Chapter 4 - Tourist

Everything around him was pitch black. The absolute absence of any feeling, sound, touch or even thought had diluted his essence entirely. Then it returned, the howling. Distant at first, it quickly rose back to a grand crescendo. He could feel it crawling on his skin. The lettering of the incantation, each strange symbol was grinding and squirming against him as if he had been submerged into a pit of maggots. Some hot, some cold. It seemed he was experiencing every sensation possible at once. It was excruciating levels of over stimulation. Surely, he thought, he was going to die. No other explanation could be possible. Something must have gone horridly wrong. In the first place, what an impossible hope he had resigned himself to believing in. Even with all their knowledge and skills, they were merely men. What fools of men could they be to think they could outwit a god? Outwit fate? Even time? This was his punishment for believing in that folly, clearly. His punishment for abandoning his family to that wretched fate alone. By now Aelithae would have trampled the whole of the village. Even if they had fled into the forest on horseback, there was no chance of escape. The dense forest would slow the horses, but not the goddess. She would simply trample it all underfoot until nothing remained but bones and ash. They were dead, clearly. His eldest sisters soft embrace, his mothers doting voice. Gone. Destroyed. Pulverized by falling molten rock and seared by swiftly thrown bolts of lightning. In their last moments did they curse his name? Call out for him? Maybe they had stayed and looked for him and died in those moments, fearing for his safety while he set aside theirs for some childish delusion. It made him sick.

What an utter fool he was. The writhing swarm of the incantation pressed tighter still into his skin. It was a fitting fate to be strangled by the embodiment of his delusion for eternity. He should have happily fallen to his knees and begged Aelithae to burn him into nothingness, perhaps then-

All at once, the suffocating binds of the incantation stopped. They lingered there, frozen in time, before slowly unraveling. As they slunk off from his skin, he could feel a strange warmth replace them. The incantation undid itself in the opposite manner from which it had formed. From the bottom up it faded away, until eventually he could feel it loosening it’s hold upon his mouth. Air rushed into his lungs and he gasped for breath. As the breath of life returned to him, the rest of his sense came back under his control. The last fragments of the incantation pulled away from his eyes, and suddenly he was blinded by light. He clawed at his face to shield his eyes, and as he did he realized a new sensation had crept into his body. He was falling. Not a simple forward trip, no he was falling straight through the air. He squinted to see something, anything that would make sense of this sensation and what he saw shocked him. He was far, far up in the air. Perhaps twenty feet or more. Below him was an expanse of air and below that, thankfully, some body of water. Just as soon as he had taken stock of his situation he plunged into the water. He had never entered water from such a height before. The impact stung his body in all places it made contact. He plunged deep until he felt his posterior push against soft mud. Realizing he had reached the bottom, he began to struggling to swim towards the surface. His lungs screamed at him and he raced upwards towards the light of day that shimmered through the depths. Arwin burst out of the surface of the water and breathed deeply. He struggled to stay afloat, flailing his arms about in an attempt to remember the basics he had been taught as a boy. There was no great body of water near the village, the closest thing was the stream which he had fallen into days before which came only to his hips on a good day. However, during a few rainy years of his childhood it had swelled enough that as a young boy he could swim around the deeper parts of it. Kicking his legs and sprawling out his arms, he drug himself towards land.

He had fallen into a pond, it seems. Quite a deep one at that. What lay around the pond was hard for him to make sense of. It wasn’t quit the plains, because unlike the plains it had a formidable level of foliage and trees, however it wasn’t nearly as dense as the forest. A strange medium. What was more strange was the grasses, the grass was short and square at the top, as if it had been recently sheared. But who would shear the grass of a forest? There was no point to it. If you were to raise crops, you would want a clearing like the plains. The forest was far too dangerous and whats more far more work. Aside from the trees and cropped grass, the other plant life in the area puzzled him. Strange clumps of bush were placed here and there. From them beautiful flowers he had never seen before sprouted off in all directions. Stranger still, the bushes formed rudimentary shapes. Circles, squares, one even seemed to resemble the silhouette of a man with two prickly red blossoms placed perfectly to form eyes.

Arwin scratched his damp head. This was all too much to take in. He felt guilty to be musing upon the trivialities of the area given what all his friends and family had just gone through, but the whole experience of the day had simply exhausted him. He had no logic left to process what was happening to him with any level of clarity. Brushing himself off, he got up and looked around. Thankfully for him, his sleepwear he had been equipped with since the morning was quite light and dried easily. Another thing was that the warm climate of the area was not disagreeable, in fact it seemed almost like the perfect temperature. He wondered what season it might be, somewhere between summer and fall if the temperature was any indication, but the leaves of the trees were green and bountiful, much in disagreement with the weather.

“Where in the hells am I?” He wondered aloud. Half out of instinct and the other with a peculiar hope that someone might round a corner and come to let him know that this has all been an elaborate prank, escort him home and back into bed where he can sleep and resume his normal life tomorrow. A path stretched out to his left, so he approached it. His thin leather house shoes he had taken out of bed protested the strange material with which the path had been constructed. It was made of thousands of tiny crushed stones. Perhaps millions. All of which were nearly uniform in shape and color. At the edges of the path, a small strip of metal had been implanted on either side deep into the ground. It seems it was purposefully laid there in order to keep the little rocks from tumbling or being kicked off into the grasses. What an enormous expense this must have been? The path went on along as far as he could see off into the trees. Even if it proceeded even fifty feet, the amount of metal that would have had to be stretched and pressed at the smithy to construct such a thing would fetch a king’s ransom. He could not see where the path led, yet he assumed it went quite a ways off. In the distance was rolling hills, far unlike the plains of his home. At his low vantage point, it was difficult to see what lay beyond them.

A thought crossed his mind, perhaps to get his start in this strange land it would be advantageous to take a bit of this metal. Just a small helping, clearly whoever furnished this was a wealthy merchant or king and could pay to replace it. Meanwhile that small stripling he could sell to a traveling trader and perhaps get a whole months worth of supplies and lodging. It seemed like a very good idea. However far he looked upon the path though, he saw the same issue arise. The metal strips never ended, they continued on in one continuous fashion. Utter insanity, he thought to himself. The size of a smithy required to manufacture even a fifth of this length would be nearly triple the one at home. It seemed the infinite stretch of metal continued as far as he could see in one direction. Suddenly a stroke of brilliance befell him, he would simply go the other way. A little grin spread across his face and he hummed a triumphant tune. He had not even ventured a look in the opposite direction, so taken as he was with his initial surroundings. As he turned around to search the other side his happy humming quickly halted. What lay before his eyes was simply beyond belief.

A massive city, beyond comprehension of any conceivable metric. It rose up so far as to pierce the heavens itself. The massive buildings quite literally disappearing up into the clouds. That is, if they could be called buildings. The structures themselves were made entirely of what appeared to be metal and glass. Some stretched forth like massive obelisks, stabbing up into the mantle of the sky, while others took completely alien shapes. Rounded, twisting, turning. No two were alike. Some even sprouted limbs that struck out against all reason, dangling up in the sky without any support beneath them. At the tops of the massive structures, little red lights blinked steadily. Arwin was floored, how could any of this be possible? Massive works of metal capable of piercing the heavens? Candles which burned bright even in the light of day, in multiple colors, even visible across great expanses? There was only one possible explanation. Gesturne had succeeded. Arwin now clearly stood before the city of the gods. He had successfully traveled back in time.

Arwin fell to his knees and kissed the ground beneath him. Grasping the crushed stone of the path in his hands, he raised them triumphantly over his head. Huzzah! Huzzah! The mad plan had worked. His family was not dead, everything could be reverted! An incredible feeling flooded his heart, first of joy then nearly of panic. It was an overwhelming sensation. His heart pounded out of his chest, he could feel it throb even in his eardrums. He was unable to lose the crazed smile that had overtaken his face and the rush of adrenaline which filled him has caused him to even start drooling as he simply could not close his mouth.

Suddenly there was a noise ahead of him on the path. A pair had come into view. A man and a woman, both adults and both exceedingly tall. They wore incredible elaborate outfits. The man was swaddled in some kind stiff cloth tarp which cut at certain angles across the lengths of his legs. On his feet were waxed leather shoes that came to a sharp tip at the front. On his torso, the strap garment was repeated, but this time in a layer. It came across his chest and covered the whole of his arms, all the way down to his wrist. At the front it wrapped inwardly on itself, before tucking into one side. Down from his chin there was an exposed section where a more colorful cloth protruded. Laying upon this was a bright red piece of fabric that seemed to come to a point at the bottom. At the top it formed a small bulb and then disappeared behind a fold around his neck. The woman was dressed quite differently. Her feet were encased in some kind of sandal, the material from which it was made was unlike anything he had ever seen. It reflected light quite brilliantly. Up from her feet, her legs seemed stained by some kind of tar. The whole of her legs were a soft black color, much to the contrast of the pale skin on her face. The tar coating on her legs however was not slick or shiny as he would expect it to be, in fact it almost seemed as though she had grown it out her legs like a layer of fur. Above this strange sight was what Arwin could only assume resembled a skirt. It was however far different from any skirt he had seen. It struck out like an upturned daisy, coming to a solid point around the mid thigh and then drawing narrower and narrower until it met her waist. It would be incredibly scandalous except for the fact that the whole underside of the skirt seemed to have been filled with some solid material. It went out in ridges from the inside, filling up the entire distance from her legs to the exterior of the skirt. However, despite this strength it was not fully rigid, when she moved it seemed to move along with her and flexed and expanded as needed. Above her strange skirt she wore some kind of black covering. It was quite thick and covered her arms and torso completely. From the very bottom to the neck, it sported a machination of metal teeth which sat opposite each other like an open maw. At the bottoms, just outside of these teeth, pockets had been sewn in which the woman had presumably hidden her hands. Even more strangely, at the apex of this upper clothing item there was a bag-like growth which sprouted from behind her neck. It was folded up and sat stoutly like a dead bat who still clung to a rafter. Inside the metal teeth, the underlayer of her garment glimmered. It reminded Arwin of the backs of the salamanders that lived in the stream below the village. Except this one was bright pink. It was adorned with hundreds of tiny scales which shimmered as they caught the light. The woman’s face was also noteworthy. Her lips were bright red, as if she had been afflicted by a painful case of the leaf rotting pox. Her cheeks too, were stained with a reddened color as if she was in a constant state of embarrassment. Her eyebrows where another thing all together, at first he thought they were just shortly cropped, but as Arwin looked closed he realized her brows were easily two or three times as bushy as any girl he had ever seen.

During his examination, the pair spotted him. The look of enjoyment they had been sharing was quickly shed, and one of bewilderment and disgust replaced it. Arwin took a moment to consider what they were looking at. He was still soaked in water, slathered with mud and was kneeling in the middle of the path with two outstretched arms with handfuls of rocks clutched in each fist. His lips were covered in a light powdering of dirt from where he had moment before been kissing the ground. Partially due to Aelithae’s assault and partly due to the incantation, his clothes had been ruffled and in some places even ripped. In short, he looked like an absolute disaster. Realizing this disparity, he quickly threw aside the rocks in his palm, wiped the dirt from his mouth and came to his feet. The pair recoiled at his sudden movement and seemed to be preparing to flee.

“Ah wait wait! No please, I promise I mean you no harm!” Arwin called out to the pair. “I am Arwin, son Emil. I come from the continent of Gaelmark! Please do not be afraid!” The expression on the pair worsened from before, now seem completely disturbed. “Ah, wait… a woman! The goddess Aelithae! I’m looking for her, have you seen her?” Whatever he said seemed to have been the final insult, and the man wrapped his arm around the woman and turned to escort her away. “No, no. Wait!” Arwin called out to them, running to catch up to them.

“Aerit vare! Ya lesh stonet valometae!” The man yelled at him in a threatening tone. Arwin stopped suddenly. Huh? It couldn’t possibly be true. The man was speaking some foreign tongue. Was this the language of the gods? Arwin stared at the agitated man in disbelief. Now that he had come closer to the pair, the disparity between them not just in attire but also physicality was clear. Even the woman stood a good head taller than Arwin, who had been one of the tallest young men in his generation. The man was nearly two heads taller and quite well built.

“Aelithae, Gaelmark… Imilator?” Arwin repeated all the phrases which he figured anyone, even a god or distant foreigner would be sure to recognize in any tongue. The man’s expression was unchanged, he barked another few words in his strange language then walked off down the path with the woman until they pair were out of sight.

Arwin was incredibly dismayed. He had come to convince Aelithae to avert her course, he had never considered the possibility that he couldn’t even speak to her. He stepped off the path and rested against the trunk of a tree. Grasping his head in his hands he tried desperately to think. Surely given the size and appearance of both the people and the city surrounding him, he had come to the right place. An incredible feat like this would have been impossible for men to create, and never had he heard of a race of man of such a grand stature. One thing was clear, surely he had indeed come to the city of the gods. Other thoughts gnawed at the reaches of his mind. Why would a god be afraid of him, a mere man? And why was Aelithae’s appearance so different from the pair he had met on the path? Sure they were tall but even the two of them on each other shoulders would barely reach the height of Aelithae’s fingernail. Was there levels to godhood? Was it a level of maturity? He had simply hoped that a local would direct him in the assuredly obvious direction of a giant golden haired goddess with ease, but what if she wasn’t a giant yet? Was he going to have to comb the whole city of the gods to find her?

Shaking off his feelings of frustration, Arwin tried to focus on the positives. Here he was, he had made it safe and sound to the past. That was well and good enough, was it not? He quite literally had all the time he needed to find Aelithae, even if it meant the whole of his lifetime here. Gesturne had been quite reassuring of the fact that more than likely if Arwin was to succeed that Aelithae would be capable of sending him forward in time back to the present, so any time ‘wasted’ here was not in fact wasted at all. He reasoned with himself like this beneath the shade of the tree for some time until he had roused enough courage in his heart to continue onward.