The Gods of Amyrantha (71 page)

Even through the ice, he could feel the Tide returning.

It was a subtle feeling at first, but then everything was subtle these days. His ability to feel anything, to even frame a coherent thought, was so painfully slow that the mere act of forming a sentence meant the first words were lost before the last words were thought of.

He lived on instinct now. And even then he wasn't sure if you could call this living. Maybe it was. If living was defined by awareness, then he was alive.

That was one thought he could form. The shortest sentence of all.

I am.

Beyond that, he was lost. Somewhere, he suspected, there must be an explanation. Logically, he did not come into being in this state. Somewhere in the frozen recesses of his mind were the reasons for his imprisonment. Somewhere the identities of those responsible for his stasis must be buried.

Should he ever find them, he'd decided — in a process that had taken centuries — should he ever escape this frozen prison, he would devote his time to repaying the favour.

It wasn't as if he didn't have the time. That was all he had, in fact.

He dreamed occasionally, immobile in his solid prison of ice. The dreams were sometimes pleasant, more often tormented. In them, he had an identity that seemed real and
right.

Because in his dreams, more often than not, he was
God.

And the Tide was turning.

He'd felt it come back before, several times. And then he felt it leave again. Each time it peaked, he seemed a little more aware of it. A little more able to understand that it
was
the Tide and that if he could only grasp it fully, he could be free.

He dreamed more often when the Tide was turning. Sometimes he saw faces. Faces he couldn't name. Faces whose names must be important, or why else would he dream of them?

Sometimes, too, he heard music. The music of cracking ice. The symphony of the shifting tectonic plates, something he felt through the very core of the planet, as much as heard, as if the music vibrated through him to compensate for his frozen ears.

He had no concept of time here. He couldn't imagine how long he'd been in this state. The memories of how he got here were frozen and beyond his reach.

But the music had changed subtly since the Tide had begun to turn. There was a different tenor to it now; a shift in the vibrations that heralded something out of the ordinary.

He tried to listen for it, to lean forward for a better chance to hear, but any movement he made existed only in his frozen imagination, so it was impossible to tell if this change was something new, or something he'd created in his own mind to alleviate the boredom.

The answer was too hard.

And it took so long to frame the thought, that by the time he'd posed the question, he'd forgotten why he wanted to know.

He slept. And he dreamed of being God again.

And then the tenor of the Tide changed and he felt

it.

He
felt
it.

The Tide swelled on the edge of his frozen awareness. It surged against the ice, surged against his ice-bound mind. Little by little he became aware, and with awareness, came the pain.

He'd always understood he was frozen, but until now, the meaning of that was something he didn't have the awareness to appreciate.

He appreciated it now.

He was frozen. Worse, he was bone-chillingly
cold,
and it seeped through every frozen fibre of his being until it reached for his very soul. The ice around him crackled and split, but this wasn't the slow symphony of time, it was sharp and immediate and it hurt and he was
cold ...

The Tide swelled again, as the realisation began to seep through his mind. The ice was melting. Cracking. Disintegrating around him.

His concept of time was still awry, so he had no idea how long the thawing took. The sound of dripping and then running water as the ice surrendered filled ears that had began to ache as they softened. The cracking of the walls that bound him, the pain and the bitter, blood-freezing cold were all he had the ability to focus on.

If there were memories, or any other thoughts in his mind, the pain overwhelmed them all...

And then a pain split his chest that left all the other agony a pale imitation of torment. He felt his heart force a beat, and then another, and he cried out, surprised to discover he
could
cry out, that his jaw moved and there was something left in his lungs to force past his vocal chords.

Another loud crack sounded, and the ice let him go. It was almost as if he was being spat out, an irritating seed being spat from the mouth of the ice monster. He crashed to the floor and would have screamed had he had the strength to do so. His limbs cried out in agony as joints immobilised for an

unthinkable time were forced to move again. His heart laboured as blood so sluggish it felt like syrup moved through his veins.

He opened his eyes, squinting in the harsh torchlight reflecting off the icy cavern into which he had fallen. After a long moment, his eyes adjusted to the light, muscles unused for so long finding their purpose once more.

A face appeared in front of him, familiar, hated and yet welcome ...

'Lukys?' he managed to gasp through his parched and frozen throat.

'Kentravyon!' his saviour replied with a smile more chilling than the icy cavern in which they were enclosed. 'Welcome back.'