The Book of Terrus: The Ghosts of Goran

Chapter 5 - Shattered Dreams

Getting every last detail of her geography lessons etched into the stone had taken Vinie over a year. Now there was only one thing left add; Amenthere. Vinie had been putting off putting the capital on to her map until the last minute. Seeing that place, the heart of her sorrows given its spot in the world, it felt wrong.

"The center of civilization, they call it."

Vinie grimaced, her grip on the nail tightening. There wasn't much left of the tool. After today, what would she do to pass the time? Perhaps she ought to just leave the map unfinished, a never-ending project.

"And then what...spend the rest of my life staring at the blank spot where Amenthere should be?"

Lifting the nail and bracing it with her thumb, Vinie drilled the little dot for a city into the stone. The wall felt wet and sticky against her arm. Water was forever leaking through the foundations of the prison.

It took only a moment to make the mark, another hour to carve the name "Amenthere". When she was finished, Vinie backed away from the map until her shoulders hit the bars of her cell door. The nail fell with a clink to the floor. It was finished.

Sliding down until she hit the hard floor, Vinie propped her elbows on her knobby knees. Ten years. Ten years alone with only her own voice, blank walls, and a pearl. The little sphere weighed hard and heavy between her eyebrows, where it had sat for more than a decade. Apparently the prison guards thought it was cursed, having been created with Obad magic. No one had ever tried to take it from her, not even during the arrest.

Untying the leather thong from around her head, Vinie laid the pearl in her palm next to the white marriage knot tattoo. It was just as endlessly black as it had been the day Zaneo gave it to her. Even the night sky at new moon could not have been darker. Sometimes Vinie would look at the pearl and pretend she could see the stars in it. It had been so long since she had seen the open sky, or the sea.

What would life be like now if Zaneo had lived? Would they have had children by now? What would their names have been?

"Stop that," Vinie told herself firmly. "You haven't survived ten years alone to go mad now."

Still, the longer she looked at the finished map the more she wondered. The Obads had said that Zaneo was powerful in his own right. What could Zaneo have done if Amenthere had not come riding in with their king, their Obads, and their axe?

"What claim did they have over him anyways? Is the capital the only place in all Goran where Obads can live?"

Pearl still in hand, Vinie pulled herself to her feet. She found the nub of the nail where she had dropped it, hiding in a grimy crack between the stones. Standing before the map on the wall, Vinie stared at the space between Utunma and Amenthere.

"What could you have done, Zaneo?"

Placing the worn tip of the nail against the black rock where the southern peninsula started, she scratched a faint, spidery line heading inland from the sea. In her mind's eye, she could see Zaneo; that all-encompassing smile of his, and the way the water had swirled in the marriage cup. She could hear the low hum as he used his magic.

"What could you have done?"

In her imagination, Zaneo raised his long arms and closed his bright blue-green eyes. She saw the sea, calm and vast, stir in answer to his droning summons. The ocean rose, rose, rose until it was a wave the likes of which nearly destroyed Danitesk decades before.