Chapter IX | The Ten Parts

Year 694 a.S., Spring | City Pyraleia, the Capital

The Reguild Archive of Endlayer was the largest library in Layer 4, and served as the primary entrance to the Undersea District. It was perhaps the nicest building in all the Ends and stood five stories tall right where the central column ran through the gut of the capital. There were many students who longed to leave the Ends that studied in this place, which is why Lana chose it as one of their few meeting places, inconspicuous in the crowd.

The king and lucky met here at least twice a month, though oftentimes even more. Again now, they sat in the same booth as always, with Lana’s nose stuck in a book, and Claude waiting for her to finish. The cover of her book read Ten Part, by Ohara Asa, Volume 10.

“When are we going to meet your family?” he said.

She flipped a page and kept reading. “Grab a book. I recommended you one, remember?”

“I read it.”

She put the book down and smiled. “Is that so? Who’s your favorite character, then?”

“Naria Stole.”

“Of course it is.”

“She’s your favorite too. You do your hair up the same as hers.”

She froze at that. “You noticed that?”

“And two weeks ago, you placed an order for a stone hammer with a curved hickory handle, just like Naria’s.”

“Are you having me spied on out of suspicion or concern?”

“Suspicion,” he said. “Stop stalling and take me to see your family.”

Lana stared at the table. “I’m scared.”

The confession left them in silence again until the sky turned orange for dusk and the staff switched shifts for the night. Only then did she take to her feet. It was time.

The civilian elevator to the Undersea District was both rarely used and poorly maintained. The inside of it reeked of pipe smoke and the air inside tasted musty and salted. The wallpaper peeled in places and revealed a metal surface underneath, where little notes were scratched into it in a variety of Purilyn languages that neither of them could read.

Despite its ragged appearance, the elevator worked flawlessly as the door closed and their descent began in a smooth quiet that could only be possible with incredibly precise engineering. And even though the floors between the two layers stood an entire thousand feet apart, the descent took a mere fifteen seconds.

The doors opened to a field of flowers that spanned nearly a hundred feet across, and stretched to the horizon. The concrete along the field’s edge curled away from it like ice cream, and the steelhouses that were once there were nowhere to be seen. Even the rootsteel rebar, beams and pillars. All gone without a trace.

“What happened here?” Claude said, moving to the field and crouching down to inspect a flower. It was unlike any flower he had ever seen, with petals that peeled out from the stem and curled upwards, and tendrils that drooped from its core, so far they kissed the ground again and glowed there.

Lana smiled sadly as she reached down and squashed a blossom in her fist. “You nobles are all so quick to blind yourselves to inconvenient truths. The JANITORs have remained in their little corner since six years ago, and the GUARDs stopped patrolling this layer since even earlier. But even without them, the deeplings kept coming. With no one then to protect us but us, we tore this strip down to direct the creatures through, and turned the steel we wrought from its skeleton into weaponry.”

“Deeplings…?” Claude said, hesitantly as if he’d only ever heard the word before in whispers.

“I always wondered whether you knew about them,” Lana said, letting the bruised corpse of the flower she’d squashed fall flat to the concrete. “I guess not. They must be like a fairy tale to you. I wonder how they keep that secret so safe when they come for us every night. How… and why?” Lana stood and backed away into the flowers, further until the last light from the glass dome at the layer’s edge flickered away, and night arrived for the Ends. She was kept alight then only by the glow of the strange flowers along the strip. That deep blue glow almost seemed to crawl up her body as the seconds passed, from her loafers up to that odd bit of bed hair that he’d noticed since they first met up but couldn’t bring himself to mention. With her hands held behind her back, she leaned forward a touch and let her smile go. “Every flower you see here sprouted by itself from the carcass of a deepling we slew. We call them ailia blossoms. They can take root in anything, even concrete, and need neither water nor sunlight to survive.”

“A deepling you say again.” The sudden frost of night made him shiver. “What are they?”

Almost as if to respond to his question, a high-pitched howl sounded in the distance, and hundreds more followed after that. It filled the empty darkness with a terrible life.

“It’s funny. They come from the ocean depths, but they can’t swim. The only way for them to climb the layers is through that central tower behind you. In other words, in this moment, the two of us are the only things standing between the ignorant masses above and the carnage that waits from deeper below.”

Claude couldn’t think of anything to say. Her words were almost like a fantasy to him, but they made him remember the day House Porter came to pledge their loyalty to him. We found a truth lost to all but fiction, the Lady Diana had said. The truth that magic is real.

The wind howled and all the little bugs scattered as Lana brought her smile back. “You’ll protect me, won’t you?”

The words left her mouth in cold fog, and a sudden tide of mildewed flesh screamed up from behind her. The smell was awful. That was the first thing Claude thought as he let the lightning spark from him. Loose bundles of green and black in the shape of wild cats the size of lions. Glowing tendrils like from the blossoms of their corpses flowed from their manes like hair, and their jaws opened larger than the size of their skulls. Rows and rows of teeth surrounded Lana as she still stood there, sweetly, as if she had complete faith that he would save her.

And he did, of course. He swung his knife, hard as he could, across the length of them, and they all opened up and died in a circle around her. The ailia took root almost right away, piercing through the concrete to stand upright and then bloom in the moment after. More of the creatures would come soon after, in waves and flourishes, for hours and hours like music until the music stopped, and the flower bed grew thicker as the flesh of the dead shriveled up and evaporated.

Soaked in sweat then and short of breath, Claude stomped back up to Lana, who had remained unmoving since the deeplings arrived, and grabbed her by the collar. “It’s not possible,” he muttered. “They come every night, you said? Every night? And I didn’t know about it? I’m the preeminent sovereign of all Purily, damn it!”

“Put our princess down.” Dozens of shadows emerged around him. Cloaked figures in the night. The wolves of Endlayer.

“Princess?” Claude scoffed, lifting Lana up higher. “Who? Where?”

The act had the wolves unsheathe their steel all at once. Swords and guns both, once concealed in their cloaks, now brandished in silvery threat.

“Stop,” Lana croaked, pulling herself up from Claude’s wrist. “Don’t fight!”

A final wolf appeared then, removing his hood for Claude to see. He tossed his weapon to the ground, where it disappeared among the flowers. He was an older man, wracked with greying hairs and a voice burdened by a lifetime of smoking. “Tell your men to stand down, Tucker.”

“Ulysses…” the pack of wolves muttered.

Tucker tsked and removed his cloak too. Despite the authority he held, this particular wolf was clearly still green, in his early twenties at best, with an angular face cut with vitriol. “Stand down,” he finally said.

Every wolf in sight removed their cloaks and tossed their weapons to the ground then, and the rhythmic thuds of them calmed Claude almost like a lullaby would, and he lowered Lana until her shoes touched the flowers again. Free then, she slugged the king in the shoulder and bruised her knuckles against it.

“He only acts like an asshole,” she promised, pulling her arm behind her back to hide how she’d just hurt herself.

“He must be a great actor,” Tucker said bitterly.

The man they called Ulysses stepped closer to Claude and brought him a warm smile. “Pardon my brother. I understand that tensions are high right now. Our princess speaks highly of you, sire.”

“Why is she your princess?” Claude rebuffed. “She has no royal blood.”

“My apologies. Not many women volunteer to fight with us, see, and Lana has been with us since she was only a little girl. It’s merely something we call her as a pet name of sorts.”

Bewildered, he looked to Lana. “And you still let them?”

“Well duh,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to be called a princess?”

Annoyed by that response, Claude glanced around the lot of them for the first time with their shadows shorn. A particular face caught his attention. “You there. What’s your name?”

The one he pointed to stiffened. “My name is Rubin.”

“Have we met before? How old are you?”

“Nineteen. I doubt we’ve met before, my lord.”

The kid was the same age as Claude, and it was true. His face by itself didn’t remind him of anyone he’d ever met, but something about him struck Claude as familiar. The contradiction hurt his brain, so he decided to put it off and turn away. “Well, I’m done here. Lana, show me where you live.”

Lana’s home was made up of a single bedroom with a tiny kitchen attachment. The bathroom and showers sat outside and down the hall, to be shared with half a dozen others. What they lacked in, Lana had told him once before, wasn’t to do with food, or power, or tech. They lacked space, plain and simple. There was very little of it, and it grew littler every day, and all that remained in the cracks were the dreams of moving up layers to breathe. In truth, the Undersea District must’ve had more land than the others combined, or near to it, but deepling invasions had claimed large swaths of territory and collapsed entire sections. However, the most notable cause was the lack of access to any sort of contraception after the outlawing of commercial plastics.

“Tell your friends to stop attacking our supply chains,” Claude said, taking residence in her raggedy bed as if it were his. “Their incessant raids make it easy for the Church to paint them as evil. Instead, I’ll personally smuggle supplies to them when I can. Once I deal with taking popular control back from August, I’ll make sure our militaries actually help you fight those things back.”

Lana nodded. She sat at her little dining table alone, staring out of the window with an odd pensive stare that he’d never seen from her before.

“What are you thinking about?” Claude said. “You have an annoying look on your face.”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Is it about my engagement?”

“I’m sure you’ll make lovely children together.”

“You think it’s a bad idea.”

“I think it’s a double-edged sword.”

He smirked and sat up. There was something about this place that he enjoyed, despite its dinginess. The half-hung picture frames on the walls of all the people she cared about; the simmering pot on her rusted stove and the aroma it carried. There were all sorts of things that made this place feel more like home than his home ever did. The worn clothes across the floor and the dirty sheets in the hamper. The books on her nightstand piled up and spilled across the floor, comics and novels both, as well as a little dream journal that she had yet to notice. And against her nightstand, a conspicuous stone hammer leaned too. This is Lana, they all seemed to shout. And we’re letting you see.

He picked up one of her books and started reading. It was already long past dark, and his RINGKNIGHTs were surely wondering what he was up to by now, but he struggled to bring up the topic he needed to. It wasn’t until an amount of time passed with an amount of quiet that he finally worked up the courage to say it.

“She’s with child now,” he said. “After our first night.”

Lana didn’t move. “That so?”

“You’re mad, aren’t you?”

“I’m not.”

“Jealous, then?”

That did it. She knocked the chair over in her resulting fury, twisting around to find… a flower blossom.

“You finally looked at me,” he said, holding the thing up to her, clearly nervous himself.

It was an odd flower, like its petals were made of bunched up silk ribbons, twisted and gorgeous and unreal. A carnation, she knew. And she knew what it meant, too. Tristan had explained it to her. A small bed of them surrounded the throne, and each one was to be cared for by the king himself. And from them, he would choose his favorite, cast it in the undying frost of the Frigid Barrier at the ocean’s end, and offer it to his most trusted advisor. The blossom of the carnation would be pinned to their breast, and they would gain an authority above all but the king himself. The last was Morris Morsylis. And now—

“Me?” she said. “Your Carnation?”

Claude had a wrinkled smile, like he’d never felt more embarrassed in his life. “You look so surprised. Is this not what you were gunning for since the start? Or did you really want to be my wife?”

“No… I…” She couldn’t find the words to say. For the first time since they met, Claude had made her speechless, and he reveled in it.

“We’ll have to put off the ceremony until after the wedding, but you can keep it.” He placed the blossom in her hands and closed her fingers around it. “Let’s make the world a better place. Together.”

A tear rolled down her cheek to her chin and fell to the dusty floorboards. “You’re an awful politician, you know. You make it hard for people to trust you, yet you put so much trust in everyone else. You already trust me too much and since too long ago, and I’m sure you’ll trust your wife too much too. You’re still wearing that bracelet I gave you all that time ago, after all…”

He placed a gentle hand on her head, and she almost jumped at the sensation. It was surprisingly warm, and comforting, and it made her realize that she had indeed felt jealous. A strange jealousy. She couldn’t see him as a romantic partner, even now, and was certain he felt the same, yet still it had irked her. But no longer. In this quiet moment together in her home at night, as the pipes across the steelhouse bunch rattled and creaked, and the clocks ticked, and he patted her head like she were a child, that odd sensation left her chest, and she only felt grateful that the old goddess had chosen to grant her a thing so precious.