Endangered Ch. 12

"Not much further now, dragon," Reyla spoke with chilling timing. "I did survive that war, to my own surprise. It ended in betrayal, stalemate, and atrocity. Our clan was ruined, more than decimated, though it was always framed as a pyrrhic victory. Both sides still claim to have won, even a few thousand years later when only fools should care. I had already found hints that my search might bear fruit, so I continued my efforts and began to travel too. A few decades later, Mother offered me the dubious honour of a high position in her court once filled by my dead older sister. I refused, and suddenly our animosity was given sunlight to grow in. Things became uneasy between us, so I removed myself from high society and began preparing my departure. I formally cut ties with the clan a century later, stealing away with knowledge the old bitch had long forgotten, or never bother to learn."

It was the internal angles, Chris thought. They looked okay dead-on. But in the corners of his vision, they were off, somehow less or more than they should be as if the shapes to either side were sapping them away. The pattern seemed to bulge out at him or shrink suddenly. It happened seemingly at random, but never when he gave it his focus. It drew the eye, and disquieted the mind. Everything was so similar, an endless repetition of geometry folding into itself, and also back out.

"So I journeyed for many, many years. I lived amongst humans for a while, and I dabbled here and there with forces better left alone. I felt another war stirring on the wind, and so I began my great work. Of course it was not nearly so large back then, and much easier to hide."

"Reyla, what is it? What is this crazy place?"

She laughed again, suddenly girlish, with a secret kept too long to herself. Her beautiful grey eyes seemed bright in the dim, curving passage. She kept his hand but began walking backward so that they were face to face. One of her expressive dark ears flicked, and she licked her lips in anticipation.

"It is I," the ancient elf smirked. "Really, Chris, you might have figured some of it out by now."

The endless curve abruptly sharpened, and Reyla coaxed him through a huge hexagonal portal to the left. Chris would have sworn it wasn't there from just meters away.

They were in a very strange room of sorts, the pattern ever present in every facet. Ever perfect and wrong in equal measure.

The chamber was an even larger hexagon, with two other openings leading away into unnatural dimness, one upward, one downward. But Chris barely gave them a glance, his eyes were locked on the object at the centre of the room.

Metallic, and somehow fibrous. Or perhaps a crystalline thing. It spun there, as alien as a neutron star. A true nexus, holding his mind's eye like a fly on fresh glue paper.

Lazily suspended between great tetrahedra jutting seamlessly from floor and ceiling, the mysterious object slowly spun. It never truly touched either tip that he could see, but the energy it gave off was real enough, washing over his senses like a lighthouse beacon in the dark.

Flash, flash, flash.

The room, and Chris' entire awareness seemed to tunnel down toward it, yet registered no lasting detail. A forever-folding, forever growing aberration of repeated geometry.

It pulsed a gentle, silver-toned light in exact offbeat to the magic. So mesmerising was it, that Chris' perspective jaunted back and forth. One blink and it rotated as he watched. The next it was stationary, while he and the entire structure spun around and around it in perpetual orbit.

"Beautiful," Chris heard himself murmur.

"Thank you," Reyla squeezed his hand. Intentionally or not, the stimulus provided a breaking in the pattern's hold.

Chris refocused, blinking blearily afterimages from his eyes. It could have been days for all he knew. In the moment he glanced to ask for an explanation, Chris registered the figures encased behind the tessellated wall at their backs. Words died on his tongue, and he spun to see that symmetry was indeed given holy precedence in this place.

Annabel's vivid retelling, and Immi's dark mutterings started to make a sick sense.

Four, three, and crowded-six ... no, five. Naked, perfect copies of Reyla embedded in the bizarre structure. Held in some unknown medium behind the repeating shapes, awaiting ... what?

Twenty four modest, yet sumptuous dark tits, unstirred by the rise and fall of breath.

Twelve pairs of grey eyes, all staring blankly from behind a mathematically perfect cage. All staring at the churning heart of the pattern.

The thirteenth pair looked unerringly at him, and her ancient heart was in those pretty eyes.

***

Birds seldom fly North into the teeth of winter, but these two were not your average birds. Their flock was only two, and their imperative was not one of migration.

They barely stopped to rest, uncairing of rain, snow, or sunshine. If they did, it was not to peck and scratch at grain or tossed breadcrumbs. Nor did the red-eyed pair gorge themselves on the fleeting bounties of the shoreline, or trill to each other in fervent mating affirmation.

The doves dropped unsuspected upon isolated farmers, fishermen, and one very unlucky woman who had done nothing except decide to wash her clothes by a stream in anticipation of a job interview.

They left inexplicable corpses in their trail. A thin string of dead so dissociated by road, mountain, and boarder that no one ever did connect the dots.

Eventually they no longer flew together, for each had their own destination. Were they not entirely possessed, the mated doves would not have willingly separated. But their brief, instinctual reluctance was overpowered by the domination set upon them thousands of miles ago.

One veered slightly west, headed for a quiet, unassuming farmyard on an alpine prairie.

The other continued on, north and east. It flew over great tracts of cropland, forests, and bustling cities. Its quarry was eventually located crouched at the bottom of the steep, foreboding gully, claimed and tainted long ago.

The long-limbed, unshorn creature barely glanced up as the dove alighted in the tines of its one unbroken antler, too intent on gulping down marrow from the grizzled bone it had just laid open between two gorey rocks.

"And what do you want?" The shaggy fellow eventually rumbled in a voice thick and cracked with disuse. He leered up at the bird through lank, twig-tangled hair that might have once been brown. Its eyes were sickly yellow, too large, and more goat's than man's. It tossed one half of its calciferous meal down toward the little gurgling stream. The undamaged side of his face twitching at the pleasant, hollow clatter it stirred before it came to rest, just one amongst thousands and thousands.

The dove fluttered down beside the creature on the great, alter-like slab of soiled stone, dangerously close to gore-flecked, strangle-fingered hands. The bird cocked its head side to side, beady red eyes seeming brighter in the thin light at the bottom of this jagged knife slash deep in the wooded hills. It began pecking strangely in the filth, then scratching with its little feet. After pausing to inspect its work, the demon-dove gave up and hopped toward the nearest midden of bleached bones.

The man-thing growled, but the bird only dumped fizzing excrement by way of reply. That seemed to settle the matter of desecration for now.

The feathered messenger began a lengthy, flapping process of selecting manageable bone fragments off the heap, then arduously dragging and arranging them on the stone. It was nearly crushed in a rattly avalanche, but the loosened pile yielded appropriately sized material far more easily after that.

It took a long time, for the task was unsuited to a small bird, and some of the bones were very large, deer, bear, and perhaps something in between.

"My ... tri ... umph, triumph, yes," the forest nightmare ponderously sounded out each roughly formed word when it was done. "My triumph is almost at hand. Soon. Follow the bird. Go quiet."

"And why, should I, help you, Radek?" Azenoth finally looked up to address the winged minion, suspicion in his hunched posture.

The eared-dove cood indignantly, puffing its chest feathers and bobbing its little head. It clearly cared nothing that Azenoth could wring its neck in an instant as it paced angrily before its squatting audience. Eventually, it hopped onto the bone words and began furiously kicking or buffeting them about with its wings until they hinted roughly at just two.

"Godling bones."

***