PART VI The Bottomless Falls

Of the numerous natural features within Llwddawanden that were held sacred, four were especially revered—the Sacred Grove, a circle of ancient oaks that enclosed the seven stone pillars believed to have been placed there by giants; the Sacred Pools, where the shrine’s priestesses retreated to celebrate their monthly menstrual flow; the Hall of Distant Voices, the cavern within which the autumn equinox rituals were conducted; and the Bottomless Falls, a thundering torrent that poured out of a fissure in the valley’s northernmost rim.

Located in the farthest recess of a sheer-sided ravine, these falls could only be viewed by taking an arduous trail up to a ledge across from which the flume plunged down the side of the cliff. Needless to say, the “Bottomless Falls” were not actually bottomless, although they appeared to be from that ledge since the torrent of water disappeared into a thick, swirling mist that covered the basin below.

Mixed with the roar of the falls was a whistling of winds that rushed along with the falling water and the shrieks of hawks that swooped in and out of the canyon, sounds that by some fluke of acoustics blended together into semi-human cries. It was because of this seemingly uncanny clamor that the falls were considered the particular province of the shrine’s oracle, whose job it was to interpret communications from the spirit world.

Just how generations of oracles had been able to derive meaning from the noise of a powerful but otherwise ordinary waterfall was a secret known only amongst themselves and those disciples able to grasp the unspoken fundamental of divination—that the point was not to be truthful but to be convincing. Without this crucial underpinning to aid in resisting the pull of the rushing water and the mesmerizing din, an apprentice sent to the falls “to listen to its wails until their meaning becomes clear” was at risk of joining others who had not returned from the same rite of passage.

As his cult’s chief priest, Herrwn was fully aware of the risks that the falls posed to the unwary, but he reassured himself that Caelym, with his essentially divine parentage and his brilliance at any task he took on, would master whatever Ossiam demanded of him.