Chapter 58 Aylah
AYLAH
T hank you for accompanying me,” Celebrant Madeleine said as they rode the lift.
The woman stared out into the yawning abyss in the heart of the tower, her hand clutching the rope railing.
“It would do my mind good to have someone speak with our Luminary, and you are the only one allowed to join him in the Final Ascent.”
Aylah glanced sideways at the diminutive woman. No radiance was needed to detect the jealousy that Madeleine tried and failed to hide. What was the Celebrant to her brother? Friend? Confidant? Lover?
None, Aylah suspected, from what she knew of Eder. It made her pity Madeleine, who no doubt wished she were all three.
“I cannot promise much, but I will attempt to persuade him to rest and partake of a good meal,” Aylah said.
The Celebrant nodded. Her grip on the rope tightened.
“Eder said I should trust you as I trust him, but he spoke little else of you. How do you know the Luminary? Were you friends before his blessed return to Racliffe?”
Aylah had discussed a story with Eder for them to use, for he had always insisted he was the only child of his “father,” and therefore she could not reveal herself as his sister. This was hardly the first time in their lives they’d needed such measures, and the lie was familiar on her tongue.
“We were friends as children,” she said. “It seems not so long ago he was pulling my hair, and now here he is, with a nation and church under his thumb.”
Madeleine’s face twitched. “You demean all he has accomplished with such language.”
Aylah grinned at the woman.
“No one is a prophet in their hometown. He may be Luminary now, but he will forever be as a brother to me, softhearted and prone to obsessions… to the point where he forgets to eat and sleep, as you yourself have so clearly noted.”
The lift arrived at the rafters, and Aylah suspected that was the only reason the Celebrant did not argue further. Instead she stepped off and gestured for Aylah to follow. They weaved through the mess of rattling gears and pulleys, accepting the respectful nods of the liftmasters.
“This is Aylah, whom Eder has given permission to join him,” Madeleine explained to the soldiers guarding the lift to the Final Ascent. They moved aside so Aylah could step into the little platform’s center. Madeleine crossed her arms, frustrated and worried.
“Please, for his sake, convince him,” she said as the platform rose.
This was the first time Aylah had visited the Final Ascent since Eder explained their purpose, and she was startled by the change.
More than half the runestones shimmered with silver light, illuminating the intricate symbols carved into their centers.
They glowed because they were bathed in Eder’s blood, and the amount required was frightening to observe as she walked through their mazelike pattern.
“Eder?” she asked. Her brother knelt over one of the runestones, a bloody knife held at his side. He was still and did not turn at her voice.
“Eder?” she repeated, touching his shoulder. He startled and spun about, his bleary eyes wide.
“Aylah?” he asked, struggling to focus upon her. His voice was frighteningly weak. “Oh, forgive me. I must have… dozed off.”
Aylah frowned at the lie.
“This blood,” she said, and gestured about her. “It is too much for you to shed at such a pace.”
“But I must,” he insisted, and tried to stand.
When he wobbled, Aylah grabbed him by the arm and aided him to his feet.
He felt thin beneath her touch. This was no ordinary bleeding, of that she was certain.
When Eder painted those stones, he was giving a part of himself to them, a faint replication of the true sacrifice required at the altar of hands.
“Your people are afraid,” Aylah said. “Queen Isabelle’s army marches toward Racliffe. Your marshals seek guidance, and your faithful, encouragement.”
“General Sid has returned to lead the defense,” Eder insisted. “As for my people, my work here is the culmination of their faith. There is no better use for my time.”
“If you must, then why not use Isabelle’s blood to paint the runes?”
“No,” Eder said, shaking his head. “She is born of radiance, that is true, but it is still thin compared to ours. Tainted with humanity. I fear it may not be enough for what the machinery demands, and I would be foolish to risk matters further by using her blood, and not mine, to power these runestones. I can only pray my radiance overcomes the deficiencies in hers.”
“Then at least be patient. You drive yourself to the brink of death.”
“Death,” her brother said, and laughed. “Death comes for us all, and in the name of the goddess, Leliel. I know our defenses. I have read my scouts’ reports.
We cannot win, Aylah. The protectorate will destroy us.
My only hope is that our walls hold out long enough that I may awaken the Tower Majestic to fulfill its true purpose. ”
Aylah glanced at the altar and its sacrificial bowl clutched in a crowded array of six-fingered hands. Her stomach clenched at the sight of it.
“And if it is not enough?” she asked.
Eder pushed her away to stand on his own strength. “If it is not enough, then I hope Faron will be kind and not toss my body to rot in the ocean below.”
He smiled as if it were a joke. Aylah was not laughing, and when Eder teetered, she closed the distance between them to catch him in her arms.
“Enough,” she said. “You are resting, whether you wish to or not, Eder.”
“Fair enough,” he said, leaning more heavily against her. “I suspect I could not resist you if I tried, and I will spare myself the indignity of being carried.”
Built against the farthest center edge of the Privileged Heights was Eder’s home.
An iron fence surrounded it on three sides, with the rear built against the platform’s edge to overlook the yawning chasm.
Its construction was still fairly humble for the Heights.
It lacked the great pillars meant to replicate the older styles found in Racliffe, and though it was two stories tall, that second floor was small and cozy compared to the grand mansions with outer decks overhanging their apportionments.
Twin torches burned at the gate’s entrance, which was watched by a lone soldier.
He saluted them both and then unlocked the gate so they might pass.
Another soldier waited inside, guarding a locked room.
Aylah dismissed him, then guided Eder to the interior living room, set him on a padded couch, and then began the process of lighting the many candles throughout the home.
Unnecessary, given their blessed eyes, but after decades spent in purest black, Aylah preferred the light of a flame.
“Ever my caretaker,” Eder said, smiling at her as she offered him a cup of wine poured from a little cask kept in his pantry.
“Someone must,” she said, and sat beside him. “Since you won’t.”
Eder sipped the wine, his gaze drifting off into nowhere.
“Thank you,” he said softly. “It has been… hard, doing this on my own. I am glad that, come the culmination of my grand work, I will not be alone.”
Aylah wished she could feel so confident. She sipped from her own cup, unsurprised by its strong, bitter taste. Eder was never one to indulge himself in sweetness. It would take far too much to intoxicate her, but she enjoyed the warmth the wine spread within her belly.
“You hold such faith in the voice you heard in the dark,” she said, carefully broaching the subject that had been bothering her since her arrival with Isabelle.
“And even more in the machinations of the tower, built by the Etemen long before we walked the lands of Kaus. But say they work. Say you succeed. What does that even mean, Eder? What will happen once you pierce the firmament?”
Eder slowly swished the wine in his cup.
“I do not know,” he admitted. “But I cannot deny that we are lost to our creator. I heard it, not only in his words, but in his confusion. His desperation. We are a lost lamb, Aylah, and I will send our bleating cry to the shepherd. If he is truly our creator, our Father, then how could he not react with joy?”
He drank the last of the wine and set his cup down upon the little wooden table before him.
“As for what will happen? We will be free, my sister. Surely you sense it as well as I do. This entire world is wrong . Humanity’s souls were never meant to live a multitude of lives.
Neither were the fey, whose offspring devour their parents, or the dragons, whose souls reenter their own dormant eggs, quickening them.
Even our own eternal rebirths are wearing on us, scraping our minds raw and clouding our pasts.
Everywhere on Kaus are cycles without end, and after each cycle, we grow more tainted, more broken, and more impure. ”
He laughed, tired and mirthless.
“We are insects trapped in a jar of stars, Aylah. When the Tower Majestic roars to life, I will shatter the glass and set us free.”
It was such a grand goal, one undeniably worth the blood and sacrifice, and yet Aylah could not shake the instinctual terror that flooded her chest at the thought of uniting with her creator. She glanced at the nearby door leading farther into the house, and her heart sank.
“Faron and Sariel will never forgive me for what I have done,” she said. “I pray you are right, even as I fear what awaits us when you tear open the skies.”
Eder pushed to his feet, and he gently patted her shoulder.
“They will understand, in time,” he said. “Good night, Aylah. Sleep calls, and I have denied it for too long.”
“Good night, Eder.”
His bedroom was up the circular flight of stairs in the corner, and she watched him vanish. The cup of wine shook in her grasp, and she had to clench her teeth to summon the concentration to render it still.
“Will they understand?” she wondered aloud. “Or will your tower reveal only the failure of the Etemen, earning my brothers’ condemnation forever?”