Those Without Place are Free Within Her Embrace

13th of Kaien, White City, the sky

(A few hours later)

How the White City continued stretching far and wide before them after walking for so long was anyone’s guess. As they explored, they looked through the buildings, noticing them all abandoned. It was clear that these buildings had a function at some point, that they were put to use - that much was clear from the wear and tear that gnawed at their corners. But otherwise, there was nothing. The city wasn’t ‘abandoned’ like the villages that the refugees had left behind earlier in their travels, where one could tell there had once been people, no. Here, in this city, there was no furniture, no toys, no food, no signs at all of any humanity within. It seemed as if everything but the buildings had been erased, all the way down to the paint.

“Something must have happened.” Rei put into words what everyone else was thinking. “There’s no way for a city this big to simply… Stop existing.”

“Magic could be involved,” Orm supposed, examining the bleached-out facades of buildings they passed. “At this point, that’s the only thing that makes any kind of sense. But -” She leaned over a little to look into a window into another empty room of a building, “That doesn’t say much. People call stuff they don’t understand ‘magic’ all the time, after all. And I,” she paused, stopping and looking at the rest of them, “Don’t understand this place.”

“It is impossible to leave absolutely no evidence of life, even if this place was abandoned for thousands of years.” Orm was growing frustrated from the lack of information. “There should at least be pottery, tables, stones, something, anything!” She sighed, collecting herself. “But there’s nothing. It’s just… Gone. Like it never was.”

“Then, it wouldn’t be impossible, as you said, for magic to be involved here. Maybe so long ago that none of that is left either…” Fin had already confirmed that no magic lingered. “Then, what happened, do you think? Did the magic just consume every trace of humanity including the people themselves?”

She looked to the eldest in the group, Hrim and Orm, for their input.

“It’s the only option that makes any sense to me.” Orm shook her head, rubbing her chin with her hand as she moved to a building entryway. She leaned forward and squinted, examining and still rubbing at her face.

When she stood upright again, she turned towards the others and pointed back to the relatively small holes that dotted one side of the stone entryway.

“Do you think the people here even took the doors? Like, all the way down to the hinges and nails?” She asked.

Orm’s question gave everyone pause. This was clear evidence that whatever had happened here was not just simple abandonment, but complete destruction, a destruction somehow neat and clean that there wasn’t even the smallest stain of humanity left behind.

“Do you think that whatever did this… Is still here?” Rei asked, everyone turning to her.

“I wonder… This place is still moving, it still functions.” Hal’s words fell slowly, as if debating with herself the probability of this out loud. “For a floating island to remain, there must be a source of energy still active…” She stared at the ground, thinking. “But for it to move, it needs a constant directive.” Her voice trailed again, her eyebrows knit together in concentration and her lips set thin as she thought.

“So, most likely,” she concluded, “Yes.”

Hal looked up and turned towards the twisted spiral at the center of the floating island.

“It can’t be a normal person, since they wouldn’t have the amount of magic needed to control it… So…” Hal let her words trail off as she looked back down to the party, those words’ meaning readily apparent for everyone.

“Oh, then can we leave?” Hrim perked up, a glimmer of hope in his voice at the thought of getting back onto solid ground.

“No.” Hal shook her head. “At first it was just a weird thing that we found, but now -” She looked all around her. If someone or something had done all of this, then…

“- We need to stop it.”

“Very heroic indeed, little hero,” Fin started, brushing back some of her hair. “But with as wild as this is, there’s a good chance we might end up the same way ourselves if we try,” she warned while she tried to figure out what sort of magic could have even done this.

“We can always run,” Hal said, pausing when she noticed the others’ expressions.

She laughed, no one quite able to tell if it was her usual laugh of pride or… Something else.

“What? Did I say something weird?”

She faced forward, looking directly at the spire, purposefully not looking at them.

Nobody said anything, the answer apparent.

“It’s fine,” she sighed, smiling still. “I know. I don’t sound like myself.”

Hal looked up to the sky.

“I still think we should try to do everything we can.” Her voice was unusually serious as she continued, “But even if we win, if I lose any one of you… Then what do I do then?”

She looked down to them now, a deep sadness in her expression at the thought of it.

“True… It’s good to know your limits.” Orm smiled back. “Still, the flames of war have already scarred you that much, Hal?”

Hal didn’t respond, she only began walking forward.

“Don’t forget, we decided to follow you, just as much as you decided to follow your dream,” Orm giggled.

“See this sad sack of rusty armor?” She gestured to Hrim. “Even though it’s taking everything in him to stay calm this high up, he still keeps on following us. He could’ve left at any point if he so chose, but he’s staying here, by your side.”

“No,” Hrim protested. “I want to get off, but I can’t, so I am doing the best next thing. I am not some magical being that can jump from this height and be alright.”

The others laughed.

“See? He’s even still got his sense of humor.” Orm watched Hal, seeing through her conflicted expression. “This isn’t the army where we have to follow your every order. We can all make our own decisions here. So don’t worry about it so much, Hal. Just be the you that you want to be.”

“Yeah. Alright,” Hal closed her eyes and took a deep breath, looking up and nodding once she was done. “Alright. We’ll… Well, we don’t even know what we’re up against, but who- or whatever it is, we’ll kick its ass.”

“Of course,” Rei piped up. “We will do… What you said!”

“You can curse Rei, it’s fine,” Fin chuckled beside her.

“I know, but it feels… Improper.”

The more they advanced through the city, the more they saw the shape, a twisted pillar. It wasn’t just the central spire, but in some buildings as well - a chimney, elongated and twisted, the tip of it pointed; some stairs on the inside of a large house that, when she looked in, Orm said weren’t designed to be that way, though no one knew how she knew that. It didn’t look purposefully placed there at all; it had no base, as if the stone itself had become twisted in some way. Now that they noticed, it was everywhere, not twisting just one or two tiles, but more and more, to the point that the interior of entire buildings had transformed into its spiral shape.

“It looks like the central spire,” Rei mused as she examined a particular specimen stretching through the roof of a building.

“No… I think the central spire is the same thing,” Orm said, looking ahead at the buildings in front of them. It had been hard to tell from a distance, but now that they were closer, it became clear: The closer they were towards the central spire, the more that entire buildings were twisted, and eventually the spire seemed to have started pulling in even the streets around them.

It came to a point where they didn’t even look like streets anymore, but rather an endless loop, going around and around itself, tighter and tighter. What were once stairs became blended with the road and walls, and what was once a building had been spun up into such an unlivable, abstract shape that no architect would ever design.

It was here, so close to the center, that they noticed their first signs of life: on the wall of a building, bent and contorted, in a space where the surface was still somehow flat-ish, words were etched:

Those without place are free within her embrace.

The word ‘free’ had been crossed out repeatedly.

There were other words as well, completely unreadable, the walls twisting them into utter nonsense.

The words could mean anything, but it was clear that whoever scratched them into existence had a reason. Perhaps things had gotten so dire when they wrote it that they realized that there was no use trying to use paper or other, less-destructive writing tools.

“Still.” Orm looked at the inscriptions suddenly surrounding them. “Someone could have written the messages with something, no? Like paint or ink.”

“Maybe they couldn’t…” Rei’s fingers traced the letters still recognizable. “We haven’t seen any paper or paint. Maybe all that was taken away with everything else.”

“Wait,” Fin said suddenly, causing others to look her way. “We can check that.”

She placed a couple of her shards against a nearby wall, magic slowly pulsing through it.

It was quiet for a long while, everyone giving the knight space to think, until -

“You’re right, Rei. These are just… Regular bricks. They were probably even regular red once, it’s just that their colors were taken away by blight a long time ago.”

“What’s blight?” Rei titled her head.

“Think of it as an extremely rare and very powerful form of corruption, a form of degradation.” Fin paused, and seeing Rei’s panicked face, smiled reassuringly.

“Don’t worry, Rei. I don’t sense anything now.” She waved her hand gently. “Whatever happened here must have been a long time ago.”

Her shards still against it, Fin tapped the wall with her fingers, trying to find any more relevant information.

“We don’t know much about blight. It’s usually lethal, and associated with the remnants of gods, since it tends to appear around them. Not every time, though. Maybe…” Fin thought for a second, her magic lingering on the wall.

Slowly, Fin’s face paled, and her slightly-parted lips trembled for a moment before she clenched her teeth. Eyes wide, she pulled her shards back to her shoulder and started looking all around her in disbelief.

“Wha… What is it?” Rei asked, also looking around, not seeing anything more out of the ordinary than it had already been.

“I was,” Fin’s words were strained, her voice choked in her throat, “... Looking for the wrong thing.”

“What do you mean?” Hrim asked, seeming to suddenly be paying attention again.

“I was looking for magic this whole time. I completely forgot that it’s not only magic that can do something like this.” Fin laughed painfully as she covered her face. “Higher powers also exist.”

“Then… Are you saying a god or something holy made this?” Orm asked, taken aback.

“Yes,” Fin said, looking up between her fingers at the central spire before her hands fell back to her side. “And now that I know what I’m looking for, I can tell that the whole place reeks of it. And that place,” She started, turning her head to face the spire, "Is the worst. I've never seen something so vile in my life.”

“Vile? Aren’t gods supposed to be good?” Rei was confused. She didn’t fully understand it, but she knew that the very idea of a god was something that brought with it the thought of prayer, and of worship. She knew, or at least thought, that a god was supposed to be a good thing. Why else would people worship them?

“No,” Hrim answered, watching Fin with concern. “Not all gods are.”

Fin looked as though she was ill, her tense expression accompanied now by sweat forming on her brow. She looked as if she might collapse at any moment.

“Some gods are meant to represent destruction, or even despair,” Hrim finished.

“I’m not talking about those,” Fin said, exasperated, as she finally closed her eyes, a sigh escaping her.

“Once I realized, it was as if I was looking into a never-ending nightmare. It was like the very concept of reality was twisted. I think…” Fin leaned against a wall and let her body slide down to the ground, “... I think I need a minute.”

None of them looked much better after she finished talking. They all stood quietly, too dumbstruck by the idea of it all to know what to say next.

Finally, Orm broke the silence.

“What do you say, dear Hal? Do we run?”

The dragon’s pointed smile was hollow.

Hal stood silent for a moment longer before she turned to Fin and asked, “Is that all you felt, looking at the central spire?”

Fin gave Hal an incredulous look, but seeing the serious expression on the aspiring hero’s face, she gave up on the expletive she was considering. Fin knew that Hal wasn’t someone that would ask something like this without a reason, no matter how much she might have wanted to chew her out for asking something so condescending.

“Yes,” she answered finally after biting her tongue to hold that curse. “It was as if at any second I’d die just by being in this thing’s presence.”

“Then it’s not a god waiting for us,” Hal answered, earning the continued silence of everyone around her.

“A god’s higher power feels as if your very soul is screaming, being slowly plucked away,” she explained. “Bit by bit, even if you couldn’t see it like you did, Fin.”

“Then… You’ve seen a real god in the flesh?” Rei asked, standing beside Hal, her hand protectively reaching for hers.

“Yeah,” Hal smiled bitterly, squeezing Rei’s hand. “My mother.”