Night Seekers

"What could we do, my friend? What could we do!"

Desperate to save those few they could, he, Dil-ya and their son had rushed to the shamans only to find them dead in their tebas, gutted and left to bleed amidst the smoking fires that had once been the huts of many families. Fleeing through a land quickly become a wilderness, the hunting cries of the humans ringing in their ears, they charged the machines one last time and called the darkness to them. There had been so much of it, a whole world screaming unheard for mercy, and from this monstrous surfeit they moulded a gateway, used their own despair-fuelled powers to catch up all those who still lived, to welcome them into the shattered dreams of the land they must leave behind.

It had worked. Would have been perfect if not for the arrow that had taken the heart from their son and left him dead and cold at the threshold where the darkness had sniffed at him, mourned and closed behind him, saving those that it could.

And now this was how they existed. The short-lived Dark Ones still birthed children at the chosen intervals and Sahla was the first shaman to be born since those terrible years. Dil-ya and he had kept the dreams alive around them as best they could by sending people through the gateways between this world and the world of reality. They influenced the humans while they slept, hoping against hope that maybe they could alter these tortured minds, help them to welcome the darkness they so feared, help them to see the mountain as a living being. But it was all for nothing. Kai-ya had not been to the real world for a long time now. What he heard from those who did go was enough. The humans had almost completed their destruction. Now they were immortal and no longer in need of any emotion. They lived in the old rock spires, drained the sacred mountain of her last pools of life to sustain their own, and soon, when all were dry, the dreams of the land would cease and so would they.

"What could we do?" Kai-ya wiped his tears away. He knew. He dreamed, too. Though whether they were his own, or those of this flame that didn't exist, he did not know.

"Sahla," he whispered. "I'm so sorry. But you must go."

He looked to the flame.

"You must."