Ber, Day 16 of Melia, Winking Moons, Year 602
Greater trillium, also known as leopard's bane, herb. See figure. Perennial with a blackish-coloured rhizome. When the plant flowers, blooms are yellow in colour and are utilized as often as the roots. —Arcane Herbs and Their Uses, Vol. 1
* * *
Bricot rolled over in his bunk that night, having turned in early after a supper of beef stew with chunks of potato and sweet, stewed carrots as big around as his wrist. Salt air and water travel always drained him faster than he expected, and he was spent.
Because it was so early, many of the passengers hadn't sought their beds, and the crew hadn't dimmed the lamps or called curfew. There was a circle of folks gathered at the center of the bunkroom. Some played dice or cards; others just spoke to each other quietly. At one point, a traditional shanty started up and several of them sang it softly, pleased to find a bit of culture they all were familiar with in this very unfamiliar setting.
Some of the children asked for stories, and one elderly man stood up and obliged everyone by giving them the tale of Pikyia and the Shadow People. Feeling very sleepy already, Bricot listened with half an ear.
Once, when trees could speak, the man began, Pikyia the Goddess of Chastity had mourned and buried her betrothed—Aethe the God of the Sun.
Now, it was in those days that the Shadow People had risen up to plague the Divine Pantheon, waging war in the most insidious of ways. This would go on for decades, but in the beginning, many thought the manifestations of dark creatures and ghostly sounds existed only in their own fevered imaginations, or else or were the work of some mischievous wild animal.
Pikyia was lonely, forlorn, and kept only her own company, which prompted her friends and family in the Pantheon to prod her, saying, 'You must come out into the sun! Healing will come to you if you allow it!' and 'Poor Piykia has given up on life. You will only be young once, my dear!'
One night after the goddess had retired, there came a knock at her door.
Puzzled, she rose to see who it was, and when she opened the door, she nearly fainted. For there, standing before her all arrayed in splendor was her dead love, Aethe.
Upon the discovery, she abruptly shut the door in his face. When she opened it again and he remained, she fell sobbing into his arms. 'How can this be?' she cried. 'For you were dead and murdered, and now you are come to my door!'
He smiled at her with shining eyes and a mouth too full of teeth.
Pikyia felt of Aethe's skin, and while lustrous and pink with health, he felt cold to the touch. She said nothing, and entertained him until morning with songs and conversation, when he begged his leave and left her alone once more. When she wept to say goodbye, he assured her he'd be back with the next fall of night.
She told no one.
This continued for some time, with Aethe visiting Piykia by night and leaving at sunrise each day. At length, Pikyia grew haggard and exhausted. When she began to sicken, her friends became frightened for her and asked her why she had stopped sleeping.
Dota, one of Ydos' daughters and the mind health deity, was one of Pikyia's particular friends, and she knew that something was not right about the goddess. True, Piykia had mourned Aethe obsessively, but her body was now failing, and rapidly.
When asked, Pikyia could not keep the truth from her friend. She said that Aethe had come back to her from the dead and was courting her by night.
"But Aethe is no more!" cried Dota. "We all saw him fall."
"I know," replied Pikyia. "But it is he—I know it in my heart. He courts me every evening. We talk and eat and I sing and dance for him. Each night is over in the blink of an eye for me. Just last night, he professed his undying love and asked again if I might be his bride!"
This sounded dangerous to Dota, but she smiled and reassured Pikyia, saying, "I'm sure you are right. After all, you know him better than anyone."
But Dota was very clever, and she went to Pikyia's dwelling that night to watch the proceedings.
Through the open window, she glimpsed the young goddess supping on fresh fruit and speaking quietly with someone. But when she moved to the other side of the casement, she saw the terrible shape of a dark spectre, nebulous in form and frightening to see. It floated in the air on one side of the small room and occasionally it came forward to envelope Pikyia like a cloud of black smoke.
Unsure what to make of this, Dota returned to her own home and reported her findings to her sisters and to her father Ydos. Ydos immediately brought the matter before Calumn, who was gravely concerned.
"And it appears to Pikyia in the image of her dead betrothed Aethe?" asked Calumn.
"Yes," Dota replied. "I fear to broach the subject with her. She seems ensorcelled by this thing and may be resistant to our interference."
Calumn sighed. "Will this war never end? These creatures keep preying upon our kind until our numbers grow thin. My suspicion is that Pikyia's life force is being compromised by one of the Shadow People. The tragedy is that it masquerades as someone she cares for dearly. It will be difficult to separate them."
The next morning, Calumn himself—God of the Cosmos, paid young Pikyia a visit. It was late, but she was still abed and exhausted from the hours she'd kept the night before.
"My dear Pikyia," he said kindly to her. "What ails you? Once you would have been out at this time walking in the forests, crafting, or working in the gardens. But here you are with scarcely any energy. How come you by this lethargy?"
"I know not," she said, shaking her head slowly. "Of late I become more and more ill. I cannot make sense of it."
Calumn placed a large hand on her forehead. "The whole Pantheon fears for your life," he told her. "And much as I dislike intruding, I must say that young Dota has told me of your nightly visitor."
At this, Pikyia was angry—for though most of her believed her Aethe had come back to life and she had nothing to fear, a tiny inner piece of her heart knew the dream was finite and doomed to end. She blamed Dota for divulging her secret.
"She told me something else, too," Calumn continued softly. "The creature who appears to you as your own Aethe shows its true self to others. It is a great cloud of dark mist to the naked eye—I suspect it is a Shadow Person come to steal your life away."
Pikyia sat up with angry tears in her eyes. "It is not," she insisted. "I swear, it is Aethe! I will not lose him again!"
But Calumn only looked at her with unfathomable sadness. "Has he ever visited you by the light of day? Is his skin cold to the touch? And how else would you explain your rapidly declining health?"
The young goddess began to cry.
Calumn held her hands in his own and waited.
At length she calmed and looked up into his kind face, asking, "What must I do?"
Pikyia, Goddess of Chastity, spent that day arming herself. The Five Deities of Healing tended to her, including a sheepish Dota. She was not fully restored, but was able to muster a small portion of her old strength.
With the help of her beloved friends and family, she brewed a mighty potion of protection for herself. It took hours and contained rare and exotic ingredients. When consumed, it would act as a shield for the entity to draw upon rather than allowing the creature access to her own vitality. It wasn't an answer, but it would buy them time.
They also brewed a powerful paralytic. Pikyia used this to line the inside of a wine goblet and then allowed the mixture to dry.
Calumn himself did not know if typical brews would even have a marked effect on Shadow People, but all present agreed they should try.
Several of the Pantheon's finest warriors were summoned to Pikyia's dwelling that night to confront the creature. They hid themselves while night began to fall.
Finally, Aethe approached the door and knocked—but to the others assembled there, it was not the God of the Sun but a dark and ominous cloud.
Pikyia answered the knock, smiling coquettishly and letting the creature in.
"Have you given my proposal some thought?" it asked her, giving her a beautiful but chilling smile.
She dimpled prettily. "Of course," she said. "But before I give you my answer, will you allow me to ask you three questions?"
There was a flash of something behind its handsome eyes, but the creature nodded.
Pikyia poured out two glasses of wine and handed one over to him.
They drank.
"Why do you not come to visit me by day?" she asked. "I should like to go among the rest of the Pantheon with you, so that others may share our joy."
Aethe Who Was Not Aethe thought very quickly. "I plan to," he answered. "But I feared that my appearing to others so soon would be too great a shock."
Pikyia nodded. "Interesting. I applaud your thoughtfulness. Here is my second question."
The creature leaned forward expectantly, and as it came closer to her, Pikyia felt some of her shield slipping away.
"I ache to be with you," she said, her mind racing. "Why is it that your body is cold to the touch?"
It sat up a little straighter and frowned, as though alerted to something. "Why do you ask?"
Pikyia stared him down. "My skin is warm. Others of my kind share this characteristic with me. I wish to know why it is different with you." Her heart began to beat a little faster as she waited for the effect of the paralyzing potion to manifest itself. What if it failed to affect the creature?
This time it gave her a warning glance and began to draw a little more upon her protective shield.
"I will warm in time," it told her. "When I have gathered enough strength." And there was an inhuman growl to the timbre of its voice.
Now Pikyia was frightened, for the visage of her Aethe was beginning to loom threateningly and regard her with eyes too bright and teeth far too sharp.
"Finally," she said, panicking and trying to force herself to speak slowly, "Why do I find myself growing more ill every day? For my strength wanes the longer I spend my evenings with you. Do you have an answer for this?"
The creature stood suddenly as if it would spring upon her and she leapt back, upsetting her chair.
But instead of advancing, it clutched at itself in alarm and began to convulse violently. "What have you done to me?" it roared.
At that moment, the Pantheon warriors positioned outside of the Goddess' dwelling sprang up and and entered the room. They began to chop and thrust their sharp weapons into the midst of the smoky cloud, but the mass simply continued to float unaffected.
To Pikyia, the creature dressed as Aethe continued to twitch and gag and fell back onto the floor. Though the spears and swords of the warriors failed to pierce it, the potion appeared to be working in some capacity. "You could have brought him back, you know," it screamed.
"It would only have been a simulacrum, vile creature; and I would not animate it at the price of my life!" she exclaimed.
With sudden certainty, she knew that she would be able to finish it off where the armed warriors had been unsuccessful. "Give me that," she said quickly to one who wielded a spear. She thrust it deep into the heart of the creature, who gave a terrible cry, and trembling, dissipated into tiny curling shreds of floating blackness.
Instantly, full health and faculties returned to Pikyia the Goddess of Chastity and she drew in a deep breath and dropped the spear.
"How is it you could end the foul creature when we could not?" demanded one of the warriors.
Pikyia did not answer, for she did not know. It had torn her heart to do harm to something that resembled Aethe, but she knew in the glow of her returning vitality that it had worked a cruel deception on her and needed to be expelled.
To this day, the Pantheon and all who worship them know that all must fight their own Shadow People. There are no substitutes.
The story over now, Bricot hummed sleepily to himself as he drifted off. There was something about a story well told that reduced him to a young boy again, keen to listen and learn. The bunk under him was stiff and uncomfortable, but his blankets were warm and pooled pleasantly around his body.
He had some experience with sea travel—more than most of his acquaintances, he hazarded, because he had been born on another continent—and he knew that his clean, dry clothes and soft blankets would not stay that way for long. The wind, rain, sweat, and constant roiling motion typical of a sea voyage had a way of souring everything and especially textiles. He was suddenly glad the precious Facerum was held carefully at Craestor and not with him, though he missed working on his translations.
Were something to befall him on his journey to and from Boradîn, he had no idea what Colin might do to ensure the document was finished in the common tongue. Find someone else who specializes in Ruqan, I suppose. He was trying to calculate the percentage of university-educated scholars who were proficient in the language when he fell soundly asleep, lulled by the rocking of the Gallant.
* * *
Craix's first day on the Grey River was slow and leisurely. She either sat cross-legged on her raft and used the pike to push herself along or stood bravely, head into the wind. When she grew weary of doing either, she simply lay down and looked up into the cloudless sky. Today, she made sure to wear every scrap of clothing she'd brought with her, for the glare off of the water would burn her skin as certain as starshine.
Now that she was well and truly on her way south toward the Outlands, the flurry of preparation and tension that had accompanied it fell slowly away and she began to breathe more easily.
At this point, the river was narrow enough that she could see both banks and in the shallows, the water grew oily and tinted with bright red mud.
She'd not run into any significant rapids as of yet, but Craix was confident she could circumvent them. She had been sure when building the raft to shear off the logs at an angle, and to turn the lengthier pieces up so she might slide over rocks and submerged trees more easily.
The sounds of water lapping at the edges of her raft and coursing about tributaries was its own lullaby.
Halfway through the day, Craix realized she was famished and would need to stop and eat. Reluctant to stall her journey, she nonetheless used her pike—which was beginning to blister her hands—to creep slowly back toward the West bank, where she dismounted into the tall grasses and did her best to haul the craft out of the water.
Before her steps could cloud the shallows, she saw a few tentative black prawn resting lazily near the riverbottom.
Her stomach gurgled.
She looked around, trying to discern where she was in her journey. She'd memorized the map of the river she'd been furnished with and knew what landmarks to look for but didn't see any near her at the moment. Suspecting it would take five days or so to reach the river's end, she sighed and decided to focus on finding lunch at the moment.
The brush here was as lush and thick as it had been up near Beechton, so she was able to find a few straight saplings fairly quickly. She cut eight or nine thick branches and gathered them up. Then she found a pair of karnwood trees which would furnish her with loads of fibrous bark. She peeled off a great pile of it and went with her prizes back to the riverbank.
Craix laid the pliant branches down in the dirt, making first a cross, and then an eight-pointed star. At the intersection of the branches, she corded and fastened the bark until they were all held firmly in place. Then, she slowly brought all of the free ends up toward one side, nearest each other. The fibrous bark, she continued to weave around them all, over one branch and under another, until she had a primitive basket that came up to her knees.
Then she went in search of more green sticks. These she cut down with her hatchet until they were the length of her hand. She buried the ends in the dirt so they stood up like a crown. Still armed with a large, soft pile of bark fiber, she wound it around the green sticks until she had another, smaller basket—one that remained open at both the top and at the bottom. Pure luck made her notice a dead, rotting minnow near her raft, so she tossed into the bottom of her container. Then she fit her small, open basket inside the larger one and set them both gently in the shallows near the shadiness of the bank.
The prawns would swim in, drawn by the floating minnow—but would not be able to negotiate their way back out past the little retaining basket.
She would need to wait, though.
In the meantime, she guzzled some water from a nearby spring and then decided to go foraging.
It was easy enough to find some wax cap mushrooms growing in the base of a rotting tree stump, and she was thrilled to spy some wild garlic, greedily filling the makeshift pocket of her shirt with the shoots. She pulled some leaves from a greatnut tree to add to her cookfire, since she'd sleep near the river tonight. No need to invite flesh-feasting bugs if she could scare them away with scent.
She made camp not long after that. Her fire caught well and quickly, and she set a large flat stone nearby for her food.
In the dimming light, she went to the river for her basket and pulled the waterlogged thing from the shallows. Her heart leapt within her at the feel of slimy, wriggling things teeming within. When she dumped out the basket by the fire, she hopped back from the large water snake that flung itself to the ground and stepped out of its way as it peeled back into the water. Craix let it go. The best way to eat snakes was boiled—and she didn't have the time or equipment to do that. Also jumping about manically were three fat prawns and she squealed with delight and tried to grab hold of them.
Craix twisted their heads off and pulled discarded the legs and clear shells. The tails she left on. She tore the mushrooms into halves and split the garlic shoots, then arranged her dinner on the flat rock and placed it over the glowing coals.
Everything was delicious. Hot, savory, and flavoured with the weeping juices of the spicy garlic. She picked the remnants of food from her teeth and sighed, then built up her fire once more. She placed the pile of greatnut leaves over the flames to drive the insects away. Then she wrapped her thin arms about herself and fell asleep.