An Excerpt from Duende by André Consciência: “The Golden Tooth”

In this passage from “The Golden Tooth”, Marquis Sandstorm encounters Vaoro, a spirit of the earth, and asks to be turned from death and brought back to life.

At first I felt an impact on all my structure, an invisible weight that gripped at me through all the conscious and unconscious places, choking all my limbs and organs. The density in the air made it hard to move. Then the stone altar seemed to gain a distinct, soft glow. When the embers were blown with the hen’s black wing the sentient creature at the triangle took the form of a man with the bearing of a menir in a black body, covered in cobwebs and with the face flagellated by craters, resembling in structure to a fossil. Sometimes a white spider stalked out of his eye, and my first reaction was of terror. I raised the chicken leg, but hesitatingly. While I wandered, the being stared at me in constancy, with no expression except for a compact presence and an electric wavering that snaked between the holes of his body and its extremities. The air grew red and black, and I told him of my intention, ordering him to turn me from death and bring me back to life.

“There is nothing destructive about decay,” he told me, simultaneously as a distinct voice in my own thought and a subtle vibration in the air. “Destruction is the root of all solid matter,” he added, and asked me to expound my pains to his continence. To this end, a girl came up to me like a smoke, almost to my knees, with beautiful portions and with black hair running down to the floor. Unlike her lord, the iridescent girl studied me with sympathy, from her heart releasing the scent of a resin resembling goodness. As I began to concentrate on my pains, she began to dance them. Soon Vaoro interrupted me. He asked me to dismiss him immediately and call him again at the same time, at midnight the next day, exactly with the repeated procedure, but this time with a drum nearby. That night a strange occurrence came to be. Before I lay down to sleep, the hen began to lay eggs that had gold for yolk.

The story continues in Duende: Dreams of a Kingdom Under the Earth.

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Excerpt from Duende: Dreams of a Kingdom Under the Earth by André Consciência, published by Star Lore Publishing, 2023.