Chapter 5 of ...Untitled Novel

It was like seeing into eternity. It thrilled him, ripping at him in a way that was almost like terror. It could only have been the sea, and it was stretched out in front of him like a desert. He became aware after some moments that he was seeing through another’s eyes, that he was standing in another body on the peak of a tall cliff several hundred meters above the water. The man’s body was like his, tall and strong, with a coarg jutting from the chest - but it wasn’t his. It was old, taught and wrinkled and from within he could feel the perpetual sense of exhaustion the man felt.

Ah’ro tried to look about him, but the old man’s body controlled the vision. He could only look into the sea, into the fog and harsh stormy distances where the greensky was still present. It was beautiful, and even with the old man’s eyes he felt as if there were no way he could be seeing this much at once. He felt the warmth and thickness of a set of robes that hung about him as they were buffeted by the breeze. He felt the icy finger of the wind on the old man’s cheek and the warming of the yellowsky at the same time, and he began to wonder how long this vision would last.

Then, suddenly, the man’s focus shifted and Ah’ro felt the uncomfortable nausea that came from being trapped within another body. It was as if something had turned his head for him and forced his eyes down. Of course, this was interesting. The old man was looking at a speck, or what looked like a speck, that had washed up on the rocky shore at the base of the cliff. It was moving. Before he had a chance to puzzle over what it might be, the old man’s body started doing things.

There were a series of what felt like small rumbles to Ah’ro then, coming from the man’s coarg. It was like the electricity he’d felt before, within his own chest, but this was different...more measured, controlled. He paid close attention to the way it felt, and what happened next. The old man’s hands flew up from his sides and met each other at the wrists, crossing perpendicularly. Then they slid apart, palm of the right hand falling over the other back of the left, until they met only at the thumbs and forefingers in a diamond. Then he felt the old man’s coarg pop, a gently crisp thing, and then there was a membrane of light within the space between his hands. He spread his hands apart then, keeping the shape and stretching the membrane...and at once Ah’ro understood what the old man had done.

Looking through the membrane he saw what only moments ago he’d thought of as a speck was actually a much larger thing. It was a man on a raft, a particularly ragged looking man on a rotten and rather submerged raft. He had the pale clay coloring of one of Pick’s people and similar clothing, although the clothing was almost nearly gone. His tattoo, however, looked just like the ones he’d seen on the chests of Yornif and Jorgen. A circular knot, split in the middle with the image of a spear. He was pulling himself from the raft and onto the rocks, and from the looks of him it seemed as if he might die right there.

The old man turned completely around and put his hands to his coarg. A low humming started within it, and he felt a sudden powerful connection to several other beings, like himself. And though Ah’ro had guessed now what this vision must mean, he was still surprised when he heard the old man’s voice resonate through that connection.

”My fellow God-Blood...we have a visitor.”

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“Ah’ro.” The voice cut through his vision and the blue man opened his eyes, startled. He blinked several times to shake the sleep loose from his eyes, and saw, sitting in the entrance to his little room, the expectant shape of Pick looking back at him.

Ah’ro took stock of himself, quickly, noticing the lack of feeling in his legs and lower torso. How long had he been laying here, in this cubby?

”Hello, Pick. Have I been asleep...long?”

”The daycycle of mourning is almost at an end. You’ve slept far longer than I had imagined you might, but perhaps that is the way it should be. You have been through many things, and your body is still healing. Do you feel rested?”

Ah’ro thought for a moment, remembering vividly his dream and wondering whether it was something he should tell Pick...indeed, of course, if it contained information the old man would need to know, he should...but for now he would keep it to himself. At least until he started getting the information he had requested, about the Reapers and the magic. The magic. He remembered the motion the old man had made, and the small puffs of power from his chest that had made the looking surface...and he decided he would try it later, as soon as he was alone.

”Yes, I am rested.” He watched Pick look about the room, at the spilled food on the ground, and then the old man nodded.

”Good. I’ve been by several times already this daycycle, and during none of them you’ve been awake. I need to show you something. Come, we will grab something to eat on the way.”

”I thought today was to be a day of mourning.”

“It is. For those at Grob, and Yuuka. The rest of us are fasting, but I don’t force that upon guests - especially guests who are healing from wounds.”

Ah’ro stood, and came to the entrance into the passageway, lowering his massive body through the small hole. “I will fast as well.”

”Very well. Come, I would like for us to go quickly. Most of my people are within their homescoops today, but I would not have them see us go where I’m taking you.”

The little man sped off down a passageway, the same Jorgen had used the night before, and the Ah’ro followed, feeling the numbness in his legs translate into pain -which he ignored.

They took several other passages, most sloping and curving upwards, until Ah’ro was certain he could feel some slight vibration in the floor. When he touched a wall he felt it as well. When he asked the old man about it, Pick said simply that it was wind against the mountainside.There was none of the glowing rock here - the passages were lighted with fire, and as such Pick had to light them with a torch he carried. It was clear that these passages were not those that were visited by many other people of the Scoop, but it was not because they were off limits...simply out of the way. Finally, in the middle of a long and flat corridor that looked plainer than any they’d seen before, that Pick turned to him.

”This is it.”

Ah’ro looked around. Was he missing something?

”This?”

”Yes.” The old man turned to an unlighted lamp on the wall and put his torch to it. It didn’t light. Pick kept the flame against it, however, and as the lamp heated, something else happend.

The wall around the lamp seemed to push in, collapsing toward the middle and opening into another, previously unseen passage. Ah’ro stood agape. “Magic?”

”No, no, nothing like that. Simply ingenuity. It’s designed in such a way that others won’t find it. The type of rock making up the entrance to the passage is one that changes shape when energy is applied in different places - and others would pass it by simply because they’d assume the lamp was faulty and they’d move on. Instead, the lamp enhances the energy from my torch and tells the rock to change shape, and in what way.”

A rock that changed its shape. The idea astounded Ah’ro - would it work the same if he poured his energy into it the way he’d used the glowing rock in his room the night before? He would have to find out - when he had time, though, because at the moment Pick was pushing himself into the little corridor and Ah’ro was eager to follow. Just what did the old man have to show him?

The smaller passage was dark, and the light from Pick’s torch was all that would have lighted the way, but for the fact that it stood in front of Pick’s body and the old man’s body was almost too big for the passage...which meant Ah’ro’s actually was too big. He had to duck his front shoulder and suck in his gut as he crawled along on his knees. He was slower this way, but it didn’t much matter. The passage opened up into the room it was leading to soon enough - so soon, in fact, that almost as soon as the giant blue man had crawled forward two or three body-lengths Pick had hurried to the end of the tunnel and popped out, spreading the light in a way that immediately brightened the rest of the tunnel - Ah’ro could finally see where he was going.

He pulled himself out of the hole just as Pick finished lighting all of the lamps in the chamber - and it was indeed a chamber, with a tall ceiling and walls that were covered in tapestries and several thousand similarly shaped obects. What he was supposed to be looking at, however, became immediately clear. In the center of the chamber, suspended by long cables, was a giant pair of luxurious metallic wings. They were held together at their bases by something extremely familiar...a coarg.

“Great L’aan.”

”This,” Pick said, “Is something I found, almost eight hundred season-cycles ago.” He cleared his old throat and sat down in a large chair that stood next to the wall.

“When I was a young man, I spent many of my season-cycles in politics, rallying people to my causes...one of which was to convince them that further settlement was needed - that simply being content with our place here at Roll would ultimately be our destruction. After a time they agreed, and we took our people far and wide and planted them everywhere we could comfortably live. Underground, mostly...at the time, the Hundif people to the west were doing the same thing. It didn’t work out for them, as they first incited the anger of the Reapers and were all basically extinct by then anyway.” He chuckled and yet the look he gave Ah’ro was not a jovial one. It was a baleful, horrible look. “You can see what good all the colonization has done, can’t you? I’ve sent them all to their deaths...but of course I could not have known that - I was still only a young man. Anyway, on one of these colonization trips I came along, and this was to build a city within the walls of the Ba-L’aan river. We spent tens of daycycles digging out the first of the homescoops, and on one of the daycycles I brushed away dirt that had covered something beautiful. Something that could only have been made from the coarg metal.

“It is when I cleared away the rest of the dirt that I found the wings...and the God-Blood they were attached to.”

Ah’ro breathed in - he had seen the coarg and recognized that it had come from one of his people, but had simply assumed the wings had been added later, after its removal from the body.

“Why are you showing me this?”

”Because these wings, if we can get them to work with your coarg...these wings will give us one of the most essential things we need in the fight against the Reapers. Flight.”

Ah’ro stared for several moments at the wings, then looked to Pick.

”But...”

”Yes, Ah’ro?” The old man watched the God-Blood intently, as if fearing refusal.

“The wings...they must connect...through the back, yes? And yet my coarg only escapes my body from the front.”

Pick cleared his throat. “The wings must be implanted...for them to connect properly, we will have to put them through your flesh, just behind and in between your shoulder blades...of course, that is if we can learn how to connect them. I have my theories, of course...this other God-Blood has done it somehow. Talk of how to implant them within your own coarg is useless, however, if I cannot remove them from their original owner’s coarg. The are fused in quite an...interesting manner.”

Ah’ro imagined the wings hanging out the back of his own coarg, limp and useless. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. But then again, the thought of flying...was much more pleasing to him.

“How do they...how did they work?”

”I don’t know that they did. The God-Blood did end up dead in a riverbank, after all. But I’ve done calculations, and the weight to lift ratio with a fast enough wing motion should have been more than enough to carry the weight of the God-Blood and much more, I should imagine. Why he failed or crashed is unknowable...perhaps he was attacked, even. But if they did work, and he did fly, it was most likely with the help of the magic contained within his coarg.”

”So you say that even if the wings could be attached to my coarg...there is no guarantee they would do anything at all. They could be useless. Is it necessary? Must the wings be used?”

Pick sighed, looking down.

”If there had been more of you, perhaps not. Perhaps a smattering of God-Blood and the magic they held would have been enough to hold the Reapers off. However, you are the only one, a newborn with very little knowledge of the magic that flows from your chest. And you would learn little more from the texts that have been left me regarding this magic - much of that which contained the more extensive information was taken when the God-Blood fled south, because they feared the knowledge would be used for evil if it ever found itse way into the hands of the enemy. Of course, it didn’t end up mattering...the Reapers are plenty strong without it.

So, for now, the answer to your question. Is it necessary? I’m afraid it is, as it must be. You would be little help to my people on the ground, as several of my guards and warriors could do the same work. We, however, cannot fly, and therefore the advantage will always go to the Reapers. A God-Blood in the air could change much of that.”

“And what if the wings do not fuse correctly, or if they fuse and then do not work? Can they be removed?”

”If they do not fuse, yes. However, if they do and do not work, the operation to remove them would kill you. We would have to cut the wings off just above the flesh, and you would be left with stumps. And I do not know how that would effect the power from your coarg. Let us say it is not...a desirable outcome. But, the risks must be taken. I’ve gone over all scenarios. If only we had...if only we had made contact with the God-Blood in the south.”

The lamentation reminded Ah’ro of his vision. He regretted, at the moment, the decision to keep the knowledge to himself. Unless, of course, the vision had been a fabrication of his sleep-deprived mind...but he did not think it so. It had been too real.

He moved toward the wings and began to stroke them, absently noting the fine craftsmanship of the metalwork. The surface felt as if it were water mid-flow, etched and inlaid with patterns that were both beautiful and suggestive of an ancient power. Beautiful.

“Pick, I have had a vision. It may mean much to your people, and to our struggle against the Reapers.”

”A vision? Of what sort?” The little green man hopped out of his seat and waited.

Ah’ro told Pick of his vision then, of his feeling of being trapped within another’s mind, with the arrival of the messenger from Pick’s man on the raft, and the message the man in the vision had relayed to the other God-Bloods.

“By L’aan, the man on the raft is Grundif. I recognize him by the description. He made it...by L’aan he made it,” Pick said after the tale had finished.
“Was there any more of the vision? Did they help him? Did they hear of our situation?”

Ah’ro shook his head. “I do not know. The vision ended with the message to the other God-Blood.”

”The message,” Pick mused. “Is this connection with the God-Bloods the reason you were able to see all of this, do you think?”

Ah’ro shrugged. “Perhaps. But it is good news, yes?”

”It will not help us, if that is what you mean. Even if Grundif tells them what is happening, they may still refuse to do anything. And if they did do something, the journey is much too far for their effort to impact much. The Reapers will have struck by then, I fear. By my estimations they will try to take Roll within the next thirty daycycles. If the time of Grundif’s voyage holds true for the return trip, the God-Blood would not reach us for another forty days. By then my people will have been slaughtered.”

”Unless I can help hold them off.”

Pick nodded.

”You are the factor in my estimations that I cannot predict. I do not want to put to much hope into you, but you are all L’aan has given me, and the fact that L’aan has given anyone at all sparks more hope within me than I’ve had the entire four hundred season-cycles I’ve been Lore-Father within this mountain. I cannot predict what your presence will bring us, but I believe it can be nothing but good. How much good is yet to be seen...and yet, without the wings...there is no more hope at all. Do you understand me?”

Ah’ro did, and as he touched the smooth metal of the wings he felt a great sense of responsibility rising in him. He would do this.

“We must fuse them as soon as possible,” he said, “If they will let me fly, I will need as much time learning with them as can be given.” And the doubt dropped away. He saw it as clearly as he’d seen from the eyes of the ancient God-Blood on the cliff-peak. He would have the wings, and with them he would fly.

With them he would battle the Reapers.