“Sing, memory,” the storyteller says, the words low and quiet, a dirge for the darkness. His skin, the few stretches of it not covered by patchwork clothing, emanates a faint glow illuminating his steps and casting shadows of the fractured, broken buildings surrounding him, jagged outlines of the old world.
“Sing,” he says again, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the darkness, perhaps to the history running through and held forever by the shards of the broken buildings.
He steps carefully. He has walked this path many times before. The storyteller keeps his eyes ahead and fixed on the two burning pricks of light giving challenge to the totality of the darkness. They are shrouded, protection against attracting predatory vines and wild animals, but the storyteller is not just a creature prowling the ever-night. He is something more, and something much less, too.
Slowly, step by meditative step, the storyteller nears the camp. His steps need not cause sound, but he strikes his heels hard on the ground all the same. His lungs do not need air, yet he gulps it in noisily anyway.
In truth, he needs nothing, not anymore, but he remembers well enough the brash existence cultivated by needing.
“Sing, memory.”
This time, he imbues the words with their true weight and import. Those around the fires knew someone or something approached through the darkness. Now they would know who.
He hears the satisfying shift, confusion and fear resolving into peals of delight as memory sparks and catches, and suddenly, voices unused to joy are raised in it.
The darkness holds little of mystery or fear for the storyteller—save the one question dreaming in the still caverns of his heart—but these people see nothing but monsters and terror in the dark. They are both hunted and hunter, searching for the water and food they need to survive; their hopes are like their small fires holding back the forever darkness of this world.
But they know of the storyteller, have heard from parents and grandparents about the one who wanders the world, telling tales of what used to be, of what still is, and of what might be again.
They know, too, that those beasts that move in shadow and hunger for light and life do not trouble the storyteller. Where he walks, the dangers of the world do not follow.
The people of this camp know, as he approaches, that they will be safe for at least the length of his stay.
“Sing, memory,” he says again, near enough now to see the faces ringing the fires, a mix of young and old. In the last camp, maybe some thirty or forty miles behind him, the storyteller felt the echoes of something that might once have been sadness when he saw how much the population had diminished since his last visit some years before. It is a reminder of the inevitable decline of things, and the storyteller wished he could have felt more of something in response.
But he is happy—or at least aware that he might have been happy once—to see that this place has grown. Forty-two, he counts, each one looking hungry and thirsty, dirty and tired, and alive.
Twist, this place is called, or it was the last time he passed through, and he starts with the sudden realization that he can’t remember why it has this name. More and more, the world and things of humanity feel fleeting to him, like so much noise carried away on the wind, empty and purposeless.
“Storyteller!” a voice from the darkness shouts, and then they are appearing around him, offering hands to aid his steps, torches lit and held aloft to light his way. These people, terrified a moment ago of what the black might hold, now turn raucous and joyful at the gift the darkness has given them. So it goes.
Children clap and giggle, able to play loudly for perhaps the first time in their lives. The charred flesh of a vine and a cup of water are produced and offered to the storyteller, and though he has no need for either, he accepts both with a smile and a word of thanks. It would do no good for these people to know the truth of him, not yet, anyway.
“I am the First here,” says a woman who steps forward and nods at him. She is short and lean, with a hard face and arms braided with taut muscles. “Welcome back to Twist.”
He nods back. To be named First in this camp is both a statement of power and of determination. She is the leader here, that much is clear. But in an attack—either from one of the other camps or the more-likely invasion by one of the creatures that hunt in the darkness—the First should be the first to fight and the first to die.
“Thank you,” the storyteller says, looking around at all that has changed since his last visit here, most of which is lost to the slow fog blanketing his memory. Buildings in further disrepair, more and more stripped for wood to burn and stone for weapons. Caught in the flickering light of the fires, more bridges than the storyteller can remember weave from place to place, each one a strand in the spider’s web that is Twist. Bridges spanning vast chasms where the ground has fallen away, arching high to the homes built above, nestled among the splaying, crisscrossing branches.
This close to the ground, the branches are enormous, mighty things, wide around as a person is tall and springing from central stalks three or four times wider than that. The effect, here as everywhere the storyteller walks, is of a vast and mighty arcade. Great pillars rise from shattered ground to a ceiling vaulting too high to ever see, lost in the infinite darkness.
People from those homes above are descending now on bridges that angle up and away, quickly scuttling down to join the other people of Twist. The storyteller is not to be missed.
“I am happy to return,” he says. “Your numbers have grown since I was last here.”
“We have been lucky,” the First says, her smile big enough to nearly disguise her curiosity at the storyteller’s wandering attention.
Time has become a fluid, smudged thing for him. More than once, he has come back to himself on the path as if from a trance, one foot raised for a step he had taken some unknown time earlier, his body totally still, his memory offering no hint as to how long he had been like that.
He is going, that much is clear, losing more and more of the world, of himself, each day. And it takes every bit of willpower he has left to care at all.
“Can I stow your things?” the First asks, gesturing to the pack slung over his shoulder.
“No!” he says, a strange flood of panic overcoming him suddenly. His glowing hand, the skin nearly translucent with age, clamps possessively on the bag he carries.
He imagines the speculation behind the polite looks of shock at his sudden burst of possessiveness. They imagine he hides some powerful weapon or secret power that might change the world. A weapon to kill a monster. Or a map of water.
Or perhaps they imagine his bag to be full of bones, the dry clacking of them his only companion, the grain of each one slivered with memory and magic.
But no. These are the fantasies of a world long gone, and there are none left living who know the magic of burning bones.