Demon Night by David C. Smith & Richard L Tierney

Author:David C. Smith & Richard L Tierney
Language: eng
Format: epub

PART II:

The Earth-folk

Woe unto this great city!—and would that even now I might see the pillar of fire that shall consume it!

For such pillars of fire must come before there cometh the Great Noontide. But this hath even its own time and fate.

—Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

Chapter Eight

They were not dead, neither were they alive. Existing timelessly in that limbo reserved for demonic forces trapped upon the earth, man-conjured or god-sent, the Earth-folk swelled and contracted invisibly, emotionlessly, inhumanly. Not wind, yet they were invisible as the wind; not alive as humans know life, yet they had thoughts and intelligence of an unhuman sort. In a vacuum between one form of being and another they existed, waiting for the summons of the moon and the stars, the planets and the sacrifice and the Name…

We exist—ageless, fleshless, unchanging, without voices or hands or faces. Our thoughts move like the wind, but we are not wind. We hunger—we await the time to devour. We do not hunger forever—we await the time of the Moon and the Feasting…

Saureb sensed them as he paced thoughtfully in his chamber within the mountainside, while Sonja and Tiamu slumbered in the outer cavern. Blue incenses curled about him from bronze tripods, reflecting murkily in the silver mirror that hung from the rock wall.

He could feel the existence and the waiting of the Earthfolk because he was their keeper, could sense their subtle unliving vibrations because he was a master of arcane arts. He knew that the darkness before dawn holds more truth than either the broad daylight or the blackness of night; he knew that sometimes living men were phantoms, and dreams more real than men imagined. The pulsing life of rain he could sense, as well, and the breathing of flowers, the sounds of eroding rocks, the voices of growing trees and their shrieks when harmed by men. He understood, too, how the Earthfolk, and all demonic things, could wait out the aeons alive yet not alive.

“Hark to them, O Zarutha!” exclaimed Saureb suddenly, a strange anguish in his face. “Can you hear me, even as I can hear the Folk stirring in the stone and the air? Would that it could be so, and that you could answer, for I have need of your great wisdom.

“Sometimes in my loneliness I weep, O Zarutha, because I am trapped by my humanity and know that even mine will be a human death. O you who came to hate man because you loved life, how were you able to laugh and dance, knowing that man is the worm gnawing at the corpse of earth? Not all of your great wisdom did you teach me, O Zarutha!”

Only silence answered Saureb’s outburst—that and the soundless stirrings in the stone and the air.

Alive but not alive…

“O Zarutha, the time has come for magic,” said Saureb into the murky mirror, “even as you foresaw. Would that I were like the warrior who handles his sword and does not question the sword’s existence; for I handle my magic—but question it always.

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