Lightning crackles over the empty walls of Talen Kapvet, scarring the dusky night over the city with veins of sullen red. Ancient towers bite into the fiery sky like a row of ugly fangs. Between the towers, the abandoned city’s houses and fortresses form a low, jagged tableau of teeth. In another instant the light is gone, and only blackness surrounds you. The hard, gritty surface of a sandstone ledge rubs at your weathered fingers and palms, and the wind blows dust into your face. You raise one arm to shield yourself, feeling the storm pluck at your body and threaten to lift it into the air.

  Thin from weeks of miniscule food and water, you weigh little more than a starved rat.

  Below you in the darkness lies a deep, narrow cut in the mountain. You have watched it for ten days and nights now, awaiting the pilgrims’ arrival. The path into the crevasse is narrow and difficult to spot. Seen up close, there are signs of regular foot traffic. Clear markings on the rocks farther down the slope lead to the entrance of the cut. But in the time you have been here, no one has come. The Faceless are not noted for their piety.

  You have it on good authority that a group will come tonight. They will be the last pilgrims.

  You sharpen and polish your lance, taking comfort in the old rituals. You have not ridden a mount in decades, but the lance is still your weapon. Two sealed glass balls, black liquid filling their interiors, rest on the ground nearby your tattered and empty pack. They are the last of their kind; no more can be made.

  You are also the last of your kind, and neither can any more of you be made.

  A faint, bobbing light appears on the slope below the cut. Its motion shows that the holder of the light is moving quickly—nearly at a run. The light is precisely where and when it should be. You sit up from your weary perch, focusing on that distant light. The Curse draws certain needed elements from other parts of your existence, sharpening your vision. The scene below you lightens, colors fading to a wash of high-contrast gray that reveals the outlines of the pilgrims below. They are strung out behind the bearer of the light, trotting and stumbling through a gloom their unaided eyes can barely pierce.

  They are not alone.

  Half a mile behind them comes a crowd of humanoid forms, loping silently and smoothly. In your sharpening vision, they flow like a tide of mercury, oozing with terrifying viscosity along the surface a tabletop. It has no need of vision, that flow; it is guided by other senses. Indeed, its constituents no longer have faces that could hold the biological organs of vision.

  A dark shape passes over the stars above the two groups, embracing them in deeper blackness. You shudder in recognition, and for an eternal moment you are trapped by the doomful shadow of terrible wings.

  It is time to run, declares the Curse.

  As the tiny string of pilgrims scramble up the slope toward the ravine, you pull your hair back, tying it with a string of woven mousefur. A white strand escapes the knot, and you push it back behind one ear. Your muscles are stiff from the long wait on the mountain, but you feel your age even beneath the aches. Your skin sags in deep wrinkles, and your fingers are weathered and worn. Though the Curse has preserved your life for many years longer than the others of your kind, you have long outlived the one who gave it, and there is a limit to the reach of a dead god.

  The pilgrims reach the ravine below you, but the tide of Faceless has drawn close behind them. Shouldering your pack, you scramble over the edge of the sheer rock face that makes up one wall of the cut. You picked your lookout post well. It is a narrow ledge, broken apart by the slow shifting of the earth, forming a path down to the tunnel entrance at the head of the ravine. The nimblest mountain cat could not walk this ledge, but you trot along it easily. You have been practicing this run for the last ten days, and you know it in the dark.

  A startled desert snake looks at you out of a hole in the rock face to your side. Your lance has taught him not to trouble you. He stays curled in his den, sensing the power and terror that floats in the air above the cut.

  Sharp cracks suddenly rock the ground beneath your feet, and flashes of orange illuminate the entrance to the cut. Bodies of Faceless, and pieces of bodies, go tumbling and flying into the air. The rocking explosions remind you of the last night in Pour Vaille. The tide of advancing Faceless stops for a short time, pushed back by the bombs; but it soon fills in the hole again, rushing forward into the smoke and fire like a sea filling in the moat of a sandcastle.

  The staccato crack of repeating carbines fills the air, shaking dust and chips of loose rock from the walls. You dodge them as you run. The clatter of the carbines continues to shake the low end of the ravine, and then gradually fades into the clang and screams of hand-to-hand combat. But the single light is higher up now, its bearer climbing slowly, laboriously toward the shrine.

  The screams of dying humans at the bottom of the gorge fades, and the tide of Faceless continues its relentless, silent flow upward. Your heart pounds as you race along the narrow ledge above, leaping over breaks in the rock and ducking under sharp overhangs. Even with the Curse filling your lungs and strengthening your legs, the long sprint is taxing. It is well you memorized the way; one misstep would drop you down into the heart of the gorge. You might survive the fall, but not the trampling feet of the advancing bipeds.

  You will not fall, intones the Curse.

  The shrine is near the top of the gorge, carved into the solid rock of the wall below your ledge. The last of the pilgrims gather there to make their stand: six haggard men and women, their breath wheezing and their backs slumped from the hard climb. They carry guns and bombs, but no other supplies. As you creep down a narrow crack in the wall, they grimly set about priming their bombs and loading fresh rounds into their carbines.

  The rustling, flowing tide of Faceless begins to emerge from the shadows of gorge below, just visible in the starlight. Repeating carbines open up, the flashes of their muzzles lighting the narrow space and their bullets mowing down the advancing bodies of the Faceless. The pilgrims, with nowhere to retreat, unleash the full fury of their last machines. Bombs, cast forward from hand-held slings, explode with terrible violence among the ranks of the Faceless, building walls and furrows of their severed limbs and torsos even as the whipping bullets pierce through the fire and carnage to mow down the rearward ranks. The gorge is a narrow place, and few of the Faceless can come through at any time.

  Conceal yourself, instructs the Curse. They will be forced inside soon, and they must not mistake you for one of the afflicted.

  You slither down the long, irregular crack in the rock face, hiding behind a low outcropping at the bottom and watching the grim, haggard defenders. They are old, save for one young man in his prime. Their dark-skinned faces, lit by the muzzle flash of their guns and the sudden daylight of bombs, are drawn with long hunger. Their wide-brimmed hats conjure up ghosts of the fearless, jovial heroes you knew long ago, who fell at the Four Corners. You wonder for a moment, amidst the carnage and fury of the battle, where they got the hats. They were never in fashion in the Empire.

  The roar and crash of the guns and bombs goes on for many minutes. And then a sudden silence washes over the gorge, broken only by the ragged breathing of the defenders. The starlight shows huge mounds and walls of broken bodies below. Nothing moves. No sounds come from the twisted remains of the Faceless. No groans or screams betray their suffering, if they can be said to suffer.

  “Where are the others?” asks the young man. His eyes, white against the black skin of his face, show resignation without hope. He speaks in the local dialect of Late High Imperial. You picked it up during the long years of the Exodus, listening to doomed bands of humans as you followed them, scavenging from their stores.

  “If there were any that could still move,” replies a much older man, “then they’d be moving toward us.” His skin is dark, too, and a thin fringe of curly white hair rims the edge of his bald pate. He is lean, and moves gingerly, but you see strength in his frame still. He carries a birdcage in one hand, and in the cage is a blob of white; a pigeon, or a dove, you think. It has been decades since you saw one. The bird is listless and bedraggled, but alive.

  The noise begins as a breath, whispering from the depths of the blood-spattered canyon below. Crouched behind your small rock, you hear the noise before the humans do. Soon they react, looking to the sky. The sound swells from its first whisper into a deep, thudding bellow, rising and falling in a rhythm that can only come from the beating of vast and terrible wings.

  It is a primal dragon, says the Curse. Take shelter inside the passage. Go now.

  Knowing what is to come, you leave the cover of your rock, making for the shrine. You keep to the edges of the narrow gorge bottom, hoping to escape the humans’ notice. It is essential that they remain unaware. The six survivors of the pilgrimage, backing toward the shrine as well, have their eyes to the open sky, high above. You slip first into the narrow door of hewn stone. You have practiced this part as well. You do not need to look at the features of the opening or interior to know your next hiding spot: a crack in one wall, opened by the restless sleep of the earth over the millennia this place has stood waiting.

  Outside the shrine, the noise turns to fire.

  It begins instantly: a column of vast white-orange, descending from the peak of the canyon like a bolt of lightning. It consumes the limp bodies of the Faceless, sweeping up the narrow path toward the opening of the shrine. The humans turn frantically to race for its protection. Unlike you, they were not forewarned. Two, farther from the entrance, are annihilated before they finish turning, and a third manages two steps before being reduced to ash. The old man with black skin falls before he reaches the shelter of the rock, incinerated even as he flings his small birdcage forward. The remaining two humans dive into the shrine entrance, rolling down the gentle slope of the floor and pressing cloaks to their faces against the heat.

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

  The Primal’s bulk is too great for it to descend into the narrow cut, and so it contents itself to bathe the canyon floor with furnace-like flame from above. The humans crawl away from that awful heat, pressing themselves deeper into the passage leading to the shrine. But mainly they cower, hoping to survive a few moments longer.

  It is not your time yet, instructs the voice of the Curse.

  The column of fire stops abruptly, leaving the sticky, hideous emission of the dragon’s stomach to burn down to a smoldering, fuming goop. The passage grows suddenly dark, and one of the humans fumbles with his lantern, striking a match with a shaky hand to light it again. The man’s face is old for his kind, worn and wrinkled with years of care. His skin is pale, like yours. His eyes are a sparkling blue in the lamp light, and a hidden smile plays on his lips even amidst the horror and fear of these last minutes of his life. His companion is the younger man with deep black skin. As the terror of the Primal fades, they weep, crawling toward the blackened husk of the man who didn’t quite reach the shrine.

  “Deeper, Iko,” says the one with the lantern. His face is wet with tears. “That is the only way now. We do what we came to do, and then we will be at the end. Make it an end worthy of your father’s journey.” His words are in Late High Imperial, but he speaks them with a slight inflection that reveals him as a foreigner in this land. The old man picks up the fallen birdcage and its occupant, which have miraculously survived the flight into the tunnel.

  You, too, scuttle forward in the gray-shaded darkness, letting the Curse guide your steps. You know the way. The humans seem to have some idea where to go, though their advance is hesitant. They have never been to this place, and they imagine dangers unseen in the dark. The passage slopes downward for nearly a quarter mile, and you pause to wait impatiently from time to time, keeping well ahead of the light as your unwitting pursuers fumble slowly forward.

  What began as a rough-hewn passage in the rock soon broadens to a highway under the earth, the walls opening up until they are nearly fifty feet apart. The ceiling ascends, too, and the floor becomes regular and slightly textured, as if to help bipeds descend safely. And then, with little warning from the design of the passage, it emerges into the Sphere.

  You see, with the enhanced vision of the Curse, what the humans do not see in their paltry lamplight. They merely stop in wonder as they sense the opening up of a great space. But you see the Sphere in its complete perfection, a colossal negative space hollowed out within the mountain. It is at least three hundred yards wide, perfectly geometrical, its stone boundaries relentlessly smooth. The lower arc is littered with irregular and scattered shapes—some large, some small—but the upper reaches are pristine and undisturbed.

  The two humans behind you advance slowly down the gentle slope of the Sphere, making their way toward its lowest point. You keep ahead of them, out of sight. Your gray vision resolves the shapes that litter the lower slopes of the sphere as they approach. Statues with horrid, leering faces and distorted bodies; blood-stained altars; patterns of swirling, concentric lines made of stones on the floor. You pass by them all confidently. Your pursuers react as they approach the first artifact, recoiling in momentary horror.

  “These monuments are more recent than the chamber itself,” remarks the older man with pale skin and blue eyes, recovering his wits. “The locals must have taken it for a holy site. What this place was—what it is—is too much to bear, even for an ignorant and shallow mind. I think these little idols are meant to domesticate it.”

  The younger man looks up into the yawning blackness above and around.

  “It is not domesticated,” he replies. His face is still wet with tears.

  They reach the very bottom of the Sphere, as you wait and watch, out of the reach of the lamplight. You feel the air coming to you in shallow gasps, and your heart racing. You force yourself to slow your pulse and even your breath.

  You do not know what will happen next, and the Curse has given no clues. Its foreknowledge stops at the edge of the great Sphere beneath the mountain.

  The old man and the young man are closely inspecting the floor at the bottom of the great Sphere. There is a plate there, and in the plate is a hole. The hole is too small even for you to wriggle through, and your previous inspections revealed nothing but darkness inside. The two men are crouched over the hole, staring at it.

  A whisper reaches your ears, coming from the path down which the two humans walked to reach the plate. It is the shuffling of many feet.

  It always has more of Itself. The voice of the Curse is sardonic and dry in your mind.

  The whispering shuffle alerts the two men as well, and they stand abruptly. The old man holds the lantern high. From far off at the edge of the Sphere its light reflects back from scores of bobbing, shuffling patches of metal. They move at head level; indeed, they are where faces used to be.

  “Always more of them,” mutters the older man. “But no more of us… and nowhere left to go but up.”

  He whirls back to the hole in the plate, probing at it with his finger.

  “Up,” he repeats. “The wall etchings your father found in Kargen’s Palace showed a great circle and a man in the center, yes?”

  “They’ll be on us in thirty seconds,” replies the younger man. He withdraws a large, cylindrical bomb from his tattered pack and holds up the fuse to the lamp.

  “Did they show a man at the center of a circle?” demands his companion, his voice suddenly desperate, intent. He jerks the lamp back.

  The younger man blinks and nods. He lights the fuse.

  You watch, intently. This is what you have awaited, ten years in the dry waste. This is why the Curse kept you alive.

  The older man withdraws something from his pocket. It is a long, thin rod, absolutely black, reflecting no light even under the lamp. The shuffling grows louder, and the glinting lights of metal faces draw close.

  “Goodbye, Jonathan,” says the young man. “It wasn’t much of an end.”

  The name stirs a memory, but you can’t summon it up.

  Wait for the moment.

  “Wait, Ikgonbe!” cries the old man, grasping for his companion. But the other sprints off into the darkness.

  Wait for the moment. See what he does.

  Several things happen all at once. There is a terrific light and blast from the direction of the advancing Faceless. In the same moment, the old man bends swiftly to the floor and inserts the thin rod into the hole in the plate. Another rumble begins—deeper, sustained—and bands of light emerge from hidden recesses in the floor, arcing up along the perimeter of the Sphere in many lines to brightly illuminate its massive girth.

  The Curse speaks to you for the last time.

  Run.

  You obey, sprinting toward the feet of the old man. The Curse pulls at your alternate selves in the nearby branches, drawing on their last strength and endurance to speed you along the ground. Their possibilities are sacrificed to make this you the most perfect self you can be. Before you, the plate begins to rise up into the interior of the Sphere, propelled toward its center by some massive shaft of steely metal. You dive for the edge of the plate as it ascends, grabbing at the slick lip of the rising circle and slipping backward. You dangle helplessly for many seconds, feeling the pull of gravity sucking you downward. With a final, desperate, panic-fueled surge of strength, your aged arms lift your body onto the lip of the plate. Glancing down, you see that you are now hundreds of feet in the air. The old man, collapsed on its surface, does not see you. The bird cage, containing one very frightened dove, lies next to him.

  With a jerk, the plate stops, momentarily lifting you into the air above its surface. By the Sphere’s now-blazing interior lights, you see that you are in its very center, surrounded on all sides by empty space save for directly below, beneath the plate. The smoke of Iko’s bomb is visible toward the entrance, and the vivid, scattered painting of blood and the body parts of scores of Faceless. Somewhere among them is what used to be a young man with black skin and hopeless eyes.

  Then the world begins to shift, and the pathways open up before you. You feel a sudden wind; impossible in this underground place, and yet you feel it. The dove flutters in its cage.

  ???

  In the dim dusk-light, the man Basil drifts silently through the ruins of the White Knights’ fortification. The bodies of men have been hauled away, and the fort itself has burned down to ashes. He moves with deliberation, and without haste. He is looking for something.

  He comes upon an overturned water barrel that escaped the fire. There is an iron pigeon cage on its side in the barrel. He pulls it out, and carefully opens the door. He reaches in, pulls out a tiny, limp form, and tucks it into his pocket. Then he walks out of the camp, never looking back.

  South, along the bank of the river under the starlight, he pauses and sits down on a fallen log at the river’s edge. He withdraws the tiny thing from his pocket, and lays it on the log. Then he pulls an even tinier black pebble out of another pocket. He selects some river grasses and carefully, slowly, weaves from them an ornament in the shape of two crossed spokes with a circle in the middle. He weaves the black pebble into the center, where the arms cross inside the circle.

  He takes the limp form on the log and dips it into the water of the river. Then he withdraws it and places the ornament on top of the dead thing. He takes a deep breath and breathes out slowly onto the body and the ornament, as if he were blowing on a faint spark to stir it to life. He does this once again, and then a third time.

  There is a light from within his hands, like fire. A faint trail of smoke can be seen, as the ornament is consumed. He smiles, and whispers into his cupped hands.

  “Wake up, little one,” he says. “We have great things to do, you and I.”

  You tumble through the black infinite, feeling the pull of gravity suck you downward. The world flows past you in a continuum of chaotic, indecipherable sensations. You are a mote of dust falling through the fabric of reality, tumbling downward into the web of branching pathways as the threads around you pull your senses into experiences they were never equipped to consume. The full, awful reality of the universe’s complete and undifferentiated oneness is impressed on your mind, which has for all its current waking contemplated only the illusion of change and motion. You experience everything that exists all at once, in every moment of time; every single possible version of you, of all the people you once knew, of all the people you once hated, of all the people you never knew, of all the people who never existed. You sense towering cities in the stars, galaxy-sized clouds of purple and yellow drifting amidst the void, the crushing collapse of a black hole’s singularity, the birth of monomolecular life in the deep oceans of some lonely and alien world, the titanic collective emotions of quadrillions of living beings in their quintillions of concurrent realities as they war and love and weep and dream. Your mind is lost, drifting in an eternal, spherical one that is everything, both lovely and horrible, maddening and unknowable.

  “Wake up, little one,” he says again.

  Slowly, gradually, the titanic oneness begins to fade, the differentiation itself lasting an eternity. The totality of the weave disappears, leaving you just a billion creatures, then just a million, then just a thousand, then just one. Your experience of time narrows, collapsing from the complete beginning and ending of infinity to just one lifetime, then just one turning of your home planet, then just one day, then just one moment. The one that is you is empty, void of identity and meaning and memory. From the oneness of everything, you become the oneness of nothing at all.

  “A bit too far. I will guide you back. We will rebuild you a piece at a time.”

  His hands close around you.