by Daryl Banner
At once, the sound of a door sliding shut behind him made him panic. He spun and reached out, his palm meeting a smooth, cold surface. Metal? The metal gave him a vision of four loud women dressed in the most lavish, colorful clothing he had ever seen—silks and jewels and tall, funny-looking hats—and they laughed merrily about something one of them said—an insult of some other woman’s stained woolen gown. Then the women were replaced by two stoic men in suits—a new story. Then by a slender woman and her pretty son who nearly looked like a daughter, both also dressed in extravagant silks. Countless people had been seen by this metal surface, countless people who looked more alien to Aardgar than the Goddess herself.
“We’re in a lift,” explained his young guide. “Don’t be afraid. You are returning home.”
A lift? Home? Aardgar tried to speak again, and this time, his throat gave way to one single word, a gravelly grunt that became: “Home?”
“Home, yes. Oh! You can talk! You are Aardgar, right? The Immortal King? The Undying King? King Of Always?”
He knew none of those titles but the first. Perhaps the rest had come after he fell from his throne. He wasn’t sure if it was safe to confirm his identity or not.
“Hmm. We … will try a bit at a time. I won’t tire you. You need answers first, I know. And I will bring you to the ones who will tell you everything.”
Aardgar wasn’t sure if he could trust the man, but he knew he could trust his own Legacy, no matter the strange tales it had already told him—the bizarre people in silks, the children, the tall and towering buildings, the rushing waters, the starless sky …
When the metal doors slid back open, he felt it in a whirl of clean, cool air. His guide brought him out of the confined space they were in, and all he knew was a cold breeze upon his sensitive skin. He shivered and couldn’t walk fast, forcing the guide to slow down, but the guide was more than happy to do so, patient as ever. They began to move through the wintry air, though Aardgar knew not where they headed.
“Take your time. Yes, that’s it,” the guide encouraged.
Aardgar didn’t appreciate being treated like a two-hundred-year-old man—until he realized that’s exactly what he was. Maybe more.
They must have walked a million miles by the time another door’s face met his outstretched palm. A touch gave him a vision of the door’s history: a plethora of important men and women had passed through that very door. Kings? Queens? Special guards in special armor? No more of the strange, self-important fools in silks and funny hats—save one sharp-toothed crown he felt as it scraped upon the top of the door by a shockingly tall woman who passed through it decades ago, perhaps a past Queen of Atlas.
It terrified him, how much had happened. Atlas had run off and had a life of its own while Aardgar stewed in the bowels of the planet.
The door yawned open, and up yet another flight of stairs they went. His footsteps echoed all around his head.
“Here,” said the guide calmly. “Just a bit farther, yes.”
After they stopped ascending and passed into a room, Aardgar heard the shuffling of heavy feet, but it wasn’t from himself or from his guide. Panicked, he stopped at once and held up his frail hands to shield his blinded face.
“Calm, Aardgar. It is alright,” assured his guide. “He is a friend, too. He is a member of your Council of Elders, in fact. And I am your Marshal of Order. Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I … I never properly introduced myself. My name is Thad, my King. Thadold, my full name, former Marshal of Order to Queen Vivilan Rubylight. Or, uh … rather …” Aardgar felt the man—Thadold—shuffle awkwardly next to him. “Former Queen Vivilan Rubylight.”
He knew no Vivilan Rubylight. She was not one of the ones contending for the throne when he left his people in charge of seeking his proper heir. What had happened in his absence? Could Vivilan have been his heir’s heir? Strangely, it didn’t occur to him at the time to ask what exactly happened to the former Queen Vivilan.
“El …” Aardgar worried he couldn’t make another word without snapping his own throat in half like brittle wood. “El … ders …?”
“Your Council of Elders, my liege.”
A new voice assailed his ears, a man’s low and gravelly voice. “How do we know this man isn’t just an imposter?”
“Look with your own eyes,” Thad insisted.
“I see a skeleton,” the man grunted at once. “Some person who could simply be cloaked in an illusion of death. Some fell Legacy. Some fell sort of … trickery.”
“I found the King—”
“Alleged King.”
“—exactly where he was supposed to be. Directly below the earth of the slums beneath Cloud Tower,” Thad argued. “In the precise spot.”
“Then why hasn’t anyone else thought to seek him out in that very spot, Thadold, you big fool?”
“Quit calling me that.”
“Of all the fools in the world—and there are legion—why are you the special one to find the King Of Legend?”
“My Legacy, of course,” Thad spat back. “That ought to require no further explanation.”
“Yeah, if I am even to trust you.” The man snorted through his nostrils. “Or your alleged Legacy.”
“It’s never failed me before.”
“What is all of this?” came yet another all new voice, startling Aardgar and causing him to back into a nearby wall. The voice was of a woman, her words tearing across the room like birds through a clear sky.
“Zema,” muttered Thad timidly, identifying the woman. “I thought you were fixing the situation in the Obsidian.”
Her footsteps stopped midway across the room. “Who is this?” she asked, cold and wary.
“The Immortal King,” answered the man with the deep voice, his words bleeding with sarcasm and mockery. “Can’t you tell, from his decaying, eyeless face to the gaping hole in his chest?”
The words stung Aardgar. He instinctively reached for his chest, then thought the better of it and let his hand rest somewhere near his belly instead.
He felt like paper, like the wrinkled pages of an old book. It wasn’t disgust he felt, but terror.
What’s happened to me?
“The Immortal King?” The woman’s voice had softened considerably. Aardgar heard footsteps as she approached. “You mean to tell me—?”
“The King Aardgar,” Thad affirmed. “The first ever King of Atlas. Back from the grave, so to speak.”
“He is an imposter,” cut in the other man.
“No, he is not!”
“He is an imposter, and you, a fool.”
“He is undying, is he not?” cut in Zema in her cool, clear voice that rang over the room. “There’s yet a simple way to test his true identity. Then you two can be done with this nonsense. Halvard. Your sword.”
“Sorry?”
“Your sword, Halvard. Your sword. Hand it to me.”
The man with the deep, gravelly voice must have been Halvard. But in a second’s time, it mattered not which name belonged with which faceless voice as Aardgar became quite suddenly aware of a sword being drawn from a sheath.
“N-N-No,” grunted Aardgar.
The room seemed to still at the sound of his one useless word, despite it barely carrying the strength of a single hair.
“He is alarmed,” observed Zema.
“Of course he’s alarmed!” shouted Thad in Aardgar’s defense, at the end of his short, frayed rope. “He cannot see anything! He has been trapped deep inside the earth for the turning of centuries! He is alone!”
Centuries?
Aardgar fell against the wall at his back, his mouth parted with a hundred words he knew he was not physically able to utter.
Centuries, did he say?
It would take him a century to succeed in asking the questions that now exploded in his mind. Where had all the time gone? What had become of Atlas? Indeed, just as the other man Halvard had asked: Why had Aardgar been freed now, of all times, and by this Thad person, of
all people?
“And scared,” murmured Zema. “Yes, of course I see it. Perhaps he is scared because his lie is about to be outed. Or scared because, as you say, he is a thousand years old and has no one in this world. Whichever the truth, it’s about to be freed. Thad, dear, pay witness.”
“Please don’t hurt him.”
“If he is truly the King Of Legend,” Zema reasoned, “then this shouldn’t hurt him a bit, now should it?”
Aardgar braced himself. He knew not from where the sword would come, but he knew as certain as there was a ground beneath his heavy feet that it would.
When it pierced his belly, he felt a searing pain that awakened everything. A memory of Charma’s last moment of life. A memory of his son or daughter he never had. A memory of the Goddess in all her golden fury. A memory of his years presiding as King of Atlas.
How did all those memories surge into him like that?
The sword … Aardgar wondered as he screamed out in anguish, yet nothing was freed from his throat but an eerie, voiceless sort of fire, like the spice at the bottom of a kettle of hot stew.
The sword … The sword …
He grabbed at the blade that now impaled him—then was instantly assaulted all over again by the death of his lover Charma, struck with this very sword.
And then the noise in his head quieted like a passing storm. The pain fell away. Suddenly Aardgar realized that he was completely numb. Was the pain just an illusion? Or rather, was this strange numbness the illusion?
Then Aardgar felt the blade release from his gut. He stood there awhile in the silence as no one spoke a word. He lifted his sightless gaze in the direction of where he presumed Zema to be standing. Then he shifted his gaze toward the last place he heard Halvard’s deep voice, and then Thadold’s.
“It can still be an illusion,” grunted Halvard.
“Oh, fuck off,” spat Zema, her demeanor of regality and coolness shattered in an instant. “It doesn’t matter if this is the real Immortal King or not. He clearly possesses a most unique defensive Legacy of … something … we must take full advantage of, especially if we intend to keep this throne we have so stolen.”
“Rightfully took,” Thad was quick to correct her.
Zema snorted at that. “Stole,” she insisted. “You can live the rest of your existence in denial over the atrocities we’ve committed in the name of Three Sister. I shan’t.” She shifted her feet. “Halvard. Accept it or not, we will work to restore this man, true King or not.”
“Sure,” conceded Halvard with a deep grunt. “But I don’t have to like or trust it one bit.”
His heavy footfalls took him away, and then Zema’s quieter, sharper ones brought her closer. “You truly believe in him, Thad? You believe in this old, withered man?”
“Yes,” Thad said right away. “Even if … he hasn’t quite confirmed it himself.”
“He hasn’t?”
“No. He … has no voice.”
“No voice and no eyes. Then how—?”
“It wasn’t his claim that he is who he is. It was mine. I … I presumed. I still presume. There is no one else he could possibly be.”
“Other than a dead man from the slums.”
“He may look dead, but he’s clearly far from it,” Thadold insisted, a note of defensiveness in his tone. Aardgar didn’t know why Thadold was so quick to defend him in front of these people—these Council of Elders—but he found that he appreciated it. Thad seemed to be his only friend left in the world, if what he said earlier was true. Had centuries really passed?
Is everyone that Aardgar knew dead and gone? Again?
“Yes, yes, clearly,” agreed Zema. “Far from dead. A man whose Legacy defies death. A true immortal, if we are to believe it.”
Somehow, Aardgar knew in that moment that he would never correct the pair of them—nor anyone else—for the rest of his existence.
No one would know that he held within his grasp the ability to discover the histories of objects with a touch; he would mercifully allow them the false security that his only power was in never dying.
It was, for some reason, vital that no one knew. Perhaps, after all he experienced, it was his small way of protecting what little he had left to himself.
Even his life wasn’t his own anymore.
“Did you ever see this day ending like this?” asked Thad to the woman. “After all the horrors we’ve witnessed? After the revolts? After … the blood?”
She didn’t answer him. Her footsteps, slow as they were, brought her right up to Aardgar’s front. He felt her breath falling on his sensitive skin. “We must find the medics. The ones left.”
“Medics? I …” Thad made a short laughing sound. “I fear he is beyond the help of—”
“They will assist in making him look proper and function proper. Do you hear me, Aardgar? If that is truly you?” Her voice drew closer. “You will be human again.”
“Human,” agreed Thad.
“But first … you will need new eyes.”
Her promise was fulfilled three days later when the medics were all summoned from their various corners of Sanctum, which Aardgar came to learn was now called the Lifted City. He learned it both from the short words of Thad and Zema that he caught as well as what his fingers told him as they brushed across various surfaces and items—indeed, anything they could. The stories spun a terrifying vision of how the once-humble-and-righteous Sanctum grew distant and suspicious of the surrounding wards, which were now known as the slums. Sanctum grew richer and the slums grew poorer, yet both somehow remained greedy. The slums were riddled with thieves, with liars, but Sanctum was full of both of a different kind—thieves who smiled as they stole from the poor, and liars who cheated each other and manipulated the laws of Atlas to benefit and protect only themselves. The picture was not clear from the pieces that Aardgar’s Legacy gathered for him, but he could see that in some great act of architecture and Legacy, the entirety of Sanctum was literally lifted up on a copious number of colossal pylons for two purposes: to protect the Queen or King and their closest subjects that lived in Sanctum, and to allow the slums space to expand beneath it—since it could not expand outward.
It could not expand outward because of a new structure that was—perhaps most terrifying of all—the tallest thing Aardgar had ever seen with his Legacy.
It was a wall—the Wall—and it surrounded the entire breadth of Atlas, every ward enclosed within. It was a great and terrible Wall that allegedly was built to protect them from the Oblivion.
It seemed, to Aardgar, that the people got what they long ago wanted and Aardgar refused to give them. Who was responsible for the Wall and to what end, Aardgar feared he may never know. One thing was for certain: the people of Atlas would never know what was beyond that Wall which, even at the height of the Lifted City, could not be seen over. The Oblivion was as much a mystery to its people now as it was to him.
Perhaps daemons and evil Sleepers did dwell out there. No one would ever know for sure now, the outer world sealed away.
It was when running his hand along a curtain that he saw—without eyes—the great boom through that window centuries ago. It was a boom that terrified him worse than anything yet—an explosion that lay to waste the prestigious, glorious twelfth ward. He felt the pain of Atlas like a wound to the belly as the towers of the twelfth collapsed, folded upon themselves, and gave to a storm of smoke and dust and black flame.
He felt the whispers of a Queen or King of the past as their words fell upon the curtains. “An Outlier is responsible for this,” they hissed. “An Outlier destroyed the twelfth ward.”
Outlier. The strange term had returned, but it no longer was used to label anyone with a Legacy. It now was used to identify a danger to society—a label slapped upon anyone with a formidable enough Legacy—an unknown, a power that rested outside the accepted norm, a threat.
Outlier … That word used to unite us.
Now it divides us.
What had
become of the Last City of Atlas?
A new set of eyes were given to Aardgar by the medics. Real eyes. But they had to go through at least nineteen pairs before, at last, the medics had deemed them a proper fit. He never learned whose eyes they were, and he never dared ask. But when he wished to open them and see his world for the first time in a thousand years, they told him not yet, and redid his bandages.
Then he endured the most uncomfortable act yet of allowing them to perform a kind of procedure on his throat while he was secured to a cold metal table. The act involved a frightening guesswork of some ancient science, biology, and a matter of the medics’ Legacies. Then when he tried to speak, they told him not yet, and redid his neck bandages.
Voiceless and sightless, Aardgar spent two more days in the darkness. Each day, Thadold visited him and spoke of all the things to come. A city ready for a new King. A Lifted City ready to embrace a leader who would push back the onslaught of slumborn that threatened the very fabric of Atlas. A future of peace once the fires had cooled.
A fine dream, Aardgar reflects in his eternal darkness, feeling a hint of a smile on his ancient, dead lips. A fine dream for a fool.
A doomed fool …
It was in the dead of night while he lay in a bed at the end of the medical wing of the Keep that the noise of shattered glass pierced his soul. Aardgar sat up at once and listened. The medics might have denied him the use of his new eyes and voice, but not his ears.
The sound was followed by a shuffling of feet, and then deathly silence.
Aardgar, quietly and carefully as he could, let his hand reach toward the table by his bed. He felt about for a solid object to wield as a weapon, but his fingers found nothing.
“Aardgar,” came a sudden whisper.
He turned toward it, startled.
“We must flee,” the whisper went on. “I will take you to a safe location. Rebels found a way into the Keep. Take my hand, Aardgar.”