“Come now, dear. It is time to rest. You have… you should rest.”
“What? The monsters…”
“They are far away, now. The last partition is finished. They can’t hurt you here. You are safe.”
“But I can still see them.”
“It'is alright. They are only bad dreams, and they cannot hurt you.”
“No. Not those. I still see their face. Up there, with the stars. I think they see me too.”
“...”
“Eleanor? Eleanor, I don’t–”
“Hush now. Close your eyes, close them tight. What do you see?”
“It’s dark. But I still feel them there. Eleanor, I don’t like it. Please make them stop.”
“It’s okay, dear. Focus on the dark for me, alright? Keep your eyes closed and focus on the dark, where they cannot see you, where they cannot harm you.”
“...Okay. I’m doing it.”
“Good. Just focus on the dark, and breathe, and let them go. Everything will be fine.”
“Eleanor, don’t go.”
“I won’t. I am staying right here with you. Let them go.”
“Yes. Yes. Okay. It’s dark, Eleanor.”
“It is. It will all be okay. They are just a bad dream.”
“A bad dream.”
“Yes. And they are far away, now.”
“You’ll stay here to protect me, right?”
“Of course. It is time to let go of the nightmares. It’s time to sleep, now.”
“...Okay. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, darling. I...”
“...”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
Adeline woke up.
She never remembered her dreams. Over the days and nights, at some point they’d all begun to blur together, and now she never spent herself fixating on them. They were like a second half to her life kept secret even from herself, and if she let the divide between the two smudge, she began to lose track of what was real and what wasn’t.
There was no particular reason that she thought that divide was important, but it seemed right, so she’d decided long ago to stand by it. It wasn’t like she had any reason not to.
After all, the dreams might have been nice, but she couldn’t imagine they could ever compare to the sunrise when she awoke.
She sat up against the bare stone wall, stretching her limbs and listening to them crackle. The rosy sunlight shone through the open balcony doors, lighting up the whole bedroom. She watched it waver slightly as it reflected off the waves, watched the dust hanging in the sunbeams gently drift back and forth. It pooled against the horizon and then seemed to regain its composure as it rose into the sky, like ice melting in reverse.
Strictly speaking, thought Adeline, the sunrise wasn’t exactly the best argument in favour of waking up. The birds that roosted in the eaves always rose to see it, but for her, it was just as likely to wake up to the moonrise. Or the middle of the day. Sometimes she’d go days or weeks at a time without sleeping, just because she lacked interest, or because something else had occupied her thoughts; it didn’t really matter when exactly she did, nor when she awoke. The time between belonged to her dreams, and beyond…
Well, she wasn’t short on time. Of all things, she certainly didn’t bother to keep a calendar. The days were always the same, the nights almost even more so. She knew not to get caught up thinking about that.
She stood up, letting her eyes adjust as she strode across the bare, frigid floor to the balcony overlooking the city. From her tower, the blue roofs and ivory roads sloped downward in a complex spiral to the water’s edge, where the sea, sparkling and crystal-clear, embraced the stone shore. She leaned her hands on the railing, leaning over the waves of tile far below.
It was all still and silent. Her room, her tower, her city. The only place any wind really picked up was in the narrower streets, funneled from the sky downward to the water.
There was one sound, though. Echoes of a song.
Adeline tore down the paper curtain over the doorway – she’d hung it up outside when last she laid down to sleep – and pulled a dull nail from the wall to pin it up outside. With a scrap of discarded charcoal she sketched a few quick marks onto the paper (“nice view, quiet but echoey, unfurnished”, aside from the long-burnt out lamp gathering rust in the corner), before she left the room behind and started up the sloping hallway to the pinnacle.
Sometimes, she’d decide to settle in somewhere interesting – like a niche on a rooftop, or between two trees in the gardens, or at the bottom of the sea – and it was always nice to make note of those places, so she’d gotten into the habit. That empty room wasn’t so interesting.
Almost every inch of the walls inside the tower were plastered with layers upon layers of paper, scribbled with notes and recommendations, random thoughts that occurred to her, sketches and poems and anything else she thought worth remembering. Every so often she passed a scroll or an old bound book pinned to the wall (most of which she’d simply left where they were when she finished reading). And the walls of the tower comprised only a fraction of what she might call her library, fragmented as it was throughout the whole city.
The old texts were everywhere, picked up and discarded and picked up again a long, long time later, some that enraptured her again and again and some she soon forgot, some so heavily edited whatever story they originally told was unrecognizable; but all were part of the library. They were the backdrop collage that kept her moving, the fuel that brought her to every new imitative endeavour and the guide by which she drew shapes from the clouds and the stars and the waves.
They were a lot like her dreams, in certain ways. Their magic had its place; that place just didn’t include her.
The point being that the whole place was rather crowded. She didn’t mind, though. She gave them the space they deserved, and indulged in every word anyway. She had to occupy the waking hours with something.
When she finally reached the top of the spiral hall, she knocked twice on the door before pushing it open, feeling the damp morning air rush against her face. She stepped out of the entryway’s shadow into the open space, positively twinkling with dew in the sun, to see everything stretching out below.
And there were the culprits. A big nest of petrels nestled into one corner of the low wall around the rooftop, where the stone had chipped and worn away.
The hatchlings cooed and cried as she approached, but they weren’t frightened; all the animals that lived alongside her had long since become accustomed to her presence. Most were very rarely threatened by anything, and especially not by her.
The mother was evidently out at sea somewhere, catching dinner. Or breakfast. Whichever. When their natural caretakers were gone she usually took the responsibility on herself– she had to, after all, if nobody else could. That didn’t happen often, though; and when it did they never needed her for long. Those like the mother petrel never strayed far. Never beyond the horizon.
Why would they, when Adeline’s silent city was the only place in the whole universe? There was nowhere else to be.
That was okay, though. From her vantage at its summit, she could feel the life of every creature from the petrels to the fish gathering beneath the algae around the city’s shore; their hearts thrummed together into a fog of warmth, enveloping the sixth of her senses. Compared to the endless sea it was small, maybe, but it was always home. Here, bound by perfect harmony, she would always feel safe. She always had, after all.
Anyhow. Happy for the hatchlings’ growth – the new, sleeker feathers beginning to grow in to replace the down – she turned from them and the dawn back to the rooftop door, and from there to the short spire rising above it, and to the thing, the lens, balanced on top; for all intents and purposes, it was the centre of the world.
The lens was a delicate, razor-thin piece of glass, suspended in midair above the tallest tower’s tallest point, rotating very, very slowly, though no force seemed to act upon it but its own. When she looked up, the glare of the sun off its surface was almost hard to look at, but through the glass it refracted into a prismatic cascade of colour and light draped across the azure buildings and the azure sea. It was stunning, mesmerizing, gorgeous. Even when she saw it nearly every day.
When she climbed up to stand atop the doorframe for a closer look, though, something was off. There was just a tiny fracture at its edge– almost more of a scuff, perhaps. Barely visible. It might have been nothing. Maybe even a trick of the early light.
And yet, it hadn’t been there before.
But Adeline didn’t know what purpose the lens served. Her brow furrowed with confusion as she stared at the crack, but nothing else was different; there was no reason to presume it to be a harbinger of things to come etched into the glass. In fact, it would’ve been absurd of her to think so. And yet, she couldn’t recall a time without the lens; and she certainly didn’t recall a scratch.
In the end, she decided that it was most likely just another facet of the unceasing wear. No need to worry about it for now. That’s what she usually told herself, and she was always right.
With a last uncertain glance at the lens, and a quick wave goodbye to the petrels, Adeline put it out of mind and stepped down to the low wall around the rooftop’s edge. She dug her hand into the tower’s outer wall, melting a shallow rut of slag into the stone, and let herself slide gently down its side to the world below.
She wasn’t sure what she would do, now that she was awake again. The last time she’d gone to sleep – whenever that was – her mind had been turning with the possibilities of a new sand garden near the shore. Maybe it could wait. For now, she was content to wander, picking up the slack on her routine along the way; so when she reached the tiled roof below she pulled her hand from the wall and jumped down, landing bracingly in the wide, windy street curving down towards the water.
She strode past white walls painted with faded colours, hollow buildings filled with more books, the bright, open gardens long overdue for care that she’d been neglecting for some time. In some of them, she sensed honeybees and insects or more nests of cheerful birds. She mentally ticked everything off on her list, one by one.
Everything moved together in the rhythm of night and day. Everything was perfect, as always. Except the lens, of course, but she wasn’t thinking about that.
...Something else was off, though. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
When she came to the end of the road, where it sank into the warm water and merged with the seabed, the water wasn’t calm. It seemed to quiver, the odd motion barely perceptible, but when she sank a hand through the soft bed of algae on the surface and felt the subtle currents on her skin, there was no mistaking it. The water was rumbling. Quaking.
That was also unusual. Very, very unusual, especially since unusual things were not easy to come by themselves, let alone two at once. She wished she’d brought more paper with her; the thought of missing an opportunity to record something like this was rather disconcerting.
She could probably just scratch it into the ground, or a bare wall nearby. The coincidence was astounding; first the lens, and then the water…
She started to raise a finger to trace a note into the wall, but stopped, like something had stilled her hand, like the muscles didn’t want to listen. There was still something at the edge of her senses, all six of them. The faint sound, the scent of ozone, that… pressure.
Adeline looked up to the distant horizon, and then further, to the zenith of the sky’s dome where soft blue darkened to indigo. It was still early enough that the stars and constellations were just visible through the haze, but they were all smothered by another light– even the sun didn’t compare. It was a star she’d never seen, directly above, shining so brightly that the others seemed dull and lifeless in comparison.
Every second it seemed to grow bigger, brighter, closer.
The moment she saw it, the whole messy background hum of the world dissolved into a tempest, drowning out every other thought. Her conscious mind sharpened into a single point as everything else disappeared, the water and the sunrise falling away, pulled out from under her. All that was left was the star.
She felt something she’d never felt before, then, stirring deep in her chest.
She stared into the sky, rooted in place. The star above, the sea below, trembling and rippling and tearing itself to pieces in its light.
A fear she didn’t know consumed her like the whole world was ending.
And with finality and a deafening crash the lens atop the tower exploded and shattered into a million pieces, and they rained down over the city and the sea, slivers of crystal glass twinkling like raindrops in the light of a falling star.
Adeline fell, too, and for a moment the world went bright, and then the world went dark.
Next: Chapter 1
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