Revelation
Asaau couldn’t say how long or far they flew – only that he could barely feel his own fingers by the time they landed. Part of that was from windchill, but most of it came from how hard he’d clung to Virenina. He had to concentrate before his hands would uncurl. Had to concentrate again to step down from Virenina’s arms without shaking. The moment his feet touched the planet’s surface, Asaau wanted to collapse onto it, to plant his palms against the ground, to lay back and press the full length of his spine against that wonderfully solid stillness.
He made himself sit, slowly. It was for the best anyway. The ground was grey-black stone, its surface rippling with age-smoothed runnels and rivulets that shone dully under the moonlight.
Shouldn’t the sun have risen by now? Perhaps they’d lost a day somewhere on the Ring, or among the trees. Or perhaps –
“Are you going to vomit?” asked Virenina, with none of the cheerful needling that would have normally accompanied such a question.
“No, Tauhrelil,” Asaau said. His voice came out thin, strained. At least it didn’t shake very much. “No, I am not going to vomit.”
“I…I tried to be slow.”
“It’s alright.” Something about Virenina’s voice pulled the words from him, even as his mind cried out in horror: that was slow?! “You haven’t harmed me. I simply…”
“Need a moment?” she suggested, after several had passed in silence.
She must have taken his own silence for assent. Asaau felt a dull, heavy thump as Virenina dropped to the ground beside him. To sit, he thought – then he half-raised his gaze from his lap and saw that she’d thrown herself flat onto her back, much as he’d wanted to do a moment before. Asaau winced in sympathy for her spine, even though he knew it wasn’t needed. Virenina engaged with her surroundings the way others might engage in a melee, and somehow, she always seemed to win.
With Virenina quiet for once, Asaau had the time to take a proper look at the lands around them. A few minutes ago, they’d been surrounded by mist-soaked jungles as far as the eye could see – enveloped for miles by rain-glossed leaves and branches shining green-blue-black-violet under their own nightglow. Treetops had swallowed the sky.
Now the same sky yawned wide overhead, and Tei Ura’s bisected moon beamed down on them like some great slit-pupiled eye. There was jungle here, too - black and broken remnants of it, creeping up along the edges of the stone table where Virenina had landed. Though greenery covered most of the Shattered Lands with viral abandon, Virenina had dropped them on one of the empty places which dotted those lands dead-dark as nightpox sores. To one side, the table’s edge poured into another block lower down, which then built and rose and swept in an impossible curve around the block Asaau and Virenina stood on until it became a sheer cliff at their backs, spearing up and up into the night.
Even at this distance, even in the low light of Tei Ura’s moonhalves, there was something strange about that cliff face. It looked – melted. As does the rest of this place. What of it? Yet Asaau found himself rising to his feet for a better look all the same. Most Shattered Lands stone looked melted in a way which suggested that, at the very least, it had all melted together over the same fire. The damage to the cliffs was different – a deep half-circle groove set into the stone surface, its edges soft as waxflow from whatever terrible heat had carved it. He could have stood inside that curved hollow with both arms outstretched, Asaau knew, and not come close to spanning its full width. Even seven of him wouldn’t have been enough.
Whichever god made this cut, he thought, eyeing it, let their grave remain locked forevermore. His eyes slid down the molten length of the cut to the ground before it, pitted and churned with scars over scars. There were more cracks and chasms and craters than Asaau could count – in part because so many of them overlapped and melded one into another. Locked forevermore, he thought again. Please.
“Admiring the scenery?” Virenina’s voice yanked Asaau out of whatever contemplative fog he’d stumbled into. Her lone eye followed him from where she still lay on the ground. “Guess that means you’ve had enough of a moment.” She paused. “Have you?”
Dread bloomed in his heart. There aren’t enough moments in the world to prepare for whatever you’re about to show me. Asaau looked at Virenina, realized he could count how many grins she’d given in the past hour on one hand, and wondered if she felt similarly. Not that she’d tell me if she did. Virenina would have died before so much as admitting dread to herself, let alone to anyone else.
Perhaps she feels no fear at all. After all, the minds of others were closed to him. Perhaps it is only me. Unless Virenina told him herself, he had no way of truly knowing. What he did know was that Virenina had yet to flinch from anything in their path. Virenina had looked upon the Shattered Lands eagerly, while the same sight had left him brainsick. Virenina had led their way into those lands, though Asaau was her instructor and she his student. Virenina hadn’t needed to take anyone’s arm on the Ring. Sometimes he wondered if she needed him at all –
A scuffling sound broke into his thoughts. Asaau looked over to see Virenina lift herself from the ground on her hands, fold her legs beneath her, and let herself fall again, this time into a seated position.
“Seket.” She gathered up Ai Naa’s spear in the crook of one arm. With her free hand, she patted the ground beside her. “Sit down.”
If she was offering an excuse, he’d take it. Asaau sat next to Virenina and instinctively smoothed at his knees. At the skirts he’d left behind in the Opaline City. He looked at Virenina and waited for her to speak.
Waited.
Waited –
“Tawret’s blood, I don’t even know how to fucking start!”
Her voice was thick with anger, all of it directed inward.
“I thought about it the whole time, on the rail.” Virenina’s empty hand scraped at the stone’s surface, as if she could somehow dig the words she needed out of the ground. “And on the Ring, and on our way up here – ” Cords stood out on the back of her hand as she bore down harder. Doesn’t that hurt her nails? Asaau couldn't help wondering. “I thought about it. I kept thinking, all this time – about how to tell you, and I still – can’t!”
Her nails broke the ground with a sharp crack. Her fingers sank in after them, burying themselves in stone up to the second knuckle. Virenina looked at her own hand with disgust. Then she pulled her fingers through the rock, as if through damp earth, and closed her fist. Asaau heard the dull crunch of rock crushed to pebbles and powder. When Virenina withdrew her hand from the little pit she’d gouged and brushed off the dust, her nails were still immaculate.
“I gather,” Asaau said once he’d found his tongue, “that it has something to do with your powers.” A brilliant observation, Seket. Perhaps next you’d like to point out that blood runs red. Yet it was all he could think to say.
“My powers. Right.” Virenina gave a short, humorless laugh. “Tell me what those are, Seket.”
He knew better than to ask if she was joking.
“Autokinesis,” he started, “to a level that beggars belief.”
In itself, autokinesis was hardly noteworthy; the power to control one’s own body and movement was a fairly common one, especially among channelers paired to unawakened spirits. But there were seven times seven hundred ways one might use autokinesis, and Virenina…plenty of autokynes turned their talents to combat, as she had. That, too, was hardly noteworthy. Plenty of martial autokynes could break bone in one blow. Plenty could move faster than the unaided eye could follow. Some autokynes could do both; a few could do even more.
What beggared belief was that, by combining autokinesis with her control over Ai Naa’s anchor, Virenina could fly. Truly fly, not merely slow a fall or make herself float midair…and sustained flight was a monstrous drain on vaara. Asaau tried never to think about how much of it Virenina must have burned through every time she took to the skies, and she took to the skies most every day. The well she draws from must be bottomless. Only a scant handful of historic precedents – and Virenina’s royal pedigree – had kept her from being taken into some lab for study.
“Yeah,” Virenina said now. “I’ve been lying about that…or hiding, more like.” She must have seen something in his face, for she went on: “I let everyone – misunderstand. Better to let them all think I’m some kind of once-in-a-generation freak autokyne than a…”
She trailed off and stared into the hole she’d gouged into the rock a moment ago, then looked back at Asaau.
“Maybe if I just showed you first,” she said, almost to herself. “Maybe that’d make it easier.”
“Show me?”
“What I can really do.” She gave another short, flat laugh. “Only even I don’t know what I can really do. This is more like…what I keep chained up.”
The rings adorning Ai Naa’s spear were still and quiet. None of the terrible energy that sometimes poisoned the air around Virenina was in evidence now. Even so, Asaau found himself suppressing a shiver. Don’t show me anything. The thought ran through him unbidden. Don’t tell me anything. It’s not too late to turn back.
But they’d come all this way. He’d promised to listen to her.
“Do whatever you must to make me understand.”
Virenina stood up, then looked down at him and offered her hand. Asaau needed no help to rise, but took it anyway. The disgust with which she’d looked at herself a moment ago still burned bright in his mind.
“You need to watch this from a distance,” she told him. “When I say so, start walking away from me until I yell for you to stop.”
“Is that…wise?”
“What,” said Virenina, “raising my voice? Leaving you alone?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “Nothing will come for you up here, Seket. Not when I’m around, anyway.”
He’d wondered why they had yet to see any of the beasts said to call the Shattered Lands home. Now he had an answer, or a shade of one…and a new, terrible question to go along with it. Not when I’m around, anyway. So monsters avoided her – that much was obvious. The question that chilled him was why.
“Before we left, I said to bring something to shield your eyes. You have that?”
Wordlessly, Asaau produced a pair of goggles from one pocket. The lenses were dark, light-drinking glass, lined with foam to block any light that might filter in at the edges. Virenina inspected them a moment, then handed them back over with a nod.
“When you hear me call stop, turn around and face me. Then put those on and get down. Don’t take them off or get up until I come back to you.”
It was on the tip of Asaau’s tongue to ask why, but he realized there was no point. Whatever the reason, he’d learn it soon enough.
He turned around and began to walk away.
The further he walked, the more he began to dread hearing the command to stop. How much further must I go until she thinks it safe? He was now closer to the far end of the stone table than he was to Virenina. Why must I go so far? Au Melai’s shining threads, what does she mean to show me?
“STOP!”
Dread pooled cold and heavy in Asaau’s stomach as he turned Virenina’s way. Though her voice reached him strong and clear, when he looked, she was little more than a grey point against the ashen-black cliff face. When Asaau put on the darkglass lenses, even that became terribly faint. When he lowered himself to the ground as she’d asked, he lost her.
He lay against the cold rough stone, alone in the dark, and waited.
And then the night shattered.
Light obliterated Asaau’s vision as the ground beneath him rocked with a terrible impact. For half a heartbeat, his world became a searing field of nothing. Blind?! some part of him cried, stupid with shock, with horror, but then the opening burst faded, and Asaau beheld its source – a beam of living, devouring light that pierced the heavens, came screaming down from the sky with the force of a god-thrown spear. Its heart burned with that same awful white brilliance which had momentarily eclipsed his sight. Its edges, just as bright, shaded to an incandescence of greens, a seething nuclear storm of jade and lime and leaf and emerald. And then Asaau saw that it was no simple beam, that there were shapes to the light – no banners of flame, no branches of lightning, but an endless boiling fury of eyes, of writhing tongues, of fangs upon fangs upon fangs…
Yet the noise was even worse.
Silence exploded into a sevenfold infinity of screams voiced as one, a sound so sudden and massive that it knocked the breath from Asaau’s body and left him gasping. He heard guttural howls and thin high shrieks, low sobs and full-throated wails, pleas for mercy, gibbered prayers, broken laughter…and, underlying the screams, a droning roar that sounded like nothing living, so deep it shook his guts and set off a terrible sick thrumming in his bones. Asaau clamped his hands to his ears, pressed down hard, harder, until it hurt, but no matter how hard he tried to shut them out, the screams sounded just as loud and clear as they had to his naked ears. His head, he realized, it was in his head –
No more, he thought. A moan passed his lips, though he never heard it. No more, it’s breaking me, no more, no more, please, I can’t…
And perhaps the god Au Melai, in the depths of her death-dream, finally heard one of his prayers; for the light faded, the noise ceased, as suddenly as they’d burst into being. With them disappeared a crushing pressure that Asaau hadn’t even known he’d been feeling until it was gone. The stone ground was cold under his chin, hard against his elbows and knees, yet it seemed to Asaau as if he were floating. Compared to that pressure, his own flesh felt lighter than air.
His body drifted in the silent weightless dark. His mind was raw, ringing, reeling. He drifted – for how long, he couldn’t say – but slowly, slowly, a lone thought crawled up from the blast-crater remnants of his brain.
What?
Beneath the surface-shock, his mind swirled with a panic of questions. That one thought unleashed them all.
What in the ruined halls of heaven was that? What did she do?! What kind of channeling would let her – what kind of partner – what is she paired with? Virenina had always claimed that Ai Naa was an unawakened spirit of unprecedented magnitude, little more than a sleeping sea of vaara for her to draw upon, but that was impossible, impossible, impossible. Aira’s pyre, that must have cut the sky itself, no unawakened spirit could – no spirit could…what is she paired with? What is she paired with? What is she paired with?
The longer that question ran through Asaau’s mind, the heavier and colder his body became. By the time he heard Virenina’s footsteps, it was as if the hideous pressure from before had never left. Fear filled his chest, gripped his lungs, until every breath came slow and labored. Virenina drew closer, closer, step by single step; every quiet gritting of her bootsoles against stone was clearer than the last. Asaau’s heart did not beat so much as spasm in time to the sound of it. Closer, ever closer. Any moment now, he would hear the metal, hear Ai Naa’s anchor, hear the chiming of rings against a beheader’s blade –
Asaau wanted to shudder, to stumble to his feet, to turn and flee and never look back, but his body was a thousand miles away, so numb and distant it might as well have been on the moon.
“Seket?”
He should say something. He should at least look up at her. He could not manage to so much as shift his eyes.
“I’m going to take the lenses off you. You don’t need them anymore. Okay?”
He did want them off, Asaau realized, but he couldn’t even nod to show he’d heard.
Virenina waited a few seconds, then went ahead and lifted the lenses from Asaau’s face. She did it slowly, carefully, gripping the lenses between her thumb and forefinger while keeping the others curled away into fists. That struck him as odd. Why –
Oh.
He was still on the ground, at her feet, paralyzed like frozen prey. The fear must have been pouring off him in waves.
She was trying not to touch him.
“I’m going to sit down beside you,” she informed him. “A few feet away. Sit up when you’re…when you can.”
When he could at last sit up and raise his head, Asaau found her looking at him.