i wrote this like a year ago? idk inb4 "tl;dr"
THE RIVER
I.
Rain never fell on the kingdom of the flame. At night, the mist would rise from the river and oases like a returning spirit. They named the mist the god of Night. He gathered the souls of the dead, and took them as the sun rose and he vanished into the ground and water. Dew collected on vines, cacti, and beaded on the cracked earth; that was his payment for our lost. The god of Night was not the god of death, but of rest for the deceased. As night was relief from the day, Night was relief from life.
It was sunset. Tarem stepped off his boat, the Shadow of the Clouds, onto the docks of the city. Behind him, the boat was enveloped in the crimson of the sunset, marooned in color if not in fact.
“The sun is not a source of light,” Domer said, “but a prism.”
“Then where does the light come from?” Tarem asked. He had grown bored of Domer’s incessant philosophizing; the man seemed to go out of his way to look at something in the most ridiculous way. But at least it was someone to talk to.
“Truth,” Domer said with a grand gesture to the city market, “the great furnace of our world burns with the heat of facts. One cannot draw water from dry bones, Tarem, and you cannot loose an arrow that does not fall back to the earth. There are laws and our world is ironbound to follow them.”
“Laws are enforced. What makes sure our bones are not damp and that arrows do not fall up?”
Domer thought for a moment. “Threat of guillotine, of course,” he said with a pale smile.
The market was bare; the two men were the only souls present. The harbor was empty but for the Shadow of the Clouds and when it left, only the stone and rotting wood, and the sound of salt water in dry air would remain.
They made camp on the balcony of a sturdy building overlooking the river. Domer didn’t want to risk animals nesting in the buildings, let alone night roamers. The stars appeared one by one, pinpricks in a black blanket. When Domer fell asleep, Tarem walked down to the river, and sat in the brittle reeds on the bank. He might have heard a frog croak. The mist grew thick as smoke around him and he wondered if Night were to gather him right then, taking his soul to rest among the other dead, dreaming in some murky underworld.
II.
Mist would make travel impossible by night, and the sun by day was an enemy they knew not to tempt. So they walked in the twilight hours, dusk and dawn. The pace was slow. Mud sucked at their feet, close to the river. A dog had followed them from the city, but it wandered too far from the riverside one day and the ground crumbled beneath it and it fell, legs maimed, in a deep pit of dust. Tarem and Domer agreed the mud wasn’t so bad after that.
Soon, Tarem had pitched his warrior’s armor. Inlaid with silver, light and battle proven; the gorget had stopped a fatal arrow for him once. But it was useless where they were going, and they needed the room for a cache of stale traveler’s bread they had found. He placed the armor in the same hidden cache as the old bread. In a perfect world, he would come back for it some day.
He wished the dog had lived, so it might bark if something approached camp. Tarem slept in the day so he might keep watch with his sword at night. Domer watched for the day and read his old books and wrote with his careful hands. “A pen is mightier than the sword,” Domer told Tarem one day, “but a sword is mightiest in the hands of a pensman.” Domer’s sword was made of fine antler wood, sharper than a razor, would never rot. Tarem’s was made of the bone of a Soak, later inlaid with silver to match his abandoned armor. His mother had blessed his sword with a prayer when he was younger, as should be done with the weapon of a warrior; Tarem wondered if Domer’s pen had been properly blessed.
As they moved upriver, the earth turned to silt and ash would fall in thick, white flakes like snow. Tarem had tried yawning and an ashflake fell right on his tongue, where it burned like a hot coal. He spat it out.
That night, in the tent:
“We’re getting close,” Domer said, meaning the ash. The light was out in the tent, but Tarem could see the dark shadows of his companion’s face.
“How soon?”
Domer shrugged, and rubbed his hands. “We haven’t been keeping track of days,” he said. After all, what was the point?
Tarem nodded. He was going to ask something else when there came a sound outside the tent. Domer heard it, too. Both of them quietly picked up their weapons, unsheathed them, bone and wood against wood as they slid out.
Night roamer? Domer mouthed, the slightest whisper escaping.
Tarem didn’t respond yet, nor did his face move a muscle. He was listening.
Another sound. Stay here, he mouthed back, and he went outside the tent. His eyes did not need to adjust, but in the thick fog everything was grey and black anyway. He could feel Night’s presence. He looked and listened for the night roamer, but all he could hear was his own breath and the trickle of the nearby river.
Then he saw it, a form in the fog. It loped strangely toward him, claws scratching the earth, low to the ground. He was ready with his sword, but as it came into view he recognized the creature. The dog they had left in the dust pit. Its legs were useless, but it dragged itself through the silt somehow. Half of its face was missing now, and in place of one eye was a strange red orb, the only color in the fog of the night. The dog grinned when she saw him, and whimpered with what might have been excitement. Its teeth were longer somehow.
There was no way it could have crawled out of the pit. And the red eye… When he killed the dog, its blood splattered on his face, cold as water, thick, black, congealed. If the dog found their camp, what else could be tracking them?
III.
“This is it,” Domer said.
It was an obelisk, sandstone. “It points the way,” Domer explained.
The obelisk had a hundred incisions, words or runes. Tarem could not read them. His hand was in his pocket, fidgeting the evil eye of the dog, smooth as glass.
The sun was rising behind the obelisk, and sunlight began to pool around them as the last wisps of mist died. “We need to take shelter soon,” Tarem said.
Domer nodded. He took out paper and charcoal and made etchings of the carvings. They camped a mile away. Closer than Tarem would have liked, but they didn’t dare travel in full morning sunlight. Domer read the etchings while Tarem slept uneasily. He dreamed of the obelisk, and this time the sun rising behind it was dark and viscous like the blood of the dog, and the sunlight was cold.
