Chapter Four – Now and for Always

Amuzad approached the stricken spirit slowly, cautiously. One hand held his staff, the other was raised, open, to show the earth spirit he meant no harm. It snarled and whimpered but made no move towards Amuzad.

When he reached its side, he stretched out with his hand and gently rested it upon the tortured flesh. “Easy,” he said quietly. “All will be well.”

He stood there, not moving, hand upon the spirit for some time, long enough that Ishkinil began to wonder if he had fallen into a sleep. At last he stirred, and drew back his hand, giving a brief shape of his head. “It is bad,” he announced.

“Is there anything you can do?” Ishkinil asked.

Amuzad’s face was all grim lines. “Yes. For it to work I am going to need your skills and talents.”

“Mine belong to a different realm, a different domain of power.”

“And it is that which I will require. As it is, the Heart of Arkech Usor is beyond saving. The corruption has gone too deep. The land will die.”

“The land is not in Enkurgil’s purview,” Ishkinil stated.

“But I am,” Amuzad told her. “The only hope for the Heart is for me to take its sickness, its corruption into myself, to leach it of the poison that pervades it. It will live but I shall die.”

A noble sacrifice. A life given freely. There was power to be had in such an act, far more than for a sacrifice made unwittingly, forced for the benefit of others. Few, though, were willing to make it; most wish only power for their own benefit.

“What would you have me do?”

“Death I do not fear,” Amuzad said. “It is but part of the endless cycle, from birth to death. I am but a speck compared to the vastness of the life of the Heart, yet without it that cycle is broken.”

“There needs to be balance,” Ishkinil agreed. “Too many have forgotten that, seek to subvert it.”

“Which is where you come in.” Amuzad pointed out. “What need for a Handmaiden of Death is death is not being denied?”

“Few understand that.”

“It is so. No, death is not my fear. My fear is that this corruption, this poison shall afflict me as it has others, to drive me mad, and in so doing I shall undo what needs to be done, do damage the spirit and the land further. If it shall come to that, then I would need your services, to prevent it. You I shall need to release me of my tortured flesh.”

“It is not my way to simply end a life thus, but these are circumstances of an unusual bent. I shall stand by your side, to do what needs doing should it so come to pass.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “Not once have you asked of yourself, of how you would return to the real world, to your body. When I am ended, so shall my link which sustains us here and you shall be returned.”

Ishkinil nodded. “I had no concerns over that.”

“We shall commence.” Amuzad took his staff and planted it in the ground. With his free hand, he rested it again upon the body of the earth spirit. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

A change came over the earth spirit, slow at first, the flesh around where Amuzad touched beginning to knit, to lose the corrupted nature. Yet even as it did, Ishkinil could see the reverse happening to Amuzad, for corruption seeped up his hand, climbing ever up. The earth spirit quit its whimpering and the madness in its eyes began to fade away. Its antlers, once chipped and stained, became as new again, strong and white. And around them, the tainted corruption began to fade, the trees recovering, leaves growing full once more.

Sweat was upon Amuzad’s brow, and his teeth were locked tight from the strain. The corruption climbed up his neck, veins darkening beneath his skin. Up his jaw it climbed, across his face, to his eyes. They snapped open and in them Ishkinil could see great pain yet not a sound he made, merely a rictus grimace. His knuckles showed white so hard did he clench his staff and his body trembled.

Up rose the Heart of Arkech Usor, taller yet, and it stretched out, new growth rippling across it. Flowers opened and blossomed, and around it gathered vivid golden butterflies and bright bees. The darkness that had been all pervasive about faded as light once more transfused the glade and the scent of corruption departed.

The earth spirit looked down upon them, its eyes now pools of deep wisdom and endless ages. A crown of flowers bloomed upon its brow, golden and white, and entwined about its antlers.

It set an earthy hand upon Amuzad’s head, though its expression was one alien and ancient, impossible for Ishkinil to read. Amuzad managed a trembling, pained smile before he collapsed, at the feet of the earth spirit.

The Heart of Arkech Usor bent down and took up Amuzad into its arms, cradling it in an earthy bed of flowers and vines, before it spoke, in a voice as deep as the earth, as ancient as the stars, both the whisper of a breeze and the roar of the storm. “Go now, child of He Who Waits. This one belongs to me now, and for always.”

Ishkinil could say not a word for even as the earth spirit spoke, all faded away before her, the hidden realm dissipating back into the real world, leaving Amuzad behind.

Ishkinil found herself standing back by the rune covered ur-ankuzu stone in the clearing beside the waters. On the grass beneath the stone lay Amuzad, his face one at peace. No sign of wounds marred his body yet he was dead. Ishkinil could sense it, without having to check. Of the gnarled staff there was no sign.

She knelt down beside the body. He had done that which many attempted to do, to escape from Enkurgil’s embrace when the end came, all to no avail. Yet, in this, she felt no anger, nor need to rectify it. The Heart of Arkech Usor had taken up Amuzad in a way she did not understand. A soft dirge she began to sing over his body, a mournful tune of remembrance for the fallen. A hush settled over the clearing and a beam of sunlight drifted down across the body as she sung, a gift, no doubt, from the Heart.

When at last she was done, she rose back to her feet. The body she would leave. In other times and other places, she would have buried it or burned it, but there it felt right to leave it, to let nature and the earth spirit honour it and reclaim it in their own way.

Ishkinil turned, and saw before her Heshberu, bloodied and clutching at a gaping wound in his side. He could not stand, but was slumped with his back to a tree, his face grimacing with pain.

“Curse you,” he wheezed, blood flecking his lips. “I should have killed you here while you were still in the primal realm.”

“You could not have done so,” she told him. A whisper of wings circled in from above and the raven landed upon the ur-ankuzu stone. “You would have been stopped.”

Heshberu tried to force himself to his feet, but strength departed him and he fell back again. “It is not too late,” he promised. “Power you can still have for the taking.”

“I had power once,” Ishkinil replied quietly. “More than enough, and yet never enough. In time you learn that it is not important.”

“You were a fool to give it up.”

“The price was too great,” she promised him. “As you are discovering. You threw it all away for your lust for power. Death approaches and will soon have you.”

“You must stop it,” Heshberu grimaced. “I cannot die.”

“We all of us die, in time.”

“But it is not yet my time. I was promised. Listen, much I know that I can share with you. You could have power over life and death both if you but just stop him taking me. Think of all you can save. Think of all those you can bring back.”

Ishkinil walked over to Heshberu and squatted before him. Her pale eyes were tight with pain and loss. “Do not speak of what you cannot give,” she told him, voice curt. “The dead cannot return.”

“I can make it so,” he promised urgently, a trickle of blood running down from the corner of his lip. “Just help me.”

Ishkinil rose back to her feet and the shadows closed in about her. “No,” she said and turned her back on Heshberu, walking away.

A wail came from the man, one that was cut off by coughing and then was silent. A presence she felt arrive, one overwhelming in nature. She turned at it, to see an ethereal form standing above the body of Heshberu. Tall the man was, and robed in black, his features indistinctive. Old he could have been, or young, fierce or compassionate, strong but weak, and many other conflicting states besides. Enkurgil, the Bringer of Ends, who saw to it that all died as they should and passed beyond the world.

He reached down to the body and his hands slid through it, emerging holding the ghostly form of Heshberu, a form that squirmed and resisted but could not break free from Enkurgil’s grasp.

Enkurgil looked back up, to where Ishkinil stood and his eyes were filled with a deep understanding and sorrow. “You are weary, my child,” he said, voice both distant and everywhere, a whisper from the ages.

“I bear a heavy burden,” she replied.

“Do you regret what I have asked of you?”

“There are days where it is heavier than others,” Ishkinil said quietly, “But never regret.”

“A while longer is all that I ask,” Enkurgil told her, grasping tight on the still struggling form within his hands, “And then you can lay down your burden.”

“I will rejoice when that day has come.”

Then did Enkurgil fade away, taking with him Heshberu, leaving Ishkinil alone once more.

“Come,” said she to the raven, “I would leave these parts. The troubled waters of Arkech Usor will once more run clean. A new anku in time shall rise to guard the land, but I would be elsewhere. There is much to be done before I lay down my burdens and I would be about it so that it may end all the sooner.”

Thus saying, Ishkinil strode off, shadow cloaked and with the sword of death at her side, feet ever on the long road that her journeys took her, until her burden was fulfilled.

The End