Midnight tides

Steeply sloped, the black wall of rock reached up into the light. The currents swept across its rippled face with unceasing ferocity, and all that clung to it to draw sustenance from that roiling stream was squat, hard-shelled and stubborn. Vast flats stretched out from the base of the trench wall, and these were scoured down to bedrock. Enormous tangled islands of detritus, crushed and bound together by unimaginable pressures, crawled across the surface, like migrating leviathans in the flow of dark water.

Brys stood on the plain, watching the nearest tumbling mass roll past. He knew he was witness to sights no mortal had ever seen, where natural eyes would see only darkness, where the pressures would have long since killed corporeal flesh descending from the surface far above. Yet here he stood, to his own senses as real, as physical, as he had been in the palace. Clothed, armoured, his sword hanging at his hip. He could feel the icy water and its wild torrent in a vague, remote fashion, but the currents could not challenge his balance, could not drag him off his feet. Nor did the cold steal the strength from his limbs.

He drew breath, and the air was cool and damp – it was, he realized, the air of the subterranean chamber of the Cedance.

That recognition calmed his heart, diminished his disorientation.

A god dwells in this place. It seemed well suited for such a thing. Primal, fraught with extremes, a realm of raw violence and immense, clashing forces of nature.

Another mass of wreckage shambled past, and Brys saw, amidst pale, skeletal branches and what seemed to be bundles of unravelled rope, flattened pieces of metal whose edges showed extruded white tendrils. By the Errant, that metal is armour, and those tendrils are…

The detritus tumbled away. As it did, Brys saw something beyond it. Stationary, blockish, vertical shapes rearing from the plain.

He walked towards them.

Dolmens.

This beggared comprehension. It seemed impossible that the plain before him had once known air, sunlight and dry winds.

And then he saw that the towering stones were of the same rock as the plain, and that they were indeed part of it, lifting as solid projections. As Brys drew nearer, he saw that their surfaces were carved, an unbroken skein of linked glyphs.

Six dolmens in all, forming a row that cut diagonally from the angle of the trench wall.

He halted before the nearest one.

The glyphs formed a silver latticework over the black stone, and in the uneven surface beneath the symbols he saw the hints of a figure. Multi-limbed, the head small, sloping and squat, a massive brow ridge projecting over a single eye socket. The broad mouth appeared to be a row of elongated tendrils, the end of each sporting long, thin fangs, and it was closed to form an interlocking, spiny row. Six segmented arms, two – possibly four – legs, barely suggested in the black stone’s undulations.

The glyphs shrouded the figure, and Brys suspected they formed a prison of sorts, a barrier that prevented the emergence of the creature.

The silver seemed to flow in its carved grooves.

Brys circled the dolmen, and saw other shapes on every side, no two alike, a host of nightmarish, demonic beasts. After a long moment’s regard, he moved on to the next standing stone. And found more.

The fourth dolmen was different. On one side the glyphs had unravelled, the silver bled away, and where a figure should have been there was a suggestive indentation, a massive, hulking creature, with snaking tentacles for limbs.

The mute absence was chilling. Something was loose, and Brys did not think it was a god.

Mael, where are you? Are these your servants?

Or your trophies?

He stared up at the indentation. The absence here was more profound than that which reared before him. His soul whispered… abandonment. Mael was gone. This world had been left to the dark, torrid currents and the herds of detritus.

‘Come for another one, have you?’

Brys whirled. Ten paces away stood a huge figure sheathed in armour. Black, patinated iron studded with rivets green with verdigris. A great helm with full cheek guards vertically slatted down to the jaw-line, reinforced along the bridge of the nose to the chin. The thin eye slits were caged in a grille mesh that extended down beneath the guards to hang ragged and stiff on shoulders and breastplate. Barnacles crusted the joints of arms and legs, and tendrils of brightly coloured plants clinging to joins in the armour streamed in the current. Gauntlets of overlapping plates of untarnished silver held on to a two-handed sword, the blade as wide as Brys’s hands were long. The sword’s blunt end rested on the bedrock. From those metal-clad hands, he now saw, blood streamed.