blur it into an even more tentative symbol, but I had it focused in my bearing now.
Just a ways more.
My feet burned in my boots. Each step was like I was running on bruised soles, the skin chafed raw, the bones whittled down. Shards of pain shot up my calves and shins, like recurring splinters. A pulled muscle protested in one leg, and the other had been pinched senseless by a sharp jab to the meaty muscle there. I briefly considered resorting to walking on my hands, for how useless my other limbs had been rendered, but the ridicule was lent a faulty premise when I reminded myself my wrist was just as twisted, and the nerves in my other elbow just as tweaked.
My breath began to sift into the air in frosty little clouds, obscuring my vision in hazy patches. It spread out to be united with the rising mist, and I scuffed hazardously faster for a few moments.
Presently, I could hear the others singing. It was a distant sound, but unmistakable; I knew that muffled lament. And even fainter beyond that, I noticed as I grew closer, was the sound of a single voice out beyond the other side of the house – a lone, crude chant. An ancient, wise, desperate voice.
Enda.
Hastily, I limped through the last stretch of road and plunged straight into the misty weeds, falling to my knees and adding my voice to the ritual. I had to salvage what I could. I imagined the others, fraught with the obligation to take up my task. What a bleak undertaking; for surely they knew they could only grasp at it – that the flowers would flicker in response, in deprivation, neglected by that which the others didn't possess.
Yet they had to try. The Wardogs were out there.
Only the slightest falter tickled my throat, raw from my breathy exertions, but I hollowed it out and forced it strong. Potent, keening notes rang through the mist. I closed my eyes and let it course through me, becoming a mere vessel for that greater power that had its seeds planted inside me somewhere. The darkening countryside became ethereal territory, awash with the ringing, sacred symphony of the song in my veins.
The weedflowers around me flitted with the first shimmers of light. Slowly, they awakened, dawning like pixies in the gloom. My lashes lifted as they assumed their full glow, and I let the breath of the song go out of me. Weariness and relief crashed down on me all at once. But I clambered to my feet with the need to spread out the effect, and, even after I had hastily achieved the task, I stumbled once more in a direction not of the manor – driven by one last piece of necessity this night; in the distance was Enda's voice still, wavering but caught in a vigil. I hastened toward the sound, pushing the weeds aside. They swished and bobbed in my wake, their buds like fireflies.
At times, I pushed mist aside as much as the weeds, as good as swimming through the abyss. But surely feet had never fumbled or caught so much for any swimmer.
Enda's voice grew and shrank, teasing me onward, pulling me around.
Finally, I found her. I broke free of the mist into a pocket of a clearing, and saw her folded on the ground in the middle, desperately stuck chanting. I treaded forward and folded myself at her side, putting my arms around the old, rocking woman. Again, I added my voice, smoothing out the song, bringing her back to a sense of harmonic sanity. I felt her go slack in my arms, her chant turning to a hum. Drawing her slowly up, I turned her about, ears straining for the sound of the voices that I hoped were still posed to hail us. Dusk and mist had lost me completely.
The first and most prominent thing I heard: silence. Then the second: the gem-cutting sharpness that was a brief string of voiced notes flitting through the gloom. They drifted to us over the field after that, unsteady but tangible. I huddled Enda close as we penetrated the mist, and ushered her back toward the house.
Our perimeter, swallowed by the abyss, held true as we left it to its nightwatch.
F o u r –
The Daylight Echo
Things creaked, and things stirred. Things shifted, and things brewed. Things festered and cracked and rippled – things that were never meant to ripple.
Stone was not meant to ripple.
Yet