Chapter 58-
“My Son, I have lived a long life,
I am not long for this place any more.
Do not weep for me,
As I pass, my greatest work will be completed…
You, my son;
The day of your birth was the Strongest Miracle…
I must go now,
And join your mother in heaven…”
It was evening when King Lizzy IX lay in his deathbed. His sheets were an immaculate white, as pure as the first snow in Galeton. He clasped his first son’s hand; the King’s was frozen with the pallor of the creeping end, the prince’s warmed by the raging fire which crackled by the window. With easy, serene eyes, the prince ran his thumb over the back of his father’s hand and parted his lips.
“Of course.”
Lizzy took in a deep breath, the last gust of life, and released it from his lungs. With those words in his mind, the strongest ruler of history passed.
The moment his heart ceased its march, the prince tightened his grasp on his father’s hand. A soft glow came over Lizzy, like a blanket separating him from the darkness of the room. The light traveled up his arm and into the prince’s body. He inhaled deeply, absorbing his father’s last light.
With a renewed strength, the first son rose to his feet and looked through the open window of the balcony into the pitch black of night, the sky dotted with hundreds of stars. One, however, caught his eye in particular. It suddenly threw off the dark veil of space around it and shone with a brilliant fervor, like a god revealing its true form to him. He drew a long, labored breath as the light inside him pounded; every drop of blood within him rolled through his veins like marbles. He strained every muscle in his body to contain it, arching his back and lifting his heels from the ground.
He struggled to keep the saliva bubbling in his mouth from flooding down his chin. The starlight filled his eyes, and what was once a deep hazel darkened to black.
From behind the door of the chamber, another man peered into the scene. His braid cast a dark silhouette against the light of the hallway, but he was not worried about being identified anymore.
“Dear God…” his lips trembled silently. “It’s begun in him now… His…” the onlooker’s fist clenched. “His Miracle…”
Within minutes, the struggling ceased, and the prince nearly collapsed to the ground, his shoulders slumped, arms resting on his knees, saliva trailing from his lips. It took another moment for him to recover, but it was a swift change of state once he had. His heaving quieted, replaced with the steady rhythm of a noble. He straightened himself out and stood relaxed, his head thrown back and every worry shed from his face.
The prince stared once more into his star, now with eyes bathed in golden light which pulsed and danced much like the fire still burning beside him. He opened his mouth once more,
“Persicho…” he called to his brother. The man nearly fell through the doorway, though once he heard his older brother’s voice, he knew there was no turning back.
“Yes, brother…”
Without averting his gaze from the night sky, he posed him a question.
“What do you say the moon is?”
“The moon?” Persicho glanced anxiously from the great full moon in the sky to his brother.
The prince decided that Persicho would never be able to answer his question adequately, so he did so himself.
“The moon is just the sun at night…”
The younger furrowed his brow and looked again to the heavenly body.
“No, brother,” the prince corrected him, as if he could read his mind. “When you look for the source of its light, don’t look to the sky, look to me.”
A moment of uneasy quiet hung in the air between them until the prince scoffed at the ground.
“Go to your chambers,” he commanded. “And no, do not describe this in your journal…”
Persicho could not help gasping before turning tail from the room.
“How did he know about my journal? My private journal?” His questions echoed with terror as his footsteps did the same, reflecting off the white marble floors and curved ceilings of the hall.
---
The Prayer rocked more intensely the closer they sailed to the shore of New Hopeland. Gallow, Sonsee, and some others sat in the mess hall, trying to eat as slowly as possible to shirk their duties on deck.
The door flew open, and Thornlove peered in at them with a scowl, the sun to her back, her face blackened by shadow.
“Get a move on!” she chided them. “We’re almost to port!”
Everyone jumped from their chairs and rushed to the doorway as if their lives depended on it, which wasn’t an unreasonable read of the situation.
Under clear skies, the sizable vessel pulled into harbor with minimal scraping of its hull against the docks. Feverishly helping the other members of the crew close the sails, Gallow and Sonsee both failed to watch the black speck of Galeton widen until it encompassed the entire horizon. The city seemed to stretch on for miles across the shore, sloping upwards the further inland one looked until the very end of the city boasted massive towers roofed red and black which reached into the heavens.
Sonsee gazed up from the deck to the expanse of the skyline. Every house was built in the traditional New Hopeland style, with gray and white bricks that reflected the warm sunlight in the evening; the roofs always slanted with angular features like chimneys and little spires poking out. Each building could have been a church.
The Prayer’s ramp folded out, settling on the sturdy planks of the dock, well worn with sea-salt and the ocean breeze. Thornlove strolled down to meet the docking inspector, a middle aged man who looked like he’d been through as much as the wood he stood on. They exchanged a few words, the inspector gave her a befuddled look that quickly returned to his gruff standard.
Thornlove turned around and peered upward at Gallow and Sonsee, who were watching her conversation from the deck. At first, the two of them shrank away from the railing, but their captain gave them a nod and a slight tilt of her head.
“She wants you down there,” Lyric popped in beside them, leaning over the rail.
“Huh?” Sonsee couldn’t tell if he’d been there the whole time.
“I stay on the ship,” he explained, rather blase. “The unloading will be taken care of.”
Gallow and Sonsee exchanged glances.
---
“Captain, you’re a fast walker…” Gallow puffed, trying to keep up with Thornlove’s pace down the busy city streets of Galeton. The brick lanes were wide enough to accommodate the swarm of buggies going to and fro, as well as the pedestrians who passed haphazardly through traffic.
Sonsee found herself studying her surroundings intently. It was not too unlike Hilltop or Pettma in its energy or crowds, but the architecture was completely different, as if the Andeidrans had intentionally drifted as far away from their motherland’s style as possible. There were street signs in Hopish, but with odd, archaic-looking lettering.
“Captain, where exactly are we going?” she asked, matching Thornlove’s pounding, unstoppable step a little better.
“I have business with someone in this city,” she replied straightforwardly. “After I’m done with him, he’ll help you with your business.” A second passed, and she added on, “He’s an artist.”
“An artist?” Gallow squinted with one eye at the back of her head. Before he could say any more, the two novice sailors nearly crashed into Thornlove when she came to a dead stop.
“Egh!” Gallow yapped to himself. They had just reached the crossroads when a buggy came flying by; with her speeds, they’d assumed that Thornlove intended to just stride across the street, but she was, in fact, just confident in her own stopping power.
They waited for a moment to allow the traffic to pass, when a teenage girl stepped up closer to them.
“Excuse me,” she started in a fair accent. “Are you a savage woman?” she asked, looking right at Sonsee with an innocent expression.
Sonsee was taken aback at the question. She was not unused to the term, but the brazenness of the question was uncomfortable.
Before she had time to react, two more people approached from the street’s crowd, and another, then three more, until there was a horde of interested men, women, and children surrounding them.
“Where are you from?”
“Is that real leather?”
“Is she your wife?”
“Can she speak?”
Sonsee threw up her hands instinctively in a defensive gesture, trying to keep the throng of interested passersby at bay. Gallow was utterly dumbfounded by the situation; crowd management was not his forte, and while he was tempted to yell at them, the last thing he wanted to do was create an even bigger scene or start an altercation.
Suddenly, the two of them felt Thornlove’s strong arms lock into theirs and heave them forward into the street.
“Let’s get a move on,” she growled. “This is pissing me off.”
“Yes, captain!” they answered, uncoiling themselves from her and jogging up to her side.
“You don’t have to call me captain anymore,” she retorted, looking at a street sign. “You were hardly crew in the first place, just the most useful freeloaders to rear your heads.”
As they left the interested crowd swiftly behind, drawing many more stares, they didn’t know whether to be offended at Thornlove’s callousness, or honored at being called useful.
---
Thornlove’s worn knuckles rapped against the door of the apartment.
“Hello?” a voice called from the other end in an accent that was distinctly non-Hopish and non-Andeidran.
“It’s Thornlove, open up,” she barked.
Sonsee peered around the halls of the apartment building. They were poorly lit, with a few lights mounted to the walls and windows at the far ends; the walls, once white, were now cream colored with dark spots stained here and there. The proud architecture of Galeton only seemed to extend to the exteriors, it seemed.
The door creaked as it opened, and they were greeted by a black man dressed in a dirtied white shirt and smock. Gallow and Sonsee were both struck by his distinctive features, as Sonsee had never seen a black man, and Gallow only rarely. He was the last person they expected to see in this city, in this country, on this continent.
“Ah,” he greeted them with a well-meaning smile. “Catherine Thornlove, and guests?” he looked to the other two with less comfort, having not expected them to be joining the captain.
“G’day,” Catherine offered a rather terse reply before gesturing to her companions. “These are travelers, they have business to ask you about once we’re done. This is Gallow, and Sonsee. Gallow, Sonsee, this is Rodan Calari.”
“Come in, come in, pleasure to meet you,” Rodan reached out and shook hands with the two of them, before they followed Thornlove (who refused a handshake).
“Make yourself at home,” he continued, pointing to the couch and chairs. “We’ll be just a moment in the other room.”
Without much more, Rodan ushered Thornlove through a door, under which white chalk had settled as if construction was occurring inside.
The travelers took a seat and looked around at the rather plain apartment. They couldn’t tell if there was anyone else living there, as the whole place felt quite lonely; there was a tense atmosphere to the space, as if the fear in someone’s heart had grown outside of them and dug its way into the walls.
Gallow watched the door close and, moments later, heard chattering too low to be audible. He shot a glance at Sonsee, who gave him no more than a passing shrug.
After a while, the chattering stopped, and there was a solid minute of silence from behind the door. Suddenly, they both heard the distinct sound of Thornlove straining her voice, the characteristic rasp after so many years shouting over the waves.
They couldn’t make out her words, but the instant she let them out, there was a noticeable change in the air. Gallow heard a tone ring out, a terrible, screeching hiss like a steam engine and the tearing of metal. Once again, they exchanged glances, and immediately knew that something was happening. Sonsee was the first to jump to her feet, rushing to the door followed closely by Gallow. She threw the door open, letting it crash against the wall as it did. Gallow looked over her shoulder into the room.
It was fairly spacious, every inch covered in marble dust, with various tools and implements scattered on the ground and in open drawers; measuring implements, brushes, sketchbooks, chisels, hammers, the like. In the center, Rodan and Thornlove stood on either end of a sculpture so bizarre they couldn’t tell how complete it was supposed to be.
It seemed to depict a classic theological scene: the Saviour lifting the Earth up from the infinite darkness, but with many odd artistic decisions. The Saviour’s face, usually left unseen, was an amalgamation of several animal heads, their arm actually many hundreds of small arms which together formed a single shape, all reaching up to grasp what would be the Earth. In place of the planet, however, was not marble at all; it was a small black orb that appeared to be completely featureless save for its incredible shine. Light reflected off of it in a way unbefitting of glass or rubber, and it pulsed intermittently with some sort of internal energy.
“Get the damn thing out!” Thornlove shouted. Rodan’s hands were grasped tightly around the orb, trying furiously to rip it from the hand, but to no avail.
“I can’t!” he grunted. “It won’t-”
“Gallow!” Thornlove turned to him with gusto. “Can you grab that with Navigator?”
“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” Gallow demanded, holding his ground.
“Just do it, goddamn freeloader!” Thornlove lost her temper, gritting her teeth. “Or we’re all gonna be strung up with the death row!”
Gallow could see the raw urgency in her eyes, and decided that it was better to trust her than not.
“[NAVIGATOR]!”
His spirit body burst forth, flying to the sculpture and reaching out for the orb.
“Does that thing have… a soul?”
Navigator actually managed not only to touch it, but to remove it from the sculpture’s grip as easily as he would pick up a paperweight.
Rodan watched him do this and whispered under his breath, “What in the…”
Thornlove stretched out her own hands, and Gallow dropped it into her grasp. The moment it was back in her possession, she turned her attention to the artist.
“You aren’t touching this damn thing.”
He raised his hands in mercy and donned a fiercely apologetic look. “I’m sorry- I just let my excitement get the better of me, and-”
“Can somebody,” Gallow interjected. “Explain what’s going on here?”
---
“There are items-- from where and when I do not know-- which were created-- by who I do not know-- with something like souls inside them. My people know about these objects; my father was from Coyunda, but my mother was from New Hopeland, specifically the Serpent Isles-”
Gallow nearly slammed his fist on the table. “The Serpent Isles?!”
Rodan nearly jumped at his guest’s reaction. “Yes, I don’t know very much about her, she died when I was young, you see, but I first came to this country to visit the place of her birth. It was a treacherous journey, but I eventually found her village, and there was where I discovered these objects.”
“And you- you have one of them now?” Gallow asked with something like panic in his voice. He looked to Thornlove, “You brought one to him? Is that what was in the cargo hold?”
She said nothing, but nodded.
“And why do you need these?” he continued. “For your little art project??”
Rodan leaned back and took a long look out the window. “Do you see that out on the street?”
“Huh?” Gallow and Sonsee both got up and walked over to the window to scan the street below.
“That man walking there?” Rodan pointed to an elderly man hobbling down the cobblestone lane, the scant few people around him shrinking back in fear. His hair was grown and unkempt, his clothing ripped and ragged.
“Yeah,” Gallow replied. “He looks like any old vagrant.”
“That man has Exitis,” Rodan explained. “Have you heard of it?”
“Exitis?” Sonsee piped in. “What are you talking about?”
Rodan left the window and paced to his chair, placing his arms on its back. “You two are Vocation users, correct?”
They nodded.
“I see… Exitis is a disease that was engineered…”
“Engin- what are you talking about??” Gallow cocked his head and leaned forward. “You can’t engineer a disease.”
“Exitis was engineered to find Vocation users,” Rodan proclaimed.
They were dumbstruck.
“It began a year and a half ago, but I didn’t figure this out until a few weeks back, when they got careless.”
“Who did?” Gallow demanded.
“The monarchy,” Rodan explained. “At first, I don’t know how it was released into the population, maybe through a few victim test-subjects, but it seems as if ever since Cartwright was assassinated in Andeidra, the number of cases shot up.”
“How do you know it’s the government?”
Rodan cast his eyes back to the street. “One by one, the few Vocation users I knew of in this city disappeared. The people who lived in their communities said they were taken into custody by the Royal Inquisition Squad for Disease Control.” His brow furrowed in distaste as he said their name. “A bunch of government thugs…”
“Slow down,” Sonsee cut in. “How many Vocation users are just in this city alone that this disease is affecting enough people to make a task force to control it?”
“There aren’t,” Rodan explained. “If you aren’t a Vocation user, the disease is symptomatic and deadly for the young and elderly. If you are, there are no symptoms.”
“How do they weed them out, then?”
“Routine blood tests,” he answered. “Whether or not you’re symptomatic, it shows in your blood. If you’re healthy on the outside, but show evidence of Exitis, they take you away.” He sat back down with a grim kind of excitement. “See, I figured out how they’re doing it.”
Sonsee and Gallow leaned in as he did.
“They’re dispersing it in the water,” he said in a hushed tone, as if someone was listening in as they spoke.
“The… the water…?” Sonsee and Gallow felt their hearts sink. This kind of subversion and population sabotage was unheard of, unthinkable, and by one’s own government…
“I can’t even imagine…” Gallow muttered, eyes locked in horror.
“How have you stayed non-infected?” Sonsee wondered aloud.
Rodan smiled and got up, running to his studio. He reappeared a few moments later holding a small pile of papers.
“Here,” he laid a series of schematics across the table, so proud he almost puffed his chest out. Sonsee and Gallow stared at them blankly until he felt forced to ask, “What, are you…?”
Sonsee slowly raised her view to him. “I don’t know what this is.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Gallow joined her, glad to not be the only one.
Rodan’s face turned to a meager disappointment. “It’s a desalination urn.”
More blank stares, as if he wasn’t done speaking.
“It’s-” he grasped at his words. “Every few days, I go to the harbor and collect uninfected sea water, then I have one of these things on the roof, small enough thar no one notices, and I purify the salt out of it.
Sonsee suddenly snapped to life. “Oh!” she cried. “I know what you mean!”
His big grin returned. “You do?”
“Yes, my people are from the coast, we used something like this to do the same thing.”
Rodan’s brow furrowed in curiosity. “From the coast?” he posited. “What tribe?”
Sonsee did not hesitate. “Atamape,” she proclaimed.
“Atamape?” he repeated, sounding it out for himself. “I’ve read some books on the Andeidran tribes, I’ve never heard of them.”
Gallow galnced at her out of the corner of his eye, watching her reaction in case she was so affected that he needed to change the subject. Instead, she gave a simple, “I suppose not,” and promptly ended the thread of conversation.
“Well, this is all beside the point,” Gallow steered the conversation back on track. “Why do you think it’s the government?”
“Because the only Vocation users taken away were Hewlinites,” Rodan got very close and spoke in very low tones when he said this.
“They were what?”
The sculptor raised his eyebrows. “You two really don’t know what’s been going on here, do you?”
They shook their heads. “We’ve had enough drama in Andeidra,” Gallow remarked.
Rodan drew himself seriously and outlined it for them: “Over the last ten years, the king, Lizzy, has been losing his mind. Everyone knows it, or suspects it, but nobody in the court has done anything about it, so the country has been taken over, bit by bit, by his son, Prince Leon.”
“I’m following…”
“Leon is a psychopath and a narcissist, everyone knows it, and no one does anything about it, he’s been running this country into the ground.”
Gallow crossed his brow. “Does he have any siblings or anyone else who can replace him in the family?”
“He has one younger brother, Persicho, but no one will challenge him anyway.”
“Why not, ‘cause he’s the prince?”
Rodan’s lips pursed as he tried to explain. “Somewhat,” he began. “That’s true, but there is an immense power that runs in the royal bloodline.”
Sonsee spoke up. “Like a Vocation?”
“We think so, but it’s never been confirmed. We have no idea how it works, but every firstborn son of the family has possessed it, and since his birth he was noted for his ability, though they never disclosed what it was. All of the accounts of his power come from a few battles he’s led.”
“And why do you think he’s doing this?”
Rodan looked around anxiously, watching the window and the door before leaning in closely and speaking quietly.
“There are a few among us who want to challenge the prince’s power before he becomes king. If we can get his brother into power instead of him, then we can set the country into a good motion for the first time in ten years. We call ourselves Hewlinites-” he said that word even quieter than the rest- “because of our leader in philosophy, his name is Gestalt Hewl.”
Gallow’s expression dropped visibly. “Oh,” he muttered. “A philosopher.”
“This man is different,” Rodan insisted. “He’s one of the people, he’s not an academic. Everything he writes comes from the same people Leon’s crown has been overlooking.”
“So where does that thing come in?” Gallow pointed at the black sphere laying in a small wooden box on the table.
“Ah…” Rodan smiled at the strange object. “That is the key to our revolution.”
“I don’t like the way you say that,” Gallow raised his eyebrows ever so slightly at the sculptor.
“See it this way,” Rodan explained to them with much the same tone as when he’d presented his schematics. “This is an object of immeasurable power, we really can’t understand it because we’ve never seen anything like it. If we could channel it, we could have a strength that rivaled Leon’s!”
Gallow looked from Rodan to Thornlove, Sonsee following his gaze. “And you brought this thing to him?” his voice was almost disappointed in her.
Thornlove, whose arms had been crossed and eyes closed the entire conversation, finally opened them and said, in a rather apathetic tone, “I was just paid to ship it.”
“Oh, come one, Catherine…” Rodan reached out and almost gave her arm a friendly bump before thinking better of it. “You’re at least a little sympathetic to us, aren’t you?”
The captain returned standoffish gaze. “If the trade laws were a little more relaxed around here, like they used to be, I wouldn’t mind it too much.”
“See?” Rodan smirked. “It helps everyone, really.”
“So,” Sonsee looked towards the studio door, now shut tightly. “That sculpture is your… channeling… thing…?”
Rodan turned his neck to join her in looking at the door. “Yes, it is.”
“And how does that work?”
“Well,” he started. “I have no Vocation, no one from my family does, but my mother’s village, her community in the Seprent Isles, they have a spiritual sense of sorts…”
Gallow snapped his attention to Sonsee. “Disael,” was all he said, with seriousness in his eyes like a fire-and-brimstone priest. After a moment, Sonsee gasped when she realized what he was talking about.
“That’s too strange…” she muttered.
“What?” Rodan wondered aloud.
“Nothing,” Gallow dismissed the topic. “Go on.”
Assuming it wasn’t important, Rodan continued. “This is why I haven’t been diagnised as asymptomatic yet,” he explained. “I’m not taking any chances though, because if I do contract it, or my wife, she will most certainly be put at risk, and I too, if I’m not taken away.” He peered out the window. “They suspect me, they’ve been increasing the number of random inspections of my home, and it’s always from the two leading officers of the Inquisition Squad. It’s ridiculous, why do they need both of them to sample the blood of a sculptor and his wife-?”
“Ro-Rodan,” Gallow cut him off before he launched into a full-fledged rant. “What Sonsee and I want to know is, can you bring us to the Serpent Isles?”
Rodan’s dark face turned pale. “Me? N-no, I could never…”
“What?” Sonsee crossed her arms in confusion. “But you’ve been there before, right?”
“That was many years ago,” Rodan elaborated. “Back before the king lost his mind, and before the place was swimming with pirates…”
“Pirates?” Gallow sat up. “That’s news to me.”
“Yes,” Rodan gestured to Thornlove. “I’m sure Catherine told you that she couldn’t take you there. It’s a dangerous trip to boot, it’s suspicious for a cargo ship to go into pirate territory, much more to come out unscathed.”
Thornlove spoke, “The coastal guard and navy have really jacked up surveillance on the shores in the last few years, we’d definitely be spotted, then identified and reported. It’s bad news, I’m not going that far for you. Even if you’re Gideon’s friends.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Rodan stood up and stretched his limbs. “You’re free to stay until you can find some other transportation.”
Sonsee and Gallow turned to each other to gauge their feelings. “Is that okay?”
“Sure, the wife went out for groceries, she should be back soon. We’ll have a great dinner!”
“Oh, well, we don’t want to eat all your food, Mister-” Sonsee forewarned him.
“Not a problem, not a problem,” he assured her. “I make enough money.”
As if on cue, the front door opened, and a kindly-looking woman stepped over the threshold.
“Oh,” she blinked at the three strangers for a moment. “We have guests.”
“We have guests!” Rodan repeated, shimmering his hands in the air. “Well, two of them…” he went on to introduce the three of them to her.
“...And this is my wife, Dana.”
She smiled courteously, running calculations on how much she would need to prepare for dinner.
“Anything happen while you were out?” Rodan asked with a well-meaning nod.
Having set down the groceries, Dana looked suddenly very uncomfortable; her arms held tightly to herself, her stance weighted heavily to one side she was leaning on.
“I don’t know if you heard the news…” she said, dragging out the sentence in a suspicious and dread-inducing way. “But… the king died.”
In the blink of an eye, the room altered. It was the kind of abrupt mood shift that made Gallow swear the lighting itself had change;, as if they were standing there, frozen in place, long enough for the sun to change positions in the sky, so that the mugs and furniture and even the buildings outside cast noticeably different shadows.
Slowly, lethargically, Rodan repeated what he words back to her.
“The king… is… dead?”
“Yes…” she replied softly. “It happened three days ago, they waited to announce it until the prince was ready to assume the throne. The coronation for Prince Leon is tomorrow; maybe, I should say King Leon.”
---
It was dark below the Heavensward Gladial. A cold, damp stairwell descended deep into the earth, black bricks lined with blazing torches. It was in this deep dungeon, so large that they had long since given up on exterminating the spider population, that a man sat atop a kind of small throne made of the same black stone. At his side was a ledger with hundreds of calculations scribbled into its pages with black ink. He was an older man who wore the trappings of an aristocrat, his graying hair neatly combed. His most distinguishable feature was a monocle over his right eye with a crimson-tinted lense. Even in this dark light, he seemed able to continue scraping his equations into the paper.
Suddenly, his focus was ripped from the page, and he looked up wildly.
“What in heaven’s name…”
Surrounding him, hanging from the ceiling, was a multitude of chains which dangled with near stillness in the dark. A second after he felt it, one of the chains shook just slightly, enough to leave it swinging. He leapt from his seat and gazed at the rest of the chains, then focused back onto the one.
“There’s no doubt,” he muttered before whispering to himself the phrase he’d told himself so many times. “The Truth has been designed…” His eyes had the look of a predator who had stumbled upon a nest of prey. “An Object has been activated here… in this very city…”