Archive of Our Own ^beta

Her kingdom comes on the backs of the ones she once loved,
So why, oh, why don’t you run?

- ‘She was the Gateway to the Empire / Fallen’, Dirt Poor Robins

Deep beneath the earth, within the Earth, they bound their broken soul back together at last. Fingers flashing together in an ever-faster cat’s cradle of memories and hopes, sorrows and joys, every frayed and bleeding thread of the years they’d spent apart, now flowing whole once more.

His tears fell hot on her hands, her laughter on his lips. He knew how she had shunned the town, and how, even if she wouldn’t say so, it was at least in part, in heart, because she couldn’t bear to be seen by friends who wouldn’t recognize her. She knew how he had flinched inside every time someone called him, as a student or soldier, by his last name.

A name like the knot of scar left in place of an amputated limb. They had both been cut off, cut apart, severed and left to live as best they could as halves. Of course Simon, seeing the body as a machine and the soul as a spring, couldn’t have seen what they needed so mortally in one another. More than their own separate lives – to at last feel their blood and memories flowing through a whole heart. To bind themselves into a greater whole still, and to see the sense their lives made within it, the intertwined lines in a story as old as land.

All of their pain had a place. All of their lonely wanderings, a destination. At their most lost, they had always been walking towards this. There would be no step now that they could take outside of love – nowhere they could be that wasn’t home.

Now you’ve seen it, she didn’t have to whisper against his ear as the threads drew them together. Every word was shared between them now, every drop of blood and joy. Whatever body they walked in when they left that place, they would do so as one.

Yes, he didn’t have to whisper in return, as their heart beat at last in perfect time with the one towering over them. Yes.

#

Even those most oblivious to the life beneath their feet, most certain they could outlive it, must have felt the change. A shift in the earth, in the air – even those who waited out storms safe under solid roofs cowered and fled from their sudden coming, after all.

Even those who believed themselves masters of the earth must have sensed that the halter was thin, held in place only by the fraying patience of the beast that wore it. They had lived on borrowed time, borrowed land, and now, the land was rising to take itself back.

A weight and a power. A waking and rising. A singing in the streets, of the streets, echoing to the end of the thinnest backyard capillaries, but it began in the Crude Sprawl.

A blessing for that place once so cursed. A balm for the streets once purged in fire. The bare feet of the herald fell there first, and those who had hoped so long for his coming fell in behind.

Parents who had told tales of that day, holding tight to the hands of children who hadn’t yet been born when the herald had been sundered and half-sent away. Steadfast elders who had been waiting for that day since long before the herald had been born, leaning on their sticks or each other for balance as they walked in hope’s wake at last. The sick and forsaken, scabbed in bloody rags in place of skin, who had thought themselves stumbling only towards death. Who saw the herald through their wrappings and agony as a beacon brighter than the bonfires that marked their district as doomed.

Creatures not welcome in that town for years or seen for centuries emerged from the shadows and stories where they had hidden, to walk the streets with hooves or spurs of bone. Winding between them in ragged, stately grace, with eyes flashing like twyrine-drunk moons, a great grey cat trotted its way up close to the herald’s heels.

The herald didn’t slow for any of them. He strode on with purpose, a man clothed only in the black, sifting clouds that accompanied him, cavorting sinuously around his naked body. Sweeping ahead or swirling behind, or swarming where a crown could have sat on his brow and his eyes should have stared out at the world. Obscuring everything above the resolved angles of his jaw, his mouth firm with determination, streaming out behind him like a hiss of long black hair.

Yet it was hard to look at him and see only that man. From other side-street angles, he seemed almost too small or slight, almost clothed in a bride’s rags, almost dancing instead of walking up the withered stone muscle of the Hindquarters. Those who had been too broken by the Termitary to leave it before stumbled out now, answering a silent call louder than the screams that had deafened their minds. Wearing looks like waking from a long nightmare, they, too, fell in behind.

Four days before, a bull had walked those streets. Letting the town grow into it, loving the town, filling itself with that love to carry to a worthy destination. So the herald walked now, west across the body of the town, and where the high fever they called the Sand Pest had not walked before, it walked with him.

Up the cramping Gut of the town, where the clot that had once troubled it stood hollow and harmless. Across its Backbone, which the soldiers had braced not to be broken, with sandbags and guard posts, but they couldn’t have brought any fit weapon or bravery from the front to defend against this. The clouds swept in on them like living, stinging swarms, grains of jagged, cutting laughter, and they dropped their rifles to cover their masks, to claw at their eyes, deaf and blind to the screams of their comrades who were caught, in the shadows, by older, stranger things. Hungry myths long starved of the blood that had once been their due.

The bell before the town hall trembled as the herald swept past, choking a note of late warning deep in its iron throat. He didn’t turn to any of the screams or wails, didn’t slow, walking the long way to his destination so that all could look on him and know. Hear and follow after, if they understood his call – come and see.

Outside the town’s theatre, the curtains drawn on its last staged fight between logic and life, two men stood watching the procession pass by. If the herald had turned his head to see them, he might still have known their names.

He might even have felt some faraway love for them. Stakh Rubin took two steps towards the gate, towards that grand, triumphant parade, but felt its will like a bonfire he couldn’t approach. A radiance that might comfort and nourish others, but rationality, baying in his nerves and arresting his steps, couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t destroy him.

Would it be worth burning if he could reach the herald? Catch hold of his hand and say his name? Could that still bring him back? He braced himself for the pain, for finding out, and a hand around his wrist caught him back before he could.

Daniil Dankovsky’s hand, holding him back from flinging himself into what might have been worthwhile death. Stakh wrenched against it, but not quite with the strength to throw Daniil to the ground, which was what it would have taken to free himself.

“We have to do something,” he insisted instead. Choking on the words, on the plum-dark haze storming and dancing through the square. His mask was no more protection against it than cowering would have been against a storm. “We have to help him, snap him out of it. If we can just-”

The man holding him back believed in no protection now. He pulled his mask down to his throat, watching with forsaken wonder, forsaken by wonder, as the herald passed them by.

“We don’t have to do anything now,” he said. “I was wrong...I thought the end would have a truly alien face, or none at all, but I was wrong. This – this must be what an angel truly looks like.”

A power that scorned all of mankind’s achievements with its very existence. A living denial of all their efforts to be more than animals crawling in the muck at its feet. The apotheosis he had watched tear free, day by day, from the chrysalis of a man he couldn’t save walked on its terrible way, leaving both of them behind without a glance of recognition or farewell.

The Gullet hummed like a black and open throat as the herald crossed its northern bridge. The statues that graced the Cape could only drown as frozen, helpless effigies, as the flood of feverish change swept and rose around their stone skirts.

But it wasn’t towards them that the herald turned. His destination was down the slender throat of the Atrium, towards the great glass horn thrust into the town’s head. Those he led filled the length of that street and spilled out into the square, massing between the silenced cathedral and extinguished Crucible in their own flood of hopeful murmurs and shining eyes.

None of them followed the herald as far as the bridge that led to the fearsome tower. There, small as a whisper before the procession’s roar, slender as a stalk of white whip against the coursing river of the inevitable, a girl with rust-red hair and her own slender thread of power to cling to stood resolutely in the herald’s way.

“If Artemy Burakh is still any part of you, then he knows that only the innocent are sheltering here,” she said, in a frail, ringing tone of command forged from the bottom of her chest. “It is a refuge for children – for those he risked his life to protect. If any of his love for them is left in you, turn back. Leave them in peace.”

The herald slowed for the first time since striding out from the Gates of Sorrow. The roots that entangled his body gleamed like supple lightning through the sifting black breath that embraced him.

But the long-awaited, the inevitable, was ahead, and anything in the way of that was a whisper of protest against the chorus of all. He strode towards her, and Capella braced herself in his way, digging deeper, trying desperately to claw that trickle of power in her chest wider than a thread. It was too soon, years too soon for her voice to carry power, for her promise of protection to be a physical shield. If there had ever been a moment for her mother’s soul to fall on her like folding wings, it was this, but still she felt nothing, only the small, naked animal fear of standing in the way of something that could crush her, something so much larger than the body that seemed to carry it.

“Please,” she had told herself she wouldn’t say, wouldn’t have to beg. “Please, if there is any of his pity left in you-”

But he didn’t slow. Standing against that power which had fed on grudges and blood since long, long before her mother’s mother had been born, all she could do was try to block it with her body, shove at his chest, like trying to move the Abattoir by hand, and one of those serpentine black clouds lashed its way up her arm at the first touch, burying itself deep in the pores of her skin and the breath she drew to scream. Clotting her sight with darkness and her blood with fire, blooming through her lungs and veins like flame touched to the edge of brittle paper.

Coughing like so many hundreds of dead and dying others who had cried for her mother, coughing as if she could shake free the thousand tiny hooks it had already lodged in her lungs and veins, she stumbled and sagged to one knee. Her eyes burned with tears, blurring the herald to a walking thunderhead as he passed her by. The murmurs and gleaming eyes of those who had followed him were spreading closer, filling the square to the bridge, and, for the first time unprotected, she looked helplessly, hopelessly up at those whose blood had fed her rich childhood.

The herald didn’t look back to see what would become of the last Olgimsky. He stepped onto that stone bridge, the surface joint connecting the town and tower, and a crack of gunpowder thunder split the air between them.

A rifle shot ringing across the sudden silence of the crowd. The herald reeled a step back, that swathe of clouds blasted clean through to a new, gaping hole in his chest.

A moan swelled across the pilgrimage he had led, like blood welling from a wound. But the roots that already bound so much of his blood together were quick, and the only important thing left for that body to do was reach its destination. They reached and bound tight through that gap in his chest, feeding blood across it, flexing and pumping it to the body’s far reaches. He lurched back into step, across the bridge, and where only a palmful of his blood pattered to the stone on the other side, new stalks of rasping, blooming ashen swish tore it to cracks and shards.

On the stairs above, Khan set that stolen rifle to his shoulder again. His ears still rang with the last shot, his hands shook with the recoil it had punched into his shoulder and with hatred for himself, for his own idiocy in giving Capella the chance she had insisted on, to try to talk this monster down. But he held his breath steady, centred the iron sight on the head of what had been Artemy Burakh, and-

“No!”

Weight and reckless momentum bulled into him from behind, nearly pitching him headlong down the stairs. That second shot swung wide, plowing into the meat of the herald’s thigh, and he hardly slowed as roots remade the connections severed between veins and muscles.

Khan stumbled to the edge of the stairs. The rifle swung in his hands, almost slipping his grip, his right foot skidding almost into empty space. Still that weight swung and clung around him, arms around his waist, wrestling him away from any hope of making a shot that could stop this.

Still that scream rang from the lamp-gold facets of the Polyhedron, Murky’s voice tearing its way free of the cocoon, the sullen mumble, it had always worn. Shrill and ferocious at those soaring heights, in its new, shrieking form, reborn out of misguided, desperate love.

“No, no, you can’t, you can’t-”

The herald was climbing the stairs towards them, borne up by will and that golden binding through his chest. The wound that should have killed him, shining like a rapt eye in a sclera of bleeding smoke, up past the first landing and climbing faster, and Khan tried to plant his feet, to make any shot that might slow him-

It must have been on purpose. That was all he could think, all he had time to think as Murky wrapped her arms tighter around him and hauled them both towards the edge of the stairs. His heel slid over all that empty space, and he tried, wavering on the edge of infinity, grasping for balance, for the tower’s brilliant dream-light, but-

The herald was a body for a greater will. A key carrying itself towards a lock. But he was also a reservoir for a soul, and even if he could hold only a few drops of its true magnitude, those drops still held his shape as long as he did. He lunged higher than his sundered, lonely soul had been ready to climb, past old limits in a bound, throwing himself to his stomach on the stairs as Murky’s bare feet slipped from them.

Only Khan’s scream echoed down the facets of the tower, the dwindling sound of a dreamer cast cruelly out into waking gravity, cut off suddenly below. The herald hung halfway from the stairs, one arm wrapped around them as an anchor, the other stretched taut by Murky’s weight, caught by a hand around her wrist.

She stared up at him with none of the fear an earth-bound child should have had of falling. Only the fear of losing him, leaving her now in tears. She reached up to wrap her own small hand as far as it could fit around his wrist, and he lifted her back onto the stairs, setting her on her feet close enough for the clouds that attended him to breathe against her face.

They didn’t seize her. She caught hold of him instead, throwing her arms around his neck as he knelt and burying her face in all he now was.

All her life, she had heard the whispers of all he now was. And if he was not what he had been, he still stood for those whom no one had protected. Those forgotten by all but kindly Earth, and the soul that flowed through him still had to follow the paths carved in his heart by the choice it had once demanded of him – to save her at any cost to himself.

He straightened back to his feet, and she wrapped her hand tight around his fingers. Without fear, without need for any words, they climbed on, while the roots and stems of his greater body embraced the flesh and bones broken on the earth below.

The other children left on the stairs crowded to the edges of the landings, even those who knew him, to watch with the helpless wariness of cornered animals. Frozen in silence, only hoping to go unnoticed. Only one followed, only from a staircase’s distance, creeping and watching the careful way he had so much of life. The way he had tried to sneak into the Abattoir, or to find albinos in the steppe, he needed, he knew, to witness this. But as young as he was, he already had too much of the town’s iron and distrust in his veins to embrace it headlong.

The sky scrawled greetings in its clear silver tongue above. The Earth receded to a hum of anticipation below. It could never have reached this high without the herald, never have greeted the sky in turn from the teetering hilt of that knife embedded in its flesh. That horn in every sense, buried in its body. The herald walked to where a paper tent stood waiting, wilted in brittle, frosted starlight.

Murky tugged at his hand. When he looked down to her, frosted starlight in her hair, she squeezed her eyes shut, in demonstration.

Just one turn of a mirror away. A turn of the soul. Stepping inside the terrible Polyhedron was truly as simple as closing his eyes and knowing he could be there instead.

A maze of stairs angled and intersected and ended strangely across the great hollow heart of a room where he opened his eyes. Even if he had somehow climbed and dreamed that far as the lost, broken shell he’d been before, he wouldn’t have been able to see where those stairs led.

He would only have seen the children crowded to the edge of the paper-thin, folded platform on which he’d arrived. Watching him from the stairs, woken from their dreams to the momentous reality of his coming. The change that swirled around him like a silt-and-fog dancer’s silhouette, clothed in every violet and amber fantasy of the tower’s light. Change was never meant to find them there.

They were meant to be able to hide from it in the dreams beyond those dead-end stairs. The flickers of fantastical mountains, ships sailing seas of gold, creatures cavorting alive only in the imaginations of children. Their love was not so different from his.

Perhaps that was why he had been bound to them, to watch over them as he grew. They, too, shared their lives with that which would have been silent, forgotten if not for them. They made life out of nothing, gifting it in endless abundance to dreams and daring ideas. They may have looked at him in terror, but he loved them still.

Perhaps they would live. Perhaps their dreams would, more alive than ever before. But change had come. The soul he carried, which had never been meant to cross that threshold, shivered through the tower’s mirrors and beautiful mirages. Facet by facet, filling them from faint ripples to vivid, living memories, pouring through the gateway of the herald’s body.

That soul had dreamed since long before any other had walked its skin. Of the souls that would come, the love they would give it and that which it would give them in return. The seeds they would sow, growing from the steps they would learn to dance, the bodies they would bury in its flesh to be born again. As those new souls, short-sighted bodies, had scarred and diminished it, it had dreamed of what it had lost. The childhood fantasies that had glittered in those facets fell under the shadow of bulls, large enough to graze the mountains’ peaks from their foothills. Firelit dances long lost to human memory blazed across the dark. Creatures moulded from clay in the shape of constellations, sacred offspring of the Earth and sky, pulled themselves now from primordial seas of gold.

That shaking spread from the facets to the tower itself as Earth’s soul, forged complete, filled it from the herald’s body to its heights. As that body became something smaller in his sight, mirrored from a hundred angles, bruised and scarred and weak and brilliantly precious. As the smaller-still body at its side clung close to it, staring up at those dreams new and so very old, not with fear, but eyes and a soul opened wide in wonder.

He saw the herald’s hand from without, moving to clasp her shoulder. To hold her close in turn. That had been him, once. Only that, that little clot of flesh, which could have lived in terror of everything so capable of crushing it and its fragile soul.

Instead, it had lived in love. In selflessness, it had cracked its own fragile soul open, to let the wondrous world flow through it. Even now, in pity and understanding, it clung to that child, and saw itself in her. Love could come from anywhere. It could take root in any heart and grow. In the world the herald had wished for, children like that would still live to dream and grow love. In the end, it was all he asked for.

The herald’s small, frail body disentangled its hands from the child’s, raising them from its sides. Above its head as if to grasp the unseen sky, and he was that body, and the bulls grazing mountaintops from the foothills, and the Earth that would bear a knife’s pain forever, gladly, for this, and the woman who had waited nine years for him to remember her and return so they could be this, and he was saying, with the herald’s lips –

“I’ve come home.”

Those watching from outside, from the square or cowering in the town, didn’t hear him say it. They only saw the tower’s light growing from harvest gold to a glow they couldn’t watch anymore, that carved shadows from their feet into the town and filled their throats with wails no matter how full of wonder they were.

Then, louder than their wails, louder than the world, they heard only the spent shell of the tower cracking at its seams.

#

What sort of world does the world itself dream of? What footfalls does it miss that we’ve forgotten?

If it could wish its beloved dead back to life, what would walk the earth again? What does it love?

Perhaps bulls that graze the clouds. Perhaps creatures of bone and clay that race through the dusk, whooping to each other in their own wolfish tongue, or dolls made alive by the seeds sewn in their cotton, or serpents made wise enough by centuries in the deep veins of the Earth to speak its secrets, and wise enough not to.

Perhaps even human beings.

If they still walk that world’s skin, if they live in that town, we can only know that they do so in love. Shared endlessly between them, between them and the Earth, them and wolfish tongues and clay and deep veins and bone. If they have died and rotted, then they have taken root and regrown, and that, too, is love.

And what of the Haruspex? The one whose love was too large for a single life and body in the end, who chose to become what he was rather than what contained him?

He is where he always was, where he was always meant to be. Around, somewhere...but never on his own.

Tiimel daa.