“I thought the Shadow-whatsis told us to travel without coldfire.” Em said. The Archon’s bright globe of light burst into life from his fingertips, reflexively.
“I’m an old man. I don’t have eyes like…like…well, like him anymore. Where…” he moved around through the trees until he spotted the Temple of Light, distant as it was. It gleamed like a star in the distant horizon, the only star. “There. Give me a few moments to work out where…” and mumbling to himself, he stepped away from their main group and began making tally marks against a tree.
“No curvature,” Henry said, suddenly.
“What?” said Em.
“There’s no curvature of the earth down here. Everything’s in a perfectly straight line.” Henry said. “He’s looking for the Temple of Light. Everyone must navigate by it, the way they would the sun back home.”
“Okay,” Hawk said.
“This isn’t a natural environment.” He said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Emile said.
“What I mean is…it’s not sustainable. Everything about it is being fueled by our world. Our organic matter. Our lives.” Henry said.
“And?” Kaiser said.
“And…what’s going to happen when the Rift closes? This place…it’s a time limited thing. That hole is going to close in a week of our time up there. One week, based on our estimates from the Bronx Event and the others we’ve catalogued.” He looked from face to face. Hawk felt mostly tired, and a little bit like a gear with stripped teeth. She wasn’t getting it. Henry sighed in disgust. “It means that when the Rift closes…what happens to all these people?”
Oh, and here Hawk thought she’d reached the end of fear. Here was something newer, nastier, stickier: fear for others. Up until now she’d only thought of her own survival. Selfish, but this place promoted selfishness. You wanted to survive, you had to hoard up everything—supplies, food, emotions, attachments—and give out only to those you trusted most. It was a closed place, where the snake eats its own tail and compassion is the greatest sin. But now she realized that they were all doomed. All of them. The people, the acolytes, the Archons, the gods—all of them were trapped in that closed system, with entropy waiting below them with hungry maw. They were all going to die. She wasn’t going to. She was going to make it to the Temple of Light, she was going to make it to the Nexus, and then she was going to go back home, where magic was a stupid idea, temples were places you visited on a tour, and where the sun shone and the plants were green, and she could put all this dreadful darkness behind her.
But now another, colder realization had hit her: if Henry Dyson was right, this world would effectively end the moment its ties to Earth were cut.
Everyone down here was going to die.
***
Hawk was exhausted past all reason by the time the Light Archon told them they could stop. He identified two edible roots and three different edible leaves, and set Hawk and the other two scientists to gathering, while he and Kaiser made camp. From the sounds of it, the Archon was having a wonderful time and Kaiser most definitely was not. Hawk returned with ten of the large, edible roots (Two of these were rejected as the wrong kind of plant; not poisonous, but the kind you cooked by boiling and discarding the water) and found five large piles of moss and two very muddy men. The Archon in particular had stripped down to just the inner chemise and his mask.
“Where’s your robes?” She asked, after he had inspected her finds and culled the bad roots.
“They’re down near the stream. I washed them as best I could, but they’re going to stain. That’s best, if we’re running. White is noticeable under light, and surely they’ll begin searching with cold light soon.”
Henry Dyson asked, “Why are the lights different colors? I noticed there was a significant difference between your light and…you know. His.” He glanced at Hawk and then back down.
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“Ah. Yes. It differs from individual to individual. You can learn to tune yours to be more or less bright, more or less this color or that one. It is a basic skill. I wouldn’t even call it a spell, because it isn’t as if we’re pulling the crystals from the earth and draping it about a God’s altar. Proper spells involve prayer, and I…have not prayed in some time. After all, my God is dead.”
There was a silence.
“Except he’s not,” Hawk said. She couldn’t help it anymore. “He’s a man named Edgar Studdard who attempted suicide after his daughter died.”
“And he’s an Archetype now. Which is what they’ve identified as gods.” Em said, very gently. “So his God is alive.”
“Alive?” the Archon said, softly. “Then why is he not here?”
“Because he wasn’t there when your world was made. He was somewhere in our world, doing whatever it is an Archetype does when his Rift closes. He still is. Hell, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t even been a full four fucking days since the whole world fell in.” Em threw themselves back on their hummock of moss and looked up at the starless, roofed-in sky. “It probably hasn’t even been an hour since we walked down here. Can we leave fucked up Narnia now?”
“I think we have to. We have to warn folks topside about this. First, that the Glass energy is pulling…life, for want of a better word, down here, and that there is an extremely hostile, super powered…whatever the hell you want to call this pantheon, down here. And in the time it takes for us to bring anything to Boston in response to this, they will have an army at the exit, ready to invade our world.” Hawk said.
“And they won’t be able to get out of here until just before the Rift closes,” Em said. “Which will kill everybody inside.”
“Do you think they actually want to invade Earth? The Gods?” Henry said.
“I think they’re fucking psychotic.” Em said. Thought for a minute, in the dim, warm glow of the Archon’s light. “I think they want to go home. I think there’s a part of them that’s as disgusted by all this as we are. But they’d want to control their homecoming. They’ll want the same comfort, the same control, the same power they have in the Rift.”
Hawk was already shaking her head. “They’re not going to have that. If their power is based on the Glass energy, the only way to keep that going—”
“Is to manifest Glass outside of a Rift…and I’d go as far as to say outside a Rift’s field of influence.” Henry said.
“Or else, just open another Rift when this one closes.” Kaiser Willheim said. Finally, he knelt in the mossy dirt with the rest of them. “It’s what I’d do. No point in trying to milk this one for what it’s worth. Just make a Prism, plop it down wherever. If you can make coldlight work, you wouldn’t even need a focused laser. Power on command.”
“Combine that with their abilities in here…if the full Pantheon chooses to to assault the rift, I don’t think we’d be able to stop them. Not without also wiping out most of Boston.” Hawk drew her legs up against herself.
“There is,” the Archon said, “A sixth variable. You have our four, ruled by Nasheth. You have the Shadowmaster, who is ruled by no-one. But if my God is alive—”
“We don’t know where Edgar Studdard is.” Hawk said, her eyes growing wide. “Or what he wants as an Archetype. Or if he could even survive outside of an Event.” Hawk said. She was coming up with all kinds of wonderful, horrible new facts to consider. Because that would mean that the Shadow, and whatever was left of Alex (she didn’t dare think too hopeful; it hurt too much) couldn’t survive outside an Event, either.
“That’d be kind of good news. One fewer thing to worry about.”
“Yes. Especially because Edgar will attempt to find Naomi.” Kaiser said. “He’s a lot of things. A foul-mouthed old man, someone I’ve wronged…probably more of a lion of industry than me, if I were honest. But the one thing he is, no question? He’s a family man. And the only family he’s got left is Naomi…and.”
“And?” Hawk said.
“There’s one more estranged kid. More estranged from Naomi than Edgar. Taylor. Goes by Tay. I don’t know her real well. When the estrangement happened, Naomi started acting like Tay didn’t exist, Edgar drank more, Amelie was…well, she was dying, not as fast then but they knew she was on the way out by then. I’d say part of what drove Ed to suicide was how he lost Taylor, and got so wrapped up in losing her that he wasted the time he had left with Amelie.”
“Which gives both Naomi and Edgar a reason to get topside, on top of power hungry nonsense. Their last kid is up there, somewhere.” Em said.
“Well. We’re not solving it tonight,” Kaiser said. “We gotta get up there to do anything.”
But that didn’t make Hawk feel any better. She laid down on her hummock, watched the Archon’s coldlight settle down amidst the moss, and she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She only felt the passage of time. It was rough-tongued, sharp-edged, and she was strapped down to it. It was going to flay her alive if she didn’t get up, didn’t start moving. She knew in her head that Kaiser was right, and that she badly, badly needed sleep. But she kept seeing the Shadowmaster, Alex’s face and voice and wit, alien hands, alien eyes, alien emotions when he looked at her. She kept seeing the line of people turned to trees, their bodies distorted into branch shape, leaf shape. She kept feeling the heat of Argon’s captured fire.
So she got up. Henry Dyson was keeping watch. She managed to talk her way out of his concerns, and she stepped out into the darkness alone. It was her choice, and she could always return to the light in the clearing, and that made the blackness in this great beyond something less fearful…though she wasn’t slamming her way through the woods. She moved slow and soft, creeping and listening, until she felt like she was out of earshot of the others.
And then she let herself cry.