The Green Lands
٤٣ Gerstesykli: ١٥ Days after the Red Storm at Westsong
The air was eye-wateringly crisp. Red light hung along the trees amidst the grasses. The sky was a blinding blue, fading to purple, with glowing eyes hung behind each bank of clouds.
Lashjuk saw herself standing beneath a massive willow tree whose limbs were hung with thin tendrils of deep crimson.
“I suggest we move onto the road before they wake,” she heard her body say.
She obliged, moving in the direction she saw her own hand point.
There was a muted rustling—so sibilant that it made her eyes water—somewhere behind her in the tall grasses. She resisted the urge to turn and face it, likewise the slightly weaker urge—to run from it as fast as her legs would carry her.
Once they were on the road, she looked about herself. Green lay all around her—a dream of summer, held in unchanging splendor. She turned to regard herself—her body controlled by another as-yet-unnamed entity. She found it hard to meet her own eyes. Looking down, she noted something that caused her heart to stop.
“Something troubles you, Lashjuk?” Her own voice sounded genuinely interested, if not outright concerned.
Yes, something troubled her. She had seen what she now thought might be the truth of her new companion. Lashjuk’s body did not cast a shadow of its own. Instead, the immense black bulk of a serpent the size of an oak tree stretched out below her body’s feet. At its head was something else entirely—a form she did not at once recognize.
“I… I see you,” she said at last.
Her body blinked in confusion, then followed Lashjuk’s gaze, and laughed. The laugh was honest and surprised, but not in and of itself a sinister sound.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” her body said at last. “Come to that, there may be another benefit to being here.” She reached out a hand to where the true Lashjuk stood beside her. “Let us see…”
Lashjuk accepted the hand. Odd and unreal as it was to reach for her own body, she made contact with solid flesh, which was something. She wasn’t certain if this discovery should make her feel surprise, relief, revulsion, or fear. She didn’t have time to consider the matter overmuch.
“Puehv gosek oann cruzeteek gosek. Zul lev zyn diyth puehv ponfehv,” she heard herself say.
A warmth passed through her. She felt herself drawn forward, led by the hands—her hands—leading her… it was too much. Her mind couldn’t make sense of it… not in a way that didn’t make her feel whatever the mental equivalent of cross-eyed was.
She felt a familiar sense—one of homecoming and relief she hadn’t realized she’d needed. There was a brief light from somewhere out of direct sight—then she was in her own body once more.
Her limbs were sluggish to respond, but at least the awful under-light was no longer threatening to overpower her vision.
To her left, she could sense the presence of her shadow—the other that had borrowed her body. She heard rustling but saw nothing more.
“I know you’re there. Come out.” She was too anxious to find her son and get back to her new family to do more than acknowledge the fear that welled up inside of her. If the creature, whatever it was, had wanted her death, there were certainly easier ways to have accomplished that.
“Are you sssssscertain? You’ve not given me a form to wear, or be wielded azzzss…”
“Nor will I. I neither know what that means nor how I would go about doing so. Come out. Their trail gets harder to follow with each moment we delay.”
“Very well…”
The green trees to her left rustled once more, then were parted as the creature came through them and onto the packed dirt road.
She gaped, then gasped, then just stared. She knew this creature, though it had been far less grand when last she’d seen it—both times she’d seen it, in fact.
It reared up, towering over her by some ten feet, and with a large portion of its black body still along the ground. Yes, it was indeed a massive serpent, as she’d thought, but now she saw the rest of it plain.
Its head was human, or nearly so. If its supple scales were black in color, then how was she to describe its face? It was shaped like one of the darker-skinned men of northern Shesh, but there was no hint of the rich mahogany color or the red or yellow undertones that were common amongst those folk. No, the face was an un-sexed black that seemed at once both shimmering and light-eating.
She had last seen the creature during her visitation with Guuvra, where it swam back into the stone upon which he toiled. Before that, however…
“How did you escape the Vodnik’s fate?”
The creature looked surprised but not at all displeased. As it spoke, she found herself surprised that its voice was so soft—so dangerously, hypnotically soft.
“I was never his. I’d bound myself to a caster during the last Empty March. My old friend became quite powerful before the Vodnik took him—an acolyte of the…” It trailed off. “This is not the place to discuss such deep matters. When your Eobum broke my old friend’s prison, his essence was able to escape at last.” The serpent paused, then added, “He was finally able to move on.”
She nodded her acceptance of this explanation, though to say she had understood it would be drawing it long, indeed.
“Can we follow them? Can you? For I can barely keep my eyes open.”
It regarded her for a moment, then lowered its bulk so that it lay utterly along the ground. “Up-ye, Lashjuk. I will carry you while we hunt. It will be slow going until you wake, yet slow is better than no-going.”
She was too tired to be afraid. She did as bidden. The creature’s scales were soft and supple. She began to curl up almost instantly, but stopped herself for a moment as she spoke.
“We have to find him… please. I’ll give you a name, find you a form, help you take vengeance, only help me save my Maksu.”
“Peasssssce, Lashjuk. We are a breath away from bound. I will not play you falsssse.”
With that, she knew no more. Her dreams were strange, wondrous things wherein she heard whispers of seemingly incalculable import. She knew she would remember none of the secrets they offered upon waking, but that was all right. Those voices didn’t matter… not once she’d glimpsed the fire.
