Chapter 30

  Elizabeth

  Song at the end of the road

  Dawn at the end of the night

  Love at the end of pain

  Flower so bright

  in the winter rain

  - Elizabeth Eddison

  Elizabeth lowered her phone and gazed up at the top, an inverted mountain of metal, cold as ice. Unmoving. It looked little different from the spinning tops she recalled playing with as a child, save for its size and its material construction. Was it bronze?

  She raised her phone and wrote another text.

  EE: I have a question for you.

  KC: :D

  KC: I LOVE QUESTIONS

  EE: More of a confirmation, really.

  KC: Go for it!

  EE: Are perpetual motion machines possible?

  KC: Nope!

  EE: Not at all?

  KC: Not even a little bit!

  KC: As much possible as it is that 3+3=/=6

  KC: is how much possible it is to have perpetual motion

  KC: sorry for grammar :p

  EE: Even here?

  KC: Even here!

  KC: If it were possible here, then that would mean that the fundamental laws of physics would be different :o

  KC: It would break not just one, but TWO laws of thermodynamics!

  KC: And nothing could exist in a world like that!

  EE: As I thought.

  EE: Entropy, yes?

  KC: Yes!

  KC: Nothing can keep going forever all on its own, not even the most efficient machine!

  EE: What about a perfect machine?

  KC: Also impossible :(

  KC: Alas!

  KC: All of existence is destined for equilibrium!

  KC: Someday all matter and energy will be perfectly dispersed!

  KC: The universe will be a flat nothing!

  EE: You seem rather excited about that.

  KC: Well it’s cool :)

  EE: If you say so.

  KC: Why are you asking about perpetual motion, Liz?

  EE: I’m looking at a perpetual motion machine I’m supposed to get working.

  KC: ?:\

  EE: Are you familiar with the word “Sisyphus?”

  KC: Is it a disease?!?!

  EE: It means I have an impossible task.

  KC: I see!

  KC: Perpetual motion IS impossible.

  KC: But a highly efficient machine could simulate perpetual motion for a long time!

  EE: Well, we can talk later. See you in Skywater.

  KC: Yeah! I can’t wait!

  Elizabeth stowed her phone and gave the enormous mechanism a final dubious glance. Then, just to be sure, she brought her phone back out and took a picture of it. The inert top was tall as the ancient white oak out back of her old house. Its vast bulk radiated cold. It stood upright, held in place by the cog-like fixture at its height, which interlocked with other wheels and machinery up there in the shadows. Elizabeth could not tell just by looking, but she thought that this top was at the center of a vast and complex mechanism. When it turned, its force would turn everything else. Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine a force of such magnitude. A small perpetual motion machine was impossible enough. Something that could turn those wheels…

  “You wanted to see the flower?” asked Kyko in a spirited chirp. Elizabeth turned to her companions. Kyko, the cardinal, her guide. Fjalli, an ancient tortoise creature, caretaker of this place. Lazaru the librarian, an apathetic but curious orangutan. Sister Thorn, a massive she-bear and archon to the distant and dying King Basileus. She was a grouch, to put it mildly, but with her from the capital came the enthusiastic and fishy Laska, captain of the defense force.

  They weren’t really a bear, a fish, an ape. They strongly resembled those creatures, inheriting physical characteristics and mannerisms. And, with Sister Thorn, size.

  “It is a journey?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Something of a trek, indeed,” replied Kyko with a ruffle of feathers. “There is no track to the height of the mountain.”

  “A dangerous journey! Indeed,” said Laska in her soft slurred voice, her piscene eyes bright. “Perilous!” She said ‘perilous’ the way Elmer Sky might have said ‘delightful!’

  “I must travel to Skywater,” she told them. She spoke, as usual, in a tone of relaxed authority. She would do as she pleased, that tone said. Elizabeth had learned that they expected her to speak like that. She was supposed to be somebody important here, even though her assigned task was widely known to be impossible. Perhaps the king, Basileus, had answers. Everyone spoke highly of the king, although perhaps that was because Sister Thorn would glower at any who did not. Elizabeth had not gone to see him yet, mainly out of nervousness and a hesitancy to involve herself too deeply in the apparently complex political situation here on Sisyphus. But she would, she resolved, when she returned from Skywater. She would go see the king.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  They nodded in understanding at her intent to travel to Skywater–all except Lazaru, who as usual didn’t seem to give a damn what she did, or indeed about anything. Lazaru chewed on the tip of a feather pen, getting ink stains on his simian lip as he peered comically at some document he was penning.

  “Do you go,” rasped the tortoise Fjalli, who then paused for an uncomfortably long period to sort out his next words, “to find your allies?”

  This piqued the interest of the others, who watched her with expectant eyes, all but Lazaru.

  Elizabeth nodded once, firmly. “I do,” she said. “We will meet, all together.”

  “E-excellent!” Fjalli declared shortly before bursting into a fit of coughing.

  “To the train, then,” suggested Kyko, with that excited glint in his big that he always got when speaking of trains.

  They set out for the train, crawling like tiny shivering ants across the floor of the artificial cavern. All of them were bundled against the cold except for Sister Thorn, who seemed quite comfortable in her thick brown fur and simple toga-like wrappings. Kyko practically danced ahead, nimble on his bird’s feet despite his heavy blue jacket. Laska marched with a quick, determined step; her peculiarly shaped boots clicked smartly on the stone. Though not much larger than Elizabeth, Laska had a powerful sense of purpose and presence about her. Not as much as Sister Thorn, it must be admitted, who could loom effectively even from a sitting position across the space of a large room. The bear stalked forward in such a way that suggested the walls ahead would be wise to make way for her. Lazaru loped along partly on his stubby legs and partly on his knuckles. He wore a leather backpack about the same size as his whole body. It was full of books, yet seemed not to weigh him down in the slightest.

  Fjalli, the slowest, brought up the rear. Elizabeth walked with him as he hobbled along. He labored under the weight of his shell. He looked like he could use a cane, at the least.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked the old tortoise.

  He chuckled softly. “Don’t worry about these old bones,” he said. “Step carefully yourself, rather. In that place. The City of Doors.”

  “Why?”

  He coughed a laugh. “City of Fools, more like. Not…that Dyaz is any different.” Dyaz was the capital of Sisyphus, home of King Basileus. “I will keep that in mind,” she said.

  Fjalli chuckled. “I am sure that you will!”

  They ascended stairs next, and Elizabeth took each step one at a time to match Fjalli’s speed. Kyko returned to accompany them, followed shortly by Laska. The silvery fish-captain apologized for leaving them behind.

  “What do you do, here, exactly?” Elizabeth asked of Fjalli.

  “Not much,” he said, “not much. But someone must be the caretaker, yes? And that someone is I.”

  “And you have no ideas concerning how that machine might be moved?”

  “You are the Child of Motion, not I,” he replied. “I am not the Healing God either.” Another hoarse chuckle. “Can’t make a frozen flower grow.”

  Elizabeth frowned. This was not the first she had heard of the gods here. “Who is the Healing God?” she asked.

  “The living one,” said Kyko.

  “The healer,” said Laska.

  “She is all things green and growing,” added Kyko.

  “So…she’s not here?” said Elizabeth.

  “The gods are dead,” said Kyko sadly, shaking his head.

  “According to some,” Laska added in sharp rebuke.

  A thin leather-bound book lay in their path up ahead, evidently spilled from Lazaru’s bag, although Elizabeth judged this unlikely to have been an accident. The Ten, its title read in golden script. Elizabeth picked it up and flipped through it. It was written in a neat, tight hand, accompanied here and there by illustrations. Laska muttered something about Lazaru as Elizabeth tucked it under her arm and continued up the steps.

  Callie waited for them in the train car, relaxed and yawning as though she’d been there napping the entire time. Maybe she had. It was Callie’s lassitude, more than anything else, that put Elizabeth at ease around Sister Thorn.

  The interior of the single-cabin train unit was comparatively warm. Elizabeth unzipped her coat, pulled off her gloves and stuffed them in her pocket.

  “Are you tired, Elizabeth?” grumbled Sister Thorn, startling Elizabeth. Deep brown eyes gazed from the shadowed face of the bear in the far corner of the cabin. Sister Thorn and Kyko were the only ones who would call Elizabeth by name. Elizabeth hesitated, then nodded in response. “Rest on the way, then,” advised Sister Thorn.

  Kyko took the controls, and they were off. A cardinal, a brown bear, a fish, an orangutan, a tortoise, a cat, a tired and lost and confused girl who didn’t know what she was doing, who missed her sister and mother and home and bedroom, who worried about her friends.

  Callie was there, slinking casually in-between Elizabeth’s arms and settling her soft reassuring weight onto Elizabeth’s lap in the back of the cabin. Elizabeth hugged Callie and could not bring herself to care whether such an action might look immature to the others.

  The train windows displayed nothing as they began to move; they were deep underground. So, while waiting for a view to open up when the train eventually surfaced, Elizabeth watched her companions. Lazaru as usual kept to himself–indeed, so much that Elizabeth wondered why he was even here, accompanying her wherever she went. She didn’t even know what library he represented. He had left her a book, though. She intended to investigate the book later. Fjalli had fallen asleep, and Sister Thorn was…also asleep? If so, then her aura of intensity had an odd way of lingering even in unconsciousness. Perhaps she was meditating?

  Laska had moved up to the front of the cabin with Kyko and was engaging him in lively conversation. Something about the gods. Elizabeth’s eyes lingered on the two curved swords which hung at Laska’s waist. The fishy woman seemed a bit brash and even silly, but she was the captain of the defense of this moon, defense against “the Dark World,” which name was a bit much to Elizabeth’s mind. “Dark World.” That was like something from one of Isaac’s stories. Cliché. Amateurish. Yet here she was, with the Dark World apparently an undeniable reality. Could she still call it bad writing if it was demonstrably real? She considered this for a minute before deciding that indeed she could. Thinking that way, many episodes in her life had been badly written. Such a thought made her smile. Was this perhaps how Isaac thought of the providence of his God? No doubt Isaac would deny that God would write anything badly. Yet facts were facts, as AJ liked to say.

  A creeping wave of homesickness tested the shores of Elizabeth Isle as the train abruptly emerged into brilliant whiteness. A panorama of broad open fields crusted with snow spread out beyond the window, pale and wan in the gray morning light. Delicate traceries of pink threaded the dawning sky. The sun, or what passed for a sun here, still lay soft and white beneath the horizon. The entire scene was noticeably off. Something about it indicated subtly but definitely that this was not home; this was not Earth. Maybe it was the noticeable curvature of the horizon, or the color of the morning light. That faint alien strangeness, reminiscent of home yet different, only served to enhance the sting of longing Elizabeth felt.

  Her eyes closed. She leaned her head against the window, felt the steady rumbling of the train matched with Callie’s warm purring. She was warm here in her thick coat and hat. Warm and cozy, if not exactly in a restful position. She thought of home, and her family, and her friends. She imagined meeting them, what she would say, the things they would do…

  She noticed the frog first, green and happy. It jumped about in a playful dance. “I am the healer,” it croaked, “but I can’t heal everything. The most important things cannot be healed. Not by me!”

  Elizabeth saw that the frog was jumping about on a thick tawny carpet striped with black and white. The carpet rose up and down in a steady, slow rhythm. Not a carpet at all! It was the back of a great golden tiger. Now she heard its grumbling, a sound like distant thunder.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she thought she heard it say. “All things can be overcome. Endure. Outlast. Resolve. Nothing is impossible. Unfortunately.”

  “There’s a flower,” said the frog, “but I can’t make it grow! How strange!”

  “I see,” said the tiger. Its voice rumbled and shook Elizabeth and the frog. The frog tumbled with a giggle as the thunderous voice of the tiger continued. “Don’t give up! Never.”

  Elizabeth spoke, her voice small and weak compared to theirs. “I don’t want to write poems about giving up,” she told them. “I want to make the flower grow.”

  The flower bright. It came, amid the cold of winter, when half gone was the night.

  And there it was: the flower, white against the dark snow-speckled rocks, encrusted with ice in a thin, high place. It was large for a flower, but smaller than she had expected. She could have held its bud in both her hands.

  It was a peony, a pure white peony on a frosted green stem. Its petals were like palest ivory, its anthers asparkle with starlight. It looked so cold, so frail. How could it possibly still be alive?

  “Motion,” said a voice behind her, cold as the rocks. Elizabeth saw behind her without turning. There on the slope, stars behind and the blue-green world of Ardia above, stood a great beast of a cat. Tiger? Lynx? Lion? All of these and none. Rather, something ancient, something primal. The platonic ideal of a feline, perhaps, rendered all in a majestic gray, its long hair twitching in the wind and its old eyes watching. Those ancient eyes seemed familiar.

  “Movement is change,” it said. “Change is necessary.”

  Speaking in riddles? She could play that game. She spoke boldly and tried not to let her voice shake, though she herself was shaking. This being would not harm her; she knew it, somehow. Then, why was she so afraid? She trembled, yet she spoke: “Change is inevitable.”

  The great cat nodded slightly. Then it gestured at the flower with a flick of its great maned head. “That,” it said, “is The End.”

  Elizabeth heard the finality in these words. The End. She wanted to ask how, if change was inevitable, the flower could be The End. Surely there is no finality; surely there will always be motion, change. Perpetual motion might be impossible for a machine, but was it not inevitable for a living person? Or a flower.

  But the great cat was suddenly gone, and so was she.

  There was only a flower, sparkling and frozen there on the dark peak, beneath the glittering stars.