Isha’s Lament by Thomas Parrott

Author:Thomas Parrott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-11T06:47:15+00:00

Chapter 5

Old Scars

Brakus fell through darkness.

There was no way to know how long he’d been falling. He had screamed in the first eternal second, but that basic fear was unsustainable. There was no frame of reference. No ground rushing up to meet him. No walls hurtling past. After that first heartbeat it was not the fall that terrified him.

It was the helplessness.

That was the thing that explorers couldn’t afford to understand. To survive here, it was necessary to conceptualise the fortress as a series of challenges. Overcome them one by one, and leave here rich. A maze or a monster, mythological in their underpinnings. Here, the truth was laid bare. In a moment of triumph the fortress had snatched him away and hurled him into oblivion. There was no way to overcome the Unfathomable, not really. In the end, his survival depended solely on the sufferance of powers beyond his comprehension.

Brakus had known this terrible truth once before. In the face of the Devourer his people had done everything they could. They had fought tooth and nail. Confronted with the face of annihilation they had spat blood in its eye. Raw defiance. It hadn’t mattered. They had been washed away as surely as grains of sand upon the beach, and his home had died in flame.

He landed hard, slamming into some dark surface.

It drove the air from his lungs and left him wheezing helplessly as he tumbled down a midnight slope. All thought was driven from his head as he rolled to the bottom and landed in a painful jumble. Brakus lay gasping for air. Everything around was pitch-black and silent. The only sign that he hadn’t gone blind was the fact that he could see himself perfectly clearly. It was as if light fell upon him and him alone.

Slowly, painstakingly, he picked himself up. His limbs responded, and though he felt bruised and sore nothing seemed broken. The very fact of his survival seemed like mockery. He couldn’t have survived that fall by virtue of anything but artifice. Would his life ever really belong to him, after this? Or was he nothing but the fortress’ creature from this day forward? He shook the thoughts away furiously.

He had lost the Carnodon and his maul in the fall, but both lay conveniently nearby. He collected them and took advantage of a chance to bind his various wounds. He felt a bit dizzy already, whether from illness or blood loss he couldn’t be sure. Eventually there was nothing left to do but limp into the darkness.

‘Exactius?’ he called into the dark. ‘Amallyn?’ He hesitated on the last name. Was this really the environment to be trapped with such a thing? Yet he found himself calling all the same, more afraid of the solitude. ‘Maugra?’

No one answered. There wasn’t so much as a breath of air against his face to break the stillness. He staggered on for a time, calling and coughing in alternate turns. Surely he hadn’t been spared merely to die

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