Ahira's Hangar

We next run into our little girl under far different circumstances than being in a lovely and loving home surrounded by family.

Now she is in a creepy place, where everything suggests decay and sterility...

The Hall of the Throne is falling apart, with cracks in the ceiling and where tile has collapsed. The very weeds are dead, and the very sunlight is crooked. The men and the women are kept apart. Even the drum beats are dull.

The little girl is walking between two tall women dressed in black, to a terrible and dark place - described as being curtained with great webs of darkness.

All of the descriptions emphasize how cold, dark, lifeless, and sterile her new home is.

A ceremony is enacted where the girl is to be executed, but is saved by a balck clad figure at the least moment. Even so, a bowl of liquid which looks like black blood in the darkness of the Hall is spilled.

The two tall priestesses then say that the little girl is to belong to the Nameless Ones, dread spirits of the place, and that her life and death will belong to them. She will be nameless, and will be eaten by those spirits.

She is then taken through the temples and goes through other ceremonies, including one where she is lamented as a person dead.

When we saw her in the prologue she ran through the grass of an orchard under the starlight.

Now the starlight sees her taken to live in a strange house which has been locked up for years - after enduring a day where she has had no food and no drink, and faced ceremony after ceremony.

A eunuch named Manan, who obviously cares for the child Tenar, comes to see her after dark. But she tells him that she is not Tenar anymore, but rather Arha - Eaten One - and sends him away.

And the child who, but a short time ago, lived a life of love and laughter, now lies alone in a strange house, staring at the darkness.

An abrupt change of scene from the prologue here...immediately we are cast into a pit of despair from which there is no obvious escape, only years, decades, of unrelenting sameness.

Still too young to understand though I suspect, nonetheless the surroundings have a subduing effect on the girl.

--A

The first time I read Tombs and "The Nameless Ones" were mentioned I thought, "My god sounds just like Lovecraft's "The Other Gods" is Cthulhu hiding in the shadows?".

Being a bit younger than you, and only coming to them late (in the scheme of things, I read some long ago, but too long for the impression to have remained until my reread), I think I thought of Feist's nameless evil Midkemian god...but hell, he might have got the idea from Tombs very easily.

--A