Black Halo by Sam Sykes

Author:Sam Sykes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2013-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Gariath had never particularly understood the reverence for elders that some weaker races seemed to possess. Celebrating the gradual and inevitable weakening of body and mind that ultimately ended in a few years of uncontrolled bodily functions and a mound of dirt just didn't seem all that logical.

Of course, it was different for his people. A weakened Rhega mind was still sharp; a frail Rhega body was still strong. And while weaker races praised senility as wisdom, the Rhega undoubtedly grew craftier with their years. Taking these traits, and only these traits, into account, he could see how an elder might be revered and respected.

However, when he factored in how incredibly annoying elders, particularly dead ones, could be, he figured he was justified in regarding them with a level of contempt just a hair above “intolerable.”

“How long has it been since you saw the sun shine like this, Wisest?”

He growled in response, not looking up. “Is that rhetorical?”

“Philosophical.”

“There are an awful lot of words to say ‘pointless,’ I've found.”

The fact that he didn't even have to see the elder's teeth to know he was grinning, with a profound smugness that only someone who had died and come back could achieve, was just number eleven on an itemized list of irritating traits that was quickly growing.

“Have you not noticed your surroundings, Wisest?” the grandfather asked. “There is beauty in the land.”

Senseless optimism. Number five.

Gariath stopped in his tracks and looked up, regarding his companion, the grandfather growing slightly translucent as a beam of light struck him. Narrowing his eyes, he looked up and out from the river, its stream reduced to a shallow half-a-toe high. The forest rose in great walls upon the ridges of the ravine he stood in, fingers of brown and green sticking up decisively to present a unity of arboreal rude gestures at him. Sunlight seeped through them, painting the ravine in contrasting portraits of black smears and golden rays.

“Dying rivers,” he snorted. “Broken rocks. This land is dead.”

“What?” The spirit looked at him ponderously. “No, no. There is life here. We spoke to it, once. We heard the land and the land…the land…”

His voice drifted into nothingness, his form following soon after, disappearing in the sunlight. Gariath continued on, unworried. Grandfather would not stay gone. Gariath was not that lucky. His sigh was one of many, added to the snarls and curses that formed his symphony of annoyance.

The river's bed of sharp rocks was not to blame, of course. His feet had been toughened over days of searing coastal sand, twisted forest thorns, and, more recently, a number of ravines home to sharper rocks than these.

It was the repetition, the endless monotony of it all, that drove him to voice as he did, if only to serve as reprieve from the forest's endless silence. The island's dynamic environs might have pleased someone else, someone simpler: a leaf-brained, tree-sniffing, fart-breathing pale piece of filth.

The pointy-eared thing would enjoy this, he thought. She likes dirt and trees and things that smell worse than her.

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