Solitudes and Silence

  Chapter 5

  Ferocity and Fury

  Waimbrill was meditating when he heard the spiritual outcry of simultaneous voices, each bemoaning a life insufficiently lived. Though he hadn’t cleaved their souls, and so their grief was not yet a part of him, he was witness to their pain, and had an urgent need to end it.

  He stood, sighing, bones creaking, imagining the myriad tragedies that could have occurred. He went to Terredor, who was tending the vegetable garden.

  “My lord has been busy,” Waimbrill said, “But I don’t know where. It must have been another attack. I could use your help, but there may be much death and gore. If you’d rather not see that…”

  Terredor shook his head, smiling, and gathered their traveling supplies. They walked to the main road, and found small groups coming to tell Waimbrill about the monster’s attack. Townsfolk and Delvers alike, they marched, a grimacing caravan of crag-faced survivors, avoiding each other’s gaze, eschewing conversation, looking instead at their tired feet pounding against the dusty road. The monster had come, destroyed, and then it had left, and that was all there was to say. The ragtag refugees lurched onward with a bedraggled stagger, every step weary and heavy, eyes staring haggard daggers dully, each word strenuous, a jagged shard of glass slicing like a sickle through the solitudinous silence. The monster had done its part: it had devastated, it had devoured and demolished, and it had done so with such ferocity and fury that it left a mark on Waimbrill’s soul even now, having not cleaved a single victim. The survivors filled their role as well, sulking home with the sullen slouch of the perennial victim, and even the Delvers were somber and solemn.

  The town was destroyed, timber protruding like splintered bone from the mangled corpses of homes and shops, chunks of hair and flesh on signs and rocks like demonic droppings, and here and there, puddles of blood congealing coldly into the color of aged wine. Wailing echoed off the exposed walls, arcing, amplified, from survivor to survivor, reaching deep into Waimbrill’s bones as he walked through the city. Messengers reported that the monster had attacked every village and the larger households, including the Elderling estate.

  The people who remained, some of the boldest of whom now milled about, stared as Waimbrill passed by, and he felt an incredible urge to do something, anything at all, just so his words might bear hope for that legion of sad-eyed faces. But he had no hope to give. Their loved one’s bodies were gone. The only person he cleaved was a Delver who had hit his head and fallen into the water, drowning. He died, but at least his soul was safe, Waimbrill thought as he recited the High Prayer.

  His words were still echoing against the ramshackle stilted huts of Delverton when Waimbrill heard frenzied shouting, screams and the rumble of a running mob.

  Bursting from Mt. Rekkerkem, the monster returned. It was long and iridescent, scales reflecting the dying day’s light, starry, twinkling, flashing blue and green in the bright sun like a brilliant butterfly. It had gone through the mountain and come out the side, and Waimbrill saw parts of the dwarven town built into the interior of the stone now revealed. He realized that the destruction there had been as complete as here in Crikburg.

  Petromyza was a mile long or more, finned, its head circular and jawless, primitive, and ringed with rows of sharp teeth. It closed the distance from the top of Mt. Rekkerkem to the lake in seconds, and Waimbrill was frozen in fear, standing above a corpse in the tattered remains of Delverton. Many of the stilts supporting the town had collapsed, and the dilapidated huts were partially submerged.

  Waimbrill heard a shriek from Terredor, snapping him out of his paralysis, and they both leapt, diving between two overturned homes. Amid the debris of the Delvers’ lives, Waimbrill swam under water as the monster crashed through the remaining structures and swallowed an elderly woman hobbling away. Petromyza splashed into the lake, its long body still trailing out of the mountain. Waimbrill held his breath as long as he could, then surfaced and gasped for air, coughing. He opened his eyes in time to see the tail of the great worm disappear beneath the waters of the very same lake whose ancient waters he was now treading.