Wind & Words

[Before They Are Hanged]

There is a scab upon my memory.

Nariona. I remember her name well enough. I remember that I envied her laugh, that when amusement came upon her that the birds would sing along, just for the joy of it. I remember that there were three of us; Nariona, Alea, and I. Three sisters. Born of different wombs, and different fathers, but sisters still.

I remember her name and, when I close my eyes, I can recall her face. Green eyes and sharp cheeks, and laughter without so much as a twitch of her lips. I know that laugh was a beautiful thing but, when I reach for the sound of it there is naught but silence, black and dead and still. I know there were once three of us, but I could not say why now there is only I.

She is a scab upon my memory, and I would be wiser to leave her be. But I never claimed to be wise, and I pick at it still, to see if today, perhaps, memory will bleed into the void. It did not yesterday. Today, perhaps.

There were five of them when they found me. A man, a halfling, and three dwarves. They stood in that dripping cavern as the beetles feasted on their fallen brethren, as bold as dancers under the open moon. The man was simple and silent, the dwarves clad in clanking steel and blind to the snakes and spiders and spores that plague the Bramble. They sought adventure, they told me, over the cooling corpse of a goblin spellsinger. They had spared me the creature’s magic, so I promised them the adventure that they sought.

I showed them game trails and streams, the tracks of boar and beetle and briar. It was not enough. I showed them a camp of the foes they sought, and they fell upon the goblins like a storm, the axes of the dwarves rising and falling like waves on the shore. It was still not enough. So I showed them to the Fortress.

We pushed deeper and deeper into the stone; beyond folly, beyond sense. But my charges had axe, sword, and steel, and they met each blow with two of their own. They were invincible, drunk on victory and proud as kings, and so we pushed deeper. Into the dungeons and far from sunlight, until the floors and walls of the keep turned against us. Spikes rose from the stone, and foul vapours seeped from between the bricks; turned the air stale and thick, and our minds slower still.

The dwarves were as thick as their plate, and if they heard my cautions and warnings, they met them only with disdain. Only with contempt.

The first I knew of the trap was the dwarf’s scream. Or perhaps it was the scream of his steel, facing the goblins beyond that wall of flame. I did not know then, and I do not know now. The fire reached me in a heartbeat. I felt my hair catch and flame, and then my clothes, and then the flesh beneath them. I smelled my own skin cook, and I opened my mouth to add my scream to the dwarf’s, but the fire took me first. The flames stretched smoking fingers down my throat, and I burned from within and without. I remember the sight going from my eyes, and the terror of knowing I would die blind and burning.

Then I remember nothing at all.

[Before They Are Hanged]

I woke a league distant, with a bitter taste beneath my tongue and a fire-gutted oak stretching into the night sky above me. There was mud beneath me, cool and soft, and the feel of it was so sweet that it might easily have been made of feathers. I ran my fingers, whole and painless, over my head, my arms, the points of my ears. All whole. All intact. My sword was gone, my scabbard empty, but my bow rested at my side, an empty quiver beside it.

My hair was present as it had ever been, and if I carried anything at all of the fire with me, it was only the lingering smell of smoke and burning wood. I plucked the ants from my skin, and said that I was not yet dead; though if it was for their benefit or mine I could not say. My cloak was intact, so I pulled it around my shoulders, and forbade myself to wonder at how I lived until I found safety.

Laughter drifted from the fire-blackened oak as I rose, and I laughed along with it. I laughed to be alive and whole, and for the hungry ants, and for the simple joy of air in my lungs in place of flame. Yet, when I turned to the sound, I saw that I laughed alone. There was naught but that tree, black and dead. Only the tree. I turned my back on it and fled for the shelter of other, silent trees.

I rested that night, but not under that oak. I found a hollow in a willow, and there I awaited the dawn. I was weary, and it was near to midday by the time I clambered free of the timber and went looking for a trail that would take me back to the Bramble.

It was not difficult to find, by daylight. Others had found the path before me, and the blood of goblin raiders watered the plants. I refilled my quiver with goblin-fletched arrows, and felt a little safer. Only when I reached my camp by the stream did I reach for the memory of Nariona’s laughter, and only then did I realise the sound of it was lost to me.

I knew it a tenday past. I know that as I know my own heartbeat. Yet, now there is nothing, and I do not know why. I live when I ought be dead, and there are holes where I ought remember. There is something wrong and, even as I set these runes down, I cannot begin to name it.

There is a scab upon my memory.