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The Clear Sky Hermit Chapter Five – Amniosis and Prishilae (Helgrind’s Death)

The leaves were like any given human in any given world. They fell from the canopy dry and brittle as Andor took the forest path from Dagrun to Urulu. One landed crinkling against his chin. When he swung his head to let it free, it clung like a burr. He glared down with cold indignation.

Whether the thing Andor saw next was real or imagined, he did not care. The leaf took the shape of a ragged woman tossed by the breeze, who cried to Andor, “Small sad son, come back home.” The prince tucked his chin, breaking the leaf's hold on him and watching it skid along the path. Then he turned his gaze all around. It was March and it should have been Spring, but Ruxomar was dying, each tree at least half bare and the colors leeched even from the richest boughs. Dagrun's meadows were green thanks to Ianite, but Andor knew better than to take this as an omen for Ruxomar's health. Soon maybe even Dagrun would be dry. A scraping noise drew Andor's attention to the front of his shirt. There, a second leaf shuddered, taking the form of a small girl. “Andor,” she squealed, “Come back home. I want to throw boomerang!” Andor clenched his teeth, hardening his face to dam up tears. “You can't throw boomerang. You're with Ianite.” A bat of his palm sent the second leaf skittering to the earth. After a long, silent trek, a tornado coalesced before Andor, drawing leaves from its coils tighter until they wove a human body that snapped and crunched as it tested its new feet. Andor lowered a palm to his rapier. “Are you the specter from before?” The man of leaves unlatched a quivering, stemmy maw and heaved out a sigh, leaves whirling up from its throat to flutter down over Andor. Its voice was like howling wind through a hollowed log. “Let me ask you a question instead,” whispered the entity. “Why do you walk when you could lie down?” Andor squinted into the uneven pits of the half-formed face. A wave of doubt washed over him, seizing his thoughts and lungs. He did not know why he want on. What was left to achieve in this world? The being swayed, waiting, and after a minute of silence began to sag and fall out of joint, its leaves detaching one by one. “Wait,” Andor barked. The being held itself together by frail strands. “Aunt Martha always asked me how I would answer the voices in my head when they rose up to test me. I didn’t understand what she meant until they started screaming like they do today. To their moaning I answer this: comfort is too lowly a reward for a prince. Let me grind my limbs until I’m spent. My goddess demands it. Like her, I am a creature serving All That Is. That is the most I will ever be. It is the highest birthright a being can have.” The being let out a guttural cackle and exploded into a heap of compost. As the prince's boots pushed through the debris like prows of ships, he declared under his breath, “But before I rise, I must descend one last time.”

The streets of Urulu swirled with dust. There was no gossip today. All was silent, save a goblin and a testificate who bickered from their doorways. Andor slid down the ladder to the underground, wove through the labyrinth of canals, and penetrated the caves. Ftero the fire dragon waited in his gilded room, coiled asleep. Andor nudged him with a palm. “Wake up, friend. You're my carrier.” Ftero's eyes opened to slits and then to bulbs. The dragon giddily shuffled to his feet. Without needing to ask, he understood the look on Andor’s face, and wept lava. “I have longed to revisit my master's playground. But to do it alone would have been too sad. Thank you, Wanderer, for being brave. We will find your father.” Urulu's volcano erupted that day. A wingless serpent clambered up from its mouth and tobogganed down a lava flow on his belly until reaching the outskirts of Urulu. On Ftero's back was the prince, cocooned in a bubble of wind that repelled heat. The damage of the eruption was small and reparable. Ftero’s long spine shuddered in a catlike stretch. Then he began a jog into the desert. “You don't have wings,” Andor marveled from his seat between two spikes. When Ftero merely groaned, Andor looked closer. The dragon's shoulder blades were scaleless and symmetrically scarred. Andor lowered a palm to the shockingly cold skin. “They were removed?” “They couldn't just kick me out of Thel Olihm. They had to make sure I would never come back.” Andor turned his palm to a fist and raised it toward the sun. “You'll return home with or without them.” Andor chose a sand dune far from civilization for the site of the Nether Portal. Regurgitated magma from Ftero's belly was pooled into a mote over which Andor poured water to make obsidian. An hour of rigorous mining and crafting resulted in the largest portal frame Andor had seen. It spanned fifteen blocks wide and thirty high. Ftero squeezed his shoulders and haunches inside. Andor held his breath as his face merged with violet swirls. And then, for a moment, his mind went blank. Light burned through his eyelids. He could open them only enough to glimpse a stream of lava that gurgled beside his dangling foot, searing his skin even from a distance. Ftero sighed with satisfaction. “My love returns to me.” “This is love? I can hardly breathe!” Andor rasped through his drying throat. For the first hour of travel, Andor stayed huddled on Ftero's back like an infant, watching the alien red contours of the underworld pass by. The terrain was unpredictable. Planes might round off to gently meet the lava below or be severed as if by a knife, making a sheer drop into a burning lake. When viewed from the side or below, these landforms often revealed themselves to be thin shelves which a miner could fall through by digging a stroke too many. All the stories Andor had heard about the Nether were true. He briefly wished to have brought his Earth Armor, but then realized with horror that the gathered heat within the metal would have baked him like a scone. Thanks to an extra bit of foresight on Ftero’s part, several fire resistance potions jangled from Andor’s belt. He prayed not to need them. Wil-o-wisps, flaming bats and native zombie pigmen roamed the barren slopes, all too frightened of Ftero to approach. An occasional magma cube lurched forward, jiggling, and was slashed to ribbons by Ftero’s glaive-like claws. A ghast ambushed the duo from a cavity in the ceiling, but its fireball was sent sailing back into its face by an expert toss of Andor’s boomerang. Andor found himself breathing easier after several hours. However, the sweat was nearly drained from his body. He needed to drink. Ftero stooped over a lava lake at the bottom of the Nether and lapped his fill, a ribbon glowing inside his neck. While he drank, Andor pulled a few dried apricots from his pack and enjoyed the slight juice that was preserved in them. “If I’m going to find my father,” he muttered between bites, “I’ll need some kind of trail. But there’s nothing. The wizard just banished him without thought, without care.” Andor smashed his fist on a scale, at which Ftero jumped, spewing lava from his nose. Andor grimaced. “Sorry.” “I was enjoying myself so much that I forgot.” Ftero cast a sidelong pout. “But something will come up. You have a connection to him.” Andor puzzled briefly, then shut his eyes and laid back for a nap on Ftero’s cyan spike.

Andor entered his dream as an observer and watched himself climb ashore a small island. He had taken the simplest of boats across countless miles of sea. The beach of sand was thin, rising into rocky hills. Andor followed a torchlit cobble path to a home nestled in a grove. It was a dome built of netherrack. A farm and a pen rested on a nearby hill. Approaching the pen, Andor saw a horse and a man inside. The man had a nostalgic gleam in his eye but a paleness that suggested his life was waning. Andor felt a strange bond to the man and wished for him to enjoy his last days. As the simple farmer greeted Andor with a shout and a wave, the sound of his voice enraptured Andor. Although there was nothing remarkable about its quality – a bit gravelly, a bit mellow – it became the focus of Andor’s thoughts for the remainder of dream, and everything he saw was framed by the words the farmer spoke. He could not put his finger on why the voice pleased him so.

Till, till, till the soil ‘till it’s lush and full. Plant the carrots, plant the wheat, plant the stalks of sugarcane. Wait a day for it to grow. Wait by Prishilae and feed her a bushel of hay. Prishilae is my mare. She came to me in a meadow, like most horses do. Come, Prishilae. Come for your wheat. I don’t know what I’d do without Prishilae. This island is too narrow for adventure, and I’d love to find Prishilae a new home, yet you can’t very well swim a horse across the ocean. I can’t leave without Prishilae. Maybe those red caves of the Nether would take us to a bigger island. But I haven’t tried. Too scared to try. Prishilae’s got a beautiful molasses and marble coat. I wouldn’t trade her for any horse, even one that jumped higher and ran faster. No, she’s the one I want, and I’ve settled on her only. You find it strange to love a horse so much, Traveler? So much you wouldn’t sail across the ocean to find a life of your own? You know, you’re the first one like me I’ve met in this world. What’s your story? You’re the same as me, huh? Made the wilderness your home, built yourself up time and time again, moved from place to place, found new loves, lost them all? Did you ever have one like Prishilae? Alone now, huh? That’s a mighty sad thing. But you’ve got some experience, that’s for sure. An accomplished wanderer. You wanna join me and Prishilae? We’d welcome the company. Plus, with your skill with a boomerang, we might just make it through that Nether place. It’s morning now, Prishilae. Eat your last wheat on the green earth for a while. It’s all red from here. And our boy’s gonna guide us through the twisty turvy. Nudge nudge. Come on, Prishilae! You’ll be fine. Some sparkly mist won’t hurt you. There, through the portal you go! I’m filled to bursting with every good and worthy thing I’ve gathered in my journeys, and here I am, standing over lakes of fire that could melt it all away. Lead on, Traveler. You know the turf better than I. Prishilae, don’t you dare chew through that lead. Aghast! It’s a ghast. But your boomerang flies true, Traveler, and not one fireball has grazed my Prishilae. The slopes are steep and the cliffs precarious, and I think it’s safer to ride her now. No room for error. Prishilae, keep calm. It’s all lights and noises here. Nothing can get you. Prishilae, we’re falling. We still have time. Let me drink the potion. Fire so bright. I’m rising as quick as I can. I’m on the surface. Where are you? Take the potion. Prishilae. Prishilae? Prishilae? Traveler, when you pulled me to shore I was burning, so brightly burning, it took minutes to stop. The fire melted something off my soul, Traveler. Now there’s just one thought left, like a rhinestone you couldn’t see through all my love for Prishilae. And now that it’s bare, what will I do? What will you do, Traveler? How will you make up for what you’ve let happen to Prishilae?

Andor woke in a fit of gasping. Ftero jolted, Andor clutching the spike in front of him to avoid a thirty foot fall from the dragon’s back. Ftero had been walking through a spaceous cavern lined with lava falls. He coiled his neck to face the prince. “What happened?” “I dreamed, and...” The prince panned his gaze around the cavern. “This is where we started. This place was in the dream.” Ftero gazed speechlessly. After a long while contemplating, Andor steeled himself. “I have to follow the path I saw.” “Lead on, Wanderer. But will you be alright?” Andor recounted his dream to Ftero, and afterward said, “While dreaming I didn’t understand the love I felt for the man, but as I wake, it all makes sense.” He slumped into a maelstrom of thoughts. “What? What makes sense?” “Somehow, in some world, it was my father.”

A plateau spread beneath Ftero’s claws. The ceiling was close and the bottom of the Nether was visible past a long downward slope. The twisting land sank into a basin. From the basin’s rim all the way to the ceiling two hundred meters above spanned a nightmarish structure. A cylinder of swirling lavender light hung in the expanse. A belt of levitating Netherbrick spines divided the cylinder at its middle. At the center was something grotesque but not entirely alien. The Netherrack that composed it was lighter in hue than that which composed the rest of the Nether. It was almost flesh. It formed organic shapes. Was it a heart? No, it was too tall. Legs. It was a pair of legs dangling from a cavity in the ceiling, folded almost fetally. A torso and pair of arms were faintly visible in the highest reaches of the field. The head was lost in the violet wisps of light. Making an eerie contrast to the dark stone, white hives bulged from the flesh and from the surrounding ceiling. They were tumors. A body the size of a mountain was trapped and tortured in this prison of light and stone. “My father is here,” Andor said. Indeed, having followed the map of the dream, Andor had come to the very ledge from which the farmer and Prishilae had fallen. But it was no longer a sheer cliff dividing the terrain from an endless lake. It was a gradual descent. Andor felt a pulse in the very air around him. It caressed him with a subtle pull. A scent wafted through the hot, dry air; an old, comforting memory. Andor had smelled it from his crib as an infant. It was his father’s breath – rank with meat and ale but sweet with the perfume of the wife he had kissed. Andor and Ftero descended the slope toward the basin, which brimmed with blood. Four motes of crimson poured endlessly from the body’s slit wrists and ankles. The descent lasted an hour, and then even longer. Each step brought the pair further through the winding landscape but never closer to the monstrous prison. “Something is wrong,” Andor patted Ftero’s side, signaling to stop. “It doesn’t seem to be getting closer, does it?” “I thought at first we had simply underestimated its size. You know how mountains deceive us? But this – it hasn’t budged an inch.” “What magic is this?” “It’s like waking from a dream. We have imagined a journey, but really haven’t moved at all.” Andor looked around. They still stood on the plateau. “Can you solve it?” Ftero moaned. For a long while, Andor did not answer. Ftero began to whimper. “It’s not a journey for you.” Andor slid down Ftero’s tail and set his feet on the scalding stone, which amply warmed the bottoms of his boots. “It’s an evil place. Whatever happens in there, it’s not for you. Live to rescue your master. I am going to find the man who called himself mine.” Another hour passed. Andor walked until his heels and toes were scorched. The looming prison did not come closer. As before, Andor turned his eyes from his goal to the world around him, and suddenly the cries of Ftero blared in his ears. “I called to you for so long! You just stood there in a trance. When I tried to move you, it was the same as when we approached the place. I couldn’t reach you.” “Then this journey isn’t for me either.” Andor shook his head with spite. “Who can do it?”

Another visit to Dagrun – and so soon – had not been in the plans. Fate kept calling Andor back. It was his final idea. If even Helgrind’s kin could not penetrate the prison for his soul, then maybe next of kin would do. To boot, Sparklez was a miracle worker. He and the sky people had overcome impossible odds before. Apart from their conquests in their old world, which were surely too numerous to speak of, they had accomplished things in Ruxomar which would shape whatever history the planet might have. For one, they had freed Andor from Inertia, a prison which was famed for its impregnability. If they could do that, a prison of dreams might prove as malleable as a physical one. Ianite had seen fit to grace the sky people with her presence, not Andor. She had loved Sparklez – a shadow of her husband – more than her own surviving grandson. Perhaps she had imparted some of her power to him. Perhaps Sparklez, not Andor, was the key to all this. Perhaps Sparklez, who had seen fit to cut down his goddess’ despair with a sword, was the sort of person who, by ruining whatever situation he entered, could somehow manage to make good of things, no matter how hopeless they seemed. As Andor looked Sparklez in the eye and spoke his request, he still could not forgive the man. But at least he could view him as an ally in the war against the sorrows of the world.

After seeing the sky people to the ledge that overlooked the prison, Andor waited by himself. Their forms receded downslope; they did not stand enthralled like Ftero had described of Andor. The prince assumed all was well. He meditated on the news Mianite had given him: this prison was, in fact, the final of five Crypts to store Mianite’s heirloom items. Mianite had not built the place like he had the others. He had found it while roaming the Nether in memory of his brother. After a time, the Crypt had shut Mianite out, just as it did Andor and Ftero. The anomoly had begun ten years ago, shortly after the death of Dianite. Exactly which item the Crypt stored, Mianite refused to tell. While Andor stood pondering on the plateu, a glimmer of violet light caught his eye. It was so similar to the whisps of energy surrounding the Crypt that he nearly dismissed it. But it was slightly deeper in hue. It lay somewhere behind the Crypt, rectangular in shape, and flickering like a star. It was a Nether Portal. Andor descended just as before and found himself able to approach. Although the Crypt did not near, a tunnel in space seemed to guide him around the edge of the prison. The narrow obsidian frame was tucked into a steep slope. The pulling pulse and scent of breath, although centered on the Crypt, split off to this portal like a stem. Andor knew Helgrind had been here. He stepped through. Cool, salty air filled his lungs. The open sky blinded him, then revealed the gentle dunes of a sandy island. The portal was fastened to coastal boulders with rough but sturdy scaffolding. Andor recognized these techniques. He explored further. At the highest dune he stopped, fell to his knees and wept. On the other side lay a flat expanse of beach. There stood four sculpted figures. A woman wrapped her arms around her excited daughter, keeping her from leaping too high as a father and son stood flanking them, throwing a boomerang back and forth. The prince approached to run his hands over the sculptures. The stonework was good. The anatomy needed fixing, but the expressions were full of life. This was all that mattered. A sandstone hut sprawled nearby. It was the worst house Andor had ever seen. It seemed in shambles, blown apart, perhaps by a Creeper. It contained a few chests. A fair supply of food was in one. In another were bits of loot gathered from the Nether. In the final chest was an envelope. Andor opened it; its folds were gritty with sand. He pulled out and brushed off the slip of paper.

My Only Son, I have descended to a place where my dreams can live. The woman has spoken to me – the one who hangs from the cavern ceiling. If she speaks to you, don’t listen. Her words are not for you. The path to despair is a gentle and gradual one. The way to madness is quiet. Don’t let your life be swallowed by silence. Love your friends. Don’t cling to the dead. Be wind, like your grandmother is. And if you must be plague, like she also is, be that too. Remember that I love you and always did love you. It was hard to say through all my bitterness. I hated the world. Life was over for me. But it need not be, for you. I wish for you all the fulfillment the world offers. Even through loss, keep striving. You are the greatest sculptor I have known, and I have surveyed all of Mianite’s greatest cities. May the statue I destroyed by the bridge be the least of your works. May you rise far beyond memories of your tyrant father and Ruxomar’s tyrant god. Your voice rang true under the arch at the port. You told me what I needed to hear. Your wings, when severed at Inertia, lay like cloth in my hands. Your blood filled my nightmares each night thereafter. I had slain something tender. Now that you are free, do what you must to reclaim the beauty I took from you. I trust you to revive your spirit tenfold. Your soul is great, far greater than mine. You need not make me proud. I was always proud. I have gone to live in a world filled with pride, joy and family. Such a world will soothe my thoughts until my soul expires. With every breath, I love you, Your Father, Glede Helgrind

A second letter was addressed to Martha. Andor pocketed them both and, realizing that he was back in the overworld again, took a boat from a slipshod dock and sailed a long journey south. Why, of all those who had harmed Andor, was Helgrind the easiest to forgive? Reflecting on the island and his travels through the Nether, Andor wondered at the significance of the dream of Prishilae. The farmer did resemble his father in voice and face, had lost someone dear to him, and had blamed another for that loss, transforming himself into a creature of revenge. But in what world did this farmer exist? Was he now a part of Helgrind’s world? The “woman” Helgrind warned Andor about had not spoken to him at all. The Crypt had not seemed to desire Andor. But perhaps “she” already had approached him many, many times. Welcoming the sky people back to Urulu, their agreed rendezvous point, Andor received the news he had dreaded to hear. The Helgrind in the dream world was not the same Helgrind the sky people had banished to the Nether. Nor did he seem to share experiences with the farmer Andor had dreamt about. He was simply a much happier and more oblivious Helgrind – the same as described in the letter – who lived in a brighter past. Andor accepted his father’s death as the one his father had wanted, just as he had accepted the death of his goddess. How much more would Ruxomar take from him?

Micah ascended the ladder to the semi-final floor of The Clear Sky Hermit, the statue whose existence was as much a mystery as the appearance of the black cloaked figure several days before. The riddles were being solved without interruption. The next one, as Micah read it over, gave very little help to the imagination. I am the bridge between two kings. One toils while the other thinks Cut my cords. Watch one king crumble; the other die to dreams

Micah could hardly focus on the riddle. His father was coming down with desert fever. The fungus in his lungs gave him a terrible cough as well as muscle pains. Other cases were popping up; it would get worse. The doctors in Urulu could do nothing. The farms were barren; drought had consumed Urulu’s once proud agriculture. The end for the last of Micah’s family was drawing near – unless, by some miracle, what Micah found at the top of The Clear Sky Hermit could save his father. What a naive notion, he thought. It was surely just a game facilitated by some bored technician. But Micah strove upward with no other hope. Maybe the gods above gods had set this monument here, knowing that some creature would scale its chambers in a time of need.

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