Fear scorched Sorweel’s breast.
The Siqu dared call out: “Mighty Oir?nas, Lord of the Watch …”
The massive outline did not move. For the first time Sorweel noticed stacked skulls—walls of them, arrayed like macabre fortifications along each of the ascending shelves of stone. Pig skulls in their thousands, snouts drawn out ragged, as if belonging to a creature far more fearsome.
When had fathers become Dragons?
“It is me, Oinaral Lastborn … Your son by fair ?liqara.”
He swayed Holol back and forth, causing the surrounding horde of shadows to kneel and stand and then kneel once again. Sorweel fairly lost his balance, feared he might swoon.
“I know …” the hulking form rumbled. “I know who you are.”
Oinaral stood rigid.
“You are lucid?”
Silence, so utter as to make wet skin of souls and razors of the least sound.
“My disorder,” the profile growled in a tone so deep as to knock heartbeats, “springs from but a single question …” The silhouette shifted. Stone cracked in unseen sockets. A face as broad as shoulders bobbed into Holol’s light, its lines twisted like ship’s rigging for wrath.
“Why do you soil my gaze now!”
Sorweel retreated a step, then another as the Hero leapt onto the stone stage below. His countenance was wroth, broad in the manner of the Holca. Gore made a pit of his mouth, so that he looked a creature whose jaws lay outside its flesh. His musculature was clawed in veins, striate for hunger. His stature was so great as to make a statuette of his son.
“Nil’giccas!” Oinaral Lastborn cried beneath the looming presence. “Nil’giccas ha—!”
The blow was swift, the force absurd. Oinaral was swatted more than ten cubits, his body bouncing like a withered tuber from the rock face back across the slope of the gravel mound. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, he had managed to hold onto Holol, the famed Breathtaker. Sorweel could see its radiant point bobbing just over the Siqu’s right thigh, blackening his twitching profile.
The light etched the nude white colossus that was his father, raving above him.
“Weeeak!” thundered across the Mere.
The Son of Harweel stood transfixed.
“How could I not love something as weak and beautiful!”
The luminous tip of Holol had slipped behind the Siqu’s leg; its first warble pinned his heart nonetheless.
“How could a father not love such a son as should be slain!”
It flickered in a series of low pulses, each outlining the Siqu with the wrack of deeper regions, each depicting the Lord of the Watch, hairless and pendulous, across stages of murderous outrage.
“Such a son—!”
Sudden blackness always surprised, whether anticipated or not. Distant obscurity became near, blackness leapt, and the white-skinned furor of Oir?nas raging over his dying son died with his son.
Holol had not slipped Oinaral’s grasp—he had slipped from it. Somehow the Son of Harweel knew this with granitic certainty.
The Haul’s fierce peering yet burned behind, but he stood upon its extinction, in a twilight underworld heaped with the skulls of pig. A greater portion of him, everything human, gibbered for terror, clamoured to flee, but some other fraction had resolved he would stand his ground.
He would not leave Oinaral Lastborn to moulder with swine. This he knew with an assurance as deep as life.
He would not abandon his Siqu.
The groan of a monstrous elk huffed from the black before him, followed by a voice like cracking timbers.
“My-my … My son …”
Silence.
Sorweel strained for some glimpse, anything, but all he could see was the luminance that fell from his false face, a spectral pool of surfaces braised with faint detail.
A sob burst upon the dark, raw, plucked with mucous, so near as to make the youth retreat a step.
“My sonnnn!” the great lungs screamed.
The peering flickered as before, and in a moment of madness it seemed the entirety of existence hung upon the black as lights upon smoke. Then he found himself nowhere … stranded in a vast nothing.
The World had shrunk to that swatch illuminated by his accursed face.
The silence rumbled as a tempest, one that could blow through ground.
The youth found himself whirling about, searching for the direction of the Haul. A heartbeat merely, and he was completely disoriented. The prospect of being marooned down here, lost in the Holy Deep, came as a chattering panic. He fell to his knees scanning for footprints by the light of his arcane communion, but the sand was too trampled, the porcine debris too copious.
A titanic howl sent him skittering backward across the sand on all fours.
“Aiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
He was lost down here, he realized. He had come to the one place the Mother of Birth could not follow. For that was why Imimor?l had hidden his children in rock and mountains: to conceal them from the Gods!