Wound of the Sky

Song of the Crooked Way

Before the sword could bite even one hairsbreadth into my throat, the Bleak One was beside me. Like a great wind sweeping away a handful of leaves, the creature brushed aside my master's hand, and struck her with such force that she was lifted off her feet and thrown to the far side of the clearing. Her sword dropped into the dust. She did not rise.

"She should have stopped bothering," said the Bleak One sourly. It kicked aside the blade at its feet. "You things are frail and stupid."

I fell to my knees, and wept. The might of the Bleak One's storm shook the mountain as it rumbled toward my home, and I knew that I could not fight against its powers. What was worse, even Master Winding Path had given me up. I knew that what she had done was desperate, and that she had acted only with the thought of saving our people from the demon's wrath. Still, I knew that if Silver Peak had stood in my place, she would have had no need to hold a blade to his throat.

I thought of Silver Peak condescending, scolding, pouring out blame on me. I remembered the faces of the faithful peering through the master's doorway, fixing me with looks of fear and disgust. I turned over the sound of Master Winding Path's voice, as she called me 'Disciple'. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to prove myself, even if only once. The fury of it thickened around me, and became dark.

I gathered myself up, opened Silver Peak's stolen tome, and began to trace the names that would bind the Thirty-Three Bringers of Silence. I would summon them myself. They would quiet the storm. They would stop the creature. They would destroy Wound of the Sky.

They would destroy me too. Perhaps, I thought, it was just as well.

The winds died down. The creature went quiet. Its arms flopped lazily to its sides, and it ambled a few steps closer. I thought for sure that it would scatter dust over the names, or lunge forward to strike me down. It did not. It only seemed to watch my writing. As it did, the light of a cruel pleasure spread over its cold face.

"So the names of the Earth call to the void?" it sang. "Your soil sprouts death? Your minds go to vapor? You heart is an explosion?" It snapped its teeth together twice, blinked one eye, then the other, and stared down at me. "Will you," it asked, "destroy yourself with your own magic?"

I thought the creature must be testing my resolve. I glowered back at it, nodded gravely, and drew one hand across my throat, as if cutting with a knife.

The Bleak One beamed in delight. Its body began to tremble. It was laughing. It laughed softly at first, then louder, until it cackled in gusts that tore the tattered skies.

"Good," it said. "Good. I hate this body, what it feels, what it does. Open the door that goes out from life. Release us to the outside, to the elsewhere, to the winds. We will go together." The Bleak One knelt down at my side, and fixed me in its hollow sky-gaze. "Here," it said softly. "You have forgotten a part. Let me help."

Then, to my amazement, the Bleak One took my hand, and began to gently guide it through the strokes of the forbidden names that would destroy us both. Its cold seeped into my fingers until I could barely feel, but its grasp was steady and calm. We wrote silently in the dust, hand-in-hand, until we came to the thirty-third name.

Just before the final stroke, I paused, and let my eyes sweep over the great and terrible names written in the dust. The script was airy and wild, but clear as the lights of the sky. I looked down at my trembling hands and realized that I could never have scribed so smoothly on my own; I was looking at the work of the Bleak One's own hand. It was powerfully strange, and vividly beautiful, and it seemed to move with its own life, just like the strong magic of Master Winding Path's own words.