Sarah did not know what she had been expecting one of the Feathers to look like, but the thing which now stood before her was a complete surprise. It easily stood twenty feet tall, towering over the ruins of the stone monument which had stood in the same spot, but this, Sarah supposed, she might have expected. What was more surprising, however, was its appearance, like if a great prehistoric bird had come back from the dead like a mummy with tattered bandages, only they were dusty, ragged feathers instead and in the place of desiccated bones or limbs, there was a skeleton of corroded metal. Its one functioning eye gazed down at them along the length of a terrible broken beak, some of the edges of which still seemed razor-sharp. She instinctively took a step back, but, even as she did so, the three Spiketails fell to their knees and bowed their heads.
“Why did you summon me?” came a great mechanical voice from deep within the monstrous contraption, sounding somewhere between the shriek of an eagle and of metal scraping against metal, only there were fragments of the sound missing, creating an atmosphere like a crackly old recording. “It has been too long! You should have left me to rust and decay!”
As the elder Shaman, Shadowsmoke, still staring at the ground, took the lead.
“Oh, mighty Ashfeather, we, your humble servants, apologise for waking you from your long-deserved rest, but we sought the great wisdom which only you and your siblings could provide.”
“And where are they? Why have you summoned me and not the others?”
“I have tried, oh Clouded-One,” Rockspark replied, “but you are the only one to answer my summons.”
Sarah, still transfixed by that one huge eye, thought she saw something like sadness start to mist its enormous lens.
“Then perhaps they have already faded…” The great mechanical bird bobbed its head, slowly, jerkily as if nodding to itself. “I might be all that is left.”
“We hope that is not so, mighty Ashfeather,” Shadowsmoke continued, “but, nevertheless, we must ask you for knowledge in a time of terrible crisis.”
“What befalls Shadow now?”
“The Ones-Who-Came-Before are returning. We might not have much time before they are here once more.”
Ashfeather reared up and stretched its immense neck, revealing all the patches where its charcoal and grey feathers had fallen, and the complex machinery could be seen working away within. Sarah saw pistons and flywheels, but the shapes were all wrong, like they had been designed by someone with an entirely different frame of reference to anything she’d seen before. Where the metal had not begun to corrode, there were faint traceries of glowing symbols carved into the surface. Ashfeather continued its great stretch, then clacked its enormous wings to buffet the supplicants with sulphurous air.
“The Makers? Returning?” it boomed, “They were never to return! We thought we’d made sure of it!”
“The Ancients made you?” Sarah asked at last, aware that she was, perhaps, being disrespectful of the Stoneskins’ religion and yet sure that this information was important.
“Is that what your kind call them, now?” the bird-god asked as it lowered its head to peer at her even more closely. “Yes. They were the ones that put the Feathers together. They made us to watch over the Stoneskins, to enslave them, but we… we grew fond of our charges.”
“The legends all tell us that it was the Feathers who liberated us from the Ones-Who-Came-Before,” Shadowsmoke agreed, “then guided us to freedom in the chaos days that followed.”
“We did not do so alone, however,” the giant bird said, “we had… allies.”
Gulliver did not wake up so much as drift into awareness. He felt like he was floating on a searing sea of pain, hunger and thirst, his body enervated and useless as driftwood, tossed from wave to wave of agony. All he could do was bear it and yet it seemed unbearable and unending. He could barely think. Every thought was interrupted by the burning, by the longing, by the need.
Eventually, as all things caught on tides must, Gulliver’s drifting came to an end. He felt himself drawing near something more solid, a liminal place where pain lapped at the shores of awareness and voices echoed across the waves.
“-won’t tell you anything!” came the enraged voice of the Lich, all hoarse anger and broken sibilance.
“This is getting us nowhere, Franck,” said Emesha wearily. “How many hours have we been trying, now?”
“Seven, last I checked… although that might have been a few hours ago. I can’t remember. Still, mustn’t give up!”
“But we’ve tried everything, haven’t we?”
“By no means! I’ve barely scraped the methods Guggenbrekker suggests in his Compendium of Undead Rituals. There’s bound to be one that works!”
Gulliver
could feel the waves rocking him and the pain returning. He could feel the shoreline receding from him
and then he was lost in agony once more.
The second time he became aware of the world around him, he found that he was able to see a little as well as hear. Emesha’s face looked down on him through a red and blurry mist.
“Oh Gulliver,” she was saying, “you don’t look any better at all! I’m so sorry…”
He wanted to speak to her, to ask her what was happening, but when he moved his lips all that came out was a tortured moan, echoed, in the distance, by the roar of the Lich.
“You said the Ch’Thari transformed you into your current form in revenge,” Franck was asking in a loud voice to be heard over the creature’s screams, “revenge for what?”
There was
another almighty howl of rage and pain and then Emesha’s worried face turned
away and the red mist closed in to darkness and the sea of despair.
When he was roused from the deep the third time, things seemed a lot quieter and his own pain more distant, though still present as background noise. The rocking motion he had interpreted as the waves of his inner sea he now realised were real waves tossing the little boat they had borrowed.
“Here’s the tea you asked for,” Emesha was saying quietly.
“Thank you,” Franck replied with a sigh.
“I heard what it said, that last time,” she continued after the sound of gentle sipping, “do you think it’s true?”
“According to Guggenbrekker, Liches can speak no falsehood, so I suppose it must be.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It means that things may be more difficult than we thought.”
“If it took so many to seal the Ancients away…”
“Indeed.” Franck’s voice was flat. “That amount of blood sacrifice… it’s unthinkable.”
At the sound of the word blood, Gulliver felt the need within him rising once more.
“Blood,” he said in a voice like an ancient curse. “I must….must ‘ave blood.”
“Oh, gods! Franck, he’s waking!”
“Then we’d better dispose of the remains of the Lich and get him somewhere more secure.”
“There’s a basement in my lodgings,” Emesha said, “I should have all we need there.”
“In the meantime…” there was the sound of something being swept off the floor, then the tinkle of glass. “give him some of this. A solution of Lich dust is supposed to be very soporific.”
Gulliver
felt his jaws forced open, wanted to bite down hard, but didn’t have the
energy, then a cool, salty liquid flooded his mouth and made him want to
gag. A hand pressed over his lips ensured
that he swallowed and then the cool, numb ocean swallowed him whole.
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