“Well. How can I get back to the Geode. Back—” Hawk turned around, looking for the spire that had brought her down here. But there wasn’t one great jutting spire of milk-colored crystal lancing away from the so-called Temple. There were ten of them, and The Temple existed precisely where each of the ten spires met. Each one of them was the size of a storm drain, as thick across as Hawk was tall, or thicker. They were faceted like Quartz, only she counted seven sides, not six. All ten reached for the ceiling, terminating each in a geode. “Jesus,” she breathed. “They must go on for miles.”

“I do not know miles,” Said the Archon. “But I do agree. They do go very high. It is said, in fact, that they outrun time itself.”

“But which one is the right one?” She said.

“There is a right one? I believe they are simply crystals, drunk on the light from the Temple.” He continued to dig.

An idea hit her, strong as a bus. “Archon,” She said, softly. “Does the Light ever…go out?”

“You speak of the Greater Dark? Well, you are a foreigner. Are you from a country up there? In the land of Gods?” he was suddenly busy over a flower bed, digging into the soft loamy soil with a modified hoe. “I can see no other place that would not know the Greater Dark, or at least know the fear that keeps its name unspoken.”

It wasn’t drawing light from the Temple, she thought. It was light, coming in from the Sun, Earthside. The great hole in Boston was admitting this light, and it filtered down through Geode and crystal.

“What about…when there was no crystal at all?” She said. The military had reported that the Rift had gotten blocked up, very suddenly.

His hands stilled on the grasses. He was quite for quite some time. Then he said, “Yes. Once the Light did come in, and every Greater Dark occurred when the Light ebbed on its own; there has never been a Greater Dark with a Nexus in place. Fortunately, we are not likely to have a time of Greater Dark for some years hence.”

“And when the crystals did come?” She asked.

“What light we receive now is muted. We displease the Gods, we are told, because we did not stand strong against the Shadow when time demanded it. The Shadow struck the sky. These crystals are his plague.”

“But your temple is built on them.” She said.

“Shadow touched the Temple. What is here, is his doing, save for what we mortal hands have set right. We cannot tear down Shadow’s crystals. We cannot reach once more for the unbroken Light to shine. So our crops starve for light and those in the outer courts of our world have no light at all. One and all curse the Shadow’s touch. Otherwise we could go straight from here to the Gods’ own country, if only we knew how to fly.”

Hawk, parsing all that information for things that weren’t mythology, fixed on the one thing she could understand. “It’s not where Gods are from. Just…people, really. Like me or you.” She kept looking up. There were other crystal outcroppings like the six geodes. They were spaced randomly across what should be a truly massive cavernous ceiling. Behind one of them—one of the ten, she supposed—were her friends, and the military, and their goddamned drill. It all might as well be back in Sedona.

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“Ah,” the Archon said, and worked silently for a few moments. He pulled up a few pale-leafed weeds. “Star-shot is all through here. Forgive me, there isn’t a proper word for it in the ancient tongue. It’s these.” And he held up the plant in question. It had silvery leaves and small flowers like drops of violet blood. “They’re not a danger to anything but onions and vech-leaf, but I eat quite a bit of both.”

She read this, correctly, as If you’re going to ask questions, try being useful, and knelt down beside the nearest flowerbed. She recognized a lot of the star-shot, which did look a little bit like purple-tinted buckshot across the otherwise silver-veiled flowers. Its leaves came in little balls. “You live alone?” She said.

“I am Archon of the Master of Light,” came the answer.

“I don’t know what that means,” Hawk reminded him, gently.

“Well…how can you not?” The Archon said. But not with confusion. It came with true delight, as if he were glad for her ignorance. “Are not the Gods everywhere? Do they not dictate and organize as they see fit all things between the sky and the ground?” He gestured up at the cavernous ceiling overhead, and the moss-covered ground at their feet. “Does one single blade of grass perish without their regard? Please. Tell me such a place exists.”

She decided this was a mine field and left it alone. “We don’t have Gods. What does it mean to be Archon?”

This shocked him. “No gods?” He dropped his tool.

“Well…I mean we have people who believe in Gods, who will very much insist their God is real, but they don’t, like…walk around and say hello. Most of us think they aren’t real.”

“Well, Gods cannot be expected to wander around with mortals. They are merciful, and stay in their Houses away from us. But no one who has met a god can doubt that they exist.”

She paused. “Have you…met your gods?”

“Yes,” he said, and went back to digging. A man pulling weeds in his elaborate, luxurious get-up was certainly unusual. “Most people have. At least, they’ve seen them at some point. Tall and noble and unifying, they are. A vision, I am told, and the answer of your every desire. And we Archons know our Gods face to face. We have seen them, and hold vigil for them in their absence. But for us, they are never absent, save for me and mine.”

“Save for you?” Hawk said.

“I am a most fortunate Archon, for you see I have learned the benefits and structures of faith. Mine is the loneliest road. Unlike the other Gods, mine is dead.” He said this simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Dead?” He’d said that a few times before.

“Yes,” They said, and continued hoeing their garden.

She picked at the flower bed a bit more, pulling individual blooms from their stems and looking at them. The deep purple flowers seemed to pulsate, and the patterning of color on each petal reminded Hawk of octopi photophores. She picked four of them and laid them out end to end before she worked out what was bothering her…and what her next question ought to be.

Where is Alex?

“I don’t suppose you have any legends of someone…I don’t know. Tied up in a box or something. Someone…” She tried to remember the Archetypical Ape from the Bronx Zoo Glass Event…and to her horror, she failed. It had been the most wonderful and terrifying thing she’d ever seen, enormous power but gentled to the hand of something that loved…oh, everything. Those sweet memories, faded, seemed as far from here as a crater on the moon. And the point of her question throbbed with her pulse. Alex. Alex. Alex.

A pause in his hoeing. “A box? Well, not that I can immediately recall.”

“What about imprisonment in…in…in a tower of glass?” She said, wildly. “Or a box of glass, or a room made entirely of crystal. One person, trapped in crystal. Are there no legends like it?”

“There is a legend about the imprisonment of Shadow, but that is one of the older stories. Not one we should much concern ourselves with.”

“Of Shadow?” She said, lightly.

He stilled completely. “Yes.” He set the hoe to one side and turned back to her, his mask impenetrable and white as prayer. “Let me show you.”

And he took her hand.