The Well of Mimir

Sing, poor Elvasa, sing like the wind across the dunes, sing to the bones of your father, and carry him with you all your life, until your children bear up your own bones unto the winds…

The song died away, drifting slowly away across the red evening darkness towards the blue edging upon the horizon and becoming lost in eternity. The gathered tribe drifted away, the ritual completed as Elvasa admired the shining ivory blade he now held, turning the thin crescent over to admire each side of the weapon…and to remember…

“Your father is with you now forever,” the old bone-singer’s voice broke into his reverie, and Elvasa looked up from the new blade into his milk-white eyes. The voice trembled with age, but there was still strength and tenor in it, subtle shadings of skill that remained eternally young lurking beyond the aged flesh. He wondered how the old man knew where to look without eyesight.

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The clouds curdled thick and gray in the sky; somewhere, a patch of brilliant blue shone.

“You’ve been corrupted by the forces you seek to control,” he shouted hoarsely at the back of the figure atop the rise ahead of him, who stared out across the city below and sky above.

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It happened that long ago the people of Lim Xhe would labor in their bountiful fields beneath the brilliant light of seven suns that soared through the heavens each day, for the gods had created the world with seven suns in the sky that there would be light everywhere. But the people complained for the fields were too hot, as each of the seven suns shone with light and heat upon the bare backs of the men.

But what could they do? For the gods had made seven suns in the sky, and it was not their place to change it. Even if they knew how.

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Ghalek stared out across the red sands and broken orange-brown rocks at the thin white band set across the desert’s breast, and the shining spike rising up into the sky above it, the glittering hues of the god’s shields dancing in the empty, white sky above it. The bloated corpse of the black sun sagged on the rim of the world behind him, painted crimson by the dust hazing the air and throwing long, sharp shadows that stretched towards the distant city like grasping claws.

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I was barely seventeen when I decided to cross the black deserts of the Kai and brave the deadly midnight dunes of Kirrel, said to be full of lying ghosts and hungry, vile beasts.

No longer a child, dressed now in sacred star-patterned robes of blue and white worn by the men of the Kaihk, my parents wept as I left with all I owned upon my back — and little it was. But there was nothing more they could do but curse and weep at my foolishness, for I was a man and they could no longer protect me from my dreams.

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Thirteenth-Jaguar-Sun did not like the smell that lingered in the air.

It was like the smell of the great temple fires that burned at the foot of the temples to Child-of-the-Bloody-Moons when the winds shifted and blew their black smoke down over the city: it was the charnel smell of flesh taken by flame, the smell of sacrifice, of bodies given over to the eternal fires by the priests.

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The red-orange haze of the far horizon as it curved away north and south bled into the pink-and-white of the sky, the sun boiling red and angry hot in the sky above like a drop of shimmering crimson blood on the flesh of the air.

And near the edges of the sky, separated from each other by celestial arcs, hung three small objects: two were pale white and washed out in the brightness of the daytime sky, lumpy and irregular, their shadows the color of the sky. The third was little more than a metallic glimmer in the heavens, though its brightness would grow in intensity as dusk approached. These were the three moons.

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In the ancient, forgotten days reduced and twisted over the aeons into fragments of myth and legend, there was once an empire that stretched along the base of the mountains of Sirral, whose tall, beautiful people built incredible temples to the stars.

These lost people were said to be giants, twice the height of men, with fair skin like unblemished marble, marked by strong and pleasing features, and deep eyes like the color of the blue night sky. But their children were nothing of the sort: tall, but stunted, strong, but twisted, with ugly features and evil black eyes, and flawed, jaundiced skin.

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Clouds of insects buzzed like thick clouds in the air as we rode up to the grassy, yellowed hill. The white sun burned down upon us from the cloudless blue sky above. The heat was oppressive and dry.

A rocky, winding path led between the craggy hills of dry grass and dusty stone. We followed it around the side of another of the nondescript hills, this one courted by a large pile of broken stones resting upon its side…except our passage by revealed this hill wasn’t so nondescript after all.

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He sat upon a shelf of rounded stone exposed among the verdant grasses of the hillside, staring up at the pulsing flickers of quiet lighting chasing one another through the clouds and painting the sky with an ever-shifting series of unfocused light and dark shapes.

The light show had been going on for hours without a single cry of thunder, just the light filling up the heavens in broad, bright sheets, nearly drowning the swaths of stars that shone through the tattered and oft-broken canopy.

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