the Vukash found a new way to take total advantage.
In this sort of cheater's game, survival itself was the prize; the people they left behind were dead or enslaved already, but staying there with them wouldn't have done any more than repeat the folly of Krona, which was to fight them openly, rather than stabbing them in the backs or overwhelming them with numbers.
Leading up to Athosvid were a series of what seemed to be stairs, but smoothed down by more than centuries, in the stone. It was sufficient to get a grip, but the height and the howling wind, the sight of the forests they'd come through far, far below them was vertigo-inducing, and every gust brought on a visceral fear of being swept away, even in the calmest of weather.
His limbs were crying out their weariness, the lack of sleep made his eyes feel like they were seeing from a distance and not too well, and he felt himself apart from the proceedings, and yet he trudged up and up these steps, around and around the trunk of Athosvid. He knew the place well, but he last trod these steps in a very different time. He tried to remember the lore his grandmother filled his head up with when he was a giddy little boy gamboling up these steps, but could only recall snippets of it, enough to put together the sacrifice of herbs and incense. This was how he diverted himself from the cries of his muscles as they strained, with the pounding feeling behind his eyes that beat a tattoo of 'curl up and sleep.'
The summit was the top of the trunk, where it branched off into many different directions. There was succor from the wind's force, but not its howl, and there was a chill in the air this high up. But here was the altar that his ancestors sacrificed to, without ever experiencing more than coincidence, compared to actual magic wielded by the Vukash. Their cries were unheard, their myths did not come to life. But they'd clung to the hope of the madman's seed this whole time, and if they were going to die hunted, without a chance, they might as well die in good scenery, or so he'd quipped a few thousand feet down.
He steeled himself for the disappointment; he'd seen the fools sacrificing to gods that did not exist, imploring spirits that did not exist, inventing rituals that did not work. He'd been there when Bozander conned himself into wealth and fled when the armies that followed him looked for actual miracles on the battlefield that he could not provide. Here now was something that had more of a substance, but was it just another trick?
He placed his sacrifice on the altar along with the seed on top. It came out of the bag glowing and with a warmth to drive the chill from their bones. When it was set atop the cloth bundle for the sacrifice, it burst into a bright green flame, one that shot out onto a stony branch and outlined a door; it did not open so much as the flame formed a rectangle and within those boundaries, Athosvid disappeared, giving access to an interior they only knew about from the rantings of a madman.
The portal yawned before them, the wind finding its way into it and creating a howl down the corridor. That loomed before them, dark and imposing, fearful.
Arikes looked back and toward the others, eyes wide of their own accord.
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