Echo in the Canyon

Fantasy?

Photo by Elizabeth George on Unsplash

The bridge was gone now, not a sliver jutting from the Orbrise side of the canyon.

Grand Yev Vymarr decreed that the charred hunks of planks on the Hurre side, the Orbset side, would stay.

Covo felt that the remnants of the bridge mocked the Deqqre.

The sounds of Aqqjeya came from the Deqqre side of the canyon from the moment the Great Orb crossed the peak of the sky to the Hurre side of the canyon.

Covo once loved the Aqqjeya, the warm and loving sound certainly, and even the look;

The seven wound steel strings meeting at the coral beak atop the neck of the teardrop shaped obsidian.

Now it was not music to him, it was the frigid refrain of an angry realm.

The mind healers begged him to find work or leisure on the far Orbset side of Hurre.

The sight of the torched bridge brought him back to the Orbrise side and the sound of the Aqqjeya held him.

Doro, Covo’s brother, couldn’t pry his eyes from the Tome of Wisdom and Prophesy.

His translations made him believe that the Truce of the Shining Rock had been forged in error, and he, only he, could realign the Prophesy of the Fortunes of the Hurre.

So he marched across the bridge on the night of the Hawk Hidden Moon and slayed the first three red eyed Deqqre he saw.

One of the dead, they say, had been playing the Aqqjeya in the sacred Circle of The Water Sprite.

Doro had committed an atrocity the Deqqre would never forgive.

They had thrown him in the canyon and burned the bridge.

All the other Hurre on the Deqqre side were killed or enslaved.

Covo overheard the sentries say that they can still hear the echoes of Doro’s screams as he fell to the bottom of the canyon.

Covo heard them say they weren’t screams of terror, but of triumph.

Covo came to the edge of the canyon to hear the echoes of triumph.

All he could hear was the melody of the Aqqjeya, now a cold echo of hate, wrought by the misunderstood words from a book written by long dead men.

It mattered not to Covo that Doro was his brother.

It mattered not that he shared a womb with evil.

The bridge could never be repaired if there weren’t hands on the other side willing to link it, and though he could see no life across the canyon, there must have been at least two hands, occupied playing chords of their own shared insanity.

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