Ranna had come of age. The proper number of turns of the sun (thirty-five); the proper number of Polite Words memorized (two from their mother, one from their grandmother) the proper number of trips into the berrywoods where the ripened clusters glowered far overhead and bristled thorns (nine formally with their elders, ten approved with their friends, one not-quite-secretly all on their own); and the proper amount of common sense and wisdom garnered (a little; none at all). It was the time agreed upon that they be made someone else’s problem, and so they took the generally agreed on first step and consulted with the local bonecracker. Her name was secret but she’d lived there for all of Ranna’s life and their mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s; she was ‘pithecus: three meters tall with a six meter armspan and a way of snapping a femur in half to read the marrow that made every motion feel as gentle and soft as milk pouring into tea. She frowned at what she saw, but her face was made for sad slow gestures so nothing much was meant by it.
Ranna waited politely at the singing table while the bonecracker reseated herself and placed the beads and buttons and rocks in their correct and serried positions, then grabbed the vibrational clutch. Subsonics trickled from her body into the glass, and the air sounded like the rim of a befidgeted winecup.
“Troublesome, but ordinary,” she said. “Difficult, but doable,” she said. “Start having mistakes sooner so you can fix them faster – do that, and you’ll make it,” she said. “Try the thousand pillars,” she said. “And remember: the name’s a lie.”
“That’s kind of you,” said Ranna, and they meant it. So they shared tea of the living leaves with her until their overwidened pupils gave them a headache and left a little more as a going-away present, and having already said as much as they must to their friends and family and unspecific others they walked the crooked pathway out of town – between the mirrors that caught sunlight to keep out demons after dark – and waited in the early hours of the orange-and-white dawn for the early early trek on the great snakeway. It rumbled up from its burrow with a hiss and the rattle of a million dry armoured scales on smoothed dirt and Ranna paid the vole and five ha’-moles and seated themselves on a comfortable esophageal nodule.
Twelve hours by snakeway to Needles. Three days hike from Needles to the thousand pillars. They would have to sleep. They couldn’t imagine ever doing it again, tea or no.
***
Needles was the first place Ranna had ever walked that wasn’t where they’d been born. They should’ve noticed more about it, but the journey and its anxieties had consumed them from head to toe: the crafting of their pack from local hawk hide (feathered and airy, waterproof with the occasional preening); the arguing with their fellow voyagers in front of an exhausted jerky vendor as to whether boof or gutton would keep longer in inclement conditions; the agonizing as to whether they’d brought enough water the night before they left; the last minute checking-and-rechecking of all six of the local skywatchers to make sure they weren’t about to walk into a mudstorm or cinderhail squall. All of this was borne with utmost grace and boredom by all around them, which was its own kind of reassurance to Ranna: their anxiety over their journey was as regular and ordinary as the journey itself.
So in a way they were almost as calm as they’d ever been when they began – halfway across the Purple Salt, the Red Salt behind them – to witness the thousand pillars rising from the sky up towards the ground, budding like icicles from the universe above.
The name was as great a lie as the bonecracker had said: there were a thousand and ten thousand more pillars, as towering as mountains – all the mountains, small and tall alike, and at their pinnacles sat a fraction’s fraction of the universe’s truths, writ in immaterial form, waiting.
The ground around them was flat and empty, and in all the thousand and ten thousand pillars the hundreds of walkers who had come to them vanished like salt in the river, alone and dwarfed and sore-footed on sand so compacted by so many feet over so many years that it felt more like solid stone than solid stone ever would.
You could stand there for days, peering at the heights. Searching for which glimmer matched something inside you. Ranna did. Then they saw others begin to shrink and shrivel doing the same, and shook themselves, and spoke, under their breath, the first Polite Word their mother had taught them.
“Please,” they spoke. The warmth pooled in their gut and stayed there, a little engine that fueled their fingers as they reached for the first stones.
This was where they had been standing when they decided to ascend. That made it the right choice, and that rightness was confirmed that evening, when Ranna tucked themselves into a thin crack in the worn grey surface of the pillar, fingers bleeding, and was met by a polite cough and thin candlelight clutched in the fingers of a fist-sized raptorial, all sickled claws and needle teeth, who smeared soothing paste on their palms and went over charts of the path upwards with them until the night’s howling wind lulled them to sleep. Ranna offered payment in the morning and was laughed at in that silent, open-mouthed way peculiar to maniraptoran emotions.
“This is not done for reciprocity,” explained the little raptorial. “It is done because it must be done. Look for the handgrips.”
Ranna learned to look for the handgrips, left behind and worn smooth by generations beforehand and afterhand and underhand.
“Keep an eye afield for the wells,” said an ancient ‘therium several days and kilometres farther up, stretching an overwhelmingly furry arm that would make even a ‘pithecus stare to pour something crystalline and esoteric into Ranna’s beverage that made it taste like neurons and hellfire.
Ranna learned to keep an eye afield for the wells, where the rainwater and the cloud haze congealed against specially-prepared surfaces and ran in rivulets ripening into basins of ancient make, where they could drink and fill their flasks and see their reflection in the ripples of a million who’d come this way before.
“Don’t give up,” said the writing on the wall. The cell was empty, but clean of dust. Someone had been here and gone only recently. Ranna had learned not to look down the first day, and so they had no idea what might have become of the unknown author.
Ranna didn’t give up. They did, however, climb up. And up. And up and up and up until the air was thin and their arms were aching knots and their fingers cramped and no amount of food or water fixed them and all that was keeping them going was that little warmth in their gut from the Polite Word.
It was rude to ask for something and then not take it.
That was what they thought, when their hand closed over thin air and they lurched – gasping, terrified – onto the very tip of their pillar. Unexpected, unprepared. The climb was done and a fraction of universal truth was before them and they didn’t know what to do or say but it WAS rude to ask for something and then not take it.
So Ranna moved to close their hand over the fraction of universal truth, but at the last they stopped, and thought twice, and instead held their hand out gently and marvelled at how softly in nestled into their palm.
Then they stood tall, sighed, slipped, and toppled off backwards, hitting the ground with an ‘oof’ and a cloud of near-rock-grit dust.
“Careful!’ shouted someone, and indeed Ranna was surrounded by milling travellers, all fresh of face and unkissed by atmospheric gales. They marvelled at them and they marvelled right back and Ranna was very confused when they professed it insanity to claim that their survival from falling from the pillar’s peak was reasonable, for the pillar was said to be a thousand kilometres or more in height but to Ranna’s gaze it seemed to be a pylon standing not much taller than their own head.
“You’re crazy,” they told them, and when Ranna held up the fraction ofuniversal truth that had nestled in their palm they said it didn’t look very big, so to save their patience they spoke nothing more of it, and left for Needles.
There were no sure trails marked for returning from the thousand and ten thousand more pillars. But everyone who did found their way somehow, and Ranna knew the look on each face they saw, for it was their own.
What next?
***
Shortly after Ranna left, a great demon arrived at the thousand and ten thousand more pillars, with a thousand tearing arms and a thousand drooling orifices and no brains at all. It battered blindly at the pillars, uprooting half of them, and it pissed in many of the wells that fueled the climbers of the other half, and its clinging and acidic feces smeared away the handgrips and erased the paths from all sight. It ran riot for ten days before it melted into the air in foul vapour, flesh unable to tolerate the gentle tapping of the summer rains.
The fractions remained. But the road to them ran longer now, and the avenues were fewer.
***
What next was a full turn of the sun spent riding the snakeway, then walking the snakeway (safe as long as you ducked and scuttled when the ground rumbled), then trading your hawkhide pack for a moment with a wizened guy.
“Show me your truth,” said the guy, and burst out laughing when Ranna did so. “Well!” he coughed out his sides, spiracles venting themselves het-het-het, “no wonder you’re lost! That’s of no practical use whatsoever!”
“Maybe not,” said Ranna, “but it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said the guy with great fondness and a little shrug of his pinchers. “And it does prove you’re willing to put in the work one way. Try the other! Go to the old stone, and look for a piece of the ever-burning fire.”
“I will try,” said Ranna, and this time they laughed along with the wizened guy, and departed in good spirits. They were lighter without the pack anyways, and though the snakeway vanished as the ground turned into hard stone and the wind grew cold and the sun fierce they remembered enough of their time ascending the pillar that these things were pleasant to them, in that lying way of memory.
Far, far along that road, beyond the wide deep rolling forests, there were places where the trees grew thinner, and leaned in the wind, and planted roots in nothing more than moss and lichen and their own needles and the thinnest of cracks in the stone, and in that deep stone – the old stone – there were the mines, and in the mines there were desperate and determined folk, and in their minds was only the hope of cracking through one last sheet of sheer stone and seeing the glimmer of a piece of the ever-burning fire. This was because the ones who thought of other things lost that hope, and those who lost that hope left.
Ranna knew how to hope already. But they didn’t know much else, which was why they walked into the first of the delvehalls they saw and signed on, where they were given a pick of diamond and iron and a chisel of adamant and copper and a cloth of flowers and a single metal rivet, which was hammered into their left hindmost mandibular molar, as a marker of initiation.
After this they were all led to the nearest mine – which was set into a drift of sandstone that had been laid and died a hundred million years before – and led below the sun’s grasp, and taught.
Ranna did not know how to mine.
“Place your hands here and here. Swing like this.”
Ranna did not know how to breathe.
“Take the flowercloth, hold it over your mouth. Change it when you can’t smell spring anymore. Never take it off. If you do take it off, get back to the sun before you hear the bones sing. If you hear the bones sing, sing louder than they do.”
Ranna did not know what the singing of the bones sounded like, and this Ranna foolishly did not ask, so after one long, long session where their own sweat was all they could smell they began to hum to themselves, and it was only when they stopped to drink of their flask that they realized they were humming along with someone else, and yet they mined alone. And in the hum were words without sound, meaning without language. Long, long, long. So long, so long. Bones we are, bones you are. Why do you walk, when soon you rest? We are lonely and you are lost. Come rest. Rest long, long, long.
Ranna listened to this, but as they listened, their hand clenched and the fraction of universal truth they bound in it sliced their skin, and with a yelp they stopped listening to anything but their nerves – and then, freshly jangled, they sang Three Gazelles And Three Giraffes all the way home to the sunlight of evening on the surface, over and over, too nervous to try and think of other words.
“They don’t mean to be dangerous,” their shift leader told them, “but they are. They want company, but they can wait.” And Ranna was mocked for the evening and watched over for the week and when no further foolishness was demonstrated they felt they had done if not well, then not so badly.
Then they were moved to the Shieldbelt, where the bones were absent and the earth moved never. Ten billion tons overhead at every step, no movement, no motion, no life, only the weight of everything forever and the tiny idiot stabs of the pick and chisel and the quiet strangled creak of the minecrawl’s desperate little legs as it spidered back up the shaft-ladder to the surface, laden with tiny chips of grit.
The flowercloth was needed here too. It kept out the dust, and the ghosts of the stone, and when the pressure behind your eyes grew too strong you could close them and breathe in three times in a row and feel the grass under your feet. Then you could swing again.
The day Ranna stopped counting how many times they’d done that was the day their pick peeled through stone and into air that had never known oxygen. It rushed past them in a hurry – all tumult and shock, four billion years gone in a blink! – and in that moment of dizzying confusion, eyes rippling with the flow of something unseen by any other living creature, Ranna peered through the crack in the stone and saw something they’d always known.
It was hot. It hurt. It beat like a heart, but ten million years apart. And it was as surprised to see them as they were it.
There were six of them. They broke down the wall farther, made measurements of the cavity. Called in a second shift. Notified the elders. Got some sleep there, filled the silent hollow with the noise of respiration and bad dreams. And then, when it had been measured and allotted, Ranna was handed their pick and told to strike at a very specific spot, marked by the eldest and most thoughtful of the delvehall.
They aimed. And as they aimed, they paused, and they spoke the second Polite Word their mother had taught them.
“Thanks,” they said. It escaped their lungs, blistered their lips, wrapped around all the delvers and the granite and the lost alien air and the ever-burning fire, cradled them together. And while they were all together, Ranna struck the chisel and the fire split into even segments, perfect as an orange, and each of them clutched one in their palm no matter how it hurt, all the way back to the air, to the light, to the land where the sun existed.
Ranna slept in the delvehall for three days. Then they returned their pick and chisel and flowercloth and had a second metal rivet hammered into their left hindmost maxillar molar, so that they might feel the mines whenever they clenched. And after one last long conversation with the eldest of the delvehall they walked down the long roads until they took them elsewhere.
***
Shortly after Ranna departed, a great demon arrived at the old stone, with a million stamping feet and a million clumsy hands and no thoughts at all, and it stamped and danced upon the ground so furiously that half the mines caved in, and many of the delvehalls were destroyed, and the roads that connected anywhere to there were wiped clean by its carelessness. It rampaged for a hundred days before it collapsed and died, unable to ever breathe and choking on the air.
The fires burned still. But the delve towards them was deeper now, and the stone harder to the hand.
***
The roads ran long across the land, in accordance with the wishes of the hills and the grudging permissions of the rivers, who left them be when they were well-behaved and dropped mud and stone on them when they were not. They ran long, then they ran thick, and finally they poured themselves together into a different kind of slurry that was a street, or streets, and from among them rose and descended and sprawled outwards the great city of Tronna,
In the streets of Tronna walked the millions, and among them walked Ranna, with a fragment of a little fraction of universal truth clutched in one hand and the hot red ever-burning fire in the other and tired feet that could not rest, for there was much to do. Tronna was filled with towers and temples and halls and walls and mansions, of gold and silver and platinum and aluminium and cobalt and pearl and plutonium and carbon and helium and adamant and quartz, but all of them had foundations, and all of those foundations were set upon the ground, and that ground must be prepared and made right, and that was what the hot red fire in Ranna’s hands would make so.
At first they needed to survive, and so they worked for any pittance that would give a meal – scrawling the flame of the world and sealing it upon old newspapers, the wrappings from shawarma, and once Ranna’s own shirt – small workings that would prevent a shed from collapsing one more summer; keep an eavestrough flowing straight through a nasty overload of ice; clean a latrine the night after a party. Once they were fed enough that they could sleep without wondering if they’d wake, they found clothing. Once they had clothing, they applied to a local guild, and on seeing the rivets of their molars and the state of their hands they were accepted conditionally, laying the basalt and uranium slabs that would grow sky-cutting structures as acorns would oaks as berries would bushes as spores would moss, once upon a time, upon the ancient shore. Ranna laboured and saved the praise they earned in sheets of frugal parchment, kept them close to their workvestments, kept them clean and reviewed them by the light of their fraction of universal truth at midnight, whispered them to themselves as a reminder: that is real, this was done, I am still here.
When the buildings Ranna had worked on remained tall and straight at the end of the season of growth, after the mercury rains of the equinox had howled and raged and moved on, they were approached to work for Tranna itself, to sear the foundations of the municipal parklands.
“This is dangerous and powerful work, and you are not obligated to accept it,” warned their guild-steward, a ‘toise of no small magnitude and age. She had begun flippering in her old age, her shell reshaping itself to something softer, her limbs widening, and soon she would descend to the seaways and begin her second, longest life.
“I will do it,” said Ranna, who still managed to like green things in a way that filled them with ease rather than desperation, and so they worked at night, consulting the stars against their fraction of universal truth and cutting deep into the living soil with their ever-burning fire, marking the trackways and guiding the footsteps of the eternal beasts consulted by the officials and masterminds of Tronna. The beasts themselves watched them or didn’t, and Ranna respectfully stayed silent unless spoken to – which was always, save a single energetic debate with a recursive-titanosaur concerning the merits and demerits of bipedalism against quadrupedalism (contrarily, each coveted the other’s).
After three years of this, Ranna was approached again, this time not through their guild-steward but by a being wrapped in smoke.
“You are ordered,” it whispered by means of burning, “to report to the Heightworks, and there to shape its foundations. Attend promptly or become sublimated.” And thusly it dissolved.
“A poor omen,” said the guild-steward when consulted (she now maintained a small personal atmosphere of water; her last hurrah before her departure). “We can hide you, remove you from the city and out of range of material destabilization. At the very least we can demand retraction of your death should it occur.”
“I will take the task,” said Ranna, “and see what I can shape from it.” And so they went to the Heightworks – where Tronna was born – and were placed very lowly beneath the esteem of Mastermind Megalith (who had named himself) and set to work sealing and cutting a matrix for a tower that would be of a scope exponentially above that of the others of the city.
“Haven’t you heard?” he said often to anyone – then proceeding without an answer, “the pillars have fallen! We must move forwards! I will have us reach to new heights, grasp new fractions! Where once we followed brute reality’s remnants, we shall forge our own factualities as we please!” And other things like that.
Ranna did not pay attention because they did not care to, then they did not pay attention because they did not want to, then they did not pay attention because they did not get any sleep. The lack of sleep made understanding the secret whisper-talk developed by the gestures and eyes of their fellow workers difficult, but they were fluent in time, and so learned to cut here and not there, and move this rather than that, and in short to set things as they needed to rather than as they were commanded to, and finally, they were told – as the first mercury rains were to arrive – to leave early, and leave Tronna behind, along with all who would listen.
Ranna stayed to watch from halfway down town. They told themselves it was for edification. They told themselves it was for historical merit. They admitted it was for the curiosity.
And besides, they had missed the last two demons. So when they saw the first heavings of the rotten ground around the tower of the Heightworks, as of yet half-grown and straining to lurch skywards more, they felt justified in their suspicions.
“Behold!” called the mastermind, who was standing atop the tower. “A flawed being now perfected, at its third birth! Witness its glory!”
And as he said such, the great third demon – who had a billion screaming mouths and a billion searching eyes and no heart at all – began to tear up all the other towers of the heightworks and slam them into the new tower, overbalancing it as sloppily as a child’s first snohuman, crushing floors into ceilings and ceilings into walls. It moved faster, more frenzied, and as the tower rose it wobbled and as it wobbled it swayed and as it swayed it grew and as it grew it lurched and finally the tower, the great third demon, the Heightworks in total, and whatever trace slurry remained of Mastermind Megalith, all toppled end over end into the sky itself and sank into the sea between the stars where no fractions glimmered.
Ranna, who had missed some of this when they were ducking for cover, marveled at the sight for an appropriate amount of time before attempting to remove their leg from under the large slab of toppled gigahogany that had trapped it.
“Here,” said a fellow worker, a fellow gawker, and between their biceps and the slivers of ever-burning fire in their hands they lifted free the slab, and by chance and the light of the fractions of universal truth in their eyes they recognized each other.
“Sarg?”
“Ranna!”
“How long’s it been?”
“Oh, a couple dozen years, I think.”
“Time flies.”
“It does! I haven’t see you since you talked to the bonecracker and walked out of town. I left a few weeks later – how have you been?”
“All over the place.”
“Well, I believe you, and so have I.”
“We should go…somewhere else? Catch up. Like old times.”
“Yes.”
“You know, you really should’ve said something before you left.”
“Yes,” said Ranna, and then, without thinking it at all – just feeling it – the Polite Word of their grandmother left their lips as easily as breath itself, and it was “sorry.”
“That’s nice of you,” said Sarg, and the word wound through them as softly and truly as blood and flesh. “So, still want to get married someday?”
“I guess. But no big ceremony. We’ll go get married at city ha – at the OLD city hall. And we can catch up after that. I’m tired.”
“Oh, like I’m not. They tell you to make it, but they don’t tell you how hard that is.”
“It is.”
“Did you?”
“Mm?”
“Did you make it?”
“I think so.”
“What did you make?”
“Myself.”
“Oh! That’s alright then.”
“It is.”
So they walked home, towards the cheaper fringes of Tronna where the demon had not reached, and as they did so, Ranna asked “kids?” and Sarg said “I don’t think we can afford them right now,” which wasn’t no or yes at all.