He struck her as a corrupt Peter Pan with a tease and a taunt, a dare and an offer.
"We hold the keys to the light and dark of Somnus. The non time. The hours of Nod. Come," he said quietly. "Join me in the Nebulus."
Then, he had his back to her, moving away into the thickening fabric of the air.
He was leaving her there, in the fog. She had a sense - Feeling back behind her... Yes, the wall was no longer there.
She was beginning to feel like she was trapped, inside the Stone.
Seeing Siekan's darker shape ahead she followed him, hand extended out before her. For a moment she couldn't see -
And then she could.
And they were in ... another place.
Her reaction was to mentally snort 'Huh, David-fucking-Copperfield'.
The odd fog was gone, the torn traces fading back behind her - yes, all different there too.
They were no longer in a city.
It was night still. Were they outside? In a canyon of some sort? Large shapes loomed all about her. The last veils of grey were vaporised, whipped from the stage.
Huge rounded rocks, all about. They followed a trail between them. Her boots felt smaller rocks or stones beneath -
Stones. She stopped, picked one up. It was The Stone. A Stone. For there were hundreds, thousands of them underfoot, like river stones on a hard shore. And, these larger. . . boulders. . . Grey, smooth. . .
She walked about one, on the other side it was concave, and filled with a slow drifting white wall of misty smoke.
She could feel but not hear those smaller stones moving beneath her boots. Then it struck her, how uncannily dead quiet it was.
She dropped the stone that she held... Nothing. Not a trace of impact.
She turned to see Siekan standing there. Even the light was strange here, like that from a cloud scudded full moon, but through a bruise-purpled lens. A huge shadow moved over them, and away, and she felt chilled from feet soles to scalp. Over his shoulder, in the near distance, she could see a massive, ragged cliff face, haunted by wisps of mist, notable for zigzags of rock-carved stairways and the many dark mouths of caves there.
"You're afraid," he said softly.
He leant forward, briefly peered at her.
"I am wondering what half truths and lies she told you."
Still a little dumbfounded, still looking all about she answered him, knowing he referred to the one he called the Karolin. "She spoke of the Stone as a rune. She told of the six ages of man, and an age that could not be enslaved, a free age."
He chuckled, a wily sound. "Free indeed." He sighed then. "No. There is only a seventh, for most, that ends in death. But another age looms large in your future, Leah."
She looked to him.
"At the last need not be, as the Bard has writ, 'mere oblivion'. At least not for every being that walks the earth. Rather, there is an eighth age, not entirely of human province."
He too now surveyed the silent, eerie landscape about them. "In superseding death, We, Leah, are the eighth age of humankind."
(Nameless)
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