The Mending

The ritual was done. For hours, Thorne had worked in silence — tracing symbols known only to the giants across Mutu’s metal skin with water from the sacred pool, while his companions held their places at the points the old magic required of them. The water carried Thorne’s appeal to the ancient ones his people still revered, and under their watch, the slow work of mending had begun: drawing Mutu’s shattered mind and spirit back toward each other, stitching the wound shut from within, and holding the threshold firm against the wayward dead who circled outside, drawn by the scent of an open soul and hungry to slip inside and wear his body as their own.

Mutu lay on the stone platform like something salvaged from a wreck. His clockwork heart still beat, but its rhythm was uneven — stuttering, catching, as though the mechanism itself could not decide whether it was driving a living thing or merely keeping time inside an empty shell. A spiritual sor of frost had formed along his joints where the arctic cold crept in from the spirit realm through the fissure in his spirit, and Thorne had to clear it twice during the ritual, brushing it away with fingers the size of Mutu’s forearm. The automaton’s eyes were open but saw nothing in this world. Whatever looked out from behind them was turned inward, toward a darkness that Thorne’s runes held at bay but could not reach.

The danger was not that Mutu would die. Thorne had said as much — the body was strong, the metal sound, the clockwork heart fuel by the fire of his goddess who did not grant such grace to fragile things. Mutu was not fragile. The danger was what might fill the space while his spirit mended. Out on the ice, the spirits of the arctic wastes pressed against the basalt spire in growing numbers — pale shapes that drifted like smoke remembering a forms they used to hold. They could smell torn opening in his sense of self like in the way predators of flesh and bone scented blood from a wound. If one found its way through teh breach before the sacred water sealed it shut, it would simply pour itself into the empty space the way cold pours into a warm room through an open door. Whatever remained of Mutu would be swept aside and while the shell would live on, he would be no more.

Yarthoon’s mind-touch had not merely wounded Mutu and left him exposed to spritual predators seeking a new home. It had also torn and scattered his spirit. Cracking the barrier between what he knew and what he had been foced to forget the way a chisel cracks stone along a hidden seam. For years, the metal that replaced his flesh had served as more than just armor. It had been a seal — a lid that pressed down and kept everything from before his transformation sealed away in the dark: the man he was, the life he led, the memories too terrible to carry into a new existence. Yarthoon, in one catastrophic moment of psychic contact, broke that seal wide open. Now Thorne’s ritual was stitching the wound closed properly — with sacred water and intention rather than crude iron and desperation. But to clean a wound you had to dig deep and make sure you cleaned it thoroughly. Not only addressing what caused it but dealing also with any previous scars — even hidden ones, secrete ones — to make sure you rooted out any possible source of infection. And as the mending worked deeper, things buried since the Witchwoods began to surface for the first time — rising through the fissure like sediment stirred from the bottom of a long-still pool. The visions came in three waves, each deeper than the last.