‘You’re getting predictable, Wisest,’ the elder chided.
‘It weighs heavily on my mind,’ he grunted. ‘And hers will weigh heavily on the ground.’ He stalked past, trying to ignore the grandfather’s stare. ‘Once I pick up the scent again.’
‘It’s been days since you last had it.’
‘It’s important.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she will lead me to Lenk.’
‘Which is important why?’
‘Because Lenk is the key to finding meaning again.’
‘How?’
‘Because …’ He stopped and whirled about, not surprised to see the rock empty of residence, but growling all the same. ‘That’s what you told me.’ He turned and scowled at the elder leaning against the ravine’s wall. ‘Were you lying to me?’
‘Not entirely, no,’ the grandfather replied with a roll of effulgent shoulders. ‘I had simply thought you might lose interest by now, as all pups do.’
‘Pups aren’t big enough to smash heads, Grandfather.’
‘Size is relative to age.’
‘No matter how old you are, I’m still big enough to crush your head.’
‘All right, then, size is irrelevant to someone with no head to crush, which is a benefit of being very old.’
‘And dead.’
The grandfather held up a single clawed finger. ‘Point being, I had thought you would have found something else to do by now.’
‘Something else …’
‘Something else.’
He spared a single, hard scowl for the grandfather before shouldering past. ‘Something other than finding a reason to live? I suppose I could always die.’ He snorted. ‘But someone had a problem with that.’
‘I meant finding a reason that doesn’t involve killing so many things. You’ve tried that already. Has it brought you any closer to happiness?’
‘I’m not looking for happiness. I’m looking for a reason to keep going.’
‘The sun? The trees? There is much here, Wisest, far away from the sorrows that have made you unhappy. A Rhega could live well here, wanting for nothing, without humans of any kind.’
‘And do what? Listen to you all day? Have pleasant conversations about the weather?’
‘Would that be so bad?’ The grandfather’s voice drifted to his ear frills softly. ‘It is rather sunny, today, Wisest … Have you noticed?’
The whisper in the elder’s voice quelled the roar rumbling in Gariath’s chest, so he merely snorted. ‘I’ve noticed.’
‘When did you last see this much life?’
Gariath glanced around. The forest was silent. The trees did not blow. ‘There is nothing but death here, Grandfather.’
He didn’t bother to look up to see. He could feel the elder’s frown as sharp as any rock.
‘The stench is hard to miss.’ His nostrils quivered, lips curled back in a cringe at the scent. ‘The trees are trying to cover it up, but there’s the stink of dead bodies everywhere. Bones, mostly, some other smellier things …’
‘There is also life, Wisest. Trees, some beasts, water …’
‘There’s something, yeah. I’ve been smelling it for hours now.’ Gariath took in a deep breath, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Broken rocks, dried-up rivers, dead leaves and dusk.’
‘There was so much before … so much,’ the spirit whispered. ‘I used to hear it everywhere. And now … death?’ He sounded confused, distracted. ‘But why so much?’
‘There would be more,’ Gariath growled. ‘Good deaths, too. But someone distracted me from killing the pointy-eared one.’
‘Would that be me or the roach she shoved up your nose?’ The grandfather chuckled. ‘If it means there’s one less dead body on this island, I won’t object to it.’
‘You were the one to tell me she was going to kill Lenk!’ Gariath snarled in response. ‘If she hasn’t already, she’s still planning to.’
‘And if she has? Then what?’
‘You’re the elder. You’re supposed to know!’
‘My point remains,’ the grandfather said. ‘What do you suppose happens when you find the humans again? Given it any thought?’
‘By following him this far, I’ve found Grahta and I’ve found you. That’s a start.’
‘But where is the end? Will you just go chasing ghosts your whole life, Wisest?’
He glanced up, regarding the elder with hard eyes. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Grandfather?’
He blinked and the elder was gone. He turned about and saw him perched on the lip of the ravine, staring down the river.
‘I want you to know, Wisest,’ he whispered, ‘that what you find may not be what you’re looking for.’
Gariath raised an eye ridge as the elder’s figure quivered slightly. The sunlight seemed to shine through his body a little more clearly, as though golden teeth seeped into his spectral flesh and devoured his substance, bit by bit.
‘So much was lost here, Wisest. Sometimes I wonder if anything can really be found. But the scent, since you mentioned it …’
There was reluctance in Gariath’s step as he walked toward the elder. ‘Grandfather?’
‘This place was not dug,’ he said. ‘Not by natural hands, anyway.’
‘What?’
‘Suffering was more plentiful back then,’ the grandfather replied, his voice whispery as his body faded briefly and reappeared in the river. ‘Swift death was the sole mercy, and a rare one, at that. Many more died in agony … many more.’
‘Back when?’
‘We didn’t want any part of it,’ the grandfather continued, heedless of his company, ‘but maybe that’s just how the Rhega are destined to die … not by our own hands, our own fights. What is it we were even fighting for? I can’t remember …’
Gariath stopped and watched as the elder trudged farther down the river, growing hazier with each step. Every twitch of the dragonman’s eyelid saw the grandfather fading more and more, leaving a bit of himself in each ray of sunlight he stepped into and out of.
Gariath was tempted to let him go, to keep walking that way until there was nothing left of him, nothing heavy enough that he would have to drop, nothing substantial enough about him that could ache.
He watched the grandfather go, watched him disappear, leaving him in the riverbed …
Alone again.
‘Grandfather!’ he suddenly cried out.
The outline stopped at the edge of a sunbeam, all that remained of him being the single black eye he turned upon Gariath. The younger dragonman approached him warily, head low, scrutinising, ear frills out, wary.
‘Grandfather,’ Gariath asked, barely louder than a whisper, ‘how long have you been awake?’
‘For … quite some … no! No! You won’t send me away like that!’
This time, when Gariath noticed the elder beside him again, he was defined, flesh full and red, eyes hard and black. The elder gestured farther down the river with his chin.
‘Up ahead.’
‘What?’
Gariath glanced up, saw nothing through the beams of light. When he looked back to his side, the water stirred with a ripple and nothing more. The grandfather was up ahead, trudging through the river, vanishing behind each beam of light.
‘What’s ahead?’
‘A reason, Wisest, if you would follow … and see.’
Gariath followed, without particularly knowing why, save for the urge to keep the elder in sight, to keep him from fading behind the walls of sun. With each step he took, his nostrils filled with strange scents, not unfamiliar to him. The chalky odour of bone was prevalent, though that didn’t tell Gariath much; he doubted that he could go anywhere on the island without that particular stink.
Thus, he was not particularly surprised when he spied the skeleton, its great white foot looming out of sunlight. It was titanic, the river humbly winding its way beneath the dead creature, flowing with such a soft trickle to suggest it was afraid the bleached behemoth might stir and rise at any moment.
Gariath found that not particularly hard to believe as he stalked alongside it, ducking beneath its massive splayed leg, winding between its shattered ribs, approaching the great, fishlike skull.
His eyes were immediately drawn to the massive hole punched through its head, a jagged rent far wider than the smooth round sockets that had been the creature’s eyes. Its bones bore similar injuries: cracks in the ribs, gashes in the femur, the left forearm bent backward behind a spine that crested to challenge the height of the ravine as the right one reached forward.
Towards what, though?
The great dead thing, when it had been slightly greater and not so dead, had stopped with its arm extended, skeletal fingers withered in such a way to suggest that it had reached for something and failed to seize it.
He stared back down the ravine, noting the cut of the rock: too rough to be wrought by careful tools and delicate chiselling, too smooth to have been made by any natural spirit. Rather, it was haphazardly hewn, as if by accident, as though some great thing had fallen …
And was dragged, he thought, looking back to the cracked skull, or dragged itself through until …
‘This land is not our land. Not anymore.’
Gariath looked up and saw the elder crouched upon the fishlike skull, staring at the rent in the bone intently.
‘This island is a cairn.’
‘Those dark stains upon the rock,’ Gariath said. ‘They are—’
‘Blood,’ the elder answered. ‘Flesh, spilling out, sloughing off, tainting the earth as this thing’s screams tainted the air when it dragged itself away from the weapons that had shattered its legs and broken its back.’
Gariath looked to the gaping jaws, the rows upon rows of serrated teeth, the shadows cast in the expanse of its fleshless maw.
‘What did it scream?’
‘Same thing all children scream for … its mother and father.’
He did not ask if they had come to save their titanic offspring, did not even want to think what kind of creatures could have sired something akin to this tremendous demon. He knew he should have looked away, then, away from the mouth that was suddenly so pitiably silent, away from the eyes that he could see vast, empty and straining to find the liquid to brim with tears. He tried to look away, forced his stare to the earth.
But it was impossible. Impossible not to hear the cries of two voices moaning for their mother. Impossible not to wonder if they had died screaming for their father. Impossible not to see their eyes, so wide, so vacant, their breath vanished in the rain. Impossible not to—
‘No.’
His fist followed his snarl, striking against the skull and finding an unyielding, merciful pain that ripped through his mind, bathing vision and voice in endless ringing red.
‘Why this, Grandfather?’ he asked. ‘Why show me?’
‘I have heard it said,’ the elder replied coldly, ‘that all life is connected.’ His laugh was short, unpleasant. ‘Stupidity. From mouths that repeated it over and over so that no one may speak long enough to point out their stupidity.’ He crawled across the skull, staring down into the skull. ‘It’s deaths that are connected, Wisest. Never forget that. One life taken is another one fading, one life gone and another one vanishes because of its absence. Each one more horrible, more senseless than the last.’
‘I don’t understand, Grandfather.’
‘You do, you’re just too stupid to realise it, too scared to remember it.’ He stared down at the dragonman, eyes hard, voice harder. ‘Your sons, Wisest.’
Gariath’s eyes went wide, his hands clenched into fists.
‘Don’t.’
‘They died, horribly.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Senselessly.’
‘Grandfather …’
‘And you would so willingly follow them. A senseless, pointless, worthless death.’
No reply came this time but a roar incomprehensible of everything but the anger and pain melded together behind it. Gariath flung himself at the skeleton, scaling up the ribs, pulling himself onto the spine and leaping, vertebra over giant vertebra, toward the skull.
The grandfather regarded him quietly before he tilted just slightly to his left and collapsed into the rent, disappearing into shadow.
‘You brought me here to mock me? Them?’ Gariath roared, approaching the cavernous hole. ‘To show me this monument of death?’
‘A monument, yes,’ the grandfather’s voice echoed from inside, ‘of death, yes … but whose, Wisest?’
‘Yours …’ Gariath snarled, leaning over and into the hole. ‘AGAIN!’
The elder gave no reply and Gariath did not demand one, did not have the sense to as he was struck suddenly, by the faintest, lingering memory of a scent, but recoiled as though struck by a fist. He reeled back, blinking wildly, before thrusting his face back down below and inhaling deeply, choking back the foul staleness within to filter and find that scent, that odiferous candle that refused to extinguish itself in the dark.
‘Rivers …’ he whispered.
‘Rocks …’ the elder replied.
‘A Rhega died here,’ he gasped.
He felt the rent beneath his grip, felt the roughness of it. This was no clean blow, no gentle tap that had caved in the beast’s skull. The gash was brutal, messy, cracked unevenly and laden with jagged ridges and deep, furrowed marks.
Claw marks, he recognised. Bite marks.
‘A Rhega fought here.’ He stared into the blackness. ‘Who, Grandfather? Who was it?’
‘Connected,’ the elder murmured back, ‘all connected.’