Chapter I #3
Caeror kicks dirt and stone over the glinting circle on the ground until it’s concealed.
Some of his former, irrepressible excitement returning as he inspects his handiwork, then beams at me.
Cheeks dimpled as he claps me on the shoulder.
“Almost there. You’re doing better than I did, when I came through. ”
“You had to go through this by yourself?”
“Gods’ graves, no. I had help too.” His expression twists into something sad, so brief I almost miss it, and then he’s moving on.
“How did you know I was coming through today?”
“I didn’t. I’ve been here for … almost two weeks? Had supplies in there for at least another month. A holiday I get to take every year and a half,” he adds with a weak grin.
I consider. “The window for when the Academy runs the Iudicium?”
“Exactly.” He stretches, then beckons. “We just need to reach the ridge over there. Still as quickly as we can, though.”
Our footsteps crunch and shale skitters as we set off westward. Caeror casts a sidelong glance at me. “So what did Ulciscor threaten you with?”
“Sapper.”
His step hitches. “Rotting gods.” He exhales. Eyes wide as he continues, staring ahead in horrified introspection. “Rotting gods-damned gods. Vis. I am so sorry.” Honest apology in his voice, in the slump of his shoulders.
“You couldn’t have known what would happen.”
“I did, though. It’s why I tried to tell him what Veridius and I were doing.
” He plucks at his sleeve. A frustrated motion that’s eerily reminiscent of his brother.
“He always was gods-damned scary once he got his mind set on something. But you should know—that’s not him.
Not really. I’m sure he’s been through a nightmare, but he would never, ever do that to someone. ”
I just nod. A hint of desperation in his insistence that I’m not going to argue, despite my doubts.
I can tell he wants to keep questioning me, to find out more about Ulciscor and the world he left behind seven years ago.
But that can wait. “When I got here, you said there was a war? Is that what happened here?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” His brow is furrowed.
Deciding where to begin, I think. “I should warn you—some things I know from what Veridius and I translated from the ruins, and some from what I’ve been told since arriving.
But a lot of it … a lot of it comes from guessing at the spaces in between, too. ”
“Alright.”
“Alright.” He lets out a long breath. Loose stone crunching underfoot in the vast hush of the crater.
The cheerless slope is getting steeper. “I suppose the war is the easiest place to begin. It started thousands of years ago, against an enemy called the Concurrence. They were bent on enslaving everyone, and from what Veridius and I could tell, at one point they were winning.” His mouth twists.
“So our side split the world into three near-identical copies. Res—where we’re from; Obiteum, which is here; and Luceum.
Don’t ask me how,” he adds with a wry smile.
I nod a reluctant acceptance. Unfathomable though it still seems, it fits with everything I already know. Everything I’ve seen. “How would doing that help, though?” Then I pause. “Near-identical?” It’s not what he said before, when I first arrived.
“Physically the same, down to the last detail. But the nature of Will was what they were trying to limit. The three worlds were created because they wanted to diminish it, restrict how it could be used. Split its capabilities.” He presses on before I can ask any of my myriad new questions.
“People called it the Rending. Afterward, the war continued, but the resistances on the three worlds began to have their own levels of success in the fight. Different capabilities with Will. Different choices. Everything diverged.”
My mind reels as I try to put the pieces together.
“Obiteum is lost. Do not open the gate,” I murmur.
The eerie chant of the eyeless bodies in the ruins.
I remember the Rending being mentioned by Artemius and the others guarding the Labyrinth, too.
“So the Concurrence won here, and were defeated on Res?” The logical conclusion, given how we’re striving to stay out of sight. Clearly in some sort of danger.
The looming sphere behind is a cold, dead sun, too large in my peripheral vision every time I turn my head. There’s silence, for long enough that I wonder if Caeror has heard my half question, and then, “What do you know about the Cataclysm?”
I pause. “As much as anyone, I suppose?” Momentarily thrown by the apparent veer in topic.
“Something happened three hundred years ago that killed almost everyone. The survivors were mostly children, and the records from before that time were lost. Civilisation collapsed. There are theories about how, and why, but no one really knows much more than that.”
“That’s not quite true.” Caeror hesitates.
The gentle reluctance of a man about to deliver terrible news.
“Those ruins you said you visited, near the Academy? That place was built to stop a Cataclysm. One the architects knew was coming.” He rubs his face, then smiles at me in sincere, rueful apology.
“They’re culls, Vis. The Cataclysms are culls by an enemy that everyone on our world has forgotten.
That one those architects were trying to prevent?
It was the eleventh. The eleventh in three thousand years.
And even with all their knowledge, they failed. ”
The terrain is more cliff than slope now, and we start to pick our way upward over boulders and exposed rock.
Less than five hundred feet to the ridge.
I clamber along behind Caeror, trying to grasp it.
The enormity of it. No desire to believe, but it’s impossible not to, given where we are.
The utter desolation around us. “So the Concurrence somehow just … killed everyone?”
“From everything I understand, yes. And they will do it again. And again.” He says it softly. Pauses to lend me a hand up, then glances over my shoulder. “They didn’t just win the war here, Vis. I think they won it everywhere.”
I stop too, twisting to join him in his inspection. We’re high enough, have come far enough that this is a new perspective. The red glass ball above the centre of the crater hangs implacably, glinting in the morning light.
Slow, uneasy recognition penetrates the shock of what Caeror just told me.
I’ve seen this. The ruins near the Academy—one of those dioramas made of white light. One of the three versions of Solivagus, illuminating eyeless corpses pinned against the wall.
There’s more detail in real life, though. I’d already noticed the jagged lines carved into the surface of the sphere, but they’re easier to comprehend from this distance. Not writing, but not random either. They form familiar shapes in familiar arrangements.
My lingering gaze finds the coastline of Suus before Caeror touches my shoulder. Nods to the crater’s apex ahead.
“I’m sorry. It’s a hard thing to hear, but we need to keep moving.”
I’m reeling, but there’s an anchoring in his calm, sympathetic authority. I take a breath. Nod.
We march on.
OVER THE RIDGE, THE CRATER BEHIND US HIDDEN FROM view, I can see the waves again. Impossible, monstrous from this angle, miles away though they still are. The roar of their shattering thunders across desolate hills.
I gather my scattered thoughts. I do believe Caeror when he says this is another world; the proof could not be clearer. But everything else …
“You said I’d been copied.” I leave it at that. Make it a question. There may be more pressing concerns, but none that have lodged themselves so disconcertingly in my mind.
“Yes. That device you were in—the Gate—it takes what’s inside it on Res, and creates new versions on Luceum and Obiteum. Perfect replicas.”
“So there’s another version of me—the original one—still on Res?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s another in some other world, too? In Luceum?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. Sick. Refusing to countenance it, even if I’d concluded hours ago that this was what he’d meant. “I don’t feel like a copy.”
Caeror flits another glance at me before resuming his surveilling of the clear morning sky.
“Perhaps ‘copy’ is a bit crude. It’s more like …
” He scrunches up his face as he reaches for a better explanation.
“We’re no less ourselves. Think of it as setting out on a branching path.
It’s still you. Just travelling a different road. ”
I chew over his words. Kindly delivered, but I find little comfort in them. “And this whole world was copied from ours, too?”
“It might be the original. I don’t know. But … yes. Thousands of years ago now, but yes. That’s my understanding of it.”
I gaze out at glistening walls of water shattering against the Seawall. Distant spray glitters as it explodes upward. “On a different road for a while, then,” I observe softly.
We clamber up another short rise, and beyond, I see what appears to be our destination.
A large obsidian circle set into the stone underfoot, only fifty feet away.
Polished black notable against the drab surrounds, but it’s the lines of shining silver running through the dark mirror that draw my eye.
Even from here, there’s no mistaking the familiar, three-pronged pyramidal icon pointing out at the distant waves.
“Give me a moment.” Caeror doesn’t hesitate to walk on the glossy surface once we reach it.
I trail him tentatively as he moves to the apex of the Hierarchy symbol and draws an amulet from around his neck.
Larger than the ones we both wear on our arms, it’s obsidian too.
Etched with a single symbol, what appears to be a crossed crook and flail.
He crouches, then inserts the medallion into an indentation at the very top of the pyramid. A quick twist, and a small section of black stone, barely a few inches across, rotates.
“Done.” He scans the horizon, then suddenly grins an irrepressible grin. “Rotting gods, I still can’t believe you’re actually here.” He shakes his head, still smiling broadly.
Several points of illumination just above where he set the amulet begin to appear. Barely visible against the glint of the sun, at first, but steadily increasing in intensity until they reveal themselves as more glyphs, like the ones on the triangle that still sits fixed at the base of his skull.
I don’t return the expression. Watching the light, and then gaze drifting to the desolation around us again. “Is there any way back?”
Caeror pauses, his smile fading, then exhales and walks over to the glyphs.
Crouches down and touches several of them in succession.
There’s an abruptly growling thrum of building energy, and I flinch as the circle in front of us bursts into motion.
The stone, which I thought was a single piece, starts to separate and rise.
Sections rotate and slide and snap together in rapid succession, re-forming, building almost instantly into a ten-foot-high triangular archway that darkly reflects the azure sky.
“No, Vis,” he says, so quietly that I barely hear him. “There’s no way back.”
He collects his medallion from its slot and then stands on the silver symbol. The humming sound hasn’t stopped; if anything, it’s intensifying. Caeror motions for me to join him.
I do so uneasily. The base of the jagged obsidian archway in front of us is lightening. Becoming clear, glass-like. As I watch, translucence flows toward the apex.
“The Cataclysm those people couldn’t stop. On … on our world.” Still hard to say that out loud. “You said it was the eleventh. Three thousand years after the first.” The calculation’s not a hard one. I’ve still made it several times since he told me.
There’s an apology in Caeror’s smile. “I’m not here because I thought we had lots of time.”
Vek. “Were they at regular intervals, though?” A little desperate.
“From what Veridius and I translated. Regular enough.”
It’s an expected confirmation. My heart still drops.
It’s been three hundred and two years since the last Cataclysm.
Emissa. Callidus. Eidhin. Aequa and Lanistia and even gods-damned Ulciscor. “But you have a way to stop it.” Veridius was trying to send students here, despite the consequences. Belli’s torn body hangs on the Labyrinth wall in my mind. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
“I hope so. I think so. With your help.”
There’s a crescendoing whine and then suddenly, just as the entire archway becomes crystalline, it stops.
Nothing but the distant roaring of waves for a second. Three.
Then, violent and abrupt, a haze ejects from the glass. Slicing away from us, smokelike, leaving an ethereal triangular tunnel in its wake. A million ghostly reflections of the arch that arrow directly at the glistening mountains of water in the distance.
The silver beneath our feet begins to throb with rhythmic white. Getting rapidly brighter.
“How?” My heart pounds in time with the pulses beneath our feet. It’s all I can do to follow Caeror’s lead and stay still.
Caeror’s face is lit starkly from beneath. His deep brown eyes assess me as he issues a crooked smile.
“Easy, Vis. We kill a god.”
The light consumes us.