Cold obsidian

Two hours had passed, judging by the alien-looking white sun slowly crawling up. Kangassk was already almost blind, most of the world replaced in his mind by the white gloom. There were no more oak leaves, branches, and acorns, just an amorphous rustling mass above. There were no more grass blades, just a shapeless shaggy carpet on the ground. There were no more pretty “jellyfish” at the fringe of vision, just a squirming, wriggling mass resembling a huge hungry monster. And it moved even closer to the travellers.

Soon after Kan had lost Vlada to the white gloom his field of vision shrank so much it ended at the arm’s length, just where his charga’s head with angrily folded ears was. Several more steps toward the heart of the White Region – and the world went white, swallowed whole by the reversed darkness. That’s when Kangassk felt the presence of the sylphs. They swarmed him, not biting yet but actively seeking something: a pulsing vein maybe or a softer place on the skin, who knows… The sylphs chirped and screeched, their little bodies were all over Kan. One heartbeat, two, three… he clenched his teeth… two more – and he cracked up.

“Take them away from me!!!” he bellowed swinging his invisible hands in the air. “Help!!!”

“Stop it, silly!” Vlada’s voice came somewhere from the left. “Get yourself together! You don’t want to fall from the saddle here, believe me.”

Well, that was sobering. Kan stopped yelling and started thinking. He couldn’t do much to keep the sylphs away but he could do at least something, so he wrapped his cloak around him tightly, hid his face and hands and leaned against the charga’s neck, face down. That was a very good idea. Chargas could see in the white gloom just fine. From time to time Kangassk heard a loud crunch when one of them crushed a sylph or two with her jaws. After a while, most of the sylphs learned to stay away from the chargas’ heads, but only the heads. They still crawled everywhere else. And there were so many of them! Finally, even the chargas lost their nerves and ran.

Kangassk whimpered miserably with every step, his face buried in his charga’s fur. The world before his closed eyes was dark, with dancing colourful spots, which was way nicer than the unnatural, spotless whiteness of the real world he didn’t dare to look at again.

“You can get up now, Kan,” Vlada addressed him after a while.

He straightened in his saddle and beamed: the world was grey! Lovely, lovely grey! There were shadows in it and contours, still patchy, but quite readable. Kangassk could tell there were trees and ruins around.

The sylphs began their slow, reluctant retreat into the white gloom. Kan resolutely shook the most stubborn ones off his clothes and put to the sword several bloodthirsty specimens which kept pestering him and his charga no matter what. Vlada did the same with her own bunch of pursuers. The rest of the sylphs learned the lesson and kept their distance.

Kangassk made a deep breath and exhaled. It was over, they had gone through the gloom!

“I thought I’d go crackers there!” he sighed. “Damn sylphs…”

“Yeah, nasty critters. They give me creeps,” Vlada nodded.

The chargas agreed by setting their ears back and growling. The clever beasts looked very tired but kept running at the same pace. They had no desire to meet the sylphs again.

Kangassk looked around.

“What are these ruins?” he asked. With the danger behind them, he was back to his curious self again. “Who lived there?”

“Scientists mostly,” answered Vlada with a sad smile. “The worldholders had a big lab here. It poisoned two Regions in one go when it blew up. One of them we’ve just passed. The other is ahead of us.”

“The Dead Region…” Kan shivered and asked no more questions.

The grey sky above the Dead Region slowly turned blue, a dark, evening blue where the first stars already twinkled.

Chapter 4. Meeting place

The ruins kept dragging on to the north. The land around them was flat and bare, so the only thing that stood between the travellers and a horizon here was a thin veil of dust raised by the chargas’ paws from the ground.

Kangassk noticed that at some point the ground began to slope in the direction of the Region’s centre. He soon understood why: the ground they walked on was in fact a bottom of a huge crater. The ruins there no longer looked like broken teeth sticking out of the ground, they were just piles of crushed stone and dust scattered along the way and formed a circular rampart by the crater’s centre. To climb it, Vlada and Kan had to dismount from their chargas and go on foot. The view from the top of the rampart was so alien it sent shivers down Kan’s back. In the former centre of the ancient catastrophic explosion stood a huge black cube, perfectly smooth, undamaged, and free from dust. A lonely man sat on the cube, his cloaked head bowed, his shoulders slouched. He leaned his heavily worn staff against one of the cube’s polished black walls. Silvered by the young moon, the staff shone through the night like a fantasy mage’s weapon would.

Vlada approached the man.

“Hello, Sereg,” she sighed. The sadness in her voice was so deep that even Kangassk who had no idea what it was about could feel it too.

“Hello, Vlada,” replied the man. He didn’t sound happy as well.

The man named Sereg removed his hood and stood up. He was so tall he towered above Vlada and Kan like a mountain but his physique didn’t match his height: Sereg was so thin he looked starved. Kan could not guess his age. The stranger’s hair was grey, either with age or with dust, there were dark shadows under his eyes as if he had been running or fighting for a long time. One moment his face seemed young yet but the next moment it didn’t, not after your eyes met his.

Now, when Vlada stood beside this strange man, she looked way older than her young face suggested as well.

Sereg had no sword on him, just the steel bound staff, no doubt as heavy as a solid rock. Kangassk, a smith’s apprentice, knew the very moment he saw that thing that it was no mere walking stick but a weapon as deadly as a sword in the right hands.

“I came through the Chasm,” said Sereg in a hollow voice.

“Why?!” exclaimed Vlada.

“I was in a hurry.” He bowed his head slightly. “Didn’t want to be late.”

Sereg and Vlada sat at the edge of the cube. They paid no attention to Kangassk at all, he just stood there, as still as a statue, his hands resting on the chargas’ necks.

Sereg took a deep breath.

“Vlada,” he said in a grave voice, “it’s not easy for me to say this… At first, after my journal had disappeared I didn’t think much of it. Yes, I put an incineration spell on the journal no thief would survive. But I remembered showing it to Orion and thought that maybe after I had removed the spell back then I just forgot to restore it…”

“What happened, Sereg?” asked Vlada quietly.

Sereg didn’t answer, not with words, at least. Instead, he removed something from his neck and showed it to Vlada. Kangassk could see it too. It was a silver pendant on a long chain, once beautiful, now brutally vandalized as if someone had torn a big jewel out of its delicate pattern.

“No one besides us could have survived touching this,” stated Sereg. “You know why.”

Before Sereg said this, Kangassk had been just angry. Now, he was furious. He didn’t care for the unimportant details, like the fact that those two both were mages, obviously, but he did care about that man bluntly accusing Vlada of theft… His strength boosted by anger, Kan covered the distance between Sereg and himself in one jump.