Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 41

~41~

Three hours before the destruction of Emeth'il

In his dreams, Tsu'min stood below a slab of white granite. The rock was taller than he was, wide enough for three people to lie down on in a line head-to-toe, deep enough for two to do the same. Behind it a wide river rushed into a green, semicircular bay.

There were twelve steps cut into the stone. He remembered that, although he'd been a child when he'd clung to his mother's skirts and watched a tall, white-haired Sh'ma ascend them.

My mother, he thought hazily. He rarely thought of his mother anymore. Her face swam in shadows. Her voice, when she spoke at all, was unintelligible.

The Sh'ma ascending the stone he recalled clearly. His father. Aimere. The first of the Sh'ma.

In his younger years Tsu'min had called out to his father in dreams, to warn him or to ask for his help or forgiveness. But he'd since learned to recognize the visions for what they were, and when they came he simply suffered and waited for them to end.

His father reached the top of the stone and began to speak.

He was telling them about the humans. That was why we were there, my mother and I—to be exhibited. That was always why we were there—right up until the day she died and my father realized that I wouldn't age and pass out of his life.

Tsu'min shivered with the memory, and the dream changed. The sky darkened. His mother's body grew skeletal and gray, as it had been when she died, and she faded into the darkness. His father's chest split open in a spray of blood, and he crumpled onto a crystal throne.

A nightmare, Tsu'min thought dimly. He separated his mind from the fear in his chest. Just a nightmare.

The sky turned black and the buildings burst into flame. He heard screaming, shrieking, watched people around him start to run. And then there was something behind him, a faceless being of smoke and heat, and he was running too, as fast as his little sandaled feet would take him but not fast enough. The heat was growing, and the smoke was in his face, his nose, his lungs.

Strange, he thought. Why?

He woke with a start. The canvas of his tent flapped above him, snapping as thick currents of air pushed it around. Heavy smoke flowed over his face. He looked for its source and found the coals of his campfire, smoking more strongly than expected in the wind.

Tsu'min's eyes watered, and he stood to get above the smoke. The sky glowed lavender and gray behind the white branches of the trees and their leaves. The air felt warm and humid, the ground cold and damp.

The white roofs of Emeth'il stood a mile away, unburned and untouched.

Tsu'min blinked off the last of the smoke. The Eshuar'a'me, they called the stone his father had stood upon. It lay in a plaza at Emeth'il's heart.

Tsu'min sat before his fire and fished a breakfast of fruit and rice gruel from a ceramic jar.

I know, he told whatever part of him had woven the dream. I know what you want me to do. He needed to speak frankly with Tyash, and he needed to warn the people of Emeth'il what was coming.

But his heart resisted. He'd gone so long without Mi'ame that he couldn't bear to leave her again.

Sucking the gruel from his fingers, he walked to the rise at the edge of his camp. Maegan Heramsun snored beneath her canvas not far away. Soren Goldguard had made camp somewhere farther off.

Emeth'il glimmered like a white serpent sleeping at the line between forest and sea.

The dragon will burn it all, Goldguard had said.

The necromancer was right.

Tsu'min had stood at the heart of Emeth'il with Mi'ame long ago, bringing word of the dragon's release and the call to arms. He had passed through again after Lomin's pogroms and seen the destruction that the Changebringer had wrought there.

The city had been burned before.

Tsu'min stayed on the knoll for hours. The sun drew closer and turned the thin strands of cloud across the sky from gray to pink to orange to white. The coals of the fire cooled and died. The gulls over the bay grew louder, and the wind calmed into a still dawn in which he heard only the sounds of the sea and the forest.

When the first orange light of the sun struck his face, he set off.

#

The plaza opened up before Tsu'min in a pool of wide gray stones. Long, flat riverboats lined the banks of the river behind it. Larger, rounder fishing vessels dotted the bay to the east. White and black gulls wandered everywhere—in the air, underfoot, floating upon the dark waters. Spotless white buildings garlanded in creeping vines and flowers stood around the plaza's edges. The music of a dozen buskers swept up and down in a constant, friendly contest.

Above it all rose the Eshuar'a'me.

The stone stood silent and empty, the bier of a public discourse that had died long ago.

Tsu'min walked to it.

Twelve steps carved into the granite lay before him. He felt the warmth of his mother's legs, the coldness of his father's eyes. The stone was covered in the waste of gulls; it hadn't been used except by the birds for longer than Tsu'min cared to guess.

He brought the green bead around his wrist to his lips.

When his foot struck the first step, the plaza began to quiet. The musicians laid their fingers over their instruments. The traders stood in silence at their creaking stalls. The young stared wide-eyed at the stone, their games forgotten.

By the time he reached the third step, all was silent save the gulls.

Tsu'min ascended slowly, let word whisper through the crowd of merchants and buskers and buyers like sparks between storm clouds. The birds upon the stone vacated in squawking protest.

The morning sun beat bright and hot upon his head, and he breathed deeply.

He was ready.

"People of my father," Tsu'min began in Sh'ma. "Today I bring you a warning."

The Emeth'ma prickled his skin with their eyes. Their white clothes rippled in the wind.

The gulls called.

The sea crashed.

The river flowed.

And for the first time in many years, Tsu'minNar'oth spoke to a gathering of his father's people.