Gotim's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

Gotim stood on the ridge with the shard in his pocket and counted his time in breaths. The bearer would come from the gate below. The hunger would come from the trail he had followed in. Both would reach this open ground before he could pick a side. He needed walls. He needed a floor he had chosen. He turned inland and looked for the seam in the rock he remembered from an older map of himself. A vein of black ran under the plain here. He set his palm flat on the stone and pushed shadow down through it, feeling for the hollow. He found it three steps to his left. He stepped there and pushed harder. The rock parted like wet cloth. A mouth of smooth obsidian opened at his feet, jagged crystal teeth around a dark throat. He dropped inside and sealed the seam behind him. The cave held him the way a hand holds a coin. The walls shone. His own shape moved in every face of them, thinned and multiplied. This was ground he could speak to. Here, darkness would answer him and not the bearer. He worked fast. He set the shard on a flat shelf of stone and pulled shadow up around it in a ring. He needed a weapon, a lock, and a cure for what was coming for him, and he had one pool of dark to draw them from. He drew first from the floor. The dark rose in a column and cooled into a forge, seamed with slow red light. He fed the shard's heat into it and kept the medallion of scales aside. From the forge he drew a shaft, three-pointed, black glass with an edge that would cut a name. He set the trident against the wall. He drew again. A tall cabinet grew out of the far side, shelved and narrow, and he filled its slots with what the cave gave him: a stoppered vial of his own shadow for the hunger's mouth, a bottle of cold light for the bearer's fire, a small green one he did not label. He would need all three before dawn. Last, he pressed the medallion of scales into the forge's mouth. The metal ran. He shaped it as it cooled. A key came out of it, horned at the bow, veined with the same slow light as the forge. It was the bearer's judgment, remade as a lock he now owned. Whichever door the bearer opened next, Gotim held the other side of it. Above him, the rock shook once. Something heavy had crossed the ridge. Then a second tremor, farther off, colder. Both had arrived. Gotim picked up the trident. He put the key in his pocket beside the shard. He had his ground. Now they would come to him.