"… a rare sight indeed, and one that will have widespread impact …" the Docent commented, addressing the congregation of bewildered adolescents.
"But in any case, your good fortune to witness something so compelling. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, to be sure!
"It behooves me, however, to remind you that no matter the outcome today, all of you regardless of distinction have the latent ability to contribute something to the Democracy. Every life is precious, every ability is treasured.
"But my words are grown stale; it is enough for you to see it and decide for yourselves what your contribution will be. We must continue.
"Betelgeuse Sakar."
He began moving before the Docent finished pronouncing his name. After Chrysilla's showing, and the shock, elation and envy it had engendered, he had no more room in his heart for anxiety.
Bronze… no, Silver…
For the final time, enough.
The cut and thrust of the day had left him feeling drained, poking holes in his defenses through which all sorts of wild thoughts percolated. As his father had taught him, human beings had limited bandwidth. This was why it was so important to maintain a serene heart; it was a strategy to conserve bandwidth, so that one's mental energy might be better spent on the people and things that were most important.
If he underwent the Analysis now…
There was no choice and no prospect for delay. With a final burst of mental energy, he mustered all of his fortitude and emptied his mind of all things.
Who cared if it was Golden or Silver or Bronze, who cared if it was anything?
Even Ash…
His train of thought screeched to a halt. His body threatened to freeze mid-step.
No stopping now.
Even if he was an Ash grade, even then, he could handle it. Come what may.
Serenity did not come to him naturally. It never had. But his affinity for it had been decided long before his birth. He was both Edomite and his father's son. What else could a son want more than live up to the prideful picture his parents had painted of him?
Rethink that. That seemed flawed. What will pride count for, at the end of all things?
The pain of the heart was its curse to be free and unbound by God's strictures. If unbound by God, from whence could Man hope to bridle it? Now without mooring it seeks past an infinity of images for one true thing, and yet will not be convinced by anything it calls true. Over the millennia had things come and gone enough times to learn that the imperative for existence was its disappearance.
By the time the helmet kissed his forehead, he had pushed away all immediate attachments.
By the time the scepter graced his palm, he had girded his mind with a will to banish all thought and destroy all distraction—
The sun had faded. The air choked on its own radiance. He knew what was coming because he felt it in his heart, and long before he saw it, he was free.
He hadn't realized that his hands were free.
The Incunabulum fell into his palms. It was lighter than expected, the spine fitting snugly between thumb and forefinger. It pulsated with a curious power and billowed vehemently under the stagnant gaze of the ancient Hierarch.
There it was, the first page, and his Increment, which read:
Will-to-Power.
His first reaction was one of curiosity.
And then, the dawning realization that what he held in his hand was an Ash Incunabulum, mud-brown in color and scaly to the touch.
He widened his eyes.
----------------------------------------
When he was twelve, Tabitha had told him that he was a very introverted boy. That must have been when he started becoming louder and more boisterous. The pointless fulminations would 'prove his extroversion' to all; but really it was more important to prove it to her.
Which was why he did that stupid thing, what with trying to find the Red Ginseng.
He'd first read about it at the Edom-Zeta library fourteen hours thereabouts from the start of the rain. Two hours of holding the bear stance under cloud and mizzle and Elder Bennett's lazy eye and he had had enough. He had gone to the Horn then come from the Horn, with poached rice and sourmilk sitting in his stomach. He was full and sleepy and flipping through Sinic books because he had not outgrown the belief that he had Sinic in his blood.
That was before he could read the language; but somewhere on that shelf, third from the left and fourth from the top, was a Sinic-to-Common dictionary. And there was the other book it helped him read; on page four-hundred-and-fifty-one, he found the entry for Red Ginseng. It was a symbol of virility, longevity, prosperity and love. It was an old tuber, and it grew on mountains.
In Sinic, Red equaled love and prosperity and many things besides. The things that had been lost in translation were buried in the same state of fitful creativity from which was birthed the Quest; the Red Ginseng, for Tabitha, and Tabitha herself would be just reward to compensate him for his labors.
And when he left the rain had just stopped.
He remembered that the road was arduous and long. He had cut his foot and gored his calf on a stump. He kept going, past the Park Territory and into the wild forest at the foot of the mountain they called Edom. Then it was up the crags, down the ravines, up the ridgelines and all around the circuitous undulations in the trail. Blood clotted, flesh stinging.
Insects with painted eyebrows appeared in the night. He slept in stutters, under the cover of stars and blinking satellites. In his dreams they would be talking pompously, he and Tabitha; now came the cold with bitter afterthoughts breaking his sleep into furry, peristaltic things traversing the dyke his body made athwart the dirt. There was an earthy embrace he'd mistaken for hers, but in his consciousness he thought the yearning a strange tang.
It was two days before he dared to imagine he had come very far. The road had plateaued, the wet had gone; the sun beat its cruel drum to the tune of the cicadas.
He saw the great granite jut browning under the sun. Behind stretched the gay lushness of the wild forest and the symmetrical tessellations of the Park Territory. Beyond that was Edom-Zeta, stuck in the middle by the meaty protuberance of a stone pavilion.
He could, from this vantage, see the main road running through Edom-Zeta and stretching all the way into the dark and sintered heart of the mines. At that hour, the roads were clogged and atherosclerotic, as brimming trucks rumbled coal onto the interstate.
And that was his house, beside the electricity pylon. The eaves were curved like shucks and reflected the sunlight at an odd angle.
There was the stem and leaves which looked very like the Sinic-captioned image, sticking out from a patch of soil at the end of the outcropping and wilting under the power of the sun.
When he had reached the edge, he started climbing. Palm, foot, palm, foot.
He was near to the top. The wind was running though his hair. He had laughed and made the mistake of looking down. Vertigo pierced his asshole and ran up through his colon. Needles pricked his soles. His grip tightened onto the ebon granite.
He stayed there for a long time, daring neither to ascend or descend. He was trapped. The coal trucks left their shadows behind them as the noontide approached.
It must have been hours until the clouds turned dark. When the splotches of gray turned black he felt it a certainty that it was going to rain—and then the rock was going to become slippery, and he would fall to his death.
The promise of rain went unanswered.
A sound like an earthquake split the heavens, and he remembered the underbelly of a vast armored Leviathan revealing itself. It was a machine wider than Edom-Zeta, broader than the Park Territory, larger perhaps than the coal mines which sustained all of the surrounding villages. The rocky outcropping juddered, as if Edom itself were shaking in fear.
The Leviathan's shadow yawned through the land. It passed over his head; and suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon, it was night. The dark clarified to his vision the orange under-bellied smog spiraling helix-like from yonder. The forge-fires the children called Earthy-Twinkle, now bright now dim, like fireflies breathing at twilight.
All things come and go. The darkness passed away into a cloudless cerulean firmament.
His quest felt very small indeed, in the face of such a thing. With a heart plunged into silence he climbed up to the peak and dug the Red Ginseng from its patch of soil, silken strands and all.
It was funny, the feeling. Nothing of triumph or elation. Nothing at all.
And then he began the long trek home, prize in hand, sullenness in his chest; unto the gloaming, unto the night, unto the swollen buzzing of chitinous insects, unto the purple dewy dawn, he walked without stopping, brooding about nothing.
He had come to the boundary line between wild forest and manicured purlieu when he saw her.
Chrysilla's face was dirty and swollen. She was hobbling pitifully along because she had twisted her foot. She hollered at me. She cursed. Something about parents and irresponsibility.
Why did you come here and how did you know, he had asked.
Everybody knows. The rangers are combing every inch of this place, right from the entrance. But maybe I'm the only one who knows you're crazy enough to go to the forest, she had huffed.
Here, take this, he said, stuffing into her hand the thing he had worked so hard to find.
It means love or something like that.
And she blushed the brightest shade of pink.
But inside, he felt confused, as if he had fallen into a bottomless well of pitch that doused everything in streaks of gray.
The Red Ginseng and Tabitha—at that point, could he say without dissimulation that either of them really mattered?
----------------------------------------
He couldn't remember much of the rest of the Analysis. Everything after the Ash Incunabulum was mashed together into one indistinct lump.
There were feelings and then there were feelings.
The hall was emptying itself when Betelgeuse' spirit returned to him. Edith, with the messy hair, was poking him in the shoulder.
"What?" he snapped.
She yelped and stepped back, clutching to her chest the ashen-colored tome.
"T-the others are leaving. They told us to go outside," she managed.
He turned around. Indeed, the last of the participants were sauntering through the grand double-doors. The Docent and the Sexton were nowhere to be seen.
"They told us to gather outside, I mean, us Ash grades. The rest are going home."
Us Ash grades.
"What about us?" He asked listlessly, raising his Incunabulum to his face absentmindedly. He inspected it's surface closely, running his eyes over the scaly texture. Bumps and micro-hillocks ran its length and breadth. Its color was a muted muddy brown.
This was an Ash Incunabulum.
Betelgeuse thought that he would have felt worse about it.
"The D-Docent said we aren't permitted to go home yet."
Well.
It was likely that Chrys was also going to stay for the foreseeable future, what with being the holder of a Golden Incunabulum.
Wonder if she would be disappointed to know I'm an Ash grade. Not that it can be helped.
"Okay, then lead the way!" Betelgeuse burst into a wide grin.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
"O-okay… I mean, it's just outside…"
"Lead the way anyhoo."
They exited into a lukewarm afternoon, the air a moist membrane which caressed Betelgeuse' cheeks. A lazy drift of white cloud covered the sky as far as the eye could see.
Betelgeuse could see streaks of water running slowly down the sides of the tempered glass bridge, draining straight onto the concrete platform before the Library. Darkened patches pooled outward from the interface between tempered glass and concrete, as the liquid absorbed into the porous surface.
The first of the LSVs were leaving, Betelgeuse noted. This one had a lion emblazoned across its side. That one, an ourobouros curled around a saber. And another, an open book inscribed with the words: "AUTEM SUPER OMNIA".
There, the symbol of Edom, the red triangle tipped with the golden finial. The Hereford symbol, Elder Bennett had called it. The Edomite symbol for eternal endurance.
"It's leaving," Edith said, and Betelgeuse detected sadness in her tone.
"So it is," he replied, for no other reason than to say something.
One by one, they lifted into the sky, their hums crescendoing; then they exploded with speed, piercing through the Troposphere into the Stratosphere, then through the Mesosphere and Thermosphere and into the Exosphere—and then, nothingness.
Betelgeuse turned his gaze to the despondent crowd, observing them yearn after their kinsmen. He estimated that there were about a hundred of them, all told.
'The Ash Incunabula are legion,' he thought, chuckling to himself.
Minutes passed.
A severe man, tall and bunched with muscle, stalked into the midst of the Ash grades. He was dressed in black, his garb military, and a plated vest was strapped across his chest; he appeared suddenly, like a ghost, materializing out of an entrance that had surreptitiously appeared athwart a pillar.
"Up, all of you!" he barked, the force of his aggression showering spittle in every direction. His tone was harsh and brooked no defiance.
The Ash grades jostled to their feet, roused from their emotional stupor by the sudden surge of energy.
"I," he intoned, "am Instructor Zephyr. Remember that name well—carve it into your chest, if you have to. It is my pleasure to serve as your superior for the short time we will know each other. Now, cadets! Attention! Three lines, at the double!"
Three line formed quickly under the draconian gaze of the Instructor. Betelgeuse himself waited until the lines were mostly formed before sauntering forward to join in with the others. Edith followed closely behind, stuck to his back like a piece of gum.
"There!" the Instructor barked, pointing to the entrance of the pillar not more than 100 paces away from the front man. "Incs in your left! March! In time!"
One step. Two step.
Plucked as they were from so many different locales, Betelgeuse thought it no surprise that their arm swings and footsteps tangled confusedly together. Edith smashed into his back, pushing Betelgeuse up and into the heel of the masculine figure before him, causing the latter to stumble and drop his Incunabulum. Somewhere down the line, someone fell, and the formation came apart.
"Humiliating! Up, Ash-fucks! Get back there and go it again!" Instructor Zephyr roared.
Everything became confused as the cadets stumbled over themselves to try to get back to their original position. Betelgeuse now found himself somewhere in the middle of the formation, with Edith right behind him.
'She really is sticking to me,' he thought.
"Move! Move! Hurry up! Quickly!"
It took perhaps three more tries before they managed to reach the pillar (the first and second try mixing together so thoroughly with Instructor Zephyr's concentrated apoplexy that no one could say when the first ended and the second began). By now everyone, including Betelgeuse, was breathing heavily. Their cadet-suits were beginning to soak with sweat.
The entrance at the side of the pillar opened into a large metal elevator. Instructor Zephyr shouted the Ash grades in, all one hundred-odd of them, and they squeezed against each other until all of them were packed in like sardines.
Betelgeuse was scrunched up against Edith, who appeared to be sobbing softly. All around them were bodies, sweaty and pressed against them. It was difficult to breath.
He took Edith's incunabulum and put it up against his own.
"More comfortable," Betelgeuse whispered to Edith, who didn't seem composed enough to reply.
The edge of someone's Incunabulum was digging uncomfortably into his back. Someone pushed on the left and the edge dug in deeper. More people were stuffed into the lift and it looked to Betelgeuse as if the Instructor was pushing them in with the sole of his boots.
By this point, Betelgeuse and Edith were all but crushed into each other.
Several aggressive kicks and pained yelps later, the pushing stopped.
"We will meet downstairs! Remember—three lines! Anyone caught clowning around will be punished!" Instructor Zephyr barked.
Then the lift-door closed. Silence, finally, and then the humming of a great machine.
"I was wondering when he would shut up," a male voice offered. Chuckles all around.
"He speaks only in capitals," agreed a squeaky female voice. A chorus of hear-hears.
"Ye gods is it dank in here," the youth behind Betelgeuse grouched boyishly. Betelgeuse fought the urge to tell him to shift his goddamn Inc.
"No gods, only Democracy!" returned someone at the far end of the lift.
"Ooga-booga! Stop clowning around, Ash-fucks!" someone else aped.
The banter died down, leaving the Ash grades alone with the odor of unwashed bodies.
Betelgeuse felt his stomach turn, as if the lift were changing directions. The gravity was all off, he decided.
"We're not going straight down," he said out loud. Edith clutched at him.
"Maybe… maybe it's dinner?" came a peculiarly mannish female voice.
'Unlikely,' everyone thought.
Then, silence again, as the heat and humidity climbed to fever pitch.
It felt like hours before the steel cage ground to a halt. Or maybe minutes. It was impossible to tell—they had been stripped of their timepieces by the personnel stationed in the LSVs.
The steel floor vibrated through Betelgeuse' leg, causing it to shudder uncontrollably.
Finally, the doors rumbled open. Cool air rushed into the space. All around him, people were raising their faces and gulping air greedily.
"Ah… thank God!"
"No God, only Democracy!"
Betelgeuse rolled his eyes.
Slowly, steadily, the pressure lessened as the Ash grades stumbled outward, until he felt like he was in control of his own body once more. Steadying himself, Betelgeuse straightened his body and glanced downward at Edith. She looked ready to faint.
"Quickly, let's get out of here," Betelgeuse whispered, taking her wrist and almost dragging her out. Why did he even care? It was difficult to imagine that she was going to survive whatever else Instructor Zephyr had in mind for them.
Maybe it was because she was a fellow Edomite.
Betelgeuse stepped outward into a blanket of sourceless white light and let go of Edith's wrist, letting her stumble onto the frigid, white floor. The climate-controlled air was cold and refreshing, washing some of the stink from his nostrils.
"Hurry up! Get out!" someone yelled from deep inside the lift. Everywhere, Ash grades were hyperventilating, stretching or whispering amongst themselves.
Betelgeuse held himself upright, unwilling to succumb to his exhaustion. He took pains to purge his expression of all weakness. He glanced around, taking stock of their new environment.
It was a large space, this, perhaps half the size of the hall of the Library. The place was spartan, cold and empty (save for the Ash grades). In the middle of the space was a rectangle outlined with broad, red tape. Some portals lay closed at the far end.
Betelgeuse looked closer and realized that the ground within the rectangular outline was heavily scarred, as though gouged by some sort of sharp instrument.
An entrance seemed to materialize at the far end of the space. Knowing what was about to come to pass, Betelgeuse turned and walked back to Edith, taking her wrist and raising her up to stand in front of him.
"He's here," Betelgeuse whispered, "look sharp."
"Is this indiscipline I see, Ash-fucks? Mother of God, I've seen smarter earthworms than you lot! Three lines, I said, three lines! Where are my lines?!"
Instructor Zephyr made his entrance in much the way Betelgeuse expected, his voice booming through the space like peals of thunder.
"You!" Instructor Zephyr, suddenly beside Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse started. Edith let out a muffled scream.
What? How did he get here so fast? He was more than a hundred paces awa–
"All lined up, while you fellow Ash-fuck-friends are struggling? Are you a suck-up? Do you suck dick?"
"I was merely following instructions," Betelgeuse managed, his nerves settling into calmness even before he could think to enforce his serenity.
"You are, are you? Well color my shit-laced ass-crack brown, we have a real soldier here! Answer my question, soldier, do you suck dick?"
"No," he replied simply.
"Exquisite! Now put your tongue on the floor until the rest of these dumb-fucks get in line!"
"I—"
"I said DOWN BOY!"
"Sir, I—"
The next moment Betelgeuse' world exploded into oranges and reds, as he doubled over coughing. He gripped his Incunabulum tightly. It was like he had been kicked in the gut. He glanced up, saliva threading from his lip—Instructor Zephyr returned a cold stare.
Like compound eyes.
Betelgeuse realized that he hadn't seen Zephyr move, not even a hair's-breadth worth of movement. The Instructor carried with him an aura of supreme violence, making the outcome of further insubordination clear.
Hate it though he may, now was not the time for pride. He was weak, and the weak deserved only to obey.
He placed his Incunabulum beside him and lay himself down prone, opening his mouth wide and touching as much of the surface of his tongue to the ground as he could.
Obedience for now. Zephyr obviously has some kind of physical-enhancement-type Inc, maybe a White. It is also possible he has a Hollow. I must observe him closely.
Instructor Zephyr had already found some other poor sod to pick on.
"Why are you breathing so hard, cunt? Did you seriously get tired from a single fucking lift ride? Well fuck me stupid, you are one fat fuck!"
From the periphery of his vision, Betelgeuse could just make out a masculine form lying supine four or five paces away.
"Sorry… wheeze… just-need-a-moment…—"
"Well here I was thinking you'd gone and decided all by yourself not to join my beautiful lines! What is your name, son?"
"I… wheeze… it's Gombrovich…"
"Well let me tell you something interesting, son—did you know that pigs eat shit? Since you're so fucking fat you could pass for a goddamn swine I'm guessing you eat shit too! Goddammit Shit-Eater. Get your ass in line, Shit-Eater!"
"... wheeze… yes!"
"That's yes sir to you, Shit-Eater! Am I clear?!"
"Yes sir!" Gombrovich wheezed, struggling to his feet and stumbling out of the edge of Betelgeuse' vision.
The others hurried to their positions, intimidated by Instructor Zephyr's unlimited capacity for abuse, perhaps also enthused by the example he had made of Betelgeuse.
The ground was cold and bore the slightest hint of saltiness.
Shuffling sounds. Betelgeuse could hear a tell-tale sniffle come from somewhere above him.
Seconds later, all movement ceased.
"Back on your feet, dog!" the Instructor barked.
Thinking that there was no one else he could be referring to, Betelgeuse retrieved his Incunabulum with his left hand and raised himself upright, his movements deliberate and mechanical. He was weighing the likelihood that the Instructor was a Hollow against the possibility that he was a White.
Zephyr was beside him again.
'Again with that blasted suddenness,' he thought. This time however, the slightest rush of air caressed the top of his skin.
He moves fast. The hit earlier was more movement and less physical strength. I'd guess he was a dexterity-type.
Eyes unblinking and insectoid inspected him closely, running over his pores, groping for chinks in his armor, searching for any traces of insubordination. Betelgeuse thought that he could feel the Instructor's turbid breath down the nape of his neck. A wispy strand of anxiety wormed its way into the interstice between his thoughts; pincering it with his mind, Betelgeuse purged it with extreme prejudice.
"You have some balls on you, Dog Balls!"
The pressure lifted. The Instructor turned his attention elsewhere. Betelgeuse permitted himself a swallow, saltiness and all.
"Incs in both hands!"
Betelgeuse raised his tome. It was difficult not to feel a little attached to it, for no other reason than that it was his.
"Insert into front pouch!"
All cadet-suits came equipped with a front-facing multi-purpose square pouch secured with velcro and typically used to hold a cadet's Incunabulum. The cadets exploded into activity, fumbling and shuffling, stuffing their Incunabulum into the pouch sideways, rightway-up or upside-down.
The fitful movement died down as fast as it had arisen.
"Listen up! Because of the glut of clowns within your batch, we are running on badly."
The Instructor walked down the row, eyeing the cadets closely.
"Look there—" the Instructor pointed to the rectangular area "—that is my arena. You are to read and absorb your Increment thoroughly, following which you will catwalk to my arena and show me what you've got."
"And seeing as you little shits have no idea what you're in for, let me do you one good and apprise you of the circumstances.
"Take care that you place the first rule of loyalty within its proper context. Everything civilized and good in Man–"
'–has come from a soil seeded by the Democracy,' Betelgeuse finished silently, the morning mantra fresh as the day he first recited it a decade ago.
"–and the time has come, in this hour of your adulthood, to contribute what little you can to Man's eternal expedition. It is right that you, having been given life by your forebears, should also lay down your life for all who will come after you. The Democracy gives, the Democracy taketh away. Your life was a privilege; this is your duty.
"There is no injustice in having been chosen by the Ash Incunabula. It is now you, and you are now it. As Ash, you must protect this your greatest weapon against Man's enemies. If it is damaged, then you will be crippled. If it is destroyed, so will you be destroyed with it.
"The Democracy has found it imperative to familiarize you to the exigencies of combat, to increase your ability to function and survive on the battlefield. The objective of the arena is twofold: firstly, to teach battlesense, and secondly, to facilitate further Etchings."
Reaching back into his memory, Betelgeuse consolidated all he knew about Etchings: colloquially termed 'writings', it was common knowledge that Etchings could manifest in either one of two ways. Firstly, by process of spontaneous enlightenment, and secondly, in situations of heavy stress. Etchings were ancillary to the immutable Increment, and usually extended the power of an Incunabula holder (in rare instances, Etchings could manifest downgrades). The quality of an Etching depended on the immediate circumstances causing its manifestation: the stress experienced by a holder, her subconscious inclinations and/or the resolutions and intentions within her heart.
"As cadets, you will have no sleep. You will fight and you will eat and then you will fight again. It is your good luck that, owing to certain circumstances, our little retreat has been shortened from three months to three days.
"At the end of these three days your batch, designation 247-B, will be transported approximately 400 light years to star system P-Delta-Sigma-70 and stationed on carbon exoplanet 541-B, designation Desert, for the foreseeable future.
It suddenly dawned on Betelgeuse that he wasn't going home anytime soon.
"There will be no questions. Your training starts now!"