She thought of everything she had learned since their last conversation—the Spire’s ultimatum and its intent, the reason why the poorer Towers had claimed this ground and why, even now, the buildings were being torn apart.
The truth about the dark magic that poured down on the ground every night.
And the belief that underlay it all: that if the Lower City just tried, it could rise up and fight back. It could take on the power of the whole of the City above, and it could win.
Oh, it was a relief just letting that knowledge flow from her. She did not control it, did not try to shape it into words or thoughts or images, only opened herself entirely to the Lower City’s magic.
It was worth it, she thought. All she had gone through, all she had seen. If it helped the living Lower City fight back—if it saved some fraction of her home, saved its people—then it was worth it. Such joy in that thought. Such hope.
The Lower City pulled away.
What? she thought. What is it?
Silence.
No, that wasn’t quite true: the Lower City’s song rang on unbroken, rising and falling with the rhythms of its life and thought, the flow of its magic through the territory it claimed. But in response to her sudden surge of magic and the knowledge it contained, there was nothing. No chords played in echo or answer, no sound of its sudden understanding.
She felt its attention upon her nonetheless.
The Spire will kill you, Xhea said, trying to wrap the words in her magic and send them flowing toward that awareness. Do you understand?
It did not reply, only reached for her, as if her mind and power—as if whatever might remain of her small and failing body—might be swallowed down like a pill.
Images rushed at her, too fast to understand—too many to tell one from the other. A tunnel, wings, something growing—
Sensations assaulted her, pain and light, color and sound and heat—
The taste of wild raspberries and the smell of rotted wood burning—
It was becoming harder to focus; harder to keep her thoughts from dissolving entirely. She wanted to rest, let go of her hurt and struggle, and just lose herself in the Lower City, dark magic to dark magic, no division between them.
Only her link to Shai held her steady, an anchor against the raging storm. Shai’s magic flowed into her, more and more, giving Xhea shape and substance where she might otherwise have none.
Xhea drew upon that power, using it to build walls to separate her from the entity that surrounded her. By will and magic she created a barrier that said, This far, no further.
It was difficult. It hurt. But then, everything did these days; pain was her renai, the coin by which she paid for any progress.
Slowly, the Lower City drew back. It seemed to look at her, considering the messages that she had sent the way one would puzzle over a letter written in a particularly difficult hand.
It will kill you, Xhea said again, more urgently. It will destroy you utterly. But you can stop it. You can fight back.
A torrent of magic in reply, black on black, all but overwhelming her. The living Lower City battered at the walls she had built between them. She felt a surge of question, of confusion; it was grasping for answers. For understanding.
No, she thought. Too much, stop—
It drew back, but not, it seemed, because of her words. The Lower City shuddered then, pain rippling through it; another building had fallen. She could feel it, too: the sudden shape of that absence; chaos and disorder where once there had been wholeness, form, structure.
Orren, Xhea realized, interpreting the rush of sound that rang around her, through her, and the entity’s grief. Orren has fallen.
It should have made her glad, that destruction; once she would have laughed to see the broken skyscraper fall, and danced on the rock and rubble of its walls. Not now. Now she felt its loss as the living Lower City did, as a piece of her torn free.
If she could have, she would have wept. She would have screamed.
Instead she cried: Stop! You can stop this, you’re stronger than them.
Slower, anguished: Why are you letting them do this? Why won’t you make it stop?
In wake of her words, there was only confusion.
At last, Xhea understood. Despair welled—her despair, the Lower City’s, it mattered little which.
Xhea had thought the living Lower City was like a Tower, and it was—and yet it was so very different. Its magic infused the streets and buildings of the Lower City like a Tower did its walls; yet, unlike a Tower, the dark magic entity did not claim those structures for its own. It lived within them, but did not change them; did not make them anything other than they were. The only exceptions were the black tendrils that held Farrow aloft and the path of her recent decent into the underground. In all the Lower City, that was a slim triumph indeed.
Like having a great house, Xhea thought, and living only in the bathtub.
This entity was ancient—as old, perhaps, as the City itself. Yet for all its age, its size, and the dark complexity of its thoughts, there was so much it did not know. So much it did not understand.
Towers, in the City above, were connected to a very many people. They had their Radiants, bound to them in life and death; they had those Radiants’ knowledge and memories, their hopes and dreams, flowing into them throughout their lives. They had their citizens, which numbered in the thousands; and each sent some portion of their magic into the Tower.
More than that, Towers interfaced with their people countless times per day: they ran the systems, the heat and water and power; they managed the myriad spells that City citizens relied on unthinkingly. They spoke with other Towers; they battled against each other, spell to spell, as they danced across the sky.
But the Lower City had always been alone.
The magic that had birthed it had come only from the Central Spire. No guiding hand, there; no intelligence with which it might communicate, or from whom it might learn. And yes, that dark magic fell on the people of the Lower City, and perhaps it had picked up some small flavor of their lives. Flavor, only; not knowledge. Not truth.
What it knew it had learned on its own. Scraps and pieces of countless lives, assembled into a picture that it thought was reality. Its understanding of the world bore little resemblance to the City Xhea knew.
Life it understood, and change. Pain, too, was clear—though it seemed that only now did it begin to understand the depth of the concept, the layers of meaning that pain might have, physical and otherwise.
But it had no knowledge of death, or even of endings. It had always been, growing, changing; it, like the world around it, knew no end.
Confusion rose, swirling around her. No, it would have said if it knew the word; it made do with shape and shade and emotion. You are wrong.
A kinder person might have found a way to speak to it calmly, patiently—might have shared an understanding of death in a way it could understand. Xhea had never been terribly kind, and of her slim collection of virtues, patience had never been among them.
Frustration welled, twin to the Lower City’s confusion, if dwarfed entirely in magnitude.
What could she do but let down those walls that she had so laboriously built? She reduced the division between them, let their magics mingle freely once more, so that it might see into the heart of her—see into her mind and her memories, and understand.
Xhea opened herself to the Lower City. Its magic washed over her, a rushing torrent of power. It had no concept of its own strength; it grabbed the whole of her and pulled.
Xhea huddled in an alley, shivering, her breath a fog before her face. He was coming, the man was coming, and she had nowhere else to run. She stared up at the sky so she did not have to see his shadow as it darkened the ground before her—
Xhea sat in the morning sunlight that poured through the apartment window, and looked down at the torn clothing spread across the floor in front of her. “Here,” Lane said, passing her a scrap of cloth
and a needle—
Xhea coughed, choking; she could not breathe for the dust in the air, she could not see. She clawed at the broken ground before her, fingernails splitting as she pushed handfuls of dirt aside. “Abelane,” she sobbed. “Lane, where are—”
Xhea froze as the spells dragged the ghost down into the broken body that awaited him. There was so much magic in the air that her hands and face had gone numb with it. “No,” she said, but Orren’s casters did not listen, only pushed her back against the far wall. The ghost screamed—
Xhea tried to push herself away from Ieren’s body, away from Shai, but the ghost stepped toward her, her hand outstretched. “Xhea,” Shai said. “You won’t hurt me.” And the shining ghost came closer and closer—
All the facets of her life, bright and dark and glittering; and there was no life without death. The Lower City ripped memories from her on that black tide, turning them over and around as it tried to understand, yanking Xhea’s consciousness in countless directions.
Ghosts, so many ghosts; ghosts of the young and old, the sick and the wounded—
Shai lying in her bed, her body thin and wasted, her Radiant glow dimming as she exhaled and did not breathe again—
Dark magic washing over a nameless young man in Tower Eridian, his face going slack and empty as he fell—
Screams in the darkened streets as the night walkers caught a man and tore him slowly to pieces, and no one could help him, no one could even try—
Xhea screamed. She had no mouth, no throat, no voice; and yet something echoed from her—some soundless, wordless cry—and at last the entity drew back.
Darkness, then; a moment of perfect black. Xhea was not fool enough to name that calm peace.
Then: a swirl of shadow, a wash of sound. A question.
Yes, Xhea said in answer. It will kill you.
This time, it understood. Or, at least, it understood death as she did: as one who had fought and scrabbled against its inevitability; one who had turned it away time and again with stolen food, a fire built from scraps, a thin blanket wrapped around her shivering body like a shroud.
Only now, death was not such a distant concept, nothing that life still held at bay. For while Shai’s magic flowed into her, that power was as thin and weak as she now felt. Too much dark magic killed a person, even her; and all her flirting with wisps and ribbons of black had not prepared her to face this.
But then, nothing could have. Mortal flesh could only bear so much power, bright or dark; Shai had taught her that. What better way to teach the concept of death than by dying? She would have laughed if she could; it seemed, in that moment, a wonderful joke.
Again that swirl, a rising sound of inquiry.
Xhea had no need to reply; the entity knew the whole of her life, the whole of her self, all the things she had ever learned. There was no need to repeat what it already knew.
She felt her death approaching, and if it was not welcome neither did she need to fear it. She had known so many ghosts, seen and spoken to so many of the dead. No wonder death felt like a friend, coming to sit at her bedside and read to her for a short while.
Wait for me, Shai had said. We’ll go together.
Only now did Xhea understand those words. Again she wished to laugh, or perhaps to cry, and neither mattered now; because somewhere she’d once had a small, frail body, and it was surely gone. Burned to ash and embers; burned to the smoke of dark magic rising.
No, the living Lower City said suddenly—its song growing louder, faster, its darkness condensing in a single black surge of denial. It reached for her, wrapped around her and lifted her up—
But it did not matter. It was already far, far too late.
Shai watched as Xhea walked into the Lower City’s living heart.
In the underground, so much was dim and dark and gray, as if time had leeched the color from all things. Yet the heart itself was black—black the way that Allenai’s heart had been light—and in its swirls she could see some hint of the mind of the creature that the City’s waste magic had birthed. No order there, as she had seen in Allenai; no true pattern.
Instead, it was like looking into the heart of a storm. Only there was no lightning or glimpse of light; just a clot of ebony cloud, swirling and raging like an unbound force of nature.
It swallowed Xhea whole.
Shai stared, wishing she could grab the girl back from that swirl of power; wishing she could clutch Xhea to her chest, as if her arms or magic might keep her safe. As if safety existed anymore.
Of Xhea she could see nothing, not a glimpse of her hand, the shape of her silhouette, a swirl of her charm-bound hair. She was simply gone.
Only the spell-bound tether remained, stretching into that dark. A rope to lead her back to the living world.
But against so much power? It looked so very thin.
A moment passed. Another.
“Xhea?” Shai called. Her voice echoed unanswered.
She felt Xhea’s binding burn away.
A sudden flood of power surged down the tether, so sharp and strong that Shai gasped as that magic poured into her. Shai would have said that she did not feel the effects of Xhea’s binding, and she would have been wrong; it was only now, with the binding gone, that Shai felt the difference.
Her power flared, bright, effortless. It rushed through her, and it felt not like magic but blood, its surge a heartbeat. The heart’s dark magic pushed at her like a howling wind—but now her own magic pushed back, a beacon shining into that storm.
Just as suddenly, Xhea drew on Shai’s power.
Shai had expected it, had braced against it, but even so that pull almost made her lose her footing. She reached out—as if physical walls would be any help, as if anything might hold her unmoving but will alone. She concentrated, steadying herself, feeling that glorious power rush out of her.
“Stand strong,” she whispered—to herself, to Xhea, it mattered little which. She was the anchor, Xhea the ship lost to the storm; only together would they get through this.
Shai was not so naive as to believe that meant Xhea’s survival. She hoped only that Xhea might tell the Lower City what it needed to know before its power unmade her entirely.
For she herself, standing near Allenai’s heart, had felt the lure that pure magic offered: the peace, she might have said; the ability to surrender all shape and form, and the worries that came with them. Though she no longer had a physical body, neither had she stepped into that heart entirely; she’d had a way, however small, to retreat.
Xhea did not.
Shai could not see the girl, could not hear her, yet somehow she felt the way the heart drew around her, and some aspect of Xhea’s loss of place, of body, of self. Shai felt as that magic unmade her, cell by cell; felt the echo of her pain as she burned.
No, she did not hope for Xhea’s life now; it was too great to wish for, and the hope of it would be sharp enough to cut. She could not afford such wounds, not here, when all else was already breaking.
She hoped only that Xhea’s spirit would survive. That Xhea would stay in the living world, as Shai had stayed, if only for a time.
We’ll go together.
Around her, the underground trembled, and Shai blinked. A fraction of a second passed and then came a great, distant booming, like thunder. She tried not to think what that sound meant, what was happening somewhere above her; she only stood steady against the storm.
Harder Xhea pulled on Shai’s bright magic, and harder still. Shai sent all her light and power into the tether, willingly yielding to that pull. The halls around her grew dim.
Shai thought again of her realization in the warehouse at the night’s beginning: that she stayed in the living world for Xhea. She stayed, she knew, for other things, too. For the chance to learn more, see more; for the chance to help people.
For a chance, truth be told, for the life she had not had—or whatever semblance of it she might find.
It was only a chance. Knowing Xhe
a’s magic and what it did to all living things, Shai understood what she had never put into words: Xhea would not live long, no matter what they did. A span of years perhaps, with Shai at her side to keep her strong; or maybe only months. A season’s slow turn.
She did not know. No one ever did with a terminal illness, though some predictions were better than others. Death kept its own schedule.
Because that’s what Xhea’s magic was, she thought—an illness. Whatever its use, good or bad, it meant only death for its bearer. What else should she call something that caused the slow wasting of flesh, the withering of life in what should have been its prime?
It was, in the end, the same as her own.
They were so very different, she and Xhea. They always had been. And yet, in this—as in so many other small ways—they were alike.
Death hurt—or dying did. Of her own end, Shai remembered only peace. She only hoped that Xhea’s death, lost in that dark entity, shared that moment of grace.
Again the underground shuddered, harder this time, as if in an earthquake. Shai struggled to look up—the movement was an effort. Cracks appeared in the walls around her, and dust rained down; bits of ceiling tile fell to the ground and scattered.
Stand strong, Shai told herself again, but already she felt the strain. No, more than that: for the Lower City’s heart pushed her away, relentless; yet the tether, and Xhea at its end, dragged her back. She was caught between those two forces, pushed and pulled in equal measure, and had no way to fight either.
Shai grit her teeth, clenched her hands into fists, squeezed her eyes tight—as if anything, anything, might make her strong enough to meet Xhea’s need.
Stand strong.
But she could not stand anymore. She could barely breathe.
She hung now in midair, her feet some empty span above the floor. Her hands were lifted from her sides, her head thrown back, and she knew not when she had moved.
Shai knew that her power was not endless—it had never been, for all that it had always seemed such. Unbound, she had come once and again to the end of her strength. Now her magic did not flicker, did not fail; it was only pulled from her, so fast, so brutally, that its leaving hurt. Its absence hurt.
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