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Chapter Text

She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals.… Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part... Iwi tel you some thing Riddley and keep this in memberment. What ever it is we dont come naturel to it.'
I said, 'Lorna I dont know what you mean.'
-Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

Here in the dark, as hangs the old adage. The shadows layer up. He's locked in with infinity. Eyes open and feelers stretched out onto the skin of the rock, the plural one is reading the pages in between the covers of the dark. He is in solitary confinement, he the only one in the world who's never alone, and that is a splendid joke in itself.

A question has been on his mind for a while, though intermittently he forgets. He's distracted by the texture of the black. He has the luxury of a deep well of time, though he might (he remembers the concept) in the course of it all hit bottom. He remembers, and he croaks,

“When?”

The stones and the dust and the masonry chips vibrate, and the rest of him that moulders in the cracks echoes back, Ever sang?

There's a deep breath in the world before it changes. A wind blows past to stir the dust and the black drops into a sheer sheet of blue. White shivers up in hard-angled blocks, and the notes trip down to his level in a staircase set for him to step upon.

“My song,” he says, and climbs the rapture. The world is in darkness and it's time for the show.

He alights into a wide flat gray plain in the center of green. It calls his smooth step forward toward a castle that glows like a fistful of candles that he can't reach, with another city in the way. No, a town, they call it, and smile that he's already wrong. It is pleasant here, with shops with their shingles and squat doleful trees, with paths that lead to a fountain that shimmers to beckon him to lean above and see his face upon the clean water.

“Oh.” When he touches his cheek the fingers come away black. Tip to tip, a tapping motion, muted and viscous. His voice is soft in dismay. “How dirty.”

He comes to wash his face. A good brisk clean beneath the fingernails and at the corners of the mouth is called for, and he feels the dry film of soap there when he smiles at the queen in the locked room that smells like the anise seeds the guards chew, and feels the pressure in his scrubbed hands when he presses hers and tells her the princess will be home soon.

His boot lifts off the castle pavement (swept and tidied, fresh rush mats every season, what else are servants paid for?) and lands on cracked flags that nearly turn his ankle. He strides over mottled gray and opens a door to a black place with a table laid in brocade, where a man encased in segmented armor lifts and places four statuettes.

The man in armor says “Where do you think you are?” without lifting his faceplate or showing his eyes.

“On the stage,” says Ardyn. The white robe falls mid-calf and the shoulders are tight. He pulls on the pattern of red triangles at the sleeve and settles it.

“With how many?” He pincers a little skeleton between his metal fingers and rocks it to get the pointy feet uncaught from the cloth. The crystalline hole in time behind him gives it all the scent of barley, and the statues are festively draped.

“On my own.”

The armor gives a grating snort and shakes its head, and the helmet squeaks where the metal meets. “That's no good. The appointment's for four.”

He sets the skeleton down in its station on the spiral between the sea beast and the serpent woman. One of the dragon's heads has come off. This is why one must take care of one's things.

“A hundredfold score is where it ends,” he says to explain the décor when Ardyn's eyes stay sucked up by the black rock done up on an altar as though it deserves it. His little finger in silver armor turns the little dragon, and it tilts on a poor center of gravity. “Four against. What say you?”

The kraken slaps tiny tentacles against the tablecloth in damp reports, round goggling eyes shining. “Oh, ho, ho, ho,” is the aristocratic laugh, “Anywhere, etched my devotion.”

The skeleton, erect and rigid, marked in his profession, says, “Every day, gave my goad.”

“You're the tinder,” says the serpent woman, the bright and quick one, many arms swinging, swirling in circles until the armored man nudges her back into place. “Always, promised my faith.”

“I'll put an end,” says the dragon, phalanx of heads focusing. Her sorrow prickles him. Who gave her the right? “Again, offered my sacrifice.”

“And what was your motto,” says the armored man, as his fingers make cages above the figurines and they walk along the spiral (Other natural habits of other species: saints line up and sages circle), “for when you would fulfill your duty?”

Ardyn reaches out a savior's hand his sword doesn't fill. “'Whenever,' said my words.”

That won't stop a resourceful man. There's a broom leaning by the door that says “EID OT NROB EREW SGNIHT GNIVIL LLA” and angered, Ardyn hurries to argue, grab, and wield, but somewhere outside there are clamoring footsteps.

The armored man says “There they are, right on time” when the door flies open and strikes Ardyn with the knob in the small of his back to send him flying so he doesn't even get a look before he slams facefirst into the table and the little dragon jams right in his throat, all three noble pointy heads.

Beside him, there are the sounds of water.

The town is unrefined, still, in crude brickwork and trapezoids of gray pavement, with windows all in a row. A fountain tinkles a pleasant if somewhat repetitive tune. Ardyn approaches the castle and is stopped by a pair of guards who shake their heads with dour duty.

“Password,” says the one. This is new, and he is proud.

Ardyn says, at full ordained height, “I wish an audience.”

“Wishing?” The other laughs and points at a group of temporary three who emerge from the gate, battered and fresh battle-tattered. “They would be heard.”

He is turned away. The chosen ones go off to strengthen themselves through self-flagellation, and Ardyn goes to speak with the people. It is crucial to know the right words. He is told of wars and proud thieves and hidden craftsmen, and that the far castle is amok with beasts. As he walks with silent steps through the cobblestone streets past the back windows of an inn from which drifts the sound of laughter and scent of fish stew, he is caught by the pale eye of a cowering prince.

“I saw you smiling at me.” His hollow eyes accuse. He draws further back against the wall, knees in ragged-hemmed blue pantaloons bent tight to his chest. “Was it real, or...?”

Ardyn shakes his head. “I would not mock you.”

The prince's sigh rattles the thinness of him. “Just my fantasy.”

Four pass carrying a canoe above them that gives their voices a concave reverberation as they call, “Metal, metal, we hunt metal from the dark.”

Ardyn springs after them. “If I may meddle-”

The one in white glares at him over a half-swathed face. “You haven't the mettle.” And shoves him back.

“We've lost one,” says the one in front.

“It's just us three,” says the second, with her bow a slash across her back.

“And one to guide us,” says the third.

“They must have the [Mithril],” says the one in white, boxed in significance for him to [learn].

Ardyn is met by solemn stares as they stand in the canoe's shadow. There is a box of his own, he sees. He has little to say and nothing to give, yet something is expected of him, so he points and learns.

Satisfied, the four nod in unison and turn. He follows them across the lake, swimming strong despite the desultory shove of oar when they can reach him, and comes out dripping on the shore to wait where sand clings and cakes on his wet boots. He watches them enter and watches them emerge, metal held between them in a crucial crate.

They travel, and return.

In the audience room the sun streams through the stone windows and the coward prince perches clean and straight-spined on the throne.

He lifts a beringed royal hand in welcome and says, “Oh where would I be without the gains I've borrowed, and strife?”

Ardyn says, “You'd always be there in the corner.”

That is enough, and so as not to meet the sad eyes he turns away and takes the stairs up and up, past fire, ice, and violet.

They meet at the tower's apex where the man in white waits before a barred door.

“An ultimate power is imprisoned here.” The cloth bound over his muffled mouth moves when he speaks. “It costs a life to open.”

“Allow me.” Ardyn stretches out his hand. “I have so many.”

The other steals his sacrifice. In midstep forward he is caught between target and caster, and the lightning arcs through his body en route to blasting the door to fragments that patter on his back as he falls and lays with his smoking cheek pressed to the ancient flagstones while the other falls as well and boots patter past, and the cry he hears from the inner vault is that it is useless, useless.

Horizon to horizon there's only the hard glitter of sun on waves, and the sky above Ardyn is empty blue as he drifts on his back out from under the shadow of the great floating rock. There has been a flood. It smells like earth until he is carried further away and there's only the smell of salt water. Whenever some gets in his mouth he spits it out again. Gulls, doves, cormorants, albatross, falcons, cranes, pelicans, magpies, sparrows, swifts, hawks: to amuse himself he makes a list of the birds there aren't.

When the sun sets the ocean and sky model themselves after one another, vastly black to vastly bright and back. There are stars, sun, and stars again. He hungers for nothing but the sight of them.

It is early and the sun is in his eyes on the day when the top of his head barks against a ship. There are no cries of man ho, not only due to sailors' rare politeness and refusal to call names. Ardyn makes himself vertical, legs of sea and chest of sun with the breeze cooling his back, and sees a collection of splinter and spar that testifies even this great and empty world can boast a thing or two to collide with. Ardyn clambers aboard before his luck can scuttle.

He must blink to the lack of light and the strangeness of standing unbuoyed. There is the smell of damp wood, and the wall he leans his hand against has the give of rot.

Wistfully he sighs, “I wish I had a leitmotif.”

His pupils widen slowly to the shadows and find an old man hunched over a table staring back over a beard that scraggles downward past his plate. He puts rice and beans in his mouth while his face moves only to chew.

"It's the apocalypse out there," mentions Ardyn. It explains his sodden clothing and seems interesting news.

The old man hawks a wrenching cough. He is unimpressed. "There's always an apocalypse."

Ardyn's is a rolling exploratory stride. A tacked map flutters to his passing and he drips into the interior. Are there boat words for a bed bolted to the floor, wearing timegrayed sheets and a maiden? He leans over to examine her. Pulse, color, respiration. This, he knows.

"Where is the pain?" he says softly.

The strains of her importance waft through the air. The girl does not flinch at the drops that land on her cheek. The old man hands Ardyn a begrudging towel.

"Nowhere." She smiles with small white teeth in a face that mauve-kelp ringlets frame. "I am where I belong."

To gently break it: “You're at the last.”

“Of what?” the maiden says.

He crouches and hangs his wrist over the rounded white border to point next to the sets of neat numbers divided by a slash. “Of this tiny little bar.”

"It's as long as it needs to be." Her smile does not waver. She knows, and this disturbs him. "What are you so afraid of?"

"My last night." As Ardyn towels himself vigorously to remove every trace of clinging water his hand finds a seaflower in his tangled hair, whole and hale. He offers it to escape the subject. "Here. For you."

As she reaches out her eyes slide away to the footsteps behind him, and they are who she rises for. Nondescript, he thinks with contempt as he tucks the wouldbe gift away for later, told apart only by their clothing. They could be anyone. The music is hers.

In the shrine the walls are shining with reflections of six cast back with the light, where the ring of water around the altar reflects its own interlocking code. The girl is crossing the stone bridge with her heels clacking and Ardyn would keep pace with her but his wet clothes entangle him, so he pauses at the entrance with his hand upon a pillar, reaching down to wrench the folds free.

The assassin's arrow takes her in the throat. The vaunted crystal is no help at all.

"Please," the girl says. Not to him. Her blood trickles to the edge, drips to dissolve in threads in the stream, and in that immobile instant by the cease of breath he [learn]s of the maiden's death by water.

Ardyn rushes forward with his arms outstretched, and there are arms, tangles of arms, thick muscular tentacles cold as seawater and hands made for a wretched bow, the clang and scream of armor and flailing blows, all grasping and clinging in the odor of rot and salt water, dragging so that his kicking does not break him free, until they fly apart when the earthquake comes. Him, alone on the tiles. The long second. Then the pillar cracks, lists, and slides with a crescendo of momentum toward him, and the flower in his pocket has gone black.

Above propellers whir and send eddies of air counter to the wind that fails to drive the ship back. Ardyn strides to the edge, clothing wind-plastered to the left side of his body, and grips the wooden railing to gaze down at the land. Around him sailors harry rope and pester arcane instruments.

"They call this 'in medias res,'" Ardyn mentions.

"Quiet," grunts the sextant man.

He enjoys this for a time. The wind slaps him briskly. A sailor comes upwind in a spray of sweat-scent and offers a flagon. "Sin and misery, mixed with your rum."

Shaking his head sends whips of hair whither-ye-may. A raise of hand, a polite decline. "I don't have a claim to the ration."

The sailor's teeth show at one side of his mouth. "You get what you get."

To smooth over the awkward conversational impasse he looks about the deck. There is a man there at the center in armor colored like bruise and tar, all spike and spire capped with the glower of a visor's wicked hook. At the look of him, a storm begins.

"Drink," the sailor insists, but the rain has filled the cup with blackness.

"Evil on board!" the one with the most conspicuous hat thunders. "The sea demands sacrifice!"

"Same old songs," Ardyn murmurs to the jagged wavecaps with a wan smile at human folly.

He looks up to observe the culprit and finds the twisted knight watching placidly while leaning on his raven black sword with the pommelstone that shines like spilled blood, and the sailors make a circle with weaponspoints hemming himself.

"Just..." Ardyn blinks. "Once more?"

Heave, heave, a tumbling toss, and then the cold sea strikes him.

He falls and flails as if down stairs, and midflight is engulfed by bloodwarm water and seething foam in a roil of cetacean halitosis. Down the gullet, past the engine throb of the hutsized heart, with a splash and crash into a stable submarine chamber where the water that carried him drains away. He breathes, blinks, and lets his eyes adjust, and that's all one needs to get used to things, really.

The place is capacious - round like a cavern, but the floor is flat enough. Ardyn sets to housekeeping. He weaves kelp into carpets and fashions a fishbone gramophone, puts anglerfish lanterns in sconces and flicks urchin spines at a driftwood dartboard. He keeps a crabshell soapdish on a vanity of shipwreck iron, and gazes at himself in a curve of polished abalone shell as he scrapes his cheeks with sharpened shark cartilage. He listens to the sea go by and loses himself in daydreams of what may someday be.

His home sings, "Where have you been?"

"My, last night?" Ardyn pats the wall. "Here with you."

"Not true," it warbles. "Not tru-u-u-ue."

It is not the destination but the journey. He has just gotten the algae antimacassars arranged to his liking when he is spat out onto the moon. He rolls and is dusted like a pastry, left alone in the mournful cry and flap of a whale's tail. It is the loyalest who let you go. Or perhaps it was indigestion.

Ardyn gazes into the eternal black above and goes to stretch his legs. There's a mountain for the purpose. The path meanders leg-achingly steep, though the fresh moon air is nice. He prizes a starfish from his sleeve as he walks, whistling at first, then as the cliffs rise and the gray stones turn jagged, not anymore. On the moon days can't be counted, and numbers never meant much. He pulls himself gasping up a slope and lifts his eyes to see his feet flat on the plain of the peak where monuments rise sharp against the sky. Four read PSSI, DLRO, LARI, WEHT in the name of explorers who have come before. He places his hand on the monolith in the center.

A lurch like his own warping, and he is taken to a room of mirrors. The wall of shining crystal before him reflects him on his knees in a puddle of white robe, utterly clean, hands folded and eyes lifted upwards in doleful piety. Nostalgia burns his throat like a rising gorge or tears.

"Tell me what you see," the image says.

"Me," says Ardyn. The room is silent, closed. Cool seeps from the stones below and from the four glass walls.

The reflection smiles tolerantly. "That can mean so many things." It sweeps its arm one way. "Maybe...?"

To Ardyn's side the mirror shows him crowned and laureled, armored, with gleaming sword and noble countenance, there to suffer in the innocents' stead.

Avarice claws away his breath. "Yes."

The other. "Maybe...?"

Ardyn turns. What faces him is creature hulking and fanged, cackling fit to make trails of black ichor stream from yellow eyes.

He stumbles and his heel treads on his hem. "No."

He shakes his head to blur his eyes, and the images that pincer him vanish as the reflected saint looks on with hands that never unsteeple. "You have an ordeal ahead."

"I know." The string of inevitability pulls Ardyn straight, shoulders square. "To sacrifice my life to vanquish evil."

"No, no. Something difficult."

Dislike of the look of pity makes Ardyn turn and ascend the crystal staircase he finds before him. He walks up and up, and soon walls of metal and glass surround him in a matte blue that reflects him as a moving smear. Up and up, into a chamber where a drama unfolds in need of an audience. Something terrible has happened, but he will not begrudge the traitorous guard captain. Let Baigans be Baigans.

There stands a suit of black armor who proclaims in growling tones, "I have brought you here by stealing the one dear to your heart."

Ardyn's attention is stolen while he glimpses blond hair and [learn]s the line, for his eyes are taken to the hero, whose dark sword is abandoned and whose face is uncovered, his guilt flung aside like a wet cape. He has turned and is radiant, now.

Ardyn paces a half-circle around him to examine the neat white stitches on the gloves and admits, "I kind of liked it, your way."

He cannot say but it might be, always for a moment it might be, that the paladin understands him.

There is no time, for an old man cries out for revenge. The seams of his face deepen with hatred and his staff spits fire like a boxer spitting broken teeth, yet they only burst in harmless spatters on the villain's warding cape.

"More!" the old man spends his numbered breaths to shout. "I'll see you moldering!"

Ardyn cannot stand by. He leaps and grabs for the casting staff. "You'll die in the effort. Prithee let me."

The old man's hands only gnarl tighter, more strong than they've a right, and he twists and yanks. "Other side, you mumpsimus fool!"

The villain laughs and Ardyn pulls with a force that slips his grip. As the old man whirls to the final the crook's hook catches him on the backswing with skull-cracking fervor, and oh, the greater pain is the envy of making the stars fall.

In the dim cool of the hold, Ardyn rests his head against the wood and listens to the waves murmur against the hull until his company awakes. Eventually one of the shapes sprawled between the benches (not in ranks for rowers, and no oarlocks to accommodate them) struggles up, tousled at the top and off-balance from the bound hands.

"What are you in for?" Ardyn says.

Says the boy, "We tried to steal a pirate ship to see what would happen."

Says Ardyn, "What happened?"

The boy looks around the dank hold at the girl waking with a groan and the old man with a grunt, both testing their bonds and failing. "This."

They are marched (prodding cutlasspoint between the shoulder blades, stench of chewing tobacco, uncalled for rudeness) to wince in the sunlight of the deck, where a woman in captain's garb stands in judgment.

"I happened to be here," says the boy.

"I'm supposed to be here," says the girl.

"Where am I?" says the old man, for which Ardyn holds empathy.

To Ardyn the captain says, "What be your excuse?"

"My people were sick," he cajoles and confesses.

The pirate pushes back her tricorner, says, "Arr."

Don't heave and haul at his limbs, o churl, or hurry him so to the plank. He'll walk.

He never has the chance. Ardyn is two steps along the creaking lumber when attention flees and he is left behind to look down until the lap and lather of the waves turns sheepish. There's nothing for it but to slip his bonds and follow. Those who won't enforce a sentence could at least extend an invitation. There is elsewhere to go, and he catches up to the four at the apex of a tower, they in raiment he is not extended: a youth who smells of birds and campfires, a girl with an air of royalty, a man in handsome women's clothing, an elder in his own world. There are never enough crystal shards afforded in this economy, and he is left unemployed.

"Starkle, starkle, little twink," Ardyn tells the leader disapprovingly. "I could have aided, don't you think?"

The last thing he could expect, careless, bemused in honesty: "Sorry."

Weeds wend thickly through the cracks in the stones, a virulent purple-mauve. In their rare clearing they stand as the old man rapidly changes clothes, stripping to shorts and faded white undershirt between each, cultivating a pile of discarded crescent-crest hat, turban, eyemask, wolfskin, wool. The wind whips up mortar grit, and in the shelter where parapets meet a crumbled dragon moans.

"You pity it," says Ardyn to the girl.

She colors. "How could you tell?"

"How you shyly placed your eyes." Trodding footsteps echo up and Ardyn snatches an unwanted weapon from the pile, coming up wielding a handbell that tocks in his brandish. "On me."

What appears is a king, come to deal with important machinery, friend enough to the old one to be accustomed to his greeting coming muffled from within an upraised and inverted shirt.

"The barrier comes down when the king dies," he [learn]s from the girl. She places her hand on the dragon's forehead and murmurs to its distress.

A dragon, up close, is unromantic. What is there to idolize in a spindle of dark drool, a smell of massive lizards' cages, scales as ridged and uneven as uncared for fingernails, dried crusted crumbs at the rim of eyes rimed with illness, garish coloration, the distressed pants of hot wretched breath?
It has its purpose here and so is permitted, but none would want its company.

The princess catches him watching, and looks from wings to wastrel. "Girls pin their hopes on monsters."

Ardyn avers an "Oh."

She wipes pink hair from her brow with her forearm, smiling. "Did you ever know that?"

The pirate tosses a knife from one sundark hand to the other, hip cocked, chin jutted, and directs its point to Ardyn. "I had mine on you."

A howl, a crack, a crumbling tower beneath them. The king clacks furiously at a device.

"Leave me," Ardyn cries, but the keys will not compress to his jabbing fingers.

"It is not your job." The sacrificial monarch will afford him no space. An elbow, a sideward step as the tower thrashes, and Ardyn is flung to land in vines and crush them beneath him in herbal pungence, rolling and rolling staining and stinging, splotched in purple poison.

He lies on his back, releasing a wheeze that thins as he watches the four take flight from the dying king, three looking forward as the princess soothes the beast.

In the center of the dressing room is a desk bearing a script athwart the middle. The flowers are crafted of silk, so there is only the scent of powder and rouge. Bottles stand on the vanity in a jewel toned array. There is the anticipatory silence of a performance in the making, the sense of the first few watcher gathering on the blank side of a curtain. It is a cramped space to allot the prima donna, but he has been given this time to prepare. Ardyn takes up the script.

"Prince Ralse?" he reads sonorously. "I hate him! Everybody does!"

He lets his hands fall and rustles in his costume's confines. His crinoline is askew. Fixing it takes precedence over perusing the script more deeply, from the cover that reads BALANCE to the other that bears RUIN. There is an elaborate prologue and a dizzying number of characters; a description, too, of an evil vizier and the betrayal and death of a noble-hearted general, all crucial backstory. There is so much to [learn]. Ardyn replaces the folio beside the cup of tea provided for him. He would like to stay here for some time in the small room's silent brightness, putting off the moment when he will step onto the scaffold in the murmuring dark.

In the mirror his costume is a delicacy layered in ivory and lace, with flourishes at neck and wrists that trail his movements like bevies of moths. The idea is to draw the eye. His face is painted in a horror of corpsewhite with mocking crimson lips in a petrified grin. He dabs with a kerchief at the kohl of the eyes, though there is little help for it.

"It suits you," says a voice from the door. A thief stands there, bandanna'd and youthfully unsure what to do with his hands. The impression is of blue.

"Darling. So..." He enters and wipes at the corner of Ardyn's eye with a thumb. "There you are."

"I will be caught out," Ardyn attempts to explain. "Where is the true player? Delay the overture and equip me with an épée."

"You'll do fine." The thief smiles encouragingly. He is many patterns, much like the dress, though in a color that does not so much entrap one's vision. "Everything'll put you where you need to be."

At a loss Ardyn takes up the tea. A bead of sweat travels down his wrist through the white powder and makes the rim unpalatable, and thus he sets it down beside the paints.

In the distance, someone laughs. "That's you." Light and nimble fingers are insistent in the small of his back. "Better go."

He is not ready, he protests, heels dug in while wrapped in soft slippers that give no purchase on the parquet, his weight slipping onwards into the dark, can't it be someone else, as the bass orchestra brass drowns him in no, no, no.

The stage about him is vast and empty. The background scrolls, purple clouds, lightning-lit. Someone safe in shelter of the wings shakes the sheetmetal thunder. He faces away from the letters in flame toward the blinding impression of upturned faces, a shining void behind the flap of the conductor's arm. Applause rattles like a box of knucklebones.

The curtain lifts to reveal a cardboard castle with stars on the black cloth above, bringing a wave of cooler air carrying the scent of poster paint that streaks pale mortar between the sponged stone blocks. He blinks in the spotlight that soon slides away and shifts him from bewildered to bereft. Who dares?

It lights the golden hair of the twins upon the painted parapet, one with arms bared, one caped in elegance. The latter's thumbnail tings up a coin.

"Mine," Ardyn gasps, hauling himself up the stairs. The skirts catch at his ankles like hands. "Mine."

"Sorry," says the one, sorrow in his eyes above the smile. "The answer's set."

They pass him on the stairs, the large loping two at once before and the elegant sweeping after in tap of blue patent leather boots. (Gold hair and machines, reluctant heir in mourning: [learn] this as well.)

"We've got our jobs," said the one crested like a wild beast. "Get up on that stage and give em hell."

"I cannot," Ardyn comes near to begging. The castle in its twilit purple stones expands as wide as desert and something rustles above the stars. "How could I do this?"

The other pauses and turns back. His thumb presses to the painted upturned corner of Ardyn's lip and rubs the red greasepaint gently into his skin. "With that look on your face."

They are gone into the footlights and Ardyn faces upward. At the apex of the staircase there is only the vastness of the open stones and the distant parapet high above the walls over a place where he will not look.

Someone takes his arm with the decorum of a general. She marches him in ordered steps, foxtrot tango, there's a bogie on your six, while he twists to look behind him and is pulled forward onto the open plain of the unforgiving stage. "Keep the pace," she tells him with disapproval when his stumble puts a scorchmark on her boot's pure white, and with a crisp turn she spins him to wobble the balance of a bentkneed gambler with a coat of enviable cut, Ardyn's strife a chip in his plié. He says, "It doesn't matter if it's in your favor as long as it's rigged." He swings his partner across the stage, where a boy takes up the clumsy waltz with hands more suited to clinging to the fur on the backs of beasts then swings him with spitfire strength up the stairs one level nearer to the looming spire. Above them the shadows in the rafters writhe and shudder out the grind of metal on metal.

"Wait," Ardyn cries, and darts to escape down the stage's stairs to the house of safety where the crowd is being given champagne from white-linened arms of service, but the chasm is too vast to leap and and destiny is in design like they told you (they should have told you) and what with all the sprays of lace and paisleyed fabrics and curved falchions and kohlmarked eyes none of them (none!) will pass as a waiter.

He is caught by a woman divided down the middle, one side with hair the color of seafoam and the other purely molten.

"You're the darkness," she tells him in a voice that trembles in half, not unkindly. "We're the stars."

"I cannot be," he implores her. The great heavy thing is above him, and he fixes his eyes though they water. "My lines are forgotten, my voice out of place. How could I act to fool anyone?"

"As if you're never hurt," she says, and screams across the painted sky.

A knight takes his hand in a sinewed grip to lead him in a bolero, spice turned hue. Mustachioed, gouged with loss, hair in a ribbon made of leftover silkflower scrap. "As if you're never down."

Into Ardyn's hands as token he presses a silk flower bouquet made in prolonged hopes and the memory of the dead. He bows, steps back, and the crescendo begins—

Hup, ho, two, three! Wind the clock and fly towards spotlight. Around and around, pushed up the climb, a waltz in six ten fifty time. The girl smells of acetone and spins him around, a sketch so sharp it cuts to bleed, a push that catches his heel against the step's stone edge in its soft white shoe, and he is passed upwards to sway past an ancient one's liver-spotted cheek and stiff whiskers borrowed from the porcupine as his magic is borrowed, charming old uncle the channel for bubbles that fizz from a monster's gravid glands, a lightfingered watery rogue, an aqua rake. Ardyn wants to cry thief thief as another considers that an invitation and takes his hand to twirl him up each tripping stumbling step, the bandannaed boy who claims that it's all in what you call yourself, who keeps a corpse and hope preserved under lacquer though she is never more than a pain and a name darling so there you are, step by step higher toward the muscular arms that coil around the ceiling girders, and he is taken up by a ragtime beast of the alleyways with clickclacking shoes taut-string-tied to paws, routine forcing toward fates and taps that concur, until its twirl spins Ardyn to the grip of a thick-pelted beast, its hand on his waist padded on the palm like plush leather furniture, as it breathes fog to each round of the winter rondo and Ardyn's eyes swing circles from its monstermask face to the scrabbling shadows of the verminridden rafters, darling so there you are, there you are darling dandling reeling kneeling on the next step up with a broken stone sliver at the edge that rends white taffeta and rather than stand he is lifted and tossed to the broad arms and claws of the prince who lost the rigged toss, both sides a noble knowing stately serenity, he who took mountain meditation over mantle and monarchy with the help of his good brave brother who understood as only the coin's other face understood, darling so darling so darling so there, then a whirl to the layered cloth and echoing movements of the swallowed one the answerless mimic of the dead who moves in perfect counterpoint to pass Ardyn onward upward under the scathe and seethe of the lightlost scaffolding to the masked one who leaps and vanishes and will never expect to be waited for as all he does with his gifts is fling them away into the flesh of monsters with hands that grip his like hilts with scars even beneath gloves that tell firm lines and son you don't want to know what he'd do for a dime.

A flatpalmed shove heaves Ardyn up the last step where he stumbles to a stop with the bouquet clutched in his hands, casting his eyes about, but he is alone now with the precipice over the abyss of what must be. In nightmares he wades thighdeep in the waters of sacrifice and the swift fish of salvation slips through his hands. There is nowhere but forward in the strains of the music and grinding writhing clash of high above. He takes his steps along the diagram he has been left and as the spotlight follows he lifts the rustling flowers and holds them in outstretched arms over the edge and teetering leans and looks.

The weight crushes him.

The ground too can be fragrant, Ardyn finds. His face is pressed to young grass, and beams of sunlight warm his back. He lies counting his fingers and toes and appreciating the green smell. There is silence here.

"Hey." A small foot nudges him in the side. "What are you doing on my flowers?"

"Napping." Ardyn breathes deeply in through his nose and releases a stem-wavering sigh. "I believe I've earned it."

"Well, you can't do it here. Up and at 'em, buckaroo." Her pink skirts rustle as she kneels, and there is a not unwelcome sensation of fingers wrapping about his forearm. It is all very ordinary. "Heave-ho!"

The world sways as Ardyn rises, then rights itself at his good example. He is sore to his bones and wearing something tattered. The location is an old church, he sees, with shafts of sunlight falling through a not unpleasant hole in the ceiling. A breeze meanders through holes in the wall that are lined with remnants of stained glass, these casting motes of colored light on the moss-softened flagstones. The petal-colored girl clasps her hands behind her and watches him with steady eyes.

"I am sorry about your flowers," he says, suddenly terribly, terribly sorry.

"They'll grow back. They're pretty tough. Here, you can shower at my place." She gives her name as they walk between the pews, though he is sneezing at the dust and does not properly hear her. The first syllable is "air." The second ends in either a sibilant or fricative, and he is never coarse enough to ask.

They hop across rooftops, her light, him stumbling and more than once requiring her steadying stick. Ardyn feels as though he has not used his legs in this way for some time. The air smells of rust and castoffs, and as they walk across a two-by-four lain across a gap between corrugated steel shacks they put out their arms like children at play . The slumlands are evidence of people creating an essential space around themselves, pasting together the scree of refuse into a whole like leafcutter ants.

"You go first," the girl says with a gesture at a ladder. "I don't want an eyeful."

A rueful tug at his rags makes them only differently asymmetrical. "It does leave rather little to the imagination."

He climbs down the hypotenuse of a lean-to made from a fallen billboard for bouillon and keeps his eyes decorously forward. She takes the offered hand to hop down and they wend through the dense dens and denizens, greeted by a down-at-heels man in a miner's helmet, chided to take care in the bad parts of town by a dowager, and dodged by a pack of children at large.

Quietly Ardyn marvels, "A human may be trapped in a killing jar and by defiance call it home."

The girl says, "Gotta keep the rain off somehow. Watch your feet."

His feet are bare and well worth the warning. The dirt and makeshift walkways to her home are many things, but not well-swept. And there at their destination there are splinters he pays no heed to, fully occupied by the atmosphere of plants and peace, as the girl calls to her mother that they have a guest.

"We'll have dinner, then you can shower." The girl leans closer to speak then knits her brows with a backward sway. "Never mind. Shower first."

The water comes out clear and warm enough, though the shower's nozzle emits an initial worrisome squeak, and he hums as he washes with a cake of soap amalgamated from the squashed-together ends of others. The water pours down on him like rain and he raises his face to the patter. There is potpourri in a cracked dish by the sink, and he exits to a small space filled with restful lavender and steam.

A draft and a blind arm come through the cracked door. "Here, you can wear this. It's way too big for me."

Dried, Ardyn drapes the long black robe over himself and lets the hood puddle comfortably on his back. The tag describes it as (cl)one size fits all.

Dinner is meatloaf, peas, and scalloped potatoes, the dishes arranged around a tulip centerpiece and served by a mother who seems accustomed to a daughter trailed by unexpected strangers. He is moved by the rightness of her tea cozy. They speak of the neighborhood, the flowers, and the curtains she has made by hand. There is strawberry ice cream for dessert.

They show him to a room upstairs where he lies a while in the dark under the quilt, looking out at the city lights through the window. He emerges and creeps on tiptoe down stairs that threaten to creak, and walks into the night breeze in the garden, where the girl gazes up as if there are stars. He stands beside her.

"Couldn't sleep?" the girl asks, in half dark that turns her a gentle blue.

"Yes." He ventures, "I wanted to thank you for your hospitality."

"You looked like you needed it."

Silence pads between them, lies down, and rolls onto its back. His mouth tastes of the mint of donated toothpaste.

Far above them is the disc, struck by light in distant arcane flashes like the codes used by sailors, a flatness out of reach that keeps them on the one side and the others on the other. There is something about that shape and the border it marks that tugs at him like the refrain of a forgotten song, something he can nearly see without the distant planets in the way. It stirs his mind and frightens him. Out there is the darkness he saw when he gazed down, and the truth of him.

"The longer you deny it," the girl says, with the light of the disc falling around her like water, "the harder it's going to be."

His voice breaks when he says, "Shall I be the one?"

The girl's hand finds his. There are coins of callus on the palm from poles and trowels, ladders and lattices. "I'll show you something."

Out of the dark garden and into the slums, the back ways now, wending behind the laughter and quarrels of the night people. Their footsteps squelch on soggy ground and skirt the orange-pink smears of puddles lit by neon. There are no stars here; only the low ceiling of the world. They come through narrow alleyways between corrugated shacks, his tread behind her patter, until there is supine tube his height with an open end which faint turquoise glows. She leans in and gestures him after.

He steps onto firm, gently sloped ground. In the small abode, the black hem of his robe brushes a coverlet the color of squash. A man sits there on the bedding, nodding to a curved screen's flicker.

"Ah," the man says, rocking forward, eyes reaching with all the strength inside him to something on the other side of the screen. His arms embrace his knees. "Oh."

The man's shirt slips to one side to show the cavern of clavicle, and in his face is a hopeless and hungry fixation that the flicker of the screen at brief and striking moments paints into a fleeting richness of expression. His head lolls restlessly, its contents too heavy for the muscles of his neck to hold. The sketches in Ardyn's memory of humans with their hands curled in claws of suffering are but tendrils growing backwards from this.

"He is sick," Ardyn says softly, as though a shout could reach him.

The girl says, "Are."

And there are so many, aren't there, shut inside the hollow aorta of themselves, ringed by concentric metal ribs, alone as though in the cell of a plant, and he knows that this around him is the shell of a great blind oyster under the dark weight of the sea, and that he is one layer of nacre in the pearl forming about the grain of loneliness. They are so many, the ones to whom his pain is not meaningless.

The sobs begin at the bottom of his stomach and wrack him from the inside like the clapper of a bell. The pour of tears is hot, sudden, and ceaseless. He clutches his hands to his face, doubles over, and weeps.

How long he cannot say. What has time ever meant to him? Count it in steps instead. He dries his face on the robe's black sleeve, where the tears lie invisible but to touch and weight.

Ardyn places his hand on shoulder of the afflicted and says, "For you."

The man says, "Ah. Oh."

"You'll hurt them back, if that's any consolation," the girl says. "Then again, that's what they want."

Ardyn turns away, his face floor-parallel. His shoulders hitch and jerk with his bites at breath. "Must it happen now?"

"Nah." There is wry sympathy in her look. "You can get the tour first."

They leave and get on a train. The clatter and sway soothes him as they travel along the track in the silent camaraderie of dozing vagrants and weary office workers. Ardyn likes the roll it gives his stride. The air conditioning cools his raw throat.

"Does this go to the other side?" he asks, watching the lights scroll by behind his reflection in the window, and brushes dust from his hair.

"Just the other side of the city. Check out the map."

It is a fully three-dimensional display that Ardyn toggles on and off in fascination until he becomes the subject of too many withering stares. He leaves it on then, a wireframe threaded with railroad tracks, on one of which their moving light shines.

"There's no getting off," grunts a large man, asymmetrically armed, his jaw rough with stubble.

"Until your stop," says the girl.

"Where is the exit?" Ardyn inquires now that she mentions it.

She tilts her head, hair insecurely bound in a twist sliding over her shoulder. "Where that red triangle is."

He swats at the great gloved finger that points at his head in accusation, and his hand thuds against it as though on a concrete block. When the train rattles to a stop he ducks to allow it to pass beneath the doorframe. From steel and aquatic glow they step into ringing, laughing gold.

"The Saucer!" the girl exclaims. In the vestibule there are broad rectangular windows that show a horizon between sand and sky, far away and far below. "I haven't been here for years."

She shoves him down a wooshing chute and drags him wristwise through a blue-tinted hall that clangs with exulting machines. Children and tall women and men in business suits feed them with coins. A basketball game spits a tongue of tickets as they pass by.

"I am excellent at games," Ardyn claims, and exuberantly isn't. He scrubs away the salt tracks of his tears with the sleeve of his robe, and for one fleeting moment his death is drowned in the way the ski-ball machine goes clunk.

The girl tells him what a roller coaster is just late enough to make it interesting. Afterwards, still reeling, there is a show.

"Here!" the girl cries, holding Ardyn's arm aloft. "Volunteer!"

"I didn't-" says Ardyn, but he already is.

Hesitations vanish when he is given his rightful role. On the stage, unpainted, he is at his full height as he breathes in the scent of plywood and stands where he alone can see, in the wings, the raw edge that borders the tarpaulin sky. The spotlights sting eyes that widen to ingenue standard.

"Behold your savior," opens the monologue, sweeping gestures unchoreographed but implied. "Cast away the fears that haunt shut you in your mildewed huts, for I am the light at morning that dispels the dark. Let me stand steadfast and batter back the demons that assail you, I the savior, they the beasts created so that I may slay a swathe and remain guiltless. Behold my splendor and marvel at my munificence! I've a bat with nails in it."

With each word a joy fills him like like breath after drowning. How ridiculous it all is.

He joins hands with the cardboard knight and the dragon with the seams showing to dance in a circle and sing,

He takes a bow, and the girl claps louder than anyone.

From there they journey. There is a place with creatures kept in egg-shaped vessels and showered in attention until they are monstrous. Ardyn touches the porthole and says, "Poor thing." When he inquires about the inscription on another, the girl says, "It must be a Squer. This company makes them."

There is a library, but someone is reading out dry texts about an organism that was apparently dead, was found in a 2000 year old geological stratum and is heedless of shushing, so they quickly depart.

They go to a farm and feed the birds.

"What are they doing?" Ardyn says with a tilt of his head toward those at the barn who coax at a penned pair of fowl with gestures whose obscenity are no doubt lost on avian intelligence.

The girl has a stem of hay between her lips. "Wow, at your age I sure hope I don't have to tell you."

"I mean the strategy behind it. There appears to be a goal in mind."

"They're recombining them, trying to keep the old stuff that works and get rid of what doesn't to make a new one that's exactly what they want. It's not a perfect thing. Sometimes you end up with something out of nowhere, or something you haven't thought about in generations."

"Like featherlessness?" says Ardyn, thinking of the naked pink creature that had squawked across the yard.

"Don't remind me."

They meet a ninja in the woods, yet she vanishes when his back is turned.

"The world is full of meetings and partings," the girl says. "We can't control them. Only treasure them."

Ardyn pats his robes at the hip. "Have you seen my wallet?"

Next, then, is a journey that requires no ticket price. They return to the city to tour an office building, as Ardyn has never seen one and wants to. He admires the opulence of glass and the mahogany desk as he catches his breath from the far too many stairs (one must provide conveniences for visitors, even the adversarial, as the laws of guestright demand) and the girl makes invoices into cranes and daffodils. The unsightly red stains on the carpets Ardyn scrubs with a handkerchief he has delicately licked, and finds after a deal of vigorous work the dismaying result that the scarlet has been blotted out with bubbling pools of purple-black. Oh well. No one's coming back this way anyway.

They revisit the library, now with the fervent mutterer cleared out. In the smell of damp and sharp disinfectants Ardyn takes some time to read. As the light is poor he holds a tome up to one of the cylinders and puzzles out poetry by the pale green glow. Inside and insensible drifts a young man, blond, unnatural, science-scented, and the placid stasis of his light lashes and upright slumber are what Ardyn [learn]s more indelibly than the crumbling texts, which are less than revelatory, really.

"Sure, you're not there the whole time," the girl says. "Less is more, y'know?"

Tired of stuffy indoor air they take in a parade at the seaside, and Ardyn catches a commemorative grenade thrown by a soldier out of step. He offers it to the lady, of course. He is a man of manners.

She slips it into an embroidered pouch. "What you are is a gold wire going up, like hope."

He gazes at the clouds above the clash of brass band oompah. "To where?"

"Where everybody needs to go sometimes." She waves to a soldier in the crowd. "Somewhere else."

There are moonlights and campfires, long evenings. The blaze that threatens in the sky becomes comforting in its motionless ever-immanence. In the ebb and roll of heart-to-heart as others doze in lumpen bedrolls, he tells her,

"The scholars had so many tales of people being punished for what they were fated to do, all of which struck me as terribly stupid. How can someone be responsible for sins committed under another's control?"

She grabs his hand and says, "Stop hitting yourself."

One afternoon they board a device like a sloop with a great gaseous bladder above. When he plants his feet for a stately train-like experience, rather the ground falls away and they are soaring, a spindly speck at the wind's mercy. He is tossed like a blown-upon pinwheel until the obliging railing checks him in the solar plexus.

"This cannot be." The land is already a map like spread parchment, at every moment shrinking in detail and expanding in scope. "Pinch me to wake me, ever so softly."

"Who pinches you softly? But sure." The laughing girl complies. His yelp leaps into the void and the scene remains.

Up they travel through clouds that wisp his face with cool vapor and linger in drops in the valleys of his hair, until they surpass that ceiling of the sky and are out into the thin, cold air. The clouds lay below them and flow in the wind's direction, and there is nothing between the small things they are and the sun.

The girl unfurls a rope ladder over the side and says, "Watch your step."

Ardyn climbs down the behind her and disembarks with a short hop onto a carpet of cloud that is springy as fresh turf. Their steps stir up white wisps, and the snapping out of a picnic blanket sends streamers into the air to dissipate as Ardyn sets out hors d'oeuvres (they had dropped in on the reunion, as he was dressed for the occasion, but when the conversation left something to be desired they had purloined the canapes and moseyed). The girl secures a parasol in the firmament for shade and they, in crunches of cucumber, people-watch.

"Say you have two cards," the girl says.

"A poor hand to be dealt."

"Don't look at me. Which you turn face-up changes everything about the game except the outcome. What you can do is, you can put down the one that says 'smile.'"

Ardyn steadies the parasol against the wind of the angel swooshing by. "If 'frown' is shown, then?"

She lifts her arms in a symmetrical shrug.

He tilts his face to the sun and thinks on it. "You do have a point worth exploring. As forced as an action may be, one's feelings on it are not compulsory. What do I have to be sad about?"

They watch the combatants for a while. It is rather involving, composed of elaborate sequences of destruction and clashes of instruments in unusual chords.

Ardyn says, "It all seems so nonsensical. Look, 'one' they say, when he's clearly got seven."

The girl picks up a bit of smoked salmon that has fallen, blows the condensation of cloud off it, and gives it dainty rearrangement on its foundational cracker. "They must only count the ones on top. Maybe the rest of them just keep him upright."

"In that case, just having the one is going to have him constantly going in circles. And what in the world are they singing?" He strains his ears. "'How to bounce a leaf dragon?'"

The girl's insecurable twist of hair hangs like a compass needle as she tilts her head. "Nah, it's 'The way tooth-reason sleeps.'"

"'Faction-flow's repellent shape.'"

"'Needle evening's half picture excess.'"

They crunch, flick crumbs, and think on this.

Their cloud drifts on the wind and fetches up against a stone structure, and they fold up their things to glimpse inside. The girl makes a limber step across the lintel - it seems she knows the way. Down the folding and spiral paths, into the scent of water and coolness that soothes the eye after the pang of the unsoftened sun.

"This was made for the people who came before me," says the girl. "There'll be some more after. It's a thing."

The space is domed, cavernous. She settles down, tucking her legs demurely beneath her on the central stone, bluegreen and leopard-spotted with lightness in the reflections of the water.

"Think a little," she says, "about what happens on the inside. It's an old riddle my kind of people used to have. The guy who's coming down now is a different branch of the family, but we're more closely related than the hair color would make you think."

"Let us away from here." Ardyn is discomfited. A good pagan boy knows an altar when he sees one.

Where they stand is an island in a vastness connected to the distance only by a straight and spindly pale-stone path. Far off, yet reaching them, is the indistinguishable words of the song of the angel who flies in circles.

The girl smiles at the center, kneeling with folded hands. "It goes like this: if you're doing what you have to because you want to, who'll know?"

"I will know that," Ardyn says. Here exposed, coverless, he throws his glances across the distant walls. Crumbs lie dry in his throat. His limbs are not moving exactly as he wants. "You are..." His calves clench and will not let him stagger back.

The problem is the cords in him. They have punctured the robe and burrowed under his skin, pinning in the process the soft black fabric into his flesh. Calves, thighs, bicep, back of wrist, the most important back of neck to keep him upright and make him nod on cue, one end knit into his muscle fibers and the other extending up and up into the dark. The pull jerks him offbalance to the left, to the right, then forward to catch himself in a heavy step. Electric signals from outward rather than the inner encased brain, wires for neurons, lightning for lymph, a blocky dance that approximates the correct motion and leaves the rest to imagination. He fights his limbs downwards but the cords pull taut. Thumbthick and covered in matte black they tug his arms up together in salute that locks his fingers around a sword's grip, leather-covered metal moved by rubber-covered metal, the cutting edge hanging high aloft to cast a shadow between the girl's attendant eyes.

"No," Ardyn says, with the only part that is wholly his.

Her posture is playful and serene. "Dreamer."

Nerveless, pulseless, his hands fall open as he is pierced. His weapon vanishes and is forgotten.

From where his ribs meet extends a narrow length of steel that goes on until it meets its rest in the midriff of another, a pained and green-eyed young another. The plain bleak fabric needs the ornament. A wrench of Ardyn's head to the rear finds the wielder, a long location of black and white. Physics unites on a string the motion of the three of them, twangs and twinges in them as well as Ardyn when he wraps his hand around the blade and his blood-slicked palm can neither push nor pull. Why is he here? What is this place to him, where he was made and brought?

Says the one end, "Be a cause."

Says the other, "You are a puppet."

There for the first time he hears the music clearly.

"Glorious," he whispers in blood that wends down from his lips. "Generous."