As she approached, more and more detail emerged. Zor’Aguhastra’s upper half consisted of countless spires, all of whom were at once black and iridescent, just as the Wizard’s notes had said they would be. She spied among them the shapes of skyscrapers and megabuildings, of the towers of Neo Babylonia, but also the organic towers of Jas’raba and the art-nouveau and art-deco architectural sensibilities of church-adjacent Calbian architecture. All these towers varied to an unbelievable degree, no two were the same, but all shared two traits: The first was a restrained means of movement either attached, growing out of, or part of the spire. The second shared trait was a binding that moored the tower to the city’s foundations, disappearing into the Grey Fog below. Among the restrained means of movement, she saw spires with clipped wings, pruned tendrils, amputated and chained limbs, actual rocket nozzles that were simply taped over with caution tape. The bindings ran the gamut from giant chains, to wrappings, ribbons, roots, tendrils, arms joined with arms joined with arms joined with arms to form their own sort of chain, and so on.
She passed through the barrier with no incident or even sensation, it was as if it wasn’t there at all, and before long, she stepped foot onto the crumbled end of Zor’Aguhastra’s main thoroughfare, one of countless walkways making up the city’s horizontal plane.
Just that step, and she was there, truly there.
That final step — crossing over the fathomless abyss from a piece of floating rubble — was as a step from one world to the next, as if, until she had taken that step, she had only beheld a mirage of Zor’Aguhastra, an image reflected in the water.
Only now, as she stood, did she see the twin black suns wheeling through the heavens and the swarm of moons spiraling in the west, the light of the suns drawing an incomprehensible pattern of glyphs across the moons’ pallor, each crater and ridge positioned exactly to ensure the shadows of any given moon continuously shifted from one sigil to another — the same sigils of the guidestone, and the same sigils that had torn free of Sorayah’s skin. The sky burned with a hue of green no paint could reproduce and the spires of iridescent-black were as windows to worlds untold, and merely glancing upon their surfaces sufficed to engender a crushing sense of the sublime, an abiding faith that within each spire a world unto itself awaited, worlds from whose bounds she was forever prohibited for her mere passage would be as that of a blowtorch through the hair-thin wall of a glass bubble. Krahe felt a grave certainty that if she didn’t force herself to, for once, stop noticing, she would get lost in it and become a true inhabitant of Zor’Aguhastra.
She saw no people, nor any monsters, or really anyone else. There were only the vaguest of shades scattered about, some milling to-and-fro and others standing on balconies, and others still floating through the air, some having the shapes of men and others being far too vague to discern. More notably, the all kept well away from Krahe, with several of them shrinking back the instant she stepped foot at the edge of the city. Even the faintest bit of direct focus was enough to begin giving more concrete form to any such shade, and, in this matter, Krahe knew better, forcing herself to focus on her destination.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Wasting no time, she made for the one spire that towered over all others in the city’s center.
It was neither a short journey, nor was it a long one; it simultaneously felt as if she had walked the city for months, if not years, yet it passed by in a flash, as if it had been fast-forwarded by a factor of thousands. A high-rate sensory feed with no time cognition safeguards blasting petabytes at a time.
There were neither steps nor guards before the throne room. Only gates, whose scale sprawled beyond conceptions of height and width from where she stood.
The guidestone’s script-reams stretched towards the doors and that alone sufficed to open them, and the masses of mirror-like stone spun apart into segments and frayed out of being, simply gone in glimmers of un-light. She could see nothing beyond the gate, only an event horizon of Grey Fog.
Once more, crossing a precipice meant transition from one realm to another, a sub-space “within” Zor’Aguhastra, one “at the peak of” Zor’Aguhastra, not merely in literal terms, but also conceptually, from the perspective of material reality being the highest realm. Therefore, this throne room was the place in Zor’Aguhastra “closest to being truly real.” She didn’t need to look back to know that the gate had shut behind her the moment she passed its precipice.
And indeed, Krahe could almost mistake the sensation of standing here, in this place, for truly being in some subterranean chamber. Ahead of her, the throne room stretched for hundreds of meters forward. To the left and right, countless pillars rose up at intervals of around five meters, each with lifelike murals of detailed scenes that Krahe had to force herself not to look at, in spite of the fact their “iridescent-black” was so rich that even the slightest motion made it shift as if a cosmos roiled inside each pillar. She could see neither the walls to the left and right, nor the ceiling above, for they were shrouded by the Grey Fog. Past the pillars, far in the distance, she could just about make out a raised alcove, and within it the bases of two enormous thrones; their majority, as well as the figures seated upon them, were both obscured by a hanging curtain. A curtain that, among all else in this place, was the most real. Krahe was certain that, somehow, that thing was the only object from the “real world,” the place regarded by the dwellers of the deep as “The Surface” or “The World of Light.”
Thus, the throne chamber was reduced to its most fundamental components: The entryway, the carved pillars extolling the dynasty’s history, and the twin thrones of the King of Many Colours and Shadeless Queen, shrouded behind an unpierceable curtain.
Patreon! You get 20+ advance chapters for both Retribution Engine and Cherno Caster, as well as a number of advance chapters for ZANMA PT: Puppetmaster Travelogue.
