Embers

Deep in the dark, beyond fathomless fractal immensities, I seek the coldlight, the depthlight, the light of the fallen.  The unreality, the paradoxicality, of the empty spaces far outside of the bounds of this galaxy, fold into my chest; my lungs wheeze and ache inside of my ears.  The dark distance flows out across my ribs, out through my breastbone, and, as I open my eyes, like a mote of brightest darkness, hovers between my palms just outside of my body.  

I breathe a sigh of relief as the spectral hands of winter flee my bared chest and arms.  The dizzying warmth of the little mote of voidlight shines throughout the small room, wooden walls and the empty hearth appearing blue instead of dull brown.  I look down and briefly take solace in the fact that the voidlight paints my graying whiskers a dull bronze, my pale skin a rich brown.  The many aches and pains of my old bones fade like a clenched muscle finally relaxed.

“MAMA!” shouts Celicia.  I start from my position on the floor and nearly hurl the mote of voidlight into the hearth.

“Grandpa is making the spookyball again!” shouts the three-year old, darting around in front of me.  Her raven hair is pulled back in various pigtails and her cherubic face is eerie in the voidlight.

“Hello granddaughter,” I say in mock formal tones, “why do you disturb the peace of your venerated ancestor?”  I smile widely.

“You’re silly Grandpa,” she says with a giggle, but is soon lost staring into the voidlight.

Celicia begins again, slowly, “Whatcha doin with that spookyball Grandpa?”

“Warming my old bones, little goose,” I say; while she’s distracted I reach up with my now spry right foot and tickle her side with wiggling toes.  Celicia squeals and rolls backward.

“I can turn on the sunstone,” says Celicia officiously as she rises from the mat, and before I can protest she has darted over to the doorframe and switched on the dry glare of the sunstone overhead.

The lifeless heat from the sunstone bears down on my shoulders and I feel the moisture waft off my skin in great fogs.  I rise from my mat and toss the voidlight into the air where it hovers over my left shoulder.  I see Cilicia’s little feet puttering away across the cottage while I press the sunstone switch back off.

I follow in Cilicia’s wake to find her mother studiously waving a smaller handheld sunstone over a shank of kouller steak on the kitchen table.  I lean forward over it to let my old nose get the scent of the charring meat.

“Get that little horror away from our dinner old man,” bites Penelope, waving the handheld sunstone at me as if brandishing a shortsword.  “Why’d you keep summoning those icky little things anyway?” she says, returning to the cooking.

“I was cold.”

“I’ve told you many times father, just switch on the sunstone, Gregor makes good money on the wireways, we can afford the extra heat for your dry old bones,” says Penelope, tucking a stray raven curl behind her ear.

“Old bones,” says Cilicia with a giggle, earning herself a cheshire grin from her mother.

“And I’ve told you,” I say contentedly, “that I appreciate the efforts of my son-in-law.  I will also say that I loved everything about your mother, including the fact that she worshiped a goddess of mercy and kindness.  But I do wish that particular goddess had not been quite so fond of using guilt as a tool of worship.”

This earned me a trademark coldsnap stare from Penelope, paired with a perhaps more unsettling half-grin.

“Besides,” I say, spinning the voidlight around my finger, “there’s always a chance my antiquated practices might someday prove useful.”

Penelope gave a short snort of derision and waved away the mote as I attempted to introduce its unearthly glow to the kouller steak.

“I worry about you, that god of yours died a decade ago,” began Penelope, “and yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms,” she puts down the sunstone and scrunches up her shoulders with worry, I can see nothing but her own mother’s posture in the gesture. “Where are you getting them?  I’m worried it might be soullight, you could be burning yourself out.”

“Then burn I shall, for I am nothing more now than a set of dry old bones.”

Gregor sweeps pedestrians out of his way while striding through the crowded alleys leading into the city center.  I bump into my third rucksack and feel pain shudder down my side all the way to my toes.  Gregor notices me propping myself up against a cobblestoned storefront and comes back to take my arm.

“I’m sorry Taldir,” says Gregor, his low bass voice reverberating around his barrel chest, “I didn’t want to bring you in the middle of the day but Penelope insisted we travel at midday for the heat.”

I grab Gregor’s arm and pull myself close to avoid any more painful jostlings.

“The Sunsowers plan on razing much of the southway homesteads on the way to the city center,” says Gregor. “They want to create a wide avenue so that their new vehicles can pull right into the square.”

“I guess they’re not worried about defending the city interior then,” I say, more to myself than Gregor.

“What do you mean?” asks Gregor as he pulls me out of the way of a couple of gendarmes, their shoulders shining brighter than the sun with their sunstone inlays.

“When I was a boy, during the last invasion, followers of the Pestilence I think, the old Voidguard cut them down in the alleys; we couldn’t hold the wall, but the alleys stopped them from winning with their numbers.”  There was more, the darkmoon, the flesh devouring fungus, the violet fires that raged for months, but I had run out of breath, and Gregor had never seen war; he wouldn’t believe half of it.

“Well,” said Gregor, “they consider it a modernisation project, along with lighting the alleys and new roads.  The Sunsowers want the entire city to shine in order to attract trade, maybe even tourism.  I’m not sure they're on the right track, but once the wireway to the eastern lagoon cities is completed, there might be some novelty in a landlocked medieval burgh.”

I begin to get nervous, not only at the idea of opening up our long hidden city to the world’s attention, but also because Gregor was jabbering, and Gregor only jabbered when he was nervous.

“You trying to retire me Gregor?” I ask as the alleyway finally starts to open up into the city center square.

Gregor barks out a laugh, but I glance over and see nerves, and maybe guilt.

“Penelope would retire me, violently, first,” Gregor smiles.

“Then why did you drag an old man away from his granddaughter?”

The square, once a small park fronting on the Citadel, was now a solid white mass of marble flanked on all sides by various Sunsower bureaucracies.  Yellow robed bureaucrats and gendarmes seemed to multiply as they crisscrossed the space, the sheen of their clothing nearly blinding me.

“To show you something I don’t think you would have believed without witnessing it for yourself.  This way.”  Gregor began leading us out towards the center of the square. The old fountain was gone, replaced by some kind of obelisk of yellow stone.

Gregor leans in close, his arm still pins my wrist to his side, and whispers, “We’re going to walk by it, we can’t be seen having any obvious reaction.”

I was about to, stupidly, ask him what he was talking about, when I see it.  An old man, probably younger than me, hangs limply in a stockade, his neck unnaturally elongated and obviously broken.  Unlike every other Sunsower facade, the stockade is bare grey wood save for a symbol dyed across the corpse and the stockade, a purple candle crossed out with a yellow slash.

I had seen war, but death on display was not something I had seen in a long, long time.  I couldn’t stop a sharp intake of breath, or my eyes from going wide.

“Come father,” Gregor said loudly, pointing us towards an alleyway opposite to the one we had entered.

When we were safely several streets away, I finally asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know with any certainty, but the rumor is that he was caught praying to the fallen god underneath the old citadel.  Some kind of dark ritual.”

“That’s ridicu--”

“I know Taldir, I know,” Gregor said quickly.  “I’m already working, quietly, on transferring us out of the city to one of the mountain kingdoms, maybe even the lagoons.”

“I certainly hope that’s not on my account,” I say, imagining Cilicia’s face at the sight of the corpse in the square, imagining her face if it were my corpse, marked with the symbol of my dead god.

“Honestly, not entirely no.  The Sunsowers are leaving reason behind.  They claim their technology comes from a group of gods, but I’m not convinced there are any deities casting their gaze upon this city anymore. No, leaving would be better for all of us. Will be.”

Gregor pulls me into a closed shop’s entryway and looks me directly in the eyes, “But until then, I need your word, no more vo--, no more spookyballs.”

I only briefly consider protesting.  Summoning the voidlight, something I’ve been practicing for my entire life, something not everyone could do.  Then I thought of Penelope and Cilicia.  

“Of course.”

“Grandpa?”

I start from my sleep.  No errant rays of light filter through the windows, it feels like a shallow morning.

“What is it dear,” I say, my voice scratching.  I can barely see Cilicia, but her eyes are wide with worry.

A low rumble comes out of the night as if over a great distance, followed by two loud crashing noises, also far off.

“The sunstone’s, it’s, it isn’t working,” says Cilicia, she always stumbles over her words when she’s upset, otherwise she’s well-spoken, and so smart.

I rise and pull Cilicia up into my arms.  I turn out of my room and begin to ask Cilicia where her parents are when I see Penelope standing near the front door.

“He hasn’t come back yet,” says Penelope, the edge of panic clear in her voice.  “The sunstones have stopped working, probably in the whole city.” 

“He’ll be back,” I say, not knowing why I believe it so strongly.

“Da,” says Penelope.

“What’s that noise?” asks Cilicia.

“Siege weapons,” I say to myself while I put Cilicia down, my arms already aching, then “just a big band getting their giant drums ready, little goose.”

“Can we go see the gi-, the big drums Mama?”

“No dear, it isn’t safe at night,” says Penelope.

The door bursts open and Gregor closes it slowly behind him.

“What’s going on?” asks Penelope, clinging to him forcefully.

“Hello little one,” says Gregor, scooping her up in his arms. “The Sunsower’s have lost whatever power they used to light the sun stones.  Followers of the Huntress of the Dawn have already breached the walls, I heard one of them screaming about the city being watched over by a clockwork god, a false god, that they broke it somehow.  We need to go now.”

A loud bang followed by terrified screams bursts from across the alleyway outside our home.  

“There’s no time,” I say.

“We could hide,” asks Penelope, tears already streaming noiselessly down her face.  

“My room, now,” I say, nudging Cilicia towards the doorway and waving Penelope towards it.  

“Gregor, put some furniture in front of the door to slow them down, then come into my room and do the same thing,” I say as I jog as quickly as I can towards my room.

“Taldir-” starts Gregor.

“Quickly Gregor, quickly.”

Without looking at my family, I sit down in the middle of the room and begin to breathe deeply.  Deep in the dark, beyond fathomless fractal immensities, I seek the coldlight, the depthlight, the light of the fallen.  I find it sooner than ever before, deep inside myself, like faith rekindled.  How could my god be dead?  The darklight never had lived.  The dark distance flows out across my ribs, out through my breastbone, and, as I open my eyes, a volatile swirl of voidlight pulsates in my outstretched hands.

My small room is crowded with ghoulish figures cast in the sickly glow, Penelope’s raven hair shines arctic blue, and Gregor’s angled muscles seem more real, more angular.  

The door bursts open behind me and I whip the mote of voidlight around.  The marauder, a young woman with long plaited hair, nothing but a predator wrapped in leather and arrows, pauses long enough to shift her expression from triumph to fear.

I thrust my hands forward and a vicious beam of obsidian purple light erupts from the mote and blasts the hunter out the way she came.  Her body hits the far wall in the kitchen and falls lifeless to the floor.  

I palm the mote and close the door quietly.  

“Stand back,” I say.  I wave the mote of voidlight around the room, searching for the right spot. “I know it’s- Ah.”  I feel the slight wound in reality and I place the mote in the scar.  Carefully, I angle my hands like daggers and stab into the voidlight, its membrane bending and stretching like putty.

I pull the voidlight open, stretching it as far as it will give, until the portal is wide enough for Gregor.  “Quickly, through the portal.”

Gregor hesitates, but steps through first, followed by Penelope carrying Cilicia.  I step through and the membrane snaps shut behind me.

“Where are we?” asks Gregor?

“Between the worlds,” I say.  I’ve only been here once before, but the cavernous darkness surrounded by low dark hills is hauntingly familiar.  Thousands of voidlight motes hover and dance about the darkness, alternating black and violet.

“Is it safe?” asks Penelope.

“Relatively,” I say.  “We have to keep moving, don’t eat anything until we see something green, and Penelope,” I catch her gaze, “we can’t let anyone sleep.” Penelope looks to Cilicia, panic in her eyes.

Cilicia doesn’t notice, her eyes are dancing with the motes of light all around her.  As I watch, she holds up two small hands and two dozen motes of voidlight swim around her outstretched arms.  She giggles as the motes tousle her arctic blue hair.

“I think she’ll be alright,” says Gregor flatly.

I smile, call down a mote to light our way, and start walking.