warnings … and something else. Another sound channeled from the gorge. The sound of it was ... and Gabe couldn’t be sure at first, and wasn’t ready for the welling sound of ...
… tears? Was it ... tears? He heard tears, torrents of tears in their river~song, their liquid sobs a broken psalm; lamentations amplified, dirges in chorus current-joined, grief preserved in mortal brine, it was ... it was tears! Prayers sent heavenward rising no higher than six feet under have their counterpoint in Tyr’s fathomless threnody. And tho he would soon lose sight of it, it was here that Gabe first turned and saw the Crystal of the Castle.
With heart flown and his hope gone too, Gabe had begun the exhaustive search that would lead to his final quest. First to the university to retrieve his trunk of notes and crate of research papers; then to the library to scout out every crumb and mote of classic myth, and every ort of obscure legend. He pored thru shelves of ancient writings, prospecting epics and odysseys, defining, reordering and refining his quest. So that his journey once begun ...
… scaled the windowless tower only to find it doorless, sleuthed in sewers, crawled black caves in the bowels of earth. Stranded, branded, stiff-armed, back-handed, he’d jumped bail, jumped clear, jumped cloud without wings, seen evidence revoke and truth reverse right before his eyes.
He’d expected the perilous path, invisible trails and signless crossroads, and prepared accordingly. His mutating, updating change-with-the-seasons chart, his organic, protean surprise-friendly map had him standing unaccountably before a chasm, a vast uncrossable crevice without end or way around, nor a far side for a bridge to cross over. With no step forward that wasn’t bottomless, the impassible collided with unachievable; something impossible had to happen here or his trail dead-ended.
Paid spies lied to him; informants lavished him with tips, spewed false information. Clues thumbed their noses at him, leads evaporated, contacts melted away. Spoor and evidence seemed to vanish. With his studies, field work and gut knowledge working for him, it should have been easy to find the river he sought at the end of memory.
Then a year ago, almost to the day, Gabe had received an IM from someone called, TheMaster. “Check your Tmail”, it read, and the IM blinked out. There were legends of TheMaster and a Brotherhood of Ancients, and lately there had been rumors (how is it that legends grow from nothing into ripe seeds, from paltry crumbs into gem nuggets, into fact from non-performing rumors?), that there had been a falling out among them. TheMaster had advocated intervention and giving Tyr another chance.
And a Tmail did indeed arrive. Egypt it said, and offered Gabe T$750k to be added to his numbered account with T$250k already in it. A similar offer had gone out to select other questors and all would collect. It was only important that one of them finish. The note, unsigned, prayed it would be in time.
And now, a fortnight after leaving Egypt, Gabe was lost in Tyr. Stumbling thru the Colossals graveyard, getting past the electric cacti, rounding that last blind corner to find a field of crystals alive with chartreuse light in a dead-end canyon called the Cul-de-Sac. Wandering lost, in his ever-forward maundering way, Gabe found these and other dark end mysteries in the twilight world of a darkened moonlit Tyr.
Chiseled signposts with cryptic markings gravid with hidden meaning peppered his path, and still he was lost. He was lost in Tyr because something here blinded his internal compass, his sense of East and West, North from its opposite South. Gabe had never needed the timid help of a quaking needle before; his sense of place was sure. Legendary as a questor with no compass to guide him; it would do for his epitaph.
Gabe stumbled on for days in the milky moonlight dodging canyon shadows. Tyr seemed to have emptied for his ordeal, and with no hope of help on the horizon, Gabe chanced on a hover board parked cliff-side, good luck at last to speed him on his way.
With quick relief, Gabe hopped on before considering why a board might be left abandoned. The ignition time was a beat and a half slow as it turned out, and before he could control it, Gabe was immersed, gasping and sputtering in a liquid waste with the familiar taste of tears. Tho new in Tyr, Gabe had known with sure instinct to give the emotionally viscous sludge a wide berth, knew to eschew the moaning depths, knew to avoid at whatever cost the relentless flow of tears. And now he was in it.
Gabe had traveled far and ranged extensively thru perils and menace until the extreme was his routine, and the teetering edge was his new tedium. The ambiguities of need (existential progress thru unpredictable worlds), had eroded and worn away all conviction and he had compromised often (out of curiosity, for survival), and Gabe was not unscathed.
It was not untypical that Gabe once authored a decision that proved the destruction of a village. Some died, and those who survived lived out their lives in bitterness and regret. Gabe lived by day with ghosts and was chased by wraiths at night. By twos and threes and in their hordes they haunted him, nightmares and demons, fiends in dreams and succubae who hunt their prey at night. Memories shackled him, the manufactured chains that fettered him forged in the act of life.
His quest this decade past had been for River Lethe. Legend holds that the waters of Lethe carry oblivion and memory’s obliteration in them. And Nothingness. And if one is willing to drink its Emptiness, then Lethe brings forgiveness in the mercy of forgetting.
Tho adhering to a personal code, Gabe had strayed widely and explored thoroughly in the low lands of curiosity and waterfronts of guilt. With love gone and memories worn thru to nerve and raw regret, if Gabe finds the River Lethe to dip his hands in it, he will drink from it.
Really? Seriously?? Go back, restart at Beginning, to an estate lower than Innocent back on the road to Wisdom? Did he really want to close out his account and forfeit his hoard of assets, his trove of experience banked from Casino Life? Give up his decades of learning, of absorbing and adding to knowledge, his growing reputation and all the good he’d done?
And what of those instants, rare moments of joy? Pure. Unalloyed. Joy. Really? And surrender the dearest treasures stored in his vault of life? And what of karma, and the mistakes he was bound for in his new life? … and still it would be worth the cost, the loss of everything, to waken and start anew.
But here he was, not in the fatal waters of Styx or the oblivions of Lethe, but in the mindful River of Tears. With tormenting demons flowing around him, now that he was in the middle of it, the grandeur of eternity seemed much diminished from the pictures painted for him in the long Before. Instead of song and heaven’s joy, menace like a rancid oil seemed to coat him, float around him, slow his arms and play between his legs. A gurgle of bubbles released nearby brought the stench of sulfur, of mortal gas and incendiary lethal methane. It was only a matter of time, he knew; escape soon or his board would ignite one of those fetid bomb pockets, and that would end it.
TheMaster’s Tmail had suggested that if Gabe would undertake for Tyr, then some clue might be found to aid in his personal quest; and now he understood. From the symmetries of history, he believed these Tears of Tyr must eventually merge with Lethe, and he would return to it ... but first his terms of contract. He must honor them or relinquish rank and hard-won name under code of his questors guild. He might yet find Lethe and his release from memory, but his record as a questor lived on, and that he would leave unstained.
The board had fired up however, and from the feel of it there was fuel enough for a single shot, for one last thrust up the canyon. If he could shut out the moaning and coast along slowly and follow these walls, he just might find the right declivity with board enough to boost him to escape.
And then strangely (because he couldn’t see it), there was the sense of green light somewhere overhead. Gabe stopped. Almost … almost he jumped off onto a rock to check the wall at water’s edge, then remembered; there was no way he was going to climb out of here. And this board once dismounted would never fire up again. If he dropped from the board now he stayed, so he stuck it.
