The Edge of a World, page 20
“What shall I do now?”
You can wake it up.
Otar blinked, his eyes focusing on Andres again and said, “Wake up.”
It was as if the ruin exhaled, as if it had waited so long for him to arrive so it could finally be something again. It rumbled under their feet. A tremor moved through the ground from the middle of the room, rippling outward—the whole structure shifted. The blocks changed their glow, now the same blue light from the rectangle in his hand was on, spilled from all nooks and crannies and lines the scholars had mapped earlier so carefully. Symbols danced in abstract patterns over parts of them, showing rows and rows of ever-changing numbers.
Life force is readied to deliver to Eitin.
We can call for home.
Otar took his hand away and danced a few steps back, he was back in the real world. His fingers still tickled, and he used the other hand to massage the sensation out. The tremor subsided, and the ground returned to its steady self. Otar blinked once, twice, waiting for anything else to happen, and when nothing did, nodded.
“Let’s go.”
Andres touched his arm in confirmation, and they stepped out. Light spilled out from everywhere. In the underground chamber, the black lines shimmered, the crystal glowed, and at the far end, on the surrounding walls, the circles gleamed, as if they were doorways covered by thin gauze shifting in the wind.
Memories scratched at Otar’s consciousness, something from the legends, words Maugi may have said.
A touch at his lower back, gone as fast as it had come.
Andres looked at him. “Are you alright?”
Otar pinched the bridge of his nose, to focus on the now. “I think so.”
His lover studied him a moment longer and once more touched his arm in a silent confirmation. Together they climbed up the stairs, up into the proverbial lights. Everything was flooded. Not the eerie blue light that did nothing to dispel the shadows, but bright, as if the sun had risen in the building.
There was only one guard, the other gone to inform Aaoran as soon as the ground rumbled. After they slipped out in his back, they found that not only the main dome was alight, but the entire ruin. The outer buildings glowed. A strange sound filling the air, not a hum but as if a low fire was popping somewhere.
They chose a nearby building to hide in to not be caught, and Otar peered around the door opening to look back. The spires crackled. Tiny light bolts, like sparks when lighting a fire, arced over them. As if it was gearing up for something. An ominous feeling formed in the pit of his stomach.
Steps thundered from down the road, and Aaoran swept past, followed by guards and a handful of scholars. Andres and Otar looked at each other, nodded, and when the rear group was high enough they slipped out, mingling in. Onder saw them do it, but at his raised eyebrow, they shook their heads.
When they reached the dome entrance, Aaoran was already pointing scientists in different directions. At last, they spotted the two of them and waved them over. For a moment, their face was unreadable and then they smiled.
“Is this your doing?” They kept their voice low, but their eyes twinkled, amused.
Otar nodded.
“So this is how a ruin looks when it’s really alive, hm?”
They turned around, taking it all in. The now glittering stones, the brightness, the constant noise. “You think the second dome opens now?”
Otar had all but forgotten about it.
Would it be alright to open it? What if a different monster was waiting there? The same type he had encountered in the ruins in the mountains? And why was he thinking about that one now?
Interesting.
And the voice was gone again.
“Let us check,” he found himself saying.
They walked in the main dome, across, down the staircase to the lower level, and stopped in front of the closed dome door. Two scholars were already on it, trying to find a mechanism to open it.
“Any luck?” Aaoran asked them.
“We tried.”
They don’t have the right.
Otar almost sighed. Can you please unlock it?
Do you want me to give them the right?
Yes.
A hum.
They are allowed.
The light of a small block to the side shifted. No one besides him noticed it. Otar looked at it and back at Aaoran. He licked his lips. “Try again.”
Aaoran narrowed their eyes at him, and Otar resisted the urge to scratch his neck or shuffle his feet.
“Okay,” they said, measured, “let’s try again.”
One scholar huffed, clearly put out, but he did as he was told, probably to prove a point. He laid his hand on the stone and pushed. For a split second, nothing happened, and a smirk had already formed on his lips when it suddenly gave way. It had opened a fraction, but it was visible. The scholar frowned and shoved harder. When he proved to be too weak, Andres and Onder, who had followed them, stepped up.
Each chose a wing, and they pressed on three.
The doors swung inward.
They stared at each other and grinned. Otar crept a few steps forward, followed by the other scholars.
The dome was lit. Large stiff canvases hung down from the ceiling and around the walls, with dancing pictures on them. Otar had encountered nothing like this before. An army of blinking lights was everywhere. There were metal stairs leading up to a narrow gallery that ran the entire circumference of the room, barely wide enough for one person. Round, long cylinders were haphazardly clustered throughout the room, connected by ropes to the ceiling. There were tables made from the same metal as the walkway. At the far end was a bigger cylinder.
Different tools littered the surfaces. Some looked familiar, but others were too strange to even guess their function. A low-grade huffing and puffing came from somewhere and a high-pitched whine grated in Otar’s ears.
It gave the impression of a workshop, still in use, the inhabitants having stepped out for a moment to return at any small-turn.
They all stood in stunned silence. This was something they had never found. Tools and materials and other strange things were all here, as if whatever had befallen the other ruins did not extend to this dome, keeping it preserved and pristine.
The scholars spread out, carefully poking at the flickering lights that danced over the same type of black stone that made up the blocks in the other dome.
Otar tried to make sense of the moving pictures. They played over sections of the blocks and over the canvases hanging throughout the room.
There were mathematical graphs, symbols, and numbers. Intersecting lines with numbers growing and growing before wiggling lines that spiraled together in a helix form replaced them. From time-to-time parts were highlighted, numbers and more symbols scrawled close to it, before moving on again.
Maugi, what is this?
Here I made you.
It shouldn’t come as a blow. But it did. He staggered back and exhaled. His vision blurred, and then he had himself under control again. So it was true he was connected to the Ancients, maybe even was one of them.
“Otar?” Aaoran and Andres stepped close. They all stood now in front of the big cylinder. A glass window let them look inside. Cords and ropes in various colors and thickness hung down, some of them touching the bottom. A row of lights blinked at its base. Otar pressed a hand against the glass. It didn’t feel different from the glass they used in the buildings in Rasanell and other places of the Seven Lands. It was smooth and cold.
“I was born here.” And it rang true. Otar asked about the room, what the purpose of the room was, instead it told him about the cylinder.
Otar was born in there.
Why?
I was told to keep watch. And I did. I was also told to release them every hundred years. To disguise them so they wouldn’t be discovered. So I made them small, released them all earlier than I would have in the past, and sent them all out into the world. But none returned. Until I found you. I wanted to call you back right there, because you were the only one, the last one I could build. I didn’t have more material. But I couldn’t do that. That wasn’t your purpose, so I let you be.
“Otar.”
He shook his head and turned to Onder, who was pointing at a smaller frame attached to the cylinder running numbers—numbers that disappeared and were replaced by a picture of Otar.
The sudden ringing sound in his ears overtook everything. Otar swallowed. He darted his eyes to the side, but none of the other scholars had noticed it yet.
“Not only was I born here, but I was the only one who survived.”
No one was left. He was the last. Grief spread through him. Even if it was impossible from the beginning, meeting someone like himself was the dream he held deep inside him. But now it would never come true.
There, he had his answers. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass, feeling hot, disturbed, and lost.
Am I different? Because why else would he be the only one left?
The tone of the voice shifted. How so? Different from what? When I looked into you, you were exactly as I built you, down to every little bit. The perfect machine.
Otar trembled. He pushed his hands tighter against the cylinder, to find a focus point. The word machine rang in his mind. It sounded repulsive.
Am I not like you?
Like who?
You, Maugi.
Someone or something tittered. The voice shifted again.
Maugi and Otar are very different.
Otar closed his eyes. He tried to make sense of all the things swirling through his head. He felt Andres’ presence on his left side, and Onder’s on his right. Aaoran was close by. The people who had protected and helped him hadn’t left him, even when his secrets had all spilled out. Whatever happened, whatever came, they were still with him, and he could count on them.
He exhaled and asked.
What is Maugi?
Maugi is the guide and the knowledge, but Maugi is also many. Maugi paused. A distorted sound broke out of it, and after it fell silent again.
The words didn’t make sense, but they invoked an emotion, a picture of a black tapestry of a space more endless than the ocean.
But what was his role? Why was he taking life force and why could he give it to the ruin?
What am I here for?
To collect life force.
Otar shook his head as those words resonated deep within him. Forming pictures and memories not his own, and yet they existed. Screaming people, bodies with his face that moved and took and took and took.
He swayed; his stomach lurched. “I need to get outside.”
And he ran.
He hurried through the gaggles of scholars without noticing where he was going. He turned to the right at the main entrance and rounded the building before he was sick in the sand.
There wasn’t just a monster inside him. He was the monster. It was him. It was his only purpose, his only whatever. To collect life force out of what was living and bring it to the ruins. Was that why he was so driven to research them? Because he was made like that? The monster always perked up at the mention of the ghost, tried to reach out for it many times.
His thoughts swirled. Otar looked down at his hand, imagined them taking and taking and then touching Andres, his sisters, all the other people he knew, and he was sick again.
He sank down, rested his head between his knees, and yearned for everything to end.
He wanted answers, he had gotten them, and now he wished … for what? Not knowing them in the first place? Different answers? He inhaled and exhaled, concentrating on his breath, pressing the panic away.
The most important thing Otar had learned in his scholarly life was if he wanted to be respected and show any integrity, he needed to follow the facts and not use them to support the answers he wanted to see.
The evidence pointed him in the direction of a plausible answer, one that was monstrous and improbable in the first place, and now he found it was even worse …
Steps came from behind him, and a hand settled on his back. Andres didn’t say a word and Otar was grateful. He felt rattled to the bone and didn’t have the energy to even talk about what was going on inside him, and what the ghost had spoken about.
Not a ghost, but Maugi—a thing also created by the Ancients. At least it had hinted at it. Neither it nor he were natural.
Andres handed him a water flask, and Otar rinsed out his mouth before taking a few sips to settle his stomach and chase away the choking feeling inside him.
He was exhausted.
Andres hauled him up and led him back to the camp and into their tent. He swayed when Andres undressed him to his underthings and didn’t protest when he put Otar down into the bed. A kiss to his forehead was the last thing he noticed before sleep claimed him.
Chapter 21
“The monster is always there. It seems eternal—it doesn’t matter if I’m sick, injured, tired, happy, sad. It’s a constant in my daily life. Often I wish it gone, but then would I be able to communicate with the ghost as I do, would I be able to wake ruins up to even have a chance at deciphering their secrets? Probably not. So I accept it, and the danger it holds—one slip up with the wrong person and I’ll be dead. The thought is nauseating and at the same time exhilarating. As if a part of me relishes in what I would be able to do.”
(From: Scholar Otar’s last notebook, unpublished)
Otar woke at night. Andres’ heavy arm was thrown over his stomach and his lover’s deep breathing was bordering on snoring. Tenderness rose in Otar, mixed with sadness. He realized now what he needed to do, but he also knew it would hurt so many people. Unexpected people. He had always thought himself alone, that no one would ever care what happened to him, that none of them stayed close because they loved him—but they did. He was unsure how he should feel about it.
He wriggled out from under Andres’ arms and then took Andres’ thick robe, smoothing his hands over the embroidered pattern. It was almost too long, but it carried Andres’ scent; that mixture of smoke and spice and sweat, soothing Otar’s frayed nerves.
He stepped outside and turned his face to the sky. Night reigned, but the pale light shimmering over the towering stone walls told him that the ruin was still ablaze. He swallowed.
Maugi?
The air next to him glimmered and Maugi materialized. He supposed that answered the question if Maugi was a part of the ruins or of Otar. It had always been with him. Whatever the ruin had done to him, repaired inside him, Maugi was now at his side.
You have been born with a fraction of me in you.
A new wave of nausea swept through him, but he pressed it all to the side. There were more important things to take care of. It was time that he understood what lay beyond.
But Maugi is also many.
The phrase kept rattling around in his mind. Since coming here and interacting with the ruin, he could make out three distinctive voices.
A Maugi voice that was neutral and lacking inflection; another similar to it, but with faint emotions, longing, and regret creeping through; and another one that spoke of ‘we’. It hadn’t been there often, but Otar had felt a force behind those words, a power contained, ready to break out.
It was time to understand it all because he now knew what he was. However, his creators were still shrouded in mystery, and he had the distinct feeling that if they didn’t figure out what the ruins were for, they all would be in danger.
He hurried down the stone road, trying to keep out of the sentries’ view as much as possible. If he was spotted, he needed to at least be fast enough to go through with his plans before the cavalry, meaning Andres, arrived and hindered him once more.
Maugi, what is the risk of forgetting my current memories if I force the recovery?
So far his memories had only come in bits and pieces—not enough to understand what was going on.
Higher than the average.
Otar cursed. He imagined that to be the case, but the risk was more than he had expected but less than he had feared. Maybe he could rely on his connection to Andres to even out the odds. He shook his head. No, he wouldn’t drag his lover into his mess any more than he’d already done.
But hadn’t he also said that he wasn’t alone? Didn’t that mean that he also had the capacity to lean on other people?
Everything had become so onerous.
Otar slipped through the ruin buildings, hiding from the guards. He arrived just on the other side from the dome’s entrance. The main entry point was in a diagonal line to his right, and two grim-looking steppe riders swept their eyes around.
The blazing lights would hide nothing.
Otar gnawed at his thumbnail, thinking fast.
Maugi, distract them.
Not sure what you mean.
Otar sighed. They need to vacate their post for a brief turn. Don’t hurt them. He added that last part hastily, not sure what Maugi was capable of.
Thinking up scenarios.
Otar didn’t find that very assuring, but let it slide.
Then one half of the ruin was plunged into darkness, emitting a high-pitched whine. The guards at the entrance looked at each other and started moving towards that direction. Otar waited long enough for them to be as far away as possible, then he hurried into the building, down the stairs and only came to a stop when he slipped into the dome with the black blocks. He dropped behind the last row and halted. But no steps had followed him down, no shouting reached his ears.
He forced his heart back under control and righted himself. The robe hung heavy around his shoulders. An embrace from a ghost. He shuddered and clamped down on the thought. Instead, he fingered the blue stone over his chest and clasped it tightly. Then he walked over to the block he had touched before.
Maugi.
Yes?
Force the memories into me.
It can be done, but the other method is the recommended one. It will be less dangerous and destructive.
Give it time, they will come to you, the process has already started. The voice with resignation and regret.
I don’t care.
Oh, Otar.
Do it. The one that held pressure, a tempest contained.
