Chapter Twenty

Broken Worlds

Elias was standing in the middle of a sky rift, assuming sky rifts had middles. He suspected they did not, that the blackness simply stretched as far as one could wander. He looked for answers to his left, for anyone else to his right, but there was nothing and no one but blinding blackness as he spun in circles. Or almost blinding. He could see himself. He stared down at his hands, mapping the topography of his palms, attempting to unearth the larger truth of his present situation in its smallest details.

In the sky rift he’d flown into with the crew of The Sleeping Sparrow, Elias hadn’t been able to see anything—himself included—until the first oil lamp had been lit. Of course, this was no sky rift.

Elias was vaguely aware that he was dreaming, and yet that fact seemed secondary, for he simultaneously felt that he truly was somewhere. Somewhere outside of him, or perhaps somewhere deeper inside than he had been before. The other thing about sky rifts: there was no ground on which to walk, but walk he did, on a surface he couldn’t see, aimlessly in a direction that scarcely mattered.

Until Elias saw another golden star, shining faintly in the distance. Were the Valshynar coming to rescue him once more? Did he even need rescuing? He traveled toward it, beckoned by the mystery of a strange beacon. Maybe it was a lighthouse for wanderers, he mused, meant to guide him through this ocean of black.

Elias walked and walked and then he walked some more, but the golden star retained its elusive form: the distant promise of daylight through a pinprick. Increasingly, he felt a rising certainty that he did indeed need to reach it, but while that feeling grew, the star did not. Perhaps there was another route, he wondered—something less direct.

Elias heard a woman’s whisper, interrupting the sky rift’s perfect silence, and whirled around.

No one stood behind him, and yet the voice spoke again. “To understand your power, you must start at the beginning,” it said.

There was something familiar about the voice that he couldn’t at first put his finger on, like a childhood flavor only his palate seemed to recall. When he turned back around, however, Elias saw something he recognized vividly. It was a small house.

Specifically, it was the house he and his mother had lived in together over the years before she died. The clay home looked like many other clay homes around Acreton, but this one had been theirs. His mother had painted dozens of landscapes from its simple, square garden, ones she could see and others she could not. And would not. Elias recognized the back of her easel splayed upright on a patch of yellow grass alongside the bright red tomatoes they had grown each summer.

Well, for three summers. They had gotten three summers in that house of theirs, a house she had spent so long saving for, a house that had promised them stability at last. Elias sold it six months after her death. He hadn’t wanted to sell the place, but he could not make the payments on his own, and he had needed the relics. One always needed relics.

The house stood solitarily amid the endless darkness of the sky rift, an inviting orange flickering from its cloudy windowpanes. Elias approached the familiar yet foreign scene. And as he neared his childhood home, he thought he could hear a woman singing inside, the laughter of a boy—words and sounds he couldn’t quite decipher. He opened the driftwood door and stepped through.

“Do you remember the promise you made?” That voice again. He recognized it now: his mother’s, and yet it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite her.

Inside, the house was dim and candlelit. Unframed paintings hung from every wall, including one of him as a boy. She would have wanted him to keep that painting, if not the others. Alas, he had sold them all. So many rash decisions he’d made, but he had been a teenage boy treading water. He still dripped with the guilt of it.

Elias made his way toward her bedroom, past an unfinished puzzle on their kitchen table, old floorboards creaking under each slow step forward. The bedroom door groaned too, as he gently pushed it open, revealing a ghost.

She was lying in her bed, turned away from him, covered in a white sheet. Even still, Elias recognized the shape of her. His approach now was a cautious one. Her shoulder shifted slightly, confirming she was alive—or rather, alive in this dream. And then she asked, “Is that you, Elias?”

He stopped. “Yes, mom.”

She twisted herself to face him. “You woke me,” she said, smiling. “I don’t mind.” She looked pale and sickly, sweat beading her face and chest as if she had recently stepped out from the rain, and yet she was beautiful in spite of her condition. “Always beautiful,” as Mr. Humbledon once said in the wake of her passing. Dressed in her nightgown, she seemed younger than Elias remembered her. Only three years had gone by since he’d last seen her alive, but he had aged along with his perspective, and his elders had gradually grown more youthful.

“Would you fetch me some tea?” she asked him.

Elias wandered back into the kitchen and found a black kettle already blowing steam atop their wood-fire stove. He prepared her tea in a porcelain mug and returned a moment later with a whispered “here you go.”

She was sitting up now, her back propped against the wall, accepting the tea with both hands, with another smile that was all the thanks her son needed. “I’ve been thinking about something,” she said contemplatively.

He nodded for her to continue as he seated himself on a wooden stool.

“My parents had dreamed of a better life for their daughter, of something more than they had, though they didn’t have very much. Less than we do, even.” She sipped her tea, savored it, then sipped some more before adding, “I’ve been wondering whether I lived the life they once wanted for me. Or am I simply now passing on the curse of expectation to my own child? That is the nature of life, isn’t it? Skating upon a thin sheet of hope, even when faced with death. I still have hope, not for myself but for my child. For you, Elias.”

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Elias choked on his initial response. He slowly dug out another. “You were a great artist—are a great artist.”

“I am too tired to paint,” she replied, then reached for his hand, clasping it between both of hers. He could feel the gray fever in her spectral fingers. “I want you to make me a promise,” she said. “Live for me. Live better than me. Live for your parents and our parents and a thousand dreams unrealized. You are so good at dreaming, my sweet boy.”

With his hand still entwined in hers, Elias descended to his knees and dropped his head as if praying. “I would rather you live for yourself,” he said, and that too was a futile prayer.

“I love everything about you, for you are my son, but most of all I love your wild thoughts,” she said. “The wildest ones are my favorite, each one bounding ahead of you like a deer in a forest, hiding and revealing itself in flashes, always drawing you forward.” What she could no longer create with a brush, his mother crafted with her words. “It is why I have hope. Some who are marooned sink. You will skim the water like a dragonfly.”

She leaned closer to him, wincing, and whispered once more into his ear, “Make me the promise.”

Droplets dangled from his eyelids. They broke into racing tears he wiped quickly with the back of his free hand. “I promise,” Elias said, matching her gaze, her unforgettable smile, though his was forced and fragile. “I promise.”

Elias heard a crack, like a tree after a storm, and then another. He felt his body drop a few inches. The floorboards beneath him were splitting, splinters popping up like spikes. He looked to his mother for answers, but instead he fell farther. He fell, entirely, through the floor.

Remnants of the room fell with him: broken floorboards, gliding canvases, twirling candles. Elias was spinning himself, flailing as if one might swim through the night sky, for that was where he now found himself—falling from the heavens. Luminous stars speckled the black expanse above him, fading into the navy horizon that circled everything. He thought he saw something far below his plummeting body, but he could not quite make it out, shrouded in clouds or mist or the mere mystery veil of a dream.

“To understand your power, you must start at the beginning,” the voice from nowhere said again. It was his mother’s, yes, but the inflections were off, as if her vocal cords had been borrowed by someone else. This was not the woman Elias had left lying in that bedroom, if she was a woman at all.

“Gaze down,” the voice said. “See the world as it once was.”

The clouds below began to part as Elias steadied himself. He could now see the faint outlines of a landmass, the orange dots of a civilization. He had always love staring up at the stars, and now he stared down from them. The view was not so different from the top of the world, for the flames of man formed an earthly starlight beneath the celestial one.

He was falling toward them, toward the ground mortals were meant to occupy, but it was still a long way down, and the voice still had lessons to impart. “You know it as the Great Continent, but millennia ago, we knew this world as the Great Mountain.”

Elias could map the shape of it now: a mountain as colossal as a continent, its singular summit rising from the ocean like an unimaginable ziggurat.

“In the old world—the world once unshattered—everyone had the power within them to become divine,” the voice said. “The Great Mountain was a land of gods. Godhood was not merely imagined in the unshattered world. It was cultivated.”

From his ever-shifting vantage point, Elias could see their winding roads weaving like rivers down the mountainside, weaving through sprawling cities and towering temples.

“But Godhood came with too high a price,” the voice went on. “Even the most altruistic divines could not do enough good to counteract the evils of their selfish peers, for it is far more difficult to grow a garden than to destroy one. Evil always had this advantage, and thus evil needed to be severed from its power source.”

Elias braced against the wind blasting his face and body as the air grew warmer, as the scene below him slowly stretched across his vision.

“In the end, there was only one way to ensure such an outcome,” the voice explained. “The power once possessed by all earthly beings was shattered. The event was cataclysmic. The Great Mountain cracked to its volcanic core.”

The boom sounded to Elias like distant thunder. A plume of charcoal smoke grew into a dark cloud as the expanding landscape started bleeding, as the winding roads that weaved liked rivers transformed into actual rivers of lava.

“Cities crumbled,” the voice said.

Elias was close enough now that he could see the fires that engulfed them.

“Temples collapsed.”

Pillars and boulders rolled down the mountainside.

“Countless died as the mountain fell under its own weight.”

And as she foretold, the world began to flatten, avalanches of rolling stone and molten rock splashing and sizzling into the ocean as the Great Mountain collapsed into the rough-hewn foundation of a future Great Continent.

“And yet many also survived, even without their power.” The voice struck a more hopeful tone. “New trees took root. Old cracks filled with water, forming rivers and lakes.”

Once again, Elias saw it unfold beneath him, wondering if he would ever hit ground.

“But power is never truly destroyed,” the voice added. “A broken window leaves a trail of shards, and a shattered world would be rediscovered through the countless relics it left behind. Few inherited the skill, and fewer still learned to harness it. Those who did called themselves collectors. They were not so unlike their ancestors, and yet their power could no longer be sourced solely from within. Power, after all, had been broken and scattered. It needed to be found, collected, consumed.”

Far below—and yet ever closer—the Great Continent had fully taken form, its lush forests and verdant valleys, its winding rivers and presently puddle-sized lakes. Towns grew into cities, connected by sprouting roads that traced the changed contours of a remodeled world, drawing the constellations of a new civilization.

“Ascension, as it became known, required a great many of these relics,” the voice said. “But while the shards of a bygone age became a global currency, collectors remained in the shadows.”

Now Elias was falling amid a hail of shimmering relics. As the pale moon slipped away and the beating sun took its place, he caught flashes of jade and amber all around him, the hail getting heavier, the ground flying closer. He could no longer see the edges of it. The Great Continent’s rolling hills had reached and reshaped every horizon.

“It is said that the unshattered world had but one destiny, and that too had been fragmented. Alas, the past is but a dream. And the future… only those with the most unique gift of all might glimpse the future—or futures—that await.”

On this uncertain note, the voice trailed off. It was as if Elias’s disembodied teacher had stopped falling with him. He supposed he would just have to face gravity’s wrath on his own.

It was coming for him quickly. He heard the voice one final time, a few seconds before the forest below would have swallowed him whole and cracked every bone in his body. The shadow of his dead mother whispered, “Now awaken.”

Elias rolled off his bed with a loud thud, landing on the floorboards in a tangle of blankets, sweating despite the cold hour.

He was, he knew, no longer dreaming. Elias cradled what would be a bruised elbow tomorrow and hoped that the drumbeat of his dramatic fall hadn’t woken the entire estate.

Parched, he saw his glass of water sitting half-empty on the nightstand. The water was out of reach, but where his outstretched fingers ended, faint green lines continued, forming a wavering path between Elias and his heart’s desire.

The young collector grinned a beatific grin, his hand hovering in the air.

Yes, he truly had awakened.