Chapter 10 Feather
Feather
I’d never slept well, not since my first life on Earth.
The nightmares that came for me were worse than anything I could manufacture: they were memories.
I was sort of disappointed I’d need to sleep in Sanctuary.
But what woke me here wasn’t a bad dream.
It was tremors, like an earthquake. And a new sound.
My eyes popped open as the bed shivered beneath me. Then I heard a disconsolate hum, long and low, moving up and down in pitch. Somehow, I knew it was the gate. Not screaming, but singing a wordless song filled with grief. My throat swelled just listening.
The lights were still dim, but I could see well enough to walk around.
I hopped out of bed, slipped on my fluffy sandals, and headed for the song.
When I turned the first corner, I realized I had a problem.
Every hallway looked the same, and I hadn’t been here long enough to memorize the number of turns it took to get places.
I scratched my cheek, and the flash of sickening gray gave me an idea.
The noise came from my right at this junction.
So I leaned as low as I could, and marked the bottom part of the wall, a bit on each side around the corner, with a single hint of smut.
Hopefully, that would be enough to help me find my way back.
I kept going, trying to find the source of the sound. A few times, I went the wrong direction and reached a dead end, but I marked those spots with an extra dab of gray to make sure I didn’t try that way again.
Once, a trembling in the floor made me reach out to hold the wall. I had lived a decade in Kyoto in the early 1900s, and you never forgot the sorts of tremors we had then. I left a terrible handprint stain on the wall, though, which was made worse when I tried to rub it off.
I hurried on, wrapping my toga around me a little tighter when I felt an odd, cold wind. That seemed unusual. So far, the temperature control in Sanctuary had been phenomenal.
Eventually, I turned a corner and saw it at last: my gate.
I peeked around. I was alone. So I walked up to it and sat down a dozen feet away, staring up at the changing landscapes that played over the surface.
At first, I saw stormy seas, mountains being crushed under enormous meteors, cities being razed, bombs obliterating farmlands, all sorts of apocalyptic stuff.
After a while, animals began to run across the surface, then strange beasts I had never seen before. A woman’s face appeared, and caught sight of me. I squinted, trying to read her lips as they moved, but I didn’t even know what language she was speaking.
More faces appeared, all of them asking me for something, to do something.
But I had no idea what that something was.
I felt a scalding sensation on my face, and realized I was crying.
My tears had fallen onto my robe and splashed the gray mud onto it instead of the floor, thank fudge.
I wiped my eyes and stood, approaching the gate slowly.
Maybe I could hear if I got close enough.
As I moved within arm’s reach, the impulse to lift my hand was almost unbearably strong. “Don’t touch it, Feather,” I warned myself. “You break it, and the Abyss will get in here and spoil all the sheets.”
Just as I said that, a sharp blast of icy wind whistled over the top of the gate where it met the pure white ceiling, and pushed my robe into the golden surface. For a split second, I knew it was pulling me in.
For a blink of an eye, I didn’t care. I knew I needed to go into it. It was home.
Suddenly, the man’s face I’d seen the first day appeared, the one that had seemed familiar.
Wings flashed out on both sides of him, and his arms stretched wide, welcoming me.
Like he’d been waiting for me for thousands of years, and I was finally there.
I’d never seen so much joy in a face before—and then it was gone.
“What are you doing?!” someone shouted into my ear, yanking me away from the gate so hard I did a series of somersaults across the floor.
“I didn’t touch it!” The whole hall was trembling now, and the screaming from the gate was so loud, it was almost deafening.
I covered my ears, then rolled my whole body into a ball as whoever this was swooped down in a blaze of white wings, bared teeth, and angry, gleaming eyes. “Don’t hit me!” I yelled.
I didn’t feel any punches or kicks, but I did feel my whole body being lifted.
I stayed in the ball, my arms tucked around my knees, hoping against hope this angry angel person wasn’t going to drop me from really high.
I was pretty sure I would still feel broken bones in Sanctuary, though I might heal when I slept, like I did between lives on Earth.
I didn’t have time to wonder what would happen, because suddenly I was being dropped. But from only a few inches.
I crumpled onto the ground, and glared up at… “Ry?”
Righteous was breathing hard, like he’d run a race. His huge wings were spread almost all the way around me, covering me protectively. Or maybe like he was keeping me caged. “What were you doing to the gate?” he demanded. I didn’t reply, trying to think of what I should tell him. “Answer me!”
I said nothing, still lost in my impressions of the gate and the man inside. He took a threatening step forward, and I flinched.
“I’m not going to strike you,” he muttered, a glimmer of hurt replacing the anger in his gaze. “It’s late. Why are you here?”
“Well, there was an earthquake, and a cold wind,” I began. “I woke up.”
“Yes, the balance is shifting. The gate is close to falling.” He narrowed his eyes. “But that’s not what woke you.”
“I heard it singing… and screaming,” I admitted, waiting for him to tell me I was nuts.
He didn’t. “You can hear it?”
“I’m not supposed to? It woke me up. All those voices, all that pain… I don’t know how anyone else sleeps through it.”
He went still for a second. “Some of us can’t.”
I clenched my fists to stop my hands from shaking. “It really is screaming. How do we stop it?” I swallowed hard when his eyes narrowed on me. “How can we help it?”
“Sometimes I sing to it,” he murmured, then twitched, as if he’d startled himself by admitting that. The gate screeched at that moment, louder than ever, and we both covered our ears.
“Maybe sing now?” I begged.
He nodded. “Stay here.” In two steps, he was facing the gate and singing a wordless hymn I had never heard before.
His voice was a clear, pure tenor, and every note was filled with so much emotion that my heart literally ached.
The song was heartbreak and healing, love lost and found, a journey and an ending.
Sunset and sunrise. It was the second most beautiful song I’d ever heard.
When Righteous was done, the gate was quiet. He stood still for a while, staring at me, or around me. His face was frozen, but his eyes were filled with what looked like awe. Wonder, shining brightly from his entire face.
Then, like he’d been released from some sort of spell, he shook his head and strode back over to me.
He stomped around for a minute, like he was looking for someone, then glared down at me.
“Don’t come back here, no matter what you hear,” he finally said.
“I’ll sing to the gate this week; it should settle. ”
“Can everyone hear it screaming for help and they’re just ignoring it?” I felt myself getting upset on the gate’s behalf. “No one else in Sanctuary knows any lullabies?”
“They don’t hear it.” He gave a curt shake of his head. “Only… some of us.” Before I could ask which of us that was, and what we had in common, he went on. “Do not return to the gate. If you come too close, you’ll feel pulled to go into it. And with your filth, who knows what might happen.”
I had a feeling what might happen would be a Feather-pocalypse. “I won’t touch it, I promise.”
Some unnamable emotion flickered across his face, and he reached toward me. I held still as he pulled something away from my clumpy, sticky hair. A feather? No, it was a lot of them.
“How did those get there?” I asked, confused.
“I have no idea,” he said, but his voice was strangled. His eyes kept landing on my gross hair, and then he would reach up and pull yet another of his feathers from it, dropping it to the floor, where it would… not vanish.
Huh. That was weird. Sunny’s had evaporated when they fell. Ry’s were sticking around. Why?
He frowned, pulling one more feather away from my hair, and the back of his hand stroked down my cheek. I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to do that since he made a face I’d only ever seen at a ghost pepper-eating contest, and held his hand out in front of him like he wanted to cut it off.
He shuddered, then pointed with his grease-stained hand. “The room at the end of this hall is a purification chamber. You should spend some time there.”
“You coming, too?” I asked. His robe was a muddy wreck, and his arms weren’t much better.
“I have my own,” he said haughtily, and was gone in a rush of wings. He had forgotten one of his fallen feathers, though. I picked it up, tucking it into my palm. I’d give it back to him later.
Maybe.