Rican’s Tale of the Expedition to Perigonne
In 2452, the frosts of the month of Nioul were especially bitter. Communication with the western and northern frontiers was almost entirely cut off. A messenger was nonetheless able to reach Dessanges, the outpost closest to the region’s principal city, from the extreme western frontier. This messenger came bearing disconcerting news of the frontier, half-unintelligible; he spoke of a wall as deep as an abyss, a hole, said he, stretching some incalculable distance, but a hole impossible to cross through. And this wall, he claimed, advanced each day.
Not much more could be extracted from this individual, crushed by travel and cold as he was; however, all were sensitive to his terror, which seemed to have broken him more than the rest of it. He died on the very day he arrived at Dessanges.
When this news reached Guevres, I was delegated to investigate along with three team members. The passage to the outpost, called Perigonne, would require several weeks, even for us, and several complained that travel had not been postponed until the weather improved. All this, they said, upon the word of a man overcome with delirium. I was able to silence this futile carping with a harsh word.
At Dessanges, we took stock of the situation once more.
“He spoke of a kind of blurred border. The thing supposedly devoured the icy plains of Ortesz, and then there were terrible winds, and fear throughout the men…”
“Do we know what happened to the others?”
“He called himself a messenger, not a survivor, but he was raving, and difficult to follow. All the more so since the story seemed to change at times; we did not know to what extent his word could still be relied upon. He had traveled for some time, weeks, no doubt.”
“Why this terror?”
“We were able to glean only that there had been victims, deaths, somehow or other. Violent ones. But we were unable to determine whether it was due to the… thing, or whether it came from one of the men at the outpost. He gave the impression that they were all a bit mad, but it’s impossible to be sure of anything; we have impressions, hypotheses based on his rambling.”
We learned little more, and resolved to leave with the first light. That light showed itself to be reticent at best. It was a feeble dawn, which washed out color and permeated the landscape with pallid shadows, and we left in a sullen mood.
Dessanges was nestled in the hills at the feet of the Tancole range. It took us two days of travel in this chill criss-crossed with slicing winds to reach the pass, all smothered in snow here and there pierced with sharp outcroppings. We had avoided the storms: the hours heard only our heavy breath against the damp wool and the crunching of our snowshoes breaking the crystal surface. At night we dug shelter under the snow, warmer than a summer cottage.
“How long till we reach Greatnod?”
This was the last outpost before the plains of Ortesz, empty of human habitation, which it would take a week to cross.
“Tell us a story, Tamid, since the night is too long for you.”
“I fear I’ve not much talent for it. Leave it to Vinsot to amuse us!”
“I’ll tell you about the Auredian Kingdom, peopled with monsters who never make love, but divide themselves like diatoms…”
“Ah! I’ve read that tale in Ronce Albin’s book.”
“Yes, it is the tale of Dez, who taught the Auredians to eat something besides their own flesh.”
“And I thought that everything in the universe devoured everything else!” said Ancippe.
“Clouds subsist on their own substance like the Auredians, perhaps…”
“They eat each other just the same: it happens that a cloud stretches itself taut like a spider’s web to catch a passing bird, as one might steal an apple from the branch.”
“And the earth too is hungry…”
But we heard the groaning of the snow in the distance, quieting us, and we soon went to bed, except for Vinsot, who enjoyed the impossible scent of the icy nights.
—
The storms, luckily, began only once we had crossed the mountains. But the snowy plateau that replaced the peaks gave us no sufficient shelter, and we covered our faces as best we could before the gusts of smarting needles that the rain had become. We advanced in the gloom with the help of our sunstone, the storm having rendered useless our other tools of navigation.
The storm lasted several days, but a bit of warmth returned, and it fell as snow and rain in turns. We were soon mucking about in a mixture of pale ice and rainwater, mud and rotten grass. We were soon mired from head to foot. And the morning the storm finally abated, we left our tent as filthy as dazed otters, our hair and our beards caked with sludge.
It was then that we saw Greatnod, hardly two slender silos alone in the plain. We decided to stay there for three days. But no one came out to welcome us. We found the meager clump of structures vacant, hastily abandoned. Tools were strewn on the central square, where an eviscerated wagon also lay, on its side.
In the evening, we were drinking some leftover rancid-tasting liquor, when Tamid thought he heard a sound. We remained on our guard for some two hours, but neither man nor beast presented itself anywhere nearby. Rest kept well out of reach that night.
We washed ourselves the next day, ourselves and our equipment, with still muddy well water. There was no more sun than what filtered through the low clouds, but the daylight seemed like an improvement after days of storms, and the place lost something of its anxious air. At day’s end, our mood seemed nearly cheerful: Ancippe sang traditional songs from Handar; Tamid cut sections from the upturned wagon and made us a fine hearth. But with evening came a new chill whose thin fog numbed us to the bone.
This fog grew during the night, and we awoke smothered in icy whiteness. It turned out more or less impossible to work, and Ancippe’s song died after only a few notes. On the third day, the fog having dissipated somewhat, I explored the site: my excavation gave no hint as to the reasons for its abandonment, other than the latter having indeed been hurried. There were several loaves of bread grown thoroughly moldy, clothes thrown to the floor pell-mell, a razor spotted with black hairs and rust. The bread indicated that they had left at least a week ago.
We departed westward again, happy to leave Greatnod’s desolation.
—
In the course of the weeks following, the fogs enveloped us almost every day, and we feared we would lose our way. Yet we at last reached this Perigonne, the messenger’s outpost, situated at the extreme western edge of the Phonidian Empire.
Yet we saw no more territory, neither wild nor inhabited, beyond this border.
At perhaps one day’s march from Perigonne rose a strange, dirty-white mass. It resembled a very high glacier, or a fogbank of immeasurable volume: it stretched from north to south as far as the eye could see.
We recognized in the phenomenon the “wall” that had figured in the messenger’s ravings. The immense obstacle seemed to surge toward us like a hurricane, but we could discern no actual movement. The high wind accentuated its resemblance to an approaching storm, as did the feeling of menace that emanated from the wall.
Perigonne’s fortifications, perfectly intact, gave no hint as to what was awaiting us inside. The gate was closed with a mere bit of rope, and seeing no guard nor sentinel, we crossed through it.
The outpost had been gutted. To the left, the façade of the principle building gaped, and bore the long black claw-marks of a partial fire. Facing it, a square of freshly-tilled earth bore a row of signs painted with scribbled marks: the names, as we would soon learn, of the dead buried there. There were signs of conflict: a broken, bloodstained pitchfork, and confused boot prints around the entrance. The gate of the stables hung like a rag on its hinges, and an indistinct pile was spread out before it. Shaken, we approached the mass with caution, already almost guessing at its nature: indeed, the carcass of a horse dead for at least some six weeks lay there in the mud.
I took it upon myself to examine the animal more closely. The rear flank and one of the legs, left intact by the fire, was nonetheless entirely bereft of flesh: the work of scavengers, I thought, yet I observed no trace of tooth or beak. The skeleton, at this precise spot on the carcass, seemed as pure and clean as a physiological specimen exhibited for study. Every bone was still in its place.
When Ancippe came too close to the tombs, his foot suddenly plunged into the loose earth. He pulled it out: his boot was plastered with liquefied flesh, and he began to vomit due to the stench. The bodies had indeed been buried in such haste that they rested beneath a mere sprinkling of earth, hardly a few inches. In the barracks, we discovered neither a logbook nor any room likely to have belonged to the commander. We concluded that the fire had devoured the latter, though Tamid suspected a voluntary destruction of this tangible evidence: all this perfectly resembled a mutiny turned massacre. But what had become of the deserters? Of the horses remained only the carcass, --but the stores were nearly full; all that was missing was what the mad messenger would have needed to reach Dessanges.
“That wall must have led to a panic.”
“It’s just fog,” protested Tamid.
“We’ll see.”
—
And we saw that this wall, whatever it was, was no fog. Or not merely fog.
To the west of Perigonne, we discovered more of the mud of weeks past, for the plain became even more swampy, pockmarked with craters and pools, and we advanced at a crawl out of hesitation and retraced steps. A very light fog indeed arose: we had made it almost halfway there.
Night fell. We set up the tents. We hardly spoke now: the wall made us uneasy, imposing silence.
The following morning, it seemed to us that the wall had come closer. We had no certainty of this: its movement remained imperceptible even though its avalanche-shape suggested an advancing mass. At morning’s end, a wind rose and the ever-present fog grew thicker: strangely, the wind did not disperse it.
Soon we were surrounded by a solid block of white fog, and tossed by vigorous winds. And our words flew away in the wind or were stifled by the fog.
We were within the wall – which was not one, but a vast bank of immobile vapors at the heart of increasingly furious gusting winds.
The vapor became more and more resistant, more and more opaque. A suffocating impression took hold of us, even though the winds suggested vast open spaces. Soon we were pushing the whiteness from our path like brambles. Until we could no longer advance before the implacable winds and the wall of whiteness – for such this fog had finally become.
We could no longer see our feet, nor the earth, nor the pools through which we stumbled. The fog closed behind us like a vast plaque of rubber, and we were suspended in a howling limbo.
We suddenly heard an immense ripping sound. A slit opened in the fog near Vinsot, a dark slit, very dark. The viscous edges of the slit attached themselves to him like the lips of a newborn. There was a sound. It slurped and swallowed, tore and shredded all at once: shssllschlllllp.
The slit closed immediately, and the fog let go so suddenly that we all fell in the mud – including what was left of Vinsot: a skeleton of pure bone, wholly stripped of its flesh.
—
Ancippe, seized with panic, ran. We could not find him again in the Fog. Nor could we ourselves find its edge: hours of searching and all our instruments were not enough to extricate us from this elusive net, and we finally fell exhausted into the depths of the nocturnal greyness.
We buried as best we could Vinsot’s remains in the mud, and took refuge on an imperceptible mound, more or less dry and covered with horsetail reeds. These offered us illusory protection against the winds and the Fog. We decided to keep watch in turns, rather in order to keep terror somewhat at bay than to keep us from danger. How could we protect ourselves from a danger like this one, from the air itself?
We still did not dare evoke either of our disappeared comrades, and our desire to recover Ancippe deceived our ears, as though we might at any moment hear his voice on the roaring wind. We spoke, however, in order to suppress our fear and horror, to assure ourselves that reality had not yet swallowed us up. Tamid finally fell asleep, but for a long time I kept on, I talked to myself, to Ancippe, even to Vinsot, and to death.
I thought I heard another noise on the wind. A slight cracking sound, an animal, perhaps, and not the human voice I hoped for. I lay down on my stomach and slid to the edge of the mound. Between the reeds, I began to watch the fog.
It was moving, the fog, so strangely stagnant up to that moment, in a slight whorl above the ground, some ten steps before me.
Then a hole opened at the heart of the whirling whiteness.
But this time, very slowly, with the tiny sound of a stopper popping from a bottle followed by that of creaking rubber.
I wanted to awaken Tamid, to flee: fear and horror rooted me to the spot. The hole began to gape wider very slowly, like a throat opening. It was not black this time, but of blended and changing colors, red, then pale or blue like veins under the skin. A thick liquid dribbled from the hole, now several handbreadths wide.
Little by little a clump of flesh emerged from the hole, muscle and viscera massed together every which way, the size of a large cat. The thing burst out all at once from the hole.
It emitted a series of clicking insect sounds.
It was a gobbet of viscous ropes from which rose, directly before me, a milky, fist-sized disc.
It was the gaze of the monster.
