The priestess and the scholar awoke in an otherworldly chamber finer than any emperor’s palace, crafted from stone as smooth as glass and illuminated by candles that never flickered. They were greeted and offered face towels by a manservant with a strange name who dressed in strange tight-fitting garments.
After their initial bewilderment had subsided, the servant gave them each three gifts. This, more than anything, helped put them at ease, for they knew that celestial messengers would often present three objects to favored mortals at the beginning of their quests.
The first gift was a bracelet, and the second was a glassy lens worn over the eye. The third wasn’t exactly a gift, per se, but rather the return of something lost: a pair of matching flutes from their previous world, one of ebony and one of ivory.
The two were both proficient musicians (as most members of the royal court were, in those days.) The priestess had written some pieces of modest renown, and her husband was a strong player in his own right. Her most famous work was a melancholy duet called Feng River Love Song, whose melody was said to have spread to towns hundreds of li distant from Fenghao, although usually under other names and with minor variations.
So they were thankful to have their instruments restored to them, and with that, they began to climb the tower. The casting of spells was a slight complication, since the language of the magic was unknown to them, but they learned the foreign words and the foreign signs well enough to carry on. In fact, they found that the foreign language was quite intuitive, with its compact set of twenty-six characters, and so they picked it up relatively quickly.
Nonetheless, the first nine floors were harsh. Burned and bleeding but alive, the pair stumbled onto a strange city with high walls and were gladly accepted into the gates. There they found a semblance of peace, and their lives began to take on a new routine. The priestess found productive work in a scholarly institution that quested for information beyond the walls of the world, but her husband began spending his time frequenting the many drinking establishments in the city.
One night, they were playing Feng River Love Song together on the walls of the city.
“You sound a bit flat,” said the priestess.
“I think yours is sharp,” said the husband.
The priestess rolled her flute outward from her lip, blew a few notes, then stopped. “I’m worried about you. I fear you drink to excess these days.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that when you got us killed. Maybe you should’ve given the King what he wanted.”
The priestess said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” said her husband. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
The priestess left to take a walk alone. It was dark, but here, it wasn’t frowned upon for women to walk unaccompanied in public. That was a refreshing change of pace, and the priestess was thankful for it.
She had meant to wander, but her feet habitually led her to the place where she spent most days, the center of learning in the city’s Guild Quarter. Here, in the laboratory, they had bored a hole in the wall of the tower, and a strange miasma of orange and black lingered in a tightly sealed chamber. They studied chaos here, and the power of outside, and the priestess felt somehow drawn to both those things. As she stared into the brumous vapors, her mind clouded over with a vision. More than a vision, it was an instruction, and the priestess had ample experience in receiving divine instruction.
The Rite of the Heart’s Opening is a simple thing, the mists whispered. Only three ingredients are required. A man and a woman. A place where the walls are thin. And the marriage of two appropriate spells. Performed correctly, it will serve to bring new closeness to a pair in conflict.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The priestess shook her head, and the vision evaporated, but the memory remained as clear as day.
“I think we should try it,” said the priestess to her husband when they were on speaking terms again. “I want to be closer to you. I feel a distance between us, and lately, I feel alone even when we are together.”
“Worth a shot, I suppose,” he replied, taking another swig of cheap beer. He had started to grow a gut, the priestess noticed.
And so they began their ascent from the city on the tenth floor of the tower. The eleventh floor was too bright, the twelfth too dangerous, the thirteenth too dark. The fourteenth had walls that were far too thick. Finally, the pair stumbled onto the fifteenth floor of the tower.
“This should serve.” The priestess raised her bracelet, and it shone violet. Her heart was suddenly beating very fast. “A man and a woman. A place with thin walls. A spell of opening and a spell of moving. All the elements are in place.”
The priestess and the scholar joined hands, then they each signed with their other hand, placing it against the walls of the world. At first, it seemed like nothing would happen, but then a tremor began, like a distant drumbeat, growing louder and louder, da-dum, da-dum. Cracks spiderwebbed from her fingers as the air broke like glass, and the spider web formed a bridge that linked their world of endless stairs to the world that beat like an undying heart.
Then, with a blinding flash of indigo, they moved through space, crossing the chasm from one tower to the next.
The other world was strange. As the priestess looked at her husband, she felt she could see everything in his heart. Pain, sadness, homesickness, anger, and even love for her, though almost buried under resentment and anguish. The mists had not lied; there was a closeness in knowing the exact way he felt.
Therefore, she was painfully conscious of the rising bewilderment in him as he looked at her, deeper than he had in years. “It’s different,” he murmured, almost to himself. “The way you feel… feels muted, less…” His bewilderment turned to panic. “You don’t…”
Suddenly, he turned and fled, down, down, back to the other tower, back to the city of walls, leaving the shocked priestess to slowly trek back across the new bridge alone, wondering what exactly he’d seen in her heart that had been so damning.
The next time she saw him was in a jar.
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(Strive 14:3)
We all sat in silence for a moment after Selene finished her story, then she got up, dusting off the hem of her dress. “And now you know. Hopefully that has prepared you a little for what we’ll face going forward. Now, let’s move.”
“Wait,” I said. “Hold on.”
“Yes?” She looked at me, raising an eyebrow.
“I don’t know if I have a specific question. I just… I’m so sorry that all happened to you.”
“Can’t believe they made you kill like a hundred turtles as a vegetarian,” said El. “That’s messed up.”
“Thanks for saying that, but it was only forty-six turtles,” said Selene. “Anything else?”
Artem clapped her on the back. “Ever the pragmatist, eh? I’ll ask a pragmatic question then. Will we have to worry about suddenly all becoming telepaths once we get to the other side? If being there with one other person was so bad, four sounds like it’ll be a shitshow.”
“I don’t care if everyone sees,” Selene said impatiently. “I have nothing to hide.”
“Me neither,” said El. “Why bottle it up when you can just do what you want?”
“Mm,” I said.
“What was that?” Artem said.
“It was a noise of assent.” I paused. “I have another pragmatic question. Mia’s got powers from the other side, right? Any clue what they are? Or are we just going to fuck around and find out?”
“There will be no fucking of anyone,” Artem said firmly, and El chittered in nervous laughter. “Given the inherent unknowns, I suggest we approach the situation like this…”
Once the plan was settled, we faced the face of the clock that led to the fifteenth floor. A towerquake rumbled our tree, but Sender’s suppression was still in effect; it was only a low tremor. I wondered if that meant he was listening to every word of our conversation.
“Now what?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she reached out and pushed herself into the face of the clock. It admitted her with a strange rippling effect, and she was gone.
I put my hand against the clock and it warped, clinging to my fingers in a way that made me queasy. I pulled away, and it snapped back into place. El was looking at me, so I was forced to put on a brave face.
“Okie-dokie,” I muttered under my breath, stepping into the face of the clock.