A feeling … thus began the new Years of the Crib. A feeling not known since Far Antiquity, since the weal and woe of the Apocalypse.
It was identical in all souls in all places, be it the rice-paddies of southern Zeum, the humid canal-ways of Invishi, or the looming turrets of Attrempus. Whether alone or in their thousands, Men leapt … then turned to the northern horizon, peering. Wives caught up crying children. Priests trailed mumbling into silence, clutched fetishes in palsied hands. Every soul living caught their breath, their tongue, and hung upon the feeling …
Like falling.
Like a great inhalation of essence from the World.
Not a soul could reckon the feeling in ancient days, at least not initially. Some even dared laugh in wonder, marvel at the absurdity of a horror without object, a knowing with direction only, a passion that moved all souls as one. Only when the first mothers began shrieking could they fathom the significance of what would be called the Boding. All souls recognized it now, at least in those nations celebrating The Holy Sagas as scripture. For the faithful of the Three Seas, the Boding dread was itself dreaded, the thing wives and mothers prayed most ardently against.
And so wailing filled the great fleshpots of the South, the lament of believers confirmed in disaster and unbelievers dismayed, doubly overthrown. Families gathered on the rooftops, made demonstration of their grief. Riot embroiled temples both humble and great, so desperate were souls to entreat and repent. The Hagerna in Sumna, already battered for the quaking wrath of Momus, was set alight, burning above the city it had forever starved. Only the mad took to the streets and alleyways, otherwise, crying out what every heart already shouted. The Boding! Sweet Sejenus, the Boding was upon them!
The Great Ordeal had failed!
Very few heard the mothers shrieking this time, so universally did souls call out their own grief. And those who could hear them, their midwives, found themselves too astounded, too mortified, to minister as a Yatwerian priestess should. No womb-prayers were offered, no name-tiles were cracked and pestled. The condolences, such as those that were given, were distracted, for they, and they alone, could recognize the feeling as one they had suffered before, as a feeling uniquely their own, the anguish of a stillbirth guessed and not yet known. The Bode of legend was their boding, the premonition both of tragedy and the necessity of running tragedy’s course …
The feeling of birthing the dead.
And they wept, knowing that every womb was now a grave, and they had become diggers.
The Death of Birth.
It towered so high over them one had to kneel to apprehend—kneel to see!
The Carapace.
Hanging coal-black above the mobbed terraces of the Oblitus, drawing curtains of dust on vast and invisible rings across the Shigogli. Hanging as it had in so many of the Dreams, only absent the eleven Chorae once affixed to its seams. There! In waking life!
Mog-Pharau.
Obsidian against mountainous gold. The sky groaned and clotted above the Upright Horn, clouds piling outwards and up, obscurity belching obscurity. Bluff winds sent detritus scratching across faces of stone. The first tendrils of black began circling Shigogli.
Mimara had folded about her screaming, her gaze fixed at a deranged tangent, her face quivering for exertion, howling out spit and outrage and incredulity, as if she aired each and every indignity—from flints in her sandal to mad Nonmen kings—she had suffered the seasons previous. Achamian and Esmenet hauled at her, pulled her down the direction of general flight. The babe squalled in the Blessed Empress’s arms. His living, breathing son.
Hundreds, nay, thousands ran with them, Ordealmen bowling between other Ordealmen standing like posts in cement, faces raised in witless confusion, fixed in the aimless rush. It was the same throughout the smoking hulk of Golgotterath. Upon the stranded walls, over the matted dead, the Men of Three Seas cracked as if upon some inner joist, dividing into those too dismayed to yield their ground and those too dismayed to hold it. A filter fell across the sun, made ochre of gold, wax of nimil. The Upright Horn throbbed so deep that only marrow could hear it. Gusts laved them, throwing hair across mouths, flicking grit into eyes. Faces took to grimacing when turned into the gyre. Those upon the heights raised the crotch of their arms in warding.
And it towered over them, a black so deep as to mirror the terror beneath.
The old Wizard sobbed as he hobbled about and over the corpses, spat at the bile. A crazed diversity of shouts scraped the air, cries that washed into ocean surf for sheer numbers. Towering warriors barged about and between them. His leg shrieked. He passed a Cuarweshman wrenching his beard from his bloody jaw. He passed an Ansercan Columnary squatting upon his helm, cackling into his palms and calling out numbers. He passed faces beaten to swollen clefts, and faces without a fleck of blood. He passed faces squinting up as though to gauge the morrow’s weather, and faces breaking … about losses, realizations, limits, all those things peace cannot bring.
He slowed not so much for understanding as recollection.
Mother and daughter swivelled inward in alarm, but his reassurance exploded about an impact from behind, and he found himself gulping air on all fours, staring into the upturned face of a Nonman, cold and flawless as porcelain, propped so as to bestow a drowsy, open-mouthed kiss. And he could feel it, the plummet hanging in the sky above all of them, the fatal fall made incarnate, and he did not despair.
This time it was Mimara exhorting him, begging, tugging on his rancid furs. He did not so much see her as see her stained hands, shaking, fumbling the pouch, spilling the cannibal ash—the Qirri. He fairly gagged for the amount she jammed into his mouth, hacked muck between clenched teeth, reflexively swallowed …
A babe squalled.
He snorted the ash of Nil’giccas from his mustaches. Lightning fell through him in shivers. He reared back on his knees. A Swayali strode out across the emptiness above the panicked terraces, wreathed in golden incandescence. He saw her gaze into the sky. He saw numberless, windblown grains explode into smoke across her Gnostic Wards. He saw that she was Seswatha, beaten and weary, hounded across the back of the World, and so very, very old.
Drusas Achamian did not so much understand as belong.
“Irjulila …” he began chanting, “hispi ki’liris …”
His voice glared across the wrack, and he glimpsed his hermit-wild face reflected in the Quya’s dead gaze, his eyes sparking blue under birdnest brows, his mouth a hole of brilliance in a whitewater beard. He shrugged aside the ministry of small hands, turned his back to the Bode, hobbled out beyond the wrecked battlements of the Ninth Riser. Wind flailed his eyes, his skin. He looked out over the surging channels of Men, out beyond the revolving shrouds of grey and black, and saw the Horde’s grotesque rim closing upon Golgotterath once again …
And he thought, Yes … I have been here before.