With sweat running down his face, Li Markuth turned and tried to run.
He didn’t make it.
35
Ziel drifted down through space, falling toward an ugly slab of metal miles-long. The elaborate steel coffin was stapled to the moon of a dead, brown planet, and he could feel millions of lives packed inside.
Amazing, Ziel thought. Living on a moon. Such strange worlds.
[There were people living on Cradle’s moon.]
What?
[Yeah, there’s still vital aura on the moon. Monarchs can fly there easily. Even Heralds could make it, given enough time. A long-dead Monarch left a colony there.]
Ziel remembered the Weeping Dragon’s breath slashing across the face of the moon. What do you think happened to—
[Oh, they’re probably dead.]
When Ziel’s black, armored boots hit the outside of the shelter, he felt observation constructs swivel on their steel mounts to take aim at him. ‘Cameras,’ Dross said they were called. He felt attention through their lenses.
Ziel waved to the nearest of the constructs and then transported himself inside the vessel.
From the study of this Iteration that Ziel had done before departing, and with his own spiritual sense, Ziel got an understanding of this colony’s structure. It was a warren of small, cramped hallways, with space at a premium. People scurried here and there through the structure like ants.
They had rendered their planet uninhabitable. Their equivalent of vital aura was a single band of light that was supposed to wrap the planet in a beautiful, colorful ring. The Worldline powered their local energy system, was as important to their culture as their sun or moon, and linked to most of their technology.
Ziel couldn’t see it at all. The Worldline had been drained completely by the greed of the local inhabitants. He could sense it, though. It wasn’t gone completely, but it was close. At this rate, it would fade away inside a decade and the dead planet would slowly suffocate.
He brought the solution with him.
Dross guided him to the leader of the colony, a gray-haired, dark-skinned woman whose messy hair and rumpled uniform suggested she’d been up through many sleepless nights.
When she saw him, she sagged into the wall, bracing herself on one hand. “Thank the Line.” She kissed the wall, which Ziel assumed was a superstitious gesture.
[That, or she really likes this building,] Dross suggested.
“We received your distress signal,” Ziel began, but she cut him off with eager questions.
“How far is your planet?” she asked desperately. “Where’s your ship? We detected your transport, but we only saw you and your suit. Is this your real form? How many people can you take? How soon? Are you going to eat us?”
Ziel’s first job became helping the woman relax into a chair, getting her a mug of hot liquid that reminded him of honey, and reassuring her that he was human.
She cradled her hot mug before her with both hands as though it were more valuable than her own life, but she spoke with her forehead planted firmly on the desk. “I can’t believe the Exodus Theory was actually right. Did humans originate here and travel the stars? Or were we placed here from your planet? Do all humans on your planet have horns?”
“I’d love to answer your existential questions, but there are some things I can’t tell you.”
She lifted her head enough to peek at him with one eye. “Are you worried about altering our technological development?”
“Mostly, I’m worried about getting in trouble at work.” Ziel raised his hand, palm-up, and Dross projected an image of the planet beneath them. Six spots around the equator began to shine.
“We’re going to inject energy into your Worldline at these points,” he continued. “It will be visible again within a few weeks, and the planet’s surface will be inhabitable in about five years. You know more about how the Worldline works than I do, but it’s my understanding that the animal population will be…recreated?”
“Oh. Huh.” She looked at his diagram with less enthusiasm than he’d expected, then returned her forehead to the desk. “What happens when we drain it again?”
Then Ziel was supposed to come back and kill the ones responsible. He didn’t think she’d like that answer.
“I’m supposed to come back and kill the ones responsible,” he said. It wasn’t his job to give her answers she liked.
She lifted her head and brightened. “Really? That’s perfect! Do we put out another distress signal for you, or do you have your own ways of detecting us? Can I give you their names now?”
[Boy, she must enjoy murder,] Dross observed. [She is right, though. At this rate, we’ll have extended the lifespan of this Iteration by twenty years at best.]
Ziel considered his options. He wanted to protect these people, and preemptively killing the people who would be responsible for the world’s decay seemed…counterproductive.
She took a long sip, then spoke into her mug. “Most of our population is gone, and the people left here are bickering. They all have their own solutions for fixing the world, but every one of them involves draining the last of the Worldline. I’m not even really in charge, I just take care of the dirty work. I’m an anthropologist.”
Dross had to tell Ziel what an anthropologist was.
Ziel didn’t see how this fell under his purview. “So you want me to…”
“Please.” She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “Write us a new tax code.”
“What?”
“We were taxed for overuse of the Worldline, but now none of those rules can be enforced. Everyone knows it’s killing us, but they can’t stop using it. If you were to write a new code and show off a little—maybe fire some plasma bolts or whatever your weapons can do—then people would follow it for fear of getting disintegrated by alien weapons.”
Ziel scratched between his horns. “I feel like you just need someone in charge who’s going to maintain the Worldline.”
“Exactly! Who are you going to appoint? Not me, I hate this job.”
Dross could show Ziel exactly what was involved with this, but he’d run a sect before. He already felt the truth in his gut.
This would involve meeting candidates, establishing his own identity, soothing scared people, making promises, writing rules, hearing out all the sides to every issue, and ultimately making a decision that the colonists would hate him for.
“Do you have a monster I can fight?” Ziel asked.
She offered him a pen. “Sorry.”
“…do you think you could find one?”
“Are there monsters on your planet?” she asked excitedly.
Ziel heaved a sigh and picked up the pen.
[Is this what ascending is supposed to feel like?] Dross asked nervously.
You tell me. Lindon had grabbed the Way in his right hand and pulled it aside, tearing open a rift more easily than Fury had. There was a world on the other side, a bustling metropolis that reminded Lindon of Blackflame City, but with more shining metal.
However, it wasn’t the same place Fury had gone. Not that Lindon had any reason to suspect it would be; there might be many locations where new ascensions could end up.
Worse, he didn’t see anyone in white armor on the other side. And no Eithan, no Yerin, no Suriel.
Worst of all, he sensed that his ascension portal was stretched. As though it had connected to somewhere much too far away. The Void Icon was close. Too close.
At any second, this portal could be devoured by hungry emptiness.
Lindon had been nervous enough about leaving Cradle, and now it felt like everything had gone wrong at once. Worries he’d barely controlled now exploded out of his grip at once.