The magic wakes him, gentle as the fall of golden leaves from the white-limbed trees that whisper softly above, in the glade of the ancient hero. Eyelids flicker, lift. A sky of pallid blue greets him, gilded with boughs. The glade is quiet, murmuring with the echoes of ages long-gone.
He sighs, and pushes upright with a wince. Caked in rusted armor, the ancient hero screeches to a sitting position, exhales a plume of dust. Moths lift from beneath his pallid braids and scutter skyward, leaving the hollow husks of their ancestors to tumble silently into his lap. The hero glances down, scrapes a few corpses from the faded forest-green of his tunic, and glances round to see who has woken him.
The waker stands nervously amid the obelisks, like any other blond, sun-frayed farmboy at the end of his quest, though this time it’s a dark-haired girl from the urbane heights of Crescent Moon City, her status and title tattooed across her neck and curling up the right side of her face in a garden of vibrant colors. Glowing swirls of indigo light trace the four obelisks in the heart of the glade. Matching talismans, prised from the Temples of the Seasons scattered in the four-corners of the kingdom, sit within their grooves in the obelisks, where their magic is tapped and, when all four intertwine, wake the ancient hero from slumber.
Same story, new generation.
A pink tongue darts out, clears the dust from the cracks of his lips, and the hero grimaces, turns his head, and spits on sacred ground. “Well, what is it this time?”
The waker blinks, then steps forward, proffering a sword. His own sword, dredged, presumably, from the sunken depths of the Lost Temple, where he’d abandoned it to the hole he’d hacked in the obsidian skull of the Abyssal Chaos. The hero winces at the thought, and swings his legs to dangle over the front of the altar. Now that had been a battle worthy of the name.
“Hero of the Sacred Glade, I beseech you, take up your gloried blade, and fight once more for the people of Sondli.”
“Sondli?” he intones, and jumps down from the altar. A series of pops hop up his bones as they learn to carry weight again while, prickling like thorns, blood flows through his limbs for the first time in gods-knew how many years. The hero represses a snarl. He always forgets the thorns. “It was Sondli’ia last time I woke. And Sol Ondli Aa when I was born here. It seems to get shorter every time. Or perhaps the people get lazier.”
“Or busier,” the girl says, then, taken aback by her boldness, ducks her head, and lifts the sword.
He chuckles, and reaches for the blade, noting the callouses along her fingers, the still-fresh scar on the back of one hand, as he eases the sword from her grip. “Fair enough. You have been busy. You’ve had adventures of your own,” he says appreciatively, and nods. “I thank you for returning my sword.”
She blushes, and her gaze darts back down. Still young, this one. They get younger every time. And yet it never gets easier, the steps it takes to work the magic of the Sacred Glade. They always bear scars, the ones who wake him.
He’d borne his own, when he’d been young, and woken the hero who’d been ancient in his day.
But that woman’s bones were long since lost to dust, and that dust had shuffled back into the earth, and the earth had turned in its seasons to lift up new life, so that he smiles softly, feeling her gaze upon them, keeping watch from the embrace of the earth, from the towers of the sky.
He nods again, as if deciding something, and lifts a hand toward the altar. “You’ve done well, friend. Now rest. The magic of the altar will restore and protect you. I’ll settle this matter, and wake you, when I return.”
She blinks. “And if you don’t return?”
He chuckles. “Do you not trust the magic of the land you worked so hard to awaken?”
A sliver of steel melts from her posture, and she sags a little, exhaling. He knows the look. Too long on the road, too far from home. Almost despite herself, the waker shuffles to the altar, rests a tentative hand on the stone. He smiles, watching. She would find it surprisingly comfortable, and the rest as easy as an afternoon nap in the comfort of a childhood home, her family murmuring in the next room over, waiting for her to join them, as she knew she would soon, and would continue to know that, no matter how long it took her to drift off to sleep, and - if he did not return to wake her, if he died in whatever apocalyptic confrontation had demanded his resurrection - she would rest easy, with that pleasant knowledge tucked into her dreams, until the next waker calls, and she awakens to fight, to protect and save, if that is her destiny, as he had never guessed it would be his.
But only if he falls.
If he lives, he will return and wake her, and resume his place upon the altar.
“I suppose,” she murmurs, laying her back against the altar, her hair fanning out behind her on the sacred stone, “I should rest, for just a little while.”
“For just a little while,” he agrees as her lids slip shut, and slumber takes her.
Then the hero turns and strides through the glade, to see how the world ended this time.
Hummingbirds tumble in the vines that cloak the cliff-sides of the Sacred Glade, visiting the golden blossoms. The scent of honey greets him on the swell of a warm breeze. The grass caresses his ankles, and even as the chaos of whatever awaits him outside the Glade gives a faint roar - a cataclysmic racket, if even an echo of it penetrates the deep magic of these woods - all he can think is that summer has swung back around. The beauty of the Glade is constant, but even here - especially here - the wheel of seasons holds court in full regalia.
The vine-cloaked cliffs narrow as the hero makes his way down the path. He pauses, only once, to glance back at the slumbering form of the girl, illuminated in the gentle rays that pierce the boughs. Then even she slips from view as the hero nears the end of the path, and the mossy, stone circle of the Millenia Gate thrusts aside the cliffs, the outside world swirling in the ether of that portal.
The hero considers the world before him, and strides through.
Ancient eyes dart to the city, lying just where it should be, between the mountains and the sea. It’s grown, of course, thatched roofs molting into soaring steeples, but his heart still leaps into a quicker beat at the sight of Half Moon City.
And the new apocalypse: a hundred colossi, serpentine and plated, their thousand-fold legs scurrying as they break through the surface of the earth, twining up and down, bleeding neon magic from the seams beneath their plates, bristling with a mane of sorcerous spears punched through their brainstems, cracking the carapace. He sees her then: black hair spun out behind her like a banner of midnight, long, wine-dark robes billowing in the wind as she rides her wyrm to the white-pillared capital and smashes in the dome with a bolt of acid-green lightning from the sorcerous storm that churns at her command, a vortex of silver and black above. The witch-tyrant laughs, the hour of her victory at hand.
Pausing at the edge of the cliff that bears the Gate, the hero considers the fight before him, and smiles a little, for he has heard that dark, triumphant cackle before, and more than once.
He lends weight to the hilt of his sword, and begins to ease the blade free when the sound hits him: metal in motion, as iron licks the sheath. That rasping whisper of glories old and done, that slithering kiss of glory yet to come.
The hero grins, lifts his gaze to the world, and slides the sword from its sheath.