Knotted Roots

Where they have landed is a plane of void, distinguishable from the empty black only by the jagged triangle shapes that colour some of the floor. While deeply discomforting, such scenery is not out of place within Nix. Such, it is not the thing that clouds Renard’s gut with such dread.

No, the dreadful thing is in the air, above them.

For this plane of void upon which they stand drops like a cliff into nothing, and the river flows off this edge — upwards, where it splits into a thousand different streams that all splay out and interweave with each other. So intricately they flow and twist, that for the eye to follow where one stream ends and another begins is impossible, for the mass is as incestuous as tangled yarn, and as large as a whole city.

The group’s navigation thus far has trusted that following the current upstream would guide them to the core of Nix. This, while deep, is not the core of Nix, and even Renard can distinguish that many of these streams form loops. Simply following the current upwards will not work, but only get them lost in cycles as the stream they follow blends into another, into another, into another, and back down to the start — for if the distortions of space can now affect the river, there is no way to trust its direction.

And beyond that, there are distant branches like waterfalls that pass through sceneries they have seen before. Even if they did not trap themselves in a maze of looping currents, intuition talks that they could take a poor turn and be dumped many weeks or months back on the path, and into quite perilous environs. And then are branches that seem to blend into the whole one second, then break away like serpents to instead pour into nothing…

Renard, lip trembling, falls to his knees.

With a cynical laugh, Verdan dumps their luggage and seats himself beside it, hands twined over his knees. He smiles bitterly. His amulet shrieks. Rummaging through the bags, he withdraws a handful of what remains of their rations — just crumbs — and playfully flicks it out of his palm as if sprinkling confetti. He seems to concede: Well, that’s it then.

Tears sting Renard’s cheeks. Gritting his teeth, he draws Kingslayer — which is still humming minutely. The thickness of the corruption has become so severe that it’s starting to affect even it… and when he listens properly, under the banshee-like shrieking of Verdan’s amulet, portions of Fidel’s leg brace are shuddering too. Renard could use these vibrations as guidemarks on the twisting river of whether he has drawn closer to the core… but no, plainly he can’t. If Kingslayer breaks, he will die. Plunging himself along the course that most stresses it could be a trap as much as any other.

Fidel looks to Renard with a bland innocence, as if the man collapsed on the earth before him is not mere seconds from bawling, but a superman who will doubtlessly carry the group over this obstacle as he has every obstacle before. It is like a sheep looking to a shepherd. The faith here is not inspiring; simply nobody knows what to do.

Plans of how to move forward crash and fade in his mind as quickly as waves on a beach. The passion fades too swiftly for any scheme to become solid; flaws spring up in every idea too risky to ignore; even the mindless release of shouting at, and blaming Verdan for sending them upon rivers withers fruitlessly before it takes form. Renard must do something… he must do something… but when even the passive option of coiling and withering to sleep, that he might flee the decision least for some hours, demands too great a commitment of will, how can anything more active have hope?

A tide shifts in Renard’s mind.

As if it were the most obvious thing, the thought occurs that now may be the time he must draw Kingslayer, kill Verdan, kill Fidel, and then maybe kill himself.

Nix has always been insidious about inserting such thoughts into men’s heads, but now it feels queerly sensible that this would be how to proceed. How, or why, he can’t answer, and nor is this thought coupled with any compassionate sentiment of granting the two a merciful death, but like other questionable ideas Renard has acted upon in his life, this one settles as something he will just have to do, sooner or later.

But what a drag…

The amount of certain passion underlying these murderous sentiments is paradoxically barring Renard from enacting them at present. Once the revelation has faded a little, and he is lying on the floor with all the vitality of a carcass, ribs bare to the earth and mouth buzzing with flies, that is when the strength will come like the tide of the ocean dragging sand across its bed, to take his arm with blade in hand and drive it in to these other two people.

He will achieve his aims more fully, then, by the less that he does.

Frustratingly, realising this in itself makes Renard impassioned to try and ‘do less’, which means he is fighting against the empty flow. Even knowing this is true, the impulse of proactivity runs deep in Renard. With a frustrated huff inside his throat, he tries to strip his mind back, that his eyes might glaze over with the boredom of nothing, and he will achieve the frustrating mission of simply ‘waiting’.

From the darkness of the sky then descends a mass of shadowy figures — the natives — who spiral down in a thin tendril like a forming twister, long and narrow. The shades coalesce together into the form of one single shade, not greater in size or stature from the many that dove into it, but greatly thicker in the sheer blackness of its form. Like a spigot turned off, no other shades descend; those with the inclination to fall may perhaps be consummate in this one shade, but also it seems that only a prescribed amount could ‘fit’ through the now closed ‘hole’ in the sky in the first place.

The shade, standing a few meters off from Renard and his group, extends its hands like a beggar, beckoning Renard.

Renard’s brows scrunch despite himself. The last time such a shade beckoned him, it was a lure into a trap by which he would freefall into a void through a hole in the floor.

As though it heard his thoughts, the shade worriedly shakes its head and strokes its hands over the floor, as if illustrating its solidity. It steps carefully forward once, then twice, then a third step — and stops there, as if conscious not to encroach any further on the group’s space. Space then twinges strangely to return the shade where it was, without it actually moving or receding in its presence. Burbling that could be voices, but is too fuzzy to make out, runs faintly through the back of Renard’s mind.

The shade, with the manner of a meek servant, again beckons.

It must be trying to take the group… or maybe just Renard, somewhere. The way it stands alone in the blank field of painted shapes, while all its fellows roil far away like stormclouds against the invisible dome of this plain’s ‘heaven’, impresses to Renard the thought that it must be somehow permitted to visit them, or special. To follow this one’s guidance… it doesn’t feel like the worst idea.

With a final, reflexive hesitation, Renard glances back to the river.

And there, carried softly upon the water, is a single, shining, bright, red flower.