Wanderers of the Silent Season (Heartbeat of the World Book 2) Read online

  “There is power to be had, certainly, but none that you would find . . . accommodating.” Wolf’s words were blurred through the pounding in Kechua’s ears.

  The man looked again at Kechua and gave a closed-lipped smile. The soft glow of the red in his eyes was what set the boy more at ease than the smile.

  “You could wound him, certainly, make his silvered blood flow,” Wolf mumbled with a savory taint. “But to strike him down, that would impress me.”

  “Fine.” Kechua gave a ragged sigh. “Then why don’t you tell me what you are?” Kechua crumbled down to the ground, aping the cross-legged stance.

  “A good question indeed.” The old man scratched his beard. “Has the old beast here not been a fount of knowledge?” He laughed. “You spoke the word ‘Aspect,’ so you have a taste of the stream at least. What is an Aspect, do you think?”

  “A monster, created from human fears, born in a kind of twin state with a . . . Blessed?” Kechua strove to recall the exactness of it all in his fog.

  “Ah, mostly right, but not necessarily a monster.” The man shrugged. “True, you of the inner spheres would likely see a monster, to fight, to beat, to gnash and struggle against. That is the material way.” He gave a conceding bow. “However, the form an Aspect takes is an expression of the Blessed in the end. It is created as you said, but it is shaped, or sometimes already has been shaped.” He smiled.

  “So, an Aspect of what then?” Kechua stared at the blur of green trees below, the rushing of the water batting against his ears.

  “Hard to say.” The man’s head bent to the side a moment. “I met my new ‘Blessed’ as I always do, in a place of knowledge as I always do.” He gave a soft chuckle. “Knowledge etched down once again, back in style it seems.”

  “Did you kill . . . ”

  “Did we fight and struggle, clawing at one another’s throats with our bare hands, for whatever power we might gain?” The old man’s head swayed again, his gaze far out into the wastes. “No, no. We spoke of many things. A friendly battle of wills and questions, you might say. For some time indeed, and then I parted from the ‘library,’ as it was called.” The old man sighed again, unsure form shifting within the cloth.

  “Have you come to test me then? If you outwit me, do you take everything I have?” Kechua glanced at his sleeping clubs.

  “No, no.” The old man shook his head slowly, his face turning with a disinterested sloth towards the mountain. “I am here for curiosity, to feel the throne beneath my legs, to taste the air. I have seen a great many of these seasons, and always the thrones feel different, a wonderful flavor to unravel.”

  “How old are you? Wolf claims to be very old, but he isn’t one to answer freely.” Kechua shifted his gaze to the mountain, finding himself lost in the man’s slow shifting attention.

  “Old enough to forget a great deal, old enough to even forget what the yearning to fight and conquer felt like.” He gave a dismissive nudge of his folded arms, though his gaze followed the mountain ridges. “Similar to your companion, perhaps, at least in your terms. What is a few thousand years of difference in the end? Relax, come closer. Do you need to restlessly fidget so?”

  “You seem peaceful, but your eyes betray the potential to do harm.” Kechua locked into the blazing embers of the man’s eyes.

  “Ah, so the . . . librarian . . . said.” The man chuckled and slipped a pair of sunglasses over his eyes. The lenses were smaller than the bulbous mirrors in his head, and he cast his face at Kechua. “I was given these to conceal my eyes, to disguise my face, put people at ease. Are you at ease?” The man made a sleepily mocking smile.

  Kechua slumped, though kept the distance between them. “Put those away,” he begged with a betrayed chuckle.

  The glasses disappeared into the cloak. “What do you see when you look at my face then? What does whatever perception you are gifted with tell you about me? Your mind, your primal consciousness would see me entirely differently, I’m sure.” The man slipped his face down into the cloak, his voice remaining unmuffled, though his form was only of folded cloth. “Choose to see my eyes as you have seen the eyes of others. Is there anyone you can think of? An elder, a friend? Imagine eyes from a face that would fit my own, a pair more pleasing to your soul.” The man nodded. “Yes, yes, think deeply, I feel something.”

  Kechua’s mind had leapt to the shaman’s, but at the Aspect’s words, he had defensively gone to darkness. He feared whatever potential power holding the eyes of the shaman would bring.

  He thought instead of Mana’s eyes, grounded brown. Old too, weakening with age, and having seen much in their time. They were worthy eyes to bear.

  “Excellent. I believe something has changed.” The old man smiled and lifted his face from the cloak. Human eyes, shining with clear brown, cast upon his face. Though weary and distant, they were distinctly his. A ring of subtle and rusted red crowned his retinas, the only lingering hint at the old man’s true nature.

  “Not quite perfect, I presume?” The man smiled, closing his eyes again.

  Kechua drew in closer. “No, it’s enough.”

  The man opened his eyes again.

  “Enough indeed.”

  The staff trembled on Kechua’s back. “What is it?” He unsheathed it onto his lap, curious.

  “Ah, now there’s a rare old soul.” The man chuckled. “A relic of another age.”

  The staff made some dowsing tugs, rumbling towards the stranger.

  “I think it wants you to hold it,” Kechua said quizzically, and the staff trembled with a whistled agreement.

  “I would be honored, little one.” The old man received the thing with a bow. “Now, aren’t you a fine creature.” He admired it, rolling it to trace its story.

  “Ah, weary one, walked so long and then slept.” Blackened fingernails traced over the carved story.

  “Your trust is a heavy gift, young one, one that pleases me.” The man smiled, turning the staff with his hidden hands. “You know of the season it seems, of those with your gifts and burden, of Aspects and Ushers?”

  “The man who raised me allowed me hints of them, base ideas. He wove them into his stories, probably more than I noticed or remember.” Kechua sighed, wanting to strike himself through the flames for not listening better. “Wolf shared a little more.”

  “To kill an Aspect, no, not kill. Hmmm,” the man muttered thoughtfully, tapping at the base of the staff wherein the tiny warriors fought the Aspects with bare fists. Kechua could almost hear the sloshing of the turbulent seas as he flailed for his meaning. “To master an aspect, yes. You must understand it. Your perceptions must hook onto it, to pierce behind the armor that it presents to the outside. You must always walk with open mind, malleable and yet confident and substantial. To master me, you would need to have understanding of me, and I confess I would gladly bow for your execution as the price of knowing myself for one brief moment.”

  “Aspects are children, fragile and mortal,” he continued. “They are curious and innocent, though many are born with great malice and sin. I have seen terrible beasts, formed from the nightmares of your people, and the nightmares of the spirit realm itself. I have seen the world torn asunder, enflamed, drowned, and rent bare.”

  There was a pause, but not an invitation for Kechua to speak.

  The man held the staff like an elongated flute of some bizarre player and blew upon it. The tendrils of his breath became translucent and opaque, drifting down the contours of the staff. Becoming a misted cloud, they expanded outwards in a shroud. The man took the staff and cut the mist with it. A smart crescent shape formed, its points bowed towards the earth.

  “Monsters, yes, they speak of the monsters, but I don’t think they have told you of yourself. They fear the truth of what you are, young one, and what heavy fate awaits you. It is a terrible thing to know, and yet knowing of oneself is the most precious thing of all.” The man looked upon the boy. There was a sadness in his eyes, a tiredness glossing over them.
“Would you like to know yourself?”

  “Yes.” Kechua nodded without hesitation.

  “You see us as beasts; things to be feared, my boy, but we are much more complex than that.” Several shapes formed upon the crescent world of mist. The forms were gigantic and foreboding.

  The mist was strange in its forms, somehow cruder and more textured than the shapes Wolf had made to explain these same concepts when he had conceded them. Kechua watched the mist swirl about with a dreamlike null mind.

  “We are creatures striving only to exist. All creatures, all beings upon the material world, began as Aspects once. All beings were raw and naked in their experience, roaming the earth without merit or purpose. It is the Silent Season which judges us to be weighty and worthy, or not.”

  Two of the four shapes disappeared. The first exploded into shards, and the second turned to sprinkling ash.

  “I cannot say if it has changed over the years. Some stories exist of a different time, but they fall well within the time that none truly recall. We Aspects are born of superstition, of fear. We act according to what the people have deemed of us, and we move according to their imaginations. Generation upon generation, I saw Aspects rise as beasts and then be made whole into the world. None of the mortals could stop us, none of them dared even to try.”

  A crowd of defiant humanoids gathered at the base of one of the giant beasts, tossing spears and rocks at it. It responded by swatting them away, dispersing them all into the ethers of the lines.

  “Then something changed. For whatever reason, in whatever inkling, humanity itself changed. You began to know community, to know brotherhood and symbiosis beyond the family, beyond the barest of tribal connections.”

  A small city with opaque and circular wall rose in the ethereal screen.

  “With this community brought the pooling of knowledge. With the community, and the spreading of labor across many shoulders, the force of the imaginations of the people began to change. Once it had brought superstition. The spiritual world had been a place of fear, one of doom and foreboding. Now, however, people made the greatest discovery in your entire history.”

  A single figure stood in the centre of the rounded village, standing tall, its arms raised.

  “They discovered hope.”

  The figures stormed out of the city gates and into the world, containing the beasts without. They all fell, save for one of them, somehow identifiable as the defiant figure standing in the town square.

  “Their reward was death in the end, but discovering hope had done something. The discovery had changed the world, and the season, forever. The season itself, and the spiritual world, were constructs of fear. With time, that will change. Time enough that perhaps I will have forgot this staff and this very moment.”

  A single figure rose from the ashes, then more, each of them stood beside the gigantic figures of the Aspects.

  “The Blessed were the result. Humanity had learned of the champion, of the boy against the beast, and the hope that they brought with them. Each Blessed mirrors an Aspect. The ethers of human thought calls them forth, to challenge and fight against the fears of the world and the society. By defeating the Aspect present in their duality, the Blessed secure themselves the power and force behind that Aspect. The trial has grown progressively more unfair to the Aspects as time has moved on. The people believe their champions to be immortal, to heal all wounds, to surmount any obstacle.”

  The figures fought their demons.

  “In the early times, when the season came quicker, it was a very different struggle. The Season still misunderstood mercy.”

  The smaller figures all perished to the larger creatures, who seemed bolstered by the victories.

  “Then, in time, the Blessed managed a fingerhold. One or two would filter through, their perceptions winning out against the bestial Aspects.”

  A new set of ethereal Aspects and Blessed leapt out of the mist, the scene repeated itself save for one difference; one of the Blessed triumphed over his Aspect, and he changed somehow. He had grown in power perceptibly, and when the season changed and the Aspects became beasts crawling upon the world, the man remained unchanged.

  “Those days were the beginnings of human gods; of spirits passing into the Dark Woods seeking these Blessed champions as Ushers in their judgement. In the early times, only one Blessed survived into the new world, agelessly waiting until the next Season came.”

  The world was laid bare once more, but the would-be gods stood upon it. When the Blessed stood against the beasts, the figure of the older god instructed them on how to defeat the creatures. Three of the four of them survived, and the world returned to a living state.

  “Creation begins usually with a father, or a mother, or both. One Blessed who succeeded would mentor and lead the other Blessed. Humanity saw the pantheons rise and expand, giving them ever more hope against the darkness of the world.”

  The season passed once more, and a third generation of gods became whole.

  “It was the Ushers themselves who became dark things then. Facing a crowding of their ranks, they became antagonistic to one another, which wrought a discovery with it.”

  The gods fought amongst themselves. The season changed once more, but instead of instruction that time, the new gods were murdered once the Aspects had been slain.

  “Within a very select set of circumstances, within the most contrived window, they could slay each other. In doing so, they would take the power of the one slain. There was only the briefest opportunity for this. As the season would end, so would all changes be made material and permanent. This made the Ushers bloodthirsty, and they made another discovery. By taking a sacrifice of flesh or blood, or even a gesture of submission, they would grow in power, albeit slight and often temporary.”

  The gods warred in the material time before Kechua’s bewildered eyes.

  “They fought terrible wars of submission, of bloodletting. They formed tenuous orders, consistently fighting to be considered the peak of the gods. The kingship brought power and glory to the one holding it. It was after this that they discovered another way to gain the power.”

  A line of figures was forced up a pyramid of steps towards a waiting figure at the top.

  “They discovered the power of sacrifice. It was a ruse, however. The sacrifice and fear garnered them some power, certainly, but it was a trick disguising the true intention. They had discovered that the Blessed could be found before the Season rose, and when found, could be sacrificed repeatedly and drained of their power in the same way that an Aspect was able to drain the power from them.”

  A pile of skulls stacked high under the god sitting idly on his throne.

  “It is remembered as a terrible time for your people, and one that would not have changed, save for one thing.”

  Kechua looked at the man, away from the grisly scene.

  “Hope. Again it was hope that changed the world. The gods did not understand fully just how mutable they were, just how fragile they were to human thought. Over time, they were changed, forged away from their roots, slowly becoming different from the things they represented before. The gods were powerful beyond belief, and yet belief itself was more powerful than they, and by those hands they were reshaped.”

  The figure on the throne of skulls shimmered and changed into a figure upon the clouds. He seemed completely oblivious to this reshaping.

  The mists dissipated slowly, as if breathing back onto the staff.

  “Those are your choices in the end. You are one of the Blessed, and you have bested your Aspect, as evidenced by your humble throne. Your place in the pantheon of consciousness is secured, and you may rest now if you choose.” The man handed the staff back to Kechua, who took it slothfully.

  “That staff is a funny thing, very much like memory. It speaks of something important within the world, of two truths existing within one, two conflicting facts layered upon one another.” The old man tickled at the staff’s base, to its trembling deli
ght. “My kind is drawn to certain conditions met. Conceits and quirks call us to your kind. I was brought here by your yearning for knowledge, by your desperation and loneliness. After hearing what I have said”—the rust-rimmed eyes turned again to Kechua—”has your path become clearer?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that it was ever unclear.” He sighed, rotating the staff in his hands. “What is the right thing to do?”

  Wolf made a derisive snort. He had assumed a prone position on the other side of the man.

  “You ask a being such as myself what is ‘right’?” The man chuckled, giving a quick glance at Wolf. “If anything from my tale should stick with you, it is that what is ‘right’ changes with time. What is right is more for you to decide, you and those you know in your life.”

  “I want to go out. I still want to help if I can. I’ve seen people. There must be others out there. Have you traveled much? Seen cities?” Kechua sighed.

  “Not cities in the sense you mean, but humans clot together, gathering knowledge and safety. There is a place as near as one could demand that shines to me like a gem. I cannot see it exactly, and that puzzles and worries me, but it radiates with thought and contemplation. Perhaps whomever has gathered there would be able to better direct your efforts.”

  “Would you walk with me?” Kechua glanced at the old man. “I would be grateful for your company.”

  “No, no, not my place.” The old man gave a dismissive flap of the cloth. “Even if I wanted to walk with you, I find myself unable to get close enough to see this enclave.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Perhaps.” The pensive man shrugged. “Perhaps that repellant nature would work against others of my kind. That may well be the intent. If so, it may well be the safest place there is in the Season.”

  “If it’s safe, then does it really need my help?”

  The man smiled and gave a slow nod. “Perhaps not.” He chuckled. “I have an inkling, however. One of your kind has come into my knowing in these past days. It began as the faintest spark from the depths of utter denial, and it began to glow and reach out. I tried to place this curiosity, but there is a fog about it, and it seems to move.” The man nodded slowly. “It moved again recently, somewhere near that repellant place, and I have not sensed it since.”