Chapter 37 - Height of The Sky

Vern sat on the bed by the window next to a telescope as he slowly cleaned away the blood from his shoulder with cotton and some purge tincture.

Ughhh

It hurt. It steaming hurt. Never in his life had Vern got himself a wound like this. He'd had a few new experiences recently, but they were all more or less psychological or under conditions where he was numbed. The worst he'd had was a broken bone as a kid, but even that didn't hurt as much.

Luckily, the wound was shallow, and he hadn't broken any bones, or it would have been a nightmare to deal with.

Crack my cogs. Just what the hell did I get myself into?

He still couldn't come to terms with whatever happened at the Ascendant Council. Why were his bullets useless on that pale man? Why did they instinctively want to either gouge his eyes out or hack him to pieces? Then there was that woman. Just what was that macabre sight he experienced after briefly peering into her red eyes?

On top of all this, his previous questions remained completely unanswered. Where was the stalker who gave him that note? Who and where was Yharl Ballin? What about that Hoist guy? All that the Ascendant council had in store for him were a bunch of psychos, out for blood.

Still, he was able to confirm a few things from this trip.

First was that those people in white robes who took Ari did not belong to the Council. There was no conclusive proof of this, but there was no way, a proper organization was running in that haunted manor. That atmosphere just wasn't conducive to disciplined ranks and structure. Also, dwellers of Council seemed to not want to come out of their burrow since they didn't chase him outside.

It is already past nine. Ari had yet to be back as of yet, so it was possible that those white robes had somehow managed to get her to join them or something along those lines.

Then there was the thing about Hoist and Yharl. Who was the real leader of the Ascendant Council? And just what had the leader done to turn its member into…that? Definitely, something had gone wrong after Duskfall, and figuring out more about that might lead him closer to Yharl Ballin.

But on the bright side, he got himself another Insight Sphere. He had used up a big chunk of those invigorating thoughts in lower northwestern octant, but there was still some leftover. And then there was another set of unknown thoughts floating directly opposite to his own that of complexity. One he would try and explore once he felt a little better.

His mind was exhausted right now and doing anything related to Observation was out of the picture for the night.

Putting the sphere back, he wrapped a bandage around his shoulder and used his teeth to tie a sloppy knot. Once done, he took that earlier note he had penned for Ari and placed it on the bed again.

Careful not to scrape his bandage, he donned the coat, which had a tear on its shoulder, and left the room—regrettably, without his top hat. He had lost it at some point in time during that haphazard chase in Ascendant Council. It was a matching one too.

Shaking his head, he descended the dormitory's stairs. He was in dire need of some food and materials. Food to survive, and materials to make himself a portable lamp because he wasn't going into any more of these dark places without some form of contraption to illuminate his surroundings.

Buying a pre-made one was also an option, but he doubted that top notch contraptions were sold on streets in times like these.

Exiting the building, he looked up at the rift which complemented the waning moon. But as he was about to shrug it off, a wild thought crossed his mind. What if I calculate the height of this rift?

He stood there rooted in place, trying to figure out how to go about doing this. Who cared if the information would be very useful or not? The idea sounded very fun in his mind, and it might just ease his mind to know exactly how high up this thing was in the atmosphere. Better to rationalize it than leave it as some unknown cosmic phenomenon.

Right now, it looked like this rift was in front of the moon because of how some of the cracks spilled over and covered some of that moon's glow. This simple experiment would make it obvious. So he pulled out the map and looked at the scale on its corner. It said that every column and row which divided the map into cells was about 400 meters.

Hmm, I should be able to get a reasonable accuracy if I walk about two Kilometers. So he picked two points on the map, exactly five cells away from each other in a straight line. To keep it easy for himself, he set one endpoint to be the bridge that connected this district to the Silverthread district. He wasn't an astral Fundamentalist, but he knew enough about parallax distance measurement to get a rough estimate.

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He would first find a parallax angle at one point in the district, then at another, and compile that information to get the height of that rift. Running back up into Ari's room, he grabbed the astrolabe, walked back out, and made his way toward the other point he'd marked on the map. It was just a few hundred meters to the south of Hartley St.

Some men were still toiling away, digging the walkways, entombing new graves every second, while the soft rustles on the roof marked the presence of Kingsman in the area. But he had no reason to disturb any of them.

Once at the spot, under the expanse of dark sky, Vern positioned himself strategically as he intently peered upwards through the small lens of the astrolabe. The motion of lifting his shoulder made him groan in pain, albeit it was already quite better than before. Focusing on the top left corner of the rift, he traced an invisible line from his eyes to the blue-red fissure and then straight down to the cobblestones underfoot.

Bending down, he grabbed a stone from the walkway and put it at the imaginary line from the rift to the ground, and then by keeping the astrolabe flat on his hands, he found the angle between his position and the stone.

He duplicated the same efforts for the moon to have another reference.

During all this, the tombstone workers stopped and looked at him with amusement, but Vern simply jotted down this angle in his notepad. Without explaining himself, he began his march toward the other end of the district leaving the diggers to their own devices.

Crossing one empty street after another, he passed by tens of closed shops before finally finding himself a diner with lights on. Going in, he ordered an overpriced dinner and waited for his meal. There was no need to hurry to the bridge.

It didn't seem like this rift revolved around the planet, so he should be fine even if he waited an hour between both his measurements.

And he needed some semblance of normalcy in his routine. It would be impractical to worry about the million other things that weighed on his mind—specially Sustenance. He was doing his best to make progress toward solving this tangled mess. Any more mental pressure would just be priming his mind to become a pressure engine that is on the verge of exploding.

During the wait, he noticed the small lamps that hung around the interior and asked the only server—an older male wearing a flat cap, a cheap cigar in his mouth, "Mister, would you be willing to sell one of these lamps?"

Blowing a puff of thin smoke out of his mouth, the man glanced at Vern and replied in a husky voice, "I don't see why not. But that's such a peculiar demand. Tell me, night farer, what fancies you in such a mundane thing?"

The man stood up, poured more leaves into the front of his cigar, and took another puff as he waited for an answer.

"I simply need a small lamp frame that I can carry with myself."

"You say that, but this one can't even handle a shake, much less carry it on your person for ease. You didn't know that, did ya? You'd be much better off going to the mechanist market at the dawn and getting something more fitting for the task."

"Hah. Please don't worry about that. I just need the frame, I'll fix the rest of it myself."

"Oh, we've got a tinkerer, have we? That mechanist market I just told ya bout used to have many more like ya. I heard many were lost to the Duskfall. The blessed ones that survived took over the shops and items of the dead—may lady rest their soul. But tell me night farer, why do you think we survived the culling? One such as me deserved a one-way charter to Styx ferry if I say so myself."

Stumped by such a profound question so out of the blue, Vern ruminated over it for a while, before he chuckled with a bitter expression, "We just got lucky, is all."

"Hahhahah. I hear you, night farer. I hear you. That really must be the case. Otherwise, so many kind souls wouldn't be lost to the winds. Besides that, night farer, what kind of tinkering—"

The tedious question that the man was about to ask was interrupted by a shout from the kitchen, and he left promptly. When he came back out with food, Vern didn't waste much time chatting and asked a few perfunctory questions before the man left him alone.

Paying Fifteen Crowns total for the meal and the lamp, he exited the small diner.

And as expected, the rift seemed to stay in position while the moon had drifted apart from it.

Confident in his calculations, he made his way to the bridge in this deep night, a small lamp in his hands, its frail wick about to be snuffed any moment by the wind. It was indeed a chore to keep it burning, but he would fix it tomorrow.

He lampooned about random things until he finally reached the other point he had marked for himself on the map—right next to the bridge. Standing in a somewhat open area, he placed the lamp on the ground and took out the astrolabe again before focusing on exactly the same top-left corner of the rift.

Repeating the earlier actions, he found himself another angle. Then putting the lamp on the railing of the bridge, he started his calculations on his notepad under the dim orange illumination.

Having traversed a reasonable distance across the city and noted the positions of both the moon and the rift, he now held the basic components for a parallax calculation. Two angles and a base distance—it was a simple ratio analysis problem. But the result was proving to be anything but.

The angle between the rift and the moon, measured from two different locations, should have shown some difference. But the two angles were virtually identical. He frowned and traced the lines of his drawings, the moon’s position moving, but the rift’s…

He shook his head in disbelief, scrubbing a gloved hand through his hair. It was as if the rift was so far away that his change in perspective hadn’t altered its position at all. But that would mean the rift was... it was...

His calculations halted, the numbers too outrageous to believe. He glanced back at the rift, the implications making his stomach churn with unease. His mind swirled with confusion and a growing sense of fear. He knew it wasn't something ordinary because normal citizens couldn't perceive it. But this…?

His calculations were saying this rift was more than a billion kilometers away from the surface. Then how could it appear in front of the moon?