Long branches hung from dying trees, touched the red dirt and stretched towards infinity. The rider, a shrouded figure whose face was wrapped in bandages, traveled at a slow-paced trot. Half-limp and hunched forward, the man sat on his horse, a pathetic grey mane, ambling on.
There were no other riders. Neither coming nor going. Occasionally, against a tree he spots a corpse frozen in a pose of either terrified supplication or ecstatic praise: hands folded, face towards the sky; red thorns growing from out the wide-open eyes of those stymied bodies. This is nothing new.
He wields a sword but never uses it. There’s nothing left to kill.
He cannot remember how long he has traveled. But the landscape changes, however slowly. The red dirt gives way to yellow, sand-like soil. Out of the soil sprout sunflowers, at first short and barely recognizable from grass, and then tall, up to his knees. He senses that his horse feels guilty for trampling the life in those flowers, but he carries on.
In those latter days even the notion of society was alien. Small settlements or villages were the closest one could get to community, and even then they were nomadic, for fear of the Decay. He had heard stories of the Age of Gods, and the Age of Kings, but those were bygone eras, no more history than fairy tales.
…
Lost in a musing of the one he sought to heal, he looked up and found the building he searched for. A church with a simple design, one long room, but the tallest building he’d seen in a long time. It was surrounded by a small village made of huts. He descended from his horse and walked through the village. He did not call out but looked around in silence. In the windows of the houses and in slightly cracked doors, he could see the yellow eyes of the followers of the Church of Fracas.
Silence save his footfalls and the soft crunch of trampled sunflowers.
The church opened to a nave leading to a pulpit. In a posture not unlike the corpses along the road, a man in a long yellow gown murmured words to himself. As the rider approached the man quieted, stood up, and turned around. A long, grey beard melded with the colors of his long, yellow gown.
“Well, well, a visitor. How long it has been.”
The rider wore a long red cloak, with a furry cape made from the hinds of a large bear.
“A rider in red,” the bearded man said, intrigued. “From the realms of the Decay. Seek you shelter in these golden lands?”
The rider stood silent.
“Your face is covered. Do you already have the Decay?”
The rider nodded.
“Ah, you seek absolution. It is… the only way.”
The rider shook his head.
“Oh? Then why are you here?”
The rider reached into a pocket and pulled out a small square painting. A woman, with raven-black hair and large blue eyes that reminded the bearded man of the wide, wide, seas he’d seen in his youth.
“Ah, it is not for you, then, but for another…”
The rider nodded.
“Well, there is still only one way, a sacrifice to Fracas must be made. They are a being of… absolutes. But would they let you sacrifice yourself on behalf of another…?”
The bearded man hummed, and his eyes flashed yellow. Then in a voice like a serpent’s hiss, he said, “Yes. Yes, they would. They would!”
The rider put his hand over his sword.
“Oh, no need for that!” The man said, and his eyes mellowed from the yellow hue, back to a pale phthisis; the rider realized the man was blind.
A loud horse cry pierced the air like the scream of a frenzied fox.
“You need to journey to Fracas’ tomb, as all of us do, and make a pledge to serve him. There you will receive absolution, and your beloved will find healing.”
The rider began to walk out.
“The tomb lies to the North, about a day’s journey. The road is clear, for the most part.”
The rider kept walking.
“We await your return.”
When he stepped outside he found his horse slaughtered, and three or four ragged children were feasting on it. Their eyes blazed a fiery yellow-orange, and on seeing him they ran into their homes, disappearing.
He walked. A sign indicating the directions led him in the right direction. North. Along the way he pulled the petals of the sunflowers and tasted them. Sating a hunger he did not feel but knew he had, he grabbed a bundle and ate them, feeling sacrilegious as he did so but carrying on regardless.
Dilapidated towers, crumbled and ruined lay strewn—almost random—along the route. North, North. At night he huddled beneath trees and heard the breeze of the night air carry strange and somber wailing. Still, in all the ruin, he felt a beauty older and stronger than life itself in the sight of the sky, the glittering stars, the moon’s soothing luminescence. He wondered if worlds beyond his own knew about this existence—he wondered if they cared, or if they chose not to get involved out of fear of what they saw.
In the skeletal remains of what was once a town, he found a man preaching to a group of rats who sat on hind legs in rapt attention. The man wore a large conical hat with a wide brim that covered most of his face. The strange man’s sermon, half-sung in a strange language the rider did not understand, spoke of the end times. Amazingly, those times, the end of the end, had somehow still not come. Life, after all, persisted. The rider could feel the sermon’s meaning, the despair, and fear, and yet the hope that lingered in the airy whispered words he heard.
“I would not bother with that tomb,” the man said, turning to the rider, “the lot of them all end up the same. Ruined. I’ve warned many before you, but they never listen. I say better to get Decayed and die now than to become some abomination like those yellow-eyed maniacs.”
The rider paid the man no mind and kept walking North.
“Why not just die?” The man said to himself. “Better to just die, you fool…”
The tomb of Fracas was made of marble, beautifully sculpted, and barely ruined by time or defilement. A rectangular mausoleum, its entrance was guarded by two ten-foot sculptures of men with wings as long as the men were tall. The large double doors bore engravings in a language the rider could not wholly read, but he recognized the occasional word: the old tongue’s alphabet, and its symbols signifying “GRAVE” and “OF THE AGE OF GODS.”
Once the rider was considered a learned man, but in the last generation he’d seen only three books, and those burnt or torn, used to hold up tables or weigh down rugs.
The inside of the mausoleum was desolate, save for a pool at the opposite end of the entrance. This pool, like a smaller version of the exterior, lay rectangular and still. The rider approached it and peered inside. The water, clearer than any water he could recall seeing, seemed to call out to him. In the reflection, his eyes that for months were turning red began to shift into yellow. He closed his eyes and turned away. Feeling his face he knew the pool carried some sort of magic. He no longer cared for himself, but for his beloved. Wretched and lost and bound to death anyway, what had he to lose? Turning back to the pool he looked down. His eyes were red again, but again slowly shifted to the yellow hue he saw in the eyes of the bearded man and the feral children of that village. Then in the reflection, beside himself, he saw the face of the woman. When last he saw her she lay on death’s bed fading from the Decay, the thorns beginning to pierce her eyes.
But the woman in the reflection looked graceful, and as his eyes turned yellow and wild and angry hers grew softer, more blue. He could feel the life return to her, as it ebbed outside of him.
A voice spoke in a language he did not understand. Low and guttural, it sounded like the throaty musings of frogs on hot Summer nights. Maniacal croaking, yet he could translate it through pure intuition or the magic of the pool. “I’m coming out... if that’s alright,” it said. “Are you sure this is ok?”
He nodded. And the guttural croaking amplified. The face of the woman in the pool transformed into a yellow hand that reached out from the water and gripped the edges of the structure. It pulled itself out, and a man who was not a man, with skin both white as pure light and yellow as a sunflower, emerged.
The croaking continued. “I will take you now, and I will make her well.”
And then the horror of the enterprise entered him in an instant. As if snapped out of a chivalric stupor, his journey, this mad quest to save his love... it no longer mattered. And as he stared into the not-man’s face, with eyes that were not quite eyes, and a mouth that looked like a frog’s—pulled back and thin as sheets of paper—he decided to run.
So he ran.
As he approached the door he heard the croaking, and then the voice, “I will make her well. Give yourself unto me.”
The doors were shut. He looked behind him and pulled out his sword. The not-man still stood by the pool, but his arms extended like rubber and slithered towards the rider.
“I am Fracas, God of the seventh outer reach. You have summoned me, and I will bring you absolution.”
The rider swung his sword at one of the arms, but it wiggled out of the way in a grotesque gesture. He ran towards the not-man in an effort to dodge the arms, but the not-man shot his tongue out and it grabbed the rider’s face. The not-man lifted the rider up with his tongue. Five feet off the ground the rider hung. But with a swift movement he swung upwards and cut the not-man’s tongue clean off. A scream and a croak mingled in the rider’s mind. He ran again towards the entrance and shouldered the door, which broke down. Getting up, he ran and looked behind; the slithering arms wavering out the mausoleum, towards him. He ran and ran until the breath left him and he collapsed beside a tree.
When he awoke he was alone surrounded by sunflowers. A piece of the not-man’s tongue stuck to the top of his head on those bandages he wrapped around his face. Pink and orange, thin but wide, the tongue would not let go.
-
“Who is that?” The young woman asked. She wore the red cloak, but did not suffer from the Decay.
“That is Master Frog-Tongue. The only man to encounter a god from beyond the realms and survive,” the man, a guide to the woman, told her.
Frog-Tongue (for so he was called) stood crouched on a rock overlooking the swamplands of the East. He caressed a small square object and the two observers could just barely hear his whispering one-way conversation. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, forgive me,” he repeated. On his head the bandages, dirtied and bearing holes, were somehow wrapped tight. Protruding out the top the god’s long tongue hung limp like a dying, bending tree.
“And some say,” the man continued, “he overcame the Decay.”
Frog-Tongue turned like an owl towards the observers. Thorns jutted out his red eyes, though the young woman saw that they were tinged with yellow, beautiful as the first rays of golden sun, harrowing as rotting flesh.
