Pain awakened him, a brutal biting encircled his neck. Sgleò remembered what it was to have a neck, even though the agony of it threatened to break it in twain. For a moment, it didn’t matter. It was a joy merely to be. Until the pain worsened.
“Bloody hell, it’s stuck on something.”
“Saint Joseph, that ain’t no log, Clyde. That’s a body.”
“So what, it don’t need the bloody necklace. Should get prime coin for that bit of bling. Lookit the size of it and silver to boot.”
A fire brand burned his neck, chaining him as it ate into his flesh. Surely at last the end had come. Sgleò’s jaw muscles fell open, neck twisting upwards. It all came apart with a sudden breaking.
“Bloody friggen hell.”
The language made little sense, but it was the act of hearing which proved he was not undone. His neck had not broken. It had been the iron chain. Moisture oozed from his murky eyes. Movement yet was beyond him. Freedom was his though. He rejoiced to know he was finally free.
“Did you see that, Clyde? Holy shit it moved.”
“Nah, just the necklace breaking.”
The strange accent could not mask the quiver in the speaker’s tone. Sgleò would offer them a reward for their unknowing deed, carrying little it stemmed from a wish to rob him. Yet, speech eluded him still.
“Shit, piece of cheap crap too. Lookit, crumbling to bits. Must have been just iron.”
“Why was it shiny still then if its rusted now?”
“Who cares? Come on, we’re late and I’m covered in freaken mud now.”
The men moved away, unknowing of their entitlement. Ah well, it would save Sgleò the effort, which seemed further good fortune. He was left where he’d lain for the years that must have passed. Above him, the wind sighed in leaves, a sweet sound, almost forgotten. Even being what he was, how often he had taken such trivial things for granted?
Feeling returned to his flesh and what an odd sensation it was. Mud and roots bound him, cradling him to the ground. Longer asleep than he’d guessed then. What a sight he must be, him once the fairest and most proud! Efflyn would be astonished, he was sure, to see him as he was now. It made him smile to imagine her fair face so aghast.
Rain came. It ran over his desiccated flesh like a lover, restoring him even more. His awestruck eyes were nearly blinded by the sun after. He knew nothing other than the world as it came back to him: water drops sliding down the curve of grass stems, a wren dancing on the wind, a grasshopper’s quiet sleep.
But as his vision cleared and stirrings came to his fingers, so too did he remember. It felt like it had been years, but surely not too many? Why had Efflyn not come to find him? Surely she had not been angered by the girl? Efflyn jealous of such a paltry thing, it was not possible.
He had been left to slumber, tricked into being iron bound. Trickery beyond the girl who had done it. He sensed someone else’s hand in the deed. Anger began to lace with the frustration in Sgleò’s frame, giving frozen muscles movement at last.
No dignity came with his release. When his tongue could form words again, he spoke to the roots holding him. A few delicate traceries pulled away, but the thick ones stayed as obstinate at rocks. He had to claw his way from the earth like some boggart caught in a hole. When had roots become deaf to demands of his kind? It seemed a final humiliation for his entrapment by something so simple as an iron chain. The court would mock him for ages, he was sure.
One last root clung stubbornly to his calf indented as it was into his flesh. But eventually his gnarled fingers bent around the thickness of it with sufficient strength. It fell away, broken for its stubbornness. Sgleò stood and stared.
He was tired and weak yes, it left him stooped some. But that did not explain the change. Gone was the tangled wood, thick in its wildness where dark was never fully banished even on the brightest day. The roots that had given him grief were weak Linden trees and merely four youths at that, growing beside a grassy gully. All else was open plain.
His vision swirled about him, so that Sgleò had to reach out to the youthful sentinels who had kept watch over him in his prison. It was then that he saw his hand. Wrinkled and the color of the earth that had covered him, it was more bone than flesh. Horror drew tight around his chest.
Sgleò tried to brush off what must be dirt, but it left his poor flesh unchanged. He pawed at himself, feeling all over to take stock. His fine raiments were tatters, the colors bled and run. His body was thin and bent and his face . . . he would not think on what he had felt there. His hands were shaking.
“A trick, a ruse, a curse?”
Even the voice was not his. This body could not be his. He needed to find Efflyn. Sgleò looked for the door, felt for it. There was nothing. Between the young trees was only air. Beyond them only the stream. The way home was not there. Maybe he was too weak and tired? Maybe these trees had grown stubborn as they rose around him?
Sgleò stumbled forward, barely finding his footing. He didn’t know his way for the paths were gone as well. It was as if none of his kind had walked here in a hundred years. So he stumbled and fell and rose and walked on, toward the only trees he could see in the distance. Amid them rose a spire.
He had to rest on the way. Luck found him a handful of withered berries clinging to a nearby bramble. They were food though, holding them gave him hope. He slipped one past the hardened lips that he would not think of as his face. Bitterness engulfed him.
Sgleò struggled with to swallow. They were old. That is the reason of his body fought the promise that waited in his mouth. The rotten taste saturated his tongue, yet he would not spit it out. Food, he needed the sustenance. It was more than taste that closed his throat as if he drank poison when no wild food could sicken one of his kind. He started to suffocate again, just like the moment the necklace had locked around his neck.
Sgleò clawed and writhed lost in the rising memory. The berries feel out with drool, lessening the terrible vision. He came back to himself on the ground once again, writhing and weak, hollow and lost. For the first time in his memory, Sgleò began to cry.