Journey to the Water Interlude One: Citadel Gate

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“I’ve remembered my name,” Khalim said. “Will you help me?”

The moon-faced owl preened the crook of one wing with its beak. “And why should I do that, little one?” 

Khalim walked to the base of the arch on which the owl perched, beside the stair that led to the temple he could never open. “Why do you call me that? I’m larger than you.”

“Is that what you see?” 

He nodded. He was half as tall as the arch, and though the owl’s wings were broad, he guessed he could hold its body in his arms. 

The owl lowered its wing and studied him with one eye. “Interesting. And what do you look like?”

It was a strange question, seeing as the owl was looking him in the face, but Khalim would play along. The last thing he wished to do was offend the only being he had seen in such a long time—perhaps forever. He wasn’t sure. He looked down at his hands. 

For a brief flash, he saw what he expected to see—brown skin, calluses, the frayed hem of a sleeve. Then his flesh turned to white marble, with two black veins twining up each of his wrists. His clothing became ridges of stone, exquisitely carved of the same material that formed the walls of the citadel.

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He curled his hands against his chest. They were frigid and bloodless; that they still moved was only a small relief. For the first time he could remember, since he came to this place of cold stone and perpetual twilight, he was truly afraid. “What’s happening to me?” he whispered.

“You’re finding your place, little one. It’s nothing to be frightened of,” the owl said. 

“But this isn’t my place. I don’t want to be here. I have to leave.” Khalim shook his head, mostly to see if he still could. “You said someone remembered me. I need to go back—I need to find him.” It was a man’s voice that was calling to him, he was certain, but he couldn’t remember to whom it belonged. He feared his mind was also turning to stone.

“Why not?” asked the owl. “I suppose it’s small yet, but that will change with time. You cannot return from whence you came, and beyond the borders of this place lie the spirit wilds. You’d be likely to have your face stolen, or worse.”

Khalim looked up. “So there are borders.”

A crest of feathers around the owl’s neck lifted and fluttered, and it lowered its head. “Ah, I’ve said too much. Your god will not be pleased with me.” 

It stretched out its dark wings against the crimson sky. “Farewell, little one. Rest well. I hope I do not see you again.” With two powerful strokes, the owl lifted up from the arch and flew off, quiet as a whisper, into the unchanging evening. 

“Wait!” Khalim took off running, chasing the owl down the road from the temple. The white marble flagstones grew paler as he went, losing their black-and-gray veins. A few more paces, and the street was a smooth, colorless surface. 

The owl was gone. Before him stretched a vast sea of white. He had entered it before, many times, each attempt leading him back to the temple. He was alone once more, and now, he thought, he would never leave this place. The realization was a crushing weight on his chest. He dropped to his knees, hiding his face in his hands. 

I’m not meant to be here, Khalim insisted silently, as there was no one to hear. I’m supposed to be with rain and fields and mountains and people, and there was a time when I wasn’t alone. 

I wasn’t alone, a voice in his memory repeated. I never am. 

The voice was his own. Though he wasn’t sure why, he pressed a hand to his chest. The gesture had brought him comfort, once, but now he felt only a hollow space and a cold, hard surface. 

He got to his feet again and stared into the void. It could not go on forever. The owl had come from somewhere, and had returned there as well. 

How are you supposed to go anywhere if you don’t know who you are? it had asked him. 

That was the key. 

“My name is Khalim,” he told the blank expanse. “I was born in Nagara, to Taherah the weaver-woman, and—and in the summer of my fifth year, the year the star fell in the northern sky, I dreamed that the bridge on the river washed out and the ox-drivers all drowned.” 

Memories flooded over him, and words poured from his mouth like water. “It was so real. I cried and cried, and I begged my mother to take me to the bridge, and when we got there the water was too high and the banks were flooded, and the posts slipped down into the river while the men and the oxen were crossing. But my mother called out to the other villagers and they brought rope and they got everyone out, even the oxen.” He felt himself breathe, and his shoulders shake, but it was distant, the sensations dulled. 

“I was so relieved, but my mother was sad.” He could see her face, wreathed in dark hair, and her long nose and her soft smiles that never reached her eyes. He didn’t remember a time when she wasn’t sad. “She told me that there was a god inside of me, and one day he was going to take me away from her, and he did. He took me to the great city below the mountain, and I tried so hard to stop what was coming and I couldn’t, so then he took me away and he put me here.” 

He was dead, or something like it, though try as he might he couldn’t recall the moment he died. There had been the stomach-dropping sensation of being yanked from the earth, and then the abject shame of begging on his hands and knees for a little more time on the earth with the man who loved him, and then nothing. 

“I did everything you ever asked,” he told the pale expanse, “and you took me away. I was young and in love and trying to help people, and you took everything from me.”

This was that god’s place, his temple and his arches and his streets that led nowhere. It was a part of him, and Khalim was becoming a part of it, turning to black-veined white marble and losing everything that made him Khalim. 

He clasped his arms around himself, sobbing in grief and helpless rage. His body shook with the furious desire to lash out, to strike back at the god who had imprisoned him here, but he had never struck anyone in his life and here, there was only stone. With nowhere to direct his anger, he thought he might burn up from within and cease to be. 

Heat flared from inside his chest. Flames licked their way up his arms, staining the white stone black with soot. This was the realm of the gods, or part of it, and believing something was enough to make it so. 

Panic seized him. His breath came in ragged gasps as he tried to smother the flames with his hands. It was no use. Fire swallowed his vision, and pain crashed against him in pulsing waves. He was—had been—a healer, and he knew what a burn like this would do; skin melting like candle wax, blood boiling and fat sizzling as the flesh blackened and fell away. His stone skin did not burn, but still the flames spread. All he could see was searing light. Someone in the distance was screaming, a hoarse, desperate cry of agony and terror. There was no one else here, so it must have been his own voice. 

I’m going to die, again, he thought, if that’s even possible here.

That thought sharpened his resolve. He was not going to remain in the citadel, not as a statue or an ever-burning beacon or a pile of ash. Someone remembered him and loved him and hoped to see him again. 

Eske. He held onto the name like a talisman. He took a breath, and then another, closing his eyes and forcing himself to ignore the pain and picture himself as he remembered, his skin warm and brown and unharmed.

The heat subsided, cooling like a bath left too long. The pain lessened to a dull throb and faded. When he opened his eyes again, a great gate stood before him, so tall that the upper edge of the peaked arch was cloaked in clouds. The sunset stained the pale stone a soft pink. The gate itself was shut, a pair of heavy wooden doors painted white and decorated with gold leaf in a tessellating pattern of sharp-angled shapes. On either side stood a marble statue, three times as tall as Khalim was, an old man in a regal robe on the left and a young warrior carrying a shield and a curved sword on the right. 

He recognized their faces. Here was Lord Ihsad of House Darela, his weathered hands open in a welcoming pose, and his beard carved with such fine detail that it turned the stone to wool. Beside him was his son, Jahan, straight-backed and broad-shouldered, the hard angles of his face framing a kind softness around his eyes, just as he had been in life. 

Jahan had died, Khalim remembered, just before he had. He thought that Lord Ihsad had been alive the last time they had met, but his memory came in fragments, and the rest was fog. How long had he been here? A week, a month, a year? How many of the people he knew had left the land of the living while he remained in this place?

He would worry about that later. “Jahan?” Khalim placed a hand—a hand of flesh, now, soft and yielding against the stone—on the statue’s sandaled foot. “Can you hear me? I—I’ll get you out.”

The statue’s head lowered, inch by inch, the marble veins stretching and folding almost like skin. “You,” it said in Jahan’s voice. 

Khalim nodded. “What happened to you?”

“I met my death in the service of Torr, the first hero,” said Jahan. “He granted me a place of honor—here, guarding the gate.”

So the god had a name. In all their years together, he had never told Khalim. 

“And what of you?” Jahan asked. “You were his most faithful servant. Surely your place here is one of great esteem.”

“I don’t have a place here. I’m trying to get out,” Khalim said. “You can come with me, and your father, as well. I just have to figure out how to open the gate.”

Jahan’s carved brows drew together in a slow, ponderous frown. “Why would you want to leave? You belong here, just as—more than—we do.”

Now Khalim understood. Jahan and his father would not be coming with him, nor would they turn from stone back into flesh. They were a part of the citadel, and they welcomed it, as a gift the god had given them in exchange for their lifetimes of service. Khalim had been given the same reward, but he could not accept it, not now. Not after he had remembered how he had received it. 

“No, Jahan.” Khalim bowed his head. “I cannot keep the faith of the first hero any longer. I must not stay.”

The great gate shuddered, shaking the ground and the stones beneath his feet. With a terrible grinding of stone against stone, it opened enough for Khalim to slip through.

“I am sorry, my friend,” Jahan said. “I hope to see you again one day.”

Khalim touched the statue once more. “Thank you,” he said, and he passed through the gate and into the wilds.

Back to Chapter V: The Emerald Sea

Forward to Chapter VI: The Isle of the Priestesses

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