Maygar, Lily and Angeline all looked too stunned to have a reaction yet.
As for me, I felt like someone had punched me in the chest.
It wasn’t because the information felt new to me.
It was because it didn’t feel new at all.
58
CAVE PAINTING
IT WAS LIKE jigsaw puzzle pieces, is all I could think.
It was like mosaic chips, or paint drops inside a broader landscape. It was like excerpts, lines or verses of the same story, woven into a single tapestry, a single, long-running storyline or epic poem with multiple threads and subplots.
Kali’s prescient visions held one part of that story.
Tarsi gave us another with her magic cakes.
Now, in our last hours, Max and his human seers held the third part.
It made sense in a way, that each race would contribute a piece to that final painting of how things would end. It made sense that we would all need to come together to see the picture it formed, to decide unanimously, as a group, to follow the map left for us––whether by gods, our collective ancestors, angels, or just the wheels of time repeating their slow-moving patterns.
Revik and I got our first glimpse on the night of our wedding.
We hadn’t talked about it much, even the morning after that night.
We never really sat down and formally dissected the message left for us in the mystical, hallucinogenic cake Tarsi made especially for us. As far as I knew, neither of us ever shared that vision with anyone else either, in all the time since. We hadn’t even shared it with Kali, after she and my father shared her vision of the end with us.
Neither of us could exactly pretend we didn’t see and feel the resonance between those two pieces of the puzzle, though.
I hadn’t wanted to see it.
I was pretty sure Revik hadn’t wanted to see it, either.
We’d both known death was a strong possibility for the two of us all along.
We’d known that even before our wedding night.
We’d known it since we first knew the roles we were supposed to play in the end. We talked about it even before we knew Revik was Syrimne, when we were alone together in that cabin, before Terian ripped me away from Revik and took me to D.C.
I think the first time Revik joked about it openly was when we saw our names on that Displacement List, and there was no mention of “Second Wave” by either of our names.
None of the Four were marked as having a role past the First Wave of the Displacement. That wasn’t true of most of our friends, including my brother, all of whom had “First wave - Second” written by their names.
Out of the Four, only Revik’s was different, in that it said “Pre-wave - First,” presumably a reference to his role as Syrimne during World War I.
Maygar, Jon, Wreg, Balidor, Stanley, Loki, Gina, Declan, Angeline, Dante, even Kali and Uye––all the humans and the overwhelming majority of seers whose names I’d seen on the Displacement list––all were slotted for “First Wave - Second.”
Revik and I weren’t.
Even back then, even in those early days in New York, there was no indication we’d live past this part of the story.
Anyway, the Myths told us that much already, if only by omission.
So did the religious commentaries, history books and oral histories.
You never heard stories in the holy books about the Bridge and the Sword after the war. They were never mentioned, not once, in the period following any of the documented historical Displacements. They were never referred to, even in passing, as helping out in the new world that followed the cataclysm.
You never heard about them being present when laws were passed.
They weren’t consulted when religious forms got tweaked, when histories got recorded, when cities were built, when technology was developed. You never heard about their children. You never heard about their grandchildren. They were never featured in any way, in any of the stories that came after, when the races buckled down to the hard work of rebuilding following the cataclysm.
Their friends and relatives never even recorded their deaths.
According to all of the great texts, the Bridge and Sword just… vanished.
Even knowing all that, Revik and I remained in denial.
We both, separately and together, held out hope of someday having a normal life together. In our more indulgent moments, we would talk about what that life would look like. We’d paint pictures for one another, getting into absurd levels of detail about things we knew nothing about, things that might not even exist by the time the war finished.
Even so, our individual visions of that future together were surprisingly similar.
They also remained surprisingly consistent over time, not changing much over the years, even in the particulars.
We’d both always wanted more or less the same thing.
A family life. A life of simple, practical things.
More than anything, a life of enjoying and battling the little things, of facing off with only the normal run of complications, griefs, endings and beginnings, unexpected setbacks and triumphs that most people encountered in a single life.
An insignificant life, we would say––to everyone who wasn’t us.
After everything we’d been through, together and separately, I think we both kind of hoped we’d get that life as a reward.
We talked about building a house together somewhere in the mountains, or maybe by the sea, or maybe on a mountain overlooking the sea. It would be surrounded by trees and grass and some kind of fresh water creek or waterfall, a nice quiet spot where no one was trying to kill us, where we could raise our children and maybe run a small ranch together.
Revik could breed horses. He could hunt and farm, study commentaries on the side, meditate, build things with his hands, learn to cook, Barrier-travel like Tarsi.
I would paint and draw.
Maybe I’d even work some kind of job––something new, something I’d never done before. Medicine, maybe. Or maybe I’d do infiltration work, or learn how to make those amazingly detailed constructs, like what Vash used to make in the Pamir.
We’d visit our friends.
We’d visit Maygar, Jon and Wreg.
We’d visit Loki and Gina, Torek, Declan, Balidor, Poresh, Yumi, Chinja, Hondo, Jax and Holo. We’d bring our kids, food we’d cooked, picnic baskets and presents. We’d have big parties and invite them all over, get drunk and race bare-back on our horses. We’d have a huge cookout after and everyone would sleep on the floor or end up in the barns or out on the grass.
We’d take turns educating our kids.
We’d go swimming and fishing and explore on horseback. Revik could teach me how to track and hunt. I could teach him how to paint, or maybe he’d write a book.
We’d fuck a lot.
We’d fuck a lot, a lot––all the time, whenever we could––whenever we could steal a few minutes alone.
We’d make up for years of separations and misunderstandings and enforced celibacy and pain. Before we’d had Lily, Revik used to joke there’d be more fucking than actual work for a few years, apart from the bare minimum we needed to do just to stay alive.
The image was so clear in my head, whenever I let myself go there.
I always figured, it had to be real, right?
To be so clear, so completely tangible, specific, consistent, mundane and perfect, there had to be something real behind it.
That’s what I told myself.
After Tawa and Max took us into that cave, that certainty faded, though.
It grew so dim in the light of that golden-painted sun, all that remained was the faint flavor of our beautiful dream.
“THERE ARE PAINTINGS,” Max said right off, the instant we were all looking at him. He glanced at Revik, nodding his head at him pointedly. “Very old. On the walls.”
He motioned sweepingly around at the rock walls.
“These images, they are all ove
r these lands. Some inside these caves. Some in other places, other caves.” His dark eyes met mine. “The pictures are all the same.”
Turning his head, he gazed at Revik a second time.
Studying his height, his hair, his build, he nodded, once, as if to himself.
He looked back at me.
“Come, Atsiniltłʼish Wo-tkanh. We’ll show you. Big one is in here.” He jerked his chin towards the opening of the Barrier door, which now only shone faintly with blue-green light. “Come on. Inside. You and your husband both. I will show you.”
I gave Balidor a puzzled look. He frowned in return.
What did he call me? I asked in his mind.
It is Navajo, I think, Balidor sent back. I heard them speak those words before. Torek said it means “Lightning Bearer,” or maybe “Holder of Light.” It’s what they call you.
Blinking at that, I looked back at Max.
The gray-haired human was motioning for me to follow him inside the smaller cave that was the Barrier door. When he turned away and began to walk through the narrow opening, Tawa followed him wordlessly, a handheld organic that looked about twenty years old wrapped around his tanned wrist.
As they disappeared through the opening, Balidor, turned, giving me a questioning look when I didn’t move at first to follow.
After an exchanged look with Revik, I realized I had no choice.
I also realized why I was dragging my feet.
Without a word, I followed the retreating backs of the two humans into the cave.
Revik followed close behind.
Behind him, Balidor, Jon, Wreg, Cass and Feigran followed.
It wasn’t the first time I’d ventured inside the crystal-lined opening to the Barrier door. It wasn’t even the second time. Tarsi and I had gone inside when we first arrived down here. I went in again with Revik when he first came down to join us.
We’d gone in to feel it, to look for clues on how to open it, to get a sense of what it even was, or where it might lead. All three of us scanned the cave thoroughly, taking snapshots of the energy currents and the walls, trying to learn everything we could about how the mechanism worked. Revik also wanted a sense of the differences between this door––a presumably living, untampered-with door, in its natural state––and the door we’d seen in the Vatican, filled with Menlim’s organic machine.
In any case, I didn’t remember any paintings inside.
I thought I’d looked at those walls pretty thoroughly, and I didn’t remember so much as a scratch mark on any part of the surface.
Like the edges of the tall, slit-like opening in the rock, I remembered the inner walls being covered in tiny crystals, most of them purple and white when dormant.
I remembered feeling really weird inside.
When I walked in the first time, it felt almost like being drunk, like being thrown into the middle of a mild twisting vortex that wanted to pull me off my feet and spin me around. The sensation both unnerved me and made me want to laugh.
In high school I might have just sprawled out on the floor on my back and closed my eyes, let those strange lights spin me into an altered state.
Despite how thorough we tried to be in our assessment of the womb-like cave, both times we entered that crystal fissure we’d opted not to stay inside for very long.
Ten… fifteen minutes tops… per entry.
When we started the process of actually trying to open the door, Tarsi warned us we had better be outside. She said if we weren’t, we’d be pulled through the portal the instant we had any success. She also noted wryly that we’d likely be the only ones to pass through that portal, or any other portal on this world, if that was the case.
For the same reason, I’d been a little nervous about getting too close since we’d been flooding all of our living light into the crystal structures making up the door and walls.
Now I followed Tawa and Max warily, making my way past the glowing crystals embedded in the dark rock of the tall doorway.
I crossed the threshold of the oval opening, and immediately, my light got pulled into a twisting feeling of spinning––a hell of a lot stronger than what I remembered from before.
I blinked, stumbling in my step slightly, just enough that Revik caught my arm, moving up on me from behind. I don’t think I was in real danger of falling, not given how much light still coursed through my aleimic veins, or how granite-like my body still felt, but I leaned into Revik’s light and body anyway, walking close when he continued to offer his arm to steady me.
We reached the middle of the cave.
I found myself thinking again that it really wasn’t that big, maybe the size of our bathroom in that penthouse in New York.
The crystals still glowed.
In here, they seemed to glow brighter, maybe from the intensity of the aleimic lights swirling around us. Those lights felt like shimmering waves, flowing over me, sparking off my aleimi, rippling my balance, pulling me faintly out of my body. They swam back and forth like liquid in a shaken bottle, a to and fro movement that made me slightly motion-sick.
Here, too, those lights seemed to pulse organically, like blood pumping through tiny capillaries and veins, or maybe like a dragon’s breath, inhaling and exhaling.
The whole cave felt alive.
It felt like being inside the heart of a giant animal.
Realizing my mind was following those currents too, struggling to move in a linear fashion, I turned, looking at Tawa and Max, who were also looking at me.
They still seemed to see me as the leader, somehow.
Maybe someone told them I was.
In any case, they both seemed primarily focused on me, not on Balidor or Cass, who followed us inside, nor on Feigran, Jon or Wreg, who’d also ventured inside and were looking around in a kind of dazed awe.
The two tribal leaders didn’t even seem to see Revik that way, as a leader, although I noted them watching him too.
“It is here, Atsiniltłʼish Wo-tkanh,” Tawa said.
I glanced around at the pulsing walls.
I still didn’t see anything remotely resembling a painting, not even an abstract one. All there was were those breathing crystals, glowing faintly with living light.
“Where?” Clearing my throat, I made my voice more polite. “I don’t see it, good cousins. Could you show me?”
Max pointed up.
Frowning slightly, I barely paused before tilting my head, lifting my chin to gaze up at the ceiling of the cave.
Once I had, I felt my heart stop in my chest. Dizziness overcame me for real as I stared up, and once more, Revik’s fingers tightened on my arm.
Silence fell on our group as every seer and human stared up at the painting on the high ceiling.
It was so high, I must have missed it before.
That, or maybe it was simply too dark to see without the pulsing and glowing crystals breathing around us. In either case, the image stood out sharply now, reflected in that glowing light. A paler, more golden light also seemed to come from the painting itself.
A man stood there.
It wasn’t a crude scrawl by cave-dwelling humans using sticks and grass and bare fingers, like what I’d halfway expected. It didn’t look like the usual aboriginal paintings on walls where handprints bled red and brown dyes down rough, curved walls.
This painting was so detailed, it looked almost three-dimensional.
It reminded me of paintings I’d seen on the walls of the Pamir, both in the Barrier with Tarsi and in person when we lived there briefly to escape the Dreng. If anything, this one was better preserved. I didn’t know if that meant it wasn’t painted as long ago, or if its pristine condition had something to do with the energies inside the crystal cave.
Either way, the level of detail was unnerving.
The man depicted there hit me like a punch to the gut.
Long, black hair whipped around his shoulders and neck. His back stood to us, to the floor of the cave, and he wore clothes that we
re eerily modern-looking––a black coat, black pants, heavy boots. He could have been wearing the same combat gear all of us wore at that very moment. He could have been wearing the same organic anti-grav boots most of us had on our feet. Around the painted man, dust clouds, boulders, rocks and trees flew up into the air, as if the earth were breaking up around him.
The man in the painting was facing the sun.
This wasn’t the sun I knew.
It wasn’t a sun distant in the sky.
The sun in the painting was enormous, filling all of the space around him, outlining him in gold, blue and orange light. It flared out in front of him like it was about to swallow him whole, and maybe the world with him.
I stared up at it, at the glittering gold and blue stones making up the sun’s arcing flames.
I couldn’t see the man’s face. All they showed was that long hair, the broad shoulders, his tall form, the long coat he wore.
Even so, there was absolutely zero doubt in my mind who it was.
Turning, I looked up at my husband.
He looked down at me.
When both of us looked at Tawa and Max, they were looking at Revik, too.
It was pretty clear who they thought the painting depicted, as well.
59
BRIDGE OF LIGHT
FOR A LONG moment, no one inside the crystal cave spoke at all.
Then a shout rose outside the cave opening, a voice I recognized.
Those of us inside barely paused long enough to glance at one another. Then Revik turned, moving fast as he vacated the crystal cave, disappearing into the light shining through the narrow opening. All the rest of us followed, moving just as fast.
When we emerged into the main cave, the one lit by yisso torches and filled with the dust-smudged, sweaty faces of our friends, they were all staring at us. Most of them probably had no idea what we’d been doing in there, and anyway, it no longer mattered.
I didn’t really want to tell them what we’d seen.
We were out of time, and it wouldn’t even reassure them.
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