And I can still feel pain. I pull my hand away from my chin. There is no blood. I appear to still be stuck between life and death, human and something…more.
I walk.
The silvery light I saw cutting through the gloom is an anamnesis. Small and frail, flickering, as though it is a candle flame about to go out.
I come to a stop before the small tree and find myself compelled to touch it. I reach out a hand, running my fingertips along the silvery leaves.
The moment I come into contact with it, I find myself overcome with a song that dulls my other senses. This is a new song—one I do not understand the words of, but can clearly comprehend. Light blooms within; no longer is there a perpetual night pressing down upon me.
Just like the markings upon my body, the anamnesis is a physical manifestation of music. The song trapped within its ghostly form tells a story. Or tries to. The events of the tale do not follow a logical order. The beginning occurs in conjunction with the end. The middle is strewn throughout, making it challenging to get a sense of what is real, what is emotion, and what are fragmented memories of something far beyond me—memories that are trapped within the Lifetree itself.This must be Lellia’s song.
I see a young world, occupied with spirits of light and darkness, nature and destruction, life and death. A garden so large that it could be the whole of the known world. Peoples, held in the warm embrace of the eternal.
There were no lines here. No barriers. No living or dead. Oneness.
An elf. The first of his kind. A king.
He parlays for a world with more order. A tidier world. They comply.
The song shifts, pitching into the highest registers of notes. It’s filled with longing as the shapes of gods vanish. They’re leaving…
The song fades and, with it, the visions. I ease my hand away. The tree shines brightly, branches trembling, new leaves budding, as though it is surging one last time with power. Like a brilliant star, it extinguishes after that final act of beauty. It unravels into silvery strands that dissipate into the water and are carried by a current through the darkness, before they condense again and ignite on a different rocky pedestal in the distance.
The song grows once more as I near the second anamnesis, and so, too, do the visions.
The dryads, carved in her image. The sirens, made for Krokan. The elves. The fae. Vampir and lykin. More in the skies and more on the land. The world is full and so too are the notes. Sung with full-bellied joy.
Once more, the anamnesis fades and the silver dust from it speeds away, guiding me along. I follow the motes like breadcrumbs through the Abyss. Each has a song that gives me another piece of Lellia. Another morsel of insight into the trapped goddess.
I hear her sorrow and feel her pain during the magic wars. Her song wavers with visions of seclusion. Of winters that seemed unending. Of a pain that could not be lessened by a mere Elf King and Human Queen.
My path through the darkness is unhindered. There is no longer the screaming of souls or relentless song the sirens imparted upon me before my departure. There is no movement at the edge of my vision. The water—or perhapsetheris a better word for the substance I am suspended within—is calm and quiet. I feel…safehere, oddly enough.
The anamneses continue to sing me their songs and guide me out of the fog of night to an underwater river of molten rock. A stone boat is moored, tethered, as though someone knew I would be coming. My hands close around its bow. My toes dig into the rocky sand as I push.
I’ve done this before.
When…?
The vessel is free and I leap into it with confidence. My feet were never at risk of touching the lava. It’s like I’ve done this a thousand times.
Drifting away from the shoreline, I begin to paddle with an oar made of what feels like bone. I don’t have to apply much effort as the river has a strong current and for the most part I can just sit back and watch this strange, slowly illuminating world drift by me. I can’t see much, but what I can see are the withered carcasses of the massive roots of the Lifetree. They are wrinkled and shriveled. Spindly things compared to the massive structures up among the sirens or even in the Gray Trench. Dotted among them are the bony remains of Lord Krokan’s emissaries, nestled in forgotten graves.
Soon, roots and bones turn to nothing but dust. Consumed by the same rot that is eating away at the goddess.
A faint haze grows in the distance, a pale fog that is reminiscent of a distant light. As the haze coalesces, I finally begin to see movement on the banks of the river. Silhouettes stumble forward. At first, I think I cannot make out their details because they are too far, or the fog is too thick, but then, some come up to the water’s edge.
They are living shadows, voids condensed into the outlines of what were once human. No, not just human—there are others among them. Some hover with the tails of sirens. Others have points, jutting out from the sides of their heads. Some have wings and others horns. There are men, women, beasts, and creatures I do not recognize. While I cannot see their eyes, I know they are all looking upon me.
We have been waiting for you, their silence seems to say.
I know, my heart sings with a sigh in reply.
The boat comes to a stop, grinding up on a rocky shore. It’s hard to tell how long I rode upon it; time is as ephemeral as the images that pass before me. There a moment, gone the next. Even though the river turns and carries on through the barren, mysterious landscape, this is where the current took me—where the boat stopped. The message seems clear. So this is where I disembark.
I hesitate a moment. The spirits still linger, barely visible to the fog. But well within the realm of my perception, because I feel them more than I see them. I wait to see if any will approach but when none do, I begin to walk.
They part for me. None of them get in my way. A few begin to walk with me. I find their presence oddly comforting, rather than uneasy. We begin to descend into a deep valley. I know who I will find waiting for me at the deepest point of the Abyss. I can already begin to see snakelike tentacles writhing in the distance.
