<On The River of the World and What Lies Across It: A Fragment from the Sealed Archives>

The old Sangomas did not agree on many things, but they agreed on this.

The demons were not made. They were abandoned.

In the time before the Lands of Stone had names, when the Ancestors themselves were still learning what they were and what the world required of them, there were existences that did not make the journey upward when their time ended.

Some refused. Some could not find the path. Some were so thoroughly saturated with what they had taken from others that the upward current had no grip on them, and they sank instead of rising, down through the fabric of the world and into the River that runs beneath all things.

The River of the World is not a river in the way that water moving between banks is a river. It is the boundary between what is and what has been discarded, a current of primordial energy flowing along the seam where the world was stitched together from whatever came before it.

The existences that sank into it did not dissolve. They were changed by it, reshaped by energies that had no interest in preserving what the original existence had been, and what emerged on the far side was wrong.

This is what the Sangomas believed the demons were.

Misshapen things that never went up to the Amadlozi. Existences that had earned their passage and refused it, or been refused it, and found themselves on the wrong side of the only border that truly mattered. Their nature was vile because the River made it vile, because the current that runs at the seam of the world does not care about what a thing was before it touched it.

Across the River, the Lands of Demons are not like the Lands of Stone.

There is no green there. No Acacia, no Baobab, no blue-stemmed grass, no spring water running clean through channels shaped by rain and time.

The earth on the other side is the color of old char, and it holds heat the way old char holds heat, from the inside out, so that even the night does not cool it.

Those who have crossed and returned, and there are very few, describe a landscape of scorching plains where the ground radiates upward through the soles of the feet with an intensity that common Dross would not survive for more than minutes.

The mountains on that side are glass-edged and bare. The sky above them is the color of blood that has been drying for a long time.

No beast lives there that a reasonable mind would call a beast.

What moves across those plains does not have the organized hunger of predators. It has the particular hunger of things that were made from abandoned existences and have been hungry ever since.

— Recovered from a Sangoma’s private record, author unnamed.

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The temperature had been climbing for more than an hour.

Damian noted it as a point rather than a discomfort, his Primeval body regulating against the heat with the same indifference it applied to most environmental conditions.

The air at this elevation had crossed into territory where common Dross on the ground below would have been in serious difficulty. Not merely uncomfortable, not merely sweating through their hide wrappings, but genuinely unable to survive extended exposure without the kind of Mana that insulated the body from external conditions.

Below them, the desert stretched.

It had replaced the forests and grasslands without transition, appearing beneath them suddenly and completely, as if the world had simply decided that green was finished and this was what came after.

The sand was not the pale tan of ordinary desert but a deeper reddish color that absorbed sunlight rather than reflecting it, and the heat rising from it in visible columns pressed upward against Damian’s flight path with the persistence of something with a direction and an intention.

He was still carrying Serala.

She had not asked to be put down and he had not offered. Her arms remained around his shoulders, and she was watching the desert below with vibrant eyes.

The desert mountains rose in isolated formations, tall and dark and wind-carved into shapes that bore no resemblance to the rounded Sacred Mountains they had known. These were angular, their faces sheer, their heights catching the heat and reradiating it outward in a way that made the air around them shimmer with visible distortion. Primal Beasts moved on their slopes.

Not the Primal Beasts of the Lands of Stone.

These were larger, their bodies built for terrain that did not welcome anything that needed comfort. A creature the size of a hill moved along the base of one formation on six limbs that ended in flat heat-dispersing pads, its hide the same reddish-dark as the sand it crossed.

Atop another formation, something winged and enormous sat in perfect stillness with its membraned wings spread against the rock to absorb heat, its body radiating the aura of something that sat considerably higher in cultivation than the beasts they had left in the Cradle of First Flames.

They passed a canyon where the walls glowed faint orange from mineral deposits and three Primal Beasts were engaged in a conflict that had already reshaped the canyon’s interior, the stone walls bearing the fresh marks of forces that exceeded anything the stone had been prepared for.

Damian observed and flew on.

Thirty minutes into the desert, the horizon changed.

He felt it before he saw it, a shift in the Mana of the surrounding air that went from hot and dry to something else, something that moved rather than sat still, carrying moisture and an energy that was not the warm settled energy of the desert around them but something more active and older and stranger.

The Mana shifted the way it shifted near large bodies of water, but the quality of this shift was wrong in the precise way that the archived records had described things on this side of the world as wrong.

Then he saw the River.

It spanned for miles.

Calling it a river did not adequately describe what was ahead of them.

It went from horizon to horizon with the width of something that had been running between the same two shores for so long that the concept of its width had become absolute, and the sound of it reached them long before they were close enough to see its surface clearly, a deep rushing that was less like the rivers he had known and more like the sound of something large and continuous insisting on its own existence.

The surface he could see from their altitude was black, inky and lightless.

They descended.

The edges of the River came into focus, and what grew along them was not the vegetation of the Lands of Stone. The mountains that rose near the banks had things growing on them that were green, present and identifiable and deeply wrong in the particulars. The leaves were too large and too flat. The growths along the rock faces moved slightly without wind.

Settlements appeared.

Against the base of one tall mountain along the river’s near edge, structures clustered in patterns that spoke of habitation rather than accident. They were low and dense, built from the dark stone of the surrounding terrain, and they had the organized arrangement of something that had been planned rather than accumulated. Paths ran between them.

On those paths, figures moved.

Short. Humanoid in the general sense that the word could be stretched to accommodate. Green-skinned, their proportions slightly off from the human standard in ways that became more apparent the longer he looked.

They moved between the structures with the purposeful activity of a settlement going about its ordinary business, carrying things and moving toward things and away from things with the focused small-scale industry of demons who had things to do.

Damian looked down at them.

The settlement pressed against the mountain’s base and climbed partially up its lower slopes, and smoke rose from several points within it in columns that bent toward the River rather than straight upward, as if even the smoke here knew which direction mattered.

Serala’s arms tightened slightly around his shoulders.

They had arrived.

The River of the World spread before them in its black rushing immensity, and somewhere on the other side of it, past the water and the heat and the wrong-green vegetation and the scorching plains the Sangomas had described in records they hadn’t intended anyone to read, his mother’s soul was burning in something’s hands.

Damian looked at the River.

He looked at it for a long time!