Chapter 236: The Shadow In The Distance
The three of us moved away from the Adepts, but we did not go far from the camp. There was nowhere to go after all, the relay station was eight hours of march that I suspected would only lead to nowhere but conflict, but I could not explain why I knew this.
It was as if a giant trap had been constructed around this entire area, and I was supposed to know this, but somehow, all these memories were lost in the fog that covered my mind, and I did not have the words to explain a thing I only half-remembered.
We went back, sat near the cold cookfire, and talked. I knew it was mostly for my benefit, and I appreciated it.
Bari looked at the sky, and he laughed, "I have never said this before, but I used to be scared of magic. It always seemed so ridiculously powerful, you know. How can we conjure fire from nothing, or fly into the sky... and see here," he pointed at the sky, "The world seems to be frozen, and yet, it is just so... big, this entire thing, its too big that I am not as scared as I should be."
"When something gets too big, we have no choice but to accept it for what it is, and only in the way we accept this lies our true strength," I whispered all of this in one breath, feeling something familiar in what I was saying, and my friends looked at me, and I could see their fear and concern, but how could I explain to them that I was even more concerned, but I was oddly not afraid.
"It has to be the pyramid," Dara said, turning her empty cup in her hands. "Your headaches, the sky. Look at this structure. How can something so massive not have extreme magical significance? You know, there are whispers that these things are the tombs of the gods, but that should be nonsense, right? Anyways, I think Scholar Orath knows more than he is letting on, that is just my intuition, maybe that is why he stayed behind, and I don’t want to miss it."
"Or maybe it is because this is his last expedition?" Bari said, before he brought his voice down to a whisper. "I heard that the man is old, even for an Adept. My grandfather knew him as a child, and even then, Scholar Orath was old."
"He stayed because he wants something," I said, and my voice carried a certainty that surprised me. "This expedition is just the cover for something else. We should be careful, because everything can change in the blink of an eye."
They both looked at me.
"How do you know that?" Dara asked, and I nearly smiled as her voice was careful and not accusing. It was almost as if she were treating me like a bird that would bolt if she approached too suddenly.
They were worried for me, and my heart felt sweet, but I did not know how to explain the source of my unease.
"I don’t," I replied to her. "I just know it." I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye, where the headache lived, a slow, patient throb I had stopped questioning. "There’s a lot I know like that. None of it I can explain."
Bari leaned forward, his face creased with worry. "Then explain the part you can. If we do not understand, then we would go to the Adepts. They would surely understand what is happening to you far more than we ever could."
I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know, and that he should not bother trying to call the attention of Scholar Orath when the memory came.
∞
You have lived all this before, but the script has been changed... You are in grave danger.
I saw a golden hall, vast, the dark eating the ceiling. Then I saw winged golden statues with their faces melted off, cupped orbs in their hands. Blood climbing the walls the wrong way, against the earth’s pull. Silver fire in my own hands, a fire that ate things and freed them.
A headless, feathered shape kneeling in the rising red, speaking in the space behind my breastbone, telling me I had a year, that I could not save her, that the world was thirty-one pieces of a shattered...
The headache slammed down, harder than it had all day, and I lost the rest. But it came from a point this time, at the very top of my skull, as though something there had pressed down hard.
I came back to the cold cookfire with Dara’s hand on my arm, Bari halfway to his feet, and my own breath ragged; they must have been calling for me for a while before I recovered.
"I’m fine," I lied. "It passed."
But it had not passed. The point at the crown of my head throbbed with pain, and at the same time, there was a feeling I could not name. It was a heaviness across my shoulders and back that I had no reason to notice and could not stop noticing.
I almost glanced behind me because it felt as if there was someone right behind me, breathing down my neck. At the very corner of my eye, at the edge of where my vision gave out, something moved, and I moved my head, but I could not see anything.
I thought I had seen a shape, but it was gone the instant I turned toward it, gone before I could even decide it had been there.
Looking back at the worried faces of my friends, I smiled at them, and my thoughts were heavy. There was something about that shape that I had glimpsed that felt so wrong.
And I was noticing that anytime I turned my eyes suddenly to the left or right, I would glimpse that shape in the distance, and I thought it was getting closer to me.
Elric, hold my threads...
Alone... he died alone...
"Elric." Dara’s voice cut through the haze in my mind. "You feel distant, where are you?" she smiled, and I could not help but smile back at her, and Bari made a wretching sound.
"I—" The heaviness shifted, infinitesimally, and the corner of my eye caught the movement again, and I could not stand it. "I need a minute. My head, I’m going to walk it off." I stood, too fast, and steadied myself against the spinning. "Stay here. Both of you. Please. I won’t go far."
I felt their worry on my back as I walked away, but I could feel that sense of heaviness and that unknown shadow coming closer to me, and a part of me did not want to confront this shadow when I was close to my friends.
I did not know where I was going. My feet chose the way, and it was drawn toward the pyramid.