Allie

Allie reached the abandoned city of Landuc the following evening as the artificial sun fell low, casting the decrepit buildings in a red-orange glow which failed to give them life. The square, adobe-like structures had empty windows like the sockets of skulls. The only sounds were the clep-clep of the horses’ hoof-falls and the scraping of Allie’s boot soles on the earth. Unease fluttered in her chest.

She led the horses through an empty street that traversed the neglected town. Both animals were silent and watchful, ready to bolt at the first sign of unexpected movement.

At the western edge of Landuc lay the blighted forest of Broceliande, where the Lady resided to protect the fountain to which she was bound.

Allie was aware of the old tales, long told to scare children in the north.

At the heart of the forest was the fountain called Bandua, inhabited by a demigod of water, and in early days Landuc enjoyed the blessings of their nearby patron demigod. During the Lady’s reign, the Corbenic-Atlantean War brought the general Gadeirus and impending invasion to her doorstep. Desperate to protect her people, she cut a deal for power with Bandua. The Lady saved Landuc, as she’d wished, but the demigod had taken her death in exchange for its power, and it had perished in her place after many long centuries of existence.

Now, three centuries and some change after the war, she was the only person left to the forest and city, her name a curse and her tale a warning.

Allie reached the border of Broceliande. The mare yanked its reins free from her hand and fled, leaving only Allie and the palomino. She could feel that he, too, was antsy to run, and she couldn’t blame him.

Broceliande was completely devoid of the sounds that forests should be full of -- no songs of birds or chirps of insects, only the rustling of the breeze through empty leaves.

Shivers danced over her arms. She dismounted, holding the palomino’s reins tightly as she unloaded the small saddlebag of food and supplies, then slipped the hackamore from his head, before releasing him. Relieved of his burden, he was gone in seconds, not looking back at Allie and the sinister wood.

She shouldered her bag and started into the trees.

She couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, made further discomforting by the lack of anyone or anything capable of watching. She glanced back over her shoulder periodically, sylvan dread settling into tension in her upper back.

She walked for almost two hours as the forest came full into the aegis of night. She lit her hand aglow, its light illuminating little around her, but it was enough to keep her from tripping over roots underfoot.

As Allie drew closer to the center of the forest, the air itself began to weigh oppressively on her, and her body felt tired down to the marrow.

A glow other than her own lingered on the trunks of the trees, coming from a clearing ahead. At its center was a stone fountain, plain and unimpressive except for the overwhelming aura that emanated from it, heavy as existential crisis and so powerful that Allie felt herself drop to her knees in the soil as soon as she entered the clearing. She took a deep breath and resigned herself to resting there for a moment to gather her strength.

The fountain had two tiers that spilled clean, crisp water back into its circular basin. Its pleasant, steady trickling was the only sound Allie had heard for hours beyond the wind and her own noises. She closed her eyes to listen.

“Who are you?” came a sharp voice.

Allie opened her eyes slowly, scanning along the clearing until they fell upon the owner of the voice.

The Lady was lit by the fountain’s glow, making her seem ethereal, as if she herself were the denizen of the fountain. She had hair the color of an otter’s pelt, wild and as long as her waist. She wore little but a white shift that only covered the absolute essentials of her bareness; her feet were naked. Her skin, of which there was much to be seen, was dark and had a sheen to it, as if she had just oiled herself down.

Her face was alert and suspicious, her black eyes wide and keen. Allie swallowed, feeling as though she were being appraised by a feral animal.

“I’m Aeliana,” Allie answered, as calmly as she could manage. “I came from Atlantis to meet you.”

Lady let out a guttural sound from her chest, a sharp, rasping sound that took a second for Allie to realize was a laugh. Lady stood straight from her combative stance, and walked to the edge of the glowing fountain to sit on the stone lip.

“Oh, it’s you. Aeliana, the last of the Ghriands. The weakest of the line. The one with the most as stake.”

Her voice was hoarse with disuse.

Allie felt her jaw tense. She stood, the movement requiring a larger amount of effort than normal.

“Surely you can relate, being the last of your era.”

Lady’s savage grin didn’t have to travel far to become a snarl.

“Not off to a good start, are you? I had to watch my people die as I lived on and on,” she rasped, “and even my love Lunete died a peaceful death without me. And here I am still, bound to this god-forsaken fountain.” She gestured to the fountain, then continued, “Whatever it is you want, you will not get it by mocking me.”

She bared her teeth at Allie.

Allie stood her ground, refusing to flinch. She decided to change tactics, ignoring her own defensiveness to bare her soul to the other.

“I didn't mean to mock you, but to draw a parallel between you and I.”

“Please, outline where you think you and I are similar.”

The Lady’s eyes were skeptical, ever-disdainful, but curiosity also flickered in them.

“I, too, face the destruction of my people. I, too, want to save them, at any cost.”

“Well, I wouldn’t suggest the way I went,” said Lady, her face bitter but her tone imperceptibly softer. “You should rethink your use of the phrase ‘at any cost’.”

“I came to learn from you,” Allie continued, “to learn what you would have done instead. To draw from your experience, without having to make the mistake you did.”

Lady appeared to consider it. She raised a hand to her mouth, her jagged, untrimmed nails denting the lovely skin of her cheeks.

Finally, she shrugged dismissively.

“Why should I care about your impassioned desire to save your people?”

Her dark eyes glittered as she gazed at the fay, waiting for Allie to woo her with words, to stir her with a reason to assist.

“Have you really lived so long that you don’t care to help an entire city that could benefit from your knowledge?”

“I have lived so long that I no longer care about anything,” Lady replied, a mirthless smile stretching her face in a way that seemed painful.

“So, care for this, see my -- our -- cause, and live for something for once.”

Lady raised her chin to look down at her, and her eyebrows arched. Allie knew she had misspoke.

“What do you think I have done for these endless years, lie in my crumbling castle and stare at the ceiling?”

“I don’t suppose I thought--”

“No, I don’t suppose you did think. Do you want to see what I do?”

Hoping to salvage the conversation, Allie nodded.

Lady turned and began leading Allie out of the clearing and into the trees.

Allie soon lost track of any sense of direction, but Lady was confident in her place in the forest. Her footing was sure, as if each hollow between the trees were a street in a city she had walked her entire life.

The forest broke to allow for the rise of Lady’s castle, an ancient, hulking thing of granite, the magicepts holding up its impossible archways and looming towers techniques lost to time.

Allie paused outside the courtyard, into which the other passed without hesitation, beckoning to Allie to follow.

Inside the double doors of the castle, there was a flurry of activity. Birds, startled by the doors, flew into a titter, alarming several goats who had bedded down in a pile of soft hay, whose bleating scared a herd of rabbits across the hall like a small, furry stampede. The rafters sung with the songs of a dozen types of birds; the kitchen was filled with amiable mice; the bedrooms housed foxes and forest drakes and sprites and every other thing that should have been in the stark forest outside, but instead clustered here, in the home of the Lady.

As she entered, she greeted some animals by name as she moved past them.

There were no servants, no Landucian citizens, no one in the castle but for Lady and her many beastly companions. The people had all long since passed, but the flux of animals had never ceased.

Allie wondered how it felt, to grow so unattached to everything because it would crumble away long before you did. She wondered how the passage of time felt when you knew it would never end, and then sequestered that thought away as it became uncomfortable.

Lady passed a giant slumbering bear, reached another pair of double doors, glanced back, then swung the doors open with a sense of unmistakable grandeur.

Her pride was not unjustified by the space beyond. It was a ballroom, empty but large enough to comfortably hold four hundred or so people.

From the marbled floor to the high arches of the ceiling, the stone walls were covered in uncountable etchings, all part of a massive, indescribably elaborate, but ultimately inscrutable mural.

There were depictions of people, and animals, and of cities and other things Allie could not make out at a distance. There were too many images to take in at once, some of which branched off from the main wall into curling wings of their own, all illustrating their own innumerable stories.

“What is this?” Allie breathed, her eyes slipping from one area to the next, mostly unable to make out individual drawings but in awe of the intricacy as well as and the effort and time required to create something so vast.

“This is history,” replied the Lady, then confessed, “I lied, when I said I cared about nothing.” Her dark eyes were also upon the drawings, but she looked over them with the fond familiarity of an author viewing her own works. Allie caught uncertainty and pride in her face.

Lady had been alone so long that she wasn’t quite sure how to feel now that someone who could appreciate the immensity of her project was present to view it. To mask her uncertainty, she dove in and began speaking.

“I started over there, with the beginning of ,” she began, pointing to the far left wall. They moved closer to it, and Allie could see the first etching -- two crude silhouettes ringed by rays of light.

“Rodull and Manon,” Lady said, then gestured to the two gods’ children in turn, “Geon, Spira, Incendis, Hydrus, and, of course, Soltinn--” she proceeded to tell Allie the history of the beginning of the world. Allie knew it loosely, but the Lady knew it all in rigorous detail. She glossed over a huge amount, instead choosing to gesture to the most significant and recognizable events of Sidhe, which through their importance earned a larger depiction, with smaller events organized around them as consequences of their happening.

“--the First War--” she gestured to a painstakingly-drawn image of the war, with thousands of tiny people-shapes forever locked in desperate battle against identical figures.

Battles, alliances, betrayals, vendettas, births, deaths, prophecies, sieges, famines — all graced the walls like pictographic ramblings of a madwoman.

Lady had started with very simple drawings, but over the course of many years her aptitude and attention to detail had developed to an astonishing level.

Allie interrupted at a break in the description, “How could you know all of this?” She saw no books, no maps, no sources of scholarly information that the Lady could have used to glean such precise knowledge.

“I had many, many years of boredom after I gave up on suicide. I began by speaking to the animals and asking their stories. After that I asked them to bring me more animals, and more still, from whom I learned to speak to the stones. I asked the animals to bring me stones from all of Sidhe, and from there --- well, there was no stopping me. The stones and rocks have the longest memories of all, and I decided to learn and depict the history of everything.”

“That’s...ambitious,” responded Allie, unsure of what to say.

“It continues.”

“What?”

“Into the next room.”

Allie’s eyes went to the doors at the other end of the great hall. Before she had even really consciously decided to, she was striding towards them, moving past hundreds of years’ events in chronological order.

She opened the doors with a single movement and found herself in what had once been an equatorial room, but the huge telescope had been moved out. The aperture for observing the stars had been sealed shut, and its bronzed insides had also been etched upon.

Its focal point was an immense dragon, descending upon Allie with its wings spread along the concavity.

Around it was more history, equally dense and intricate as the previous room -- up until a point. The entire right side of the room was untouched, with events trailing off in unfinished visual sentences.

“I’m almost caught up to the present,” said Lady as she caught up. “I suppose I’ve been stalling, working instead on the drake.”

Lady’s time away from other people had caused her social skills to suffer greatly, and she no longer composed her face as quickly as another would, nor did she make the effort to soften or mitigate her expression, allowing her facial muscles to contort themselves as they wished in response to her raw pain.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Lady said, her gaze intense as she exposed a beating red slice of herself to Allie, acknowledging her vulnerability with reluctance. “I have even drawn events of the future in the primary guests’ quarters, what we know will precede the end of Sidhe. Now that my timeline has its beginning and end, I am doing as much as I can to avoid filling in the space between. I have heard dark, troubling things from the creatures who have come to me from Auster-Sidhe, and I do not wish to record what comes next.”

Her use of the word auster for south showed how old she really was. Bitterness seemed to be a permanent feature on her face, but here in the castle, with her consuming project, she had lost the defensive viciousness she had assumed in the fountain clearing.

She beckoned Allie out of the equatorial room, shutting the doors behind them.

Neither of them broke the silence as Lady led her across and out of the ballroom. In the hall, Lady took a left, leading deeper into the castle, but Allie didn’t comment, not wanting to presume that the Lady would allow her to stay.

Finally, the other stopped in front of a decorated pair of doors and turned to Allie. Her face was stony.

“You can sleep here. We will begin tomorrow.”