Before them, in the cavern, lay a city in miniature. The buildings were stone, the roads were straight, and the streetlights made from slender iron rods topped with glowing crystals dotted them at regular intervals, brightening up the dark cavern enough to a twilight level and giving them just enough light to both navigate and appreciate the city.
Benjamin was glad that they did. The city was a tiny work of art. Everything was straight lines, and only at the edges of the cavern, where precision was forced to give way to the shapes that nature demanded, did the streets curve and twist in artful patterns. There, the buildings spiraled as they climbed up the walls of the cavern and the stalactites and stalagmites to create tiny high rises that towered above the orderly city.
Lasthome was by far the most aesthetic thing that they’d seen since they’d come to Aavernia, and perhaps the most modern, too. Though it was much less stunning than the Arboreal Throne’s tree castle, in Benjamin’s eyes, the fact that he could see just how much hard work went into it rather than springing up from magic left him stunned as he studied the details.
For all he knew, the tree had been grown in a single day, but just looking at the tiny town that lay spread out before them, he could see that it would take lifetimes to produce, and there was a certain grandeur in that as well, even if the result was a bit more humble.
To his eyes, the city appeared to be carved from a single piece of stone. Oh, there were seams in every building and every street that showed the efforts involved, but they were so small that he knew the whole effort had been made with great planning and precision.
That alone was enough to give him hope that these people might be able to help him with what he needed after all. He’d studied Feldsparia’s crossbow with an eye toward understanding how sophisticated their tools might be, but the fact that each light post they passed was made of delicately twisted wrought iron answered all his questions in that regard.
“It’s kinda dead in here,” Raja said quietly, breaking Benjamin’s train of thought to realize the same thing. “Where is everyone?”
“Lasthome is…” Feldspaira trailed off. “Well, you will meet the others, and we will tell you more then. It is time for dinner now, anyway. Everyone will be gathered in the great hall.”
Communal dining for a city of hundreds or thousands seemed like a strange choice. Benjamin but he said nothing, though. Instead, he looked around at the city and took his friend's words to heart.
The whole place really is deserted, isn’t it? He thought to himself.
No matter what their guide might say, it was clear that this city didn’t have as many inhabitants as it should. The stone streets were barely rutted, and in many places, it was clear that the dust was settling thickly. Lasthome might have been a beautiful city once, but now it was something closer to a tomb or a memorial.
A few minutes later, they walked inside the great hall. It was the only building large enough that they’d be able to enter it easily. Inside, he was distracted for a moment by the gilt ceilings and the delicate inlays in the wall panels that seemed to be detailing important moments in the past. Benjamin would have loved to study them, but when he noticed just how few of the stone children were there to greet them, he lost all interest in the minor details.
Besides the guard, there were only six of the stone children here, and that gave Benjamin a bad feeling. He stayed quiet as Feldsparia went around the room and introduced everyone, noting the rock-themed names seemed daily universal, and when the time came, he introduced himself and his friends.
Finally, when he could take no more, he asked, “So how many more of you are standing watch or working the forges?”
“This is everyone,” Phosdan said sadly. Though he looked no older than the rest of them, the way he sat in the middle, in a place of honor, had marked him as the leader in Benjamin’s eyes from the moment they’d gotten close. “When you entered, we summoned everyone to greet you properly, so the mines and forges are currently closed.”
“But the city,” Benjamin asked. “There were so many houses, so much effort… How can it—”
“Was there a great battle?” Matt asked. “If we can lend you a hand against any enemies you might have, we would be glad to do so.”
“No battle,” Phosdan shook his head. “Not in a long, long time. We have made peace with the worms below, andwe have the Throne of the Sky Sea’s protection. So, none of her servants from above would dare to attack. No, the only enemies we currently face are time and boredom, I’m afraid.”
“Could you explain that one?” Benjamin asked, but the boy shook his head. “Not right now. It is time for dinner, and all things must be done in the proper order. Such sad talk can wait until there are no appetites to spoil.”
The food that was brought out for the four of them was a simple stew of meat and root vegetables. Feldsparia apologized. “It is rare we have guests of flesh. You will forgive us for being out of practice.”
The food was fine. It was plain and a touch over-salted but hearty and filling. It was better than what they had around the campfire most nights, so it was nothing to complain about. The stone children’s food, on the other hand, was… strange. They feasted on nuggets of colorful ores and small chunks of crystal mixed with finely ground rock.
It was a surreal experience watching them clear their plates, and Benjamin tried not to stare at the sight while he focused on the conversation. Several times, Matt or Emma tried to steer the discussion to the empty city, and each time, their hosts turned it back to the war.
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Other than some token interest in what Benjamin wanted to create, all they seemed to be interested in was how many Rhulvinarians they’d killed. Indeed, they seemed more than a little disappointed to find out that they’d been focusing on freeing their slaves as opposed to killing their sorcerers.
“You can’t let a single one of those monsters live!” Granitia yelled. Despite the fact that she had a high, childish voice, her words, and her fervor reminded him more than a little of Emma.
“We won’t,” Benjamin said, choosing his words carefully, “But the priority has to be on saving who can be saved.”
Several of the stone children looked at him crossly, but before they could disagree, Matt chimed in, “Every person we save is another soldier in the war against a common enemy.”
That at least everyone agreed with, but the growing argument was only set aside when Phosdan finally weighed in. “We used to believe that, too, that every life was worth saving. We thought each creature was a beautiful, unique gemstone. That was why we sheltered the Rhulvinarians, and we were wrong to do so.”
There was silence after that as everyone reflected on the words, and it was almost half a minute before Benjamin said, “We heard that they pretended to be refugees and that they did terrible things and we’re sorry about that. The Rhulvinarians took us from our homes, too. So we want—”
“If they had just taken us from our homes, we could yet build a life without them, but that will never happen. Do you know why that is?” the boy asked, fixing him with those sad stone eyes.
“Because they still control the world island?” Benjamin guessed, unsure.
“I will take them to the shrine and show them what they must know,” the stone boy said as he stood, the crumbs of rock on his plate forgotten. “The plans and schematics can wait until tomorrow. Any of you are free to accompany us but not required to.”
As Benjamin and his friends followed Phosdan out of the hall, no one joined them. Benjamin knew that would be the outcome as soon as he saw the sadness carved into the faces of the other stone people. They walked in silence, but only for a short time before Phosdan began to share his story with them.
Out of the seven children that they met, he was the oldest, at nearly three hundred years of age. Out of all of them, he was the only one who had a clear memory of how the world worked before those first Sorcerers split through a crack in reality and found their way to another world.
“There were over 40,000 of us then,” he explained. “Theoretically, there should have been 44,444 because that was the number that mother had decreed, but there were almost always fewer than that. Accidents happen after all, and even stone men can be broken in battle, and sometimes our mother had other things to do besides carve new children to replace us.”
“She… carved you?” Raja asked, “Forty thousand of you? Like one at a time?”
The Jade Throne was a woman of infinite patience and kindness,” he said, almost choking up. “The Arboreal Throne takes the time to plant the seeds, and the Throne of the Sky Sea lets her children rise from the dust all on their own, but our mother made each and every one of us for a specific reason, and now those reasons are as lost as she is.”
“I’m very sorry for that,” Benjamin said. “So, where are the rest of the survivors?” Benjamin asked, not sure what else to say.
“There aren’t any. None that we know of, anyway,” the Stone boy confessed as they approached a large building near the center of town that looked like a mausoleum more than anything else. Only thirteen of us were off the island for any reason when the Summoner Lords rose up and seized it for themselves. We didn’t know that, of course, as we started congregating here. We built this city in the hopes that there would be more survivors, you see. It was planned for 4,444, but we hoped that if we could even get 444, then we could find some sense of normalcy, but, well, you’ll see.
Phosdan held his tongue as they approached the large building, and Benjamin contemplated what it must have been like to build a city for decades, with the near certainty that no one was ever going to fill it. In that sense, the houses and shops that surrounded them weren’t ever intended to be homes. They were tombs for all the ghosts that they couldn’t escape.
He didn’t really understand, though. Not until they reached the shrine. He’d assumed that it would be a place of mourning for their mother, and indeed, the Jade Throne was represented in a single piece of lovingly carved jade almost twice as tall as he was, but there was more to it than that. She looked down sadly, with tears in her eyes, as she gazed down at the ruin that was her world. In her broad arms, there was an island that he could only assume was the world island, but it was covered in the shattered corpses of thousands of individually carved stone children.
It was a terrible attention to detail, and one by one, each of them turned away, unable to bear it. It was only when Benjamin noticed that those same shattered bodies were carved across the walls and the ceiling that Phosdan began to speak. “They spent years growing in strength while they claimed to be looking for another world they could escape to so that they might leave us in peace.”
“They weren’t, though, right?” Raja asked, “They were up to no good?”
“They were not,” the stone child agreed. “We helped them build ever more complicated hardware to further their goals, but in the end, they were studying us to figure out how they could enslave us with their systems, and when they could not, they cast a single spell that shattered everything made of stone for hundreds of miles in a single instant. Just like that, every subject of our mother was dead or maimed in a moment, and there was no one left to save her when they moved on her next.”
“Is it even possible to kill a goddess, or a Throne, or whatever?” Benjamin asked, unsure. “The Arboreal Throne told me she’s lived many lives surely—”
“Death is not as permanent for the natives of our world as it is for yours,” Phosdan told them. “Even all of our dead brothers and sisters, every single one of them awaits us in the stone, but it is her hand that is required to carve them out of it once more. The Jade Throne can be killed, but she will always come back, which is the greatest problem of all.”
This time, Not even Raja was dumb enough to stick his foot in his mouth, and they all stood there waiting for the stone child to get a handle on his emotions before he continued. “She always comes back, and they always kill her again. Over and over and over again. They stripmine her soul for the rare and impossible elements that it contains. It happens every day, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.”
Benjamin’s heart broke at that. He had known that the men and women they fought against were evil, but until now, they’d been a casual, utilitarian evil that saw others as nothing more than resources to be used. This information pushed them well beyond that, though. After this revelation, it would be impossible to see the Rhulvinarians as anything but monsters.