The Korellian Odyssey: Requiem by Vance Bachelder Read Free Book Online Page B

Korel, you've become a fallen lord, a desert wanderer. The Obsidian Order has touched your destiny and your future."
    His voice died as fading echoes resonated throughout the monastery's endless depths, terminating with a momentary silence born upon the sound's last whisper. And in that moment the skin covering the priest's face shrank back, its desiccated tightness revealing every detail of his skull, his orbits growing large around his eyes as cavernous shadows fell across ever-smaller sclera, leaving a burning blue of malice and desire smoldering in their depths. A bright and perfect column of blue flame ignited the air between Korel and the priest, its purity overlaid by a discordant sense of music lightly pressing upon the mind; choirs in an ever-greater multitude, harmony and grace, but soft as the dew distilled from heaven. Korel felt a heavy sleep come upon him, and the ever-present burning in his gut began to sleep as well. Vaguely, toward the back of his mind, he thought he saw Hurnix curl up in a ball on the floor, fast asleep within the vaulted chamber, just as a trusted hound would sleep before his master's fire. As sleep consumed his consciousness, Korel felt himself fall . . .
    He stood upon a small ridge, its natural mouth running down into a vale that in turn made its way to the base of a flat, brown plain of baked earth riddled with small fissures, as though all the moisture had been wrung from its soil a millennia before. Distant mountains ringed the plain on three sides with the vale running down to the forth. Dark clouds hung low with intermittent vision-scarring flashes of angry lightning brilliantly illuminating the landscape for brief moments, only to have the earth plunge back into near-complete obscurity, the darkness tempered by a pearly phosphorescence that seemed to come from nowhere. In the middle of the plain, an enormous charcoal-black obelisk rose like a spike toward the clouds. Although he could not see the horizon, Korel felt that there was nothing more beyond the plain and mountains, that literally nothing existed beyond this place. He began to make his way down through the vale toward the plain.
    As he started his journey across the baked flatness reaching out before him, gouts of lightning erupted from the highest tip of the obelisk up through the clouds, illuminating the sky beyond. He had been walking for nearly an hour before he finally came to the base of the obelisk, which was made of circular steps curving around the entire structure. As he climbed the steps he realized the obelisk was circular, a narrow black cone inverted and rising several hundred feet to its tip. The black surface was polished and impossibly smooth, without blemish, crack, or defect, like the surface of a pool of liquid glass—perfect.
    Korel could see his narrowed reflection moving across the surface in parallel with his own movements. But as he looked more intently at its surface, he began to see other objects within its depths . . . a broken writing instrument, a small crinkled paper heart like those given on the Day of Passion, dried flowers with some of the stems and blossoms missing, unfinished poetry with teardrops on their pages, fragments of music manuscript, broken bones, pieces of flesh, a kidney and a heart, skulls of various sizes. Then he saw them—white bodies with black, vacant eyes staring out from inside the obelisk, hundreds of them, each rubbing the inside surface. Some used their fingers, some their hands, some the hems of their garments, some even various objects found within the obelisk, but all polishing the surface, polishing, polishing, polishing, smoothing the surface from the inside out, polishing as though they had never done anything else. None seemed to see Korel and he started to scream . . .
    Korel started as if coming out of a deep sleep, sweat pouring off his body. He did not know how long he had been in the keeping of the priest, but he estimated it had been several weeks. He