Umber

It was twilight in the desert and the bloated red sun sagged low in the sky when a massive, hooded and heavily laden figure appeared at the top of a rocky outcropping. His cloak was dusty and worn, his thick boots showed signs of much patching. Someone watching would have thought him a fool as he crested the rise and stepped carelessly onto the scree below. Someone who thought carelessness its own reward would have laughed as the rocks gave way beneath him: a shout, a flail of his arms, and the man vanished in the avalanche. Someone who approached thinking to pick through the rubble in search of the dead man’s lost spoils would think again as the slope’s inherent instability became plain to even casual inspection. Perhaps he would uncap his waterskin and take a sip against the dryness of the settling dust. Then he would shake his head at the never-ending folly of men and look for a different victim to relieve of his water, his valuables, perhaps his life if the desert hadn’t done it for him.

Beneath the rocks the buried individual was cursing, not at his grim fate but because he was having a harder than usual time finding the door. But he found it at last and slipped inside, using his pack and his body as a kind of airlock to keep the rubble from spilling in with him. Traversing a long passage sloping steeply downward he came to another door. He opened it and sighed with an almost sensual pleasure as a rush of cool air greeted him. The air greeted him, and something else. Cleverly veiled windows built into the base of the outcropping and sealed with thick glass kept out the heat but let the dying sun’s light into his hidden, cavernous home. A few last rays danced against the far wall, and to a casual observer one might have looked like an unusually energetic pattern of light against other light on the wall, but the figure nodded brusquely toward it. "Avangion."

Something like but not quite a voice spoke directly into his mind. Preserver. Welcome home.

"I’ve told you at least a thousand times to stop calling me Preserver. And this is my home, not yours."

Must it be mine to welcome you to it? The figure shrugged out of his pack without replying. Perhaps you’d be less peevish, the voice went on, if you didn’t insist on enacting your own death every time you entered.

"It keeps the little mortals from thinking there’s anything interesting out here," he said gruffly. "Besides, the symbolism appeals to me." He removed his cloak and hung it on a bone peg by the door, and the casual observer would have realized at once that he was not precisely human. He was much too tall and too broad, for one thing, and his skin was a shade of reddish clay not seen on mortal men, and there were odd, blunt protuberances on his forehead reminiscent of an insect whose dangerous pincers were removed to render it more docile. In truth they bore a stronger resemblance to a bull shorn of its horns, but as no one alive in those days had ever seen a bull, they wouldn’t have drawn that comparison.

More books?

"Yes. If the Jura Dai are going to ransack Urik, I wanted to be there ahead of them." The Preserver was hauling the pack to one of the darker corners of the cavern. Bone bookshelves lined this portion of the wall. About half of them were full. Scattered across a long worktable in front of the shelves were about a dozen tomes in various states of disrepair, from crumbling to mildewed to every state of ruin in between. In the center arranged in neat rows stood the items that would restore them to their former glory: dye, paste, silk mending tissue, leather protector and dressing, needles and thread, an assortment of steel scalpels and other rarities not widely seen on Oerth for millennia. Most of it a merchant would have happily killed for. "I can repair a lot of damage, but not pages burned to ash."

The light detached itself from the wall and bobbed over to the table. Anything interesting?

"They’re books." He lifted them out of the pack with the care a priest would lavish on a holy relic, if deities with relics to dispense still existed in the world. "They’re all interesting. Why are you here, anyway? It’s too early for the seasonal ritual of reminding me not to throw myself into a fire to end this miserable existence."

The fire would reject you. As would water, earth and air. You made your bargains millennia ago, and they do not forget. The voice in his mind sounded amused. You could always walk my path.

"Don’t start," he snarled. "You haven’t answered my question."

I was of a mind to take in new experiences. I borrowed your scrying pool.

"Anything interesting?"

It’s all interesting. The light danced toward the center of the room. Would you like to see?

"Let me get something to eat." The Preserver pulled some food out of the bottom of the pack and joined the Avangion. "It was a hot day."

You wouldn’t need to eat if –

"I said give it a rest." The edges of the roughly fifty foot cavern were partitioned into regions for eating, sleeping and working. But the central area was dominated by other things entirely. A pool of still water nearly ten feet across. A large, freestanding fire that kept itself burning by uncertain means. A granite obelisk whose tip touched the roof of the cavern some thirty feet above. And a gaping chasm some five feet wide and ten feet long, from which a fresh, cool breeze blew. It was this last toward which the Avangion moved. The Preserver pulled up an intricate bone stool and sat beside the hovering light as it projected images onto the drafting air.

They sat for hours, communicating sporadically, watching the sputtering sun, the easy drift of sand and cactus across the desert, the arduous trudge of man and elf and dwarf among the cactus and across the sand, the brutal dance of merchant and templar and slave in the cities walling in the men and elves and walling out the desert. As if a wall could shut out the fate that awaited them all.

Several motifs recurred, and one of them finally attracted the Preserver’s attention. Seven youths rescued a trader dying in the desert, the wreck of his caravan burning in the dunes. They found his pack animal and some of his belongings. They nursed him back to consciousness, spoke with him and killed him. The seven adolescents walked across the desert, themselves and the mudered man’s kank laden with enough water for a journey of several weeks. They wore barely adequate clothing and carried poor weapons. They were accosted by spiders and motile cactus. They skirted a hive of wasps as large as a man. A silk wyrm sniffed out their water, broke several skins and carried away one of the women. They killed it in its lair, retrieved their companion, took its silk. They struggled, but they survived.

They awakened something in him, a memory from such a distant past that it was nearly beyond even his prodigious recall, so much had happened since. "A pack of children," he murmured. "Do you remember when – " he shook his head impatiently. "But there’s no more salvation to seek. For once men didn’t create their own ruin. The world itself has turned on them, and there’s no turning it back."

Once you would have relished knowing the world would not outlive you.

"You still do."

An angry red glow flared at the center of the light. The day the world that killed my race cries out in its own death throes, I will dance. Then as suddenly as the red glow had sparked it died. No. I shed the hatred with the body.

Looking at him with some sympathy, the Preserver rubbed one of the smooth, hard disks on his forehead. "I took these off myself when I realized I only had one shape left to confront this world in. They still hurt, sometimes. Or maybe I imagine it." He looked back at the image of the adolescents. "Who are they?"

The Earth priest’s brood. Opa Skarp.

"Skarp? I would have bet my last ivory pipe that his kin would tend that patch of ground forever. Granted," he added wryly, "neither the pipe nor forever mean what they used to."

The land endures. The kin do not. They have grown too few.

"So where has he packed them off to?"

To live.

"That’s helpful," he grumbled.

What else is there to do?

"If all they were supposed to do was live they could have kept tilling the land until the last one dug his own grave and pulled the soil in over himself." He sat up a little straighter, looking thoughtful. "Unless…show me that dead merchant again."

He watched and listened as the trader asked what was most valuable about their place. Their answers were various, honest, naive: Opa, the land, the water. "You," he replied, and in their innocence they did not understand what he meant.

"He didn’t collapse on their doorstep by accident," the Preserver scowled. "Well, the collapsing may have been an accident, but the doorstep wasn’t. His house already knew they were there. Fourteen young, strong bodies, fattened like cattle on Opa Skarp’s good food, just coming into adulthood. The fortune they’d fetch on the slave market would be worth a small detour for." The Avangion shifted perspective to the burned-out caravan. "They didn’t count on the Jura Dai."

Not once, but twice. A second caravan overlay the first. Hundreds of the feral elves who called themselves the Jura Dai were putting it to the flame. A smaller band of elves were hunting down a dozen men fleeing on kanks, and a smaller one still surrounded the seven youths, who sat quietly with hands plainly visible around the smoldering remains of a smoky fire.

"That was risky," the Preserver said. "The Jura Dai were just as likely to kill them all and sort it out later."

Freedom meant more than security. Vengeance meant more than life.

They watched as the elves reclaimed their kank and most of the water, leaving the band of humans with scarcely enough for a week’s travel. The youths were pragmatically unprotesting, grateful even, for the little they were left. "I see the elves were kind enough to tell them to stay away from Urik. But they didn’t leave them enough water to get anywhere else. At least at the rate they’re going they won’t have to worry about their desirability for the slave trade. They’ll be wasted wrecks like most of the other pitiful little mortals on this planet, assuming they survive at all."

The Jura Dai left them another option. To find the dwarves.

"I see." The Preserver’s eyes glittered. "And have they?"

"Not yet."

He nodded. "I definitely see. I suppose now that a human drama has piqued your interest, you’ll be wanting to stay and watch."

The Avangion darted to the long table full of ruined books and bounced up and down almost playfully. I could light your work.

A quip about the being’s former life sprang to the Preserver’s tongue, but he suppressed it. In this wreck of a world it was bad manners to bring up the past. He crossed to his living space and opened an ancient armoire fashioned from the wood of a tree that hadn’t flourished on Oerth in well over a thousand years. He reached in and pulled from a hanger an equally ancient jacket. The sleeves from the elbows to the cuffs had been replaced and the rest looked somewhat worse for wear, although it appeared meticulously cared for. It had been fashioned from a material once known as velvet. The nap of the fabric had long since worn down, but on close examination one could detect the faintest of patternings. No living mortal would have known what it was, but in the time the garment was made the tailor would have called it paisley. The Preserver slipped it on and, humming softly to himself, sat down at his table and began to work.