“Those of us who became Siqu so long ago did so because we knew this day would come … this, the day of our Dissolution. We did what we did so that we might finally relieve ourselves of hope’s burden, and let it pass into our children …”
A wonder had accompanied these words, one demanding scrutiny as much as reverence. Such a world Sorweel had stumbled into, filled with so much darkness and sorrow and truth.
“Children …You mean Men.”
Halls branched through the blackness, untrod, Sorweel somehow knew, for thousands of years.
“I will tell you what Immiriccas could not know,” the ancient Siqu said, staring into the depths of the Observance. “There comes a point where all the old ways of making sense just slough away. You persist in your daily ablutions, your ritual discourse and habitual labour, but an irritation claims you, the suspicion that others conspire to mock and confuse. This is all that you feel …”
Massacres lined their passage, the toil of making dead.
“The Dolour itself is invisible … all you ever see are cracks of fear and incomprehension where before all was seamless … thoughtless … certain. Soon you dwell in perpetual outrage, but are too fearful to voice it, because even though you know everything is the same, you no longer trust those you have loved to agree, so spiteful they have become! Their concern becomes condescension. Their wariness becomes conspiracy.
“And so the Weal becomes the Dolour, so the Intact become the Erratic. Think on it, mortal King, the way melancholy is prone to make you cruel, impatient of weaknesses. Your soul slowly disassembles, fragments into disconnected traumas, losses, pains. A cowardly word. A lover’s betrayal. An infant’s last, laboured breath. And for the heroes among us, the heartbreak commensurate with their breathtaking glory …”
Oinaral lowered his head as if at last conceding to some relentless weight.
“This is how you know that you stand before the least of my Race,” he voice raw. “The fact that I stand lucid and Intact before you.”
Their boots sent echoes muttering into the excavations buried about them.
“And that is why Nil’giccas is dead and gone …” Oinaral said on cracking passion. “He warred valiantly—I know this because for long centuries I was his Book. It was he who contrived the Bark and the Concavity, who made the Seal-of-the-Mountain a floating jewel. None toiled against the Dolour so mightily—or piteously—as he. The more he came apart, the more he demanded that his surroundings bind him together. But nothing could remedy his dissolution …
“Depravity, Son of Harweel. Only depravity retrieves the Wayward soul. No one knows why, but only horrors can render it whole, the commission of atrocities. You recover yourself for a slender interval, and you despair, crack for shame at the dishevelled beast you have become, and you rejoice. You live! The hunger for life burns far stronger in us than in Men, Son of Harweel. The suicides among us are miraculous, rare names in the Great Pit of Years …
“And so Nil’giccas—the most Illumined of our ancient Heros—took to depravity …”
Oinaral fell silent. His gait even slowed, as if he dragged his ruminations across the floors behind him.
“What did he do?” Sorweel asked.
A momentary glance to the littered floors—detritus leached from the porous walls.
“He took to the Emwama—a practice that Nin’ciljiras continues. That oil he pours upon his face and head is distilled from the fat of his victims. Atrocity! Simply to warrant his claim to be Intact!”
The Siqu cast his right arm down in the Injori gesture of disgust and symbolic ablution. “But this is to be expected from a Son of Viri, the line of Nin’janjin. But from Nil’giccas? The Blessed Man-Tutor?”
“So what did you do?” the youth asked, understanding that Oinaral gave him a confession in lieu of explanation.
“I feared. I mourned. I cautioned. Finally I threatened. When he persisted, I abandoned him.”
The Siqu walked riven now, his fists clenched, his neck finned above the folds of his nimil coif.
“And this would be all that he would remember … My betrayal …”
The youth could feel his own heart swell.
“Second Father!” Oinaral boomed, his voice crashing through the black tunnels, ripping through the film of shadows. “Lover! Sharer of Secrets! I abandoned thee!”
The Nonman collapsed to his knees, and Sorweel glimpsed his own image slip across Oinaral’s nimil shield as he pitched forward in kneeling anguish— The reflection seized him about the throat.
Head sealed within the eldritch helm, a cauldron pitted with inscription …
And a face where there should be no face, as if shining across the skein of nimil sigils …
A Nonman face.
“He would have died a thousand deaths for me!” the Siqu cried. “And in his darkest watch, I abandoned him!”