by Sarah Chorn
The soldiers led them out into the warm night, loaded them into the back of the wagon, and clapped manacles made of heavy iron on their wrists. They sat across from each other, staring into each other’s eyes, both of them refusing to watch the men they’d just fed light their torches. Refusing to watch as the walls started to burn, and then the roof, filling the night with a smoke so thick it choked the moon. He tasted the ash of better yesterdays, and inhaled the soot-dark promise of a barren tomorrow.
“Forward!” Anatoly shouted.
The wagon moved, chewing up the earth, churning up his life as it went.
INTERLUDE
The Volunteer
They’d changed the name of their village from Novbirsk to Eyadigrad after the Premier took control of the Sunset Lands. The wealthy farming village was located a day’s ride from Lord’s Reach. The change of power had been liberating and exciting for them. They followed the Premier eagerly throughout it all: through the communal farming; the rounding up of land owners; the state’s reclamation of private property, farming implements, and livestock. They’d been with him the whole way, eagerly offering up what they had to the Sunset Lands, anxious to reap the benefits of this new, incredible system. Some of the changes hadn’t made a ton of sense, but they’d gone with them because the Premier seemed to know what he was doing.
Life had gone on much as it had before, and the changes seemed minor and manageable. Farmers farmed, merchants traded, secret police came and went, and the collectivist commissar was muddled in the middle of it all.
Then, the land rolled over and showed its dead side. Fields dried up, and no rain appeared on the horizon. Winter never came. The earth talents they had in the village, all three of them, had searched out water and fertile soil. That had saved them for a while. But then the wells started filling up with dust rather than water, and two of the earth talents ran off, afraid for their lives as the farmers increasingly blamed them for the drought and poor crops. They’d just disappeared, damning them all.
Adrian’s wife had been the one that stayed behind. She’d been killed early on in a fit of pique by a farmer who couldn’t stand seeing his children starve. He’d blamed her for not working hard enough, and bashed her brains in with a rock. When she died, the sun stopped shining on Adrian’s life.
Yet despite all the turmoil, the loss, and upheaval, the Premier never lowered his taxes, never decreased the amount of grain and food they were to hand over to officials, and never increased rations. Slowly the countryside, even their loyal, wealthy corner of it, died.
“Premier Eyad requires us to hand over more subversives and counter-revolutionaries to the state,” said the Elder of the Mir, the ruling village counsel, to the assembled villagers. He was a portly man who wasn’t so portly anymore. “He is giving us a quota of twelve land owners from our village, all to be sent with the collectivist commissar to a camp; sentenced for five years forced labor.”
There were grumbles and mutters, but the people had been starving for so long that any feeling of anger or worry was just too much energy for their shriveled bodies to handle. So they muttered, exhausted, saying words that meant less than nothing because words could not be eaten.
“Furthermore, our grain quota has increased—” the elder continued.
“The land is dead!” Alexandra, a mother of four on a collective farm, shouted from the back of the room. It used to be a temple, but now it was a meeting house. If he concentrated, Adrian thought he could still smell the incense that used to burn here daily. “How does he expect us to give him more food? We don’t even have enough to feed ourselves, our children! Already there are rumors of roaming bands of cannibals wandering the countryside, so hungry they are eating those who have fallen before them. My children ate a soup made of boiled tree bark tonight! It was all we had! Will they take even that from us?”
That was the kind of talk that would see someone hung, but no one seemed to mind overmuch. Not now, not when everything was so hopeless.
More shouting. More worry. So much of it. A deluge of fear, with nothing but the tentative promise of another day at the end of it all.
Adrian was on his feet before he realized he’d stood.
“I am a land owner,” he said loudly.
Someone laughed.
“You are not,” a woman yelled. “You don’t even own the shirt on your back.”
“My wife is dead and I see the writing on the wall,” he said. “If I stay here, I will starve to death. At least in the camps I will get gruel once a day, and because of that I will live.”
He was the last person who could be dubbed a counter-revolutionary. He’d volunteered to work with the collectivist commissar. He’d done his due diligence, turning this land from monarchy to collectivism. He bled the Premier’s colors, even after his wife had been brutally murdered, but here he was. Survival was his siren call, and he wouldn’t find it in Eyadigrad. He inhaled and faced the elder and the assembled mir. With all the resolve he could muster, he said, “I am a land owner. I am a subversive. I am a counter-revolutionary. Arrest me.”
Silence fell like a shroud, and then there was shouting.
Adrian laughed as the collectivist commissar’s men came.
The Ascended
Conversations
He could feel her out there, tugging at his awareness. The thread that bound them together, soul to soul, was quivering with new consciousness. A complex mixture of emotions hit him. Relief, because now he truly wasn’t alone. She was awake, stretching and yawning, coming back to herself after an era of sleep. Trepidation because their relationship had always been complex, made even more so by the activities of their last failed attempt to help others ascend. The disaster of what happened before hung over him like a curse.
She was just opening her eyes far away in the west, probably feeling the pull of events he’d set in motion, and waking up to meet them.
He gave her time, until he felt her tugging on their connection, until her soul called out and his answered.
Lyall. He’d always liked her voice, liked the way it filled his mind. It was low and husky, she was easy to listen to, and hard to be around. A study of contrasts.
Dreshti, he replied, sending the word back through their bond, amazed that he still remembered how to do it.
I hate waking up, she said. He could hear her grunting, feel her discomfort. She was so far away and yet she might as well have been right there, in his barrow with him, for how acutely he could sense her. My body is too small. I ache. This is agony. How long have we been resting this time?
A while, he answered.
And what woke us?
He didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to know, and her ability would tell her soon enough anyway. Up above, his potentials were starting to change, drawing on more and more magic. He could feel them effecting his own talent. Feel fragile bonds waiting to be formed with them. There was so much promise in this group. He wanted to go up and find them, help them through this; but he’d put the call out, and he had to wait here until they responded to it.
Plus, he had things to prepare. This would not be easy. Every group needed a push.
I see that a nice rest hasn’t made you any less of a secretive bastard, has it, Lyall? She asked. I suppose I should come to you. Whatever it is that woke me is happening where you are. I feel like I’m being pulled there, and it will take me a long time to walk that far.
It’s not my fault you chose a barrow so fucking far away, Lyall spat at her, instantly defensive. That’s what Dreshti did to him. She put him on edge. And yet, he couldn’t imagine a world without her in it.
He almost felt her shrug. The two of us needed the earth between us, my brother, or one of us would not have woken up again.
She was right. He’d always liked her, but he and Dreshti were dangerous if they were around each other too much. They didn’t simmer, they ignited.
The longer he was awake, the more he remembered; and he didn’t like rem
embering. Memories were fickle things, especially when a person had lived as long as he had. Right outside his barrow were the walls of the city he had pulled into the earth, the bodies of all those people he’d killed in his unleashed madness. Every life was a chain around his ankles, shackling him. He was a slave to all of his yesterdays.
He never knew being immortal would hurt this much.
For the love of… Dreshti cut into his thoughts. Are you still moping about that? Haven’t you castigated yourself enough? If this is what it’s going to be like being connected to you, Lyall, maybe I should have chosen a barrow closer to yours after all. I could have used someone to sharpen my claws on. I don’t know if I can take another epoch of your guilt.
I killed an entire city full of people. Murdered them without even blinking, he told her. He remembered Niamh, the way her eyes lit up when she smiled. Her dimples. Her shining lavender hair. She’d taught him what love was, and then betrayed him. And he’d reacted by burying her entire civilization alive.
Yeah, she grumbled. You always have been a bit of an asshole. There was a pause. Listen, you’re going to need to learn to do what every good immortal does and suppress all of this, or I will make it my mission to figure out how to kill one of the Ascended. I don’t care if you’re part of my host or not. I have enough of my own guilt weighing me down without adding yours to it.
It’s not that easy.
It needs to be that easy, Lyall.
Dreshti— She didn’t understand. There was no way she could understand. There was no hiding a grief this strong. His children had lived in that city with their mother. He hadn’t spared them a thought when he pulled the city under.
Now they were all he could think about. He thought he could still hear their screams.
You think you’ve got a monopoly on misery? You aren’t the only person who has ever loved and lost, and you sure as hell aren’t the only one who has ever been betrayed. Stop acting so small. Your tears are too weak and your sorrow is too fragile. Carve your pain into your bones and move on.
You can’t fathom... He sounded like a petulant child even to himself.
I may be all the way out here where the sun sets, but I can feel the others Becoming. I can feel the magic changing, and new bonds forming. I hear the call you put into the earth. I know that, if this group survives, the last thing they need is to be driven insane by all the guilt we’ve accumulated over our very, very long lives. So pack it in, Lyall. Get control of yourself. I am coming. I’m on my way, cutting a path through the fucking desert my jungle home has turned into while I was sleeping. I’ll be there soon.
Dreshti saw too much. She had always seen too much. That was part of the problem between the two of them. Lyall had things he liked to hide, and it was impossible to do that around the God of Sight.
Do you still love pain? He asked.
She didn’t answer in words, but the smile he felt through their bond said enough.
He closed the mental door on her, and focused his attention on the potentials up above.
One was coming, an army of bones trailing behind him.
For the first time in centuries, Lyall felt something like butterfly wings beating against the cold, dark glass of his soul.
It might have been the first stirrings of hope.
Taub
He’d had a name once, but he’d probably eaten that somewhere along the way. He’d had a life at some point, but chances were he’d devoured that too.
The land stretched before him, shades of light and dark all blurring together. The world was a soundscape, his vision mostly gone, along with everything else he’d once held dear. His feet shuffled forward, relentlessly west, though he had nowhere to go. All he knew was that stopping was impossible. If he stopped moving, stopped eating, everything else would stop as well. He couldn’t let that happen. Something drove him, and he was powerless against it. If he didn’t walk toward whatever was calling him, he’d lose everything that was holding him together. It would ooze out like puss from an infected wound and there was no going back after that.
He’d stopped breathing a while ago. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d last felt his lungs rattle in his chest like broken drums. Time had no meaning out here in this dusty sprawl of dead and decaying things. His heart had stopped beating, too. Someone came along and ate it right out of his chest, but it didn’t matter. He had no use for it anymore. It was just one more thing that was holding him back, tying him to a mortality he wasn’t sure he wanted. Mortality felt like a skin that was one size too small, chaffing him, rubbing up against all the parts of him that were yearning to expand.
Hunger stopped clawing at him in the way it had before, in those days when its hand had been clasped around his throat, smothering him with need. He still chewed up everything in his path; but he was doing it out of habit now, rather than to survive. He’d go a few steps without eating, with nothing in his mouth to swallow, and he’d feel no pain. The end wasn’t going to come roaring at him like a hurricane.
He just shuffled along, a mouse-like munching filling the air from the others around him. He was a long pause, an island in a churning ocean. He was different from the rest. Further along in his transformation. That persistent drive to devour wasn’t so persistent anymore. He knew if the rest of them stopped their consuming, they would fall and become dust, consumable parts, just like everything else.
But not him. Maybe he’d been like them once, but he wasn’t anymore.
He was… Becoming.
He had been so ferociously hungry once, a lifetime ago. So he’d filled himself up, and the transformation had overcome him. Slow at first, and then faster and faster until, just like that, it was over. He was done eating. He was done changing. Done feeding the beast inside. The beast had died, and now it was just him. He’d won both the battle, and the war.
He felt like the plague that had swept through his village when he was just a boy—fast and impossible to contain. He could feel something inside of him, roiling around in his bones, shaping his future, determining his fate. He felt it spread with each step, felt it take hold in the horde that followed behind him; and then spread into each of the villages they marched through.
They were the plague, only they didn’t bring red sweats and fevers. They brought hunger, and transformation. They unmade. Remade. Pulled life apart, stripped it to its bones and cobbled back together what was left. His horde swelled with the ranks of the infected, and their ceaselessly chewing mouths. Like rats scrabbling over the remains of the world, jaws moving in a cacophony of clicking and desperate swallowing.
It was poetic, really.
He shambled forward, the desire to move west burning deep inside him. He couldn’t say why he needed to go in that direction, he just knew he had to. He’d walk into the setting sun, move his bones across its surface and leave trails of smoke behind him if that’s what it took to satisfy this need. He couldn’t stay here, in the east, where his life had been. There was nothing sewn into the land but ghosts and bones.
West.
He didn’t question it. He just did it, put one skeletal foot in front of the other, over and over again. Never stopping. Never resting. He’d shrugged off his humanity. He’d eaten his morality, chewed it up and swallowed it long ago. That had been his last true meal, and it had gone down as smoothly as perfectly aged wine, disappearing into that black void never to be seen again.
He wasn’t a man anymore, and no one would mistake him thus. No, the disease of want had infected and fundamentally changed him. Now he had no skin. He had no lips, no hair, no fingernails, no muscle or sinew. He was nothing but bones, gleaming white in the oppressive sunlight. His fingers didn’t feel as much as they interpreted, guessing at what he was touching. He understood pressure. He understood demand. He understood hot and cold.
When his eyes fell out, he heard a few of his fellow travelers scrabble across the dirt to snatch them up. He listened as they ate the last living part of him.
/> Let them. He didn’t need eyes anymore. He was learning that there were other ways to see. Other ways to understand the world around him. Better ways.
A whole new world was opening up to him, one he was just beginning to explore. Now that his eyes had stopped distracting him, he finally started to see. Funny how that worked. Without sight, he gained clarity. He understood his place in the world and he began to understand what he was becoming, and why.
Then, one day, he became aware that the travelers around him were in fact following him. He was standing at the front of a large line of the damned and the doomed, of those who were slowly feeding the beast, stripping off their humanity and devouring it, becoming something more. Infected with this new plague, spreading it like a message with each step they took.
He had a purpose, and purposes were important. Purposes gave power, and now he had his he was unstoppable. He armed himself with it and marched west, right into the baleful eye of the setting sun; the army of bones, of those who were also becoming, following after him.
He learned to speak again, but not with his mouth. Not with such fragile things as lips and tongue. He learned how to send his impressions out, as if pushing water away from his body. He formed thoughts, and he sent them toward those who followed. His fellow bones would move their trajectories a bit, just enough so they were aligning with his mighty cause. He felt the flow of bodies shift around him in response to his sendings.
It was incredible.
He commanded them. They were his and he was theirs. It was a symbiotic relationship, a perfectly balanced game of tug-of-war. They needed each other. He had purpose, and they had power. Together, they were mighty. They carved themselves out of a world set against them. The famine had come, and instead of dying like good boys and girls, they had become the starvation that had dogged their last days. They had transformed into that which had tried to terminate them, and now they were on the move. They were an army comprised of those too stubborn to die.
