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Dedication
To two of my favorite teachers, who taught me:
When the going gets tough, the tough get going – A.M.
&
Whispers drown out a shout – J.D.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Draysky
Chapter 2: Draysky
Chapter 3: Draysky
Chapter 4: Draysky
Chapter 5: Draysky
Chapter 6: Lucille
Chapter 7: Clave
Chapter 8: Clave
Chapter 9: Clave
Chapter 10: Merrill
Chapter 11: Merrill
Chapter 12: Merrill
Chapter 13: Draysky
Chapter 14: Draysky
Chapter 15: Draysky
Chapter 16: Oliver
Chapter 17: Draysky
Chapter 18: Lucille
Chapter 19: Lucille
Chapter 20: Lucille
Chapter 21: Lucille
Chapter 22: Merrill
Chapter 23: Merrill
Chapter 24: Merrill
Chapter 25: Draysky
Chapter 26: Draysky
Chapter 27: Draysky
Chapter 28: Draysky
Chapter 29: Draysky
Chapter 30: Draysky
Chapter 31: Lucille
Chapter 32: Lucille
Chapter 33: Lucille
Chapter 34: Lucille
Chapter 35: Merrill
Chapter 36: Merrill
Chapter 37: Merrill
Chapter 38: Merrill
Chapter 39: Merrill
Chapter 40: Draysky
Chapter 41: Draysky
Chapter 42: Draysky
Chapter 43: Draysky
Chapter 44: Draysky
Chapter 45: Draysky
Chapter 46: Draysky
Chapter 47: Lucille
Chapter 48: Draysky
Chapter 49: Oliver
Chapter 50: Merrill
Chapter 51: Merrill
Epilogue: Clave
Gates of Heaven 1: Downeytown
Runes
Heaven Fall
By Leonard Petracci
Chapter 1: Draysky
Draysky met his first ritebald when he was eighteen. His grandmother’s stories were true.
“Ritebalds are the devourers of souls,” she whispered, the firelight from the wood stove’s last few embers illuminating her face, casting light into even the deepest wrinkles on her brow. Draysky and his sister, Aila, huddled closer to her, as much as for heat as for their furtive glances toward the dark window shutters at the end of the room.
“It is the brightest souls that draw them—the essences, the emotions that course through you, from your anger to your joy. The ritebald senses those, it feeds upon them. To a ritebald, laughter is opening bread, and tears are a dessert.”
Her breath frosted as she leaned backward, her eyes flitting to the crack under the door. No shadow masked the wooden paneling to announce Draysky’s father’s return. Sometimes, she knew, he would brave the cold to smoke, his eyes closed as he leaned against the doorframe. The ridges do not need help killing your lungs, she would chide him if discovered, swatting away the hand-rolled vaporweed from his mouth. But the vaporweed brought sleep, and on the nights Draysky’s grandmother failed to catch him, Draysky never heard the pacing that started hours before dawn.
“Emotion—that is what gives sustenance to a ritebald. And who has stronger emotions than children? With one nail, they slice your spirit open from neck to navel, then they pluck the soul right out. Sometimes, afterward, the heart still beats, and the chest still breathes, but the body is empty. Even a worm has more soul than a ritebald husk.”
“What… what do they look like?” Aila asked, her hands wringing through mittens stitched together from the shreds of their father’s old trousers. Two years younger than Draysky, this was her first telling of the ritebald, and Draysky wished the question had died in her throat.
“Like devils,” his grandmother hissed, lowering her voice and leaning forward as if the ritebalds themselves were listening. “Their skin stony, like ridged armor, tipped with ever wet blood. Their breath like sulfurous spoiled meat, their teeth the only part of them that they keep clean. Sharp, pristine, bigger than your fists! Their hands are clawed, more like wolves than humans. And their howl… Well, it’s said that if you hear their howl, it is already too late for you. They have started their hunt, and they won’t stop until they find you soul.”
Aila’s eyes grew wide while she simultaneously tried to cover them with the mittens, though she peered through the holes in the fabric. Above the wood stove coals, a pot of water finally started to boil, and their grandmother ladled out tea to fill three cups. It would strengthen their bones, she claimed. The bitterer the better. But Draysky drank it for warmth, holding the cup between his hands, his skin covering as much of the clay as possible.
With that heat, as the fire flared slightly brighter and his grandmother removed the pot, he found the courage to ask a question. One that had formed in his mind earlier while the sun was still shining, and the light cast doubt on the monsters that felt too real in the darkness.
“But if the ritebald eat human souls, wouldn’t that make them human?” he asked, a slight note of rebellion in his voice. “If they search for emotion, it’s because they want some for themselves, right?”
His grandmother cracked a slow smile, her eyes shining, an expression that sent him huddling back into his coat. Denial or insistence from her would be expected, something that he could argue with. But this was agreement.
“Ah, Draysky, always trying to poke a hole in my story,” she said, sipping down the start of her tea. “Yes, you are right. One could say that the ritebald may be even more human than we, in the same way one might call a drunk more passionate than an artist. They are perversions of emotions. They are rage, or bliss, or desolation. They are the very bit that makes us human, and yet too much of it. Something that makes them not human at all.”
“What happens if they come to get us?” Aila asked, her voice thin and panicked.
“That is why we have the Keepers’ protection,” their grandmother responded. “We work for the Keepers, and the Keepers keep the ritebald away. Never forget that. That is the Keepers’ covenant; their charge to keep the ritebald contained. Otherwise, the ritebald would prevail. And you would never be the same.”
Their grandmother checked the shadow under the door again once more, then started to prepare us for bed, bundling us in enough blankets that somehow felt like they offered meaningful protection. Deep into the night afterward, Draysky would stare at the ceiling, fingering the simple knotted pendant around his neck, wondering just how much truth there was to his grandmother’s stories. How much had been exaggerated, enhanced by time, added on to scare him into completing his chores.
But when he met his first ritebald, he learned that her stories were but a shadow of the truth.
Chapter 2: Draysky
Draysky’s father worked in the ridges, as his father had done, and as Draysky one day would as well.
From the doorstep of their stone cottage, the Kriskian Mountains loomed over them, casting their home into shadow in the early evening as the sun slid behind the peaks. At night, cold air rushed down the slopes, whistling through the mining outpost and driving flakes of snow onto the stone streets. Stone not from construction, but from the shale that flowed down the mountain like a river, perpetually threa
tening to submerge their homes as it accumulated. Every spring, Draysky’s father jacked the house higher with a crew of ridgers, raising the floor two to three feet above the rock, then laying another few layers of stonework under the thatching to heighten the roof. And each year, the abandoned homes of those who died in the ridges receded, until they were as buried as their owners.
It was the shale that caused the ridge collapses, building up until the struts could no longer bear the weight and snapped like twigs, closing off the already neglected trails to the top of the mountains. It was the shale that ground into the thick dust that lodged into the ridgers’ lungs, giving them the hacking cough that plagued their thirties, and the wheezing seizures that claimed many in their forties. And it was the shale that drove them to dig deeper, to search for the source, the crystals sprouting from underground that were born by the mountains themselves.
“Care for your sister while I’m gone,” his father would say each morning, as he prepared to depart to the mountaintop. Outside, in the square near our home, twenty-three other workers would gather, yawning in the brisk morning air with their hands tucked into their armpits for warmth. Next to them would be two Keepers, their white uniforms blending in with the snow. These were similar to robes but with deep pockets running around the waist, fastened by a padlock about their neck. Because the ridgers had to trek outside the defenses of the outpost, on the winding trails to the mountaintops, the Keepers guided them. To ensure none of the wilderness attacked them, and none of the ridgers ran off into it between shifts. And more importantly, to monitor that the collection of crystal was proceeding on pace.
“Line up!” barked one Keeper as Draysky watched mere weeks before being recruited for ridging. The lock around this one’s neck was constructed from hardened fabric. Runes lined the sleeve of his coat, written in gold lettering that sparkled against the morning sun, and the snow around his feet had melted into a puddle as he waited. He cursed as the men slowly moved to fill their positions, shaking his head and raising his voice over the crowd.
“There are six more days to the month. Six more work days for eight day’s worth of crystal, or the firewood is coming in short.”
“Rocks be dry! Grinder ain’t spittin’!” complained one of the ridgers from the front, and the Keeper walked over to the man, tugging at the lip of a white glove on his right hand. A pretty thing, too delicate to be out climbing the mountain, with runes stitched into the fabric above the knuckles.
“Could you repeat that?” the Keeper requested, and the ridger met his eyes. At least twenty years of age separated them, the Keeper young enough to be just starting in the mines, while the ridger’s dusted arms testified to decades of work.
“Rocks be dry, Oliver. Ain’t no crystal in the veins. Might as well be diggin in powder snow.”
Oliver’s gloved hand slapped across the man’s face before he could blink, the cold air adding the sting as the miner stumbled backwards. The ridger cried out as the velvet fingers pulled away, clawing underneath his eyes to where four black marks spread, growing over the skin like a rash of death. After a moment of panic he fell into the snow, facedown, his chest heaving, his screams turning to moans. Above him, the Keeper cleaned the glove with a small cloth as he spoke with a voice of steel, taking special care not to damage the white fabric.
“Each day, we watch over you and shield you from the dangers of the wilderness. Our protection extends to your wives and children who wait for your return. We provide you with food and water, and firewood for warmth. In return, you pick the ridge. When you pick slower, the goods come slower, and our kindnesses turn harder to reach. When the crystal comes in gaps, so too might our protection.
“Now, you are down one man, yet you must still provide eight days out of six. It’s storm season, so may all the heavens forbid we lose a day. For your sake, I pray we do not. Now, march. March and rake and pick.”
They left, the ridgers casting looks back at their fallen companion, whose wife ran out into the snow to help. For the next two days, he never left his bed, and for the next week, his eye was swollen shut, so much so that he nearly fell down the mountain path from loss of depth perception. Even then, it was with Draysky’s own mother’s help that he regained his sight, using her knowledge of herbs as the unofficial outpost healer to restore what the Keepers had taken.
The ridgers pulled up ten percent short of eight days, and the rations came in halved along with the firewood. Draysky’s grandmother stretched them thin with soups and rice she had stockpiled away for the occasion, but stomachs are harder to fool than minds. During those weeks, the bones on Draysky’s face became sharper, and he felt his stomach curl inward when he slept on his back, his ribs poking through the coarse blankets. So too did the ridgers’ faces become gaunt, and the streets were quiet, as all conserved their energy for the next day behind the pickaxe.
But the Keepers watched on. And Oliver’s face lost no fat.
Draysky lived on the southern side of the town, farthest from the mountains and wilderness, and closest to the main road. Should a ridger wish to escape without paying his debts, he faced foraging upon his own far enough from the town then doubling back to the road, or running the gambit through the Keepers’ quarters. Of course, if he was a debtless man, he could walk free.
But Draysky had learned early that no men here were debtless. Not even the Keepers.
His father had taught that to him long before, when he was only ten.
“You see this, Draysky?” he said one day, holding up a sliver of crystal smaller than a splinter. The dark brown rock glittered, almost metallic, its sheen making it hard to focus on any features. “This is where your pappi goes in the mountains. This little bit, this fingernail chip, isn’t great quality—not enough for even the Keepers to sniff it out when I returned. Still, outside of our outpost, in one of the cities, it would sell for enough to feed us for a day. But there are Keepers between here and there, and I have my debts.”
“Mum says we’ll pay those back one day,” Draysky said, and his father’s mouth tightened. Together, they sat on the roof of their home, where Draysky had spent the day patching up the holes from the last snowstorm. After his shift, his father helped polish it up, and Draysky knew he would be tired. Last week, Draysky had laid the thatching on too thin, and his father stayed up half the night fixing it to ensure the snow wouldn’t fall through. This time, he’d made sure his lashes were tight, and the covering thick, and his father had been pleased.
“Ah, your mother is a doctor, Draysky. She sees this as a sickness, one that can be cured. But I’ll tell you this—there are good years and bad years in the Ridge. In the good years, we make enough to save, and I do better than your mother. In the bad years, there are more injuries, and she does better than I do. But there’s always something waiting. A new pickaxe is needed, the mine admittance fees go up, or someone can’t pay your mother for treatment and she has to forward the supplies herself. And the Keepers, well, they think their fate is worse than ours, since we’re ignorant of the rest of the kingdom. As if they watch over dogs too stupid to know their kennels are outside in the cold, and fight over table scraps because they have never tasted a true meal.”
“The Keepers look pretty satisfied,” Draysky said, turning his head toward the Keeper quarters. At the center, there was the tavern where his mother refused to let his sister work for spare chits. He would often hear songs pouring out through its windows late into the night. Sometimes as early as dawn the Keepers would leave, stumbling to guide the ridgers through the wilderness with alcohol heavy on their breath. Those were the days his mother bit her nails to the nub, watching from the window as his father climbed the mountainside.
Afraid that the ritebald might attack that day. Or just as bad, that the Keeper might enter a drunken rage.
“Ah, yes. But you see, the Keepers come from somewhere other than our outpost. They’ll never want you to know, but they’re servants as well. You watch, when the Silver Keeper arrives
, how deep they bow and how quickly they scurry. They are angry when we do not treat them the same, and that is not the attitude of a strong man. They demand respect, but they do not earn it. Remember, Draysky, respect is an effect, not the cause, of a man’s ability. The type of man who turns his cheek into a blow when life strikes him.”
“Why don’t the Keepers just go home then?” asked Draysky, and his father fished in his pocket, pulling out his vaporweed smokes and chewing on the end of one.
“Because they’re in debt, too. The Keepers didn’t come here of their own choice. Truth is, they screwed up back at home. Got sent here to watch over us. Then they take our crystal and transport it, paying their debt off piece by piece until they can return.”
“At least they’re better than the ritebald,” said Draysky as he shivered again.
“Ah, don’t know about that, son. At least the ritebald kill you quickly.” But he stared off towards the Kriskian Mountains, and the barest glimmer peeked through his eyes. “But still, we hope and we save. That you and your sister might lead better lives than our own.”
Chapter 3: Draysky
Starting at age twelve, Draysky made lighters.
At sixteen, each member of the family would enter the trade that would keep them from starving the winter. His sister went on to become a doctor, and Draysky would become a ridger, like his father and the vast majority of the outpost. But until then, they earned what they could with the tasks they could perform.
For Draysky, every vaporweed smoker knew his name, even some of the Keepers, because Draysky made the best lighters in the outpost.
“Four chits each,” Draysky said, watching as Aleman wiped his nose on a handkerchief, then folded it into his pocket. Aleman’s face was red, and his breath reeked of alcohol, but he wasn’t drunk. Draysky had never seen the man drunk, nor had he ever seen him sober. Instead, he seemed to perpetually exist in the area in between. Which was wise, considering he dealt with the Keepers as the owner of the tavern—too little alcohol and he’d lose his mind, too much and he’d lose his temper.
Heaven Fall Page 1
