I grow and their invasions redouble. They batter at my thoughts, groping for a way through the maze to the center, tearing chunks away in their frenzied search for the bridge. They grind Solmiz's corpse into me like mortar so that every path they stamp is lined with his ash, but still they cannot find the way.
At some point they bring me up to the world.
I am perhaps seven years old by then, lying in a thumping metal tray as pipes pull out from my spine. Through the glare of light I see an endless hall stretching away, and with it come words that I don't yet understand, but will come to.
Court.
This is a Court and I am just another failed experiment.
Liquid drains around me, the thumping sound fades and the glass dome overhead peels back. This machine has cocooned me in an artificial womb all my life. I see others like me sitting up, hundreds of them in their wombs too, all broken and failed.
I can feel their wounded thoughts, each damaged in ways a shade different to me, gradations in a meticulous experimental plan. They too have invaded, and tortured and now we are to fight for the amusement of the master we have failed to please.
MAKE ME PROUD
His voice rings in my mind, a distant presence I have felt all my existence but never truly known, the one who murdered Solmiz and left me alone; my god, my lord and my tormentor.
I understand what must be done.
My body decants to the floor and in seconds I feel pain. It ties me to this weak flesh, but I know this flesh is not what I am. I am only a passenger in an organic machine, the crust they couldn't scrape away, the echo of Solmiz in my dreams, and I live in a place very far from here.
I look down and see the first of my toes disappear. A boy larger than me has bitten it away. Now he lunges, and I have a moment to pity him, because I can see all his weaknesses. He doesn't have the strength that I have, doesn't have it innately, and so he must die.
With my mind I stun him, then pull my bleeding foot from his mouth and stand, ignoring the pain. It does not compare to the pain I have known all my life. It is a relief. I look at the others while he lies on the ground. Already they are fighting and dying. They are larger than me, and stronger, and they are all mine.
I stamp the boy's throat then I fling myself into the fray. Size does not matter here. The strength of their bodies has no impact upon me. What matters is the Soul, and they trained me well for this.
They surge before me and I break them one after another. I squeeze and they burst; from the eyes, from the ears, from the nostrils. Their blood coats my face and I wear it as a mask. Hundreds of them fall one after another as their deaths make me stronger, and throughout I think of Solmiz. Every pulse of my heart is his name, echoing endlessly with absence.
It's wrong that this was done to me. My lord was wrong and this wound can never be right. I enact my rage upon them, and before my rage their Souls vanish. I am too angry to be killed.
Finally there are none left. Hundred of bodies surround me. Blood drips from my hair; the wounds they have inflicted cover this body. I stand and wait for my cruel lord to come.
He comes.
"I am so proud of you," he says.
Days have passed in the slaughter, and I have learned much. I know now that my lord is called the Suns, and this figure is his hand, sent to me as an emissary. I know that I am the victor of a very special Court. I feel pride and disgust.
"There is a school waiting for you," the Suns' hand says. "Come."
I go.
The school is filled with children older than I, and they are soft. I give them examples of my power until the lesson is taught. I give more lessons until it is burned deeply into their Souls. I thought I had come here to learn, but now I see I was brought here to teach; not just these children, but the brood, the world, and even the Suns itself.
My lord should not have killed Solmiz. The world should not have allowed it. So I will teach them all to be better. I will unmake everything they have done and rewrite it afresh.
For Solmiz I will do all this and more.
I break through the shield and gasp for air in an airless space, now face-to-face with the bloody boy within his trebuchet carriage. The great throwing arm creaks with the weight of so many stolen Souls ready to propel us on; the whole life of the aether. He smiles at me, blood leaking from his gums, then holds a knife to his own throat. I remember what Far said about Disjunct, and understand why he never found the path to apotheosis. To reach the inner bridge of the aether you have to sacrifice everything that exists.
"You and me at the end," the boys says, and slits his own throat. Blood sprays out. Before the knife can drop I snatch it and slit my throat too.
The trebuchet fires as we die and the tether keeping this universe alive breaks; the weight of all Souls drops and some dying part of us is flung out and up with all the force of a billion aether-wide Disjuncts. At once we reach incomprehensible speed, faster than Far ever imagined possible; the Bathyscaphe forges around me and another forges around the boy even as the dust of so many burned bonds coalesces around us into the encircling shell of an asteroidal ferryboat.
CHTHONIC ROCK
-comes the voice of the brood-King in my mind, of the bloody boy, and together we hurtle across the vast distances to the inner bridge of the aether, to the blazing purple Hollow Star at the heart of all things, toward a cataclysmic race for godhood that neither of us can escape.
--.
R. ASCENT
For six months we train. I keep a lock on Ruin at all times and I use his Soul like a punching bag. We go together to all the ruins I visited alone some ten years later. The godships are much the same, though there are still a few holdouts living on them at this point, amidst the giant rusted hulls and upturned rooms, running along their chain walkways as I pull up in Don Zachary's speedboat.
Don Zachary is of course a younger man now, but he hardly looks it, already gnarly and twisted. His empire is much the same, but twenty years away from being ready to quakeseed the world. This is an era when the War is just beginning to resolve, and when I go to him to borrow his boat for old time's sake, he's only looking forward to the days of peace to come and the chance to consolidate what he already has.
After sucking strength from the Don and the godships, we go to the shark-fighting arena, and I draw the old violence and loss out of it. We go to the sunken subglacic and I suck out the jealousy of its mad old captain. We go to all the other locations Ruin would write out in his folder for me years later; best of them all is an expired vault buried in a jut of Arctic rock where once all the seeds of humanity were stored, until the tsunamis crashed in and killed the climate-control generators, leaving the seeds to die.
Standing inside it I feel the immense sense of loss, all these patterns gone forever from the aether, and I swallow them down. I do the same in the abandoned Wall train station, and in a military bunker blown into the bedrock of Calico, and wider back along Mr. Ruin's trail hoovering up bonds and strength wherever we go; into the Hollow Desert, across to the fringe wastelands of neo-Armorica, trawling the blasted nuclear craters of Europe.
I practice my jacks on him. I run circles around his frazzled Molten Core, confounding his Lag and causing his Napoleonic plastic soldiers to shoot each other full of holes. At the last we sit on the rollercoaster rails at the top of Candyland with the sweet fog of boiled sweets in the air, and I tell him my whole story.
"I build the tower right here," I tell him. "You never see it coming. I come through the bridge, just enough to erase my family from your mind. I flood your mind here. And over there," I point, "somewhere along the Wall line, the Suns comes for me. I had a hard time with him."
Ruin listens, befuddled. His mind doesn't work so well at the moment, I've turned him around so much. I've taken everything I need though, more than enough to rupture all the golden shells there are. I can bring down King Ruin in minutes. I can bring down the bloody boy.
So I do it.
Into my o
wn mind I go to man the Bathyscaphe alone, surging up through the Molten Core and grapneling into the Solid Core, running the maze in instants and bursting through the aetheric bridge with ease.
The thunderclap of my arrival rings out across the aether and I fly out with it, riding the crest of the boom as fast as memory, to the great red revolving Suns. I break them open with a thought. Their golden shell peels back and I wither those suns to dry black pebbles.
So simple. In my hands the Suns die, and all their countless spider lines out to a thousand Courts around the world die too, releasing tens of thousands from suffering and shearing every brood member away from their lord and father.
I give the bloody boy no chance to respond. I ride the dissolution up to his Soul while he is buried deep in the mind of an experimental victim, still fishing for the route to the aetheric bridge. He's been hunting it all his life. I take hold of his Soul and squeeze.
He squeezes back.
For an impossible moment he looks into my Soul, and sees everything: everything I have done and everything I have changed back through time to the Hollow Star and the Chthonic Rock and beyond. He sees it all before his grip begins to fade, and in the fragment of time before I crush him to nothing, he speaks.
YOU LACK IMAGINATION.
Then he's gone. The brood-King is dead, withered away.
I rouse in Candyland. Mr. Ruin is sobbing beside me. Everything he knows has just been destroyed.
It's the same for me.
I feel empty inside. I have changed the aether forever; I've killed the King and the brood-King both, but I don't feel any better. I have saved Ven and my old chord, ended the War early and ensuring the survival of tens of thousands, so why do I feel so hollow?
Mr. Ruin's sobs tear at my heart. I have been cruel to him needlessly. I go to Lag him but halt, because that would be for my comfort only, not for his. The pain would remain inside him, festering like a gangrenous wound. I could Lag it wholly away but what would that make me now?
A sob escapes my lips as the emptiness settles in; a void I couldn't see before with the mission to kill the Kings looming so large. Now it is clear; I have lost everything I thought I might gain. Ven and my subglacic chord are dead to me; the first woman I ever loved and the first family I ever had, and now I've set myself on a path that will not be the same as my old one.
The truth hits me like an ideation grenade; I have lost Loralena.
There is no way the man I am now will form the exact same union with her as before, and without that my children Art and Mem will never be born. Maybe she would still love me and maybe we would still have children, but they will not be the same.
They are gone.
I drop to my knees beside Mr. Ruin, scarcely able to breathe. I have done this to myself. Is it real? Have I really done these things?
The brood-King's last words echo in my mind.
YOU LACK IMAGINATION
I feel sick with it.
I look back on everything I have done in my pursuit of Solfeje, or godhood, or my own happiness. Even these meager dreams have ruined me. How could I become a god, and take charge of all Souls at once, when I cannot even control my own?
How could I deserve apotheosis?
I look at Mr. Ruin and tears stream down my cheeks. I have failed in spite of all my efforts, and I don't know what to do. Perhaps the bloody boy has won. I throw my head back and scream into the sky.
"Solfeje!" It seems to be the only word and only name that matters now. With the emptiness comes understanding, like a curse; I know who she is and what she represents. I understand things I never glimpsed before; how much stronger than me she is. Her suffering was greater. Her dedication was brighter. Maybe she knows the way.
"Solfeje!"
The world cracks under the force of my will and I lean into it, crowbarring the aether open with my Soul. The rollercoaster underfoot bends out of existence, Calico peels back like a chrysalis skin to be replaced by pulsing purple sands and fizzing white skies. Mr. Ruin and the sea and the Wall all disappear, and I'm left standing atop the smoking, crater-pocked wreck of the Bathyscaphe. The brick cladding is ruptured, the metal crumpled and it rests nose-down and half-buried in glinting purple sand near the peak of an immense mountain. I look out over a windswept purple desert spotted with wrecked ships and buried buildings. I think I can make out badly-drawn facsimiles of the godship cluster, and my lost arene tank, and the hydrate rig I blew up in the Arctic.
I stare with tears drying on my cheeks. In the black heavens the orbital ring of Chthonic Rocks hangs like a line of pebbles glimpsed through shallow water. Ahead of me rises the apex of the mountain, crested with a point of impossible bright, pulsing purple light.
The Hollow Star. The inner bridge of the aether. I understand it all.
"I killed you."
I turn to see Solfeje standing on the slope a short way distant. Solfeje, this pulse of the bloody boy. She looks far more powerful than I feel; armored in certainty shines, wielding rage as a weapon I've already lost. Her icy eyes are resolute, while I feel weaker than ever. The things I have done have taken a toll on me, though I was never as strong as her.
A silent moment passes between us. No wind rustles the sands of the Hollow Star. Nothing moves or breathes in this place, so near the summit, and I see it all. A hope, perhaps, tumbling back to the mission pack that began this all: a piece of paper with an arch and simple labels.
YOU
ME
"We are the pillars," I say. My voice rings out like a message on blood-mic, carrying a message I'm just beginning to grasp. "You and I."
"It can only be one of us," she says.
But she's wrong.
I know so much more than her now, after living out the dreams I've clung onto for so long, after holding her Soul in my hands and crushing it. I see what she wants and why, and I begin to understand what that means. Where my small alterations led only to greater pain, the tsunami flood of change she brings will undo us all.
So the mission pack was wrong. We are not the pillars; there is no place in the center where we can meet to build an arch, no balance to be found here. I cannot and will not allow either of us to become a god and destroy what so many Souls across the aether have built.
"I'm going to kill you," I tell her.
"You will try," she says, and starts to run. I run too. We reach the bristling light at the Star's apex at the same moment and…
S. NOT THIS
The Hollow Star swallows us up and spits us out.
I tumble and stand; it is a Court, except it is no Court that ever existed. Larger and brighter and unending in scale, it is like the aether itself. In part it looks like the experimental arena where the bloody boy proved himself, but that is far from its entirety, and I can feel countless realities shimmering underneath the surface, just like the ferrywoman's periscope.
At once I'm on the Skulks, standing in the jack-site with Mei-An on the EMR tray before me, but I'm also atop the rails in Candyland with Mr. Ruin begging me to stop, and I'm in the seafort where Harim Ongshoy fought to his miserable death, and I'm in the Sunken World slogging through mud with the chord, and I'm in the monastery with the bloody boy teaching his lessons to the brood, and I'm in the godships, and on the Chthonic Rock, and Loralena is alive then she's dead, and Ven is dead then she's alive, and what is it all for?
I gasp, dizzy from the motionless revolutions. So many possibilities spin beneath my feet, and I see that this is all the power of a god.
I blink.
In the middle of the non-Court hangs King Ruin; one twin alive, one dead. Conjoined, they are a horror. One withered, one glaring, while all around us another experimental brood are killing each other like they've done so many times before; raking with cracked nails, biting with chipped teeth.
In their midst stands the bloody boy. Solfeje. She is alone but not alone, for every child fighting in this Court here carries the same face; a face I recognize from her Soul.
&nb
sp; Solmiz. The dead half of her pulse.
"He didn't die on the sublavic," I say.
Solfeje looks at me with something like pity. I am so slow to understand. "He was always dead, Me. I had him for moments only before the Suns gouged him away."
I look at these child copies of Solmiz, every one bloodied and staring at me now. I can hardly conceive of losing this much. My adoptive parents jacked into my mind but they didn't kill the chord. I kept seven parts of myself alive, while Solfeje lost fully half of who she was.
"You've suffered," I say. It is empty to say this really, because she knows. We both know; have been in and out of each other's mind for a lifetime, it feels. I know her, I know him, and she knows me.
"You suffered as well," she says. "You led the way. And you would never have helped me."
There is nothing to say to this, no answer to give. She's right.
"So we fight," I say.
Now she smiles; it is sad with the weight of my lost potential. "There will be no fight. Your chord are dead, Ritry Goligh. I can feel the defeat radiating off you. You are weak and lost, while I have all the strength of the world and a purpose to fulfill."
I can't argue. Her will is bright and swollen with all the Souls of the aether. "Stolen strength."
Her smile turns to pity. "Of course it is stolen, as you stole every shred you ever took. How else could you beat Mr. Ruin, how else could you bring down the Suns and cross the aetheric bridge so many times? You stole from the world too. It's only I who would repair the damage we've all done. Only I want to make it better."
I know what she wants now. It will be an end to us all; a hollowing out with consequences that last forever. "With a flood."
"With a new creation! I will remake it better, Me. Do you honestly believe your petty ambitions compare to mine? You've known love, you've had companions, but does any of that make what King Ruin did to you worthwhile? Does any of that compensate for what your parents did?"
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 56