Chapter VIII | The Lady & the Clouds

Claude took a deep breath. “I was only nine when they took my older brother and I from our home. It may come as a surprise to you, but my family didn’t stand at the head of House Morsylis, and so we could not live in Layer 1. The Morsylis Estate was actually empty then, and had been since King Finryd lost the ability to walk, or speak, or eat, and his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren had all passed away without him. It was suspected my father was the closest living descendent of Finryd’s, but a great fire had taken the Library of Luridia years ago, and so any records to confirm it were lost.

“In Layer 2, there were so many nobles that whenever something would go awry, no one ever noticed or even cared. Back then, as those two RINGKNIGHTs hauled us away, I wailed for help, and no one answered. Down the brightly lit neighborhoods of nobility, no one cared at all. I imagined then, just how difficult it would be to find help were I to live in the Midtown, or worse, the Ends, down the layers where millions live without surname or land.

“Supposedly, the Old King spoke of a prophecy. He foretold the fall of House Morsylis.” Claude fingered the bone whistle at his collar and glanced at Lilya through the balusters, who only stared back, entranced by his words. “After more than 300 years of history, of ruling first the Kingdom of Luridia and now the Purilyn Cities, they would fall victim to their own bloated weight and be overthrown by the Church of House Caecilius.” Lilya scraped her fingernails against the cold pavement. “Can’t deny the possibility?”

“I don’t know,” she muttered, clutching her chest so the fabric of her uniform bunched and twisted.

“Well, Finryd somehow spoke it,” Claude continued, “and Morris believed it. To respond to the threat, he initiated an expensive program to create a small unit of super soldiers. There were five candidates. First, the most cherished potential heir, my older brother Alyn. Then myself. Then my cousin, Thera. Finally, two beholden to our house, known as the face-swapping twins, Alex & Lisica Foxglove. Kavesta Technologies had plenty of prototype augments to give us, but dangerous prototypes were not enough for Morris. He had them tested, again and again until he knew they would be safe. Infants, children, teenagers, and adults were all experimented on, and only the children survived. Then of the children that survived, the prototypes were ripped out again from their spines, and they were incinerated with the rest. They were criminals and cripples and the terminally ill, but the thought still fills me with unfathomable rage. This man is my uncle. He still stands beside me. He still advises me.” Claude clamped his hand around his face and squeezed until his nails made marks in his skin.

Lilya stayed silent, the nightly chill setting in her skin.

“The augment surgery took 24 hours, and I had to be conscious for the whole of it. I was told that if I fell asleep, I would never wake again. By some stroke of luck, we all came out exactly as Morris wanted. Perfect. Even when they placed swords in our hands and had us spar with each other, the blades would only spark against our skin, and injuries were extremely rare. When my uncle saw the fruits of his labor, he burned every blueprint to ash and either had the engineers who knew about it executed, or sworn into Morsylis servitude. There would never again rise soldiers of our caliber, he swore.

“They let us go back into the real world in bits at a time. Once a week at first, then once a month, then once a year, and then not again until the program was over. It’s true that I don’t remember much about my time with you, but—”

Lilya reached her hand under the bottom rail to grab his hand and hold it tight. “But you spent those rare few days with me.”

“I did,” he chuckled. “I don’t remember why, but I did. Always back to you, then back to hell again. It was in the third or fourth year, I think. I was a teenager or just about, and we were given our final mission. Once completed, we could leave and come back home. I wasn’t quite sure what home meant at that point. My mother and father had just passed away, and our house was taken up by some priests of the faith, but still I longed to go back. Maybe back to you for good.

“The five of us boarded a ship, stowed away in a cargo container deep in the heart of the vessel. My brother Alyn had no trouble sleeping the days aboard away, his augments setting his muscles in a perpetual state of corded steel. Alex and Lisica seemed to leave their augments off during the journey; Lisica always clung to her brother, crying and seasick, barely able to find sleep. As for Thera, she mostly kept to herself, but I could tell how the life drained from her as the days passed. Gaunt and exhausted, what remained of her youthful beauty had all but left her by the time the ship docked. Something’s wrong, she would mutter to herself. We’re not moving. Why aren’t we moving? Why wouldn’t we? Am I going mad? Have I gone mad?

“Her murmurings unnerved me as well, but I didn’t let it get to me. I should’ve figured something out then. Thera was the only one of us who kept her perception cranked so high at all times, and probably the only one who ever prioritized their perception at all. She felt something the rest of us couldn’t. I still think that if I had only just spoken to her, we could have avoided the horror of the next two years entirely. I think about it every night.”

Claude rubbed his neck as the fireflies lit up around the gardens, and the moon emerged from behind the clouds. “After a week of travel, we arrived at our destination. Our intelligence agent informed us that we had sailed to the Old Kingdom of Iralia, and we were to investigate a growing military threat and shut it down before they could bring destruction upon the Purilyn Cities.

“What remained of Iralia at that point consisted of little more than winding metal corridors, some narrow and others like streets, perpetually must-ridden and unbearably dark. It felt like nothing but night ever fell on Iralia. Unlike the Cities, they never tried to build up from the ocean floor. Apparently, such a construction is impossible without tons of rootsteel. Instead, they built an endless floating expanse of pipeways and platforms, ready to rebuild or replace any part at any time. It was truly miserable, but for the first time, I thought about how it was probably similar to what it was like to live in the Ends back home.

“The five of us all infiltrated places of power with relative ease. We were taught the language during our training, and the native accents weren’t difficult to imitate. Alex and Lisica took residence among the common people to search for bastions of support. Whether from built-in rebels or those who sought to live in the Cities. Thera became the handmaiden to the Princess of Iralia herself. Alyn and I became common policemen who patrolled the streets and clawed up the ranks by putting down criminals and ousting a few rebels that Alex had found.

“It took us a year to find out what weapon they had to use against us. Eight drilling torpedoes, one for each of the Cities. After that, 96 cargo submarines to haul what rootsteel they could recover back to Iralia. If successful, we estimated at least 100 million Purilyn commons would perish, an untold disaster the likes we had never seen in all history. Of course, we had to stop them at all cost, but even after two more months of rigorous investigation, we didn’t get any closer to finding the drills or subs. We were running out of time, and our contact agent had gone silent. Iralia was chaos, but one thing remained true in every rumor, and that was the launch date. It never changed, and the chaotic days continued to pass until that rumored distant day became our tomorrow. With our desperation at its peak, Alyn and I lost all pretense of espionage and wildly tore the place apart to search for any clue we could find about the devices.

“It didn’t take long for our fellow officers to realize our betrayal and turn their guns against us. We were forced to slaughter them, all twenty in our squad, and not one could leave a scratch on us. I can’t deny that our training covered a lot of ground, but they never prepared us for just how much blood a human body spills when you burst it. There must’ve been at least forty gallons of it flooding the station when the fighting was done. We did it so quickly, we never gave them a chance to surrender. They fired first, so we fired back. Quick and hard until they couldn’t fire anymore. Looking back, I realize we didn’t need to kill them, but we were in a hurry, and wherever my brother went, I followed.” Claude rubbed his eyes as if they were still slick with blood. “Umm, at the center of Iralia—or at least, I think it was the center—there was a tower. The King’s Tower. We spent at least an hour fighting our way to it, through the hordes of tanks and machines they sent after us, and somewhere along the way, I completely forgot about the twins, uhh, Alex and Lisica. We needed to regroup with Thera, at least. That was the only thing on my mind.

“By the time we made it to the stairs, we were drenched in oil and blood, but still they pursued us. The tower crackled like thunder with gunshots as we clambered our way up to the Princess’s room. The door to it was locked, so we kicked it down. Inside, we found a corpse and two broken girls.

“It wasn’t my fault. I barely touched him. Thera muttered those two things over and over again to herself in a corner while the Princess of Iralia bawled her eyes out, bound tight in steel cords beside her father’s stinking corpse. Alyn told me to deal with her, and walked right back out the door again to hold off the rest of our pursuers.

“He knew, Thera said. The king knew we were here the whole time. The rest of the situation became clear to me almost right away. It wasn’t the king who had the torpedoes. It was the rebels. We’d known for a while that the rebels weren’t fans of Purily, turned extremist through some strange doctrine that had spread through the commons in the past decade. And the king, who had some semblance of sensibility, knew they couldn’t survive in the war that would follow after the torpedo strike. In response, he set up a series of controlled explosives in the pipeways of the commons that would go off at midnight. It would completely detach the nobility from the commons, thus flooding the peasants and ending the rebellion in one fell swoop. The only way to stop it would be to tear out the princess’s heart and destroy the device he had surgically implanted there.

“He knew we were here, and gave us a choice. Let the common people of Iralia die for the sake of Purily, or murder the princess and save the common people of Iralia by risking the destruction of Purily’s own. Either way, the ensuing war would be nothing but chaos, and the choice became too much for the king to bear on his own. So he gave the decision to us. To his own daughter, Thera muttered, voice shaking with a tired, fearful rage. Then her eyes turned to me, her expression fallen to that of a helpless child. She begged me to tell her what to do.

“The Princess continued to sob and thrash to escape her bindings. A timer ticked on the nightstand with only five minutes remaining.

“I am fond of girls, you know. The rumors aren’t completely wrong. I loved my mom as a kid, and my little half-sister, and my cousin Thera, and even my rowdy disciple. Back then, all the boys would bully me, my brother would condescend me, and my father would ignore me. In contrast, the other side seemed so much kinder. Regardless, on that day as I was bathed in blood and oil, I felt like I could kill her. When I looked at my hands, there was only red. The memory of their flesh splattering across me, viscous and sticky, tinged with this metallic stench… it ate at me. I thought then that this decision wasn’t about choosing between us or them. It was just us. What difference was there between our endtowners and their commons? I couldn’t think of any. And the torpedoes? We had a fleet of HUNTERs whose job it was to stop things like that. Who knew if it could even damage the tough skeleton of our Cities?

“So I unsheathed my little knife and approached her. Thera held her ears shut as the princess wailed and begged for her life. Her screaming rattled me, so I shut off my sense of hearing. It felt good to be deaf, then.

“That was when my brother Alyn returned. He had to have cleared out the rest of the army on his own. How invulnerable, how venerable. I paled in comparison, surely. He must’ve seen me approaching the princess with a knife and shouted at me to stop. How noble, but I couldn’t hear him. I took another step only to suddenly find myself flat on my back, a flare of pain shooting down my spine. Alyn kicked the knife from my hands and knocked me across the room and into the nightstand, destroying the timer in the process.

“It’s us or them, he declared. I wiped my own blood from my nose and thought how it was the same color as the blood we took from the comrades we betrayed. I thought, ah, he doesn’t see it. He didn’t see it, so I told him, I choose us, so I’m stopping the bombs. It was a poor choice of words. He couldn’t read my mind. He must’ve thought, oh, Claude has gone over to the side of the rebels. He must’ve thought, we can’t trust him anymore. My own brother is an enemy now. So, I won’t let you, is what he said in response.

“I used my quickest trigger then, as high as I could crank it, to pick my knife back up and stab it through the princess’s heart before he could stop me, but as soon as I activated it, he already had his knee slammed into my stomach. I flew across the room again, and by the time I regained my senses, he was on top of me, landing fist after fist. It didn’t hurt as bad as I expected. He must’ve sacrified much of his strength for speed to stop me in time. I tried to think of a counter, but each punch landed with greater weight than the last, and I struggled to break free.

“Is this where I die? The thought repeated itself in my head with each punch he landed. It was suffocating. My vision blurred, my ears rang, and I felt nothing but a raging pain. A red pain. It burned inside me until it overflowed and spilled out in a torrent. Blind, deaf, ageusic and anosmic then, I knocked him off of me. I followed the fire of my pain back to him, mad and wild and near-dead. I came back at him until the pain was as unbearable for him as it was for me as I envisioned it in the red darkness I beheld. I flailed wildly with kicks and punches and elbows until I felt nothing give in response.

“When my sight returned, he was dead. A mass of unrecognizable flesh, specked with bits of chrome where his augments had been installed. Drunk with delirium, I rose again, hunched over and exhausted, wondering how much time had passed. It hasn’t been that long, I thought. There must still be time left. But when I looked for the princess, she was gone. In her place sat Lisica, who I realized I hadn’t seen since we landed. She sobbed and sobbed, just like the princess had. It was only supposed to be a game, she cried.”

Claude released his grip on Lilya’s fingers and pulled himself upright to perch on the balusters again. He stared blankly into the darkness of the loggia, eyes quivering with the flickering glow of the passing fireflies. He tried speaking again, but his voice trembled and stopped. Lilya stumbled back to her feet, on the verge of tears herself, and Claude collapsed into her arms.

“I killed him for nothing,” he said through clenched teeth. His hot tears seeped through the breast of her uniform in their embrace, where he laughed over his cries, almost maniacal in its quality. His tears continued to stream until they ran dry, and his laughter turned haggard. Finally, he continued again. “After that, a flurry of Purilyn knights flooded the room, led by Nico Calista himself. We were taken back to Pyraleia. It took several days for them to finally explain the situation to me.

“Those two years we spent overseas… they were nothing but a training simulation. Of the four of us, only Alex and Lisica were in on it. We had never gone to Iralia, and we were only about thirty miles off the Pyraleian harbor. A complex compound of pipeways and platforms were built and rebuilt to mimic something that could be mistaken for a dying Iralia, and it was populated with a hundred actors, convicts, and actual refugees from Iralia. The bulk of the military they deployed against us in the end were only remote-controlled machinery.”

“That’s insane,” Lilya said.

“I’ve been wondering ever since… do I even deserve to be king? I tried my best to do the right thing each day for those two years. In the end, when I decided to sacrifice the princess for the sake of a people I didn’t even know, I thought I did the right thing. But really, if I hadn’t killed him, Alyn would be king now instead of me. I would be his carnation, Thera would be his lejindir, and Alex and Lisica would be his closest retainers.

“Instead, my court is fractured and faithless. I feel like I’m always surrounded by enemies I can’t see. The people I once considered family refuse to speak to me. I wake up every morning in the dark, before the sun has risen, and shake in fear of the day to come. I’m invincible? The immortal king? What a cruel joke. I’ve nearly died more times than I can count. Just last week, one of my maids choked to death after trying a bite of my poisoned dinner. When we caught the culprit, he claimed allegiance to the Ends, but if that’s true…

“Sometimes, I feel so lonely that I consider jumping into the sea. I would wonder if the fall could kill me. Surely it would, I think. But would it be painless? Is it possible that my body is so durable that my death could be obtained through nothing short of indescribable agony?”

“Please don’t say that,” Lilya said. “You’re not alone. I would sacrifice my own life in a heartbeat if it would save yours.”

Claude pulled away. “Lilya Caecilius, a name I must fear most by the wisdom of my predecessor. Is that all I’m left to trust?”

Lilya let her augments spark across her body with the beat of her heart, and she found her lips on his before she even realized it herself. The fireflies swirled around them in her trail, and they shimmered brightly as their breaths were held in a silent kiss. When they parted again, their warmth made a fog in the cold Pyraleian winter, so high up in the sky they had surely forgotten how far beneath them a real ground stood. “Your enemies are my enemies. We’ll stop them together.” Caught in her own frantic heartbeat, she gripped his hand and dropped to a knee. “That is my vow, so… dear Claude, if you can find that I’m enough for you… Will you marry me?”

Claude had been searching for a reason. This search was why he spoke to her at all this night. He wanted a reason to ask for her hand in marriage, any reason at all, but she beat him to it, and he never imagined he could even feel the way he did now.

He covered his eyes with a hand as he blushed from ear to ear, and gave his answer.