Heart of the Night

 

Utuzan went alone into the western desert, and a flame went before him to light his way.  He left the fortress of Hamun at the setting of the moon, and no one saw him, for he moved as one with the night.  Once he was away from the works of man, among the rocks and the sand, he held up the ancient jewel called the Heart of Anatu and he called forth a light from within it.

He studied the indecipherable carvings upon the translucent red stone, uncut and rough.  Even he did not know where it came from, or who had marked it.  In his long-ago age it had been a forbidden thing, a relic of an ancient goddess who the people of the empire did not revere.  Only he had dared to take it up, only he had dared to use it, and it had always given him strength, always been his ally.  Now, it was faded from what it had been, and his power seemed to fade with it.

Since his poisoning he had been weakened.  He still knew all his secrets and mysteries – the names of wind and fire, the conjuring of spirits from outside time and light.  It was his innate power that had been sapped, and he at last had come to understand that the heart had spent too much strength to preserve him.  Its power was finite after all, and now it was dying.  It grieved him, as the loss of a friend, for without it he would be very alone in this fallen age.

He sought a way to revive it, a way to bring back the power that had been his, that had allowed him to defy an empire and would allow him to conquer a new one.  So he sought guidance from his goddess.  He walked alone into the empty places, and he called forth a fire, and with his supplication it emerged from the stone and twisted before him, as though it could almost form the shape of something he knew, but could not quite hold itself.  He bowed his head before it.

“Anatu, Black Mother of the night.  My mother, my strength and guardian.  Show me the path.  Show me what I must do to help you.  I will do anything.  I am your son.  I am the Black Flame brought forth from your womb.  Show me.”  He spoke in the ancient tongue of the Usun, the speech of the black witches out of dead ages.  Those who had first worshiped Anatu, and given her a name.

The flame danced before him, and then it began to flicker away through the dark, and Utuzan followed it.  He would summon no steed, call no power to carry him through the dark.  He would walk this path as a penitent, seeking the way back to his goddess, back to the night mother who bore his race in the earliest ages of the primordial world.  The stars passed overhead, falling motes streaking among them with fire, and he walked the sands into the limitless night beyond. 

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This was the deepest desert, hollow with rearing dunes and haunting silence.  The starshine turned the pale sands to silver, and the shadows to a blackness complete and utter.  Utuzan climbed up and over, down into the fallow trough, and then upward again.  It was like walking upon a sea, and the sands shifted and slid underfoot.  He seemed to walk for an age, far longer than any night could last, following the flickering fire until it awaited him at the crest of a dune like a stilled mountain, and when he stood atop it he saw ahead the baked hard earth scraped bare of sand, and the stony canyon mouth between towering rocks.

As the sands shallowed he saw the broken teeth of ancient pillars, and he realized something had been built here in another age.  The remnants of a road emerged from the dust, and he walked a path that no man had trod for uncounted gulfs of time.  At the mouth of the canyon were a pair of beasts carved from the dark stone, their features so weathered by time they were little more than malevolent shapes with yawning mouths and hulking shoulders.  The way past them led into the dark, and the flame he had followed stopped there in the shadow and then died away, fading until it was nothing but an image left upon his eyes.  The stone in his hand was dark and still, and he felt fear then, for it seemed to be dead.  He put it inside his robe, against his skin, and he drew his black-bladed sword.

The stone walls of the ravine rose up on each side, black and glossy, polished as obsidian, and there was a low, musky smell beneath the metallic taste of the dust and the shifting sands.  Utuzan trod carefully on the bare earth, watchful, feeling as though he were watched by a thousand eyes, sure he saw motion in the darkness.  Something still lived here, and he held himself ready to end that life, if he must.

The ravine led downward, and soon he realized that if he looked up, he could not see even a sliver of the sky.  Rather than a rift, this had become a passageway leading down into the earth.  It was too dark to see, and so he held up his hand and called forth a blue fire to guide him.  The light threw back the shadows, and revealed that the gleaming walls were carved with age-worn reliefs of a kind he did not recognize.  He saw towering warriors and a great battle upon a tormented sea, he saw a giant figure with a scaled, draconian tail in place of legs, and then he knew what he had found.

The giants were the most ancient forefathers of the Usun – the giants called the Omira, who had learned the arts of civilization from their god-king Uannan.  The first race who had been driven from their homeland across the sea.  Lost El’el, the first kingdom, now vanished beneath the waves.

He saw the tale etched in faded black stone.  A great wave destroying the towers of El’el, bearing away tall ships across a churning sea.  Waves taller than mountains bore nine ships across the land and beached them in a land of trees and many rivers, and there the people raised their new city.  Here, in this place.  A lost tribe of the Omira blooming in this place like a desert flower.

Utuzan saw a queen enthroned, taller than any other, a giant among giants, with light radiating from her eyes in lines of power.  She towered over a great battle against monsters that crawled like worms beneath the earth, striking them down with bolts of fire.  And then she lay in state, dying and wrapped in funeral cerements, her face a mask of beauty and pride.

He came to an archway, and beyond it, steps led downward into a deeper land, and a mist hung in the still air.  He looked at the peak of the arch above him, and he saw there the face of the queen carved like a guardian.  He bowed his head to her, and then he entered into the lower deep.

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Utuzan entered an unimagined world, and he wondered how long ago this place had lived and died.  He tried to picture vast waves carrying ships across the land, so far from any sea, and his mind could scarcely encompass it.  Such distances of time and reach blunted even his imaginings.  Here was an outpost of civilization from the ages before even the city of Akang rose beside the vansished Sea of Xis.  In his mind the deserts of Zaheh bloomed, filled with waterways and rich with life.  It must have been so, once.

He descended, and he held up his hand with its ghostly light and saw the carvings continued, but they were worn away and crumbling, as though they had been gnawed, and he saw holes in the stone, black openings that burrowed out of sight and stirred in him a disquiet.  Here in the hidden ways apart from the sun, something had been eating away at the memory of this place.  He held his black blade ready, and wondered at the prickling of unease in his skin.  He held his head up and cast away any fear.  He was of the line of the Muritai, descended of old from the race of giants.  The people of this lost world had been his kindred, and he would find what remained of them.

He entered a black hall, the walls gouged and tunneled with winding trails, and the floor covered in bones turned black with years.  Something moved at the limits of his light, and he narrowed his eyes.  At first he thought he was imagining it, but then he saw them, crawling in the edge of the darkness, coming closer, eyes shining blind as coins.

They were like worms, thick as a man’s body and a repulsive white color, fleshy and swollen.  He saw their faces almost like those of men, save for their unseeing eyes and the yawning mouths filled with reaching teeth.  They whispered, and he thought he almost understood words, but it was like a tumult of madness with no sense or rhyme.

They crawled from the holes in the stone, their leathery bodies hissing across the black rock, pushing aside the ancient bones.  He felt their hunger as almost a physical presence, something that pressed upon him.  They coiled upon one another, rising up on all sides of him like writhing walls.  Their dead eyes flickered like candles, and then they fell in toward him, mouths rasping with teeth that chewed stone.

Utuzan felt a loathing in his guts like venom, and then he spoke that venom with a word that sent the creatures cringing back, their pale skin blistering.  He held up his hand and spoke another word and the flame in his fingers turned to many colors, and then he hurled it outward to strike like a bolt of lightning.  It scattered the things like husks, and the smell of their burning choked him.  Fire seared the stone floor and shattered the ancient bones, and Utuzan spoke another word of power that smote upon the air and cracked the walls.

A wave of the worms came for him and he hewed them apart with his black blade.  Teeth reached for his flesh, but his was suffused with a fire that blackened and burned.  The things flailed in the dark, cut apart, their teeth splintered and broken.  The venom of his words turned them black and left them gasping and heaving upon the floor, vomiting forth their own foul innards.

They still came on, pressing against him, burning and searing, and he clenched his fist and bent one knee so he could strike a blow upon the floor.  A wave of many-colored flame burst out and the stone cracked beneath him.  The worms were blackened to ash and hurled away, scattering apart as they burned, and then he stood in silence.  His arm still rang with the fury of the blow, his breath coming fast and harsh.  The room shivered, and dust sifted down from the fractured roof to mix with the drifts of charred things like burned leaves.

They were gone, though he thought he heard their stealthy motions in their burrows.  They were not all dead, only driven back with fear.  How hungry they must be after such a long time, feasting on stray animals or foolish men who wandered down into this place.  They devoured the rock itself, so great was their appetite.  Below he might find yet the gnawed remnants of a race of giants, and he might find a nest where subterranean horrors writhed and spawned.

He caught his breath, feeling the ever-present weakness threaten him.  He could not wield power wildly, as he once had.  He touched the lump of the Heart beneath his robes, hoping for a stir from within it, and he thought he felt the faintest flutter of warmth.  It was enough.  Utuzan firmed his grasp on his black sword and made his way deeper into the ruin, the dark whispering around him.

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He knew he had reached the great fane when he saw the light that came up from beneath, and he let his ghost flame die and instead followed the red gleam down into nighted depths.  The steps here were dusty, unmarked by footstep or worm-trail, and so he knew that none had reached this place before him, and no one had trod here for a very long time.  He felt the Heart stir against his flesh, and so he knew he drew near to the center of this mystery, and soon he would learn what he wished to know.

Utuzan stepped out into a cavern that stunned him with its dimensions, the immensity of it, so he could hardly see the roof that arched above.  The stone above gleamed with luminous fungi, and so it was as if he stood beneath a vault of strange stars.  A wind stirred here, speaking of unseen gulfs beyond, and he saw the bones of a fallen goddess, and he was afraid.

If this had been raised as a tomb, it had been made for a titan beyond anything he had ever known.  The shrunken, desiccated body lay on the upraised stone bier, covered in tattered funeral wrappings, adorned with jewels and a sea of gold heaped at the base of the stone.  She lay arched, her hands drawn up, her back bent as though in agony, but her face-mask still gleamed the sullen splendor of gold, the features impassive and remote.

She had been massive, more than three times his size, her ribs jutting against the wrappings like columns, the flesh that covered them like black glass.  From where he stood he saw there was a great hole in her chest, and from that hole the red glow radiated like the curse of a dying sun.  Rings dripped from her clutching fingers, and everywhere dust lay, showing that none had trespassed before upon the tomb of Anatu.

Utuzan knew it must be she.  A titaness in life, a warrior, a sorceress, in death she became a goddess, and her worship had spread across the land until she was revered by races yet unborn when she fell.  Here lay the goddess he had followed all his life, and her power had reached beyond death, and it had brought him here.  He brought the Heart from within his robe and held it up, and saw there an answering glow.  He bowed his head.  “I am your son.  I am the Black Flame, anointed by ancient rites and your own power.  I come to your call, and I will serve.”

He approached her, his feet soft on the dusty floor, the soft clink of ancient gold under his tread.  He was uncertain what he must do.  Should he place the heart inside her chest?  Was that what was needed?  The glow was brighter, and then something obscured it.  He hesitated, and then he heard something move.  There was a leathery sliding, and then her body moved.

For a moment he thought it was Anatu herself come to life, but then there was a hiss, and something dark erupted from her chest, bursting through the hole, cracking her glassine flesh.  Utuzan gave back with a cry of loathing as a humanoid shape dragged itself from within her.  Eyeless and membranous, it had arms but no legs, only a long, verminous body that slithered into view.  It had two glittering eyes and a mouth that was most of its face.  Curved teeth worked in their hundreds as it hissed at him.

He felt a terrible wrath boil up inside him as this desecration.  Worms had devoured the fertile land, had turned the valleys and rivers to dust, had brought down the people who had lived here, and they had even burrowed into the body of Anatu herself and fed on her power.  Now this thing, father of worms, rose up gorged on the strength of her heart and rushed toward him, hands extended to grasp and rend.

Utuzan would not permit it.  As soon as the thing came within reach he called forth a blazing fire in his hand, the light driving it back.  He spoke terrible words and the air shivered and echoed with power.  He swept down his black sword and cut off one reaching hand, and then the thing reared up like a cobra and lashed at him.  He met it with a burst of fire, and then he drove his sword again and again into the fleshy body.  It hurled itself against him and bore him off his feet, its coils squeezing as it dragged him toward that unclean maw.

He spoke another word and where the flesh touched him, it seared black.  The jaws came closer and he tore his arm free, drove his sword up through the misshapen skull.  Together they crashed against the far wall, dust raining down, and then the body of the worm coiled and thrashed in a frenzy of pain and dying wrath.

Utuzan hacked his way free and staggered back, breathing hard from his exertion.  The floor was stained with a spreading pool of black ichor, and the death-throes of the monster grew weaker until it lay still.  He looked on it as the lower body split open and hundreds of finger-length worms crawled forth, squealing as they sought food to sustain them.  With a sound of disgust Utuzan held forth his hand and then he spoke an envenomed word and all the writhing creatures curled on themselves and died.  A pass of his hand, and fire washed over them and burned them to black cinders.  And there was silence in the tomb of Anatu.

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The Heart had fallen to the dusty floor in the struggle, and he picked it up, seeing the light within it flickering.  He carried it to the vast remains of the goddess, and he mounted to the stone platform and stood over her.  Even so, he could not see into the cavity of her chest, and he crawled onto her, feeling her desiccated flesh grown iron-hard and smooth as glass.

The opening into her was a well of red light, and he looked within and felt the power there, simmering like heat from a coal fire.  Narrowing his eyes, he saw there the shape of a huge heart made from red stone, fractured and broken but still whole, light bleeding from the cracks.  In one place there was a missing piece, and he knew without asking what it was, and where the stone he had long called the Heart had come from.

Even as he watched, the heart pulsed, and he felt a rush of excitement in his belly, like a taste of fire.  The heart lived on, in some unknown manner, and so the goddess was not truly dead.  She had fed power to him through this piece of her heart, but when he had been laid low she had given too much, and so the feeding of the worm had tipped the balance and begun to bring her down into the real death.

Now, he could undo it.  He sheathed his sword and took the Heart in both hands, running his fingers over the carvings and the contours of it that he knew so well.  Lovingly, he placed it within the petrified chest, finding the missing piece by feel and then carefully pushing it into place, so that the crystalline heart, smooth as a raw jewel, was whole again, and it beat again, more strongly in his hands.

Strength flowed into him as well, and he felt his eyes sting as he wept keen tears for the first time since he was a boy.  He ran his hands over the glowing heart, feeling the warmth rise, feeling her strength in him once more.  She was not dead, not truly dead, and with time, and with care, who could say what might be possible?  He would purge this place of the parasites that plagued it, no matter what he had to do, and he would make this again a shrine for her, where she would be adored, and sacrifices made.

He touched the funeral mask she wore, and then he kissed the warm gold, feeling it almost alive against him.  He would build his new empire for her, a great land with a goddess at the heart, until she lived again, until she rose and looked upon his works, and he might be, at last, truly her son.