The Fox & the Crow: Chapter 1.1, Revelations

Tick.

Cornyx's world had become a sea of oxidized grains and flat horizons made jagged by this place's crooked teeth; an ocean of barren nothingness that extended into the thin air and touched a pale yellow sky tainted red with a distant sun. No more were the golden waves of grass and rainbow hues of spring wildflowers stretched under a cerulean sky. No more was her bubbling laugh and a smile that turned hazel eyes a shade lighter in the summertime. No more were broken promises, his salvation instead derived from the bitterness searing the back of his throat and leaving a thick, dry film over his mouth.

Smoke poured from his nostrils as if he were a beast from Revelations itself, and he supposed it was not far off to believe the place where he stood a lake of fire within which he would meet an inevitable and agonizing demise. Where his epidermis would melt from the impossible heat to leave the muscle charring underneath until all that was left were bones. Flakes of white beneath charcoal black. Once glowing and alive, and now...

His ebony eyes struck the surface of his pocket watch, gaze tracing the Roman numerals and the rotating hands that meant nothing here beneath twin moons and alien skies. An eolian murmur whispered over the desert to tug at his sleeves, his hair, grains striking his pale skin and leaving behind scarcely visible marks.

Where was his mentor now?

Inanna's tip had long since dipped below the horizon. In a land of eternal day, the moons were all its denizens had to track time: no regular seasons, no stridulating nocturnes, just an immortal light in a world renowned for darkness. Yet, alone amidst the standing rocks, it was clear why this place had been called Hell and Diyu, why it was a place of eternal torment and little more.

A centimeter of ash was left behind on his cigarette's glowing tip, fuzzily illuminating the sharp, gaunt angles of his owlish face and aquiline nose before a cloud of grey overtook his somber visage once more.

Tock.

A silhouette emerged through the particle-filled air. It was as if he stepped out through a cloud, trench coat pulled by a faint breeze to the side to reveal a broadsword hanging from his hip. He appeared to be a simple man: dark-complexioned, dreadlocks hanging unevenly about his face and held in a lopsided ponytail, haggard and worn as if he'd just risen from the ashes of a thousand-year war. His eyes were the only hint at something more: molten gold, burning and infernal.

"I thought you'd given those up," he observed to his pupil, his figure half-covered by the vertical stones.

The young man's gaze fell to the ground, followed by the cigarette, its life promptly smothered out beneath his toe. "I have little to report. They don't speak to me, Mikael; I'm nothing more to them than I am to your sister. My presence here is useless." It was not a statement but a plea, delivered in a plaintive tone, hung with frayed threads of resignation bordering on despair.

Silence. Then, "When do I come home?"

Cornyx's eyes rose for a fleeting instant when his imploration left his lips. The man to whom it was addressed only sighed and reached forward, hand stalling inches away from his pupil's.

"Soon, my boy."

Soon.

Tick.

"Levia's death has left the courts uncertain. They still don't know who took her life, or her son's. It leaves me as the sole heir. It wasn't..." You? But the words died on Cornyx's lips and he said nothing more.

"No, my child, of course not. Never would we take the life of a youth."

"Mikael?"

"Yes?"

"I'm not coming home, am I?"

"Soon, Cornyx. Have patience."

Seven months in Hell, and he was bidden, have patience. "Yes, Mikael."

"How much time do we have left?"

"We never had any to begin with." Cornyx slid the silver watch into his pocket. "I had best go, before they realize I'm gone."

"Yes...of course."

He nodded, and turned away, but before a single step could draw him away from his torment, his name was spoken and he stopped.

"Cornyx--don't...lose yourself here. Edin will be waiting when all this is done. I promise you. This isn't the last of it."

"Yes, sir."

"Good luck."

Good luck, and ill fortune, came a voice from another time, leaking into the younger's ears before he was left alone in silence but for the wind's gentle whispers. She spoke to him more kindly than the semi-god did, he thought; at least she told no pretty, Hallmark lies.

She was his only company when he traversed the sands back alone and left Angrikh, the dragon-stones, behind. The foreign roll of Earthen tobacco was swallowed by the earth and his footprints went with it--swallowed by her mistress, the Summer eternal.

The stygian stones of Gru'mai's keep, the single most powerful location in Sukur, rose from the sands as if each building was a jutting scale of some extinct creature devoured by the desert. No, he reminded himself idly, his soles coming to a stop upon a flat-topped rock to overlook civilization; the desert had a name. Ashkuln. The First Circle of Sukur, the innermost of them, the desert land of the hundari.

He tread to the walls, skirting their gunmetal rocks sealed tight with weathered and ancient mortar that no longer seemed necessary, given how tight each brick was against the next. Mingled scents of parched granules and dried detritus-turned-earth replaced that of nicotine in his nostrils. It was so tantalizingly similar to that of shimmering heat back home, yet lacking in the sweetness of grass and hay. Like everything else here, the scent was a skeleton, the flesh and fur that adorned it elsewhere gone to leave clean, dull ivory.

- 

Pronunciation Guide

Mikael: my-kay-el

Sukur: soo-koor

Gru'mai: groo-my (rhymes with "lie")

Ashkuln: ash-kooln

Hundarans: hoon-dar-awns

Angrikh: awng-gree-kh (a hard "kh" from the back of the throat)