Mordwell Verune, 250th Lassedite of the One, True, Resurrected Angelical Lasseditic Church awoke with a start in an alley damp and cold. He lay on the ground, smooth concrete pressing up against his cheek. For the briefest instant, he thought it all might have been a dream. The Sword. The window in the air. The Hallowed Beast, storming through the Imperial Palace. The… horrors.
But then reality found him.
It found him in the invisible trumpets that blared from beyond the alley. It found him in the flying machines that roared overhead. It found him in the buildings that reached up, as if to infinity, covering him in their austere shadows. But, most of all, it found him in death, for Verune was absolutely certain that he was dead.
He could almost feel his body rotting.
Verune’s fingers splayed onto the concrete as he pushed himself up with his dead hands. He rose to his knees, pinning the hummingbird robe’s blue-green iridescence beneath his legs.
It was cold; an autumn morning’s cold, made colder still by the looming shadows. His breath condensed in wisps.
That puzzled him.
Why was he still breathing?
He was dead. Corpses had no need to breathe.
Verune turned around, to face the street, only to moan as his body failed to move as it should have. His movements lagged behind his will. While his mind told him his fingers had moved to clasp his head, the dead, useless things were still on the ground. It took barely a heartbeat for them to respond, but that gap might as well have been an eternity. It was intolerable.
For a moment, Verune considered suicide.
It just might be an improvement, he thought.
But how could a man kill himself when he was already dead?
He didn’t know.
There was so much he didn’t know.
Rising up—unsteady on his own two feet—Verune staggered to one side of the alley, to lean against a patch of old brick exposed in the plaster that covered the wall. There were crude, bombastic images chalked onto the plaster, though they were melted, as if half washed away by rain.
“How did I get here…?”
As he thought back, he found something within himself. Something that hadn’t been there before; something that whispered at the edge of his soul. The Lassedite shook his head and rubbed his eyes, and the presence faded.
Verune whipped his head around to look as a siren shrieked and drew near. A bulky vehicle of some sort—like a sleek, beveled block—rushed down a paved street in the impossible city. Light flared on its roof, rapidly alternating between orange and green.
There was a forest across the street, massive and sprawling.
Wait… no. A park.
Verune shook his head.
And then he remembered.
He’d arrived in the Night, in an Imperial Palace that was not the Imperial Palace.
Or was it?
A great city rose up around him, stretching out into the distance, even to the other side of the Bay.
He gasped. “Elpeck…”
The thought struck him like a bolt of lightning.
As a child, in Vineplain, in the farming country, on the sweltering summer nights, lightning-bugs would light up the trees in the thickets like harrow stones on Shrovestide. The city Elpeck had become shined like those trees. Endless summer’s radiance had danced on the Night’s Moonlit waters.
Verune moaned. A wave of dizziness swept through him as he was bombarded by memories of the night before. They were like visions in a séance. His senses relived the memories, moments by moment. He heard the barking horns. He saw reflective spires, awash in golden glow. He smelled the sweet, earthy fragrance that clung to the air.
He’d walked through that night, as if through a dream.
The storefronts…
He’d passed by shops filled with bounty and splendor. The goods on display in the windowed storefronts had been nothing short of extraordinary. He’d recognized some of the products: loaves of bread, bottles of liquor and spirits, but others were marvels that defied explanation: glowing screens; magicians’ ghosts.
Elpeck seemed almost sterile to him. The sight and stink of horses were nowhere to be found. There was no hint of fish, nor of butchers and boiling leather; only earthy sweetness.
Everywhere, that earthy sweetness.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He’d passed a kind gutter that let out into a cavity that spread beneath the street. At first, he’d marveled at the thought that the sewers had spread that far, but then he’d caught sight of a wondrous thing growing from the drain. It looked like fungus, though of a queer sort he’d never seen before. It was a mix of fleshy rinds mottled dark colors and tubes that reminded him of the Melted Palace’s pipe organ, capped here and there in elegant bulbs that glowed yellow and green.
Music filled the air. Verune looked up in wonder, unable to find the source. But then he realized: the music was from his own memories.
As a neophyte priest, Verune had been lucky enough to hear Jordan Gallstrom play a set of variations on that organ. The Melted Palace had resounded with the aging master’s music. It was almost palpably beautiful, as if he could just reach out and touch it.
But then he dove back into the memory.
The street. The night. The strange fungus in the gutter drain.
There’d been powder there. Incredibly fine, with a brilliant green hue that belonged on a painter’s easel, not dusting the nooks and crannies of a city street. The stuff had had a heady, rapturously sweet scent; earthy, but with an acrid tang.
He’d picked some up out of curiosity, grasping like sand between his fingers. But it burned. It stung his skin, making the Lassedite flinch. Spitting into his hand, Verune had rubbed the green dust and then pulled his handkerchief from the pocket in his robe and wiped the nasty stuff off.
He’d pressed onward, searching for people, keeping his distance from the fungus. Something about it made him feel uneasy.
The flower shop…
He’d passed a flower shop. It was dismal. Ruined. Filled with mostly empty pots. The large windows on the shop’s storefront had been shattered, dusting the sidewalk with glass. A wan light flickered in the shop’s ceiling, from which hung several baskets, one of which wasn’t empty.
It held the strangest looking plant he’d ever seen. It had long tendrils that spilled onto the shop’s tiled floor like octopus arms. Leaves and branches erupted in strange fronds topped with more of the glowing bulbs. He’d thought he’d seen the tendrils sweep toward him. The thought had made the hair on the back of his neck stand up on end.
And then, he’d heard the sound. A soft, ceramic scraping. Stepping toward the broken window, he’d looked and noticed that not all of the terra cotta pots were empty. One of them lay on its side on the floor, rocking left and right, rolling side to side, clacking over the tiles.
He’d bent down to look.
Inside was a plant that might have been a palm tree, only it moved like an animal, flicking its palms like wings. Then the stiff leaves pushed off the floor as the thing shoved its pot forward, toward Verune, ceramic scraping on the tail.
That sent him running. He ran all the way to the end of the block and around the corner, panting and screaming, looking for a way out of this nightmare Elpeck.
That was when he’d begun to suspect he might have been in Hell, and he couldn’t understand why.
He’d squeezed his fists so tightly, his fingernails had drawn blood from his palms as he ran. Eventually, he’d come out onto a broader boulevard, and when he turned his head and gazed down the street, he could see straight through to the sea.
He remembered thinking it might have been Market Street.
In the present, Verune moaned again, rubbing his dead hand against the side of his dead head.
No, it was Market Street. The signs said as much, as did the sight of the Bertkin Mansion in the distance. With its gables, pitched roofs and witches’ towers, the fish magnate’s manse was like something from a fairy-story, glowing and golden in the streetlamps’ lambent light.
It was only then that it started to dawn on the Lassedite that, perhaps, this really was the holy city of Elpeck.
But how? How could that be?
The sidewalks were bereft of people, save for corpses curled up by trees or strange metal tins, rotting and forgotten. Most of the (living) people he’d seen were in their self-moving vehicles, cluttering the streets from end to end, like cattle lining up at a slaughterhouse.
They were automobiles.
The blasted things had taken over everything. Even without the nightmare of darkness that had descended upon the city, there would have been no room for people to walk about town. The speed. The fumes.
In the present, Verune’s breaths turned rapid. Panic pumped through his dead blood. His heart raced.
He remembered the awe and confusion he’d felt as he’d walked up to what he recognized as a transfigured advertisement column. Instead of paper flyers advertising the latest operettas or public lectures, the onion-domed column of greened bronze was covered by more of those brilliant glowing windows, the ones he’d seen in so many of the storefronts. But, here, the images were different. Instead of scenic vistas of far-flung places, he saw…
…News?
His whole body shivered.
Every day at Sunrise, when Datu—Verune’s personal attendant—brought the Lassedite his cup of tea, he carried with him the folded leaves of the morning’s issue of The Daily Caller. Verune had made sure to impress on the Costranak that he would read the Caller and nothing but the Caller. He had no stomach for the radicals’ rubbish.
The Caller had been so taken to learn of the Lassedite’s patronage that they bound each weekday’s issue with a facsimile of the paper’s coat of arms: a lion supporting an escutcheon with the shining down on a boat in the Bay. And as Verune stared at the glowing screens, he saw that coat of arms once more. At the top of the window, above images and texts spelling out unthinkable horrors, he saw the year. He’d never thought much to ponder the year, not after 1799 passed to 1800, but now, he fixated on the four-digit date like never before.
2020 AAF.
“Twenty twenty?” he’d muttered, his voice breaking.
Suddenly, everything made sense. The strangeness of this place that claimed to be the holy city.
It was no longer 1803.
Verune hadn’t known whether to call it a miracle or a curse. He’d started laughing. A frightful, manic laugh of half-disguised weeping that had brought him to his knees as he ran his fingers across the glowing surface, in disbelief of what he saw.
He spent hours at the advertisement pole. He learned he could slide the window’s view up and down with a swipe of his fingers. Differently colored text would take him elsewhere; swiping left took him back to where he had been; swiping right took him back to where he had gone.
And he learned.
He learned that the future saw the Empire as nothing but a memory, that, somehow, the Munine had come to rule the world, and that the cradle of the faith had stepped away from the Angel’s Law after a flirtation with a string of malfeasant tyrants. And as he learned, the wonders of this future Elpeck took on new meaning. He looked upon the city in heartache and, unlike the things in the flower shop, this dread could not be outrun. The world had changed, and now, when Hell had come a-knocking, the people were unprepared. They were doomed, because they’d lost track of their identity; of who they’d been, and of what truly mattered.
They’ve traded the Angel’s eternal truth for mere vanities.
And he laughed, bitter, broken, and empty.
He’d looked up at the thickened crescent Moon that hung high above the once-holy city.
“Why!?” he’d yelled. “Why here!? Why this!? Why!? Why!? Why!?”
He’d staggered around, tear-stricken, facing the sky, waving his arms when he stumbled.