The Korellian Odyssey: Requiem (8 page)

As his mind wandered over the terrain of his own bitterness, there came over the distance the deep howl of wulvs (those wild ancestors of the common forest tracking wolf). Korel staggered to his feet and continued a loping trot east, straight up the face of the mountain.

T
he wind played across the clearing, touching Korel's face. The smell of old ash, like remnants of forgotten memory, rode upon the air as the pale, wane light filtering through the mist-covered morning gradually penetrated the haze clouding his mind. Memory swirled around him and seemed to flash and grow out of the stone, trees, and air. The stone alter stood silently by, seemingly uncaring, unfeeling despite the pressure of memory rising out of the raw substance of the earth. In slow pieces, a numbing calm settled upon the clearing as Korel's memories began to sleep, receding upon the silence, fading into nothingness.

He sat up and put his back against a tree, the cold firmness of the petrified wood seeping into his back to lodge in his spine. The coldness rode upon a wind that entered from across the clearing, dispelling the mists, pushing the last gray clouds away, and leaving a pristine gray sky. Still Korel sat motionless. The intermittent grasses bobbed their heads up and down in silent prayer, the trees whispering quiet supplication, the dust swirling in scriptural ciphers. The grayness deepened to become grayer still, a gray wash filling the sky, the land, the clearing, and finally his head and heart. There was nothing but gray in the whole of the world, a blinding gray that became everything and numbed creation until all was ether, all an interminable sleep.

But for all the gray that swirled through creation, distilling everything down to an essential catatonia, Korel began to notice an icy finger upon the nape of his neck, then many, then a pressure as of many fingers squeezing the life out of him. Korel took hold of the fingers wrapped around his throat and pried them away, one by one. Once he could breathe a little, he tightened his grip on the wrist of his assailant and pulled him out from behind the tree to look upon the author of this most recent ambush. Korel saw the familiar fear, rage, and loathing play across Hurnix's face as a rage of his own exploded to life inside him. His grip tightened as the decaying wrists began to crack and grind in his fists. He pulled Hurnix screaming, crying, and groveling toward the stone table and took a thong from his purse to bind the writhing creature to the stone table. A fire-filled rage consumed him and he felt the pillar of his passion rise up through his chest and above his head to swirl with invisible tongues of flaming anger. He retrieved from his purse the stone knife he had crafted upon the Mount of Instructure and gripped it high above his head, his fist trembling with the emotion pouring through him.

Hurnix continued to writhe pathetically, begging to be spared as the smell of rank decay permeated everything, his patchwork body twisting acrobatically as he strained at the cords that bound him. Then at last he seemed to tire as if all his misery had finally left him spent. Within the sudden calm, he barked in an alien croak, "End me!" and was still.

Korel's straining fist came down in a blistering arc filled with all the rage and venom of a lifetime, of a thousand lifetimes. He placed all his power behind the stroke, his arm aching with the strain of taut muscles. But as his arm approached mid arc, a pity he had nearly forgotten touched his intent. The fire of his rage suddenly burned at an even heat, and the blood in his eyes became the cool blue of the vein instead of the red-hot artery. Yet his arm still came down with terrible force, still potent with the initial passions that powered it. But at the very last, the course of the blade deviated enough to drive the stone blade one inch deep into the substance of the altar, just above Hurnix' left shoulder. There the blade stayed.

Korel unbound the unmoving Hurnix and held the limp, decaying body in his arms. The other roused a little and began to cry, placing his denuded arms around Korel, sobbing uncontrollably. He wept with Hurnix and together they cried for a time. Then he began to weep in earnest, his tears falling upon Hurnix as rain, his body heaving in great paroxysms. Little by little, Hurnix seemed to liquefy in his arms. The sinewy muscles fell in strands to the earth and the bones dissolved with the touch of every tear. Soon there remained little but some quickly disappearing remnants of skull and skin, lying in small heaps upon the ground. Then they too were gone.

Korel stood, feeling a new calm. Only a slight warm breeze stirred in the clearing, and a quiet born of peace reigned all around. His gut was cool and the wound on his index finger did not hurt, as only the occasional drop of clear fluid fell from his hand to the ground. The silent vigil of the stone alter continued unbroken, but it too seemed at peace. In a gesture more like a sigh than anything else, Korel took the tome from his purse (Of
the Fall of Valyrea and the Madness of Thoren)
and laid it down on the edge of the stone table, its pages fluttering haphazardly along their binding as the fancy of vagrant breezes pushed them to and fro.

At last, Korel turned and looked toward the peak of the mountain. Out of the clearing a faint path left the place of the altar to pick its way through shale and rock, quickly leaving all vegetation behind. Upon this course Korel made his way, blending in and out of rock, and soon the altar had lost all sight of him.