<html> <body> --------- Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats by Charles Matthias and Ryx Pars IV: Infernus (b) Saturday, May 12, 708 CR The tor, the stone table, and the silver moon shining on both vanished in a flash of darkness. The last thing he saw was his eldest son's sleeping form on that table and then he fell through a darkness that opened out into another night. Although it seemed as if he fell for a very long time, like an old memory savored during a day's journey, it whisked passed in the blink of an eye. He landed on his side, a painful ringing in his ears as he struggled to put his hands and legs beneath him. The ground was tangled with gnarled roots, upthrust stones, and briars, all of it suffused in a deep gloom as of a moonlight night obscured by thick clouds. His rodent eyes were well-suited to the dark and after a moment he began to make sense of everything around him. He crouched in a forest tangled with the roots and limbs of misshaped trees rattling dry branches in a crisp autumn wind. Bushes and brambles choked the underbrush, each sporting a profusion of long thorns that grasped and tore at his cloak. Beneath of these and climbing nearly every tree he could see were mushrooms and fungus of all sorts, brown and crimson like rust in the midnight pallor. His whiskers trembled with every brush of air and the impression of other things watching him in the sullen wood. His ears lifted and turned to capture any sounds, but for the moaning of wind and clattering of empty limbs he heard nothing. The forest stretched impenetrable in every direction. Above him and through the tangle of branches he could see nothing but an impression of cloud. He had no marker to guide him. As he stared upward, one hand brushing brambles and twigs from his cloak, he realized that the branches overhead were intact and that apart from those crushed beneath him there was no sign anywhere that he had fallen. And yet he was sore as if he'd tumbled out of a loft. He stretched, taking slow, careful breaths, listening and wondering. Where was he? Was this another dream? What happened to Malger? Wasn't the marten supposed to be guiding him? Or perhaps you are somewhere beyond their reach. Perhaps, he mused. Still, one thing was clear, there was no sense in remaining where he was, but at the same time there was no indication which direction might prove helpful. He lifted his nose and sniffed, turning into the wind, but he felt nothing but the bitterness of dried leaves and the putrefaction of mushrooms coating everything. He grimaced and gingerly began to make his way into the wind. The underbrush clawed at his legs and tail, while thick branches at head height made him duck and weave as he pushed forward into the inconsistent but palpable breeze. It was difficult to move without making noise as twigs snapped from branches at the slightest touch, but Charles managed reasonably well. Only a few times did a branch snap so loudly that he winced and waited to hear if anything would stir in that spectral gloom, but as much as he turned his ears what few sounds he could detect all seemed far away and unconcerned. He couldn't tell how long he walked through the deep forest beneath a cloud-blackened sky as he felt no exhaustion and the only soreness that lingered was from where he'd landed after crossing the bridge on the tor. He felt neither hunger nor thirst, but something assured him that he could slake either should he choose. The woods were not inviting and they certainly did not feel alive, but something must be in this place. Eventually the wind brought him the odors of some animals and he quickened his pace. He couldn't tell what they were but it was the first thing he could feel in this place that seemed alive. Even the few stones he'd felt beneath his toes were impenetrable to him. He worked his way up a gentle slope toward spires of upthrust rock, the very first he had seen other than the wood. Though his eyes were meant for seeing in dark places, the gloom was so complete and the tangle of trees so dense that he was nearly upon those spires before he first glimpsed them. The spires stood much taller than any of the trees and appeared to be formed from basalt with massive channels of smooth stone like the teeth of a gear rising up each side. The trees flanking their sides were roughly the same height as those covering the Narrows. Beneath both he felt small, as if he were only the size of a normal rat instead of his usual twelve hands from toes to ears. Between them the ground dropped suddenly, framed by a ring of rock across which empty branches stretched. The air beyond was open and hazy, though he could discern the outline of even taller trees in the distance. Charles eased his way through the brush until his paws rested on the stone lip between the basalt towers overlooking a small clearing below. The clearing stretched a hundred feet in each direction, as if a great circle had been ripped out of the earth. The center of the clearing was raised with slabs of speckled granite laid one on top the other at odd angles, so that it appeared to be a gray sunburst. Had there been any light the rat knew its reflection would have made the cairn appear to dance. The rest of the clearing seemed to be a mix of grass and moss. There did not appear to be an easy way down to the clearing. The lip of stone overlooked a steep cliff that had been polished smooth. Charles would break a leg or worse trying to climb down. Even the basalt towers with their columns had been smoothed where rough and filled in everywhere else with granite so that they were a seamless whole. The towers stood like sentinels in the wood, or the horns of some vast nameless thing staring up at the cloud-scarred sky with its eye of layered stone. A brief chill ran through the wind and Charles shrank back. The scene of animal musk grew stronger as the breeze skirled over the stone and rattled the branches above. Twigs snapped behind him and he spun his head to one side, but there was nothing in the midnight gloom but the dense cluster of trees and brush. He swallowed and eased himself back from the lip of stone, walking carefully toward the left tower. He had walked into the wind so he might know what waited ahead of him. Was there something else following him too? Charles reached into his cloak and ran his claws along the compact Sondeshike. Its cool, metallic surface settled his anxiety some, but in this strange forest he knew he could never feel completely safe. He followed the towering spire around the hillock, and the ground quickly fell away. He climbed down hillocks and outcroppings, trying to stay as close to the basalt as possible, never letting it stray too far from his right. The clearing came into view again, only a short distance below him, when he heard the sound of several somethings moving through the wood on the opposite end. Charles crouched low beneath the roots of one trees that stretched against the tower, dangling like a monstrous hand before a cavernous maw. He waited, one hand wrapped about his Sondeshike, watching the trees on the other side of the clearing. The sound of movement, the crush of twigs and the rustling of bushes, grew nearer and nearer until out of the trees emerged a quartet of what he first took for wolves and then for wolf Keepers, but quickly realized that they were neither. They loped and they were coated for the most part in lupine pelts, but there were parts of them that seemed more man-like and not in the manner of Keepers. They did not have beastly features grafted onto a human shape, but bits and pieces of human shaped mingled with their wolf guise. Their snouts ranged from long, black, with yellowed fangs flecking spittle, to shot, almost pug-like protrusions with flatter teeth but for the canines which protruded from thick black lips beneath swollen nostrils. Their arms seemed to end in both paws and clawed hands, some coated in fur and others just swollen from calluses. Patches of sickly pale skin showed through the otherwise scraggly fur on their chest and back. Only their legs and tails seems wholly beast. Two of them dragged a fifth figure between them. Charles peered from his cover and sucked in his breath when he saw that it was a woman of child-bearing years draped in rough skins and cloth rudely stitched together. Long black hair streaked with white lashed across her back, mixed with blood smeared across her neck and shoulders. The rat swallowed, claws digging into the roots around him, as he watched the four beasts carry the dead woman toward the cairn of stones. They stretched her body across the sunburst. Even though the air was cool, the blood sizzled when it struck the stone as if it were a skillet on which to cook their meal. And then, turning his stomach once more, the woman stirred, arms and legs quivering as if she were gasping from a sudden fall. Her eyes flicked open even as the blood oozed from a fang-torn rend in her neck. As she began to struggle, the four wolf-things grabbed her limbs and held her down, some with hands and others with jaws, crunching through flesh and bone to spurt more blood onto the cairn. The scent scalded his eyes. He pulled the Sondeshike from its place in his cloak, but stopped when more figures dashed from out of the woods, clubs and axes raised above their heads. Charles marveled as the axes appeared to be stone rather than steel, and each of them was garbed in animal skins of various quality. They were ten in number, men of various ages and appearances, both light-skinned and dark, short and tall, stocky and lanky. But only on one of them did his eyes rest. That one was not a man at all. In the clearing at the front of the party, silent all of them but for the fall of their feet against the turf, ran a Keeper. He had almost non-existent ears, in the midst of a thick brown fur, dark eyes, short angled snout, whiskers, and incisors. Little claws tipped his hands, and a short emerged from his pudgy middle. Charles swallowed, too stunned to move any further. He knew this Keeper. He had briefly served alongside him in the Longs. He had a widow and two daughters in Tarrelton whom Caroline the otter visited from time to time. Craig Latoner. But Craig Latoner had died almost two years ago. Two of the four beasts leaped from the cairn, their jaws slavering in delight as they stretched outward, proportions shifting to make them even more top heavy. They clattered into the men and Keeper, knocking the first group over before the others fell on them, beating them down with heavy clubs and stone axe. The wolf-things howled in rage as they snarled and snapped, ripping flesh from legs and arms and staining the earth red with blood, but their attackers continued to crush them. Charles winced at the sound of snapping bone that accompanied every blow, and yet not one of the men nor either beast showed any sign of injury. Even a pack of wild dogs fighting over the last scraps were not more violent than what he witnessed. No horde of Lutins in fury could match the primal hunger he witnessed. Charles noted that the woman on the cairn had managed to slip all but one arm free and even as her head dangled from her shoulders, she kicked and jabbed at the last of the beasts with all of her strength. Mad as it was, he lifted one foot from his hiding place to go and help her. And then a long-fingered hand rested on his shoulder. The touch was so gentle, he did not even feel a breeze from the motion of his limb. No whisker gave twitch to show the presence of the other behind him. One moment he was alone in the crook and then ext there was a tall figure beside him along the roots of the tree. Charles stiffened his spine and tail, turning only his head enough to glimpse to his left at the mystery that found him. The figure was thin but draped in an elegant green and blue cloak atop a prismatic brocade running from his neck down to his waist. The cloak divided into hundreds of thin tassels spun with gold and silver thread that shimmered about soft boots of a brown so rich he felt a hunger well in his throat. His flesh, where it was visible amidst the gentle folds of cloth, was a pearl gray. High angular cheekbones framed his face, with ancient eyes peering as if from a great distance, beneath a gentle brow. Long white hair fell behind pointed ears with a grace that the fiercest wind could not disturb. Charles blinked and turned his head completely, jaw gaping in recognition. His tongue moved to speak the name, but the figure narrow his eyes. The glance silenced him, and with a swallow the rat slowly turned back toward the clearing. Craig and the humans managed to beat down the wolf-things and half carried the woman from the cairn. The last beast still crawling leaped over the sunburst platform only to have the prairie dog drive the stone axe clear through his skull. Blood and brains spewed out to either side, sizzling atop the otherwise cool stone, as the beast twitched with fast jerky motions. The woman, her neck stronger and no longer torn raw, draped her arms over Craig's shoulder, while the remaining hunters kept the other three beasts at bay. Even as the stone axe left the ruined skull the flesh began to knit together and the head reshape. Craig and the humans all fled back the way they'd come, their faces set in grim lines, but each of them wordless and, it seemed to Charles, panicked. The rat tensed but the hand on his shoulder kept him from moving. He heard it in the same moment, a crashing lumbering thing coming toward the clearing at great speed. The trees across from the towers shook in its passage, branches clattering and snapping to send a rain of twigs and debris in every direction. Even the four beasts, struggling to regain their paws, shrunk back away from the thunderous mass. And then something standing three times the size of any man erupted with a heavy thump from edge of the clearing. It walked on two legs and had two arms, but each arm split in two at the elbow so that it had four grasping hands which stretched toward the humans and Keeper desperate to escape. Each of its hands had three fingers and a thumb, all of which were tipped by jagged black talons. So too was the rest of it, covered alternately in greasy, black fur and broad, obsidian scales. But the most horrifying feature was the creature's head. Oblong with protruding eyes as brilliant as jasper on either side, the entire middle from top to bottom was split in a toothsome jaw. This opened in unearthly silence as a meaty tongue snaked out between sickle fangs to invite all in the clearing within the cavernous maw. Charles' heart thumped so loudly in terror that even the deaf would hear it. Craig swung his axe as he and the humans ran toward the left-most edge of the clearing from where Charles hid. The creature's right arm batted the stone wedge aside and with one hand grasped the man behind the Keeper by his arm. For the first time one of the combatants finally began to scream as he was hoisted into the air and shoved between the abomination's jaws and onto the waiting tongue. The jaws pressed down slowly into the main's chest, fountaining blood across its cheeks and down its chest where it glistened on its belly scales. The four wolf-things slavered their jaws at the spilled blood for a moment before turning to run in the opposite direction. The monstrosity ignored them and took three more steps toward the fleeing men before sweeping out its left arm. Craig spun on his paws and threw his axe. The blade, poorly balanced, spun with a whistle and wobble before smacking the creature across the face where a single human arm had wedged in between its teeth. The blow did not seem to harm the nightmare, but it surprised it just long enough for the humans to scatter back into the trees. Charles watched helpless as the thing reached up one of its strange two handed arms and shoved the errant limbs from the man he'd crushed between his jaws into his strange maw. The oblong head tilted back until the jaws pointed at the cloud scarred sky and then with a grinding rumble those jaws worked back and forth, chest swelling with breath, throat distending as morsels of flesh and bone were swallowed. This continued for more seconds than he dared remember. Finally, the towering thing lowered its now empty jaws, and proceeded to lick the blood from either side of its vertical jaw. The wind shifted slightly, and Charles felt a heavy revulsion come over him anew as the scent of the creature reached him. Offal and metallic from the blood, it had as well a sickly sweet odor that made his nostrils and whiskers tremble. He could only be grateful that with the shifting wind, so too did the monstrosity's attention, as it turned to lumber off into the forest in the direction that the wolf-things had fled. He remained where he hid until the sound of its frightful footfalls faded into the eerie silence that swallowed the forest. Even the echo of the unfortunate man's scream which had reverberated in his ears, was gone as if smothered. Charles lifted one arm to rub the scent from his nose, and then took a slow, deep breath. When he exhaled he lifted his gaze to the figure still standing impassively and immovably at his side. One pearl gray hand lifted a slender finger to touch his lips. The gesture was measured, simple, but clear. Charles kept his jaws closed, but he narrowed his eyes to suggest a question. The other extended that same hand off in a direction away from the basalt towers and away from all of the combatants. Charles shifted from his hiding spot beneath the roots and followed after, finding it very easy to avoid making any sounds in the ancient one's wake. ---------- May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love, Charles Matthias </body> </html>