YOU HAVE SACRIFICED [offered, surrendered] EVERYTHING OF VALUE [worth, gain] TO CALL UPON US [we, me]. WHAT IS IT YOU OFFER, BETRAYER, THAT COULD ENTICE US [we, me] TO THIS CHORE YOU REQUEST.
With his body cowed against the creature's monumental presence -- it called him betrayer
, the evidence of some specific offense done in the past -- Audmathus faltered and dropped to a shuddering knee, his black hand extended to bolster the vaporous barrier that separated him from the manifestation.
"I wish to give you something else," the drow said. "Something that is not mine."
THEN HOW [by what means] MAY YOU GIVE IT. BY WHAT RIGHT HAVE YOU TO BESTOW IT UPON ME IF THIS THING [object, belonging] WITH WHICH YOU BARTER IS NOT YOURS, BETRAYER.
"Because its previous owners are dead. It may have retainers," he reasoned. "Retainers and curators. But you and I both know, acumenus
, that neither of these imply an artifact's ownership."
Audmathus's muscles burned; his head was a throbbing mess of confusion and misdirection. Invisible hands kneaded at his cheeks, jabbed into his eyes, prying tears from their ducts and dragging him closer, closer to the floor. The summoned creature's influence was beginning to pry through the boot-tar circle. The dark elf's will over the conjuration was slipping. Any moment, the handmaiden would slither through the cracks in his spell, shatter his mind to shards, pry inch by inch his veins from beneath his black skin--Underneath the earth, a basso hum whispered in the peat, setting grains of dirt to sift like scuttling bugs. It was a bone-rattling echo, a sound less in the ears and more in the bowels. If Golben were a porcelain teacup, a fine lady's teacup, a celestial finger tapped its brim, asking for more,
more--
Shadowdancer was a black fang drawn in by Glenn Burnie's foot. Audmathus listened with a wondrous patience, the pits of his red eyes on nothing but the governor. This governor, who refused to recognize his new
place, who reasoned out his current predicament with a word-bloated tongue, had an answer for everything, and a thousand questions after; but the dark elf chose his retorts with discretion.
"That sword is a husk, Glenn Burnie," he informed. "It is useless weight. It might cut a creature, spill its blood, but beyond that, I've no need for it anymore. Perhaps it will answer your questions more thoroughly than I."
He would have had more to say.
Oone, two, three, Glenn Burnie listed;
one, two, three, all fine little organizations of thought in a place wrought with chaos and emptiness. But a more pressing audience introduced itself in that moment, as if Glenn Burnie's protracted announcement (
I need to get out, only after so much talk) had been a performative litany, a declaration to Golben that it must give reason for his escape, or stir the governor from his endless chatter--
That hum never stopped. The noise grew louder, more apparent, a soil-bound song that crawled through the hedges and set the thorns to shudder. The nearest mirror to them -- a tall sheet of reflective glass -- started to waver, quiver with a resonance that bent its polished surface. Audmathus could feel vibration crackling inside his teeth.
The mirror-glass did not shatter. Instead, like liquid parchment, it slipped out of its frame and dribbled out, mercurial and shining. When the mirror leaked onto the dirt, it was a sheet of quicksilver, errant droplets quickly crawling toward the larger puddle to coalesce and become one again. From the wet nucleus a figure began to emerge, silvered and faceless, the newly-shaping mirror-liquid taking on vicious hands and oversized feet. The figure was vaguely human, a glittering golem that began to trundle toward the two of them.
In Glenn Burnie's mind, the drow's voice was a struggling candle, physical volume eschewed for the immediacy of its mental simulacrum:
There are times your weapons must adopt the same love of self-preservation that your words proclaim. The tone was free of pomp and impudence.
This may be one of them, Glenn Burnie.The faceless mirror-silhouette let out a grating scream -- a nightmare of breaking glass, the tangle of conflicting frequencies -- and lunged for the governor.
* * * *
I am a wishing-goat; I shall grant you a wish.Stories were meant to come full-circle. Narrative perfection required it. Sometimes, stories lived and breathed on their own, as the Storyteller knew all too well. Like an infection, they could develop their own minute communities, not of plague-cells, but in the mind, in the soul, and the world in which those stories resided could be reshaped, refined, like the slug of red steel hammered diligently at the anvil. Paper and words were formidable blades and astute shields; they were armies all their own, forces of the intangible and conceptaul that could build new religions and raze temples of the old.
One story became another. And then another, and another still.
One
story became
many, many,
and many stories--
many, many stories--
could again become
one.
Beneath the broken Storyteller and the ethereal creature that cradled her, the earth started, shuddered, shifted. The motion was not grand or vast, but minute, forgettable.
The bloodied ground swelled, took a long, wheezing terrestrial breath--
--and then deflated to its original state.
The floor of Golben went flat again, as if nothing had happened at all.