Low Owl -:- Two Moon Canoe
Book One, Chapter Three
For many months, here and there, time had passed like the wind over glacier meres. Now she whipped along with it as it grew stronger. Running north up along the lake’s shore, she came to an open shale covered with many flat stones and pebbles and black moraine sand. On the other side of the clearing was where she hid her canoe, made of birchbark and sewn together with ox leather.
In it were also some fishing rods, including a small one for catching cyprinids, minnows, perches, zanders, darters and bitterlings. She pulled out the canoe and turned it to empty out rainwater, swiping away spider webs that had collected in its hull along its thwarts and yoke. Grabbing the paddle, which she hid inside a hollow log nearby, she pushed the canoe into the lake and jumped in.
Halkjavyk landed on the gunwale as Greil plunged her paddle deep into the lake’s glassy waters, hitting only soft waves as the storm continued to recede north and west. The sky grew brighter, though it was still covered with clouds, the distant reflection of yonder mountains and drumlins hovering above the lake, reminding them of a sleeping giant facing up, while at the same time its reflection was faced downward. Over the chest of the giant flew a phalanx of geese, flapping their wings in unison, carving the air in a triangle hovering over the lake, their reflection a double arrowhead grazing the giant’s peaceful face.
“What do you call this lake?” Halk asked Greil as she dug in, building the canoe’s momentum into a smooth glide, moving them further and further from the flint shore toward the sun high above out over the deep divide.
“We call it Sky Hall, for it is mostly calm,” she said. “At night, you can see the stars and the moon in the water just as clearly as looking up. There are many lakes here, as I’m sure you know, and this is the first one of the Goorvalig, from the south and west of the Magistrad, which is my real home, not the lodge.”
“I see,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about that, and more about Tammerak. So the lodge is just for hunting? I guess you completely missed it when I said it, that I’ve been inside a time chamber before, my lady, many times, in the heyday of Or’Loz. We called them back then Kyndrayks: the Time Dragons. For they unraveled and bent the perception of time, melting the ice mind.”
“Magic!” she said. “So you’ve been to mighty Or’Loz!? I did not miss it, but I did not realize you had been in the time chambers of Or’Loz. What of Kyndrayks do you recall? Ours we call Ral Tanzul, the golden slumber in the sky, and is one of only a handful in this part of the world, as far as I know, modeled on the ancient designs. We use it as a retreat for contemplation. Big problems are cracked in its quarters, and even cracking that sometimes goes too far. Tanzul is also for hunting. My uncle Kúlluvía has long used it to restore and prepare before embarking on his long journeys. Like the tails of a dragon he winds.”
“Koo-luh-vhy-ah?” he said. “I would like to meet him. You said you were sent to the Uplands to hunt and to pray? Yes, time chambers are funny things. They are like beacons of the spirit world, like torches that attract animals and bugs with wings. You know, like moths that fly into flames? Silly things! But we mothlings are not so eager for enlightenment. We seek contentment. It’s less about what one knows, and more about how one uses the knowledge one has. For it seems the world is doomed to amnesia, again and again. That is one of the great teachings of Lord Aratarasu. I have seen many an ice age across millennia. The more important question to ponder up here is simply this: what is time?”
She plunged her paddle in with greater force to keep the canoe moving. Her rhythm had slackened as she listened. “Well then, that would bring us back to Tammerak,” she said, picking up her pace, paddling left and then right, and then left, and right. “It seemed to me he was running out of time. And as the glaciers melt, the world seems to be quickening with its flooding into rivers. Like Aratarasu’s dram or manor, I see the chamber as a redoubt.”
“It is true that we need time for thought,” said Halk, his mind now loosening as he listened to the lake water slosh against the hull. “Lord Beetle bid you to make a dram. I believe that is a good omen, but it is also perilous. If you know anything about Or’Loz, then you know that knowledge was also its downfall. It’s hard to imagine the fires of creation, so skillfully and artfully cast with so much wealth and power in their hands, could lead to so much ruin. So is that the purpose of your solitude, to change the meaning of the past — for redemption?”
“Yes? For isolation, and meditations on the future,” she said. “And I had never thought of this, but for dreaming, I suppose. My family built it before I was born. While my people came to Irèlia generations ago, a few hundred years or so, only in the last hundred did we take up the local need for hunting. My father’s people that is. My mother and my uncle’s people are an Irèlkan tribe, the DaKúrain, from the highlands up north, where the Haarynns have made their home. The Vul Kalla in my mother’s tongue. There was a war long ago between us, and we lost.”
“I remember it,” said Halk. She turned and looked at him. He was looking southwest, where the lake continued far beyond sight. Eager to get to the other side directly west, where she hoped to find the rosewood, she decided not to pry right away. It would be nightfall when they returned, and it would be bad to be caught in another storm while on the water. After some time, he spoke again. “I like it here,” he said. “I’ve never been on a boat, my lady. The sounds of the lake are peaceful, and the view so very wide and tranquil.”
She listened to the water, as well as the drops that fell off her paddle when she pulled it back out, and the slashing sound it made when she dug it back into the lake’s undisturbed surface, the canoe cutting cleanly through it, waves going out as they went, growing smaller and smaller as they spread into two giant wings.
“You see many things when you fly,” he continued. “I never fly as high as the eagles, but I see flower tops and tree tops. I see rivers from above canyons. I can see the cliff’s ledge and not fall. I can float down alongside a waterfall, and spy fish in its pools and jumping out of rapids. I can see people like you, through windows, or from tree branches.”
“I recently dreamed I could fly,” she said. “But I didn’t get very far. It was an entirely strange but wondrous sensation, as if I was levitating on a cloud.”
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“Over the mountains. Or at least I tried.”
“Those?” he said, pointing to the distant glaciered western range in front of them, the cold vapors and clouds slipping over their snowy heads.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be. I’ve always wanted to go west, toward Elfsayker, where the Elves live, and Elorthiel, at the heart of the great Gamma Wood. Or further still. But I think Mr. Feleran, something tells me they were the ones behind, the tall jagged ones, toward the great river Kúmareg, which we call Serpio the Great, and I suppose, onto Killadran. But I truly don’t recall.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter overmuch,” he said, as he walked on the gunwale close to the canoe’s bow, looking over and straight down at the lake’s surface. “Does it? All that matters right now is that we kept it. East or West will come to you.”
He saw his reflection in the lake, and the sky above him in all its brightening power. A sensation of slight hovering came over him, as he felt he could fall into the sky, its clouds suspended underneath them over a deep cobalt void, where he glimpsed a sudden hidden world in its depths. The shadow of the canoe brought him back to center, watching its hull press against the water, where below he perceived in its shadow a darkness that was unknowable. How deep did it go?
“Can you swim?” he asked. “The lake seems deep as the sky, both up and black as night below, just a bubble here or there I can see.” As the canoe moved, as the water rippled away, he perceived a shaft or two of light reaching into his dark abyssal gaze into nowhere. “I wonder what is down there?”
“Yes, I can swim,” said Greil. “All children of Goorvalig and the Magistrad are taught at a young age. But not all learn to swim strong. Some of us drown. The lakes are cold, fed by glaciers and mountain streams and rivers, and not by hot springs, which are to the south of the Goorvalig. While this canoe floats, we do not so easily on our own, which I am told is different from the sea, which carries everything higher up. My father says it is the salt in the sea. But here, there is no saltwater. If you are not strong, you will tire and sink into oblivion.”
“I guess that’s where wings would help? Or fins?”
“I think so,” she said with a chuckle. “Wings would help with a lot. How deep the lake goes I do not know. Some fishermen or boatmen maybe know by measuring the length of rope tied to dropped nets and anchors. I have no anchor. I’ve never had a need. Sky Hall though is very deep, I am told. If you drop something in it, you can’t recover it.”
“Well, it is a nice canoe ride nevertheless,” he said. “Nothing like it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess you could say, for me, it is almost like flying.”
Halk folded his arms and put his right hand to his chin, contemplating what Greil had said. Was it like flying? he wondered. She did not know flight, so perhaps this was the closest she could imagine to what he had always enjoyed. And yet he did not know what it was like to paddle and move the canoe forward. At times it did seem to glide just so, effortlessly, as if the lake was not even there, like air. He noticed the canoe’s wake rippled from its two sides like two wings.
It reminded him of the geese they saw fly off, which made him think about how the glaciers had carved out these intricate highlands. For he remembered a time when they covered everything in their giant slumber. And now, hundreds of years later, they had given way to Sky Hall. That was the power of time. So he watched the ripples travel away for sometime, what seemed like an hour. Then he spotted what looked like an owl along the northern shore out past the canoe’s dwindling wake. It had white feathers and it seemed to sway and buckle in the cold air. But how could it be an owl, he wondered, for snow owls never came here this time of year. Just as he had that thought, he realized the western shore of the island was fast approaching. Greil was indeed moving them much faster than it seemed.
The isle loomed before them. It was small but not, with many large rock formations and boulders that looked like giants had simply sloughed them off, with one great spire of rock in its center stabbing at an angle high into the sky. They had a greenish hue with some speckles of blue. Pines and rosewood trees circled the great slabs, crowning them along the island’s shore. She was once told by DaSheen that it was called Sawyer’s Stone, and that the priests of the many Irelkan tribes once gathered there. Beyond the island not far was the western shore of Sky Hall, vast and riddled with moraines and drumlin swarms.
“Landfall is what canoe people call that,” she said, as she scanned the trees. “Do you see any rosewood or malachite on those yonder rock mounds? That is what I hope we will find here to quarry.”
As the shore came closer, the wind picked up suddenly, and blew Halk off the canoe and into the air. Greil’s hair whipped about. Halk nearly fell into the water but grabbed one of her strands of hair and glided down under the gunwale and back up near the huntress, grabbing onto her left shoulder as she thrust the paddle down, and then steered them straight onto the black beach.
“Hold on!” she yelled. She then got up and climbed forward, jumping off just as the canoe hit the sandy rocky shore. It gave a scraping sound as they landed, the water splashing up around her knees as she carried it forward and set it to rest.
“I’ll look for the rosewood and green ore,” she said. “Why don’t you fish?”
He had looked at her uncertain, then flitted to the stern of the canoe which was right at the lapping shore. She reached into the canoe and rummaged through her fishing kit and pulled out a small rod the size of a thin, long reed. He looked at it more closely. On it she attached a line and a small hook. To him, the rod and the hook were not small, but like a great oar with a big anchor. He was dubious.
“My vision at the pond was right,” she said, looking down into the water and stepping around, where she saw little tiny minnows and bitterlings scurrying about the lapping waves. “There are all kinds of fish here. If we can catch even a handful or two, they will make a few nice meals. Just dip the rod in and gently rock it, and wait. They attract to slight movements. When they bite, pull!”
“My lady,” protested Halk, as she reached back into the canoe and pulled out a little leather bag that she opened and set down on the canoe to hold any fish he caught. “I am no fisherman. I am a Dream Keeper!”
She looked at him for a moment. “Anyone can fish!” she said, and turned to the forest, pulled out her axe, and waded into its green mystery. Stepping through the woods, she looked at this glade and that glade, and onto this ridge and that ridge. Then, she stopped, closed her eyes, and breathed in deep through her nose. She smelled the sweet scent of rosewood not far away, just a little south. “I’ll be back soon!” she yelled to her little companion. “Don’t fret, just catch what you can!”
She walked deeper into the isle, scaling its steep trails into the rocks. She would search for the malachite first, she decided, on the way to the wood, where she also smelled a trace of hickory, perfect for making tools. As she came on some bigger boulders, she scaled them easily as they were rough on that side of the island, a massive sheet of rock having broken off when the glaciers melted and drifted through the Goorvalig. Gripping lips and faces with her hands and boots, she jumped from this outcrop to that rockfall.
As she got higher, she could see the canoe, but not Halk, for he was too small. Though she thought she caught a tiny glimmer of obsidian, or perhaps it was the sheen of a silver bitterling. Turning again, before her was a wide plate of grey greenish limestone, and above it a large thrust of green rock, as big as a hill. Irelkan legend had it that it was once a whale that swam the ice, eons ago, searching for its long lost brother who had followed the moon to Irèlia.
His name was Thölkynwu, the Whale Finder, and so the rock still retained that name. For the legend said that the ice melted beneath him and a sea of icebergs drained into the Goorvalig and out to the Moon Sea. He never found his brother on the Great Ice, many said, for he escaped down the Magistrad to the ocean. For there was a great lasso in the sky, a constellation that ran from north and east to south and west, from summer to spring, a vast sheave of stars that breached the sun gate and travelled along the Whale Road over the horizon.
The vision told her that was where she would find her malachite lode. So she scrambled up the limestone table and walked under the shadow of the imposing Thölkynwu toward his belly, where its base pushed up, out and over. Picking up a large rock of dolostone, she approached the greenish Whale Finder and swiped at its face where others in years long past had chipped at its wall. Her hit sparked against the flint in the sediment. She hit it again and some small pieces broke loose. She hit it a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a nice slab fell off.
She knew enough about metallurgy to realize that from the malachite, she could smelt copper to make the mazed plates of the dram’s six sides. She kneeled down and smote the slab in the middle, breaking it in half, so she could put the smaller pieces in her pack. She might need more, so she whacked at the malachite whale some more, splintering off several more hand-sized pieces. She also knew about stannic rocks she could find in stream banks on the way back to the lodge. If she mixed it with the copper ore, she could make it stronger.
She looked up again at the Whale Finder and then bowed down in gratitude. Then she stood up and started back down the limestone slab and slipped back onto the old paths left by her ancient Irelkan kin, arriving at a fork that she had come up, but going the opposite way to the west along the rocky face of Sawyer’s Stone. Winding down into a small ravine, she headed south to the smell of hickory.
It was utterly strange that rosewood could be found in the cold climes of Irèlia, for it grew in warmer regions of the world. She was doubtful that she would find any surviving trees of rosewood, and yet she smelled its floral scent wafting with the hickory. And she knew that the Deserts of Tazaram created bursts of vortical rain and heat that might give them root in the Riverland. Something else was possible: that the Exiles may have planted them, for the Orlantian strain of rosewood, the long enduring kyrm holoz, was sacred to the Magi of Korin.
As she had that thought, she came into a hidden glade tucked under the cliff face of the malachite mine. There in front of her was a ring of rosewood trees around a rim of dark garnet rocks that were polished smooth, each about the size of a bear. Inside the ring was another ring, and inside it, another, each with small trees of kyrm holoz and tall standing stones. She was astonished to see the trees, and the enclosure. Had it been kept secret, by the Magi, or hidden by Lord Beetle?
With that thought, she realized that the three rings mirrored the rings that Aratarasu and Ranharrow drew at the pond, of memory’s existence in dreams. Was this another dream? No, it was not. That, she was certain. Or was it a crossroads between? The rosewood leaves rustled in the wind, and the morning’s storm near the pond still grumbled in the distance. Pulling out her axe, it was time to cleave.
Whock! Whock! She hacked at the thicker branches. Down they came after a fierce series of blows. The sun was now westering and they only had so much daylight before the canoe journey back across Sky Hall. Something told her to stick with threes like Aratarasu’s rings, so she chopped three logs. Then she went to the center where she found an iron altar in the shape of a box?
How very strange. It had been smushed, possibly by a glacier or by a fierce fire. On it was engraved what she thought was a large beetle, with three horns. Kyvaliya. She wondered, was this the heart of the drum?
Looking more closely, she saw some runes around the beetle. She wiped her hands over its dirt-crusted letters and blew away the loosened dust. It was in a script she hardly recognized, for it seemed to have elements from the Orlantian Taíshalk, the ancient hieroglyphs that she had seen in some of the oldest tomes and scrolls kept in her father’s library. She took out an engraving knife that she carried with her to mark her trail on rocks and tree trunks during harsh winters. Carefully, she copied the runes onto one of the rosewood logs.
The letters were very strange, even for the sleight of Taíshalk. They had sharp angles and cunning geometries, but also intricate tangles that seemed to suggest deeper passages and chambers of thought. There were three words, each faint in their echoes, that she seemed to recognize: “moon,” for it had three strokes that lashed up under a circle; “seer,” for it had a sharp arc that cut through a stack of delicate needles; and “vine,” for it made a serpentine thread with what looked like water drops dropping from it.
She thought about it for a moment: moon, seer, vine. Yes, they already made sense, painting a picture in her mind, of an old man with a band tied around his eyes, a full moon gleaming in a starless dark night, and a winding road running through a wet rice country out to sea. It was a question as much as an answer — words and things that had stumped the wise since the beginning of time. Dun-dun, dun-dun, went her memory of the drum at the heart of the ice cave. She reopened her eyes, looking at the sky, not realizing she had closed them. Then it came to her.
Kameino would know. For nothing could explain this strange place. She had communed with insects. She had happened upon Halkjavyk. But this? She had never heard rumor of it in the Magistrad. It did not add up in her mind. Did Lord Aratarasu and his followers make this place? If it was Orlantian, then who made it? Kameino would know. Her grandmother would know. For she remembered many forgotten things in the movement of her hands.
But now it was time to go. Walking out of the encircled grove, Greil hacked away at a large hickory tree, collecting small logs that she could burn into hot coals, to help fire the smithing of Lord Beetle’s tabernacle. Tying them into a bundle with leather twine, she lifted the holoz and the hickory onto her back and then stepped up the path under the brave Whale and over the sharp malachite hill and down to the island shore. The truth was, she had never seen a whale, or the sea. Only in her deepest imaginings.
“Kyrraskala!” he had said as she left, this time annoyed. “Incredible, it’s only the second day, and she’s making a moth contend with fish.”
With that, he dipped the rod in with both his arms, seesawing the rod on the gunwale so he could use his whole weight to counter any catch. He peered over into the water. There he saw silver cyprinids, breams, and breaks, and chubs, with their flares here and there of red and green and blue. He saw gobies and shiners and daces, hundreds of them, the more he looked, as plentiful as a swarm of hornets and flies, only he thought the fish much more pretty, much more delightful and silly.
Rocking the rod up and down, he felt a tickle deep down slowly coming up his throat, and out came a giggle.
“Alright, my darlings,” he said. “Time to come up for some air!”
Crack! Crack! — he heard the sound of Greil banging a rock against Thölkynwu the Whale, the echoes falling down onto the lake. Looking up, Halk saw a bunch of geese and ducks fly off and head south from the island.
Not long after he got a bite and a tug. He pushed down on the rod until it was straight up and the line was taut. “Now what!?” he shouted, in a panic. Before he could think more on what to do, the rod slipped off the canoe seat and fell into the hull, dragging him with it, and over came on the hook a silver chub with green fins, flying overhead, and falling right down on top of him.
It was heavy, and indeed half his size. He had caught a big one. It thrashed suddenly, spraying water all over his indigo wings. Aghast, he looked into its big round pearly eye. “Dear me!” he shouted, as he grabbed the hook and yanked at it, his legs against the fish’s head, pulling it back out of its mouth. There was blood on the barb, some of it smearing onto his hands. This was different than eating pollen or honey, he thought. He looked at the fish as its gils opened, its fins flipped, and its mouth gasped.
“Sorry my slippery friend!” he said.
He then grabbed its tail, and pulled it up to the leather pouch, and dragged him up and over and in. Halk panted in exhaustion. “Two handfuls!?” he complained to himself, looking again at the dying chub, bleeding and drowning in the air. The afternoon had taken a turn, he thought, but he had to press on. He picked up the line and heaved the rod up to the seat again, and then threw the hook back into the lake’s little lapping waves.
Chip! Chop! — he heard the sound of Greil’s axe cutting into the forest. She must have found some rosewood, he wagered. Strange that, he thought, for he hadn’t seen such trees in these parts in hundreds of thousands of years. She hacked on.
He tried to block out the sound in his mind. Fishing was hard work. And dangerous too. One of the hardest parts was dislodging the hook. Halk felt the pain of the fish acutely. Each time it seemed he caught a different kind, each different in shape and size, colors and scales and fins, even personalities he gathered. Some were feisty. Others frightened.
Still a few were stoic. Even prideful. There were the spiny ones. And there were the flashy ones. There were the elegant ones. But the best were the plump ones, mainly the goby, which reminded him of newts and mudskippers, with their round cheeks and pouty mouths.
Most came up surprisingly easy all things considered. But there was one that didn’t. Though the fishing rod angling on the gunwale was almost like a catapult, Halk lost advantage with fish that were caught further out. So it was with a big grumpy gudgeon, with his wide face, his mean mouth and eyes wide apart. He was a bottom dweller used to hiding under swift waters, now adrift on the lake, wily and desperate. So it pulled Halk forward, jolting him above the canoe. He clamped down again on the rod, closing his wings so he would back-yaw.
But as he came down, he bounced back up, the rod bent and catapulted him over into the lake. Splashing down, Halk was shocked by the freezing cold water. He was paralyzed for a moment, confused by where he was and what happened. It was so fast he had no time to think.
The gudgeon, hook in his gill, mad as hell, leapt onto the Butterfly Lord, pushing him down into the waves. While Halk had drank often at streams and creeks and ponds, he had never been underwater. Now, he found himself in a foreign land, a big green and grey fish trying to drown him.
It thrashed and pushed him down into the lakebed. Bubbles floated around him, big orbs of air that reminded him of his beloved moon. He grabbed one orb and pulled it to his face, sucking life back into his lungs. Then he reached his arms down toward the lake bottom, so shallow for humans, but deadly deep for the Ovyrrakrúsk, fumbling for a pebble. He reached frantically for a bludgeon.
He finally got his left hand on one and swung it at the gudgeon’s fat lip. It spasmed when it hit, thrusting Halk out and up to the surface, where he gasped for air, water up his nose, spluttering and choking.
Then another fish came at him, and another, and another, bumping him off onto a rock, ramming him in the stomach, slapping him in the face with their tails.
“Oh my!” he thought. “This is the end!”
Over a hundred thousand, thousand years, undone by a fish. Out of breath, he desperately grabbed onto the smooth face of a big skipping stone, his spindly fingers slipping. Beating his drenched wings, they propelled him upward so he could hug it, and wrap his body over it. Now he could breathe, even with the fish mutiny all about him. He looked at the gudgeon as it swam up next to him. He looked into one of its ringed eyes with a blackhole for its giant pupil.
He was fierce, and in that moment, the Ovyrrakrúsk felt great respect for his aquarian adversary. How strange how water had shaped this Mr. Grump. On another day: friends. But Halk was going to die, so he punched him in the eye.
The gudgeon pulled back, giving Halk the briefest window he needed to fly. Up Halk soared onto the edge of the canoe. “Kyrraskala!” he yelled, and then kicked the rod off the gunwale. It fell into the hull, zipping the gudgeon right up and over to his final destiny.
“Forgive me!” the Ovyrrakrúsk cried, pulling out his curved vorpal sword and jumping down to his last catch, to jab him in the gullet, twisting out the light. The gudgeon thrashed, but then slowly wiggled, went limp, and was dead. He was thrice Halk’s size and could have eaten the moth in two bites.
“Well, my friend,” Halk said, patting the gudgeon’s head. “I’ve never felt more alive! But I must apologize. I don’t like killing. Lord Beetle commanded me to keep this girl fed. And well, I did not expect it, but fishing is not so bad.”
What was it like, he wondered, to roam the lake just as he had roamed the sky? He believed he had some idea now. Hoisting the gudgeon into the leather bag, he slipped him inside along with all the other fish. He looked over the pile. He was amazed at the bounty of the haul. A multitude of beasts, with different shines to their scales, fins like blades or fans, and glassy eyes that stared back at him.
Their legions reminded him of the butterflies: monarchs and admirals, hawk moths and mourning cloaks, coppers and skippers, metalmarks and silverspots, whites, blues and painted ladies, cloudy-wings and dusky-wings and angel-wings, wood nymphs and willow sisters, papillons and elfins and crescents, seraphs and archangels, sprites and goblins, satyrs and queens. He could keep going, but then Greil emerged from the forest with sweat on her brow.
“Let’s go!” she said and laid the rosewood and hickory logs and bag of malachite in the canoe under the thwarts. She picked up her paddle, pushed on the canoe, and then jumped back in. Off into the lake, they glided once again: “Look east now as we go and take in the other mountains!”
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the fish!?” Halk asked, adjusting his balance.
“Very good,” she said, looking over at the bag. “I wasn’t sure you would even catch one. It was just a hunch you might hook these little fish. I am grateful. I am. But the sun is setting, and another storm is coming, once again from the East.”
He had completely lost track of time. It was very unlike him. While he was not a time keeper, dream keeping required a strong sense of history. Wisdom in rhythm, is what he called it. Including her underestimation of him, maybe he was actually in one of its troughs. “Was it hard chopping the rosewood?” he asked. “You must have hit it a hundred times! Bless the fish, I don’t think they could hear it.”
“Are you sure?” she said, the wind picking up, blowing west, the surface of the lake more choppy with waves and the current. A loon flapped out of the way in front of them, making a laughing yet haunting call in three notes, its last note teasing them as it glided off, its black head and red eyes gleaming with a silver trout in its scissoring beak.
The sun now touched the back of the mountain range behind them, the sky growing more orange and red and magenta, the waters vibrating with the shifting of the light. “Hang on!” shouted Greil. “This is going to be choppy.” In front of them rose the crescent moon amid the growing storm clouds, waxing wider this time. She plowed her paddle in and out, right, right, right, fighting against the northern wind, then left, left, moving forward.
The mountains loomed much greater in the east, jagged and young and ice-crowned. They were fire-tipped as the sun sank. Halk flitted forward, hugging the thwarts and the gunwale, the stern now the bow, his blue-green indigo wings also aflame with the sun’s farewell light, his obsidian skin scintillating in an echo of Aratarasu, for a moment reminding Greil of her encounter with the Dream Lord.
That was why they were there. That was why they were on their strange errand, that for all she knew, as she once would have argued, was headed nowhere. Halk turned his head, the wind fluttering the fur on his collar and his wings. She could see his green eyes shimmering in the fading light, his antennae bending.
“You were right!” he said excitedly. “The mountains are wondrous! I’ve seen them every day for hundreds of years, but today they are as glorious as,” he stopped to think, “the first mountains I ever saw! With flowers covering their many hidden meadows and treasures.”
“That’s nonsense!” Greil shouted over the wind. “But what kind of flowers!?”
“Lilies. Lilacs. Yarrow. Poppies. Honeysuckle, with its summer night smell.”
She could barely hear him, as writhing lightning streaked in front of the mountains from north to south, flashing in a purplish light over the ridges and forests, and then seconds later thundering and echoing all across the Uplands and the lakes, rolling from mountain range to mountain range, trailing slowly off into silence. The wind snapped three more times, blowing her cloak up behind her, splashing water up in Halk’s face, nearly pushing him off into watery oblivion.
Then the sun went out, and the wind died down, and the water calmed. The storm seemed to shrink before them as darkness swept over the Riverland and the wild lake lands of Goorvalig.
“Look!” said Halk, pointing. “There is the moon, free from clouds. We are moon wise! Like my name, Halkjavyk. You can see it in the sky and in the water.”
There it was, untouchable, glimmering in the sky and in the lake. Two moons. She could see them now on either side of the water line, like two eyes partially closed, the mountains in front of them the contour of a woman’s tender nose.
“We are lucky,” she said. “It may be calmer now until we return to shore.”
All of a sudden two meteors shot below the moon. Then three more.
“Kyrraskala!” he yelled, taking a deep breath and exhaling. Then he put his spindly little hands to his jaw, and lifted. For a moment she thought he was removing his head from his body in some kind of macabre magic trick. Yet as it came off, there in its place was a handsome face with green skin, and yellow eyes with amber irises, and a shock of wild green hair in a topknot.
“This, Ovyrrakrúsk, I did not expect!” she said, bewitched.
“Well, we’re bug-like, but not bugs!” he said, pausing as the lake lapped against the speeding canoe. “You know, I almost died back there. A fish tried to kill me. Tried to drown me when I fell in. It is perfectly understandable that he wanted to murder me. I was fishing him out of the water, so he tried to fish me out of the sky. He probably thought I was a bug too. Fish love bugs.”
“Kyrraskala!” she said, stopping her paddling and bowing her head before the obsidian winged knight, the canoe gliding momentarily as she held her head down. “I shouldn’t have asked you to fish, Sir Moth. I am terribly sorry.”
“Now, now!” he said, waving it off with his hands. “No need for ‘terribly.’ Do not worry! Keep paddling. We have a warm lodge to get to, my lady. As you can see, I am fine, though I am drenched and rather cold. It’s why it was time to take my mask off. I may be small, but I am old far beyond your years. Besides, today I breathed in a lake, and I am, I found to my relief, still alive.”
“Kyrraskala!” she said, the wind blowing in her hair. “Huzzah, Aqua Moth.”
“Not Kyrraskala,” he chuckled. “Praskarryn: tears for the sea. For I wonder now, where will we go? Not in hundreds of thousands of years has Kyvaliya been heard. The future is not yet written then. Much is in our hands.”
As if the heavens answered, another meteor skipped down from the night sky, its reflection converging on the horizon before it disappeared into the dark vastness of the land. Then she saw beyond the mountains what looked like a honeycomb of ghostly purple, lightning that lit distant clouds, an upside down sea rippling it seemed to the ends of the Earth.
“Well, Pras-skar-ryn!” she said, saluting him with an Irelkan sweep of her hand from her brow to her chin, then out. “And are they happy or sad tears?”
“Both!” Halk said, nodding and climbing onto the canoe’s prow. “Both sting the stronger, bitterest and sweetest, when they go together, I have found.” Lightning in the east illuminated his golden sunrise eyes, his green horseradish plume, his sweet grin, water running down and off his face.
She wondered in that moment: she had found a rift-moth and a dream beetle, accompanied by a singsong bullfrog and a phasmid engraver, but was a whale’s brother really once lost in the ice back there? And then, as her eyes wandered, she recognized the same purple horizon. She had seen it before.
Skimming her paddle back into the black lake, the little gusts of wind watering her eyes, she believed she was heading through invisible waves emanating from far away, even from as far away as from where Tammerak came.
It was East, she recalled right then, watching the mothling’s antennae and topknot bend in the wind, East that she flew in her dream.
Thus concludes the third chapter of the Aphantasia Trilogy: Where No Thoughts Go, an original epic fantasy work by T.Q. Kelley. You can read about its mission and its musings here. We will be self-publishing future chapters (most will be free), and short stories (which will be for paying subscribers) here at Wraith Land. The first chapter is here and the second chapter is here.