Tundra

Here I stitch another thread into this story. Far away from the Tower of the Art, the shore and the deep, another traveler was eking a path towards the tundra. He could not yet glimpse the barren plains or hear the banshee wind. The grasses did not rustle for him in a thousand shades of grey. Rather, it was slim, green reeds that girt his vessel’s passage through the lake that separates the tundra from the unnamed desert which protects it. The lilies were not open, but their cone-like fruits on their tall stalks remained from summer. The water was blue tinged with silver and gold, and garnets and tigers-eye where the morning stowed her gems in the soft silt of the riverbed.

Best of all, however, was the sunrise. Even after having seen a year's worth of blinding mornings, Erasmus still loved a good sunrise. He had been drinking smuggled mead well into the night prior to arriving in this paradise. Cramped in the cargo hold and trying to soothe his discomfort, he had only succeeded in making his head too large and sore for the space he occupied. Yet, somehow, the softness in his vision when he peered out of the open portal made the scenery more striking. You didn’t need to be sharp in a sunrise, he reflected. The light did the work for you.

Presently, it bounced off the surface of the water and the glittering dunes which lay the way he had come, as well as off the fog which still curtained the way he was going. Erasmus didn’t mind that the Tundra was still a day away. He was busy reveling in the success of his spell. He was not a mage, but with a stage like this, he thought, oh, how he could do tricks!

On the tundra’s edge, he had discovered a land of smoke and mirrors. When the dawn trumpeted by the lakeside, mist lifted like a prophecy off rippling silk. Ibises perched in frozen moments, and the desert dunes on the opposite skyline cupped a swollen sun. Pyramids gleamed ghostly silver at their caps, their bases eroded so that they appeared to be fossilised. It stole Erasmus’ breath to see them, not least of all because nobody he had yet encountered could remember who had put them there.
As he watched, the light christened the valley, anointing each of the Kings carved in stone by the pyramid bases. Illumination made them newly regal, stripping millennia from their faces and leaving them young as civilisation. Erasmus found those stone eyes with his and thought about what he would soon possess– a chiseled countenance of his own, perhaps?

He did not know what he would look like in his final form. Besides, since that morning’s ritual, he was handsome enough. It was more important that he would have undying age. He would not grow older as mortals did, but wiser and stronger with each day's revival, like the carven Kings. His would be the prize nestled in this forgotten landscape and hunted by men since words were made to describe it.

Only when the sun hit his eyes, and his gaze deflected to the crumbling blocks of sandstone at the feet of the Kings, did he begin to doubt himself. What if he, too, ended in ruin? What if he only came close to the prize, and not near enough? What if he had wasted years and forsaking his past an all in it, only to grow old and turn to dust, unloved and unremembered? Who would listen then, when he was muted by death? None would cherish what he had seen, heard and thought. Histories, he mused, were for the rich and the fortunate. In mages’ towers and in the records of town halls, nothing was written about downtrodden men.

Erasmus could not dwell on that thought for long. So close to the end, he couldn't admit any possibility of defeat. The inevitability of death, which he denied, was but a star in a daunting galaxy. Besides, he had invested too much in his faith.

When he had left the fjords two seasons ago, he had had only words and hopes to go on. Later, as the sand settled in his hair, the seasons vanished and the dust and dryness became a natural part of his skin, it was desperation that drove him. Erasmus had been a sailor once, or something close to one. That was back when he had tried to circumnavigate the continent, with the aim of reaching the mythical Far West, where it was whispered that a tundra stretched a year’s travel on foot, guarding a timeless land. Of course, the rocks around the headlands had been impassable. There lay the cliff-high splinters of Jidean Reef, where mermaids lurked with fins on their faces and serpentine fangs. The moonlight on that reef showed more wrecks, their masts like crucifixes, than Erasmus had ever seen ships. Some were older than his late great-grandparents’ memories.

And so, Erasmus had forsaken sea for land. He was not an experienced land-goer. When the streams dried up inland, becoming mere trickles and muddy beds, he lost his bearings for a while. Eventually, however, he found the rim of the vast, nameless desert that, along with the Evergreen in the far north, marked the edge of the world. The sand whose breath blew towards the last grasses spoke of punishing heat. Devils warped the landscape and whipped up tempers of dust. Yet, he had come too far to turn back.

Pinning all his hopes on a rumour, he gathered what fresh water and scarce greenery he could, and set out into the desert’s heart. He had no assurances of meeting with safety on the other side of the rolling dunes. He could only pray that his pact assisted him, and that the one he made it with would intervene to enable him to live and pay his own part back.