by A. R. Knight
From the apartment we headed east, cutting through the central part of Riven. Streets broadened into wide boulevards and buildings grew to five and six-story heights. Hotels and offices that had never been used. As if a child had dreamed them up and discarded the idea halfway through. Dollhouses with no dolls.
We saw guides. Guides by the dozen. Dashing in teams towards popping sparks. Carrying wounded back towards where they could cross over, to where guides could heal and return again after some hours away. Cries for help mingled with shouts of victory down the corridors between the walls. Several times we broke off to help guides seal away spirits, close a breach or a wrangle cluster of mauling souls. Selena and I, with our coats and guide weaponry, stayed low. Didn’t talk, didn’t give our names. Did what we could while avoiding recognition.
Only once did another guide push the issue. He’d recognized Alec and, after we’d closed a breach together, the guide congratulated each of us in turn. Hesitated when he saw my battered features. His eyes, bagged and tired, squinted. Looked me up and down.
“I know this face,” the guide said. “What is your name?”
“His name doesn’t matter.” Anna put her hand on my shoulder. “He’s with me. And Alec.”
The guide gave her a side glance. “Our laws are not kind to those who help fugitives.”
“I never knew a guide to turn on someone giving them aid,” I said.
The guide took a step back. “I cannot deny your efforts. And I have neither the energy or the desire to deliver justice to you today. On another morning, however, I will not hold back. You have lives to answer for, Carver Reed.”
He turned and walked away, the other guides in his group following in silent judgment. His words hurt, but the pain filtered into the same numb part of me that had grown in the days since I’d been cast out as a guide. I made no pretenses that I was a saint. That I hadn’t done terrible things in the name of grander objectives. But losing friends was never easy. Losing my place in life stung every day. Every hour.
As we neared the east edge of the city the buildings thinned out; broad courtyards became the norm. Patterned white stone broken up with the occasional statue or domed building. The largest of these, the Palace, marked the spot where Alec and I had fought our first ghoul months ago. A time when my life was different. When I had a life.
“So when do you think you’ll be back?” Anna said.
“That’s an impossible question,” I replied. “Nara might give us an answer in fifteen minutes, or she could hold us there for fifteen months.”
“Riven won’t last that long.” Alec glanced at his gauntlets, as though they were directly responsible for Riven’s survival.
“We’ll move as fast as we can,” Selena said. “I won’t let Carver waste time.”
“You won’t?” I said. “But it’s my favorite thing to do.”
Riven’s east gate stood large and proud. An archway built of stone and bordered by twin turreted towers. The four of us stood beneath that arch, looking out to the hundred yards of clear space before the endless fields of waving white grain began. There was something inevitable in the stance, the feeling that we might never see each other again. This parting, this moment where the two pairs separated, with Alec and Anna returning to the war-torn streets while Selena and I ventured into the unknown.
“You are sure you don’t want me to bind you?” Anna said. “I can keep you from the Cycle. We can talk over long distances.”
“You need your strength,” I said. “Can’t afford to be anything less than your best. If you die because the binding saps your energy, then I’d be right where I am now. Binding me wouldn’t help Selena either.”
“We can keep each other sane,” Selena said.
“The opposite of most loves of known,” Alec said. We laughed, but it was the dry sore. Low and laden with future burdens. Still, I welcomed the chance to smile. While in my head, the Cycle continued its whispers.
It never stopped.
Chapter 5
Selena and I put one foot in front of the other. Alec and Anna turned back and disappeared amongst the statues and the columns. Back to the world that I had known. In front of us stood stalk after stalk of great white grain. Some taller than I was, most at least three or four feet in height. All shifting back and forth in Riven’s eternal breeze.
I took the lead, pushing and shoving the stalks apart. Like making our way through a thick forest, or swamp. There simply wasn’t a motion I could take that didn’t involve pushing aside the plants. If they could even be called that.
“How did you manage to walk this far before?” Selena batted a stalk away from her face. “Find your way to anywhere?”
“Nara showed me,” I said. “Pointed me in the right direction, led me most of the way. Until I could see the walls.”
“I remember the conversations,” Selena said. “You talked about how endless this all was. I didn’t really believe it but now these plants are the only thing I can see.”
The last time I’d been through here Selena and I had been bound to each other. I’d been alive and we could send our thoughts, our emotions over any distance in Riven to each other. It’d been my only comfort as I’d wandered through the endless field alone. Even Nara, when she’d been there, acted less like a companion and more like a distant teacher.
“When we find her,” I said. “Let me do the talking at first. I don’t think she’ll be expecting you.”
“You think that’ll be a problem?”
“I don’t know what to think.” I parted a pair of stalks with my hands, stepped between them and held them apart for Selena to follow. “She told me that she was old. Hundreds of years. That she’d seen Riven built from the ground up and turned into what it is now. You tell me whether you’d go crazy being in here that long, with no friends, no seasons, nothing other than this.”
“Alone?” Selena said. “I don’t think I would last a month. I don’t think anyone would.”
“You came close,” I replied. Even after I’d found her, even after I had bound Selena, she’d spent most days in Riven waiting and watching. Drawing on the walls of the apartment; cityscapes that she could see from her window. I’d worried whether she was going to fall apart, whether I would come to visit her one day and find Selena destroyed by this world’s unchanging pallor.
“I’ve always been a survivor,” Selena said. “I leaned on you. I leaned on Nicholas. I leaned on the memory of my children and what it took to raise them.”
Selena didn’t mention the husbands she’d murdered. The willpower it must’ve taken to plot their ends and actually pull them off. To leave one life after another behind as a weeping widow until it finally caught up with her. That scar running along Selena’s face an ever-present reminder of the sacrifices she’d made and the pain she’d suffered. And had inflicted.
Perhaps that was what drew me to her. What kept us together in this crazy world. She and I had both lost so much, had endured broken lives and broken dreams. It was fitting that Riven would prove to be our home. The only place two souls like us could make an existence. Such as it was.
“How long will we be wandering?” Selena said later, as the city walls disappeared on the horizon and we continued our march.
“Depends on whether I can find her,” I said. “If I get lost, then we might just be here, pushing through the stalks until Riven implodes.”
“You’re inspiring a lot of confidence.”
“Hey, it was your idea to come with,” I said. Selena had insisted on it, actually. Declared that if I went off on another quest without her, one of two things would happen: Either I would go insane and fall victim to the Cycle’s constant whispers or she would. Made it a pretty easy choice.
We continued pushing further and further into the vast field for what felt like a day or more but without a body’s fatigue or a sun’s pattern to tell you the time, it was hard to know. Eventually, though, we both saw the wispy smoke rising into the sky. Nara’s fire. Bu
rning the grain one stalk at a time seemingly forever.
When I shoved through the last line of stalks and into the clearing, it looked the same as it had before. Nara’s hut, a thatched structure, stood alone beyond a fire chewing its way through a large pile of grain. I wasn’t sure if it was the same pile that’d been there when I’d first found the clearing, or if Nara actually cut more stalks. Either way it didn’t seem like her constant burning was making headway. The grain crowded as close as it had been before.
“Where is she?” Selena said. “Didn’t you say she would be waiting?”
I nodded towards the hut. “Guessing she’s in there, or we’ve come all this way for nothing.”
“For nothing?” Nara’s voice came out of the hut’s door, frosted and scratched. “For nothing? You have a very low opinion of your journeys, Carver. Even if you simply had to turn back now, would you not have gained even the slightest insight into who you are?”
Nara emerged from the hut, wearing the same dark robe I’d seen her in before. Her hood pulled up to cover her eyes, keeping her face in shadow. That strange combination of age that had Nara looking both wise but far from frail. Etched lines over strong arms, thick skin, and bright hair. Movement with purpose.
“Does she always talk like that?” Selena asked.
I could only nod.
Chapter 6
Perhaps it was the way Nara looked in her robe, her slow purposeful walk as she crossed the clearing to stand in front of Selena and I, but I shivered. Wanted to but resisted backing away. As Nara came closer the light sneaking under her hood revealed more of her face, a look that had just enough wrinkles to convey wisdom if not desiccated age. If this had been Chicago I would’ve given her a senior’s due, respected her as an elder. Here, in a place where spirits determined their own guise, choosing such a look had a purpose.
“You brought someone with you? Who is this?” Nara bent her head towards Selena, kept her eyes on me. “A spirit. An unusual choice for a guide.”
“I’m not a guide anymore,” I replied. “This is Selena. We’re here for your help.”
“My help?” Nara replied.
“You said you had a way to keep Riven from falling apart. It’s only getting worse; the spirits continue to pour in and breaches are opening everywhere,” I said. “If you have a solution, I’d like to know what it is.”
Nara stepped over to me, reached out with her hand and touched my face. I flinched away. There was something strange about a person you didn’t know touching you. Nara’s cold hands, the wisps of her fingernails glancing on my cheek sowed unease. I noticed Selena’s hand drift towards her cleaver. But then Nara stepped back, a frown crossing her lips.
“She and I are not the only spirits here,” Nara said. “What happened to you, Carver Reed?”
“You see this sword?” I said, my hand rising to the hilt of the great blade on my back. “The man who owned it had me killed on the other side. He paid for it.”
“Then you succeeded,” Nara said. “I’m impressed. For you to be back, Riven must truly be in dire shape.”
“Please,” Selena said. “If you can help, we need a way to close the breaches quickly. A way to help the spirits get to the Cycle faster.”
Nara gave Selena a frosted stare. “Riven is not a product of nature. It is not a random world of chaos, like where you came from. Where I came from. It is a construct. Built by those who refuse to take the last leap into the Cycle. I am one of those.”
Nara held up one wrinkled hand.
“Before you start to ask your questions, before you panic, or assume I am something greater than what I am, take another look at the world in which you find yourselves. A place where natural law is scattered. Where the things you take for certainties come and go with the breeze. Where a house might be nothing more than bits of rubble and yet the next stands perfect. All of this, every inch you walk upon, comes from us.”
I heard the words. They sounded like Piotr’s. The mad ramblings of someone who thought they were above and beyond everyone else. Even if Nara was telling the truth, even if she was some sort of ancient spirit that had a hand in molding Riven to what it was, she was still here in the middle of the endless stalks of grain, alone in a hut. Hardly the existence I’d imagine for someone with the power to craft a world.
“If you are so strong, if you are truly what you’re saying, then why let Riven slide into decay?” I said.
“Because I cannot,” Nara replied. “Because, for everything we have learned over our centuries in Riven, we were once human. And humans are imperfect.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“I asked you to return,” Nara said. “Because I want to save you. I want to save your guides and your order. To keep Riven safe. In our folly, in our fear, we bound ourselves. I can no more leave this clearing than you, a spirit, can choose to cross back home.”
“Carver,” Selena said. “She’s manipulating you. I’ve seen it before. I’ve done it before.”
“Your friend is astute,” Nara said. “I do want something from you. I want you to go and find the other two. Bring them here. Together, the three of us can make Riven into what it needs to be. Can prevent this catastrophe and make it so that the guides never need die again.”
“That’s one hell of a promise,” I said.
“It is one I can keep,” Nara said. “Is it one you can afford to ignore?”
I glanced at Selena. Her mouth pursed, her eyes squinted at Nara. I’d been the subject of that scrutiny before. Had my soul weighed and measured. But it didn’t matter. We had come out here for one purpose; to try and find help for the doomed city and our friends who were, right at this moment, battling for their own survival. Even if Nara wasn’t giving us the whole truth, could we walk away?
“You said there are two others,” I asked. “Where are they?”
Nara moved over to her burning fire and grabbed the unlit bottom of one of the stalks of grain. Held the torch up high. Her lips moved, a silent whisper that I couldn’t make out. The flame at the top of the grain twisted, curling in on itself before launching out to the north and west. Back towards the city and then above it.
“Mali is the first,” Nara said. “You will find her playing with her creations. If there was any one of us that truly wanted to be a god, Mali was it.”
Once again Nara whispered to the stalk of grain. Once again the flame crawled in upon itself and shot out, south and west this time.
“Dolan is the second,” Nara said. “He should be as idle as ever. Caught up in a past he cannot return to.”
“And once we get the two of them, you’ll be able to work together?” Selena said. “You’ll be able to close the breaches?”
Nara gave a withered nod. I continued to get the sense that Nara hadn’t spoken with anyone other than me for years. Possibly decades. The sheer act of holding a conversation was a struggle for her.
“We will do more than close the breaches,” Nara said. “We will prevent them from ever happening again.”
“That sounds too good to be true,” I said.
“When you’re dealing with gods, that is often the case,” Nara said. “I suggest going to find Mali first. She will be the more difficult one, and you will need all your strength.”
Nara turned her back to us and walked into her hut. I watched her disappear and held a thousand questions on my tongue. If there was one thing I’d learned from Bryce and the other guides, it was that information often came according to the wishes of others, not my own.
“She showed us the way,” I said. “I guess we better start walking.”
“Wait a minute,” Selena replied. “We’re just going to follow her orders?”
“You have any better ideas?”
“We could get more information.” Selena looked towards the hut. “I get the feeling she’s not telling us everything.”
“She’s not telling the whole truth,” I said. “But I don’t think pushing her is going t
o get us a better answer.”
“Carver, she said the three of them created Riven. If that’s true, then why does she need us to do this? You don’t buy that nonsense about being bound, do you?”
I didn’t know what to do. Or know what to say. All at once the feeling of being trapped, being locked into Riven forever seem to compress around my mind and fracture into pieces. I was never leaving this place. Never seeing another sky that wasn’t gray, never actually breathing real air or drinking another cup of coffee. I’d gone from a world of order and laws, where reason ruled the land, to a world where the dead walked and mysterious figures claimed unimaginable power.
“Selena,” I said, wrapping her in a hug so suddenly that her eyes widened with surprise. “I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what other choices we have. If we turn our backs on this, then what else is there? What else do we do except fight and fight and fight until the Cycle claims our minds and turns us into nothing?”
“I...”
“We died, Selena. Our lives ended. And yet, somehow, we found each other here in this terrible place,” I said, without really knowing the words I was speaking. They rolled out one after another as though coming from instinct instead of my mind. “Riven is great and hideous, but it is all we have. I am willing to do anything we can to save it. Help me.”
I felt Selena’s arms wrap around me, return the hug. It was both ridiculous and utterly necessary for the two of us to hold ourselves close. I could not hear her heartbeat, because she had none. I didn’t feel the rise and fall of her lungs, because she wasn’t breathing. I didn’t feel the warmth of her body beneath the coat, because we were not warm. But I felt her love, and I embraced that.
A long moment later I released, stepped back and met Selena’s eyes. “Are you ready to go find a god?”