Incarnation: Wandering Stars Volume One (11 page)

Enoch struggled to make out
anything
intelligible from their speech, but their language was entirely foreign.  He recognized on
e
phrase that he also heard them speak after his capture
, but he didn’t know the meaning of it
.

T
he leader of the hunting party knelt down and
pulled on the cords that bound
Enoch’s
hands.
Laying a curved, sharpened bone against them, he severed the cords with a quick, violent movement.

Immediately, Enoch felt a rush of blood return to his
fingers
.  He wondered briefly if the hunter had cut his skin, but when he pulled his hands in front of him and flexed his
joints
, he could see that the only wounds were the abrasions on his wrists and the cuts and scrapes on his palms from being dragged across the ground.

Before he could comprehend the sudden change in behavior of his captors,
the hunter gently lifted him to his feet and
led
him
toward a nearby stream.

O
h no; they’re going to drown me!

The hunting party sat him in the shallow water of a small pool.

Immediately, Enoch closed his eyes. 
Most Holy One of
H
eaven
, he prayed silently. 
Let not
Y
our servant perish
at
the hands of these
ignorant
people.  Preserve my life so that I may continue to follow
Y
ou. 
Cover me with the protection of
Y
our hand
.

When he opened his eyes, several women
had gathered
around him.

What are they doing?

They began to softly scoop up the cool water and pour it on his skin.  One of the women took his hands and submerged them, gently stroking his palms to clean away the blood.

“What are you doing to me?” he asked aloud.  But no one answered.  The women just quietly cleansed his body, while in the distance, the hunting part
y stood with their arms crossed
.

With the sun
rising
over
Bokhar
—Morning Mountain, as it is called among the Chatsiyram—Sariel
and three young men set out from the village and
headed
north along the river. 
Mo
st of the
people
were already
awake
and
had
gathered
along the banks to
see them off
, but Sheyir wasn’t among them
.
 
Sariel followed
the lead of the others
who moved across a field and into another stand of trees, then turned abruptly to the west and into the river.  As they
stepped into the cool, shallow water and wade
d
across
to the
western
shore where passage would be easier
, Sariel couldn’t help but look back
. 
To his relief,
Sheyir
was standing on the bank. 
The sun
illuminat
ed
her from behind
and she appeared as an ethereal being, as when Sariel had watched her from the
E
ternal
R
ealm
.  He smiled and she smiled in return
.
  It was a simple exchange, but enough to satisfy his need for some communication before their momentary parting
.  Hopefully, she understood that
he
was thinking about her, and would continue to do so until
they saw each other
again.

Turning around, Sariel set his mind to the task at hand and followed the young men through the water. 
For the next four days,
they trekked
downstream
across
rolling,
grassy
foothills. 
With few obstructions, they made
quick
progress
through the valley that ran between
Bokhar
to the east, and
Ehrevhar
to the west. 
With t
he sun near
ing
the Evening Mountain on its descent, the men crossed back to the east side of the river
at a
wide
ford and ma
d
e their way into the foothills
of
Bokhar
.  As they ascended
, the grassy lowlands gave way to thick tangles of trees
which slowed their
speed considerably.  Just before sunset, they reached the summit of a rock outcropping that jutted from the dense vegetation and overlooked the valley to the north.  From this vantage point, Sariel could see that the river turned slightly to the northeast and broke into dozens of streams until they rejoined at a large lake.  The valley itself widened as it left the confines of the mountains.

“This is
Arar Gahiy
?” he asked his guides.

“Yes. 
R
eeds grow tall near the water.  Good for building roofs
,” one of the men answered.  “We will sleep here tonight and you will go in the morning.”

“Very well,” Sariel replied, anxious to get started
despite the
growing anxiety with each step
closer to this mysterious
place.

After a fitful night
’s
sleep, Sariel rose early and sat on the rocks overlooking the valley.  He was still trying to get used to the human form he wore.  He had never slept before coming to the
T
emporal
R
ealm
, but found that his body tired quickly
in this
habitation
, so it was a necessity.  So too was food, as his body grew hungry after
only
a short time without nourishment.
  He knew all these things, of course, before c
rossing over.
  But knowing and experiencing were very different.

When his companions woke, they handed him a
small
bag with some
dried fruit
.

Sariel
understood
this to mean that he was expected to
leave
, so he did.  Making his way down
the mountainside, he moved slowly through the forests until he reached the grassy foothills again,
nibbl
ing
on
some food
to fight off the hunger.  By midmorning, he reached the
east side
of
Armayim
, the Lake of the Curse.  He
could see what the young men meant about the reeds.  Standing at twice his height, the thick green shoots were clustered densely in the shallows at the water’s edge.  He walked casually,
regularly
s
hifting
his consciousness slightly toward
the
E
ternal
, giving himself the
best opportunity to discover what inhabited this area and what might be out of place
.  He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for
;
Sheyir’s father didn’t say why he considered the valley to be cursed.  Sariel had questioned the younger men during their journey
, but all
he was able to ascertain was that this valley used to be a place where the young men came to gather building materials.
T
he Chatsiyram knew something that they weren’t sharing
, and this was Sariel’s test. 
If he really did possess
d
athrah
, as they thought, then he should be able to tell them why the valley is cursed.

Shortly after mid
-
day, Sariel was moving around the northern end of the lake when he saw a flicker of shadow
among the reeds.  Moving
cautiously toward
the water’s edge, he found a sandy shore that had been cleared of
vegetation
. 
It appeared that the reeds had been harvested from this side of the lake some time ago. 
Looking left and right along the shore, he found nothing.  Then he noticed something sticking out of the water a few yards in.

Choosing his steps carefully, he waded out into the
shallows
.  It didn’t take long before he found something that he’d never seen before
and
it
gave him a sickening feeling in his stomach.  Just below the surface, human bones lay half-embedded in the sand.  Their lifeless skulls looked eternally up at the sky through
hollow
eye sockets.
  The long, narrow bones of hands reached outward, as if pleading for someone to bring them back to life.

Sariel
shivered. 
He had seen many deaths among the angelic races, but never a
dead human.  Though not immortal, their lifespan was still nearly a thousand years.  In fact, the first
humans were still alive to this day.  He’d only heard of them dying by accident and had never seen it
first-hand
.  Yet now he looked down on s
everal and it broke his heart. 
Sariel slowly
s
hifted
his consciousness toward
the
E
ternal
and immediately
, his body went rigid.

All around him, demons swarmed, screaming and wailing
with
mournful cr
ies.

He backed up a few paces and stared in disbelief.

Their appendages were thin
, their abdomens distended,
and they flailed about as if in pain.
 
T
heir coloring, which was normally blacker than the darkest night, looked sickly gray with blotches of white
and pale green
.

“
Ikthier
manom
hatda
! 
Ikthier
manom
hatda
!
”
they screamed in discordant unison
.

Baffled by their use of the
Kahyin
language, and their presence in this realm, Sariel remained silent for a moment, watching them swarm over the human skeletons like flies over refuse.

“What are you doing here?”
he
demanded finally
.

The demons shrank back in fear,
but their initial reaction quickly changed. 
“We might ask you the same question,” one retorted.

“Yes, what are you doing here,
C
hild of
L
ight?” another asked.
  “This is not your home.”

Sariel
ignored the questions.  “You
have been banned from
this realm,” he stated.

First one, then the rest began to laugh.  It was a grotesque sound, like a wheezing bark.

Even without their cooperation, Sariel was gleaning useful information.  He noted that the creatures
’
movements, though awkward by their perverted nature, also seemed confined to a certain location. 
As their spiderous forms crawled, then
floated
through the
air with the look of dissipating smoke, each one moved through
a
space
that
roughly
coincided with one of the human bodies.
  They
passed
through the air and even down into the water and earth beneath the bones, but never elsewhere.

Their starved appearance also suggested that the source of their strength was depleted.  Sariel looked
again
to the
dead
humans lying beneath the water.

Impossible!

Long ago, the
demons
were
prevented from
exist
ing
in the same realm as humans.  From that point forward, their only interaction with the
T
emporal came through manipulation of a being’s spirit
,
which existed in a realm
partially
accessible to them.
 
But no human would, or even could
, consciously
yield their bodily existence to a demon.  Humans simply didn’t have control over their own spirit in that way, and most weren’t even aware of this part of themselves.