The Never Tilting World

by Rin Chupeco

  By the fifth day we had reached the end of those endless plains.

  It was Arjun who was driving, and he halted the rig, standing to get a better look. He whistled softly. “Look at that.”

  Puzzled, I stood up beside him. Not far from where we stood was a series of small dwellings scattered haphazardly before us.

  “A village.” Arjun was stunned. “It’s a village.”

  But something else took my breath away entirely. “Look beyond them,” I whispered, pointing at the two mountains looming above us—no, one mountain, I realized, split down its very middle to become two. The dark clouds spiraled in between those peaks, funneling down into a strange break in the ground—a wide canyon that went on for thousands of miles on either side, encased in heavy smoke and a thick fog of darkness.

  “The Great Abyss, Arjun. We’re finally here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lan the Captive

  “WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING,” Noelle said quietly, without moving her lips enough to attract attention from our jailers.

  I’d worked and fought alongside her long enough to know what something meant: overwhelm Odessa’s followers, knock out their leaders, take back control of the expedition. Strategy-wise, it was a viable plan. It would take years for the newly gated to gain the experience necessary to defeat us, even outnumbered as we were.

  I shook my head slightly, and Noelle’s frown grew.

  “I know you don’t want to go against Odessa, Lan, but we can’t let her continue. She’s just as inexperienced as the rest of them.”

  “You forget we’re talking about more than just a mutiny.” I stared pointedly down at the ground. Odessa had grown more crops to feast on, and they’d ripened in the space of a few hours, without the need for sunlight or water to flourish. What the rest failed to see was the slowly rotting ground underneath the harvest, partly covered by the newly sprung grass.

  “Odessa is”—the words stuttered in my throat, but I swallowed hard, again and again, until I mustered enough strength to form the words through my grief—“dangerous. The galla have warped her mind. And then there are the shadow creatures to worry about. To go against her is to go against them, and I’m not sure we can fight them all off.” I could overpower Odessa the same way I had in the past—by using my ability to render her unconscious. But I had no way of knowing if her control over the shadows would waver. Without her influence, they could attack the camp, and I couldn’t risk that.

  “So we do nothing?”

  “We do nothing for now. Odessa shows no inclination to do the other Devoted any injury. Let’s not give her more reasons to.”

  “No talking!” Bergen said sharply, poking at my side with a stick.

  We were moving again. The shades of Cathei, Graham, Salleemae, and Nebly continued to follow quietly in our wake, but accompanying them were the strange creatures of the wildlands, shadows that shifted in and out of vision. Odessa’s new Devoted were no longer afraid; they treated these monsters as proof that she was their true leader. I couldn’t blame them. Their survival was now tied to Odessa’s ability to carry them through the wildlands safely; it was in their best interest to believe.

  No other beasts had confronted us on our journey so far, and it looked like we were reaching the end. The changes were gradual, but I noticed soon enough that the sky was beginning to lighten, color leaching through the clouds more vividly than I had ever seen before. The endless plains ended at the foot of the broken mountain, its peaks shrouded in even more darkness and fog as a stark contrast to the heavens’ now-softer hues.

  I started to shake without realizing it, until Noelle placed her hand on my shoulder and slowly squeezed.

  My fellow rangers had died under the mountain’s shadow.

  “We’ll make camp for now,” Odessa said, apparently unimpressed by the sight. “And enter the mountain in the nightspan after next.”

  After what had happened to Holsett, the Devoted were watched at all times. Their hands were still bound, though they could walk on their own. Janella had assumed leadership of the Devoted and responsibility for the prisoners, with Odessa’s approval. Asteria’s followers talked very little, though Gracea’s cajoling and threats more than made up for their silence, quieting down only after Andre cuffed her on the back of the head hard enough to draw blood. As odious as Gracea had been to me in the last few weeks, I saw no difference between their treatment of her and her previous treatment of them.

  I was treated far better than the rest of the Devoted, though I was closely watched when Odessa wasn’t around. The goddess frequently insisted that I be invited to her tent for company, and she would keep up constant chatter about our journey and speculation about what we might see upon reaching Brighthenge.

  The conversations were not always pleasant. Every nightspan found her in worse shape than the one before, and it became clear that she wasn’t sleeping. Dark circles formed under her eyes, and her behavior grew even more erratic. That someone from within the camp might come along and usurp her authority became a growing obsession she felt she needed to defend against; sometimes she would accuse me of preparing to betray her, only to become apologetic and tearful a few seconds later, begging forgiveness for ever doubting me.

  She said nothing about Holsett’s death, acted like nothing had changed between us. She talked about finding a way to change her mother’s mind, finding a way to continue our relationship without interference. I said relatively little, allowed her the fantasy. Whatever her mood, she made no move to touch me like she had in the past.

  The galla had corrupted her. I repeated that over and over in the solace of my mind. The galla had corrupted her, and Odessa wasn’t herself. I was afraid of what might happen when we finally reached the Abyss—what would the galla demand of her there? What more could they ask of her?

  And the closer we drew to the Abyss, the more effort I had to exert to keep myself from falling apart. As destructive as our relationship was becoming, at least her nearness chased away the nightmares that threatened to overwhelm me.

  She sent for me again the next nightspan, another invitation to have dinner with her, and as always I obeyed without protest.

  “We’re close,” she told me, smiling, pushing her fresh vegetables around in her bowl. “So close I can practically feel the energies spilling out of the chasm. Don’t you feel it? So much power, running through the breach? Will I see the seventh and final galla there, do you think? What will it offer me this time around? Surely there is a reason they allow me this much strength, this much control over their creatures.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m sorry I have to keep you under watch until then,” she continued like I had spoken. “I have to look impartial. You’re a Devoted in name only, but the rest of my followers don’t make that distinction.” She smiled sympathetically at me. “I know this is the most difficult leg of the journey for you. I wish I knew how to make this easier for you.”

  Reject that last galla, I thought. Give up all the powers you’ve accumulated, and return to being the Odessa I know and love. “You can’t, Your Holiness.”

  She frowned. “My name is Odessa. Must we go back to being so formal? Tomorrow will be the most difficult, I think. I may wield an army of galla, but there could be other surprises waiting here. I’d like to figure out more about this mysterious portal that allowed you to return to Aranth. Janella and the others had been concocting theories, and some sound unbelievable, but after everything I’ve seen out here, anything seems possible.”

  She abandoned her bowl to pace the length of the tent. “I’ve stopped sleeping altogether, you know,” she admitted softly. “Every time I try to close my eyes, something tells me to remain awake, to be vigilant. I’m not foolish enough to trust the galla just because they’ve given me power. I don’t need to sleep to have waking nightmares. Nightmares where the shadows will attack if I allow my control to slip just a little. Nightmares where they consume the whole camp. I don’t wan
t that to happen. I refuse to let you witness another massacre when I know I can make a difference. When everyone else is counting on me.

  “I tried to grow more food earlier today, for everyone. But the ground refused. It told me I could only poison it the once.” She laughed, a curiously high-pitched sound. “In every land I will ever walk, the harvests shall grow for me once, and then never again. Do you know how I suffer, knowing that the Earth rejects me even when I strive to save it? No, it is not the galla’s fault. No, not their fault. It is the rules of the ritual, is all. Only the rules.

  “You understand that, don’t you?” she asked, turning to me in appeal. “I work so hard to make sure no one else has to die out here. I failed Cathei and Salleemae and Nebly, though not completely. They’re still with us. All I need is something to bring them back completely; then I won’t have failed at all. You understand that, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, shaken, for lack of anything better to say, watching with horror as Odessa slowly came undone before my eyes.

  “Mother never thought I would be competent enough. That’s why she imprisoned me in the Spire all this time, and never gave me a chance to prove my worth. She only thought me important when the time came to complete the Banishing. How foolish I’ve been, to believe her! Mother couldn’t do it on her own. She needed my strength, my skill. I could have completed the Banishing all on my own, but for years she had me believe that I was weaker than her. That I wasn’t as important!” Her hand whipped through the air, and her bowl broke. I started, but she didn’t even notice.

  “I’ll make her see,” she seethed, staring at nothing, her hands balled with patterns of Air still spinning around her fists, seeking out another target. “I’ll show her, and I’ll show everyone. I’ll undo the Breaking and turn everything back to the way it was. To the way it should be.”

  I wet my lips, trying to find words to pacify her, and momentarily coming up with nothing. “Your Holiness . . .”

  “It’s Odessa!” she shouted. The whole tent shuddered. “Why won’t you call me by my name?!”

  “Odessa,” I responded quickly. “My love.” She calmed down visibly, a small smile on her face at the endearment, and my heart hurt. The girl before me wasn’t the Odessa I loved. How could I bring that Odessa back? “I believe you’ll find a way to heal the world. I have no doubts about that. But even goddesses need sleep. Or you’ll be in no shape to enter Brighthenge tomorrow.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Every time I try, I know they’ll find a way to break free. They’re always whispering, taunting me in my mind, telling me that I am not strong enough. They all wait, you know. Just waiting for me to make a mistake so they can attack. The galla wait for me to weaken, to lose my grip on them. Gracea waits too, watching for a weakness in my armor so she can take back leadership. Mother waits, because she always waits.”

  “Gracea knows she’s been defeated, Your Ho—Odessa. She won’t escape.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said bleakly. “How far can I trust my own faithful, Lan? They may not have sworn to serve Mother with the same fervor as the Devoted have, but they turned against her all the same. If I could lure them away with honeyed words, then what would stop them from turning against me, toward someone who carries speech more sugared than mine? Even Noelle, who I thought served me out of friendship and respect, thought it would be easy to rise against me.”

  Her eyes softened when she gazed back at me. “You’re the only one I can trust,” she confided, settling down beside me. “You knew me when I wasn’t a goddess, when I was just that odd girl who read romances. Do you remember? You thought I was a merchant’s girl, a girl who never carried the weight of the world on her shoulders, but you loved me all the same. There is no one else here who could say that—that they thought I was unimportant, and loved me in spite of it.”

  “Odessa.”

  “Maybe you should call me Ame. It reminds me of better times. Oh sweet Mother, Lan. I wish we could go back to those days.”

  “Odessa, please. Get some rest.” Sometimes I wished we could go back, too. But I didn’t want someone that Odessa pretended to be; I just wanted Odessa. But not like this, either.

  Her expression changed, grew frightening. It was almost like a devil looked out from behind her eyes. “Why? So you can ally them against me, to destroy me when I’m at my most vulnerable? Is that what you really want to do, Lan? Play with my feelings only to betray me in the end? Is that what they’re telling you to do? Is that what Gracea ordered you to do?”

  “Odessa!” It was so hard to do this—to beg her every night, trying to find the girl behind the growing madness. “Odessa, please! You know I would never do that!”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry. Why did I say that? You have no idea how hard it is for me, Lan. If I could find someone else to take this away from me, I would. But there isn’t anyone. I can protect everyone. But I’m so tired . . .” She trailed off, her eyes on the broken wooden bowl on the ground, where the rest of her dinner lay. “Please, go away,” she said sharply. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

  “Odessa.”

  “Just go.” Already she had drawn back the tent flaps, summoning Slyp to take me back, and I knew there was nothing more I could do tonight.

  “There is a sickness in her mind, I believe,” Sumiko told me quietly, as we resumed our trek the next nightspan toward the foot of the mountain. “It’s a strange disease that isn’t easy to diagnose and heal.”

  “I’ve touched her many times, and found nothing,” I protested. “If her mind is ill, why can’t my touch affect it?”

  “Some sicknesses not even a Catseye can heal. For now, the strange blackness around her heart is contained, but I believe it is her mind and not her body that is being attacked.”

  “By the galla?”

  Sumiko shrugged helplessly. “Certainly her condition has been exacerbated since she first came into contact with those galla, but her symptoms are very similar to some I’ve encountered in the past. Impossible mood swings, unexplained shifts in her emotions, uncontrollable anger at times . . . does she still display sexual aggression toward you?”

  I turned red. “She isn’t letting me touch her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That means she still has some control.” Sumiko pursed her lips. “I would need more time to analyze her further—she isn’t allowing the Devoted much contact with her, so it’s difficult to know for certain without your observations.”

  “I don’t think we have much time for that.”

  “I know.” She looked at me. “And how are you faring?”

  I knew what she meant. As we approached the mountain, I kept my eyes on the ground, holding my breath every time some unusual rock formation or strange shrub graced our path and releasing it once I realized that it wasn’t a corpse. “I’m good.”

  “No, you’re not. Would you like to talk about it?”

  “Not right now, no.”

  “Over there!” came a cry from the front. Odessa gestured at her faithful to fall back while she hurried forward, her eyes eager.

  A thick, impenetrable-looking fog surrounded the Abyss, so that much of the wide expanse was still hidden from view. The sky was light now, but there was a peculiar, dead emptiness that surrounded the chasm, cloaked in its own black miasma that no natural phenomenon could breach.

  “We’re here,” Odessa whispered, eyes aglow. “We’re finally here.”

  “Is this what you saw before?” Noelle whispered to me.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice dull.

  “Stay back,” the goddess commanded.

  “That’s not what Asteria commanded us to do, Your Holiness,” Gracea implored her. “Our mission was to find a way to access the breach, and return to report our findings to—”

  “Janella,” Odessa said calmly, interrupting her.

  Without pause, the other girl lifted her hand and casually backhanded the Starmaker across the face, sending he
r crashing onto the ground. “You were warned not to speak unless you were spoken to,” she snapped.

  Odessa turned to me. “Where were you attacked again?”

  “Along the edge,” I whispered.

  “And did you find the remains of any temple?”

  “No. We had little time to explore the area before we were ambushed.”

  Odessa paused, studying the Abyss carefully. “I shall investigate it up close.”

  “Your Holiness!” Noelle, Janella, and even Gracea all voiced their protests at once.

  “I have the best chance of surviving whatever lies beyond that canyon. You are all in enough danger by just being here.”

  “Your Holiness,” Windshifter Halida gasped out. “If we were all armed with our gates, we would stand a better chance of surviving.”

  “Prisoners have no privileges,” Slyp barked.

  “This is a death sentence for us!” Gracea shrilled.

  The old man shrugged. “Then I would advise staying close. If necessary, you will be provided weapons, but that is the extent of Her Holiness’s generosity.”

  “This is a dangerous task,” Odessa informed her followers quietly. “And I will not force you to volunteer. But I shall enter the Abyss. If you are willing to take a chance with me, come forward.”

  For a moment, no one moved. Then Janella did, her eyes fervent, and soon Lorila, and then Andre followed suit.

  “The rest of you, be on guard,” Odessa told the others. “And I want a force ready to come at the first sign of trouble.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Odessa—!”

  “I won’t put you through that again, Lan.” Odessa crooked a finger, and the shadows materialized around her, eager to do her bidding. “I will not go unprepared. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “You’re not going to do this without me! I’m coming with you!”

  She approached me then, smiling gently and looking so much like the old Odessa that my heart ached. “Lan, my love,” she said, laying a hand on my cheek. “I’m sorry, but you will not.”