Gods of Jade and Shadow(89)

As she walked she noticed that this land was eerily quiet. No wind, no rustle of the gray sand by the road. It was so quiet that she began to hear the beating of her heart, the movement of the blood through her veins; each step was like the trampling of the elephant. But this was the only noise: it all came from within her and had a disorienting effect. She paused a couple of times to sip from the gourd, and the sloshing of the water was as loud as the rapids of a river in this desert of silence.

She could hear her lungs, the breaths she drew, and she began to walk faster, hoping to find a source of noise, an end to the silence. But when she walked the road was the same, it did not change, and neither did the absolute stillness of the land. It was like being encased in amber.

Casiopea sped up her pace, then she ran. Her heart thundered inside her chest and she had to stop, out of breath, the sound of Casiopea drawing air as loud as a hurricane.

Once she had recovered, the stillness wrapped around her and she discovered she was standing at a crossroad. Casiopea spun around, trying to determine which direction she should follow, but no matter where she turned the gray desert was the same, and the roads had no end. They did not curve, they were four straight lines. Hun-Kamé had said nothing about this.

In the stories of the Hero Twins there had also been four roads that intersected, but they had different colors, green and red and black and white, one for each corner of the earth. This was not the case, and each path could lead to doom or her objective.

“East lies the answer,” said one of the roads to her.

“West is the city,” replied the other road.

“North you should go,” cried the third.

“Turn back, you go in the opposite direction,” concluded the fourth.

Casiopea did not know how the roads spoke, but they did, in an insidious whisper, a bothersome buzzing, which made her grimace. Their voices came from inside her head, too, just like every other sound. She squinted, trying to discern which path was the appropriate one. The roads spoke.

“I hear her heart beating in fear,” said one road.

“I hear the blood in her veins, cold from the madness which assails her.”

“I hear her breath catching in her throat.”

The voices were like a steady drop of water falling on her skull, a form of clever torture, terribly distracting. One could not concentrate when they spoke, but it was even worse when they were silent, the quiet hitting her like a wall.

“There are monsters in this land.”

“There are places crafted with the sorrows of men.”

“There are traps made of blood and bone.”

She placed her hands against her ears, but the voices were within her, and they laughed at Casiopea, making jokes, telling her to follow each one of them.

She spun in a circle and knelt down, tired and overwhelmed, her fingers aching again. Casiopea clutched her left hand, where the bone shard lay, and the silver bracelet Hun-Kamé had gifted her clinked against her wrist, a soft noise, which in the quiet of the land was like a note from a cymbal. She recalled then what he’d said: the road listens to you.

Slowly she stood up and dusted her clothes, the rustle of the fabric like a knife that scratched the land, and the roads laughed louder, drawing echoes inside her head.

Casiopea gritted her teeth and opened her mouth.

“I am headed to the Jade Palace,” she told the roads. “You will show me the way.”

The roads did not wish to comply, and they yelled terrible curses at her, promising to eat her bones and spit them out, but she held her left hand up, and she remembered how Hun-Kamé spoke, sure of himself at every turn, and her mouth reproduced his iron tone.

“Show me the way,” she demanded.

The roads wavered, physically shaking, making Casiopea almost lose her balance. Like tongues they wagged and went quiet all at the same time.

She noticed then that the road to her right possessed a section with a slightly different coloring, not black like obsidian. Instead it was black like bone char, more velvet than silk.

Casiopea stood upon this section of the road and, not knowing what to say, she simply repeated her destination.

“The Jade Palace,” she said and took a step forward.

For a second she was in a pocket of shadow, black the world above and below, and then she had stepped back onto the road, which was bordered by mounds of earth. More mounds in the distance. The land had changed: it was no longer the flat grayness she had walked through. The silence had broken too. There were weeds by the road, on the mounds, and animals there, crickets and snails, which made the dry plants rustle.

She found another patch of shadow and then another, and she stepped through these, and with each leap she took, the land changed and she progressed in her journey until she was moving past pale stone pillars, a few of which stood proud and tall, while many had fallen by the side of the road, broken into two or three pieces, some missing large chunks, others almost intact.

The pillars had faces on them, and she paused to look at them, thinking they represented warriors. But this was a wild guess. There might have been a hundred or a thousand pillars bordering the road. At one point she sat next to one of them, drinking from the gourd and massaging her feet, but she did not dally long.

Then the road dipped. In the middle of the road there rose a pillar, but this one was made of dark stone, and when she looked at it more carefully she realized it…breathed. It was alive. It was not a pillar at all.