The Chaos of Possibility (15)

I waited for the call of the night bird.

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I waited for the call of the night bird. Not because it signified a certain time of night, but rather because the ku-ku-broo is shy and waits until the still of night before emerging. In fact, the bird will not emerge if it can hear anything at all. Zhalghumi claimed to know about these things, and I accepted the authority in his assertions.

Some hours after the evening meal, unexceptional while perfectly palatable, adrenaline surged through me. I could only think about the hours ahead and paid little attention to the meal that would be my last.

I knew what was coming, in the calm of the night. This would not be the calm night the ku-ku-broo was expecting. 

I sat against the wall, drumming my heels against the floor like some frustrated child. 

Ku-ku-ku-broo.

"It's time," I thought. I didn't need to find the right mindset: Zhalghumi was waiting. And now I felt his presence in me grow, his tendrils creeping over me like an animated yet invisible vine. I could feel just how alien he was.

I got to my feet, not moved by Zhalghumi's tendrils, but supported by them in my actions.

I approached the stone-clad door, its outline barely visible in the gloom. The Agalins are immaculate masons, as well as mages. I placed my hand on the cold cladding of the door. I tried to reach the place in my mind that would allow me to participate, but I couldn't find my way to it. Instead, I felt the tendrils within me extend through the stone to the locking mechanism and give the slightest push in just the right spot.

A click.

The crack around the door widened, then gaped. It was open. All I had to do was step through.

There could be no warning magick within the Folly, and there was no need for it either: a simple human, even a mage, could not possibly have opened this door. Not even an Agalin mage could have done it. 

I stepped into the dim passageway, and here I allowed the tendrils to guide me. I could see enough, with my night eyes, but I didn't know the way.

There were several turns, and a staircase, leading to a higher level. Now there was more light, but whether it was starlight, moonlight, or lamplight I couldn't tell. 

The tendrils pulled me towards one door in particular, made of a silvery metal. I could not tell, but Zhalghumi had told me the door was fashioned from a material outside of any magic, unconnected to it, unconnectable to it. Even Faerie arts could not penetrate the mechanism of the door, or even grasp the handle from afar. 

He called the lack of connection to magic gakarun, a word known to me from the Old Tongue, but the more common words for it were anchala, eymura, or aquendis. None of these words were truly common, of course. Only the greatest of human mages uttered any of them. The most obscure of these words, eymura, appealed to me the most. Naturally. Eymura was simply invisible to any magic. But the Agalins had made an imperfect cage, and Zhalghumi had outwitted his enemy.

Or so he said.

The door contained a gear, operated by a circular handle: clockwise locked the door, anticlockwise released the lock. I turned the handle, and the door opened. Another door waited for me, but I had to close the first one before opening the second. I needed to maintain the cage of eymura. Somehow, the Agalins would know if both doors remained open, and come running. I didn't understand why for a long time.

The first door closed; I opened the second. 

Before me, an iron sphere floated, not by any working of magic, but by magnetism. A frame of strong magnets held the sphere suspended in a magnetic field, so that there was no physical connection that would allow tendrils of Faerie magic out of the sphere.

Zhalghumi hadn't said — wouldn't say — what it was. Only that there had been an oversight, and it had been enough.

I approached the magnetic cage and reached out to the sphere. My fingers tingled and ached with the lines of force they passed through. I grasped the iron sphere. I pulled, but it wasn't like plucking a grape. More like plucking an apple, perhaps. The sphere didn't move. I pulled again, harder, and rotated along the lines of force.

I staggered back, the sphere in my hands. Now we had only seconds to act. I opened a tiny latch in the same eymura metal. And the little door swung open.

There was Zhalghumi.

I gaped at him. A tiny human-like figure, but with wings the size of a butterfly, although nothing at all like a mere butterfly in shimmer or shine or sheer beauty. Light seemed to come from within the wings, and to pulsate through the different colours of light in the spectrum, although not with any discernible pattern or regularity, but a kind of madness, a frenzy, a random throb from one colour to the next, and different parts of the wings shifting at different times and rates. The site was incredible, and I couldn't think of anything else.

Zhalghumi flew up, and I watched his flight in childish awe and wonder.

"ARALED! FOCUS!" Zhalghumi's voice rattled in my brain, and brought me back to awareness, and to what must be done.

I had wasted a few precious seconds. 

Zhalghumi landed on my head, and I felt the tendrils become roots and torrents.

An instant later, we erupted from the Folly in a cascade of pure agony and withering destruction. I acted as a channel for Zhalghumi's ancient and unfathomable magick, an energy sink for him to draw upon, to break the chains holding him in this place. I had a flash of terrible certainty that my usefulness had been expended, and that I would be drained to a husk and then burned to ashes by the immense forces involved.

And as the agony extinguished my light and my thoughts and my memory, and only darkness and emptiness could remain, the last thing that resounded in my mind before the void finally took me were the words, "The stupid creature!"

Continue reading with Part 16.