Auroras rift, p.24
Aurora's Rift, page 24
part #1 of Celestial Arcanists Series
The elemental uses different magic than the human Speaker of Viathan. Instead of giving off smoke, she shimmers in the smoke-hazy sunlight and vanishes.
Eldan and I hang back, watching that light shimmer in the air move through the grass. It’s like watching the dappling of a grove of trees do something it’s not supposed to. It’s unnerving in an uncanny valley sort of way.
The scout lets out a yell as Dar’s daggers sink into his back, and I aim Starfire at him the moment Dar is out of the way, readying Icicle to fling in his face when he tries vainly to scramble back to his feet. One devastating bash of Eldan’s shield shatters the man. The sound sends the hairs at the nape of my neck prickling. It sounds like dropping a sheet of tempered glass, pieces of frozen scout collapsing in a pile.
Any hope of searching his person vanishes into chunks, and his horse, battle-trained, hardly moves with his death.
I can’t say I blame the horse for not defending its rider.
Dar goes to the animal, speaking in a low tone I can’t hear, and she rummages around in the saddle bags. “Nothing useful.”
I didn’t expect anything, but it still leaves me with a sour taste of disappointment in my mouth.
“Routine patrol,” Eldan says quietly. “I doubt he was looking for us. Could have even been hunting.”
“No bow.” Dar’s disagreement is simple. “He was tracking something, but it might not have been connected to us.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
The rift is quiet above us, but its hum is still audible to me. I wish I had some sort of clue for what to do. For lack of a better idea, I look to the ground while the other two discuss.
If the scout was tracking something, maybe there are actual tracks.
I can see where Dar walked up to the scout, a slight indentation in the ground caused by her bracing herself against his inevitable flail of shock at her backstab.
The ground in front of the pile of dead scout is disturbed, and not by him, I think. There’s gouges in the grass like something with claws pawed at the ground, and when I circle around it, I mark three other spots where it looks like the creature’s feet rested. A short distance away, there’s deeper indentations with one pair of holes in the ground that looks like the loamy dirt was punctured by claws. There’s no more prints around it.
You have gained a point in the ability Tracking.
You have gained a point in the ability Keen Eye.
The prints go backward a bit, but they start as suddenly as they stop, with a set of deeper indentations in the ground and a scuff mark or two.
“Dar?” I ask.
She stops talking to Eldan mid-sentence. “What?”
“Can you think of any animal about the size of a—” I hesitate, trying to come up with a suitable comparison. Then I remember the wolves I fought with Teinath and Ink, what feels like an age ago. “The size of a large wolf. Any animal that large that can…fly?”
The elemental blinks at me, clearly not expecting the question. Instead of answering, she moves over to where I’m standing and studies the prints. Eldan joins her a moment later, just a hint of I-told-you-so on his face.
You have gained a point in the ability Keen Eye.
“No,” Dar says finally. “Nothing living, anyway. Historically there were a few animals that fit that description, or at least large and can fly, which isn’t a particularly specific description. But as far as anyone knows these days, whatever animals like that went extinct sometime during or after the last rift.”
There are stories of beasts, fantastical beasts even to the ears of a resident of Sirethan. I have vague, tickly memories of Apathan’s tales when I was young, but nothing sticks out as a possible match for these tracks.
It isn’t worth it to stick around. We continue back north toward the city.
Eldan suggests we go into the Gilded Quarter when we reach Mithrathan, which I don’t like.
I agree, however.
I doubt Arnantas would venture out of his sector of densest support and power, but elves stand out in the Gilded Quarter, and elementals stand out anywhere.
The streets are wider here, paved with smooth grey stone and home to medians down the center that are lush with trees and bushes and plants that are beginning to go dormant for autumn. A few flowers cling to life, the occasional petal of red or purple showing amid the green that is slowly making its way to the blaze that will kindle only to die into winter.
The buildings are taller, less squat and more soaring, and cafes and shops line the footpaths, bustling with people talking and the occasional clatter of a passing carriage or cart.
I hardly see any non-humans here. Even the people serving are human—it’s one of the reasons in the Knolls people only manage to find work for each other. Humans don’t hire us. Most humans, anyway.
We draw a lot of eyes just walking down the street. As well as we are dressed, we’re all in armor, and the humans on the street are in casual clothing. They wear smartly-tailored coats and trousers in dark colors, occasional flowing skirts or robes.
Some of them openly stare, but no one makes a move to stop us.
I wait with Dar by a tree while Eldan goes to ask after news.
I try not to focus on the smoke still pouring into the sky from my home.
It’s one of those things I can’t look at too long anyway, can’t focus on. Like the sun, it will blind me.
It seems to take a decade for Eldan to return. Dar and I don’t dare talk for fear of drawing more attention to ourselves. We haven’t seen any Purifiers yet, but that could very well be because they’re all occupied in the Knolls.
It’s a bleak thought. For all the people we managed to get out, I know others didn’t leave. Didn’t or couldn’t, whether they were like Voreth and simply tired and finished or didn’t believe in the escape and stayed to burn.
When Eldan finally comes back, he gives us a nod, and we follow after him down the street. The wind is picking up a little, bringing with it the smell of the smoke.
The humans who react to it hold up perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. Every so often they look up to the sky with distaste and annoyance.
The sight makes me want to scream at them.
We follow Eldan down a side street before he speaks.
“Arnantas is planning to make a public address in an hour,” he says. “At the temple.”
There is a cathedral in each sector of the city, but the Grand Temple is rooted in the Gilded Quarter, easily three times the size of the cathedrals and so crusted in gold I’d half-expect a rainbow to spontaneously sprout from it.
“What are our options?” I ask.
The idea of going anywhere near Arnantas or any disciples or zealots or really any person who would listen to the man in earnest makes my skin feel like it did when those giant spiders were pressing their feet and hairy legs against me.
“How well do you know the area?” Eldan asks me.
“Not well. Before today I think I’d only been in the Gilded Quarter once or twice, and I never ventured close enough to see the temple except from across the river in the docks.”
Eldan nods. “The temple forms an amphitheater in front of it. There’s a wide bowl where people will gather, and we don’t want to be in that bowl. There are limited exits, and there will be Purifiers and guards everywhere.”
“Yes, thank you,” says Dar. “Let’s stay away from that.”
“There is city hall on the opposite side of the amphitheater,” Eldan goes on, looking at me expectantly. “It’s got a flat roof with a good vantage point, but if we were behind the lip of the roof, no one would see us unless you wanted them to.”
The way he says it is so simple and neutral, and what he’s hinting at crashes into me.
“You think I should let them see me?” I ask.
Dar is watching the human warrior with something like respect. “I didn’t think of that, but it could work. He wouldn’t be expecting it.”
“You think we could get back out again?” I have to ask it, even having spent the day with this man.
Without hesitation, Eldan nods.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
New Quest: A Symbol They Can’t Ignore. You have chosen to reveal yourself to the people of Mithrathan and to Arnantas himself. Find the higher ground Eldan has promised. Choose your moment wisely.
This time, hurrying through the streets behind Eldan is somehow worse even than trying to get into the Knolls earlier.
Every delay, every time we have to dart down an alleyway or a side street to avoid someone his instinct says shouldn’t see us, all I feel are the minutes slipping away like grains of sand through the chokepoint of an hourglass.
My skin feels taut. Stretched with tension I’m only barely keeping inside me. The hum of the rift doesn’t help. Instead, it makes me feel like its resonance might make me fly apart the way a frequency pitched high enough can shatter glass.
There are people moving through the city now, in the direction of the Grand Temple and the amphitheater where they plan to listen to Arnantas.
We don’t venture that close to the gathering crowd. Instead, when we are several streets away, Eldan leads us down an alleyway where a rickety set of stairs traverses the side of one of the buildings.
“In case of fire,” he says absently, but then he looks up at the cloud of smoke in the sky and swallows.
We don’t have emergency fire escapes in the Knolls. Not that it would have done anyone any good.
We climb the stairs and onto the roof of the building, picking our way after Eldan.
“How do you know all of these routes?” Dar asks him. “I can believe you’re a seeker, but this one feels like it’s one you’re personally familiar with.”
“I used to come up here and hide and watch as a boy,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “I’ve never liked crowds. I could always just sit on top of the roof and look out over the city, hear everything that was happening.”
I picture this enormous man as a boy doing just that. Nervous in the throngs of his city, seeking out ways through and around them, learning to evade not because he was being chased, but because he needed the space.
It’s so different to my own life, but it rings so familiar.
When he helps us up over a ledge and onto the roof of the hall he told us about, I can already hear Arnantas speaking. He’s already begun.
We all stay low—the lip around the building’s roof is hardly waist-high. The roof itself isn’t flat, either. It is a shallow pyramid shape with drainage rivulets that lead to gutters at each corner. Otherwise, it’d be a pool in a summer rainstorm.
Walking around the edge at a crouch is awkward business, but I prefer it to being seen before we’re ready. My heart flaps against the inside of my ribcage. Every time I swallow, my mouth feels stickier, drier.
We reach the front of the building. Until now, I’ve been tuning out whatever Arnantas is saying, afraid I’d react to it and give us away.
His words fill the amphitheater.
Arnantas’s voice is a resonant, booming baritone.
“Children of our One God, you have joined your will to his, and he will reward you for your faithfulness, for the courage it takes to stand against heresy.” I can’t see Arnantas, but I can tell he is moving, slow and deliberate, from the brief shifts in how his voice carries with each of his footsteps. “It is not your shame that those with whom we share hospitality in our city, those to whom we offer the friendship of neighborly kindness by allowing them to dwell among the faithful—it is not your shame that they treat it with disdain and abuse.”
Dar’s face is changing with her rage.
Unlike elves and humans, the elemental’s skin changes like the shifting leaves in the wind, colors of earth and sky moving across it. Her eyes are silver clouds, flashing, shining back emotion.
Eldan’s, by contrast, shows nothing. I wonder if he has gone somewhere else to avoid listening, if his mind has protected itself by withdrawing.
“Our God offers all who humble themselves before him a measure of his glory,” Arnantas is saying. “From the lowliest of those he has confined beneath us to the faces he sculpted to reflect his own, he offers you his glory.”
He speaks with the kind of confidence used by car salesmen in the post-crisis world. The kind of confidence that says, “Luxury could be yours if you just reach out your hand” all the while slowly pulling the hope farther and farther away.
But people never notice that they’ll never reach. He’s not selling cars. He’s selling the dream that everyone has an equal shot at one. Beyond that, he’s selling the lie that people should feel like they need one.
He’s selling that even though in one sentence he has divided his own followers into us and them—confined beneath us. It is no secret who he means. He sees the face of his god only in faces that look like his own.
Or perhaps only when he looks in a mirror.
I stop listening again, tuning out the words to follow the flow alone, listening as he justifies what he has done today, listening as the crowd stirs with his words.
But my listening reveals something unexpected. While much—most—of the crowd seems to be eating up everything he is spooning onto their tongues, there is a quaver of unrest in the outer fringes, closest to us. It is perhaps the only reason I hear it, that it is close to us.
Arnantas’s words intrude again.
“Look above you, good citizens. Gaze upon Aurora’s Rift and marvel at it—you have all known the fear of its appearance, but you have trusted in your god to see you through this time of promised chaos.” Arnantas drops his pitch as if confiding a vast secret. “My siblings, my faithful family, you do not need to fear chaos. Believe. He has sheltered you in your city through my hand. If your faith is great enough, our god will ensure that this rift, this rift that cuts through our sky with magic of uncertainty and destruction—he will ensure that this rift…is the last.”
The murmur that goes through the crowd is a roar, and even Eldan jumps at that.
“He cannot make such a promise,” the man says numbly. “How could he ever make such a promise?”
“Easy,” I say, getting to my feet. “He’ll be an age dead dead before the next one. As long as no further rifts appear, they will believe he is right.”
Dar gives me an urgent look. “Lithrial, are you sure?”
“Not even a little bit,” I say.
I stand up straight.
With every eye on Arnantas, I have some little time to look around before anyone notices me. The crowd is still fitful, people turning to each other to murmur in confusion and disbelief, but that is only the crowd closest to us. Deeper in, in the parts where Arnantas is claiming the locked gaze of every fervent believer, a cheer is growing, swelling.
Soon it is deafening.
“Make sure I don’t fall,” I tell Eldan dryly, and I hop up onto the edge of the lip around the roof.
It’s not much wider than my feet, and I don’t particularly enjoy heights. My vision swims a little, but I push the sensation aside as best I can and steady myself.
I stand with my feet planted and pull my staff from my back, holding it beside me for extra balance.
The shout below me is the first indication I get that someone has seen me.
“Look! Up there!” It’s a quiet shout, not meant as an alarm.
The first one, anyway.
A ripple spreads outward from me through the crowd.
“There’s someone up there!” someone calls out, and gasps sound, scattered.
“Is that an elf?”
It doesn’t seem that Arnantas has noticed yet. I stare directly at him, waiting.
While the confusion moves toward him in a wave, I look out over the crowd.
“I am Lithrial,” I say.
The name is not enough for anyone to understand, but I speak loudly enough for those closest to me to hear.
“What did the elf say?” a voice asks, and someone answers in a whisper.
“I come from Viathan.” I let that ring out even louder.
News of Viathan will have reached Mithrathan by now. This time the response is like setting fire to dry summer grass.
I can watch the speed of sound in the crowd’s reaction. They may not have known my name, but by now, they are understanding that something significant is happening, something dangerous, maybe. Something new. Unexpected.
They understand that someone is challenging Arnantas in the very nexus of his power.
“We won’t have much time,” Eldan says urgently, quietly, too low for anyone below us to hear. “Once Arnantas acknowledges you, there will already be people coming for us.”
“I know,” I murmur.
It doesn’t take long. Confusion sends shockwaves through the mass of people, and in the distance, with Arnantas hardly the size of my pinky on his raised dais, the exact moment he sees me peals like a bell.
There is one moment of surprise where he stops moving and goes absolutely still.
Only a moment.
“Lithrial,” he says. His tongue tastes my name, carried to him either in a message from Viathan or in the mouths of the crowd gathered before him.
I have no intention of hearing anything he has to say. The amphitheater will not carry my voice the way it is built to carry his, and I don’t care. It’s the voices closest to me that will take my message and spread it through Mithrathan in rumors and whispers. Probably in taunts and jeers. Maybe in quiet hope.
“My name is Lithrial,” I say. “I was raised in the Knolls.”
I have no need of explaining any further than that. Several faces tilt upward, eyes on the smoke that now is at my back, framing my figure against a sky clouded with death. The sunlight is hazy red, smoldering through the city.
The rift is there too, visible, growing, humming, singing to me.
I know what I’m going to do.
“My name is Lithrial,” I say, projecting my voice as far as I can, “and the power of Aurora’s Rift is mine.”
I summon my mana, summon the force of Aurora’s Beacon to me, and the red haze of smoky sunlight turns gold, then white, white, pulsing outward from me and growing, filling the amphitheater and beyond from the top of this building.
