There was only the beam, and on the beam, time had no meaning. They could only walk, or rest.

Eolh was the last one to speak, and that must’ve been hours ago, at breakfast. He had asked, “What if we get there, and Sen’s elevator is broken?”

Nobody answered him.

As they walked, Poire daydreamed of trains, or constructs that might carry them. His feet were blistered, and his legs sore. He could only imagine how the others felt. Yarsi hadn’t said anything in days. Agraneia, in a week.

Poire thought of using the architect’s gloves to somehow carry them. He had seen it done before, in videos back in his Conclave. But it looked dangerous, even for someone used to wearing them. And though the beam was as wide as an avenue, he didn’t want to think about falling. There was nothing below for hundreds of miles.

Besides, Poire didn’t want to go alone. Poire was embarrassed by the selfish thought, but he took comfort in knowing that it simply wasn’t feasible for him to go alone anymore. And even if it was, there was no way Eolh would leave his side.

Poire looked over his shoulder at his black-feathered friend, smiling.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, good,” Eolh said, “I was worried you were going to say something that might break up this miserable boredom. Hells forbid I think about anything other than my aching feet.”

Yarsi giggled at him.

“Don’t you get any ideas,” he warned the lassertane.

“I sing?” she asked, a mischievous grin showing too many teeth.

“Please don’t,” Eolh said. “We both know you only know one song.”

“Then you sing!”

Eolh sighed. Shook his head. And Poire thought that was all they would get. They walked in silence for another few yards. He cleared his throat, and started soft, and low and a little shaky.

Nothing worth taking in the house of the king,

No flash, but the flash of gold.

No beauty in the dance or the wing,

Until I saw you alone.

It is said this could never be,

By the gods’ grand design.

It is said there is no reason to dream,

But they have not dreamed of mine.

Low adrift in noblest flock,

A liar lost in your song.

I would have worn through every lock,

To be yours, I’d do everything wrong.

Tell me not this could never be,

Oh, gods send no bitter sign.

For a fool, there can be no sweeter dream,

And yet, I still dream of mine.

Why can’t I forever stay,

When your smile fills my wings.

Answer my plea, this only I pray,

Can a noble love a thief?

I will heed no warning,

nor the will of gods divine.

There can be no dreaming,

Unless I dream of mine.

Eolh’s voice went quiet, but the song seemed to go on forever in that great, hollow place beneath the crust of the world.

“Sad song,” Yarsi said finally.

Agraneia put a hand on Eolh’s shoulder, and squeezed, and kept walking.

“Very sad,” Yarsi said.

“You asked for a song.”

“Is it about you?”

“What?” Eolh said, sounding surprised, “No. It’s an old song. About a Lowborn, who falls in love with… with someone he can’t have.”

“So,” Yarsi eyed him skeptically, “Not you.”

“No. Forget it. Let’s go back to silence.”

The beam was a perfect octagonal cylinder that extended for hundreds of miles across the expanse. Other beams cascaded down around them, most of them the same size and shape, each one at a slightly different angle.

It reminded Poire, in a way, of his home. Not the madness of so much empty space, but the shape of the beams. Back in the caverns far below Kaya, in his Conclave, the train tunnels were hollowed out octagons, too. Each one, the same shape.

If this was the world Sen built, then Poire wondered if she had ever been to Kaya. Was she ever at my conclave?

He tried to remember the faces of all the visitors who came to the Conclave. There were the other directors, from the other Conclaves. And the woman with dreadlocks made of machines. She had smiled at Poire a lot, and said, “I can’t believe how much he looks like me.” But she wasn’t allowed to talk to Poire. And then, there were the quadruplets, who came often enough. And the bright old man, with the long, unkempt beard and his sad, hopeful eyes. And there were more, weren’t there? Dozens of them, that he couldn’t quite remember.

Hours later, they made camp because Yarsi was stumbling too much. A few beams sprouted from some place far below and speared the rock overhead, to hold up the world.

Eolh slept, his whistling snores rising into the cold air. And Yarsi was, as Poire’s caretaker used to say, zonked out from all the walking.

Poire could hear Agraneia tossing and turning in her knapsack, like she always did. He wondered what voices she was hearing. Were they getting worse?

There was a strip of silver on her, the fragment of Poire’s armor that she had used to climb down from the Lassertane’s village. The strip of silver rolled over her as she rolled, as if it were a part of her.

Agraneia turned. They locked eyes. He hadn’t meant to do that. Poire blinked, turning away, embarrassed. “I wasn’t staring.”

Agraneia pushed herself up and padded over to Poire, her heavy boots (she always slept in full gear) barely made a sound on the beam. She knelt before him, cupping her hands so that the armor pooled into her palms.

“Godling, I…” She looked down at her hands, and the words came out in a rush. “Thank you for lending me this. I am afraid I am keeping it awake. Please, take it from me.”

Poire didn’t know what to say at first. And then, he smiled at her misunderstanding. “It doesn’t need to sleep, Agraneia.”

“Everything sleeps.”

“It feeds off your kinetic energy. And warmth. And light.”

“Truly?” Her eyes went wide, as she appreciated the metal all over again. “Still, I am not worthy of this-”

“Keep it.” Poire said.

Agraneia’s head jerked up to look at him.

“You might need it,” He said.

“But we are headed towards an elevator. And I do not intend to climb again.”

“It does more than help you climb. Here, look. Just talk to it.”

“How?” Agraneia said. She got up from her kneeling position, and sat cross-legged in front of Poire. Holding out her forearm.

“I can do it in my head, but you… you’ll have to use your words. Like this. Armor, cover her arm.”

The liquid metal raced up her wrist, thinning out and became a kind of thin, silvery bracelet.

“Now, you try.”

She lifted her silver arm up to her face, staring wide-eyed.

“Hello,” she said. And it rippled. “Hello, bracelet. Please move to my shoulder.”

And it moved. Her face lit up with wonder.

She said “ball” and it became rolled itself into a metal ball that she could pass from hand to hand. She said knife…

Agraneia made a sound that Poire had never heard from her before: a laugh, deep and booming from her chest. He liked the sound.

Eolh snorted awake. “What?” He sat up in his knapsack, blinking blearily up into the endless light of this world. A sleeping mask, which was just a piece of fabric torn from his vest, hung off his beak.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“That’s nice and everything,” Eolh said, “But should the person who, you know, hearing voices, really have a living knife?”

Agraneia’s not the only one hearing voices, Poire thought.

Agraneia was too enamored to answer Eolh. The cyran sliced the knife against the air, and when she found that it stuck to her palm—even with her fingers open—her eyes lit up. When she jabbed the knife forward, it grew into a kind of spear, extending her reach.

“Whoa,” Yarsi said, sitting up on her own knapsack.

“Go back to sleep,” Eolh said.

“How?” Yarsi gestured at Agraneia and the glittering, vicious dance of her metal.

“You’re right,” Eolh said. “No way I’m sleeping with her doing that ten paces from my head. Right. What’s for breakfast?” He rummaged through his pack, and pulled out a bundle of cloth. “Oh, dried fruit and cheese again? How exciting.” His tone suggested it was anything but.

They packed up their possessions, and started across the beam again. Yarsi always left one boot outside camp, pointed in the direction they needed to go, because it was “whole beam looks same.” Which was true. The ceiling changed, the distant beams crisscrossing the void changed, but in a way it all looked the same. There were only two directions they could go, and yet it was still so easy to get turned around. They hadn’t brought enough supplies for that…

Agraneia was in front. She held one thumb out, and one eye closed as she stared down the beam.

“The light is getting brighter,” she said.

“I don’t see it,” Eolh said.

“And that dark spot is darker, too.”

“Ags, are you sure?” And he lowered his voice, “Could you be seeing things again?”

“I see it too.” Poire said. “Yarsi, what is that?”

And when she didn’t answer, the remainder of his armor wrapped over his limbs, and crawled up his neck. Thus far, the young lassertane had talked their ears off when they came near a landmark. But right now, she stayed silent and squinted straight ahead.

“Yarsi?”

“A lake,” she said quietly.

“That’s it? What’s the dark spot?”

“I not know,” she whispered, one hand clutching at the back of her neck where the memory insert was implanted. “I not remember this. Lake not here last time.”

“Since your last pilgrimage?” Eolh said.

“Yes.”

“Then she won’t remember how to cross it,” Eolh said to Agraneia. The cyran grunted her agreement. And the two of them bowed their heads together, discussing what they should do. Yarsi was still squinting down the beam, trying to make out what was ahead.

Poire was the first to notice the dust. The specks were hard to see, but they warped the air where they fell, like bubbles refracting light in odd ways. One speck was so large, Poire could see how it seemed to change shape as it fell. It reminded him of something.

Of home? That wasn’t it.

And then he remembered. The tests. The ones he was born to take, and had all but failed.

“Does he know?” a voice whispered.

“Know what?” Poire said aloud. “Who are you?”

“Poire?” Eolh crooked his head to the side, blinking at him with those huge, avian eyes.

“Nothing,” Poire said. “We need to keep going. The dust is falling again.”

And so it was. Only a fleck here and there, but when one fell to the beam, it sank right through the metal.

They walked in tense silence, careful to avoid the errant particles of dust, or whatever it was. Poire couldn’t tear his eyes away from the shape, as it grew on his horizon.

It was a machine, the size of a small mountain. Half of it was embedded in the glowing light, shimmering and frozen. Sheer cliffs of metal stuck out of the light, turning red with ancient rust. Somehow, the lake—that purified light—held it in place. The construct was vast, and yet, compared to the lake of light, it was so small. Like an insect caught in the sap of a tree.

“Do you think it knows we’re here?” Eolh asked.

Poire said, “Probably best to assume it can.”

“What do we do?” Yarsi asked. Without her usual confidence, she sounded so weak and small.

If the light came from the beam, or from somewhere far below the beam and simply pierced up through the metal, Poire couldn’t tell. It made a perfect, glowing boundary on the metal, and above it the air shimmered. Where the mountain construct stuck out of the light, a dark line of rust ran across its multi-tiered hull.

“There!” Yarsi gasped. Her finger was pointing not at the machine, but on the vertical beam that it was leaning against. At the space where that beam intersected their own.

“The way down,” Yarsi said.

“The construct was trying to destroy it,” Eolh guessed, and Poire nodded his agreement. The mountain construct had come close, it seemed. Enormous pincer-like claws extended from its base, and were frozen forever around the perfect geometry of the beam. Perhaps its sensors got frozen too. Or its core.

Do these machines even have cores? Poire wondered.

“It’s not moving,” Eolh said.

“Not yet,” Agraneia added.

“Maybe it won’t.”

Agraneia grunted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“Maybe we walk under it?” Yarsi suggested.

The mountain of metal stared down at them. Looming. Giving no sign that it was alive. And yet…

“I think it’s waiting for us,” Poire said.

Now that he looked at it, Poire thought that its unfrozen side looked like a shell, with its conical twists ending in a kind of giant point. The shell was ridged with hundreds of metal steeples and giant instrumentation bays, each the size of a building.

“The truth is,” Eolh said, tapping his beak thoughtfully, “If it does move, there’s nothing we can do out here. We’d be safer inside the light.”

“But we don’t know how to navigate it,” Poire said. He looked at Yarsi, who cast her eyes downward, ashamed of herself. “Hey, it’s not your fault.”

“Bad water,” she said. “You touch, you die. But I don’t know how to go through.”

“Still,” Eolh said, “If there was a choice, we’d be better off by the light. At least it might catch something if it comes at us.”

“Yes,” Agraneia said, and immediately started walking. Poire looked at Eolh, who shrugged.

The corvani held a feathered hand, saying, “Come on.” Yarsi took it. They followed the cyran, with Poire lagging behind. If he started hearing voices again, he wanted to talk to them without the others breaking his concentration.

In this world, where the light came from below, the mountain had no shadow. They walked for miles with its presence looming larger. They could see dozens of specks in the light now. Drones that had been caught in its otherworldly pressure.

The lake was right there. And they could move no further. Eolh suggested throwing another knife into it, or using something to poke their way through, to see if there were any soft spots like before. Yarsi didn’t think that would work.

“She opens the way,” she said. “It opens only for her. But she not talk to us anymore.”

As they discussed, Poire started listening to a new voice. There was little wind down here, below the world, but still the voice seemed to float on the breeze, “Does he know what he is?”

“What?” Poire said. “What do you mean ‘what’ I am?”

The others were standing together, Agraneia was pointing at something on the mountain construct.

Poire thought he heard the voice again, when a jawing, wrenching sound wailed like the song of some mournful abyssal leviathan. A sound that should not have echoed in all this space, but did.

The mountain construct’s body began to twist on itself. Turning against its spiraled layers. Steeples snapped off, and its shell crunched and ground strips out of itself as if something was eating it from the inside. Poire could see something chewing holes from inside the mountain, and metal tendrils flicking out. Hundreds of holes appeared in its shell as it gave birth to a wretched horde.

They took off in swarms. Leaping up from the holes and flying up in long lines, arcing far out to their left.

“Uh,” Eolh said.

“Ready,” Agraneia said.

“For what? We need to hide. There’s far too many of them.”

“Poire,” Yarsi was saying. And someone else was calling his name too. “Poire.”

“What?”

“Help us,” Yarsi was saying.

And someone else was saying, “Now? He’s already here? But it’s so soon, and I have only arrived. How can it be so many years? I want to stay with you.”

The drones were rising and rising from the mountain. And then, there was a terrible shriek as the shell of the mountain ripped itself free from its own body. But the shell did not fall. It drifted in midair, as if gravity had no meaning, trailing huge chunks of its metal innards, dangling wires that were miles long. And as it floated, it spewed hundreds of drones out from its severed belly, dumping them into the air over the beam.

The first of the drones arced high above. Its metal screamed against the air as it circled back, throwing its body down at the four of them.

There was shouting. Agraneia was flexing her arms, crouching in a stance as if she meant to kill the whole swarm by herself. Eolh was shaking Poire, telling him something, but Poire couldn’t hear over the other whispering voice. Only, it wasn’t whispering now. It lashed at him like the wind at the front of a storm, until all he could hear were her words:

“What is he doing? Is he going to stand there and die?”

“What should I do?” Poire said back, his voice weak.

“You can hear me?” the voice answered in his mind.

Yarsi squeezed against Eolh. Eolh was crowing orders at the others, at Poire, telling them “we have to go!” but there was nowhere to run. There was only the beam, and the lake, and the void far, far below. The glittering lines of machines were close enough Poire could see individual lights blinking on their heads.

“What do I do?” Poire shouted.

“Stand still,” the voice answered. “Don’t move.”

Eolh was tugging Poire, pulling him away from the Lake. Poire put a hand on his hand, and said, “Stop.”

“Fledge, we have to go.”

Poire set his jaw, and had to swallow for his voice was shaky with fear. “Do not move. Please.”

“Fledge, what-”

“Listen to him!” It was Yarsi, her eyes wide with awe. “Don’t move feather face! And you too, big one!”

They stood still. All of them watching the growing wedge of drones overhead, arcing down towards them. The beam below Poire’s feet flicked on, as if the whole world had been in darkness before this moment and now, there was light. A new lake surrounded them, a glow of light that made the whole world shimmer.

It caught hundreds of drones. From near supersonic speeds to perfect stillness, in a single blink. The ones behind, the ones still outside the lake slowed and pivoted as fast as they could. They wavered, buzzing around the edges of the lake. A few of them tested its edges, and had to rip off their tendrils to escape its clutches.

“Go fast,” the voice said. “I have opened the way. I don’t know how much longer-” And then the old, whispering, weary voice was gone.

“Run,” Poire said. “We have to run.”

“How do we know-”

“She’s shaping it for us. Somehow, she’s keeping the lake open where she knows we’re going to step.”

“Sen?”

“Sen.”

Poire led the way through the lake. Yarsi followed close on his heels, and the four of them walked quickly through the lakes of light. Poire kept a straight line, daring now to move too far off his path. He didn’t know how much of the way Sen had opened for them, but he didn’t want to risk it. Hundreds of drones gathered on either side of the beam, staying just out of reach of the lake. They made a net of eyes that shifted, ever so slowly, as the four of them hurried along the beam.

And behind all those drones, the huge floating half-body of the construct mountain hovered, always in view. Rotating its huge, torn-up shell as they moved.

They came to the mountain construct’s body, still stuck in the lake. It’s great pincers, which were really layers of metal discs were embedded in the vertical beam, two frozen showers of metal debris spraying out from where they chewed. Even the sparks from metal on metal were frozen, still glowing softly.

They had no choice but to pass underneath its bulk, but there was nothing the machine could do to them in here. This close, Poire could see the dark heat shields and anti-gravity hubs and service bays for its monstrous engines. The pieces inside the lake were spotless, as if the whole machine were fresh off the assembly line, except for one jagged line of rust that ran down its hull.

No. Not rust. This line glittered black. Did that happen before or after it was trapped by the lake?

Poire didn’t have time to wonder, as Yarsi was tugging at his arm. She whispered that she didn’t know how to bring the elevator up, and she was hoping he could help.

Poire put his hand to the vertical beam, and felt for the controls. No guide came to help, no Oracle or other half-deranged AI. Instead, he had to summon the elevator alone.

But the controls felt so distant here, separated by more than just space. This place hadn’t been maintained in thousands of years. It was still such an incomprehensible length of time. But searching through the hollow, empty network of this world, he could feel it. So much was broken. So much death.

Finally, he found one. He impulsed it to wake up, and it pinged its response.

“It’s on the way,” Poire said. But even after he let go of the impulse, he couldn’t shake the feeling of utter abandonment.

The face of the vertical beam split open, as if there had been a doorway there all along.

Outside of the lake, the massive machine made a wrenching sound, horrendous and screeching. And pieces of it began to shatter and fall as it turned away from their beam.

“What is it doing?” Eolh asked.

“It’s leaving,” Agraneia said.

Behind them, the elevator chimed. Ready and waiting.

But the mountain construct clearly had a plan in mind. Its swarm followed it, only a few drones left behind, waiting to cut Poire to pieces should he walk out of the light. But the mountain was moving away…

“Going where?” Eolh asked.

They watched its great body shrink into the distance, eating up the miles that had taken them weeks to traverse.

“Oh,” Poire said, a sinking feeling in his gut. He looked up, and saw Agraneia looking back at him, shaking her head. She knew.

And Yarsi did too.

“My home,” she whimpered.

“Don’t let her watch,” Eolh said, and Agraneia pulled the lassertane child into her arms, covering her face from the flight of the living mountain.

It didn’t matter much. They couldn’t see the destruction. From this distance, it was just a few flashes of light, and dust falling from the ceiling.