Faith moved their feet.

There was no other word for it. Faith, that the red face leading them through the mists was somehow on their side. The ragged squad (if it could be called a squad) were days deep into the cloud wastes. Three cyrans and a corvani. None of whom had any right to be alive.

The shallow lake had replaced algae-slick stones and loose gravel with floors of metal debris. A foot below the water’s surface, there was a whole landscape of scrap and wires and pipes and rusted metal panels and pieces of roofs or walls or floors, she couldn’t tell. How it could all sit there, submerged in the lake, with only the odd tower or the spears of antennas jutting up, without rusting, Agra would never know.

Skeletons of old drones and other constructs cracked and shifted unevenly under their feet. But at least the water was clear, and moved slowly.

Agraneia was on point. The rest were strung out behind her. The Scribe was sloshing through the low water, trying to keep his feet from slipping on a parallel strip of metal pipes, too exhausted and too focused to say anything. Behind him, the politician was leaning heavily on Eolh’s shoulder.

One night, they camped under the eaves of two massive towers, whose forked heights rose into the mists and out of view. The towers were connected by a series of catwalk bridges and aluminum staircases, and a set of enormous, rusted treads were fitted to the base of both towers, as the whole thing was made to move. Agra couldn’t fathom why anyone would need such a large machine, or what it’s purpose might be.

Eolh couldn’t resist. While the others rested, he flew up to the top, his black, flapping form swallowed by the mist.

Long minutes passed. Kirine groaned and sat into the wheel of one tread, taking his soaking feet out of the water, not caring about the rust. The Scribe rifled through his pack. Agra listened.

She could not hear the beat of the corvani’s wings. Nor see him.

A ripple of worry made its way from her head to her gut. In any other soldier, a common reaction. But for her, this was unusual. She had thought that part of her died a long time ago. How many of her fellow cyrans had she dragged into battle, into death? Why should this xeno make her feel any different?

But there it was.

Eolh came soaring back down like a black-feathered arrow. He splashed lightly in the shallow lake, his talons wrapping around the corner of some sunken building. There was a crack between that building and the next, where the water went too deep to see the bottom.

“Can’t see anything up there,” Eolh said, shaking the water from his feathers. “The mist just keeps going. No sky, nor moons above.”

The Keeper’s face never stayed with them. Never answered their questions. “The administrator is waiting,” is all it could say. And then, it would disappear. And reappear, somewhere deeper in the mists, drawing them ever forward. When they camped, it patiently glowed through the night. Unmoving, like stone. Waiting for them to continue.

Agra had seen that face before. Hundreds of them, carved over and over again in the sunken temples of the Lassertane. Emotionless and flawless and blank.

Because they had no leader, the squad voted on it. Unanimous, they agreed to follow the face, but not to trust it. Not for a single moment.

Sometimes, a breeze stirred the clouds out of their way, and Agra could see the whole sunken junkyard exposed before them. They could see ridges where the elbow joints of immense pipes rose out of the water, or disappeared back below the surface. Agraneia had seen the sewers beneath Cyre. Each of these pipes could have drained the whole city, and there were dozens of them running off, parallel, into the distance.

Spiky forests of antennae cut into the clouds, some still blinking red or white or green lights. One night, they passed by eight “silos,” for that’s what they looked like to her. Grain silos, only instead of brick, it was made of perfect, smooth metal. And, instead of standing tall, these silos were perched horizontally in mid air. Hanging only a few dozen feet above the water, with nothing to support them. How they were suspended, she had no idea. Underneath, corrosion ate through the outer layers of metal. Inside, there was something…

She could only shake her head in wonder. Gods know what that is. An array that looked like the inside of something alive. But it was also so perfect. Rows and rows of geometric shapes that wrapped around and around each other, and fed off in such strange patterns to each other, and to other places deeper inside the silo. Gods know.

She hated this place, because it was overflowing with wealth. A vast richness of ancient technology, sunken and forgotten, and hidden behind some unthinking deathscape of mist and monsters. The metal here alone could supply the whole Cyran Empire for generations. More. No wonder the Emperor wanted to conquer this planet.

And somehow, Eolh’s friend had simply walked in here. A human? A god? Agraneia wasn’t so ready to start believing. Back in Vorpei’s prison blocks, the corvani tried to spin her a tale about his “human” friend, but she knew Eolh’s type. Eager to believe anything, those ones were.

And Agraneia held on to her doubt, all the way through the templelands. And even when the Keeper called off its shambling monsters, half-machine and half-plant, she found that she still doubted what Eolh was saying. True cyrans did prayed to the gods, but they did not believe in them. Because it mattered what the dullfolk thought of you. How many of the Venerate had proven that, time and time again?

Only the dullscales and the poorest of the true cyrans believed in the gods. Some of the elite even claimed the Cyran religione, with all its saints and gods, was merely a tool. What was it they said at the academy? Why help the dullfolk, when you could just tell them to pray?

Sometimes, legend said, their prayers were even answered. But not in Agra’s lifetime. She did not hate the gods, because how can you hate something that doesn’t exist? No, she hated the people who used them.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

The Everlord, most of all, for allowing such beliefs to reign unchecked in his immortal empire. He was no god. At best, he was a splinter. A distant heir. All the gods, or whatever the humans had been, were gone.

Only...

Only, Agraneia began to feel the stirring of doubt, as dark as blood. It started somewhere in the soles of her feet, soaked to the ankle in her water-logged boots. It ran up the backs of her legs, and up her spine. And needled at her.

After spending days trekking through this flooded, cloud-ridden wasteland, her doubt had turned into something else. A gnawing concern. But of what? She could not say. There were faces in the mists. Old faces. Faces she knew, but some she didn’t.

Shut it down, soldier. She thought to herself. And then, You’re not a soldier. Not anymore.

Shut it down!

Agraneia shook her head, and stared up at the only face that mattered: the Keeper’s, shining ruby bright, like a gas lantern in the fog. This was a wrong place. That didn’t mean she had to let it change her.

On the fifth day, there was lightning in the water.

The lake reached up to their waists, and they had to swim to keep their feet. Slow moving currents gathered strength, pulling them the direction they were already going. That made it easier. They floated for a long hour, treading and clinging to each other to stay afloat. And then, the Scribe spotted the towers. Twin pylons, their metal tips disappeared into the mist. Between them, a deep, dark trench was gouged into the whole structure of metal below them.

A streak of lightning erupted from one of the towers, a snake of blue energy flashed from the tip of the pylon, and spidered across the surface of the water.

On the other side of the trench, they could just make out the dimly glowing face of the Keeper.

“You two swim around,” Eolh said. “I’ll take Kirine. Meet you on the other side.”

Agra watched as the corvani dragged Kirine through the water, taking him to a rusted, dry hillock of metal cresting above the water’s surface. She could see him warming up his muscles, getting ready for the flight.

Agraneia and the Scribe swam as far east as they could (was this east?), skirting around the water dancing with lightning. Tiny whirlpools opened up beneath them, as the water was sucked into avenues and alleys of the sunken metalscape below. The clouds above felt like they were falling. The white ceiling, pressing ever downward.

Agra touched the platform first, and hauled herself, dripping, out of the water. She held out a hand for the Scribe, who tossed her his pack first (how had he kept it so dry?) and, gasping for breath, they stared at this strange, rippling world around them. Pulses of lightning still emitted through the clouds, and the mist was so thick here it seemed to refract all the colors of the rainbow.

And there was Eolh, his talons hooked on Kirine’s shoulders, flapping dangerously as he struggled to keep them both above the water. Their two black shapes passed between the towering pylons. Agraneia cringed as a strand of lightning escaped one pylon, and used Eolh’s open wings as a conduit to leap to the other. Agra tensed, ready to leap back into the water, and swim out to Eolh’s electrified corpse... But the lightning passed through him.

Eolh and Kirine crashed on a concrete platform. Gasping and flopping onto dry ground. Kirine was howling with laughter. Ecstatic from death, missed nearly. “Did you see that?!” he shouted, though everyone was right there.

Eolh was still gasping for air, but Kirine’s was worse. He was coughing and his breath was ragged, though there was still a smile on his lips, though his brightest scales were peeling and going dull. “Gods, I felt their power,” he said, laughing. “Look at my hands! I’m still shaking. You are a wonderful courrier, Eolh!” It was the most Agraneia had heard the politician talk in days. And he paid the price for it, as his laughs descended into a coughing fit.

“Where’s,” Eolh spoke between breaths, “The Keeper?”

Agraneia looked around. The Scribe was looking at her, as if she might know. “It was here.”

The clouds might’ve thrown them off. Shifting, layering over each other. Making it look like the whole world was turning, when it should’ve been standing still.

Eolh crowed a sound. Nodding up the concrete platform. “Look.”

The platform ended in a sheer cliff. From this chasm, all the mist of all the world seemed to pour out, all at once.

And in that mist, a bridge glowed. This was not at all like the grand bridges on Cyre, that forded the Twins, rising like cathedrals from one hill to the next. Nor was it like any of the footbridges her fellow soldiers constructed, everywhere they went. There were no stone columns, reaching to the ground. There were no arches, holding it up. Indeed, she did not think any amount of concrete could support something above that vast, swirling chasm below. And yet, it was there. Flickering, orange light. The mist that touched it burned and hissed away, so that it made a kind of tunnel through the thick, white wall of mist.

Agraneia looked back at the group. Eolh, his feathered chest still heaving. Kirine, gripping his leg, his laughing smile turned into a rictus of pain. The Scribe, who was so far out of his depth, his stare had gone blank.

“Wait here,” Agra said, and stalked off toward the bridge before anyone could tell her otherwise. Her boots made wet slaps against the concrete, the soaked leather constricting against her ankles and feet.

As she approached, the hum of energy grew louder. Bright and orange and volatile. And the hissing mist, as it climbed up from some vast, human-made canyon below. A sheer drop, that curved slightly to her left and her right. For the thousandth time since coming to this place, she wondered why this was here. No answer would ever suffice.

Agraneia crouched, and hovered her palm over the bridge’s orange light. No heat at all. Unnatural. She tore a strip of cloth from her already ragged shirt. And let it drop against the bridge. Expecting it to burn. Instead, the light seemed to harden underneath the fabric. Holding it aloft, over those roaring, billowing white clouds. She tapped the bridge with her finger. A shock made her pull away. Her finger was numb. But it still moved. And she was still alive.

Shapes flickered along the light, where the clouds touched and burned away. She tested the bridge with her foot. And then another. The bridge was only wide enough to fit one person, especially as there were no rails to hold.

Agraneia stepped deeper into the mists, until she lost count of her steps, and the mists above sprinkled her scales with dew. Behind, the concrete platform slowly faded, until she could not tell what was concrete and what was cloud. And still, the bridge kept going.

There was something sitting in the middle of the bridge.

No, not sitting. Floating.

A hollow sphere, or the suggestion of a sphere, built by floating, languid ribbons of silver. The ribbons were weaving and unweaving themselves, changing the shape of the hollow sphere ever so slightly. There was something in the center.

Agraneia pulled out her knife.

There was someone inside. Sitting cross-legged. No, floating cross-legged.

“Stop.” A voice came from the sphere, amplified and made metallic. “Who are you?”

It was the first time Agraneia had ever seen a god. And she froze. She simply froze. Her lips were locked, her arms could not move.

“Why are you doing this?” the voice said. Not angry. Defeated. “You’re killing them. There will be nothing left if you keep going. Why are you making us do this?”

Only then did Agraneia realize the god could not see her. Its face was covered in the same writhing, weaving metal.

Does he see me?

She took a step back. All the metal ceased, staying in perfect suspension.

“Eolh?” the voice had changed. More awake, but still muffled by all the mist and metal between them. Hopeful, and youthful, but deepening. The ribbons began to unweave themselves as the shape in the center unfolded. All the floating metal slid back into his body as he came to his feet. “Eolh, is that you?”

Still, the words did not come to her. Too many years separated her from all the prayers of her youth, and all the oaths they sang in the temples. The holy words vanished from her mind.

What the hells do you say to a god?