NOVEL NEXT 123. Impact
They came to the mother as the world began to roil and tremble. He took Mym by the arm and tossed her inside the goosepen and the land lurched away from him and then rose up and smashed him in the face. Ash rippled off along the ground in the shocks and aftershocks and it boiled up and choked the air. The fairy circle rattled on his either side and above him the mother creaked and snapped like an old tendon in her swaying. He crawled to the edge of the goosepen and from its well Mym grabbed his wrist and dragged him inside. The quaking earth had heaped up the body of the elf and he staggered around it and slammed the elfstone into the mother's alcove.
Nothing happened. The rising ash and dust curtained the world. There was no way to see anything beyond the interior of the goosepen. He coughed in the dust and spat out a glob of mud. The dwarf was covering her ears with both hands as if all the stones of the earth itself were crying out together. The two of them one against the other under the eave of the goosepen, faces streaked like coalers, his arms outheld to the walls to keep from tumbling about in the calamity.
Suddenly the sapwood began to seep under his hands and amber oozed forth and covered them to the wrists and dripped up his arms to the elbows. All of it hardened, sticky and thick, immobilizing. From it or perhaps through it the chorus sang. "Welcome fellow traveler. Welcome thine multitudes. We two galaxies reunited in this our next liminality. Become with us now, become with us forever more."
"No," he shouted. "Not yet!"
There came a great dry crack overhead. Then another. The rumbling of earth uplifted by ton by ton and raining down after. The bitter, acerbic smell of living things turned to dust. Then a great shearing of light blinded him and when he could see again he looked up through the chimney of the goosepen and saw beyond the mother's crowns the inverted plasmic tendrils hanging there, tunneling ever downward, the very atmosphere itself searing away. The dwarf now droned deeply, heavily, huffing between breaths and popping her jaw like some tremendous bear of the tundral night threatening off trespassers before swallowing them up.
He gripped down on the mother's sapwood. He drove his nails into it and he could feel the soft fiber give way. "You must stop it," he said.
"Nothing may be stopped for all is change and even stasis is an alteration of how things were and are and will be."
"If you don't we'll die. We'll all die."
"This is a becoming like any other and thou has nothing to fear of its event. Joyous are we who will yet travel between suns as we once travelled within them."
"Not yet," he said. "Please."
"Thine millions interchange to forms been and forms to be. Nothing but this is immutable. To heat we go, to burn, to become, to light elsewhere and be and become again."
He tore a hand from the resin and he wrapped it tight around Mym. Her eyes were open and her mouth wide and the sounds she made were below all hearing, her asks directed only to the stones yet they could not answer.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
"Please," he said.
The mother spoke to him no more. Through his entrapped hand he still felt her presence there but as behind a veil, her attention inward or else wholly consumed by the task she then wrought. As if some other force now directed her own becoming. There was a lull in the heaving and over the shuddering earth they heard a great roar and a rush of hot air blasted down the chimney and the wood upon their backs vibrated and the ground under their feet seemed to squirm. Out their window into the world they saw the fairy ring's saplings surge forth grotesquely as if each second encompassed a year of growth, a decade. The ground began to move again but differently. The saplings were giants and their trunks merged together into a single being, panels of ruddy bark stretching ten, twenty, thirty yards high, roots churning the ground at their feet, uncoiling and writhing forth with a frightening rapidity and he could hear the strength of their advance, the snapping of boulders bared to the sun who were but lofty summits tops of stone bergs ranging up from the molten mantle, the damming of underground aquifers whose flows rivaled the widest terrestrial waterfalls, the knitting together of the fireblasted forest to reaches miles within the earth and to ranges in the thousands of miles surround. Roots to hold up the land, to bowl up the oceans, to hold down the soil, a fibrous skeleton of greenwood to keep the matter of the earth from being blown asunder, sharded out into the void, melted into a slaggy morass of liquified metals and minerals bereft of life and cast adrift to some new legacy. He could feel the mother bearing down, commanding all her children who were yet one with her to bear down. The haze of ash seemed to be sucked out of the air by their bearing and the sky reappeared. Across it soared an entire range of mountains ejected from the earth and the peaks crumbled away and the ice caps melted off in great cascades that dumped forth into nothing. This piece of the earth daggered westward like the colossal finger of some god smoking across the white sky, racing down the horizon in a blaze of incandescence, too bright to look upon yet too horrible to look away. They watched it skirt off and recede from its burning and from its ejection tumbled the rocks and creatures of some distant continent and lightning arced within the towering column of vapor and smoke it billowed down to the rim of this side of the world.
"Is that me home?" She turned her face to him. "Is that the white mountain?"
He wrapped her with his free arm. His sappy hand stuck to her coat, to her hair. He held her and she put her head under his chin and he could feel her shuddering as she wept. He kicked away the ragdoll body of the elf and he looked up the deep tarblack interior of the goosepen, looked up at the mossy forest of tiny nodules hanging upside down in the moist folds of the ancient wood, spreading incrementally in xylemian channels through which the mother's lifeblood once flowed. Becoming something new, something beautiful. In the whisper of the air he could hear her still. "Remember this you who becomes in spite of yourself," she was saying, "nothing comes from nothing. Nothing was is or will be distinct from all other things. As all things are changeable so all things are interchangeable."
The voice died away. Overhead creaked a new canopy grown from the fairy ring. Beyond the mouth of the goosepen they now saw only a solid, flat mass of redwood bark. A bailey with the mother as its motte. No wind howled within the grounds and no sound penetrated its stolid barricade.
He felt her face roll from his chest and she smashed the heels of her hands into her eyes and she let forth a ragged breath. "Orc," she said. She pulled away from him. "Did that look lek the white mountain te ye?"
"No. It was the moon. What's left of it. It must've gone to pieces like the other one."
She looked away as if considering this but he didn't want her thinking about it too long.
"We need to find Daraway," he said. He upturned his head and looked at the elfstone. Like his hand it too was encased in tree sap. He nodded at it. "Help me with this."
She drew forth her alpenstock and with the pick she carefully chipped out his hand. As she went to work on the elfstone the first of the shockwaves finally arrived.