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Ai, God. A galla.
Kansi had captured her and meant to kill her. No, that was fear talking. She had no reason to believe that Kansi knew the galla or had ever used them.
Liathano.
The galla came from a plane outside of this world, and therefore they did not fully inhabit this world. Air and water meant nothing to them. Heat and cold could claw no purchase into the forms that passed for their bodies. Rock did not halt them.
It was coming for her, and she had no weapon with which to kill it.
Liathano.
She was cold, and determined, and flush with the heat that comes of a racing heart and bitter knowledge. I am dead, but I will not go down without fighting.
She rose, fixed her feet and, ignoring the pain of her wound, sought by taste and smell and hearing for the direction of the galla.
Where is it coming from? There!
There! The cavern was pitch-black, without light enough even to see her own hand held right in front of her nose. But the galla was blacker still. Seen in such darkness, she perceived it as a void cut through onto another place, a worse place, a plane of existence racked with torment that, to the galla, seemed a blessed mercy compared to the torments of Earth. It was not like humankind, not meant to dwell in this world even for the space of a breath, her own, one in and one out, as she stood her ground and sought deep into the rock for the scattered grains of fire embedded within the structure of stone.
So faint they were, but she was desperate, and it rang closer and closer, floating across the vast black expanse of the cavern.
Liathano!
It knew her. It only wanted to go home, and she was its gateway.
The thought gave rise to ugly hope. She swept her awareness past the grains of fire and sought those attenuated veins of aether. Through the gateway she could find griffins. She might escape through the gateway.
She called her wings. As they flared, the towering black pillar that was the galla fluttered as in a strong wind.
She sought: At the heart of the aether lies the burning stone, the gateway—so far off, so faint…
It bloomed, frangible but present, a man’s height and breadth in size, shimmering with the pulsing blue aether.
The shaman stood there still—or had come again to seek her. The pale figure of the Horse woman wavered, limned in blue as she reached out her arms in a gesture of welcome.
“Liath!” called the shaman.
“I’m coming! There is a galla—” she cried out as she lunged forward, but her leg collapsed under her. Already the gateway was collapsing from man height to child height to knee height. Too late! Too weak! There was not enough aether to sustain it. Her wings shredded into sparks. The galla swept down upon her.
The shaman’s voice rang clear through the last hand’s span of the opening. “I am Li’at’dano. Come quickly, to me!”
It was the same name, blurred by the centuries into a word that breathed more softly from the lips but which in its essence had not changed.
It was the same name, and she had carried it for far longer than Liath had.
The stinging presence of the galla scorched her, but it passed her by and twisted through the vanishing gateway on the trail of the one called Li’at’dano. Liathano.
There came a cry of pain, and a dazzling blaze that flared as the galla engulfed and consumed its prey.
The last light of aetherical fire curled in on itself, and winked out as the gateway collapsed.
Dead.
Devoured.
Into silence, into darkness, Liath fell. Her ears rang and her pulse throbbed, beating wildly as she knelt on the cold stone and sobbed so raggedly that it seemed she could never stop.
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