Chapter Text
He lives inside of an Angel’s mind at the edge of a green glass Sea. From the Tower’s heights, he can hear the distant rumbling of the waves against the breakers, a thousand howling voices of the souls in eternal Torment, unsaved and unascended. The cacophony of a cold, watery hell.
Clancy crouches catlike in the niche of smooth gray stone and listens to the distant birds cry and the halls breathe their silken sighs. Content among the hollows of his Home.
When high tide finally ebbs in its advancement, Clancy crawls from his niche among the statues - a hand of marble extended here, a foothold on a bended knee there - down to the floor far below him where the dust gathers in the recesses, pale ashes of the glorious ones that come to him on the breeze. He gathers handfuls into a makeshift pouch at his side, formed from a shirt tattered beyond use except as a receptacle for his prizes.
Clancy cinches the little pouch tight on the belt at his waist and climbs the spiral stairs at the end of the hall. They protrude like a piano’s teeth from a central point and extend into the open air, so that as Clancy steps on each one, he almost expects it to sink down and release a beautiful note into the bones of the building. But of course, there is no music here.
This is the World, and he is its faithful Citizen. He knows the Layout as it unwinds in his mind, an endless procession of hallways and loosely fitted-together rooms, the many statues and niches, the courtyards open to the gray sky, and the grim dark depths that plunge like a dagger into the heart of the earth below. And this Knowledge transforms him.
Structure is beauty. Structure is perfection. Structure is salvation. And the Structure of this place is Clancy’s guiding purpose. Because many have tried before, to know the Tower in its entirety, and now Clancy alone counts their bones. In all the World, there have been twenty-five before him. But none of them were able to complete the task given to them before they perished.
Clancy is exceptional.
He hurries up the stairs to the chosen vestibule where the tallest of the statues stand with legs like trunks, their hands curved toward the ceiling in an arch of rendered human flesh. They are largely featureless. Smooth and perfect beings, like angels. That is why he calls this place an Angel.
It calls to him and teaches him. It says to him, Be ye not afraid, and it shelters him within its wings and grants him Knowledge most profound.
But here in this vestibule, only a few spans past the passing of high tide, he will meet his dearest friend and confidant. His most beloved companion. While he is not a permanent resident of the Tower, he visits Clancy here at least three times each moon. Sometimes four.
He steals in by an entrance that Clancy has not been able to locate despite his searchings, but this, Clancy must admit, is because he fears such a passage. Because whatever entrance or Exit it must entail would lead beyond the World, into the great unknown outside of his reality, the City, and Clancy would rather throw himself from the tallest heights of the Tower and join the many bones of those who came before him, than be ripped from his precious Home.
Clancy counts the spans once he reaches the vestibule, where all around him giants stand in postures of silent worship. How he hopes that today his friend will arrive. It is three hundred and seventy-two spans before he finally hears the quiet brush of fabric and the gentle breathing of his companion as he emerges from between the cut-stone bases of two statues.
He is tall and regal in his movements, with hands like living stones and a mouth like flashes of lightning over the icy waters. His eyes are sharp as flints and clear as glass. They drift over the grand vestibule with the precise cut of a scalpel, and when they light on Clancy, they smile.
His Bishop pushes the scarlet cowl back from his head and opens his arms. Clancy folds himself into Nico’s embrace. His robes smell of incense and the open air. The smog of the City clinging to the heavy fabric in a tang of chemical residue, something akin to amber-dark formaldehyde.
“My boy,” he says, his voice deep and rich as the lower reaches of the Tower, where moss and lichen grow on the walls and the damp of the guttering tides climbs the staircases. “Let me look at you.”
So Clancy steps back, somewhat begrudgingly from the embrace and presents himself to his Bishop more formally. His hands outstretched, palms up, in entreaty of Instruction and Correction. His posture is perfect, if his general appearance is somewhat less so.
In the many moons that he has resided within the World, Clancy has owned only three different sets of clothing. The first he awoke in when he was first born here. A strange, foreign shade of green with bands of yellow affixed to his shoulders. He removed the bands quickly, fearing the vibrant shade would burn his fingertips, and hid the color away in one of the lower floors where the neon sconces are few and far between and the hallways echo with moans. A place he does not often like to venture and avoids if possible. There, the color cannot harm him.
But eventually, those clothes wore away. The tatters now form the rope he uses for climbing certain statues or between lofty cracks and holes in the Tower’s construction where the elements have begun to wear through and reshape the Structure. Since that time, Nico has brought him a more comforting gray jumpsuit, which he modifies to more accurately suit his needs.
The jumpsuit he wears now has been cut into a separate shirt and pants which makes it easier to dress and undress when making himself ready for sleep or a wash or other, less savory bodily activities. He has removed the sleeves for added freedom of movement, slits partially cut down the side of his torso to make climbing easier, and what fabric he took from the sleeves, he has fashioned into fingerless gloves that protect his palms.
The pants he has left mostly the same. Though he has cleverly added extra pockets, since he is most often mobile in his Home and needs to carry much with him as he explores the halls and memorizes the sacred Layout. And he has made himself a belt from previous clothing, on which he keeps his pouches.
His shoes, unfortunately, are in the worst state of repair. It has been many moons since Nico brought him a new pair, and the ones he owns now are tied together with rope to keep the soles in place. He has hoped that Nico will notice their poor state and bring him new ones, but when he observes his Bishop now, he finds his hands are empty.
Fingers probe his jaw and tilt his face this way and that.
“You are looking thin, my son,” Nico comments in his cheery manner of speaking. He does not crease his face with worry or seem concerned by the lack of weight upon his acolyte. He is the picture of perfect serenity. “Does the Tower not provide adequately for you?”
“No, no, I am well-provided for,” Clancy rushes to say. He does not like to disagree with his friend, but he would hate to speak ill of the Tower and its gifts, of which he is a most grateful recipient. “But as the winter moons are approaching, I take care to be a good steward of what I am given. I take the salts from the lower floors where the tides reach, and I cure the meat which the Tower gives in order that I will have enough to subsist in lean times.”
Clancy is proud of himself for this. In his first winter in the Tower, poverty came upon him like a thief and nearly stole his life. And while Nico would caution him not to fear his own death, Clancy knows that the work he is doing here is important, and if he fails - if he perishes here within the Structure - Nico will have to find another to fill his role.
Someone else will become the Citizen of the World and will file his bones away with the twenty-five others who have come before, and Clancy will fall nameless into the void of memory between rooms.
He wants to complete his work.
“Tell me about your progress,” Nico says and settles a hand onto the back of Clancy’s neck as they walk together. He is calculating with his affection, granting what he knows Clancy desires so long as his acolyte gives him what he wants in return.
Information. The Knowledge of this vast and awe-full place.
“I have walked the Layout of the central floors and memorized their halls and rooms,” he rehearses. This information he has had since his first year in the Tower, after the Moons of Tears and Wailing but before the Winter of Hunger. The central floors, thirty-three in all, radiate out from a central point where the grand spiral stairs of piano keys lead to the various landings.
“From there, I have ventured into the First Heaven, which I estimate to be forty floors in total, thirteen of which are damaged by the Elements and are hazardous to study. So, I must take care to chart these on days of fair weather when the sky is clear and the winds are from the East.”
Nico’s hand tenses on Clancy’s neck, and he wonders if he has said something wrong. He looks up into his friend’s eyes and sees that they are distant with thought. They are deep wells, those eyes, framed in short, blunt lashes that flutter with each ticking of the mechanism of his mind. Threaded on either side with soft wrinkles, Clancy has often wanted to touch the delicate skin there to see if it is as feathery as the velvet lining of his robes or if the white paint makes it stiff and strange.
When Nico looks at him, Clancy’s skin jolts, as though he has been caught in his thoughts, a lizard pinned within the sun’s spotlight. He ducks his head again and leads Nico into one of the finer courtyards of the central floors.
“I expect,” he continues at last, once they seat themselves on a marble bench beneath the draped arms of two more statues, reaching for one another where the shape of a neon gravestone blooms and glows between their outstretched fingers, “that I will soon expand my search beyond the Firmament to the Second Heaven.”
Clancy is careful never to take Nico beyond the central floors, which are the safest to traverse. Nico is not as knowledgeable of the Tower’s many idiosyncrasies, and more than once, when Clancy has taken him on a brief tour, the Bishop has nearly slipped on a damp bit of stone or has not had the fortitude to climb the many stairs or the hanging knotted ropes which Clancy uses to scale the marble slabs that bisect certain rooms and halls like the blade of a planing tool. Clancy must take care with his friend, not to put him in danger. For he is a very important man in the City beyond the Tower.
Nico sighs contentedly when he leans back upon the bench to rest his bones. He stretches out his legs before him, and his shoes are white as the paint on his face, cushioned beneath and spotless. “And what of the lower reaches? Of Sheol and the Abyss?”
Clancy blinks his gaze away from the shoes and back to Nico placid face. “I- I take care not to disturb the lower reaches. They still frighten me.”
In the Moons of Tears and Wailing, Clancy never moved beyond the first floor at the heart of the Tower. He feared the other floors with holy terror and would not allow the rooms and halls to reveal themselves to him. He remembers that period now with much shame and laments the time that was wasted on his emotional response to the beauty and finery of the Structure.
Nico says it is often too much for the human mind to bear.
“There is always,” he had said in his kindest tones as they sat together in the First vestibule, “a period of adjustment.”
Clancy remembers it in vague, blurry flashes. Tearing his fingernails on the walls, scratching like a wild animal in search of a way out. But one memory is clear and perfect as an obsidian dagger piercing the gray matter of his mind.
In his woe and desolation, Clancy plunged deep into the lower reaches intent to find something with which he could end his existence. He did not, at that time, know of the heights from which one could fall, where one of the twenty-five previously met their end.
The halls provided him no weaponry, but as he descended, it Revealed itself to him. Drawing back the curtains of Clancy’s mind to display the many rooms of endless walls, a puzzle map of mazes all folding in on one another in fractal patterns of mirror glass and black stone. His own face reflected back at him, distorted, shattered, screaming, laughing, singing, dead.
He recalls those spans of time that seemed to stretch on forever. Where each beat of his heart could be measured out in hours, if not days, but the lower reaches have no windows through which to see and observe the movement of celestial bodies. They are too deep beneath the earth to hear the bells that sound the hours. And so, Clancy has no recollection of how long he was truly there within their grasp, tearing hair from his scalp, clawing his skin with broken fingernails, and gnashing his teeth.
It might have been moons. It might have been only an hour. But when he crawled out again, broken and exhausted, he slept. And in waking, found clarity.
Nico, sensing Clancy’s present fear, reaches out a firm hand to stroke his fingers through the younger man’s hair. Clancy tries to keep it cut short with the knife of flint that he has fashioned for himself. But it mostly results in a series of pathetic clumps that hang haphazardly from his head. He recalls that personal hygiene was among the customary habits in the City, dictating that men’s hair should be kept short, and he tries his best to keep to those old standards. Though his memories of the outside are few and often unremarkable.
“My boy, you know the structure must be understood in its entirety for the sake of our research. It is very important that you commit it to memory. For how else will we understand the shape of all creation? How else will we harness the secrets of this world?”
Clancy hums softly in agreement. He knows the mysterious work is important to Nico, and to the City beyond the Tower. Though Clancy is a Citizen of this World and not the other. He is cloistered here, hidden away from the distractions beyond this reality in which he resides, a blessed student of the architecture.
Nico believes that the Knowledge learned here could translate into some vast and sacred power in the outside world. But he has never satisfactorily explained the relation of the two concepts to Clancy. Yet, it is a Bishop’s place to wield the power, and it is the Citizen’s place to accumulate the Knowledge. And Clancy will do his best.
In all its beauty and all its terror, he cannot turn his eyes away from the wisdom and divine intelligence of the Structure.
“I will descend,” Clancy whispers as a sparrow flies in from one of the open sections of the wall where the courtyard overlooks the City. It is a small, brown bird with a little black mask over its eyes. It pecks along the floor, searching for crumbs, and regards Clancy with little concern.
Clancy loves the birds that come to visit him. Their feathers decorate his sleeping niche and soften his pillow. He whistles to the creature and sees it turn its little head to study the strange, ugly bird on the bench, featherless and misshapen. It does not find him worth its while.
“I will descend, and I will tell you of Sheol when you come again,” Clancy says when Nico plucks a bit of cobweb from his hair and spins the gossamer thread between his painted fingers.
Clancy smiles at him. “Though I wish I could show you the beauty of the First Heaven. I have found there a map of the stars cut into the domed ceiling of the room I call the Blue Observatory. Have I told you of it before?”
Nico hums deep in his throat and tips his head back to listen. One arm splayed across the back of the bench, he draws Clancy into his side and continues to stroke his hair. “Tell me of your Blue Observatory.”
Clancy describes it for him. The row of eyeless faces that stand along the western wall, painted in fresco in shades of gray and blue. They are weeping, despite having no eyes. Tears pool in the hollows where their eyes should be and pour down their blank faces, and Clancy pretends they are old saints who have gone on before him.
Above the heads of the saints, the domed ceiling is inlaid with flecks of gold to accentuate the stars in their constellations: the Dragon’s Breath, the First Vulture, the Old Bishop with his flail, and the Torchbearer.
Nico’s hand pauses in Clancy’s hair again.
“Have you named these constellations yourself, my child?”
Clancy blinks, as if waking from a blissful nap in a sunbeam-filled niche. He rehearses the words he just spoke, trying to understand what he said that was incorrect.
“No, Father, the constellations are labeled. Painted by an expert hand. I have had to scale the statues in the Observatory to read the names written there. Perhaps you would like to see? The climb is not so very bad.”
But Nico shakes his head. His face has changed. Become grave with some kind of misgiving that Clancy does not understand. He withdraws from the bench and steps across the stone floor of the courtyard to where a marble fountain burbles with clear water. But Clancy knows the water that flows from the spout at the top, trickling down like crystalline tears, is fouled by some kind of poison from deep beneath the Tower.
He drank from it in the early days, during those first desolate moons, and remembers the pains it caused him. How he nearly perished, lips blue and fingers curled tight into a grip he could not release. When Nico found him and stayed many days with him and nursed him back to health. What a time that was. How close they could be.
“The stars are none of your concern,” Nico tells him, watching one of the sparrows flit from the open window to the top of one of the statues. It depicts a woman with a fine, round face, her hands outstretched in the stance of Entreaty, and a sword extending from her mouth. “You are only here to memorize the divine shape of things.”
Clancy bows his head, shame burning in his cheeks. He thought he would impress Nico with his Knowledge, make him see the beauty of the Tower and perhaps entreat him to stay a little longer with him. He always looks so tired when he comes from the City, where life is filthy and difficult. Where there are too many people with their rotting flesh and their unholy ways that the City must mend.
Here in the Tower, everything is clean and Ordered. Everything is just as the World intended. Here, they could be content together. Clancy could show him.
“When I return, I want to hear of the lower reaches.” Nico goes to stand at the entrance to the courtyard where two stone vultures crouch with their wings spread to either side, sunning themselves with their gray heads tipped back.
“Come, lead me back to the entrance.”
Nico extends his arm, and Clancy rises from the bench to take it. Sometimes he worries for the Bishop, when he sees how delicately he must be treated. How heavy the years hang upon him, but still, how he holds himself so well. With such dignity and grace. He must be truly Great to subsist for so long in the imperfect human form which Nature has bestowed on him. Never to deviate from the teachings of Vialism, and yet to remain in this state to teach others.
Clancy dips his head to him as they reach the beautiful vestibule, and he presses his lips to back of Nico’s hand.
“I may be delayed in my next coming,” Nico warns him at last, and Clancy feels his heart flutter with worry. With disappointment. “There is much to be done on the outside. You understand.”
Clancy bows himself over in shame. If he stares at the sorry state of his shoes, he will not raise his face and disgrace his Bishop with tears. “Yes, Father, of course. I will look forward to our next meeting with renewed excitement.”
Then he watches the length of scarlet robes recede across the stone floor. The soft padded shoes the Bishop wears hardly make a sound as they go. One moment, he is there, and the next, he is imperceptible. Clancy is alone. The only Citizen of this World once again.
He leaves the beautiful vestibule to tend to the Bones of those who have Come Before, his twenty-five brethren, who wait for him in the Innermost Chamber. At the base of the great spiral stairs, there is a small doorway, just large enough for Clancy to fit through if he slides in sideways and stoops his head. Within this Innermost Chamber, there are a number of small niches cut into the stone wall where neon glows and the birds do not enter.
Clancy visits each of his charges, the woman with the silver-capped tooth, the young child who Clancy found with a black toy car, the man close to his own age who kept a scrap of green fabric just like Clancy’s strange green clothes. They are all partially identifiable by the shapes of their bones. But Clancy can tell little more than their age and possible biological gender, and others, of which he has only found partial remains, there is even less to intuit. Yet, he likes to speak to them from time to time, basing their personalities off the little objects he has found with their remains.
The woman with the silver-capped tooth likes to talk about the weather, so Clancy tells her that the day is clear and the winds come from the North with ice in their teeth. The child with the little car likes to hear about the birds that Clancy has seen, so he tells of the sparrows that haunt the courtyards like will-o-the-wisps and the gulls that sing to him from the First Heaven or the vulture he found, perished from a broken neck in the Fourteenth Room of the Seventh Floor.
“It’s a sad sight, to see such a magnificent creature brought low. But it is a gift of the Tower, you see, so that I will have food to eat and bones to use for my collection.”
Clancy reaches into one of the pouches he wears from his belt and undoes it with care to reveal the small collection of fragile bird bones he keeps there. They rattle nicely when he moves them, and he thinks to string them into a necklace, if he thinks he can spare the thread or perhaps has time to dredge seaweed from the lower reaches, so that he can dry it out and use that instead.
“A present for my Bishop,” Clancy explains to the man with the green scrap. He is the friendliest and likes to hear all of Clancy’s dreams and wishes. “You see, if I give this present to him, he may find himself wanting to reciprocate my gift, and I hope he will bring me the shoes I need to travel to the more dangerous reaches.”
He leans into the curve of the niche to rest his own bones a while and reaches out to brush his fingertips over the scrap of green. Like moss. Like a faded memory of someplace far away, but he knows that nothing beyond the City is real. It is all a frightful figment of his own demented mind. He is a fragile thing, and he must be careful to fill his mind only with the divine Knowledge presented to him by the Tower. For Nico.
“You will see, my friends. Really, he is very kind. Only he forgets because he is so very busy and important. His work takes much from him, but you will see.” Clancy shuts his eyes, hoping deep within himself that it will be so. “He is the kindest person in all the World.”