In a little gap between the body of the Fort and its walls curled the outer court. I liked the outer court. Especially at night. Unlike the main Fort, it kept just a bit of itself open to the sky. The gardens ringed it. The walls cradled it. The ground spoke of the comings and goings of the past day. But despite that, silence seeped from the dirt. From the stone. From the sky. Peaceful, in the way of still things.
I liked noise too. But the talk between everyone inside wasn’t an easy noise. Not like the noise that Ronnie and Davian and Whip and Kit and Vin and Maddie and Taja made. There was a little spot between all their noise. That was where I curled. Quiet.
Deep down, underneath words and cries and the beating of hearts, everything was quiet. It was the quiet that lay at the centre of a whirlpool. Mindlessly sucking its surroundings into nothing. The placid eye it all revolved around didn’t care it meant everything.
That was why the outer court felt truer at night than it did in the day. Because the loudness was stripped away. My path took me across the bones of the outer court’s silence. Thinking.
The gardens made me think of Whip. She didn’t like vegetables. Her face would wrinkle like a pig’s anus whenever they entered her mouth. She’d say ‘Ugh,’ and stick out her tongue. No one minded until Vin joined. He didn’t like when we didn’t eat everything. He’d have a big frown on his face. When he’d been with us for a little while, he’d started saying it out loud. I missed Whip. She would talk at me for hours. At the end, she would hobble over to me and say with a big smile, ‘Thanks for listening!’
I leaned down and looked at a stick. There was a bug crawling on it. Some kind of fuzzy centipede. Slowly working its way along the stick. I stared at it for some time.
Ronnie gave me Whip’s big crossbow. Gale and I were making it better. He was teaching me a lot. I talked a lot with him. Gale was a person who needed to talk a lot. Always needed his noise. He was very close to the quiet. We had good talks. We talked about the crossbow again today. It was nearly done.
Sometimes I would hold it and think. No one liked that. It made them sad. Except for Kit, because even when she was sad, she wanted to know more about Whip. And Vin would listen, too. Vin couldn’t listen, anymore. Noise was too weak to stab through his ears. I hoped he would be okay.
The centipede paused at the end of the stick. It wiggled back and forth. Finally, it settled on a path and began crawling down.
I missed Davian. He was the closest in age to me. We’d known each other for a while. The others were young. Vin sometimes wasn’t young, but he didn’t count. Davian moved like me. He was old. Davian liked talking, but we didn’t have to. Ronnie always had to talk. Kit was sometimes frustrated with my quiet. Maddie and Taja were nice, but they didn’t talk to me.
These days, there was a lot of talking. A lot of moving. A lot of noise. I liked noise, but all sounds were lies. All shapes delusion. My thoughts were sometimes in words and sometimes weren’t. They were lies too. Irrelevant. But I was human. We traded in the irrelevant.
So, I liked the noise. But sometimes it all started to stink and I had to go somewhere else. Nothing in the outer courts smelled worse than Kit and her mum, talking behind my back.
“…Show me you’re on my side, birdie,” the older woman was saying.
I watched the centipede squirm away across the dirt. Cold out, for a bug like that.
Kit stumbled forward. I turned to find her eyes boring through the darkness. Like two lanterns. She held her sword in both hands. Its tip shivered.
Before we’d entered the Fort, I’d never really seen Kit scared.
I nodded at her.
She shook slightly. Craned her neck back. “What’s it you want me t’do?”
The woman’s face was patchwork. Separated and bound by thin white scars. Like Tully’s. They ruined the pattern of her face. Made it so you could hardly recognise the thing she wore as laughter. “Boss-man likes yer round cow over there. Nothin’ romantic, sure, but you see how much they talk?”
In the past few weeks, Gale and I had talked often. He liked to hear about Vin, mostly. Or ‘Orvi’. Wanted to know what had happened to him the past four or five years. I didn’t think I’d known him for more than a year before we left Spires, so I couldn’t tell him much. So sometimes Gale would talk about himself. Sometimes about his projects. Vin’s conversion stones. Whip’s crossbow. The wishes he was trying to grant. He needed to talk. He needed to be answered, too. So I talked as well.
I’d said to him I was different from other people. I didn’t see what they did. I didn’t think everyone’s eyes worked the same as mine. Or their minds were louder. Maybe that meant they saw farther. Gale understood. He didn’t see anyone at all. We were both alike.
If I were different, maybe I would’ve noticed sooner.
My gaze had been too close. Or too far. Looking at plants and bugs. Or runes. Or the flow of noise from quiet. I was beginning to think I’d missed the simplest thing of all.
Kit’s mum was trying to get her to kill me. I was going to die tonight.
Because if Kit refused, her mum would do it herself. And Kit was too scared to stop her.
“Gale thinks he’s so mighty,” the woman hissed. Her lips were peeled so far back I could see her reddened gums. “So much grander’n th’ rest o’ us. Un-touchable. Hah! All I have t’do’s ring th’ right bell, and he’ll come runnin’.”
Kit’s gaze turned back to me. Her eyes were very wide. “What bell’s that, Mother?”
“Start yer friend there on th’ road to dyin’. Boss-man’ll pull her back.”
I began moving sideways. Slowly. Carefully. Like a ghost.
“You want me to kill her?”
“I want you to show him – show me – that you’re my daughter.”
I reached the wall.
“It’ll kill you.”
She sneered. “He’ll ‘save’ her. I don’t even think he sees it as dyin’.”
“Mother, you don’t- “
“You think I can’t beat him?!” Kit’s mum barked. “I could split him like a wet wad o’ paper! He needs me, an’ I don’t need him, and he’s gotta know that!”
Kit stared at the ground. Her jaw quivered.
The older woman leaned forward. Lips pressed against her daughter’s ear. “He can’t threaten me, birdie, ‘cause he’s mine. An’ he’ll know that, when he comes runnin’. Jus’ like you do.”
My fingers brushed against the ladder. I got a grip on its rungs.
The corners of Kit’s mouth tried to quirk upwards. “That’s, uh, that’s funny, Mother. But we don’t get anythin’ from this.”
“I do. An’ you’re with me, so you do too.”
I hoisted myself upwards. My hands burned. The grip was bad. I was heavy.
“She’s bloody runnin’!” A scoff. “Go get her.”
A discordant set of footsteps from behind. Out-of-tune. Slow. Enough that I could make it a few more rungs. My breath burned as it ran from my mouth. Panting. I was no good at running. But I’d left my runeslate (momentum, motion, recursive array) in my room. No blood to power it. After all, I was a fake Owlblood. Sometimes I felt like a fake person. A ghost. Silence playing at noise.
That’s what Strains were. Ronnie and Whip and Davian and I. With the asymmetry and the crutches and the twisting. All a dozen little ways to be quiet. A stranger had once said we’d been in the oven too long, or too little. We’d come out half-formed, or cracked. That we should blame our parents for becoming the muted corner of humanity. I’d thought some people were different. Like Vin. Strong; likeable; powerful. Or Maddie. Head of a House. Or even Kit. Loud; aggressive; outspoken. But they were just in another corner. Just as muffled.
I reached the top of the ladder as Kit mounted the bottom. The stone of the walls cut into my hands as I pulled myself onto the battlements. My arms already ached.
“Stop,” I told her.
Kit did.
“Blood’re you stoppin’ for?” barked her mother. “Keep goin’!”
It was as if Kits’s joints had calcified. But in the end, they creaked upwards.
I turned and hurried down the battlements. Frost fought and lost against Tempest in the air around. A heavy wind blew across my body. My fringe hopped like a little bug. Leaping above grass. The Fort’s body began to press against its walls as my feet took me away from the outer court. Cold stone on one side. Open air on the other. Kit bent upwards behind me. The Jackal stood at her shoulder.
Looping around would take me back. If both followed, the path back into the Fort would be clear. But I wasn’t fast. They’d catch me before then.
My vision panned sideways, towards the cut stone of the Fort. Its form was squat; toad-like. It had only two floors. The second rose above the battlements I stood atop. No windows peeked from its inscrutable form. But if I reached above, I could grab its slanted roof. On the roof was Gale’s observatory.
I’d been up there. Gale and I had talked about Vin. He’d squinted against the wind, pupils drifting across an invisible landscape. Asked whether Vin was happy. I had no answer. I didn’t know much about happiness. I didn’t know much about anything, except the things I did.
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to climb the observatory. It wasn’t high – more a nipple sticking from the peak of the roof’s tiles – but it was high enough. Yet if its door was open, my cries would be heard. The mirror-hall was still full. Someone might come. Ronnie or Vin or Gale. Or even a stranger. They might help. They might not.
I pressed my body against the wall and began scrabbling for its lip. As soon as I began trying to pull myself up, I realised I wasn’t strong enough. My feet barely left the ground for a few seconds before my arms gave out. I looked around. Further along the battlements lay one of Gale’s rune-worked ballistae (force, bond, activation array). A long crate – for bolts, maybe – beside it might support my weight. In the opposite direction, a figure moved towards me.
Kit hunched over her bared blade. Shivers wracked her body. She looked scared.
Her mother was no longer behind her. “Can I go past you?” I asked.
Kit halted. Then swallowed heavily. Her silence was reply enough.
I didn’t say anything else to her. If she had to kill me, she had to kill me.
The swordswoman was moving slowly. Slower than even me. But if she was alone, her mother would be rounding the opposite side. If I’d powered my runestone, I might’ve been able to move past them. Tripped them up. But Vin was decaying.
A long time ago, I’d watched a tree be eaten by termites. It had taken a while. I’d had nothing better to do than watch. The termites had tasted decent enough. Though I hadn’t the words to describe what I was seeing at the time, its slow orbit towards dissolution remained embedded deep in my mind. Deeper than any rune. Thousands of red dots swarming at a touch. Seeping in and out of gashes in a trunk. Spreading rot. A branch pointed skyward one day, then fallen to the ground the next. Pink swelling from beneath its warping wood. Until one morning, I woke to find it collapsed.
Vin wasn’t a tree. There were no termites. But they were similar enough that I already knew where he’d end up. I couldn’t ask him for the thing that kept him standing. Gale had refused as well.
I’d left my runestone in my room. It was heavy. A decade of carving in weight. Nothing more than rock, without another’s blood to bring it to life.
I hurried further along, then knelt. I strained against the long crate until it pressed against the wall. It took a few moments to clamber atop it. When I’d finished, I placed forearms over the edge of the roof and began pushing myself onto its slope. I flailed one of my legs sideways. A toe caught on a tile. It slipped a heartbeat later. Then a shoulder pushed into my butt and began pushing me up.
“Would it,” Kit grunted, “kill you t’unsheathe a few pounds o’ fat.”
Maybe. I thought fat had saved my life a few times. Probably more than muscle had.
With Kit helping, I managed to settle my weight against the roof. My weight balanced precariously on its incline.
“Mother’s waitin’ by th’ court,” Kit whispered. “I’ll needa t’run round an’ tell her you’re not there. She’ll know I’m helpin’ if I don’t. You needa get up there an’ do it quick.”
I nodded at her and began slowly pushing myself upwards.
For a long moment, Kit did nothing. Eventually, I heard her footsteps growing distant.
The tiles crowning the Fort were unadorned. Smooth from exposure. Its incline was slight, but even slight was enough to unsettle my balance. I went up slowly. Slow was safe. Quieter than its counterpart. The observatory stared above me. The heavy eye of this place. It protruded only slightly from the roof’s peak. That was enough to take its veranda a decent leap upwards. High enough for me to jump, fail to catch its edge, roll down the tiles, and break my skull on the landing below.
So when I reached its base, I called upwards. “Help,” I said.
The word trailed away breaths from my face. “Help!” I tried again.
I watched it vanish into the night. “Help!” I shouted.
“Shut up,” came a voice from behind.
Bracing myself against the side of the structure, I turned. The Jackal slowly worked her way up the roof. Everything on her face was twisted by the scowl carving its way across it.
“Figures,” she spat, “Kit wouldn’t have the guts t’do what I ask her to. Figures half-a-year away from me’ll scramble what little’s in her head ‘til its good fer no one – least o’ all herself. Really, fat lady, what in Enn’s arm happened to…” She paused, brow scrunched, then snapped her fingers. “‘Filial piety’ – that’s the one. What happened?”
I shrugged. Took a step back.
“Stupid little whore o’ a daughter. Beddin’ with whatever fat cow throws her a bone.” Her voice was like a knife against a whetstone. “You like yer mother, fat lady?”
I shrugged again.
“We give everythin’ t’you. Carry you ‘round fer th’ better part of a godsdamned year – a year that coulda been spent doin’ anythin’ else – and all you get’s a pissin’, wailin’ skin-sack o’ dung and a whole lotta disappointment.” Her face darkened. “S’pose I shouldn’t be surprised. I hated my mother, too. But my mother was a weak little slime, worthy o’ nothin’ but a shallow ditch. I’m different from her. But try and try and try as I might, a bit o’ appreciation seems too much t’ask for! An’ oh look! Here comes th’ ungrateful pissant now!”
Kit carefully stepped upwards from behind me. Her hands were open at her side. “Mother. You, uh, you- ”
“You uh you uh you uh- “ The Jackal sneered. “After deliberately disobeyin’ me, th’ least you could do is speak like a human bein’, ‘stead of a brain-damaged bird.”
“You weren’t there.”
“’Cause I was checkin’. Good thing I did.” She scoffed. Ran a hand through her hair. Sighed. “One thing, Kit. I asked one thing o’ you.”
“I don’t think- “
She threw up her arms. “I don’t ask you t’bloody think, Kit! I ask you to cut.” She snorted. “Seems you can’t even do that anymore.”
“No, Mother, I- “
The older woman staggered forward until she was a hand’s span from Kit’s. “You like her more’n you like me? Hm?” She brought her face inches from her daughter’s. “Hm? S’that it? Nearly two decades, beaten by six months? Should I stuff my face everyday ‘til I can only fit clothes fer cattle – would you like me then? Appreciate what I done fer you?”
“That’s not- “
“Then what is it, Kit? ‘Cause I’d really like t’know.”
Kit’s eyes darted to me, then back to her mother. “Gale likes her.”
The Jackal shook her head in disgust.
Her daughter’s eyes widened at that. “It’s not a good idea- “
“You wouldn’t know a good idea if I crammed it down yer throat.” She grasped Kit’s shoulders. Her words came slow. Heavy. “Give me a real reason.”
Kit just stared at her.
The older woman sighed. “Figures.” She released her grip and cast her gaze skywards. “That’s okay, Kit. I figured out a way you can help me and yer round friend there.”
The Jackal extended a hand. “Gimme yer sword.”
Kit’s reply was the tremulous cheep of a cornered rodent. “What?”
“Yer sword. Give it to me.” At her daughter’s mute incomprehension, the scarred woman sighed. “You wanna help me or not?”
Wide eyes locked onto the woman’s tight glare.
“Help me and her, Kit.”
A desperate smile wobbled across her face. Then Kit’s blade was frantically unbuckled and shoved into the Jackal’s arms.
She weighed the sword in her hand, giving several experimental swing. “Pretty good,” she stated, lips pursed. “Decent balance. It Owlforged, you reckon?”
Kit’s hands were whitening where they clenched around each other. “Think so.”
“Hm.”
She gave it a final twirl before swiping it at me.
I blocked the first blow with my hands. One fell apart. The other caught the blade between two halves of a shattered bone. My fingers toppled to the ground. I stumbled backwards. My head cracked against the bottom of the veranda. I tried to catch myself with hands that no longer existed. My failure marked me falling stiffly against the tower’s base. I didn’t understand.
The Jackal tore the weapon from the ruined digits that used to be my own. It retreated to her side. The angle was carefully positioned. Painstakingly chosen.
I didn’t block the second blow.
Its steel was catapulted through my stomach. It slowed. Tore through something vital within me. Then finally halted. I stared at the weapon protruding from my gut. Felt it tug against an intestine. The sensation was grandparent to nausea; the sneering, bloody-toothed wrongness of a body gone bitter-
----------------------------------------
-and the fugue nailing me to the divan was shattered in the reflection of a fading fire.
Gast was dying.
I snatched my onyx sword from where it sat and barrelled out of my room. Amongst the many flames flickering within the Fort’s dead walls, three swayed above me. One – tumultuous, as if oil had been flicked into its manic grasp – I recognised as Kit’s; another – as smooth as ever, even as its edges ebbed infinitesimally lower – was clearly Gast’s. The third had been flitting around for days. I’d taken it for a maid. Yet no common maid made a murderer – not with Kit around.
Whatever wound had been inflicted upon Gast wouldn’t kill her instantly. But it was grievous. That was all I could discern. Whether it could be treated or not was beyond-
I shook that thought away. I had to be able to save her. There was no other alternative.
My fumbling gait took me to the staircase spiralling further up the hall. Anticipating a dexterity I no longer had, I took the stairs three at a time and was immediately forced to use my hands to paw up like some malformed rodent. As I did so, my mind began parsing the logic of my actions: though I’d never been inside, I’d noticed the observatory bulging atop the Fort opened into some kind of veranda. Once up there, I would have a direct path to them.
I staggered up onto the landing and rammed my shoulder into the doors next to it. The rebound nearly sent me tripping back down the stairs, but I managed to recover my balance and force the immaculately varnished wood into creaking open. Beyond the entranceway, the observatory was lit only by the two moons staring through the glass above. They were immense. As if the Owl’s stare had soared into the sky for the purpose of burrowing into the souls of mortals below.
Both the huge map-table dominating the space and the small workbench shoved to the side sparked interest within my mind, but it was quickly squashed by voices emanating outside.
“…help her,” came a coarse voice. A mirror to Kit’s, yet charred into gnarled cinders by some combination of age and abuse. It sent a shudder up my spine. “Help me.”
An indecipherable murmur, followed by a pained grunt. Gast’s words.
I searched for an exit within the darkness of the room and quickly locked onto the opaque silhouette of a door marring the transparent glass.
“Okay.” There was Kit’s tone; torn down into a dull croak. “See you later.” On that final word, her voice snapped like a dry twig. “Gast.”
I barged onto the balcony and cast my eyes below. They fell on Kit kneeling above the impaled form of Gast. A sword hung limply from the Strain’s gut. Intestines gleamed wetly beside it. Yet despite that, Gast had pulled herself up the sword to place two ravaged hands around Kit.
Wet lines ran from the swordswoman’s eyelashes to her chin, terminating in thick tears. Snot dripped from her nose. The white sclera of her eyes was shot through with blood. Beneath her, the Strain’s gaze was unfaltering. Though Gast’s breathing spasmed through her body as if strummed by a mad musician, her expression was familiar. The lines of her face were steady. She looked at Kit and gave a quirk of the lips.
Then Kit drew a dagger and opened Gast’s throat.
A strangled croak emerged from my throat. Kit looked up and saw me. Horror squirmed across her face.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Another figure from further down the roof swore. “Ox’s bloody balls.”
My eyes darted towards her. Carved in black shot through with scars of white stood the figure from my nightmares. The Jackal: grin twisted into an angry sneer as it gazed up at me.
“Godsdamnit,” it hissed. “Jus’ had t’see it. An I can’t bloody well kill you, either. May as well shove half-a-decade workin’ with Gale down th’ dung-hole.”
My mouth was dry. I could barely bring myself to move. That fact alone was what drove me to speak. “Gale knows?”
“N- “ It cut itself off, staring silently at a wall. Its chuckle was filigreed with fury. The hairs of my neck stood at the sound. “Sure does. He’s gone an’ killed Colin an’ Greta, too – would you believe it?”
I pushed another word through the stranglehold on my throat. “Why?”
“You’re a smart feller, Vin,” it stated. “I’m sure you can figure it out.”
Another pulse ran through my mind. Gast would die soon. One by one, I uncurled my fingers from the stone battlements and began readying myself to leap down.
“Guess that’s my cue to skedaddle.” The Jackal gave a lazy wave, then began walking down the roof. “Catch you later, Ravenblood.”
It took several shameful moments to muster the courage to lower myself down. The creature that haunted me was down there. Corporeal. Wrought with raw, physical power – the same that had carved my face apart all those years ago. But Gast was dying, so I dropped down.
I landed awkwardly. Pain spiked through an ankle – nothing compared to that in my arms in neck. And that nothing compared to what lay beneath me. I lowered myself next to Kit. In front of Gast.
The Strain blinked quietly. Blood flowed freely from the cut in her neck, soaking through the impeccably tailored clothes Maddie had forced her into for the reception. Crimson spread to Kit as well, yet the dull moan emerging from the swordwoman’s throat did not falter. The flow died as it ebbed through the material, leaving only a smear to trickle into the wound in her belly. Her eyes flicked from Kit’s to mine. They were large and clear.
My eyes blurred as I comprehended what the blood leaving her body meant. The absence in my body faded. It felt as if some very small, very large thing was dying inside of me. In deep, enduring agony that flailed against the walls of my flesh. Some animal impulse set my shoulders shaking; sobs breaking from my throat. An old, ugly instinct that slept until called.
And at the same time, the need to stop it.
“Please stay,” I told her. “Don’t go.”
No one called me a fool for my plea. Instead, Gast released a swaying hand from Kit’s shoulders and daubed two of her fingers in the blood fleeing from her neck. Slowly, she moved the hand towards me. Yet it faltered. She lacked the strength to raise it further.
I lowered my head. With trembling hands, I slid my bandana off my forehead.
Gast extended a pair of fingers and anointed me with her blood.
Memory has never held much sway over you. But here is the press of another soul for which memory is everything, and it is with their fingers that you pull open the calcified bedrock that sleeps beneath your being.
Kit’s hand failed to muffle her sobs.
Existence can always be divided in two. Such demarcations are artificial, yet knowing this never stops them nestling into the furrows of your mind. The most central to your reality is ‘Noise’ and ‘Quiet’; ‘Motion’ and ‘Stillness’; ‘Heat’ and ‘Cold’. Yet the one that has persisted the longest is ‘Here’ and ‘There’. You are ‘Here’. Memory is ‘There’.
We knelt on the roof. This late in the season, Frost and Tempest mingled. At some moments, the wind’s bony hands felt as if they would cut through all warmth. In its next breath, it would breathe humidity into our bodies.
You walk amidst speartrees and bushes and plants and a thousand other red mosses and mushrooms and lichens and plants that coat the space around you. There is a trail of insects winding their way through bark; a flock of birds cocking their heads; a small furry creature scurrying through trees. Here is the scraping of thirst and the yowling of hunger; the press of dozens of scrapes and scabs and bites; the opening that is you. There is a monster: thick skull smashing the forest around it or orange eyes twitching above a snarl or sluggish body slowly shedding flesh. Here is you: creeping away from the destruction or hiding in the roots of a tree with held breath or witnessing the undying thing journey towards its end. You are Here. You watch There. This is the fundamental truth.
Wide eyes beheld us. Astonished, at seeing and being seen. Wearing two sets of eyes in a single, impossible mind.
The sun and moon take turns in the sky. Yesterday slowly recedes into irrelevance. You sleep often. You eat small crawling things or fat roots twisting from the ground. You drink from puddles in leaves or burbling streams. When the many-shaped leaves get bitten from their branches you find things to cover yourself with and sleep during the day. When snow falls, you shiver into caves of white during the day and walk during the night. Whenever your toes go white you rub them until sensation returns. Some blacken and fall off your feet. Occasionally, you find a dead creature. They are always so still. Yet such stillness attracts life, and so you can never spend as much time examining them as you would like. Instead, you break their veins open with sharp stones and feed the crimson juice in them to the dirt. The dirt always returns with thick fruits – enough to feed you for a time. You do these things repeatedly, and you walk. Here is you. There is everything else.
I – or she – stared between our shoulders. I – she, him – grasped the dying woman’s body and carefully lifted her upright. Two gasps escaped us at a the singular pain in our gut.
A small crack forms in this truth. Eyes that are not your own follow you one night. A possum, gaze flashing when it catches the light of the moons, is stalking you. Not to fight – fighting and killing is the domain of big, fast things – but simply to see. It is when you catch yourself in a puddle that you understand. Small, slight, thin, filthy: this is no surprise. But even as you are Here, you are also There, within that small of water. Slowly, as time rotates above you, you come to understand that a part of you exists in the same way as possums and bugs and anything that can be touched and felt. And you come to realise that while you are Here, the possum has its own Here. In which you are There.
Dying used to be cleaner. Before I got so mixed-up.
It is when this conclusion washes over you that you come to believe that creatures like you exist. Once you begin looking, you find them quickly. They thread their bodies through fur-like coverings; they carry inverted shells woven from leaves; they carefully pick the fruits and mushrooms and vegetables and mosses you are too scared to. They return to dens of felled trees and wield stones sharper than any you’ve held. But they have four limbs and a head. They move like you. So you watch them.
Some strange alloy; a meal with far too many ingredients and coincidence as its only chef.
As days pass, the dozen that you follow begin looking around. Eyes darting when alone. “Gast,” you hear, over and over. Much later, you realise you misheard. They were saying “Ghost.”
None of it felt like circumstance, though.
Eventually, you are caught. They approach with face coverings and make sounds at you. Their hands fold over your thin arms. They doff their masks. Stunned to find your form corporeal. They take you to their den and wipe the filth from your body. They see what lays underneath. They begin to teach you about the world they swim in. About tools and clothes and cooking and cooperation and communication. About the way in which sounds can fit together. About the way in which the endless stretch of yesterdays and tomorrows can be measured. About yourself. You are perhaps eight or nine. You are female. You are human. You are pitiful. Your name is Gast-girl. Then, later, just Gast. There you are, they say.
I wondered if this could’ve ended differently.
Language comes easily to you. The family that has taken you in suspect you were taught some by your parents, before whatever circumstances led to you roaming the Heartlands. The simple truth is, the way words hook together present a tapestry with a far clearer meaning than the inscrutable workings of wood and flesh. But you have learned it too late to be good at weaving your own words. As such, you understand more than you can say.
I doubted even the gods knew the answer. Or maybe they knew it too well.
Every meal is far more than you can eat. You grow far more slowly than the other children. For every hour you spend awake another three are spent sleeping. Though all of these are comfortable things, the adults – fish that swim through these human waters far more adeptly than others – speak their concern out loud. There are five other children. Every time they hear of the adult’s concern they yell or throw stones at you.
I felt us sink into one another. Each incomprehensible insult and tiny wound. Distant and fresh.
When layers of flab appear on you confusion strikes through all human interactions with you. You think it normal, at first – you’ve seen some of the carnivore animals sporting thicker coats. They tended to sleep a lot as well. Yet through your increasingly deft comprehension skills you manage to glean the source of their suspicion: fat is meant to be a reflection of what you eat, and you consume less than half the other children do. All of them are as lean as cold itself. When the fat keeps pooling off you, the adults produce some truth internal to you. Over the course of days, their gazes change.
Disorientation coursed through me. Every shake of Kit’s shoulders at half-speed.
You’ve heard of gods. You have never seen one. They exist on the far side of There; the same place where nobles and cities and oceans dwell. But you have seen monsters. You are told they are Blooded – albeit ones whose choices have been overwhelmed by divine instinct. These Blooded are the weak kin to gods. Made dangerous, erratic, and vile by their association. Capable of great acts, yet more inclined to spread the same kind of terror gods do. Creatures that need a measured, human hand to guide them. You are kin to these creatures. The taboo offspring of a Blooded that abandoned their responsibility to humanity; chose instinct over discretion. Twisted by their parent’s sin. You are a Strain. There you are, they say.
The caress of night an eternity.
And so you are marked in the eyes of everyone else. For the second time in your life, you realise that your Here is everyone else’s There. But this time, you know there are no exceptions.
A lifetime, spent mindless of the thing measured it.
You have survived for years alone, they say. You will be fine, they say. You have a month to prepare to leave, they say. They die before the week has finished.
Everything a contradiction. Everything made alien.
You are gathering in the forest – grass basket balanced atop your head as stone sickle tugs through herbs, roots and fruits – as you have learned to do. When you hear loud yelling you hide – eyes wide as you share space with a swarm of termites in the hollow of the tree – as you have learned to do. The children yell at you often. Once, they threw stones at you. When questioned about the bruises by adults, you told them such. They stopped, until you became a Strain. Though this yell is different, you hide until they stop. Within that tree, your mind slowly parses through a deer slowly torn apart by an orange-furred godkin, and the sounds it made. You compare it to the sound you hear now. They are not the same. But they are the same enough. The family is screaming.
Everything an impossible affront, but no fury to contain it.
After a night and a day curled within the hollow, you return. They lay strewn amidst the den. Adults do not move when shaken. Some of the children wear second smiles across their throats. One you’ve never seen before: a black-haired woman with a split in the back of her head large enough to see brains. The bloodied axe that dealt the blow is in the hands of the woman who taught you to speak. The youngest are completely gone. The corpses are very, very still.
People just like me, tolling backwards unto eternity.
It is not the stillness of death. Death has passed; taken its due in a flurry of violence and screams. This is the silence that reigns afterwards. It is the stillness of absence. A sudden vanishing, borne by some force you cannot see. Or simply what once existed stripped away to what must. Though it passes over the forest around the corpses, some of that absence seeps into you. Your silence seems only right.
We were quiet on that roof, too. Even the dying, for we wore each other’s eyes. Respect for the dead by trying to mimic them. Kit failed.
It takes a week to bury them. Then, as promised, you leave. You return to that familiar play of sleeping and walking – insects picked off trees and water sucked from plants. You are better at finding food, now. Better at avoiding freezing, with knowledge of bark weaving and clothes and shoes. But the passing of days is more desolate. You notice more of those quiet bodies. Where motion has stolen somewhere distant. You come to see it in the chain of insects winding around a tree, day after day. The sharp conversation of birds, couched in head-twitches and empty eyes. The fact that when you throw a stone upwards, it always falls back down. And you begin to see the absence embedded deep within the Here you wear. Like some transparent cocoon, waiting to flower into a flightless moth. Except there is no flowering. There is no cocoon; no butterfly. There is a thing that cannot be caged by words, and there is the creeping understanding that it dwells inside everything.
Between the place where I watched my body and felt a lifetime pass, I, too, failed.
Colourless ghost. The small fumblings of temporal things, spun into forever. Here and There is infinity. And what is infinity, if not nothing at all?
I suppose it didn’t matter.
Sometimes, when the ache of it becomes too dreadful, you find your way to humans again. Your imposition is tolerated for its low price: you speak little, eat little, and can share news of whatever monsters you’ve seen roaming the surrounding wilderness. A week is enough for your otherness to send you scurrying back.
Just reeling her into me. Or being reeled into her. An irrelevant distinction for a phenomenon wrought in nonsense.
Over the years, you come to trade the trinkets you find in the Heartlands – flat, glossy obsidian from riverbanks or chunks of quartzite toed from beneath rotting leaves – for boots, a proper bag, a coat. Somewhere along the way, you cease growing. Survival becomes easier, yet the space it opens in your day is empty. Spent watching a hawk circle a scabby tree-rodent, or a cave’s icicles slowly melting, or a tree weeping blood from where your axe has hit it. You sleep. You eat. You walk.
Things were happening within the Fort.
In the quiet meals you spend at homesteads, the slurping of soup becomes overcome by rumours of a city being built within the Heartlands. Such a thing is rare: the rare shelfs of stone that shield against the Aching are used as gatherings for markets – trading in tools and scrimshaw and weavings and blood – or festivals during Spirit season. They are usually cared for by a single lineage, but are regarded as the collective inheritance of all Heartlanders. Houses have veered away from the Heartlands – it’s too unstable a bet to place chits on – but one stirred up by the Albright’s war is evidently game.
I could feel them, in that extra-sense. That I mapped in flame and distance, but could not be measured in either. At this point, it had become instinctual.
You make your way towards this city. It’s something to do. Forest turns to grassland to hillocks to rock-shelves to swamps to scrublands. All crimson-red, each plant similar yet entirely unique from its siblings. It’s in this way that the Heartlands and the Achings that shape it strike you as strangely human. People are loud, after all – always seeking to cover silence by filling their days. It is when the rumbles that precipitate the Heartlands shake the earth that the similarities are closest. You always spend them in the highest, most stable point possible. It is always very, very loud.
Not like how it’d been when I rocked Sash and Dash back and forth in the triage tents, as Ma held down those seizing too fiercely. I tried not to think about that too often.
The new landscape is distinct from the old. New fruit, new plants, new mushrooms, new mosses, new lichen, new leaves like daggers or pitchers or snowflakes or hands. Yet they’re all dyed from the same shades of red; all taking every opportunity to tear open exposed skin of whatever walks by. The Heartlands grows. It takes different forms. But it never truly changes.
I tried. But more often than not, my sleepless nights were spent trawling through every day I’d found before.
The new city sneaks across the horizon one day. Initially, you believe it to be sixteen parallel speartrees poking from a field of grass. You grow closer. The grass is not grass. It is a forest. Slowly, you comprehend the scale has deceived you. The ivory spires are unmistakeably speartrees, yet their size is beyond anything you’ve encountered before. As if to mock both mountains and gods, they tower above the land. Only clouds are higher, but clouds simply float. The spires rose of their own energy, in a weight that can only be measured in thousands of humans. And bridges are being built between them.
Even now, I’m still doing it.
They’re thin. Far, far too long. Sometimes they break under wind pressure. They are also impossible. Instinctively, you understand they shouldn’t be capable of tolerating their own weight. The glowing symbols on their bottom hold the key. Not just for their alien engineering, but to some sleeping part of you locked away. Neelam Heltia finds you squatting beneath one of the bridges in progress. Both Strain and Head sit in silence for a time, before you ask him what one of the symbols mean. He explains it. You keep staring.
Enough of that.
Owlic runes are perpendicular to conventional logic. Even as you stare at them you know they’re nonsense. Devices contrived to blur one thing into another. A joke played on the world. But plenty of nonsense things exist in the world; bizarre yet unchallenged by reality. Here is a nonsense you can decipher. That fit together in ways you can understand. Even if the basic symbols are incomprehensible, the ways in which they fit together are intuitive. Yet unlike spoken language, you are not too late to be decent at this one.
A gathering within Fort Vane. The spectator part of my mind was hooked by that.
Neelam sees you seeing. For a moment, your Here is shared. He asks you to help in the initial days of construction and you acquiesce. The Head is better than you in the craft in every way. More learned, but also more talented. He rarely sleeps or pauses in his goal of hollowing the spires into a true city. You operate on a different time. One slower; rife with digressions towards sun or stars or horizon or plants or the way in which one of Neelam’s tiny nephews pats your belly and gives you a wide smile. Your pace never matches the other’s, but that bothers you little.
All those little lights. Maddie amongst them. A larger flame: Gale.
One day, some of Neelam’s companions ask if you’re an Owlblood. Because you have never seen language as a means for anything but sharing, you tell them you are a Strain. Then you leave immediately.
The Jackal, scurrying through the stone bowels.
Time rotates beside you; its revolution in the sky above dragging you through the same day repeatedly. But joining the things filling the dead space is your craft: chiselling basic runes in your slate into increasingly elaborate patterns. You cannot test any of it: the power is beyond you, alone. All you can do is imagine. Most of the time, that is enough.
Maybe she’d begun to realise the kind of catastrophic mistake she’d made. Yet I somehow doubted a mind like hers could comprehend ‘I’ and ‘mistake’ in the same thought.
Years pass. Achings pass. The land cracks open and writhes for a new form. Creepers tug on your hair after one. They’re replaced with bald, bulbous fruits after another which kill any animal that eats it. A band of cockroaches forage through underbrush far thicker than it was a decade ago. The sun is always the same.
That would mean she’d changed. And nothing ever changed.
One day you return to Spires. They’ve grown just a tiny bit. Heltia has burrowed into them. Their bridges span larger gaps and carry houses on their backs, but with neither money nor Godsblood, you are barred from them. Instead, you spend several days roaming the bottom of the city. Only the poorest settle there willingly: the mass of humanity and their stockpiles attract monsters, allowing little defence to be raised. But you are better at hiding at them. Where others may die, you are simply silent.
Whose thoughts were bleeding into me? Gast’s? Vin’s? And who was Vin, anyway?
Between sleeping curled in a crook between pipes and plodding into the surrounding wilderness for food, most of your days are spent attempting to crack the purple leylines that channel Spires’s magic. By adding addition, auxiliary runes, the power flowing through them can be channelled into the slab of stone you’ve spent countless hours poring over. This requires sidling into the blind-spot of Heltia’s guards and spending several hours suspended from a pipe by a chorded knot of vine. You succeed in your endevour. Unsurprisingly, the first feat of witchcraft your runeslate performs is tearing itself apart. You fix it and try again. This process continues for some time.
A contusion of strings.
One day, you notice a man with a warped face. You continue noticing him. He occasionally travels with a lopsided – girl? boy? – of an indeterminate age, who is constantly followed by a large dog with drooping jowls. You’re no good at guessing these things. Occasionally they are visited by a very large man, who delivers money to the smaller one and avoids looking at the child. The warped man speaks; the child writes on wax tablets and raises them towards him in response. This is bizarre.
A walking body.
It is the day you manage your first real success with your slate that they notice you. The child approaches you while you leave the city and raises the wax tablet towards you. Her chaperone quickly notices your incomprehension and translates. ‘Are you a Strain?’ The answer to that question is, as it has been every day since you were found in the wilderness, yes. They are excited. They are Strains as well. They invite you to live with them. You do.
A person who had made a very big mistake.
They aren’t like you. They sleep for only a third of the day; they speak easily to one another, even the one with no words; they rush towards things that will come anyway. Yet when bands of teenagers surround the house to etch genitals and warbling cusses in charcoal, you sit together. Every morning, you eat breakfast together – face-to-face, looking one another in the eye. When someone speaks, they are heard. For you, that’s more than enough.
I traced the stunned part of my mind over those within the Fort, until my stupor shattered like glass.
Davian grows more lines across his face. Ronnie grows upwards and outwards, until their head reaches your shoulder. Yowler grows older. Whatever chits you gain are given in exchange for Davian’s tutoring of Ronnie, but you’ve lived long enough on the Heartland’s bounty that the bite of empty chit-strings never reach your bellies. Then one last Aching comes, and the world is torn asunder.
Our minds met, and in doing so the dying woman saw me flinch away. She gently brought my gaze back to where it needed to be.
The Aching is far violenter than any you’ve witnessed before. The land rattles for what feels like weeks. Its aftershocks are felt in hordes of black-haired, dark-eyed individuals roaming across the land like a tide of locusts; chewing apart whatever living thing reaches their gullet in a tear-stained feast. One night, panicked shouts echo beneath the inscrutable Spires. You huddle together. The next morning, Heltia finds twenty dead Ravenbloods and nearly one hundred butchered civilians. Whispers flit between mourner’s cries: Avri’s Cult has lost what little sanity it once possessed.
My eyes widened. A vicious chill stole through me.
The Houses – as great and insubstantial as gods, to you – come together in Spires. They leave in a tide of bronze and flesh that seemed larger than the horizon dared contain. They never return, yet the Raven is reported as dead all the same. Revenge came too swift and too shocking to halt the tears of the mourners.
No mere wind or caress of ice could compare. It didn’t come from any external force.
The city begins to pull itself back together. As always, you continue onwards. You begin to measure time in the elevation of Ronnie’s shoulders: at your armpit; beside your shoulder; at your head; above your head. Until one day, the teenage giant returns with a girl with a crutch under her arm and dark rings beneath her eyes. Another Strain. Soon enough, it as if Whip has always been there.
Instead, it rose from a low suspicion that steamed into a solid understanding.
The famine creeps up on you all. The Aching is not as rhythmic as the turning of the sky, but it does always come. Three years march to four. Then to five. Then to six. The delay itself means nothing to you. It is the held breath of all Heartlanders that fights its way between your slow walks through the wilderness; your etchings; the hunted-animal look in the other Strains’ eyes. You venture further and further outwards to find bushels and trees already picked clean. With people around you, everything is growing easier. Everything except hunger.
More than anything, I’d wanted to be rid of the Ravenblood.
It is on the eighth year that all Heartlanders – from the nobles in the Nest far above it all to the harvesters on the earth – begin to prepare for a world without an Aching. The outer edges of Spires are already empty. The animals that flit beneath crimson branches are growing hungrier, as are the monsters that feast upon them. People begin ripping their skin open to water the earth and feed their family. The sunken-cheeked emerge from the wilderness carrying all they own and are met with the sight of another hundred like them. Everyone you pass walks in garments too loose and a hardening dagger in their eye. The well that feeds all life within the Heartlands is drying up. The first to be pushed away are people like you.
So much so that as soon as I’d been told it was possible, I’d buried all doubts in service of pursuing it.
Your foraging skills can do no more than garnish the plates of the others. Whip – still so small – needs food. As do the others. You’re all hired onto a small team of gatherers. Few speak to you. You go on four trips before you’re all replaced with another. You search for work as an Owlsmith. Your lack of innate magic is immediately disturbing to all that see you work with runes. You’re hired on to perform repairs on some of the derelict parts of Spires. Your skills are lacking, and when you nearly fall to your death after a strong gust of wind leaves you hanging from a pipe a gods-length above the earth, the others beg you to stop.
But it wasn’t courage that had brought us to this place. Killed Gast – killed me. Killed Spider knew how many people, from Fort Vane all the way back to the Wastes. Would maybe kill us all.
Davian is the one who suggests you hunt monsters. Heltia needs individuals to clear swathes of land. He tells you that many die doing this. That for the Houses, it’s likely a matter of spending a few lives in exchange for more time. To set up more secure trade routes, he hopes. He trains you all, and you fall into it. You end each monster – Godkin or mere Strain – with the careful steps of people lost in a labyrinth. Each time you make it back buys more time.
It was the stilted sibling to hope. A fear so black only one path seemed lit.
Time was once insignificant. It seemed to ignore you. But it doesn’t ignore anyone else. Davian, Ronnie, Whip – the fat recedes from their muscles. Their skin grows sallow. They become lean – even Ronnie, with their impossibly over-defined musculature. Not you, though. You are Here. They are There. Whatever noise they hold is gradually receding into silence.
It was abject stupidity. It was wilful ignorance. It was my great, enduring cowardice.
The trade routes fail. A bandit dubbed ‘the Jackal’ – an ex-general from the north, though you’re not sure what that means – has sabotaged most of the caravans carrying Heltian bloodtech for Baylarian food. House Baylar isn’t happy, and their unhappiness means the Spires of Heltia are alone. Suddenly, the last Ravenblood appears in stories across Spires. A scheming killer, playing at innocence to trick one of humanity’s greatest heroes into baring her heart. Some sort of Declaration confirms this to the Heartlanders, and they spit whenever the person is mentioned. You never meet this Ravenblood. You never meet the Jackal’s daughter. But you do meet Vin, and you do meet Kit. And then there are two more.
The refusal to look myself in the eye. But for a moment, I had two pairs. Enough to be shown what I was too terrified to see.
Whip is the one who brings him in. She likes stray animals, and there’re few creatures more stray than the person she drags in – bedraggled, covered with bruises and stinking of cheap liquor. A story-teller, or so he claims, trained by a man now imprisoned for crimes that could not possibly be his. At first, he only comes with you when you hunt, then retreats elsewhere when you return. To spend everything he earns gambling, Ronnie scoffs. But as the months pass, he smiles more. He spends more time with you.
Gale’s flame had grown larger, hadn’t it? Significantly larger.
Kit comes later. Leaner and meaner than any hunting hound – slouching into the group with a scowl and a hard word for anyone who dares raise a lip at her. All of you are used to taking it. Except Vin, who barely manages a civil dislike for her. But you all fall into a routine, eventually.
Almost as large as my own.
You like them. All of you find your place in the huddle. Then you find a way out. Your mule dies, though, and your cart is scrapped, and everyone dies, and then Whip dies. And then there’s more walking and you’re stuck in a cave. And between all this chaos, you look at the sky and at the earth at your feet and it’s always so quiet: up there; down here. Quiet everywhere.
“Oh, gods,” one of us said. “I’m sorry.”
You made it to the Fort. Whip and Davian echoing into silence, and Maddie and Taja squeezing their own frayed edges into the spaces that remain. Vin falls apart, too – not one piece at a time but shaken apart all at once by some monstrosity only he can see. Then he shivers and twitches and puts himself back together. You all see it. Even him. But you can’t do anything.
My words echoed.
Kit weeps for you when her mother slits you open. Apologises over and over for something she did not do. Screams and snots at the nose. When her mother tells her to put you out of your misery, she puts a knife to your neck. Then takes it away, and beats herself in the side of the head, red-eyed; calls herself a fool and a thug. You pull yourself up on the blade. You’ve never had many words, but they’re harder to get out when dying than ever before. You’d always thought dying would be easy. If everyone did it, how could it be hard? And it’s not hard. The hard part is telling Kit that everything is okay. And she doesn’t believe you: she says you did everything right. You weren’t weak or cowardly or untrue. But right or wrong never mattered with things like this. In your last moments, all that really matters is she takes the knife for herself. She accepts your wishes. Then Vin’s there, and there’s one last thing you can do for them.
My silent apology went unacknowledged. There was nothing to forgive. Gast had already gotten everything she had ever expected from the world.
Ronnie fears quiet. That they’ll be alone, when all the non-Strains leave them behind. Taja is like the giant, in that. Maddie is scared that she’s given up. That she’s sacrificed so many for something she never cared about. Vin’s soul is too loud. There is no quiet in him, so he takes his carving knives and tries to hollow some out. Kit is scared. She’s scared of her mother and what her mother means. But right here, right now, she’s scared there will be nothing left of you, when you die. Some time ago, Kit would have been fundamentally mistaken.
After all, she’d never expected anything at all.
Because in the beginning, you were never anything at all. Dust on the wind, made substantial only by the fact it knew it was being carried. That was then. You’re not a very good runesmith. You can’t fix a lot of things. Least of all the silence that dominates everything you are. But you can leave something for them.
That last flicker.
It’s a good night. Stars are bright. The firmament is clear. Your body is cold. Yet on the edge of that great hole on which all of existence straddles, something else tugs you back…
Then two visions turned into one, and all that was left of Gast were Kit’s low howls, a cooling body, ten tiny cuts where I’d drove my fingernails into my head, and everything that she was, stitched into a patchwork soul.
Just I, once more.