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——The WharfCare went into restoring Hōm’s wharf.
Ancient stone blocks hewn from time before memory and scorched and darkened by Red Brother guarded the fjord from the high-point tide. Some blocks were said to be timeless as the foundation pillars of Orst, those legendary pylons of the deep balancing land on sea. Still others insisted the wharf was built by the very formless beings who shaped the whole of the world in its infancy. It was a sacred thing. To Hōm’s people, it was a bridge to life, survival. All honored and preserved it from mischief and vandalism. To Talt’s eye, the long, convex curve reminded him of a wyer, a faceless winged monster. When he was a child, he feared the beast. Now he knew better. Yarn weavers regaled Hōm’s youth with tales of wyers snatching prey larger than oxen in vicious, rust-tinged talons, extruding their stomachs and feeding slowly, openly on bleating victims for days on end as bits crashed downward, slick with digestive acid. All low in the sky, all too easy to see, to fear, wings motionless, surreal. The wharf, meanwhile, filled his soul with peace, security. It steadied him. Three jetties bit into the ocean, breaking up waves and keeping safe the fishermen’s moored skiffs.
Time, tide, and salt warred against it, but it had its people, firm.
Talt gazed outward, lost in thought. Between him and the horizon, low, sharp crags adorned in salt-froth circlets pierced the inlet’s mouth. For them, the amethyst waters were perilous to any seafarer unfamiliar with the lay. On them, selins light-bathed, bellies fat with blubber and bodies brown and spotted. He felt them close cousins, for skin cleaves to skin, and shared with the people of Hōm was their bespeckled tawniness and broad faces. A notion entwined in myth, in stories; perhaps true. He smiled, joining them in their pastime, he, on the wharf, bathing in Red Brother’s light on the warm stones, drying off the wet of his swim. Nude among his brothers still making sport in the cool, clear sea around Lee Fang, name of the jetty where they were left to their play with neither reprimand nor judgment. The splashing and rough-housing was easy for him to ignore. Like the statues of Hōm’s heroes, he was quiet, immobile—yet he by force of will. His hope was that one day his likeness might be sculpted and placed on the wharf, an immortal guardian of his people. Quietly, he watched the yawning selins and beyond, the watchtower. Some day soon he would be assigned that sacred duty. Today was his last day here, tomorrow his first among the grown. He would get his tattoo, his first mark on his smooth, hairless skin. Most at their first Rite of Growth chose wings or fins, to better fly or swim when the power of the tattoo bloomed from their flesh as a silver-black mist. The fighters chose claws or tails, to sharpen their strikes and balance their grace. One boy even chose a shield.
Talt did not know what to choose.
Instead, he thought of change; his own, that of Hōm, and the wharf itself so rather recently.
From the roaring peopled vastness and its great school came to Hōm a scholar learned in
Ano, a sorcery for awakening dust-like metal motes. Her name was Yargal, and she was the first woman to enter the village. To Talt,
Ano was the apex of magic, its reagents self-healing, gleaning energy from light and motion, serving the will of those versed in its hidden language. It changed Hōm, mending the wharf of its cracks, filling them with vivid, colorful light that changed hue and shape in accordance with the will of Harbormaster Etana. In a few short years, the village grew tall, bright, and colorful. Terraces stacked upon terraces, eaves curving vaguely upward to catch the rain. It lent action to the tattooing, rather than mere symbolism.
Red Brother sank across Grandmother’s distant, massive face, elongating his gangly, brief shadow. Her light was cool, dim. Vague. At night, a smear in the darkness.
It was time to talk to the tanner and silker, for men wore clothing along with tattoos; but before that …
——The FountainChildhood behind him, he stilled his mind with an inflection of spirit born of commitment, practice, and faith taught in Hōm’s shrines, the Dive. An act. A lifetime of acts. To drown one’s uncertainty, to let one’s spirit swim free and unburdened in the eternal current of the amethyst sea where strength and fate are a man’s lone guides. Talt’s concentration broke, for in him bodhi was far away in, he hoped, some heroic future. A repetition of acts, he again unburdened himself and in slow, deliberate steps walked from the wharf and ascended the Cleansing Steps, large, rough-hewn pumice stones, black and broad and which over a thin stream perpetually rushed, and onward, over each step, then through a narrow gap in the wharf’s masonry and at last out into the sea. Today, scaled pastel blue and celadon swam unhurried as fish on the surface of the steps — another manifestation of
Ano, a recent addition to the village’s architecture, but apt and ancient in mood.
These improvements were slow, the yield of deliberations among the village elders and scholar Yargal. Even now, her sacred school was relegated to the outskirts of the village, out of sight behind a curve in the cliffs for its form was deemed by Hōm’s elders to be anathema, pale, smooth until it sharply bent, and at odds with nature.
When he reached the top, Talt was weary but his feet were clean, smooth. In his imagination, he believed the fish of light devoured the dead flesh. In reality, it was buffed away by the pumice and carried away by the clear, clean current where it would feed the krill and fertilize the plankton. Before him was the fountain, the center of town. Built around a natural sprint, it was made of the same rock as the Cleansing Steps and square in geometry. Not spartan, however, for all over it was delicately sculpted with images of sea shells and creatures of the deep; the work of a master artisan. Within, though, was dizzying. A cascade of hollow, perfect squares, each one slightly smaller than the next and slightly rotated, a spiral without curves that descended into complete, impenetrable darkness. Always, Talt felt there was something off about this fountain. It felt different from the rest of Hōm. More ancient, despite the legends of the wharf and the similarity of the stones. It required no maintenance, no restoration via
Ano. It never faded, or chipped, or seemed worn. From deep within the fountain well, he sensed an odd, fearsome power.
Odder still were the three chimeric figures over the central waters, a meter above the fountain’s highest outer rim. Back to back, they were one figure of statuary, yet each rather unique in material and form. Tricks of shadow made it seem they floated, but that was impossible. Nobody was brave enough to test the theory, for these statues were fierce with a similar power as the fountain's depths.
Of the three, Talt preferred the stoat. Primarily carved of white, soft-looking stone, it melted to gentle lavender at its roots. He felt it curious that a stoat boasted tentacles, nebulous, ethereal, and translucent; unlike those he knew of from the washed up remains of the deep. In each of its eyes were set a different gemstone, one fathomless black and the other vivid blue that, even far away at the edge of the fountain in the warmth of day, tensed the fine hairs of his face with the sensation of cold.
Next was the hyena dragon, a blend of muted gray and fiery red that prowled and shifted in the light as though alive and in motion. It seemed both fierce and friendly, and he wondered at the placid intellect that locked eyes with him, impossible as he knew that was. Fire ever danced lively in those ametrine eyes. Yet he knew it was just stone, a matter of mallet and chisel.
The last one unnerved Talt, for in it morphed darkness, formlessness. It was not any kind of animal at all. It had no face, yet he knew somehow that it watched him, mocked him. Quick, he dipped his hands into the cold, clear water of the fountain and splashed the salt out of his lashes.
——Salt & ShadeTo his left his destination hunched atop four deep, low tiers of stone steps or platforms. In their presence — the school and the fountain —, he felt himself merely a sojourner near the ruins of a civilization oblique and ancient; yet this village, the slopes of the fjord, and the sea in all its wild, unpredictable, nurturing violence were each and all the full compass of his life. He did not confront what that meant, that feeling. It seemed that if he did, if he tried, he would witness the truth of himself, temporary, pointless, already forgotten.
What was it he overheard Scholar Yargal say? He pressed his memory for the proper order of the words, and in that void of mind that loses comprehension of place, finally arrived.
Youth loves that which is fleeting, but comprehends not its value.Talt turned his back on the fountain and the weird, lingering dread it evoked, and beheld the school. No different than any other building in Hōm, it was square, squat, and paneled with flame-charred unburnished timber, the overhang of its bottommost tier supported by large, round, straight pillars painted red, like the red of rich, fecund soil. Between the pillars billowed tapestries in the light breeze that flooded the fjord from the sea like a decanter, a robust, salt-tinged wind. Their fabric was stiff and light, crafted from braided seagrass left to dry, pale from Red Brother's brilliance, and finally dyed with pigments contrived from crushed sea shells, squid ink, urchins, and whatever else nature supplied.
Abstract, he thought. Or maybe he just didn’t understand their significance.
No one seemed to, other than that they were stolen from a dream and passed down by the first settler of Hōm, for that is how old these were. Yet even now, the colors were proud, and boasted rich, bold purple strokes, supple yellows accents, and bursts of chaotic orange that pleased his uneducated eye.
Quietly, soberly, Talt stepped through the narrow slit in the lattice frames of the sliding doors and into the dimly lit entrance. Under his feet was a soft tatami, also of woven seagrass. He knelt, kowtowed, and waited patiently. There was no rush, but his mind did wander. It fixated on the interstices of the shadows, where light danced its peculiar dance. In that dim, unsteady light, he considered the back of his hand. It was mottled brown, dark with light blotches, darker streaks. His fingers were stout, thick, and vaguely webbed. If he focused, he could see the striations, the weave. It was barely visible in all woven works of the ocean’s verdant bounty — in the tapestries, in the mat that cushioned his hands and knees, in the very substance he and the men of Hōm accepted as their flesh, beneath which was a void, and in that void was …
Throughout his innermost core he shuddered, and a shadow shifted behind him.
Excited as Talt was, he could not deny the anxiety of this day. It boded a decision that was to be tattooed into his depths, until stillness, death, and the sea demanded he return.
“What are you?” the shadow asked, heavy and bleak.
He knew the prompt, for it was required each time he entered in the school, barefoot and carefree, often noisy, ever reminded that it was a sacred place and so he knelt on the tatami and thus admonished awaited permission to rise, to enter. The school’s call and response was engrained into him, as were so many other memories. Yet today he paused, he thought it through and contemplated its significance. He was a boy about to become a man, and he didn’t know what that meant. He was a student eager to learn what that meant, and he hoped he possessed both the aptitude and resolve to glean that wisdom.
Why am I so— his mind trailed off, unable to express in words the wistful, weighty emotions that within him roiled as storm waves on the deep, amethyst waters where once, in a faint memory, he knew he’d been and knew he would again one day be.
“Salt and shade,” Talt answered the shadow—Beircru, his teacher, but not his friend.
What he learned was that it meant he was no different from the sea, but Talt suspected there was a deeper, more concrete truth hidden in the maxim.
“Come,” Beircru invited in his firm, terse way, “
You are today’s only postulant, and your path today does not keep you within these walls.”——A PathOutside the school, Scholar Yargal waited.
A narrow, sharp face met Talt, expression neutral as always. Compared to him, she was very pale. She reminded him of the statue of the stoat, except that she had long fiery red hair, which burned and twisted down and along her shoulders like the eruptions that frayed Red Brother’s edges. No, maybe it was more like the talons of a wyer. Rust-tinged, but vibrant. Her lips were the same color, but seemed painted on, some parts dry and flaked. With a single spelt-brown eye, she watched him. Covering the other, a translucent patch infilled with variegated coiled strands.
Then there were those large lumps on her chest, which to Talt seemed so impractical. He made no comment, but focused on her face. Well he remembered Beircru’s admonition when Yargal came into the village; he warned them — Talt and his fellow students — to neither stare at nor inquire on her unique anatomy, as to do so was to visit a shame on both Hōm and on their esteemed guest.
Most impractical of all in this humid, moist climate, was how she wrapped herself in walls of fabric, from throat to foot, of a nature that recalled to Talt’s mind the tarksi fish and its large opalescent scales that melted to fins and face of silver-white.
“This your guide for the morning, Talt,” Beircru said,
“meet me back here when you’re done, at midmeal.”Talt nodded, and followed Scholar Yargal. She didn’t speak, and so he likewise held his tongue. She led him a little ways out of the village, around a hillock, and up steep stone steps carved into the rear slope of the tapered mountain that penetrated into the ocean. Long Jaw it was called, though Talt didn’t know why. Either side led to dangerous, sheer cliffs, and across the harbor he saw the other mountainous finger of the fjord known as Strong Jaw. Betwixt them, the harbor teeth. Despite the bright hour, this path was dim and shaded in heavy trees with vibrant moss-licked bark and veinous trunks. They sprawled above him, wider than they were tall, broad leaves soft and filmy, like ferns, akin to the multitude of small shrubs that grew between the roots that arched up and around the violent, mica-flecked stones that penetrated the thin, grainy, black topsoil.
It was an excellent place to hunt mushrooms, a staple of every midmeal. He paused and gathered a few on his way with that thought in mind, but remained close to his peculiar guide.
A dangerous place, with many rocks that jutted jagged from the soil, inscribed with odd, ancient symbols.
“Here,” Yargal said, and directed him into a well-lit cavern.
He recalled the place, back when he and the other children roamed The Jaws once they learned to walk. Before Yargal came to Hōm. Called Eyehole, it went deep, deep, deep. Its entrance was obvious, a lure, a trap. He never explored the entirety of its depths, for they menaced and terrified him, the weird way the rocks writhed and the otherworldly sounds that crawled out of its narrow, lightless places.
Not her lab, not the place of fanciful modernity from which he and the other children of Hōm were forbidden; thus, disappointment glanced across his form. She raised an eyebrow, and as one they entered.
Within, a bench on which to sit, strange metal apparatuses, and a soft amber fire that floated inexplicably but kept the large cavern entrance warm and well-lit.
“Your tattoo,” she began,
“But first, do you understand what Teacher Beircru told you about what it means to be a part of The Sodality?”“Teacher, I wish to—to have someone to talk to, to guide me true,” Talt blurted, his mind and expectations well ahead of her inquiry.
Intently they gazed at one another. Yargal was patient. Finally, his lagged focus caught up with his present. He grasped her question, and answered,
“Teacher, it means to learn, to — uh, to share what we learn, to protect others from truths that are harmful and keep those truths secret. To do all that without personal bias, without arrogance.”She nodded in agreement and pointed to a stick, then began to adjust her equipment.
“Draw the pattern,” she requested, and so he did.
——A Pith &a DralifRed Brother descended and blazed large and bright into pale Grandmother’s midst, as if together they served as some weird eye, lidless, fiery, and apocalyptic—the orb of some eldritch, eternal entity. Born to such a scene, all it signified to those native to Hōm was midday, and naturally that meant midmeal, and in the present plenty that omen thrilled the soul with bounties of honeyed oyster skewers, soft-boiled selin eggs, savory toegi crackers, and cold, fresh, life-giving water from their fountain; moreover, it mapped to moment Talt emerged, alone, from the cave, for Scholar Yargal lingered to see to her equipment, her work done, and done well in the estimation of both herself and Talt, although the boy possessed not an expert’s eye and was satisfied with mere vanity—appearance. Nearly a man, he strode a mite faster down the rugged, uneven path than when he ascended; indirect, careless, at ease as he crawled across fallen trees and leapt upon the high, flat, light-bathed and strangely marked stones that were everywhere, like scales, on Long Jaw’s cragged surface, the view of the fjord always at his left, bright, endless, and amethyst in the fringe of his gaze.
Eventually, one rather brief, his stomach rumbled.
A man now, he thought, he required garb, and so started for the silker; but then he recalled his promise, noted the time by the position of Orst’s two near stars, and thus made his way down the mountain. So instead of at the silker, he arrived at the agreed upon place where he was to meet with Beircru for midmeal, and there he sensed, a figment of a notion at best, that the final step on his Rite of Growth was once again delayed.
“You seem pleased with yourself,” Beircru said wryly as Talt loped onto the warm stone pavers that signified, along with the fountain, the village center; later than expected, yet not so late as to merit wrath.
The boy smiled, nodded, and slowly turned around for Beircru to behold and inspect the Scholar’s handicraft.
A new, vibrant tattoo circled what Yargal said was the location of Talt’s heart on most mammals, the sinistral side of his chest; a genial, intelligent, animal face that from Talt’s bosom looped its slender body up his shoulder, swung about behind the nape of his neck, and finally curled atop his opposite ear. Its points shone akin to stars on his creased, dun brown flesh, brilliant flecks of citrine, platinum, and starstone; it matched his eyes, and his own secret, although not at all a secret inside Hōm’s peaceful borders — his serrock core, the salt hidden by his own shadows. Abstract and tribal, the tattoo stirred imagination with the form of a serpentine forest creature, an elongated markin or dralif — small, furry, six-legged, inquisitive beasts with lucid eyes and claws that grasped at fire and rays of light, one the night and the other the day, and thus sprinted across the very air. Yargal claimed it was a thousand nodes, and each node was a million axons; that it would keep him company whenever company was needed, that it would share with him that which was, is, and would be true, if he to ask.
In his hand, he carried a device; a clear, spherical object with which he might always know the direction he faced. Talt didn’t know what to put in it, so Vargal suggested an
Ano clime-glimmer charm until he should come to the City of Knō, for such would balance heat against the cold, the darkness against the light. Grateful, he heeded her wisdom.
Beircru nodded approval, and gestured with his chin,
“Leave that with me for the while.”Talt placed it on the ground next to his teacher.
“Did Yargal explain what this is?” he asked, to which Talt nodded his affirmation.
“At the Great School, they call it a hexagazer alembic, such an awkward turn of phrase,” Beircru opined, then he sighed and was silent for a while. Talt knew better than to interrupt, as such spells were commonplace given his teacher’s preferred mode of instruction. At length, his teacher added,
“We call it a helemb, or a pith.”Carefully, Beircru watched as the boy’s eyes wandered where his gut bade them with a rumble. Practice forbade his face laughter, it remained blank, stolid, but sincere. Again silent, Beircru dipped a cracker in the half-shelled yolk of his selin egg and then chewed it slowly, thoughtfully, and swallowed.
“Today, Talt, you must fast. My hope is that your heart yearns for more aeonic ambitions than your next meal, your next physical desire. See that narrow path beside the Cleansing Stairs, perilous and from which you have thus far been forebode? Lower, it sits, but it remains dry. Follow it, and you will come to an opening. Go through. The path will guide you, as it has others.”It was dry, as his teacher said. Dry, much like his flesh, light-baked and unquenched. His fingertips traced along the rough basalt edge, that signified the Cleansing Steps. For this narrow path, he knew no name. Yet it was all in shadow. At length, his arm pressed forward into a darkness his eyes could neither penetrate nor distinguish from the shadow-draped rock alongside him.
Into that, he ventured.
——The First SecretBlind, he ventured by touch and naïve temerity his way forward, and after a little ways his ordained path curved inward, then forward, then downward. It was deep, and after what he perceived as several spirals Talt’s intuition intimated that neither the walls nor the floor, while flat and sloped, were smooth. Creases from the precise union of bricks delicately grazed the flesh of his fingertips, often, regular, a pattern. He knew he was below the village, further down even than the level at which the tide lapped upon the wharf. He was certain that his path was spun around the well over which the Fountain of the Three Gods loomed, and that it was ancient, far more ancient even than Hōm itself.
Moisture pilled along the bricks, and with it came the cold, and with the cold came the light and the fear.
Talt saw it beyond the corner, and stilled until his eyes adjusted to the infringed formerly-placid gloom. Gently, his hand touched the wall and sucked in the moisture. He no longer felt dry, thirsty, nor hungry. An irrational fear pulsed in his mind.
He lifted a foot, then hesitated.
Why do I fear the light? he chided himself, and stepped forward.
Nearer, he halted and listened. There was no noise, not anymore. Gone, the tide’s reliable crash on the wharf’s impervious stones. Gone, the whisper of the wind through the valley. Gone, the erratic, interminable drone made by insects and beasts. Gone, the laughter of his friends; children, still, for whom this unknowable dread loomed as part of their inexorable future. It was true for all the Elders of Hom, all before him walked this path. To his memory, not a one had mentioned this place.
Not the light. I fear the knowing, he realized.
Gradually, his eyes adjusted. He came to realize that the wall was not merely rough with the seams of bricks, but etched with glyphs beyond his ken. A language so old, only the gods who slept still dreamed in its tongue. Talt’s mind went back to some lessons, general principles on knowledge. How it was power. How power can corrupt, and as such should be—should be what? He couldn’t remember. Feared, maybe. Respected. Kept safe, if need be. Kept secret.
If he intended to be part of the Thirkoan Sodality, he needed to preserve, weigh, and reflect on their secrets, first and foremost among them the secrets of Hōm.
Is that what I want? I have this tattoo, but it can be removed, transformed. As with the pith. Yargal can change it to eyes that see further than my own, and I could become a Sentry of the Fangs — I could warn my friends against pirates, monsters, and other threats.Pensive, his fingertips traced a random glyph.
To him, it meant nothing, merely a shape in the darkness, one that felt familiar, one that felt similar in nature to the appearance of those etched on Long Jaw’s sharp, obsidian scales.
So that’s it. That’s why none speak of it. They turn back, here. Turn back for the fear of knowing, and become fishers, or sentries, or artisans. Only a quiet few become teachers, and fewer still leave the village.Around him, his world rumbled. Just once, just a moment. Brief enough to be imagination, long enough that it roused doubt.
Firm, Talt stood; hand braced on the wall.
Then he laughed, because of course he knew what he wanted.
I want what I don’t yet know.With that, he walked forward into the illuminated corridor. It opened to a chamber, the ceiling low, the walls wide, and the end far and confused by the haze of light that emanated from a barrier midway through. A wall of diffused light that separated him from what was on the other side.
Nearer matters captured his attention. At his feet, in the center of the first half of the chamber, a large pit. He could not see the bottom, for the deeper he gazed the more his vision became confused rather than by darkness obscured. A rope, knotted at easy intervals, looped through a large metal hook in the ceiling and descended into that hole. On the wall next to him leaned a crook, with which to catch the rope. Talt snatched up the crook, and with it hooked the rope and pulled it toward him. It felt like silk, but showed no signs of wear. He wondered who maintained it, or if magic preserved it indefinitely. First around a leg and then fingers interlocked above a knot, he leaned forward to the abyss. Suddenly, it was below him. His rope swayed, but calmed after several minutes. Down here, time felt abstract, distant. He couldn’t tell how much had passed since that first step into darkness, that next step into terrible quiet light. Down he went, one careful knot clasp at a time, and that mysterious light came down with him.
That’s when he saw it, Hom’s first secret.
When a Homsur died, their corpse was burned and, Talt thought, returned to the sea. A great ceremony was held to commemorate the deceased, a feast to honor them, words from friends. He participated in many and always it was a grand and happy occasion. As the third moon ascended above the amethyst meridian, the honored corpse was placed on a small, wood raft, covered in dried seagrass, set afire, and pushed out into the bay with the out-going tide.
Yet around him rose columns of serrock bricks. Thousands of them, at least. He could not see how far down the pillars went. On each was meticulously engraved a name.
Around him was a tomb.
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