Silence

by Tyler Vance

  Suddenly, five blue-tinted balls of white light illuminated the pitch-black room, drifting around and casting a hazy, aqua shimmer on the grey, stone floor. They flared into being just long enough for Sheikoh to catch a glimpse of Camillio disappearing through an archway on the far side of the room with an ominous ripple. Sheikoh flinched in surprise. Then he shook his hair from his eyes.

  Sheikoh hadn’t seen it until the bulbs of light had floated into being. The granite archway was covered with intricate runes spider-webbing over its ancient surface. Wherever it led was shrouded in deep shadows, so dark that even the glowing balls of light couldn’t penetrate it.

  There was nowhere to go but forward. Sheikoh took a deep breath to steel himself and then strode across the room and through the archway. He expected some magical sensation, but he felt nothing noteworthy. He stepped through the pitch-black hallway and into the blinding glare of the next room.

  He was stopped cold by memory. His breath whooshed out in a strangled gasp.

  Four, identically stark-white walls imprisoned the room around him. The indelible blankness of his surroundings was a chilling reflection of the Transcendent Plane. Where he’d met the Sycrarian. He glanced down at Emili in his arms. He couldn’t help being a little relieved at the absence of the fires in her eyes.

  Sheikoh shook himself, annoyed at the irrationality. Across from him a bone-white desk grew seamlessly out of the floor. Behind it, lounging in a white throne, Camillio grinned at Sheikoh as though the Celestial expected him to react with delight. Sheikoh’s eyes met Camillio’s dark blue irises impassively, and he found himself repressing a tiny shiver.

  “This castle was made before history’s records, back in the time before the Intrasentient Empire. I believe that that was when the codex and amulet were created as well,” Camillio explained with excitement.

  “There was never a ‘before’ the Intrasentient Empire,” Sheikoh responded slowly. “It’s always just… been.”

  “I thought so too. Then…” Camillio told him. He cleared his throat and then swept a hand around the room. “During my travels, I chanced upon this.”

  The Celestial’s dark blue eyes sparkled with repressed revelation.

  “I explored these black-bricked rooms, back before I had renovated, and discovered books detailing the magics of another time. Some of the inscribed spells were more powerful and more dangerous than anything I had ever imagined. Miles-wide curses that remain active for centuries, hidden blood runes that can empower an ordinary man to the level of an android, as well as the lost rites to summon and bind the Sycrarian, I was in ecstasy.“

  His voice, which had slowly been growing in volume, dropped to a dramatic whisper.

  “And that was before I found this room.”

  “Do you see this around us? This room doesn’t exist in the same time as the real world. I believe that this is a doorway to the Transcendent Plane,” Camillio finished with excitement, staring at Sheikoh.

  “Seems like it, C, but you might want to be careful with this thing of yours,” Sheikoh cautioned.

  The excited Celestial waved his caution aside.

  Actually that wasn't totally correct.

  Sheikoh's eyes widened.

  The Celestial hadn't been dismissing his concerns; Camillio had been doing some magic.

  Beside him the ground bulged upwards. Sheikoh’s arms tightened around Emili's limp body, as he watched the lumps of white form themselves into something. A table staggered up onto four legs like a Swifthooves colt, smoothing itself out and then freezing still.

  At the end of it all, it looked strangely normal.

  “Put Emili down there,” laughed Camillio. “Even someone of your remarkable attributes eventually tires.”

  “If you only knew…” Sheikoh murmured under his breath. He was way past exhaustion. The realization crashed down onto his shoulder and eyes with almost unbearable weight. With a yawn, Sheikoh gently rested Emili’s unconscious body on the surface of the table. Then he realized something.

  He wheeled around to stare at the Celestial in shock.

  “You’re surprised that the amulet didn’t cancel out the magic of this place?” Camillio guessed with a wry smile.

  “No, I’m surprised your eyes didn’t go all blue and creepy,” Sheikoh responded, flinching around the last word.

  Camillio threw back his head and laughed. Sheikoh joined him after a moment, his giggle cut with unease. All the while, he watched Camillio warily. He hadn’t been joking. And he’d never seen the imperious Celestial act this way.

  “My eyes glow when I draw energy into myself,” Camillio explained with a laugh in his voice. “I didn’t have to just then. Here we’re immersed within willing Celestial Energy. One doesn’t have to be a Celestial to manipulate pockets of the Transcendent Plane. I would’ve thought that you’d have realized that after your own time in this dimension.” He grinned. “Why don’t you try?”

  Nonplussed, Sheikoh looked around and then experimentally pointed a finger at a wall to their left. His brow crinkled with concentration, and the wall rippled like the surface of a pond in response. Globs of white goo floated out of it like a slow-motion splash of water. Camillio watched the droplets, his face lined with interest. He turned back to Sheikoh.

  “Why don’t you make yourself a seat?” Camillio asked him.

  Sheikoh grinned in response, willing the globs of white into a sphere that floated just in front of the Celestial’s desk. A marble-white snake whipped around his waist and jerked him into the glob’s center, exactly as it’d happened in his own time in the Transcendent Plane.

  Unlike the vivid scene from before, the center of this blob was just a boring white. Sheikoh believed that it was because that horrible meaning no longer had any hold on him, now that he’d brought Emili back. Sheikoh let the material melt from around him, dripping over his rising body into the form of an armchair. He molded it to resemble the one he’d sat in his first time meeting the Celestial across from him. Camillio applauded his show.

  “Pretty sick stuff,” Sheikoh admitted.

  “Indeed,” Camillio grinned back. Then he cleared his throat. “And now, the reason I brought you up here.”

  Curious, Sheikoh waited.

  “The empire isn’t forever Sheikoh. It isn’t absolute and it doesn’t deal in justice. The empire left both you and me to wither within the chains of captivity,” Camillio murmured, piercing Sheikoh with an intense gaze. “You and I are the victims of a broken system. We can change things to how they should be, with the Transcendent Amulet and the powers of the Sycrarian.”

  What has this dude been smoking?

  Rebellion against the Intrasentient Empire was futile, everybody knew that. It was common knowledge that the Intrasentient Line was invincible. Sure, individuals could die, but in times of coup and peril Intrasentient’s last surviving heir gained their birthright, the immortality that’d held the Empire together for 10,000 years.

  Camillio read his expression well enough.

  “The Celestial didn’t perform the magic upon the Intrasentient’s bloodline. That power is far beyond even the entire Enclaves’ combined ability,” Camillio excitedly told Sheikoh. “Their immortality seems to be a magic above the Celestial’s, along with the Transcendent Codex, the Transcendent Amulet and this very house.”

  “No Celestial could ever hope to match these feats; their power is inhuman. It stands to reason than that these artifacts are of the Sycrarian peoples’. And now, thanks to you we have the powers of a Sycrarian within our grasp.”

  “So you’re saying that the Sycrarian created the codex and amulet, the only things that made it possible for us to control them?” Sheikoh wondered aloud. “Tad unrealistic, mate, and what about that Celestial Crescent of theirs? The one whose orders they follow? Who created that?”

  Camillio thought to himself for a few moments.

  “That’s a good point,” he admitted slowly. “I seem to have let excitement get ahead of me.�
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  “No worries,” Sheikoh yawned. “Happens to the best of us.”

  Camillio stared at him for a few moments. Sheikoh eyed Camillio back, trying to work out what was going through his head. What was he getting at?

  “My original point remains, however. There is a power that is greater than the entirety Celestial Enclave, and I intend to show them that. And I want you to help me, Sheikoh.”

  “Honestly, I’m not much of a revolutionary type. Afraid to disappoint, mate,” Sheikoh responded uneasily. Camillio Tyche’s intense gaze didn’t even waver at the rejection.

  “You have no idea how unique you are in the entire world,” Camillio told him simply.

  “Right back at you,” Sheikoh replied lightly, raising his eyebrows.

  Camillio Tyche laughed, and his slightly-manic looking, twilight eyes held Sheikoh’s. The resolve in their depths was unwavering. He noted that the Celestial’s hands were taunt and veined.

  This was starting to creep him out.

  “From the outside in the life of a Celestial seems glorious, doesn’t it? Wealth… Prestige… Power… that’s everything the common man sees,” Camillio said out of the blue. “However, this that isn’t always the case. To live on the inside of the enclave is the same as staring through the bars of the Solitarium, condemned without trial. The life of a Celestial is the life of a slave. You lost a few minutes of yourself to my magic and that felt horrible, didn’t it?”

  Sheikoh’s eyes hardened.

  “Imagine losing a decade.”

  They stared at one another.

  “When I was twelve year old, so very long ago,” Camillio murmured, seemingly lost in reverie. “I was confirmed Celestial.”

  “I was excited at the possibilities ahead as a train carried me from Dario in the distant region of Chorz, all the way to Intrasentient City. I remember looking at all the enormous skyscrapers and the monocled, suited people riding around on made-up Swifthooves with wonder. Coming from a village of solar farmers, I had never seen such opulence.” His tone was without inflection.

  “The train dropped me off at the station and two Century arrived to escort me to my carriage. I thought that the escort was a simple statement of my newfound prestige, rather, than the truth. That their duty was assuring the emperor that no young Celestial escape. They brought me to the Celestial Enclave, and then shoved me into a blacksteel room. The first time that I met Zul,” Camillio’s voice twisted when he said the name. “The council member shoved a burning hunk of metal into my chest. The mark of restraint… It was a more painful experience than any since. Though my… relationship…so to speak…with Ternate Zul… Let’s just say that it didn’t improve from there…”

  Camillio trailed off.

  “The mark of restraint was conditioned so to make disobedience of any orders given from an Imperial superior impossible. For many power-mad Celestial the mark is a necessary evil. In my case however… something about my pain that day… attracted Zul’s attention. He would-

  Camillio choked on some desperate emotion, opening and closing his mouth like he couldn’t breathe. His desperate eyes flickered blue.

  Suddenly Sheikoh was hurtling through the Celestial’s memories. His awareness flew through eleven sadistic, subhuman years of constant enslavement to the wrinkled hands and lusting face of Ternate Zul. Sheikoh’s jaw clenched with glaring hatred, mixed in with helpless pity as he watched the Celestial Councilman force a young Camillio to do unspeakable things. The flickering memories of abuse and depravity rent at Sheikoh’s heart.

  Then they landed, stretching out the life-changing day that Sanatous had been called to the enclave for an inquiry on his exploration of forbidden avenues of magic. Sheikoh watched the white, dread-locked Celestial admit to their accusations boldly. One of the council members brought up Sanatous efforts to artificially create Celestial.

  Sanatous answered that he’d managed to achieve the end and went on to outline a process in which a woman with child could converted, provided one cut certain blood runes into her skin that would force the woman’s obedience as well attempt to merge her life-force with her unborn child’s. According to Sanatous, the child’s death was certain and the mother’s was almost certainly likely.

  Sheikoh’s thoughts were ripped through with the memories of the runed women ‘Celestial’ at Randel Sanatous’s house, the surprise on one of their dead faces. The last one had tried so desperately to survive.

  He’d had no idea…

  The memories juddered to another moment. Ternate Zul ranted furiously, pacing circles around a room that was arranged like a torture chamber. He stood over the now-older body of Camillio that was chained to a silversteel bedframe and bleeding. Sheikoh felt Camillio’s hope as Zul mockingly described the amulet that Sanatous had professed nullified the effects of magic. Camillio realized in that moment that the amulet would be his release from the horrible prison of Zul’s unceasing attention. While Ternate Zul took out a perverse, indignant fury on the younger Celestial, Camillio Tyche dreamed of freedom.

  More years, more horrible, depraved atrocities flashed through Sheikoh’s head. He watched Camillio age before his eyes. Sheikoh found that he hungered for the sight Zul’s blood almost as Zul had lusted for Camillio’s. His eyes tinted the deranged Zul an eternal haze of scorching red. Sheikoh wanted to kill Zul himself; that piece of subhuman filth deserved a slow death by torture.

  Then the memory paused one more time. One more night. The night that Camillio had managed to wrest a mission that brought him to the city of Interium, where Randel Sanatous and the man’s rumored amulet had been exiled to.

  Camillio had arranged his break-in at a time that Sanatous was in a meeting with Cylium Vest. He crept into the Celestial’s house. Sheikoh noticed that Sanatous’s home was arranged almost exactly as it had been when he’d visited the man.

  After several hours’ worth of spells and incantations, Camillio teased his way through the runes and pentacles guarding Sanatous’s secrets. He slipped through the house invisible and stumbled upon a room where two pregnant women were chained to the metal walls. Runed pentacles etched red-rimmed scabs into their skins. With a jolt of horror, Sheikoh recognized one of the Celestial. He felt sick. Her limp brown hair and patched skin was dappled with sweat. As she lay on a blanket of coiled chains, her eyes wildly flared between their normal state and a brilliant poison-green.

  Sheikoh’s perception was dragged back into the hall, following as the Celestial’s search of the rooms. Finally Camillio found Sanatous’s office, where the Transcendent Amulet hung within one of Sanatous’s many bookcases. Desperate for release, Camillio threw caution to the winds and ripped the amulet off of its pedestal, tossing it over his head and running back out into the night.

  He didn’t slow until Sanatous’s house of horrors was out of sight.

  Memories flickered again, skipping ahead to the vision of Camillio walking through the doors of Councilman Zul’s room. It was the middle of that same black night. Camillio walked up to a sleeping Zul and stopped. His hands balled into fists as he looked down at the elder Celestial. His face burned into an expression of unfiltered loathing.

  As if he sensed the peril, Zul woke up. The elder Celestial sat up rubbing his eyes and asked how Camillio had gotten through the rune lock on his door. Camillio ignored the man’s question. Sheikoh could feel his euphoria at that simple defiance.

  Then Camillio lifted a dagger and plunged it in the heart of the contemptuous man who’d invaded his every aspect of being. Blood splashed red droplets onto Zul’s sheets as the Celestial garbled his wordless shock. The decrepit Celestial shook violently, coughing up blood that streamed down his chest. After a moment, Zul fell back with sightless eyes.

  Camillio, wearing a pair of ice-cold eyes, ripped the dagger out of Zul’s lifeless body stared at the corpse for a moment. Then his expression twisted with vindication and hatred, and he thrust the knife’s red-stained blade into the Celestial’s chest again and again. By
the time he’d stopped, Zul’s chamber was stained blood red, and the Councilman’s mutilated body could have been that of a butchered Swifthooves for all the features anyone could make out.

  Suddenly Sheikoh blasted back into his body. He stumbled backwards, reeling with revelation, and stared at the Celestial with new eyes. Camillio didn’t seem to be able to meet his gaze however. The Celestial went on with his story.

  “They never traced the murder back to Zul’s young apprentice. The other Council Members believed the killing to have been one of theirs,” Camillio explained coldly to the white surface of the desk he sat at, his voice breaking on the word ‘apprentice’.

  Man… I thought I had a hard life… Sheikoh thought to himself numbly with a shudder at the horrors Zul had inflicted. He had no idea how to respond to the Celestial’s life-shattering confession.

  Camillio took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “There was one Celestial that I trusted,” Camillio continued, more controlled. “I loved her, and I thought that she loved me back. One night I confessed everything. Her aura flickered with disgust, and I suddenly realized that she intended to turn me in to the council. There was nothing to do but run away.

  “While she watched, I reached beneath my bed and pulled out the amulet and knife that I’d killed Ternate Zul with. I tossed the amulet over my head and cut the mark of restraint out of my chest. With the dagger that I killed Zul with,” Camillio explained tonelessly. “She ran away screaming.”

  Then Camillio opened his purple, jacket to the side. Sheikoh gasped. His eyes were instantly struck by the mottled, baseball-sized scar over the Celestial’s heart, sharply contrasted against all of Camillio Tyche’s jewels and finery. His horror traced the jagged scars winding over Camillio’s torso like veins. Apparently the mark that Camillio ripped out had wound all throughout his chest. Sheikoh met the Celestial’s eyes with shock in his own. He could almost feel the awful wound.

  “I spent the next few years on the run, amassing fortunes upon fortunes, as well as unearthing talented individuals - the others here, with the blood runes – while waiting for the day I finally break and remake the Celestial Enclave. No one will ever have endure a slavery of their mind again,” Camillio told Sheikoh with conviction. “But you’re a key player. More than that, I need you. I promise, if you join me, you’ll never want for money again. You’ll always have a safe haven here.”