Black Halo

Six

CHEATING LIFE



The heavens move in enigmatic circles.

In the human tongue, this translated roughly to ‘it’s not my fault.’ Gariath had heard it enough times to know. Those humans he knew had been happiest when they could blame someone else.

Formerly humans, he corrected himself, currently chum. Lucky little idiots with no one to blame.

Not entirely true, he knew. If their heavens did indeed circle enigmatically overhead, and they had indeed gone to them, they were likely hurling curses upon his head from there at that very moment. A tad hypocritical, he thought, to praise their mysterious gods and resent being sent to them.

Or is that what they call ‘irony’?’

But that was a concern for dead people. Gariath, sadly, was still alive and without a convenient excuse for it.

The Rhega had no gods to blame. The Rhega had no gods to claim them. That was what he wanted to believe, at least.

He had been able to overlook his inability to die, at first, throwing himself at pirates, at longfaces, at demons and at his former humans and coming out with only a few healthy scars. They might have cursed him, if he left them enough blood to choke on, but they were lucky. Death by a Rhega’s hand would be as good a death as they could hope for.

When a colossal serpent failed to kill him, he began to suspect something more than just mere luck. The sea, too, had rejected him and spat him onto the shore, painfully alive. If gods did exist, and if their circles were wide enough to touch him, they took a cruel pride in keeping him alive.

Now that is irony.

The former humans, he was certain, would have agreed. And if he had learned anything from them and their excuses, it was that their gods rarely seemed content to allow a victim of their ironies merely to wallow in their misery. They preferred to leave reminders, ‘omens’ to rub their jagged victories into wounds that had routinely failed to prove fatal.

And, as his own personal omen crested out of the waves to turn a golden scowl upon him, he was growing more faithful by the moment.

Like a black worm wriggling under liquid skin, the Akaneed continued to whirl, twist and writhe beneath the sun-coloured waves. It emerged every so often to turn its single, furious eye upon him, narrowing the yellow sphere to a golden slit that burned through the waves.

Just as it had burned all throughout the morning when the sea denied him, he thought. Just as it had continued to burn throughout the afternoon he squatted upon the sand, watching it as it watched him.

He wasn’t quite sure why either of them hadn’t moved on yet. For himself, he suspected whatever divine entity had turned him away from death thought to inspire some contemplation in watching the sea.

Humans often thought sitting and staring to be a religiously productive use of their time. And they die like flies, he thought. Maybe I’ll get lucky and starve to death.

That seemed as good a plan as any.

The Akaneed’s motives, he could only guess at. Surely, he reasoned, colossal sea snakes couldn’t subsist purely on angry glowers and snarls from the deep. Perhaps, then, it was simply a battle of wills: his will to die and the snake’s will to eat him.

Though those two seem more complementary than conflicting …

By that reasoning, it would be easy to walk fifteen paces into the surf until the sea touched his neck. It would be easy to close his eyes, take three deep breaths as he felt the water shift beneath him. It would be easy to feel the creature’s titanic jaws clamp around him, feel the needles merciful on his flesh and watch his blood seep out on blossoming clouds as the beast carried his corpse to an afterlife beneath the waves.

The Akaneed’s eye emerged, casting a curious glare in his direction, as though it sensed this train of thought and thoroughly approved.

‘No,’ he assured it. ‘If I do that, then you’ll have an easy meal and I’ll have an easy death. Neither of us will have worked for it and neither of us will be happy.’

It shot Gariath another look, conveying its agreement in the twitch of its blue eyelid. Then, in the flash of its stare before it disappeared beneath the waves, it seemed to suggest that it could wait.

Gariath lay upon his back and closed his eyes. The gnawing in his belly was growing sharper, but not swiftly enough. Sitting still, never moving, he reasoned he had about three days before he died of thirst and his husk drifted out on the tide. The Akaneed was willing to earn its meal and he was willing to settle for this bitter comfort.

That being the case, he reasoned he might as well be comfortable.

The sounds of the shore would be a fitting elegy: nothing but the murmur of waves and the skittering legs of beach vermin to commemorate the loss of the last of the Rhega. Fitting, perhaps, that he should go out in such a way, shoulders heavy with death and finally bowed by the weight of his own mortality, with only the beady, glistening eyes of crabs to watch the noblest of people disappear and leave this world to its weakling pink-skinned diseases.

The Akaneed hummed in the distance, its reverberating keen rumbling up onto the shore and scattering the skittering things. The waves drew in a sharp inhale, retreating back to the open sea and holding its frothy breath as it went calm and placid. Sound died, sea died and Gariath resolved to die with it.

In the silence, the sound was deafening.

He recognised immediately feet crunching upon the sand. The pace was slow, casual, utterly without care or concern for the dragonman trying to die.

An old enemy, perhaps, one of the many faceless bodies he had torn and crushed and failed to kill, come for vengeance at the tip of a sword. Or maybe a new one, some terrified creature with a slow and hesitant pace, ready to impale him with a weapon clenched in trembling hands.

Or, if gods were truly intent on proving their existence, it might be one of his former companions. One of them might have survived, he reasoned, and come searching for vengeance. He listened intently to the sound.

Too heavy to be the pointy-eared human, he reasoned; she wouldn’t attack him until his back was turned anyway. And likewise, the feet were too deliberate to be the bumbling, skinny human with the fiery hands. That one would just kill him from a distance.

He dearly hoped it wasn’t the tall, brown-haired human woman. She would likely come all masked with tears, demanding explanations in sobbing tones while righteously insisting that the others hadn’t deserved to die. If that were the case, he would have much preferred the rat. Yes, the rat would come and give him a quick knife in the throat; surely that would kill even a Rhega suffering from a severe case of irony.

It pained him to think that the feet might belong to Lenk. The death he so richly deserved then would never come from the young man’s hands.

The others knew how to kill. Lenk alone knew how to hurt.

The feet stopped just above his head. Gariath held his breath.

No blow, no steel, no vengeance. The shadow that fell over him was warm rather than cold. Even against the setting sun, the heat was distinctly familiar and embracing, heavy arms wrapped gently around him.

He hadn’t felt such warmth since …

Almost afraid to, he opened his nostrils, drew in a deep breath. His body jolted at once, his eyes snapping wide open at a scent that instantly overwhelmed his senses and the stink of the sea alike. He opened his mouth, drinking it in and at once finding it impossible that it filled his body.

Rivers and rocks.

He looked up and saw black eyes staring down at him beneath a pair of horns, one short and topped with a jagged break. The snout that they stared down from was wrinkled and scarred, but taut, each twisted line a point of pride and wisdom. The frills at either side fanned out unenthused, crimson petals of a wilting flower that had not seen rain in a long time.

It was the eyes, alone untouched by age, that seized Gariath’s gaze. They were softer than his own black stare, but that softness only made their depth all the more apparent. Where his were hard and unyielding doors of obsidian, the eyes that stared down at him were windows that stretched into endless night.

The elderly Rhega smiled, exposing teeth well worn.

‘You know,’ he rumbled, the Rhega tongue deep and hard as a rock in his chest, ‘for someone who has such reverence for my stare, you could at least get up to talk to me.’

Gariath’s eye ridges raised half a hair. ‘You read thoughts?’

‘I don’t get much conversation otherwise.’ The elder returned the raised ridge. ‘Not impressed?’

‘I have seen many things, Grandfather,’ Gariath replied.

The elder considered him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

‘So you have, Wisest.’

The elder scanned the beach, finding a nearby piece of driftwood half buried in the sand. Lifting his limp tail up behind him, he took a seat upon it and stared out over the setting sun. The light met his stare and Gariath saw the elder’s shape change as beams of light sifted through a spectral figure.

‘You’re dead, Grandfather,’ Gariath grunted.

‘I hear that a lot,’ the elder replied.

Gariath looked up and down the empty beach, bereft of even a hint of any other life.

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘You would,’ the elder snorted. ‘The fact remains that you are the only one who has come by; you’re the only one who noticed. My point stands.’

‘Why aren’t you at your elder stone?’

‘I got bored.’

‘Grahta never left his stone.’

‘Why would he? Grahta was a pup. He would get lost.’

‘Ah.’

Gariath settled himself back on the sand, staring up at the orange-painted sky above. After a moment, he looked back to the elder.

‘Grahta,’ he said softly. ‘Is he …?’

‘Sleeping, Wisest,’ the elder replied.

‘Good.’

Another silence descended between them, broken only by the sound of the Akaneed’s murmuring keen rising up from below the waves. After an eternity of that, Gariath once again looked up.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing?’

‘Seems a bit unnecessary,’ the elder said, tapping his brow.

‘Then aren’t you going to ask me why?’

‘You are Rhega,’ the elder replied, shrugging. ‘You have a good reason.’

‘So, you won’t try to stop me.’

‘I might have a hard time with that.’ The elder held up his clawed hand to the light, grinning as it vanished. ‘What with being dead and all.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I thought you might like some company while you waited to die.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Oh?’ The elder looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Was it not you who was just wishing that his humans would come visit him?’

‘Those thoughts were private,’ Gariath snarled, glowering.

‘Then you shouldn’t have thought them while I was standing right here.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ The younger dragonman turned his stare back up to the sky. ‘They’re dead.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Possibly?’

‘You didn’t die.’

‘I am Rhega. I am strong. They are weak and stupid.’

‘Bold words coming from a lizard hoping to starve to death so a snake will eat him.’

‘Can you think of a better way to die, given the circumstances?’

‘I can think of a better way to live.’

‘Live?’ Gariath’s snout split in an unpleasant grin. ‘I’ve tried living, Grandfather. I’ve tried living without my family, living without other Rhega and living without even humans.’ He sighed, chest trembling with the breath. ‘Living was fine for a time, but it was too full of death for my tastes. Maybe dying will be better.’

‘There is nothing worth living for, Wisest?’

‘There was. Now, I have nothing.’

‘You have me.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Gariath grunted. ‘One thing I never seem to lack is dead Rhega.’ He waved a clawed hand at the elder. ‘I do not need you, Grandfather.’

‘What do you need, then?’

‘It’s not obvious?’

‘Not to you.’

‘I need to die, Grandfather,’ Gariath sighed. ‘I need to rid myself of all’ – he waved a hand out to the sky and sea – ‘this. I don’t need it anymore.’

‘You’ve had plenty of opportunities to die.’

‘I haven’t found the right one yet.’

‘They all basically end the same way, don’t they?’

‘Not for a Rhega.’

‘Ah, I see.’ The elder scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘So, the right way is to lie down here and wait to die while contemplating the existence of weak, human gods?’

‘It’s a way.’

‘Not the way of the Rhega.’

‘There are no more Rhega,’ Gariath growled in response. ‘I am the last one. I get to decide what the right way to die is.’

‘And what is the right way to die, Wisest?’

Gariath had an answer for that.

It was an answer that he had often dreamed of, birthed at the fore of his mind when he held two barking pups that seemed so tiny in his arms. That answer had grown along with those pups, nurtured by their experiences. When they had learned to catch jumping fish, to chase down running horses, to spread their wings and glide on the winds, that answer had grown to something that swelled with his own heart.

He would have very much liked to have that heart stop beating when they held pups of their own and watched red silhouettes gliding across the sky. He would have very much liked for them to have their own answers for the question.

Instead, two hearts had stopped beating instead of one. And with them, so did his answer die.

The elder stared at him with intent concentration, seeing it unfurl inside him. He shuddered as he and the younger dragonman shared the final thought.

An angry, agonised wail, offered to a weeping sky as Gariath clutched two lifeless forms in his arms. The same wail offered to so many wide-eyed, terrified faces as Gariath threw himself at them time and again, hoping for and being denied a righteous death.

‘That would be a good way to die,’ the elder said, nodding. ‘I would have liked to have left my family in such a way.’

‘How did you die, Grandfather?’

‘I didn’t,’ the elder replied with an enigmatic smile.

‘You are most certainly dead, Grandfather.’

‘In body, perhaps.’

‘Oh, this.’

‘What?’ The elder furrowed his ridges.

‘I’ve heard this before. Some vague philosophy about the separation of body and spirit, and it always ends the same way.’ Gariath made a dismissive wave. ‘Some attempt to be inspirational by suggesting the two can be resurrected alongside each other, maybe a little aside about raising spirits and being true to oneself. Then we all hug and cry and I vomit.’ He snorted derisively. ‘Humans do it all the time.’

‘Humans have had their points, Wisest. The difference between body and spirit is one they adopted, but it is not one they thought of on their own.’

‘It’s all greasy, imbecilic vomit, no matter who spews it.’

‘Is it? You’ve seen me. You’ve seen Grahta. Can you still deny the difference, knowing what death means to the Rhega?’

‘I wonder if I do,’ Gariath muttered. ‘You know what Grahta told me.’ He stared up at the sky, frowning at its endless orange and white oblivion. ‘I can’t follow.’

‘I know,’ the elder said, nodding solemnly.

‘Do you, Grandfather?’ Gariath turned his hard stare upon the specter. ‘You know death, but you know peace. You will know your ancestors, eventually, as Grahta did. You will know rest. Me …’ He sat up suddenly, brimming with anger. ‘I can’t follow you. Grahta said as much. I can’t see my family, my ancestors …’

They shared a shuddering cringe as they both felt his heart turn to stone inside him and pull his chest low to the ground.

‘I can’t see my sons, Grandfather … I can never see them again. I can’t follow.’

‘It is the way it must be, Wisest.’

‘Why?’

He leapt to his feet, the sand erupting beneath him. The earth trembled as he stomped his feet, curled his hands into fists so tight that blood wept from his claws. He bared his teeth, narrowed his eyes and fanned his frills out beside his head.

‘Every time this happens,’ he snarled. ‘Every time someone dies, every time I don’t, that’s “the way it must be”. Everyone sighs and rolls their shoulders and goes back to living. I’ve done that and I’m done living. If this is how life must be, then I choose death!’

‘It is that way for a reason, Wisest. You have duties to your ancestors.’

‘More excuses! More stupidity! Duty and honour and responsibility!’ He howled and stomped his feet. ‘All just excuses for not getting things done, for trying to excuse away life and all its pain! I have served my duty, Grandfather! I have tried to live the way the Rhega are supposed to. I have tried to be a Rhega when there are no more. I have tried and … and …’

His fist came down with a howl, splintering a hole in the driftwood beside the elder. He jerked it out with a shriek, wooden shards lodged in his fist that wept blood as his eyes wept tears. He collapsed to his knees, pressed his brow against the wood and drew in a staggering, wet breath.

‘It’s too hard, Grandfather. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore. I can’t follow.’ He punched the wood again. ‘I can’t kill myself.’ Another bloody-handed blow. ‘I just … can’t.’

It wasn’t often that Gariath flinched at a touch. All the steel and iron that had cursed his flesh in crimson words, all the scars and bruises they had left behind had never made him so much as tremble. But they had struck shoulders that were broad and proud, arms that were thick and fierce.

The hand that rested upon him now was upon shoulders that were broken and bowed, arms that hung limp and bloody at his side.

‘Wisest,’ the elder whispered. ‘We are Rhega. The rivers flow in both our blood and we feel the same agonies, as we have felt since we were born of the red rock. I don’t ask you to do this for you or for me …’ He tightened his grip on Gariath’s shoulder. ‘I tell you to do it for us. For the Rhega.’

‘What,’ Gariath asked, weak, ‘am I supposed to do?’

‘Live.’

‘It can’t be that easy.’

‘You know it isn’t.’ The elder rose up, walking toward the shore. ‘You’ve spent so much time bleeding, Wisest, so much time killing. You’ve forgotten what living is like.’

‘It’s hard.’

‘I will help you where I can, Wisest,’ the elder replied with a smile. ‘But there are better guides to life than the dead.’

‘Such as?’

After a moment of careful contemplation, the elder scratched his chin. ‘What of Lenk?’

‘Dead.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘Consider where you would be without him,’ the elder replied. ‘Still where you buried your sons? Or buried yourself, if whoever killed you had enough respect not to skin you alive and wear your face as a hat? How was it you managed to get away from there?’

‘By following Lenk.’

‘And how was it you managed to find Grahta? To end up here so that I might find you?’

‘Are you saying I need Lenk?’ Gariath growled, slightly repulsed by the idea. ‘He is decent enough to deserve a good death, but he’s still stupid and weak … still human. If he is even alive, how do I get him to lead me to where I need to go next? How can I even—?’

‘Many questions,’ the elder said with a sigh, ‘demand many answers. For now, limit yourself to simplicity. You are caught between lives. Choose one, then make another choice.’

‘What kind of choices?’

‘In time, many.’ The elder turned and walked toward Gariath, counting out each pace beneath him. ‘The choice to seek out my elder stone is one, but that is far away in time and distance. The hardest choice’ – he paused and drew a line in the earth with his toe – ‘is to recognise that you will never be as alone as you hope to be.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That’s the point of cryptic musing, pup,’ the elder muttered. ‘But we don’t have time to discuss it. The much more immediate choice must happen within your next fifty breaths.’

‘What?’ Gariath creased his ridges together. ‘What choice?’

‘Whether to move or not. Forty-five breaths.’

‘What, like … move on? More philosophical gibberish?’

‘More immediate. Forty-two breaths.’

‘Why forty-two?’

‘The tide comes in at twenty, it’s taking me another fifteen to tell you all of this, and the Akaneed, which has been known to hurl itself upon a beach to get at its prey at distances up to twenty-six paces, has been waiting for the aforementioned tide for about five breaths, leaving you …’ The elder glanced over his shoulder. ‘Two breaths.’

It only took one for the water to rise up in a great blue wall, the Akaneed’s eye scorching a golden hole through it. Its jaws were parted as it erupted onto the shore, bursting through the liquid barrier with a roar that sent great gouts of salty mist peeling from between rows of needle-like teeth.

It took Gariath another to leap backwards as those great teeth snapped shut in a wall of glistening white. A low keen burbled out of the Akaneed’s gullet, cursing the dragonman as it might curse any man who broke a fair deal. Snarling, it writhed upon the sand, trying to shift its massive pillar of a body back into the surf.

‘Huh.’ The elder observed the younger dragonman’s wide-eyed shock with a raised eye ridge. ‘You jumped away. Nerves, perhaps. If you still want to die, I’m sure he won’t think it a hassle to come back for a second time.’

Gariath regarded the spectre through narrowed eyes. Impassive, the elder stared at him without flinching. He folded his wings behind his back, raised his one-horned head up to meet Gariath’s eyes with his own gaze that shone hard as rocks.

‘Make your choice, Wisest.’

And, with the sound of a snort and claws sinking into wood, Gariath did.

His muscles trembled, then burst to life in his arms, great beasts awakening from hibernation. The driftwood log was long and proud, clinging to the earth. But it tore free, resigning itself to its fate.

His roar matched the Akaneed’s, matched the sound of air rent apart as the wood howled. Both were rendered silent by a massive jaw cracking, teeth flying out to lie upon the earth like unsown seeds, and a keening shriek that followed the Akaneed back into the ocean. Blood leaking from its maw, it disappeared beneath the waves, sparing only a moment to level a cyclopean scowl upon the dragonman before vanishing into the endless blue.

The breath that came out of Gariath, rising in his massive chest, was not one he had felt in days. His hands trembled about the shattered piece of wood he still held, as though they had never known the life that coursed through them. When he did finally drop it, that life sent his arms tensing, his tail twitching …

His body thirsting for more.

This is what it means? He stared down at his hands. To be a Rhega? More death? More violence? This is what it is to be alive?

‘Not the answer you’re looking for, Wisest,’ the elder chimed, his voice distant and fading. ‘But good enough for now.’

When Gariath turned about, nothing but sand and wind greeted him. No footprints remained in the disturbed earth, nothing to even suggest that the elder had ever been there. And yet, with each breath that Gariath took, the scent of rivers and rocks continued to permeate his senses.

Perhaps he should be concerned that he felt alive again only when he was grievously wounding something. Perhaps he should take it as a sign that his road in life was destined to run alongside a river of blood. Or perhaps he should just take pride in having knocked the teeth out of a giant snake that had now failed to kill him twice.

Philosophy is for idiots, anyway.

His concerns left him immediately as he plucked the serpent’s shattered fangs up from the earth and felt their warm sharpness scrape against his palm. He would keep these, he decided, as a reminder of what it meant, for the moment, to be a Rhega.

But he could not dwell on that. His feet moved beneath him as the sun disappeared behind the sea, and already his nostrils were quivering, drawing in the scent of living things.