Dust of Dreams

tasting of mother’s milk.
    So arrived the Spotted Horse, a cascade of heart-stains rippling across the beast, down its long neck, sweeping along its withers, flowing like seed-heads from its mane and tail.
    Ride into the alien world. Ride among the ancestors and the not-yet-born, among the tall men with their eternally swollen members, the women with their forever-filled wombs. Through forests of black threads, the touch or brush of any one of them an invitation to endless torment, for this was the path of return for all life, and to be born was to pass through and find the soul’s fated thread—the tale of a future death that could not be escaped. To ride the other way, however, demanded a supple traverse, evading such threads, lest one’s own birth-fate become entangled, knotted, and so doom the soul to eternal prison, snared within the web of conflicted fates.
    Prophecies could be found among the black threads, but the world beyond that forest was the greatest gift. Timeless, home to all the souls that ever existed; this was where grief was shed, where sorrow dried up and blew away like dust, where scars vanished. To journey into this realm was to be cleansed, made whole, purged of all regrets and dark desires.
    Riding the Spotted Horse and then returning was to be reborn, guiltless, guileless.
    Kalyth knew all this, but only second-hand. The riders among her people passed on the truths, generation upon generation. Any one of the seven herbs, if taken alone, would kill. The seven mixed in wrong proportions delivered madness. And, finally, only those chosen as worthy by the shamans and witches would ever know the gift of the journey.
    For one such as Kalyth, mired in the necessary mediocrity so vital to the maintenance of family, village and the Elan way of living, to take upon herself such a ritual—to even so much as taste the seven herbs—was a sentence to death and damnation.
    Of course, the Elan were gone. No more shamans or witches to be found. No families, no villages, no clans, no herds—every ring of tipi stones, spanning the rises tucked at the foot of yet higher hilltops, now marked the motionless remnant of a final camp, a camp never to be returned to, the stones destined to sink slowly where they lay, the lichen on their undersides dying, the grasses so indifferentlycrushed beneath them turning white as bone. Such boulder rings were now maps of extinction and death. They held no promises, only the sorrow of endings.
    She had suffered her own damnation, one devoid of any crime, any real culpability beyond her cowardly flight: her appalling abandonment of her family. There had been no shamans left to utter the curse, but that hardly mattered, did it?
    She sat, as the sun withered in the west and the grasses surrounding her grew wiry and grey, staring down at the disc lying in the palm of her hand.
    Elan magic. As foreign to her world now as the Che’Malle machines in Ampelas Rooted had been when she’d first set eyes upon them. To ride the Spotted Horse through the ashes of her people invited . . . what? She did not know, could not know. Would she find the spirits of her kin—would they truly look upon her with love and forgiveness? Was this her secret desire? Not a quest into the realms of prophecy seeking hidden knowledge; not searching for a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil for the K’Chain Che’Malle?
    Dire confusion—her motivations were suspect—
hah, rotted through and through!
    And might there not be another kind of salvation she was seeking here? The invitation into madness, into death itself? Possibly.
    ‘
Beware the leader who has nothing to lose
.’
    Her people were proud of their wise sayings. And yet now, in their mortal silence, wisdom and pride proved a perfect match in value. Namely: worthless.
    The Che’Malle were camped—if one could call it that—behind the rise at her back. They had built a fire inviting Kalyth’s comfort, but this night she was not interested in comfort.
    The Shi’gal Assassin still circled high in the darkening sky above them—their nightly sentinel who never tired and never spoke and yet was known to all (she suspected) as their potential slayer, should they fail. Blessings of the spirits, that was a ghastly creature, a demon to beggar her worst nightmares. Oh, how it sailed the night winds, a cold-eyed raptor, a conjuration of singular purpose.
    Kalyth shivered. Then, squeezing shut her eyes as the sun’s sickle of fire dipped below the