SONIA
Sonia stood with her bare toes curled over the blunt edge of earth. This was no crater, no mere cavity. This was an abyss, and far deeper than her vision could penetrate. It was wider than the circumference of an entire city. Air currents eddied where the cold air from beneath collided with the sun warmed air from above. Winds tangled her hair and raised goose flesh over her exposed skin. And the ley energy raised gooseflesh all over her skin.
Three days had lapsed since first entering into the enemy territory of Grater Barren. In that space of time, Sonia could detect no sign of life anywhere, and though she had seen many craters pocking the ruined earth, there had been nothing like this. What could have caused such astonishing damage?
The condor flew cautiously behind and well above the giant hole. Finally, it lit on the ground beside her.
Sonia shook her head in amazement. “What is this?”
“This is what you’ve come for.”
Sonia started. “But it’s only a giant hole.”
“It’s much more than that.”
She sniffed. “I suppose you want me to jump straight inside?”
“You’ll die if you do.”
She let go of a bitter laugh. “Ah. Now you offer me a boat.”
“Not a boat—obviously--but if you dare…wings.”
“Little good they’ll do me.”
“I think they may be some good, but the currents in the abyss are fierce. We must be careful.”
“Why put me up to an act of suicide after rescuing me and leading me over all the countryside?”
“Okay then. You tell me: why do you want to do it?”
Sonia through her hands in the air. “Who said I wanted to see this hole in the earth? Who said I wanted to come here at all?”
The condor cocked his head to one side. “You said it with all that glitters in those warm amber eyes of yours. You say it with every blink of your lashes. Every stride of your burdened feet. You want to know what is down there. What happened here—like you want to know the blood that beats in a steady rhythm through the chambers of your own heart. Listen to it beating. It’s urging you down into an abyss within the enemy territory of your life’s deliverance. You have wanted entrance here as long as you have known this territory existed. Do you deny it?”
Sonia trembled and her voice broke with emotion. “No.”
“Then?”
Sonia’s heart leapt inside her chest. “Wings?”
The condor beat its wings up and outward, and in that instant, the sun’s glare caught Sonia’s eyes and half hid, half disclosed the condor’s movements. Sonia couldn’t see, but she felt the razor sharpness of giant talons gripping the back of her neck, lancing clean into her skin and piercing shoulder muscle, then marrow bone. It pulled her like prey upward from the ground.
The airborne giant banked to one side, arced, and then swooped into a steep descent, down into the darkness of the enormous pit below.
Wind engulfed Sonia, as she dangled like a limp fish from the talons of a giant bird. Sonia fought for consciousness against a pain so searing, she prayed once for deliverance and then twice again for death. The abyssal darkness had blinded her, encased her, assaulted her whole body. When at last light penetrated, it sent her a beam so bright, she prayed again for darkness. Then she fainted and she had her answer at last, but not for long.
*
Morning broke with a sharp, penetrating beam. How that were possible in the abyss, Sonia couldn’t tell, but it awakened her from a deep sleep. Something sharp gripped at her neck and Sonia winced with the renewed awareness of pain, but something cool and soothing also met the hot knife of her fresh wound.
Sonia awakened to pain, but not only pain. She found herself in a downy bed like she had never known in her father’s home, much less the barracks of the Green Guard. Where was she?
She lay in a kind of grotto, built into a bank of red rock. The hollow was earthen, but furnished in an extraordinary and civilized way. An instrument of some fashion played soft music by her bedside. A second and third bed stood to one side of hers. And the bright glare of light penetrated the bricks in the far wall.
Someone had dressed her wounds with ointment and clean gauze. A washing basin stood by her bedside, filled with water and a cloth, tinted pink with, Sonia supposed, the blood of her neck wound.
Where was the condor? The question came with a pang. She’d trusted him and he’d wounded her. A warm sense of indignation boiled up from her center. The bird might have killed her, and at points, she’d wished he had. And now he’d abandoned her. And she couldn’t even tell whether she was angrier that he had wounded her or that he’d left her alone to cope with the consequences.
A moment later, a stranger appeared at the opening of the grotto, removed his cap from his head and meekly asked if he might enter. His face was clean shaven and when he raised his eyes, they flashed with startling amber light. Sonia couldn’t respond for several seconds. And then she asked him, “Where am I?”
“You’re in the abyss.”
“The abyss? This isn't heaven?”
“No, quite opposite. Though I can’t call it hell, either. You’re healing rapidly, though you’ve lost a lot of weight. You need to recover before I dare take you any further.”
“What? Further? Who are you?”
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The next instant, the man disappeared. The giant condor stood upon the floor in his place.
“What did you do to me?” Sonia had wanted to scream at the condor, but she knew she didn’t need to vocalize anything. The bird had always read her thoughts.
He answered, “I have made eight punctures upon your right and left shoulders.”
Tears streamed down Sonia’s face. “Why? Why did you?”
The bird didn’t answer. “Sometimes to rise up, you must first descend."
“You said you would give me wings!”
“You mean, you thought my help would be painless.”
“I—I don’t know what I thought. I had no idea…”
“While you’ve healed, I’ve taken care to avoid infection and to preserve the puncture hole for a permanent handle. In the future, it will hurt less.”
Sonia’s mind reeled. “Hurt less? What do you mean? Where are you taking me?”
“To your people. You’ll never survive alone.”
“I don’t—” Even Sonia’s thoughts stammered in a tangle, impossible to unravel. Impossible to communicate. “How do you know my people?”
“That question probes nowhere near far enough to offer you any useful intelligence of your circumstances. I may as well not answer. Drink this broth and rest.”
Sonia had no strength to oppose the condor and so she sipped the broth that he had given her and she fell asleep again—half believing, half rejecting the past month of her waking days. It was a wrestle. She must be mad, but lunacy was so lucid! The broth so savory, the hot pain on her neck still so bright.
In the end, madness seemed to agree with her, and so she slept, sipped broth, and gradually healed. She healed enough to venture out of her grotto, tentatively, at first, then purposefully. Out in the wide open, she discovered the light was no sun but a vague glow of broadly diffuse energy emanating from the atmosphere itself. And it seemed to revolve on a day and night cycle much like the earth’s revolution around the sun, but much like the universe, she could little fathom it.
She walked on and at last reached the edge of the great abyss and she saw that she was standing upon what was merely a lateral shelf within the abyssal cavity. Bending her neck backward, she tried to see how far she had dropped, but couldn’t really tell, though it was a great distance. Craning her neck sent a spasm of pain so sharp, she lost her balance, and nearly collapsed helplessly over the edge. An arm shot out and clasped her wrist fast.
“It’s a long way down,” the man, who was also the bird said, and restored her to her feet and equilibrium.
She blinked. “You came out of nowhere.”
“Lucky,” he said in a way that made her certain there was no luck in it at all. He gazed at her meaningfully. “You’re nearly well enough.”
Sonia trembled with the memory of pain. “No. Not yet. Give me more time.”
The condor man blinked his amber eyes and nodded silently, and Sonia returned to the grotto, and her broth. The next day, she stayed inside and well away from the edge of the abyss. She stayed in the next day and the next, and her health seemed to plateau, and then gradually, to decline.
*
The condor man folded the blanket back from her bed. “Get up. You haven’t been outside in days.”
Sonia didn’t verbalize excuses. There was no need. The condor knew her mind, how she feared to travel, but even worse, how she feared meeting her so-called people.
She blinked at the condor man. “What makes them my people?”
He nodded. “I will make them yours.”
Sonia wanted to laugh. “And they’ll accept me because a bird man tells them to?”
“Yes, and no. They will accept you for who you will become among them. I will speak for you.”
“Acceptance sounds far from realized.”
“So it is…and so is your own progress.”
Everything from Sonia’s life Arrow compelled her to fear confronting a strange people, but another part of her—that spark of personhood which hadn’t been taken away from her wondered: who are these people to whom I might belong? And what if I really could find a home with them? She grew lightheaded with the thought. Then she stared back at the condor and gave a tiny nod of her head.
*
Sonia stood at the edge of the abyss, her callous worn toes curling over the cold stone rim rock. Her eyes closed, nostrils flared, her body felt alive to the cool air and the vaguely warm light and her own lucid madness. She stood and readied herself—for the drop, for the weight of her body suspended from the angry talon grip.
She trembled with anticipation, with fear, and with the exotic breath filling her lungs in every gasp of this strange abyssal air. Only the thought of the sheer risk she was taking almost dropped her straight down into the vacuum, but as she teetered over the edge and leaned into the fall, the knife clasped fast through her neck wound, gripped and slung her like a rag doll over the wide open expanse, not gliding, but diving down in an aggressive drop into the cold expanse below.
She felt it all. The pain. But not only pain. Euphoric hope filled her body inside and outside and all over her—until she swam in it. Matter waned, spirit waxed, and something mysterious lit her insides. Something wild and fresh and vicious and glorious. She recognized it at last. The will to live the condor had argued belonged to her. That precious impossible will to live! After all of her shame and seclusion. She had it—a life, a will to be. To have her existence ratified. It radiated through her skin and no one could deny it.
Witnesses did see. The condor had chosen his moment. It was the instant when light parted darkness, penetrating the clouded atmosphere. The people of Grater Barren emerged from beneath eaves and out from the inside of dark rooms. An entire village assembled, eyes dilating and faces turned upward to the sky.
This is what they saw:
A mighty condor—wings spread like a great awning, shadowing the land. Profound in its dignity. Massive talons threaded through the neck of a young girl. They saw and couldn’t unsee it diving into the square, fast, head bent and his cargo swinging. It banked and circled, and then, at last, gentle as a dove, lit upon the branch of a tree in the center of the market square. There, it released its hold on the girl.
The condor beat its wings—beat them hard and the assembly tilted as one body while the wind off its feathers forced them back and down upon knees. As the condor mounted up again into the sky, they saw its shadow ranging over the square and ascending up again, up an impossible distance until it could no longer be seen at all.
The great condor was a legend, but not a stranger to Grater Barren. It was the Magnus Avem—a demigod of the sky. A messenger helper. He had appeared to them before. And each instance had been set down in Grater Barren’s history along with the city's destruction and every other heavenly manifestation.
The moment of speechlessness had to pass. And the job of breaking the silence and mediating the consequences of this girl’s miraculous appearance into his city belonged to one man—the former general and protector of the survivors of Grater Barren. General Rudyard Travertine.
He had been forced down to one knee by the furious blast of the condor’s wind. This reluctant homage given, he rose again to his feet and addressed the girl, whom he startled to realize had eyes of amber, like a child of one of the survivors of his own city.
He smiled and reached up a hand to help her down from the tree. “Child. What is your name?”
Sonia stared into the fear-filled amber eyes of the assembly around her, and her voice almost failed her. Almost. “Sonia.”
“Welcome, Sonia. And I am General Rudyard Travertine—the governor in this place. Where do you come from?”
Having made such a dramatic landing, Sonia thought she might claim anything. She might be from anywhere, but of all things, she couldn’t let herself become their enemy. And failing to bring to mind the name of any of Grater Barren’s allies, replied, “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
The general blinked with suspicion, but how could he interrogate a miracle? “Well, Sonia, you look very much like a daughter of Grater Barren, which is the city where you have, er um--landed. Will you come down from the tree?”
“Yes, thank you.” Sonia accepted the general’s rough hand down.
“We don’t have many visitors in our city these days, and as you must be aware, there are only two ways out of the city. One way is easy, but fatal, as it drops further into the abyss and the other way is impossible. Your arrival here is so, um, er—irregular, I’m not really sure what procedure to follow, but one thing seems quite clear—you are a young girl. And being a child, we have a duty to see to your education. Come with me.”