The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.18

Chapter 2.18: The Dead City

“Cal,” Charlotte’s hushed voice roused me from my slumber. “You’re up.”

I nodded groggily, grateful they’d given me last watch even though Charlotte had been the one nearly falling over last night. I supposed she at least had gotten a few hours in while I was advancing. By the time I’d made it to my feet, grabbed a few things from my bag, and opened the door to our camp of choice, her vicious snore had already breached the otherwise surreal quiet of this place.

I stashed my headlamp in my pocket as I noticed Xavier had left his on the floor, its light bouncing down the wooden hallway all the way to the stairs we’d taken up. I didn’t move it, content to let the ground bear the admittedly minuscule weight of the lamp for the handful of hours I had before I’d have to re-don mine.

I sat down, leaning back against the door to our makeshift bedroom, and glanced to the hatchling still resting in its sling. As if sensing my attention, a wave of emotion hit me.

Hunger!

I smiled. “Of course you are,” I muttered, already reaching for the qi with which to feed it. It drank greedily. “Don’t you worry, little one. There’s plenty where that came from.” Even hundreds of feet below the surface, I couldn’t so much as find Ilirian, so drowned as it was by the infinite sea.

Full!

Instead of stopping, the flow of qi continued through the creature and into me, stretching and overfilling my newly-advanced core. A dull ache accelerated into sharp pain as the excess threatened to rupture. In a panic, I sent what I could through my meridians and dumped the excess into my Vac Suit. Shadows cascaded down my body, coating me and the void beast alike in a layer of cool darkness the puny headlamp couldn’t hope to pierce.

I kept the technique running, for practice’s sake more than anything, though I dialed back the qi expenditure to something more sustainable, similarly halting the flow through my meridians. Even without my eyes full of stars, the natural improvements my cultivation had made left the single headlamp more than enough to illuminate the entire hallway. I couldn’t tell if it would’ve been enough for a mortal. Already I’d lost the ability to see the world from that perspective.

Hunger? Full! Hunger? Hunger hunger.

I chuckled, taking a moment to parse the creature’s meaning. Continuing to gently stroke its head with my left index finger, I dug my right hand into my pocket to retrieve a piece of the jerky I’d stashed there. For a moment I worried over a half-remembered fact about baby birds and pre-chewed foods, but as the hatchling snatched the dried meat from my hand, I remembered that the creature’s similarities to terrestrial avians were superficial at best.

This was no bird.

“I suppose you need a name,” I told it as it scarfed down a second then third piece of jerky. “I can’t just keep calling you ‘it’ forever. Come to think of it…” I trailed off, gently scooping the hatchling up and turning it over in search of… let’s call them biological indications of gender. I found only solid chitin.

After looking for a bit longer than I might’ve like to admit, I returned it to its sling, slipped it more jerky, and pulled up my holopad. A few keywords brought up an entry from one of the encyclopedias the device had come pre-installed with.

Due to the inherent danger of such research, science has yet to offer a definitive answer to the question of void beast reproduction, but in the thousands of specimens thus far recorded, no evidence of sexual dimorphism has been found.

“Oh good, I’m as thorough as all of science,” I whispered, affectionately patting the void beast’s head. “What to call you, what to call you…” I trailed off, conjuring and dismissing possibilities one by one. I looked down at them, focusing deeply on the concept of a name as I spoke the words I knew the creature couldn’t hear. “What do you want your name to be?”

Name?

The response was more confusion than anything else, the very concept foreign to them.

“Okay, not helpful. Let’s see…”

I whiled away another half hour brainstorming names when the solution hit me like one of Xavier’s back-claps.

“Ariel.” There was a rightness to the name, a symmetry between me and the creature whose soul I’d tied to mine. I conceptualized it, focusing furiously on the ancient character, a fairy bound in service to the same master as my own monstrous namesake, of the wonders of flight and the desperate, soul-aching need for freedom.

Ariel, I sent.

Ariel? Ariel, came the reply.

I fed them another piece of jerky. I tossed the next one into my own mouth, chewing along in companionable silence.

Together we kept our four hour vigil, the hall around us ever unchanging in its stillness, ever haunting in its silence broken solely by my own breath and the muted roar of Charlotte snoring in the next room. I’d only heard it twice now and already I couldn’t fathom how Xavier got a wink of sleep sharing a bed with the woman. I wondered if he had a technique for it, The Indomitable Art of the Unbroken Slumber or some pretentiously aggrandizing name like that.

When at last I heard movement coming from the room behind me, I pushed myself to my feet and stepped inside. Charlotte had lit her headlamp and was rooting through her pack for breakfast while Xavier rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“Good morning,” I greeted them, sitting crosslegged on the floor by my bag. I reached into the sling. “I’d like you to meet Ariel.”

Charlotte squinted at me. “Is that a pun?”

“What?”

“Arial? Because it’s a bird?”

“They aren’t a bird. They’re a void beast.”

Xavier clapped me on the back, nearly knocking Ariel from my hand. “A brilliant name! A meaningful name. Two creatures, bound together in service to the same power. It suits you.”

Charlotte blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“The Tempest, Charlotte. You know, one of the oldest surviving texts from the pre-mausoleum era? How have you not read it?”

My eyes flitted back and forth between Charlotte and Xavier. “I’m surprised you have,” I told him. “My dad’s the only person I know who bothered with that stuff.”

“To understand the present, one must first understand the past,” Xavier declared. “Those texts survived for a reason.”

“So has this city.” Charlotte deftly changed the subject. “And I’m more concerned with it at the moment.” She handed Xavier a thermos of soup. I waved away the one she shoved in my direction, having already eaten my fair share of breakfast in the form of watch-time jerky.

“Obviously it’s enchanted,” I said.

Charlotte shook her head. “The wood isn’t. You’re right that the stone all is, just below the surface, at least, but none of these buildings have qi running through them. Something is preserving them.”

I shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s gotta come back eventually, right? If it’s not passively keeping things intact, it’s gotta be passing through with some frequency.”

Charlotte took a sip from her thermos. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Everything that isn’t bolted down isn’t just decayed, it’s gone. This place should be infested with all sorts of creatures, but other than that argentivore that must’ve left the city some time ago, we’ve seen nothing.”

“We shall travel to the source of this mysterious phenomenon and uncover its ancient secrets!” Xavier announced.

“Sounds like a plan to me,” I concurred. “Presumably whatever’s doing this is coming from somewhere. There’s gotta be a core or something powering these enchantments, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Charlotte said. “We can’t assume whatever’s down here follows the same rules we do.”

I glared at her, only then noticing her red eyes and the shadows beneath them. Had she slept at all? I’d heard her snoring. “Alright. There’s probably a core or something powering these enchantments.”

Xavier downed the rest of his soup. “First things first.” He clapped his hands together. “Forms!”

I blinked at him. “Here? Now?”

Incredulity filled his voice. “When else? True discipline never lapses, and it’s better to venture into the unknown limber and ready.”

I spared a glance at Charlotte. She looked exhausted. Still, she finished her soup and rose, drawing her rapier in the same motion. I followed suit.

By the time I’d made it halfway through my bastardized sword forms, I knew Xavier had been right. My blood pumped, my heart pounded, and my thoughts ran clearer than they had mere minutes before, and unlike the others I had been awake for hours.

Xavier finished first, transitioning into some simply bodyweight exercises while I continued through the extra forms I’d stolen from Cedric’s holo. Charlotte went on for nearly fifteen minutes after I wrapped up, her own family’s style far more complicated to match the intricacies of the rapier. I caught her trying to hide the labor of her breathing as the warmup came to an end.

We gathered our things and left the ancient bakery behind, emerging once more into the stifling stillness of the silent city. Our headlamps cast long shadows across the cobbles, twisting and dancing with the rhythmic bobbing of our stride. The air sat unmoving, our motion through it the sole impingement upon its rest. Ours was the only life in this fallow place, our steps and breath the only sound, our flesh the only warmth, our presence the only trespass into this graveyard bereft of dead.

Another me, a colder me, might’ve found solace in the quiet of this place, well needed refuge from the light and the heat and the noise of the jungle above. The eeriness of it all drove a stake through that temptation, the jagged understanding that a great many people had devoted their lives to building the very streets on which we tread, and in the end it’d served them no purpose. They’d died out all the same.

Now, I supposed, it served something else’s purpose, one thus far inscrutable beyond our understanding that it must be heinous enough to attract the Gardener’s ire.

We weren’t thorough in our search. We looked through perhaps one in a dozen of the buildings we passed, finding little enough variance within to justify such a tactic. That didn’t stop us from venturing beyond the main thoroughfare. Whatever we were looking for was like as not to be at the city’s center, where a great palace stretched several stories above the surrounding structures, but it seemed foolhardy to approach it without first gathering as much information about its surroundings as possible.

We barely spoke as we spiraled towards the palace. Words themselves seemed to disrespect the quietude of the empty streets, the solemnity of this buried ruin, and let me be clear, while not a single building, sign, or cobblestone had been so much as touched by the ravages of time, I could think of this place as nothing but a ruin. The structures, the objects, the stuff may have been in perfect condition, but a city without its people could be nought else.

I caught Xavier flashing Charlotte concerned looks a half dozen times as we progressed. I shared his worry. Even long past the grogginess of morning, her eyes had grown more bloodshot than before, at least as much as I could glean obscured as they were behind the light of her headlamp. Her steps grew sluggish, her breaths shallow and frequent. Nine times as the hours passed did Xavier ask if she wanted a break. Nine times she denied him.

It was clear to us all that something was wrong. We didn’t know what. We couldn’t know. It went unspoken that there was little we could do about it, that other than resting more and soldiering through it, Charlotte’s only option was to somehow make the trek all the way back to Lucy, forgoing both the Gardener’s task and her potential aid escaping Ilirian. The point was moot in the end. She never would’ve made it. She didn’t even make it to the gates of the palace.

Six hours into our reconnaissance, a scant two blocks from the city’s epicenter, Charlotte collapsed.

Next