A Prayer to Mishakal

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It was not always like this.

The forests were once alive. We remember that, don’t we? Birds called from the canopy. Deer moved through the undergrowth. There were dangers, certainly. A careless hunter might end his days impaled on a boar’s tusk. But those were honest dangers. A beast killed because it was hungry, or frightened, or cornered.

Hobgoblins. Noxious automatons. Hags whose magic leaves the earth swollen and diseased. Once, such things belonged to old wives’ tales, or to distant lands we could safely fear from the comfort of our hearths. Now they move beneath these trees. Taking the forest, we tell ourselves. Yet, sometimes when I see how the roots curl around their footprints, I wonder whether taking is the wrong word. Whether they are actually reclaiming it. Whether the stories were warnings, and we have forgotten what they warned us about.

We are drawing closer to the source. I can feel it in the forest air, thick enough to make each breath an effort. I can taste it in the water, though we boil it until nothing should remain. The hag’s poisonous roots, the cabin torn apart - all point toward some great sickness at the heart of this land.

Soon we will meet the Speaker of the Sun, leader of the most reclusive elven society. And beyond him? Verminaard himself, perhaps. Each time I speak that name, I find myself listening afterward.

I fear we are not ready. Mishakal has guided us this far, but even with all her power, she has not fully returned to this world. At night I look above the canopy for reassurance, and find none. The constellations are still out of place. I remember where each star should be; my teachers made certain of that. Now I count them until my eyes ache. Last night there was a light between two stars where I am certain there had been only darkness not two months ago. By morning, I could no longer remember which two.

I am afraid of voicing too loudly after sunset. Last night, Durnik’s voice called me from the other side of the wagon. It sounded so much like Durnik that I had already risen before I saw him asleep.

Tonight, while the others slept, I knelt beside the embers and whispered my prayer to Mishakal. I kept my voice low. Something beneath the ground repeated them. I felt it through my knees before I heard it: each syllable, slowly and carefully, as though being learned. I stopped. For a long while there was silence. Then, from directly beneath my hands, it whispered the next line.