Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  And the Spire from Shai’s stories? All those gardens, so much growing and green—all those places, level upon level of homes and offices and public spaces, stretching from near-ground to sky. She could not see them; only watched as the Spire cracked and crumbled.

  From the Spire’s peak, more pieces broke away and tumbled through the City. The Spire should have broken, Xhea thought. It should have cracked in half and fallen like a felled tree, crashing through the Towers all the way to the ground.

  It should have fallen, but it did not. For, Xhea realized, the power that she saw rise into the air was only some small portion of the Lower City’s magic; the rest surged up through the Spire itself, and wrapped around it, through it.

  It held. The Central Spire stood like a sword plunged into the ground, and though it swayed and shuddered and threatened to break, it held.

  If the Spire was a sword, it was one held now in the Lower City’s hand.

  The Spire was a channel for magic, and now it channeled only dark. Xhea leaned back, farther and farther, and watched in horror as dark magic flowed from the Spire’s center and stretched across the sky.

  It reached for the Towers and twined around them, one by one. And, one by one, they grew dark.

  It was her plan, she realized; her plan achieved. But now she reached out, small fingers grasping at nothing, as if she might take it back. As if she could gather that magic and draw it down.

  As if she could stop the Towers from dying.

  “Please stop,” Xhea whispered to the Lower City. She was so quiet; she could not even hear her own voice.

  There was no point in arguing anymore. No point in begging or pleading or crying. She could hear in its song: the Lower City would not be turned from its path. It would pull the Towers from the sky one by one, as long as it was able.

  Vengeance. Justice. The City cast to the ground as she had been, as so many Lower City dwellers had been, as if they were nothing. Shouldn’t she have cheered?

  Not anymore.

  Xhea sank to Farrow’s dark-covered rooftop, feeling the smooth vines against her palms; she rested her aching body and her throbbing knee. She settled to the ground as if it were her bed, some soft nest of blankets where she might rest in peace, for all that she did not let herself surrender to sleep.

  There, she began to sing.

  Xhea had never had a good voice; she had learned long ago that even her tuneless humming when she washed her clothes in the communal basins would earn her only dark looks or mockery, depending on the audience. She had never wanted to sing, for that poor voice was just a vulnerability, and the last thing she’d needed was another weakness.

  Now, that song came without thought or hesitation, the words falling from her tongue. The melody was slow and simple, the words rhyming; it was a song that Abelane had sung to her during the longest, darkest nights, when the walkers had been outside their building and neither of them could sleep.

  A lullaby.

  Her voice did not carry, nor did she try to make it. Yet it was not only her voice that she raised, or that echoed now across the broken landscape. Her voice was but the vessel; it was her magic that held the true power, the sound only giving shape to the black.

  She lifted her voice, and yet she sang, too, the way the Lower City did: letting her power flow from her without words. Magic rose from her lips and tongue; it rose from her hands and outstretched fingers; it lifted from the whole of her bruised and battered skin and swirled in midair, its patterns complex and slow.

  She knew the Lower City’s song, that furious chorus that shouted: Betrayed, gone, alone. She knew those pains; she knew that anger, burning so hot and fast that it seemed it would consume all and leave nothing in its wake.

  She knew how it felt to want to tear everything down, everything, as if in destruction one could be avenged; as if fury might purify, might wash one’s heart clean.

  It was not of such things that she sang now.

  The Lower City’s song was inhuman, too beautiful and terrible to have ever been birthed from a human mind or throat. Xhea’s song was the opposite: thin and weak, her voice warbling, breaking. Her magic, too, for all its glorious power, was nothing compared to the dark magic that rose even now from the ground, thick and black, as if it meant to turn morning into night.

  But it was the heart and soul of her. It was inherently human; and though it was not beautiful, it was true.

  Xhea sang not of pain or death, not of vengeance or destruction—not even of the sorrow that was left when such things were past. The words were simple: they spoke of the laying down of burdens and closing one’s eyes to rest until the next day dawned. But it was not, now, the words that mattered; and into their simple, repetitive phrases she put other meaning.

  Xhea sang a song of farewell.

  Farewell to the place she had known: the market and the skyscrapers, the tunnels and the streets and the ruins beyond. Farewell to the world she’d known and the people that had filled it; farewell to the joys and horrors of her time in the Lower City, its petty frustrations and small triumphs.

  Farewell to her life, and the lives of countless others. The people in the Towers, guilty and innocent alike. The Towers themselves, great and unknowable creatures of magic, airborne structures dancing across the sky.

  Xhea felt as the Lower City hesitated, confused—for she wasn’t trying to reach it now, wasn’t trying to speak or reason with it, wasn’t trying to change its path. She only sang.

  There was guilt there, too, woven in amongst her goodbyes, but she did not let it settle on her shoulders; that weight was not hers to bear. She had tried, in countless small ways, to fight the things that occurred as much as she had set them in motion, she and Shai alike.

  Xhea had tried to fight, and she had failed. A thousand times over she had failed.

  Yet for all her mistakes and missteps, there were some things that she would never do differently. If she could live her life over, her mistakes unmade, her sorrows washed clean, she would still accept the hesitant, fearful ghost that had been brought to her one rainy spring day. She would still try to save her.

  Shai. Her hand rested on the tether, though she did not need the physical touch to connect her to that ghost anymore. They were far apart, but Xhea felt her friend as if she stood by her side, her hand resting on Xhea’s shoulder. Xhea felt Shai’s struggle to achieve some great working—felt the pull on her own magic. But beneath that, beneath thought or image or emotion, there was only Shai.

  Goodbye, Xhea sang, repeating her lullaby’s simple melody once more. For here it ended, and though tears coursed down her cheeks to wet the blackened rooftop beneath her, it was not only sorrow that she felt.

  Her life had not been gentle; it had not been easy. It had not, at times, even been good. But it had been hers, and for that she would be forever grateful.

  Her song finished, the last whispered note vanishing into silence. Xhea took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  The world around her stopped.

  Xhea sat unmoving, caught in a moment of perfect quiet. Silence was a bubble that rose to surround her. She could not hear the earth shuddering, the Spire cracking, breaking; there was no hint, even, of the Lower City’s song.

  She opened her eyes.

  The Lower City’s magic surrounded her like a wall. It was poised, waiting. Confused.

  Then sound rushed back in a wave of magic, and she winced from the force of it. Again that power spiraled around her as if to draw her attention, then swooped skyward, toward the Towers.

  Bright power surrounded those structures, flashing like blades of light as they attempted to beat back the dark magic that assaulted them from the ground and Spire alike.

  Look, the Lower City seemed to be saying. Here.

  As if she had not already seen what it was doing, or understood its intent. As if, understanding, she would cheer for that destruction, and join her magic to the flood of power that now rushed skyward.

  Xhea shook
her head. She moved her hand, and the dark magic that flowed from her fingers did not join that upward rush but cut through it, pushing it away in a gesture of sharp, swift denial.

  Again the Lower City hesitated. She could feel its attention on her like a pressure, for all that it reached skyward and battled the Towers. Its song stuttered in confusion and inquiry.

  Why did she not join it? Why did she just sit there, looking out and not up?

  Why did she not watch its fight with the Towers above, that coming triumph, and instead only stare at a lone Tower on the City’s fringes?

  It had been so difficult, once, to understand this entity. To understand not just that it sang, but that the song was its voice; to understand the meaning that was—and was not—in that melody. To understand the rush of magic and image, emotion and sensation that came with every note.

  It wasn’t sound, not in truth. Sound was only the way that her brain interpreted what it sensed. She knew it, and it did not change the way that song thrummed through her body and ears alike.

  Once it had been difficult to understand the living Lower City—but then she had lost herself in the whole of its mind, and it had, in turn, lost itself in her life. Her memories. Her emotion. However briefly, they had been a single entity.

  Now she struggled to imagine hearing what she heard, feeling what she felt, and not understanding it.

  It was puzzled, almost hurt by her reaction. A cloud of dark swirled around her, and in its song she heard the words that might shape that questioning sound—the words that she would have spoken.

  What are you doing?

  “I’m bearing witness,” Xhea whispered.

  Confusion.

  “I’m watching. I’m seeing the effects of what you’ve done—what you’re still doing.”

  Confusion compounded. Sound and power swirled, probing, questioning.

  “If they’re going to fall, they’ll fall—but I will not let their deaths go unmarked.”

  No more hidden lives, like the one she’d lived; no more ignored deaths.

  Xhea did not know the name of the Tower that she watched slip from the ranks of the City. Perhaps she would have known the name if she had heard it spoken; perhaps it was one of those whose names had so recently echoed through these streets, reviled. Lozan or Helta, Elemere or Jhen or Tolair. It did not matter.

  The Tower was from the City’s edges; no debris should have reached so far. Yet it had, and the Tower’s defenses were too weak—the Tower itself was too poor—to push it back. A piece of the Spire hit it hard and the Tower shuddered, sliding on air.

  As Xhea watched, its grown-metal flesh turned liquid, shimmering as it attempted to heal that wound. Attempted, too, to stay aloft.

  But it was falling.

  Just one casualty in this fight, but not, she thought, the last.

  As it fell beneath the level of the other Towers, that unnamed structure gave up its attempts to struggle back into the sky. Instead, its whole surface changed to that shimmering liquid, and Xhea imagined that inside, its citizens were being absorbed into the walls or floors or whatever other surface they could find as the Tower prepared for impact with the ground.

  Xhea winced as that huge structure hit the earth of the distant badlands, far beyond the brilliant protective ring that now encircled the raging Lower City. A moment, then she heard the sound of it, echoing across the landscape. Its long, tapering point crumpled as it hit; its defensive spires cracked and exploded in a shower of sparks. But maybe, just maybe, it had managed to slow its descent enough to protect its citizens. Maybe, just maybe, it would live.

  “You did not deserve what they did to you,” Xhea said to the Lower City. She did not have to try to speak in magic anymore; that power was like air to her, its calm filling her, its taste perpetually on her tongue. “And that Tower? It did not deserve what happened to it.”

  A rush of sound, of anger, of denial.

  The Lower City was a vast creature, ancient, unknowable. She knew it. Yet, hearing that voice, she suddenly understood that it was also a child. A child lost and ignored—just like Xhea’s younger self.

  Despite its strength and power and rage, that’s how she suddenly imagined it. The Lower City was a hurting child, just a small girl curled in upon herself, weeping angry tears. Angry, lost, betrayed.

  And because Xhea had been that girl, she understood. Once she, too, would have burned the whole of the City to the ground. She would have watched the Towers fall, and she would have laughed.

  “This doesn’t fix it,” she whispered now. “This death? This destruction? It doesn’t make it better.”

  Again she hummed the lullaby’s refrain, as if to remind it of all that had come before; not just of loss, but of life and home and stability.

  A pause, then: Too late, it said. The sorrow ringing through that chord did nothing to ease the sense of inevitability. Too late, too far. As if now that it had begun this destruction, everything had to fall. Every Tower just a domino, tumbling one after another from the sky.

  “No,” Xhea told it. “You get to choose. Every moment you get to choose.”

  The words themselves were simple, even trite. There had been a time when hearing them would have made Xhea roll her eyes at best. At worst? She wouldn’t have listened at all.

  But if the Lower City was now like her younger, angrier self, it had within it, too, the memories of everything that came after; the seeds of growth, and the person she had become. It was choosing the anger, as she once had. It was choosing to cling to that hurt and betrayal, and no matter how truly it had been earned, it was not of use here.

  Dark magic poured from the ground, up through the Central Spire, and into the City above. It wrapped around the closest Towers, the richest Towers, and for all their wealth and status and affluence, they struggled. They sputtered. They began to slip from the sky.

  Farther the Lower City’s magic reached, and farther. No triumph there anymore, only a slow weight of grief. It would see through what it had started. It did not see any other option.

  A surge of thought and emotion came from Shai, flooding into Xhea like the sudden memory of a dream. Home and conflict and youth; a flash of leaves; a living, flaring heart.

  Allenai.

  Xhea looked up.

  Amidst the chaos of the Towers and the black, smoke-like tendrils that reached for them, it took her a moment to find Allenai. The Tower had changed much since she’d first seen it, when she’d thought that it was to blame for every ill that befell her since Shai’s death. It had changed, too, since its forced takeover of Eridian. But it was not Allenai’s new appearance that made her blink in surprise, but the magic that surrounded it.

  Xhea knew Towerlight—could see Towerlight, even against the overcast sky, the Towers’ defenses shining like a brilliant gray aurora. The magic that spread from Allenai was different.

  For all their beauty, the defensive spells of the other Towers seemed sharp, forming great blades that swept through the air. The magic around Allenai was gentler in its movement; and it did not press against the spells of the Towers surrounding it, but seemed instead to flow around them.

  Allenai reached for the Spire and the dark magic that surrounded it not as if it wished to attack or defend. No, Xhea thought. It was like a hand reaching out.

  An offering. An invitation.

  A plea.

  Xhea saw only magic; she was too far to hear any sound if Allenai was, indeed, singing. But Shai saw something different.

  Meaning filled that magic, thought and color and intent, and if Shai did not read such things with the ease that Xhea now shared meaning with the Lower City, she nonetheless understood.

  “It’s calling,” Xhea said. Her words felt like an echo of Shai’s, as if they spoke in unison no matter the distance between them. She felt pride in those words, joy; she felt Shai’s sudden smile.

  To the Lower City, Xhea said, “It’s not an attack. It’s a greeting.”

  As Towers fought and
struggled and fell, Allenai called out to the Lower City. Called out, too, to the Towers that surrounded it—and one by one, they stopped fighting. The Lower City reached for them and they did not engage. They pulled away, not battling that touch, but evading it. Around them, the other Towers shifted and moved to make room.

  Xhea thought suddenly of standing within Eridian as Allenai crashed down upon it, the walls tearing away and becoming liquid, swirling and merging. In the City they spoke of hostile takeovers in human terms; yet there, listening to the Towers as they merged, Xhea had heard only joy. It was joining of thought and mind and power, as much as it was of physical, grown-metal flesh.

  They want to join, she’d thought then in sudden understanding. But now she realized something more: despite their human inhabitants, the Towers were lonely.

  They battled, one against the other across the sky, fighting for altitude, power, position—but not because they wanted to. Not because such things had meaning for the living Towers themselves, but only because it was the will of the people who created and fueled them.

  The people who ruled them.

  All her life, Xhea had seen the Towers move in the City above, rising and falling, turning and shifting and clashing. Only now did she see the Towers move of their own volition.

  If their magic was a song, then this was a dance. Spells flared around them, but not like blades; Xhea could not help but think of the twist and flutter of silken veils.

  Again and again, one reached for another and they changed. Xhea did not know what passed between them in that magic; she saw, too, that whatever was said, some obviously disagreed. Some Towers fought back, or struggled against the damage already caused by dark magic. Some slipped slowly, slowly, toward the broken ground below, pieces falling from their sides like rain.

  The Lower City hesitated, all that dark power suddenly frozen across the sky.