Chapter 33 Eder #2
“I do what I must,” he said, interrupting her. “This place is… sacred. I do not know if you feel it, but I do. We are close to Father here.”
Calluna stood, wiped at her dress, and then walked along the edge and its cavernous drop.
“No, not Father,” she said. “But we are close. You believe Father is in the heavens, and so you climb ever higher to reach him. But the Etemen? I think they believed the opposite. Their god lived beneath the sea.”
She stopped at the silver markings he had formed for the ritual.
He thought she would protest, especially if she realized their purpose, but instead she stood in their very center and turned about so her back was facing the edge.
Cold wind blew across her, teasing her hair and the hem of her dress.
She crossed her arms behind her, a bit of shyness returning.
“You just want your knowledge, right?” she asked.
“I seek to pierce the veil separating us from Father,” Eder said. “All else has been the means needed to accomplish that goal.”
“So if you succeed, then you don’t need to fight Faron and Sariel? You won’t need your kingdom, your faith, or your tower?”
“I cannot say, little one, for we dabble in realms beyond us all. What might I learn? How might I change? In what ways will Father guide or command me? It is unknown, all of it. I promise I seek no war. I desire no violence. Beyond that, you must trust me to do what I believe is right.”
Calluna clutched the sides of her dress, thinking. For a long moment, the only sound was the distant crashing of the waves.
“I trust you, Eder,” she said. “I always have. It’s why I let you do this for so long. And I… I’m going to trust you again. But only if you trust me, too.”
Eder smiled softly at her.
“Among us all, you are the purest, Calluna, and the most true. I would put my life in your hands, if you would but ask.”
Calluna withdrew a knife from her dress pocket and held it to her palm.
“Then I do ask,” she said, and sliced her flesh. Blood poured, and she clenched the wounded hand so it collected into a single stream. The blood dripped to the center of the silver runes and splashed upon them. Calluna moved her fist about, painting them all.
“Your little silver is drawn across what once remained,” she said, her voice taking on a strange, dreamlike tone. “It is carved, so softly, so thinly, you did not see. But you feel it. You chase after it, as you draw your own spirals.”
She knelt down, not caring that her blood was staining her dress.
She pressed her bleeding palm to the center of the runes and then began to swirl it about as if she were a painter seeking to cover a canvas.
The blood smeared across the silver, banishing it…
and then revealing beneath it similar runes and markings.
Blue light sparkled across them, illuminating the dark. It was as if the blood awakened them.
“How?” Eder asked, excitement racing through his veins.
“After the shattering, I came here,” she said, and stood, her work apparently finished.
Light washed over the lower half of her body from the blazing runes.
“The Tower Majestic defeated me once, Eder, and so I swore I would learn its secrets. All its secrets, even the ones it would hide most deeply. It took years, but I won.”
She lifted her arms. Her eyes sparkled. The runic circle blazed with light.
“Fly with me, Eder, to the tower’s truth.”
And then she tilted backward to fall headfirst to the water below.
“Calluna!”
Eder dashed forward, too slow to stop her. His hand grabbed air. He peered over the edge, tormented with the thought of watching her plummet… only he saw no sign of her. Even with his radiance-blessed eyes, which lit the deep dark with starlight, he could not see her.
“Calluna?”
He glanced to the runes and saw their light fading. The blood she had spilled cracked and burned away into dust, leaving a ruin of his original silver designs. The waves crashed and broke against the Tower Majestic’s sides. Laughing. Mocking.
“I said I would trust you,” he said, and drew his own knife. One cut, and blood dripped from his hand to the runes. “But it is a monstrous recovery, even for us, to endure years of being feasted upon by creatures of the sea. I pray you are right. And if not…”
He grimaced as the runes shone once more with light.
“If not, then hopefully Faron and Sariel drag our corpses from the water sometime this next decade.”
Eder smeared his blood, just as Calluna had, to ensure each and every mark and line flared with silver light. It was so familiar an act, akin to preparing the devouts for their sacrifice, he suspected he had been imitating this Etemen ritual without ever realizing it.
When finished, he turned, his back to the edge, and spread his arms.
“Fly,” he whispered, and let himself fall.
The world turned and shifted, the terrible height of the Tower Majestic stretching on and on above his feet as he fell headfirst. Wind blew against his robes and hair. The roar of the ocean neared. He closed his eyes.
Water washed over him, but it was not the cruel impact that should have broken his neck, nor was it shockingly cold, but instead pleasantly warm.
His descent slowed. Not suddenly, but gently.
His weight returned, and weirdly, it felt like he had righted himself.
The sound of the waves faded, and at last, he found the courage to open his eyes.
Eder stood upon the ocean. No, not upon the ocean.
Beneath the ocean. His feet pressed to the surface as if he were a spider clinging to a ceiling, yet the change felt natural.
It felt right. He could see a faint outline of the final step in the distance, as well as the eight devouts hanging from the edge.
“How is this possible?” he asked. Though surrounded by water, he breathed in open air.
His voice was muffled, but only as if he had a bit of cotton stuck in his mouth.
“Above” him was the seabed, brown stone smoothed over countless years.
Faint blue light shimmered through the water, lighting the way as if he walked in broad daylight.
Calluna waited for him a few steps away, a playful grin on her face. Her hair floated wild about her.
“Come on,” she said. Her voice entered his mind as if spoken from all around him. “It isn’t far.”
Eder walked along the underside of the surface, the water somehow firm below his feet. As much as he told himself the ocean floor was above his head, it still felt like it was a cave ceiling instead. As a test, he blew out a long whistle of air, expecting to see bubbles. Instead, there was nothing.
“I’ve been down here for an hour once,” Calluna called over her shoulder. “After that, my head started to feel light. I wouldn’t try for longer. I think that’s when the air finally goes away.”
Given everything, Eder held no sense of direction, and so he followed Calluna toward one of the tower walls.
As it neared, he expected to find the immaculately smooth hardstone surface down here, same as above.
It was, for much of it… but Calluna led him to a strange little jut, sharp and jagged, like several pyramids broken and pieced back together unequally.
In its center was a door, or a gap left to serve as one.
“What is within?” Eder asked, trying, and failing, to control his excitement.
“What the Etemen tried so hard to hide,” Calluna said. “And everything you claim to seek.”
Remarkably little remained of the Tower Majestic’s original builders.
Even the name, Etemen, had been given to them thousands of years prior by the humans who first settled the tower, their word for “ancients,” which had clung and remained as the human language shifted and changed.
They had no diagrams, no stories, and no statues, just the pedestal in the Final Ascent and a small collection of books filled with nigh-untranslatable runes.
Never did Eder expect them to appear so…
plain. A hundred colorless statues filled this underwater building, all of them carved so they knelt with their arms lifted toward the ceiling.
They were six-fingered, not five, and none of them sported any hair.
Little ridges marked their skulls, faint and almost like a series of waves.
Their noses were sharp, their mouths open wide in a way that unsettled his stomach.
They were not human, but they resembled humans closely. Even their robes looked familiar, and were buckled with sashes carved with incredible attention to detail so that they seemed to ripple and flow within the water.
All one hundred faced the center of what certainly felt like a temple. Within was another pedestal matching the one upon the Final Ascent. And resting upon it…
“The key,” Eder whispered, unable to believe it.
It was a bowl, shaped like a half sphere, its sides a dizzying maze of runic lines and circles.
At first he thought it made of hardstone, but its surface was too shiny, its color too reminiscent of silver.
Eder touched the sides, feeling the lines beneath his fingers.
It was warm, and the contact made his insides tighten and his heart pound in his chest.
“Here,” he said. “Right here.” He turned to Calluna. “Why did you never reveal this to me?”
Calluna pointed to the ceiling.
“Look,” she said. “And see.”
The floor was barren, as were the curving walls.
The statues and the key had stolen his attention, but now he looked to the ceiling, he saw it was a grand mosaic formed of tens of thousands of tiny colored stones.
It depicted the key, held in the pedestal, while bright sunlight shone through the windows of the Tower Majestic.
Two Etemen garbed in deep blue robes stood before the bowl, knives in hand.
In their grasp, they held a man whose neck was cut and whose blood filled the bowl.
That man looked exactly like Sariel.
“I don’t understand,” Eder said, humbled by the sight. “The Etemen, they were gone from Kaus long before us, or the humans. We… we couldn’t have been here.”
“Couldn’t we?” Calluna asked. “With each death, we remember less. With every year that passes, the limits of what we remember fade deeper into fog. When did we first arrive? We don’t know.
Were we children? Perhaps, but not in a time any of us remembers.
What if we did walk among the Etemen? Maybe they loved us.
Maybe they hated us. I do not know which, but I do know one thing, Eder.
” She pointed to the bowl that was the key to the entire device.
“It needs our blood. Radiance-blessed blood. That is why I left it here. That is why I feared it. What good could come from such a thing?”
Eder pulled the key from the pedestal. The metal felt like squirming worms beneath his fingers, but he did not care. At last he would solve the riddle of the tower and confirm his theories of the purpose of the runestones.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to Calluna, only to discover she was gone. There were only the statues of the long-dead Etemen, their arms raised toward the now-empty pedestal, their mouths open in prayer.
Prayer, or perhaps wailing.
Eder carried the key out, walking along the water’s undersurface. Instinct had him return to where he fell, and sure enough, he found a collection of runes glowing upon the water’s surface. Eder stood in their center, clutching the key to his chest, and waited.
The sea gave way below his feet, and he fell.
The world righted itself, and a great splash of water washed over him and forced his eyes closed.
He gasped, then retched, suddenly heaving out a tremendous amount of water from his stomach and lungs.
His legs went weak, and he dropped to his knees.
Hardstone greeted them, leaving bruises.
Weak and breathless, Eder opened his eyes. He knelt upon the runic circle, now just scattered dust that had once been blood. Below, swinging from ropes, slept the devouts in their cold cells.
“Thank you,” Eder said, the key safely cradled in his arms. Cold water dripped from his face and clothes, and he shivered. “I will never forget this kindness, dear sister. When we hear Father’s words, and the lies of this world crumble around us, I will repay your faith tenfold.”