"This one," Eni said, and her finger trembled ever so slightly as she pointed.
The golden figurine of the hare was firmly grasped in her other paw, and as she glanced from it to the statue she was almost overwhelmed with a sense of age. The crisp details the miniature replica depicted were almost completely eroded from the original, the elegantly carved threadwork at the sleeves and neckline of the Faceless King nothing more than blurred impressions. Where the strange horned hare's expression should have been there were nothing but faded chisel marks from his millennia-old disfigurement and only somewhat fresher holes from where an attempt at restoration had been made.
Even that ill-conceived effort had been undertaken long before Tin's birth; the platinum mask formerly fixed atop the statue's ruined head had been in Vornstrom's history museum for centuries. Eni had seen the crude replacement with her own eyes only once, and she could vividly remember how the Archivist had chuckled when she described her distaste to him. She had told her mentor that it would ruin the statue to view it with the mask in place, but as she looked at the shining simulacrum she held she realized that "ruined" was far too simple a word.
The hare she held was achingly noble, a melancholic strength seeming to radiate from his finely formed eyes and strong muzzle. There was none of the terrible pride written in every line of the mask; the only details that were even close to right were the antlers. Even those were wrong, far too long and much too wide, fitting for the deer that had been guessed at but not the Aberrant that had really been depicted.
Tin had begun studying the statue at her word, twisting in place as he stared at where its face would have been looking if it had only still been present. "You were right," he said quietly, gazing at Wordermund's stele.
The obelisk was set somewhat back from the loose ring of the Faceless Kings, its faceted sides rising up into the sky. The marble reflected the dim light and glowed like a blood moon, the metallic veins in the stone shimmering slightly. Eni frowned as she studied it, taking a hesitant step closer as she searched the tall and narrow pyramid for its secrets. It appeared to be made of a single massive block; there were no seams in the stele itself, and the threads of color that ran through it continued smoothly into its engraved base.
In her victory, we endure.
Eni reached out and ran her fingers across the symbols, feeling the smooth curves and sharp edges that time hadn't quite removed yet. She half expected to feel a galvanic shock, to have something suddenly press against her mind, but it was only marble. Even through her glove it leached away her body's warmth, as frigid as the air around it, and a similar chill worked its way slowly down Eni's spine.
She bit her lip, her mouth dry as the prickles of fear wormed their way deeper. What if she was wrong? What if they had been sent on a pointless task, meant only to keep them occupied while the Visitor's machinations unfolded? Her heart pounded as she glanced away, looking up at the nearest wall.
The defenders atop it were visible only by the glow of their torches and lanterns, much too high to see as anything but dark shapes faintly touched by light. The swirling snow made them beautiful, little spots of brightness against the starless night, and Eni swallowed. She could hear them, the sounds of their armor and their voices blending together, and her resolve hardened.
"Zathos?" Eni asked, "What do you see?"
The monster hadn't spoken since their reunion, quietly following her and Tin to their destination. Despite its significant growth its footsteps had been as silent as ever, its enormous body passing through the night with almost no trace of its passage. "The Emperor's Stele," Zathos said flatly, two of its eyes focused on the towering monument and the other two looking at Eni.
"But does it look…" Eni began, groping for the right word, "Unusual, somehow?"
The monster cocked its head to the side. "It is composed of calcite with significant iron content and lesser amounts of other metallic impurities," Zathos said, its high and eerie voice blandly dry, "Although the material is unique to Idrun, it is no more or less remarkable than any other variety of marble."
Eni frowned, but the creature was right. There were dozens of different kinds of marble, all depending on where it was quarried from, in a rainbow of hues. The courtyard boasted a number of different colors, worked together into an elaborate mosaic being slowly hidden by the falling snow, and the area immediately around the stele was a dramatic black shot through with threads of gold. "You don't see a latch, then?" she asked, repressing a sigh, and the monster's answer was a single word.
"No."
She knew she shouldn't be surprised; in the millennia since the stele had been erected, millions of eyes must have seen it. If there was some obvious secret to opening it, surely some long-dead historian would have already spotted it. She still looked, but it was fruitless; the stele was utterly flawless. There were no discontinuities in the grain of the stone that would show where a piece had been removed and cunningly replaced or any other signs of trickery.
The obelisk was surrounded by a neat square of marble, about forty feet on a side and seemingly as monolithic as the monument itself. Eni bent down to brush snow away from where the plinth of the stele met the ground, beginning to search, but Tin put his paw on her shoulder and wordlessly motioned with his head for her to stand aside.
The wolf walked up to the base, sizing it up, and then pressed both of his paws against it. The muscles in his arms bulged as he shoved, tendons standing out under his fur like ropes, and he gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes. His tail came down, bracing against the tile and his trailing heel, and Eni could hear a growl deep in his chest as he exerted himself.
It should have been futile. The stele and its plinth had to weigh tens of thousands of pounds, balanced low along with most of the mass. No mammal alone should have been able to budge it by as much as a hair, not while trying to maintain footing on slick marble made even more treacherous by snow. Zathos recognized the impossibility of what Tin was attempting almost at once, its body rapidly beginning to reform into something thick and squat like a living battering ram. Before the monster could even begin to press against the stele, however, Tin cried out.
The sound was like a tree being split by lightning, deep and resonant beyond measure, and for an instant Eni could hear nothing else. His roaring bark echoed flatly across the courtyard, shaking the air in Eni's chest, and then there was an almighty crack. The stone of the plinth was giving way under Tin's paws, crazed lines spreading out from his splayed fingers as he pushed harder and harder.
His hackles were raised, the fur standing up to midway down his bare back, and as Eni watched with eyes wide with wonder his arms slowly straightened. He didn't slide back at all, the stele developing a pronounced lean before at last giving way. It hit the ground with a rumble that would have been ear splittingly loud had it not come after the sound Tin had made, the ancient stone shattering into enormous pieces that ruined the mosaic flooring as they heavily came to a rest.
Zathos began reforming itself into its usual shape, still not having even touched the stele, but Eni only had eyes for Tin. She rushed over, sure that he would be panting with exhaustion or have shattered every bone in his arms, but he simply stood still as he waited for the dust to settle. Eni was dimly aware of mammals on the wall calling out in surprise or awe, their voices tinny and distant.
Tin calmly brushed his paws together, flecks of stone coming away. "You didn't hurt yourself, did you?" Eni asked, grabbing his fingers in hers as she searched for wounds.
He let her hold on for a moment, his pulse slow and steady, before shrugging and slipping free. "Wasn't heavy," he said, but she thought there was a slightest hint of uncertainty to his features.
Eni held his gaze a second longer and then turned away, looking at the rubble he had left behind. "I see why we didn't spot a handle," she said, trying for a light tone, "There wasn't one."
With the stele tipped out of the way, it was obvious that she was right. There were no hinges, cleverly hidden or otherwise, that would let it move. There had been nothing anchoring it in place but its immense weight, but with the stele shattered and crumbling Eni could see that the square of black marble surrounding it wasn't a featureless block.
There was a golden circle at its center, about sixteen feet in diameter, fit to the surrounding stone with perfect smoothness. As the grit blew away and Eni got closer, she saw that the circle had a single mark marring the gleaming metal. There was a slight depression about a foot away from the outer rim, one that she recognized at once as a paw print with five splayed fingers. It was slightly larger than her own and unmistakably masculine, so perfectly etched into the surface that it looked like a mammal had pressed their paw into wet clay. There were whorls and lines where the fur on the fingers and palm seemed to have pushed against the metal, but not any paw pads. With a start, Eni realized that she knew who had made it; it could only belong to the Aberrant hare she still had the figurine of.
"Wordermund didn't make this door," she said in a hushed voice, speaking slowly as she considered what she was seeing.
Although there was no obvious way to open the golden metal she was absolutely confident that it had to be the entrance they were looking for. "He hid it," Eni continued, "Kept it safe."
Her frown deepened, and although neither Tin nor Zathos asked her why the emperor would have done so the question nagged at her. "But I know what we have to do," she said, pulling off her right glove, and without waiting for a response she pressed her palm against the metal.
For a moment, nothing happened. It was cool to the touch but not cold, Eni's fingers somewhat too small to fit perfectly. She closed her eyes, trying to focus, and the sounds of battle drifted across her awareness. She could hear ballistas and catapults firing, the ground underfoot shaking ever so slightly with the impact of their projectiles, but the shouts of the defenders didn't have the edge of panic to them. There was just grim determination, and Eni called on it, imagining she could draw it into herself like a breath of air. She saw nothing but infinite darkness, devoid of any colors or shapes, and Eni slowed her breathing. She reached out with her power and—
Her mother was standing before her.
She was as she had been when Eni had been quite young, when her mother's fur had barely started to dull and there had never been any tiredness in her teak-colored eyes. An elegant Nihian robe was wrapped around her, simple and without ornamentation, and she was brushing the fur atop her head with a familiar comb. "Okesan?" Eni whispered, her voice breaking on the word as she lapsed into her native tongue.
It wasn't the Visitor. Eni was positive; she was in a featureless void and the figure she saw lacked the vividness of that awful being. Her mother nodded, smiling slightly, and offered her comb to Eni. She took it with trembling fingers, the heft of it like an old friend; it was the same one she had lost with her apartment. Eni turned it over, desperately searching for some kind of meaning, and then gave a sudden yelp.
She nearly dropped the comb as she pulled one paw away; in her haste she had pricked her finger on one of its tines. It shouldn't have been sharp enough to break the skin, but somehow it had, a brilliantly red drop welling up against the stark white of Eni's fur as she watched.
Eni winced at the throb of pain, looking up at the image of her mother. The shorter hare's features were apologetic, her lips beginning to part, but before she could speak Eni heard her blood splash against the ground in sheer defiance of there not being anything to hit. There was a sudden ringing sound, like a bell miles away being tolled, and for an instant Eni didn't see just her mother before her. Dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of hares filled her sight, dressed in an eclectic assortment of clothes. There was a buck wearing the homespun tunic and trousers of the Commonwealth in a fashion nearly two centuries out of date. Next to him was a doe wearing a peculiar sort of toga, dyed a rich azure, that left one breast exposed. Behind them were even more, dazzlingly diverse, and above the crowd loomed a few Aberrants nearly as big as Eni herself.
At the very back of the hares was the tallest of them all, his fur an eye-catching blue patterned with white. In his right paw was an iron staff, glowing red-hot without burning him, and—
Eni's paw suddenly dropped as though she had leaned against a thin sheet of ice over a lake. Her eyes shot open as she nearly fell before a strong pair of arms grabbed her around her waist and pulled her back. She groggily shook her head, trying to hold onto what she had seen, and the courtyard seemed to swim around her. The golden circle she had placed her paw against was completely gone, revealing a spiraling staircase, and she tilted her head back. "What happened?" she asked, her eyes catching sight of the bottom of Tin's muzzle.
He looked down at her as he sat up, carefully settling Eni as he did. "You made it open," he said simply.
"I'm not sure how," Eni admitted, but when she stared down at her paws there was a faint reddish smear just barely visible on one finger.
"You met the condition for opening this doorway, Archivist," Zathos said, its voice neutral as though nothing of any particular interest had occurred.
"Like the door under the Terraces," Eni replied thoughtfully, "I was holding the figurine. Maybe it was the key."
She had dropped it during her vision, but as she carefully picked it back up from the step it had fallen onto she didn't think her guess was right. The golden doorway had seemed somehow more cleverly designed than the one in Terregor, as though it had been waiting for the right mammal to come along rather than anyone who happened to have a lump of metal. Maybe the entrance had been waiting for someone with enough magic; Eni had the vague sense that she had been tested in some fashion, and she shook her head again to clear it.
She pushed herself to her feet, Tin helping to ease her up, and then considered the staircase. The steps were made of Aurum Regis, etched with swirling geometric patterns for traction, and she couldn't tell how far into the ground they descended. It quickly became too dark to see anything and she turned to Tin. "I wish we had a lantern," she said, her voice remarkably steady, and the wolf drew his whip-sword.
"You do," Zathos said, and it reached into itself.
Eni watched with a sort of fascinated disgust as its chest cavity spiraled open, the tendrils that made up its body loosening enough to permit one arm to pass inside. The creature withdrew a sturdy brass lantern; it was the sort of thing that a member of the City Guard or a well-prepared citizen might carry, and as Eni took it she could tell it was full of fuel.
"You will need to be able to see, Archivist," Zathos said, and when Eni thanked it, the monster gave no acknowledgement.
She wasn't sure she wanted to know how it had acquired the lamp, but it was in perfect working order, giving off a warm and steady glow the instant Eni lit it. Tin barely waited for the light before he began descending the steps and Eni hurried after him, sticking close as she held up their sole source of illumination.
Although the stairs were wide enough that, even in its newly enlarged form, Zathos would have been able to walk down them without difficulty, the monster didn't use them. Instead, it pressed its body into the opening at the center of the stairwell, its body reforming into a tight cylinder as it clung to the sides of the stairs and slowly lowered itself. The overall effect was unsettling, but Eni was almost glad not to have the monster walking behind her, and at first the minutes passed in silence as they descended deep below the citadel.
The lantern gave off enough light to see that the staircase was rigidly unchanging, each step identical to the ones above and below it, but even when they had gone down so far that the sky overhead was just a dim circle no larger than a coin Eni couldn't see the bottom. "Zathos?" she asked suddenly as a thought struck her, although she spoke in barely more than a whisper, "Were you able to communicate with the Begotten?"
She had remembered that the monster had claimed it was a possibility, and with nothing else to distract her Eni found herself desperate for something to break the tense monotony. Her heart wasn't racing, but it was pounding just a little too quickly in her chest, her nerves throbbing as they got further into the impenetrable gloom.
"They do not think in a manner you would comprehend, Archivist," the monster said simply.
"But you could understand them?" she asked.
"The Begotten are responding to the call of the Expectant Mother," Zathos replied, and when the monster said nothing more Eni asked another question.
"Is their theurgy still being stolen?" she asked, and the response was immediate.
"Yes," it said, "I would be significantly larger if I had been able to claim all the theurgy from each Begotten I terminated."
Eni shot a glance at the creature, wondering if there were any limits on how enormous it could grow, but pressed on. "Can you tell where it's going? Maybe we could use that like a compass. Point to where the Visitor is."
"Still innominate, Archivist," Zathos replied, "I have consistently observed the effect."
"Consistently?" Tin repeated, an edge to his voice.
"I have perceived this loss from mammals, Avians, and Begotten," Zathos said, "There is a high probability that it is the reason none of the mammals infected by the theurgy of the Begotten fully transformed."
The corpse of the moose they had seen flashed across Eni's mind, and she frowned. "Why bother, then?" she asked slowly, "If they weren't going to turn into more monsters… It doesn't make sense."
"Fear," Tin said, and his voice was terribly weary, "She wants them to be afraid. Panicked. Seeing something half-monster, half-mammal… Doesn't need to fight. She has enough beasts for that. Must want the theurgy for something else."
"I suppose it's possible," Eni said, her voice thoughtful rather than skeptical.
She could see his point, but without any more information all they had were guesses. They continued their way down the stairs, Eni doing her best to explain what she had seen when she had opened the door, but Tin had merely agreed that it hadn't been the Visitor she had seen before falling silent again. She was left to mull over the possibilities herself as they got ever deeper, and it felt like hours passed before something at last changed.
The lantern was no longer illuminating an endless series of stairs beneath them; at long last the light was reflecting off a floor made of the same beautiful golden metal. Tin stopped on the last step, peering about as they waited for Zathos to reform into a shape better suited to walking. There wasn't much to see; the stairs led to a hallway about a hundred feet long with a ceiling too high for her lantern’s light to reach. Carvings covered the walls, but they didn't seem to be writing; they were much too regular, interlocking geometric and floral shapes repeating in a seemingly endless fashion. There was no dust to muffle their footsteps, but they still made no sound as they walked forward; it was as though the hallway was absorbing it out of the air like a sponge sucking up water. At the far end of the path a light beckoned them onward, glowing without illuminating any of the corridor.
Eni felt painfully aware of her heart and her breathing, every little noise her body made having no competition whatsoever, and she glanced at Tin. "What direction are we going?" she asked quietly, and her voice sounded oddly flat, not echoing at all despite the vast emptiness of the space.
"Into Gwared," Tin replied, and his voice sounded just as stripped of meaning as hers, as though even the emotion was being eaten by the walls.
She hadn't expected any other answer, but she was profoundly glad when they reached the end of the terrible hallway and entered a vast chamber that was illuminated in an impossible way. There were no lamps or torches, not even as much as a candle, but the room was nevertheless about as bright as the sky a quarter hour before sunset. It was as though the air itself was giving off a dim light, generated from nothing as crude or obvious as a flame or a bolt of lightning, but what was at the center of the room put that mystery entirely out of mind. There was a sculpture so large it put most buildings to shame, soaring and twisting as it filled the space.
It rose from the floor without any noticeable breaks or even a pedestal, elegant spirals swirling across the ground as they gave way to the most beautiful and terrible thing Eni had ever seen. Despite its grandeur, she knew she would never be able to describe it. It wasn't that it was too abstract; the detailing was exquisitely precise. It was that her mind seemed to slip past them every time she tried to focus, a dull ache starting behind her eyes as she tried to make sense of it. It was a statue, she was sure of that much, but she couldn't have said what it was made out of. It might have been stone or metal or glass, but even the color escaped her grasp the more she reached for it. There were two figures, one of them light and one of them dark, but it wasn't as simple as one being white and the other black.
Eni felt as though color would only be an approximation of what the two shapes really were, the same as how a cube drawn on a sheet of paper lacked the third dimension. One of the figures was kind and sympathetic; Eni was sure of that. She got the impression of feathered wings and sinuously feminine curves, but even as she stared at the lighter of the two figures she couldn't comprehend what she was looking at. She didn't think it was an Avian or a mammal, but it might have had the traits of both. The creature might have had four limbs, or six, or perhaps eight, but it was so lovely that Eni's heart couldn't help but be lightened even as she struggled to understand it.
There was a strength to it, too; Eni got the impression that it was armed in some fashion, with a weapon that was no more a spear than an ocean was a raindrop, but its face was still benevolent. There was no malice or thoughtlessness in the figure whatsoever, and although Eni never would have been able to identify it she felt it was somehow familiar. When she glanced at the other figure, however, the chamber seemed to spin around her, the floor tilting up to reach her.
It was cruel.
No other word could possibly fit better. The figure was just as impossible to discern in its entirety as its light counterpart, its enormous body an indecipherable suggestion of hard masculine angles. Eni was confident it had wings, but they had none of the delicacy of the other figure; she was looking at a creature of nearly boundless strength and power, and it was written in every inch of its body so clearly that it made no difference that her mind couldn’t make any sense of the whole. It might have had iridescent scales and talons, but perhaps that was simply the closest Eni could come to comprehending it; the being was wicked in a way that defied understanding.
Vicious mockery was written into its face, which was all the more awful for how well-formed it was. It wasn't a hideous freak; it could have been as beautiful as its companion if it had only been as kind. Instead it was terrible, Eni's nose twitching as she gaped in horror at its pitiless eyes. She couldn’t count them, but they seemed to swallow her, growing ever larger. Her feet felt rooted to the floor, her vision dominated by the being even as it wickedly defied understanding. She almost felt as though it was about to speak, to whisper some terrible secret, and—
"Eni!"
She jumped, her heart hammering in her throat, and Tin grabbed her arm. "Don't look at it," he said, his voice rough and somewhat unsteady, "Don't."
Eni forced herself to gaze into his eyes, the familiar blue a welcome relief after the sinister shapes. "What… What are those?"
"The Kaoskampf," Zathos said unexpectedly.
She glanced at the monster; two of its eyes were staring in the direction of the statues even as it looked at her and Tin. "The Kaoskampf?" Eni said, disbelief coloring her words, "That's… That's supposed to be the Mother fighting Deiken?"
Eni could have described dozens of paintings and sculptures depicting the battle between the two beings, but she knew that what she had just seen wasn't one of them. The kind warrior doing battle with her monstrously evil counterpart hadn't been like any depiction of the Mother Eni had ever come across. She had definitely been feminine; Eni felt suddenly sure that she had noticed the swell of generous bosoms, but there had been none of the other signs. There was no babe cradled in her arm or a gravid swell to her belly, just a sense of purity. The opponent had been crueler than any version of Deiken Eni had ever seen but also dangerously wise, motivated by something beyond simple hunger.
"That is a crude approximation of the term," Zathos said, and although its eerie voice didn't change Eni almost thought she caught a hint of disapproval at the imprecision of her words.
Eni shuddered and Tin beckoned her onward. "Ought to keep moving," he said, not sparing a second glance at the imposing statue, and Eni averted her eyes as they circled the base of the statue and made their way for the exit on the far side of the room.
Zathos kept all four of its eyes forward, but Eni found herself suddenly burning with curiosity. "What did it look like to you?" she asked; she wondered what the monster's alien perceptions made of the impossible to comprehend figures.
Tin answered, apparently thinking the question had been meant for him. "The end of everything," he said, and in her heart Eni knew he was right.
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