Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 196

MarissaMarissa found herself sleeping less and less, because of the dreams. They had changed.

They were no longer the fragmented impressions she had first experienced, shapes without context, sounds without source. They had deepened into something with texture and weight, specific enough to leave residue when she surfaced, vague enough that she could never quite hold them after waking.

She had stopped trying to hold them. She let them move through her instead.

That was when she began to remember them. And the memory terrified her.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself standing in sand, in a place she could only call foreign. She knew it was foreign because nothing about it matched home. The ground beneath her was not the pale highland silt of the southern riverbeds. It was gold and fine as powder, stretching outward in every direction until it met a horizon that shimmered with heat she could feel on her skin even though no fire burned anywhere near her. The sky above was a blue so deep and clean it looked like something had polished it. The sun, bright and yellow, sat at an angle that made every shadow short and sharp.

Behind her, rising out of the desert floor as though it had grown instead of been built, stood a tower.

She had seen towers before. She had seen the spires of the Imperial capital, counted among the greatest architectural achievements in the Empire's history, a mastery of mana, stone, glass, and crystal that could hardly be matched anywhere in the known land. She had climbed the Imperial Academy's observation platform, which offered a view across three provinces on a clear day and the mana storms in the sky at night.

None of that had prepared her for this.

The tower rose so high that its upper portion was lost in a layer of thin cloud, its surface a sheet of silver-blue material, steel and glass perhaps, refined so heavily it bordered on the miraculous. It caught the light and returned it in long fractured lines that shifted as she moved, and she moved through the scene the way a ghost moves, weightless and unfixed. The structure narrowed as it climbed, tapering to a point that disappeared into the sky with the patient certainty of something built to outlast everything around it.

She stood in the sand watching the tower glitter in the sunlight. She felt very small in a way that was not unpleasant and that she did not understand. The urge to explore rose in her, unbidden. It was a strange thing to feel, standing in a place that could not be real.

The people in the community surrounding the tower were just as foreign. They wore garments she did not recognize, lightweight and practical, fitted to the body without the draping and layering she associated with wealth or ceremony. They spoke a language that was tonal and quick and expressive. Almost all of them carried small flat objects that caught light from their surfaces. None of them looked at her. None of them seemed to see her.

She reached out to touch the tower's base.

Her hand passed through.

She should have been afraid. Calm held her instead.

Just as she was about to explore, the scenery changed.

She was standing in the middle of a street, except the street was nothing like any street she had walked. It was wider than the Li estate's entire main courtyard, and it was full with a density of people and motion and sound that pressed against her from every direction at once. The buildings on either side rose far above her, their faces covered in colored shapes and moving light, and above everything a canopy of wires and cables and structures she could not name ran between the rooftops like a second city built on top of the first.

The strange part was the people. They resembled her, and the resemblance went deeper than she expected. The shape of the face, the color of the hair, the particular way the eyes were set, all of it echoed her own.

That was where the resemblance stopped. The way they talked, the way they moved, the way they interacted with one another. Even the clothes they wore. Their garments were simple to the point of strangeness, cut close, made from materials that had no weight or drape. The variety astonished her. Some wore skirts so short they barely covered the backside, with long socks and shoes that were basically platforms, low-cut shirts, rings on their fingers, metal pierced through their brows. Others looked more formal, though she could not be sure. Suits of fine material, with a band of cloth knotted at the throat and hanging down the center of the chest, which had to be some kind of formal dress. Many of the men wore them while holding objects to their heads, or speaking aloud while they walked, seemingly to no one. Almost everyone carried the same flat objects she had seen in the desert, and as she watched, one of them raised such an object and its surface lit with a moving image, a face, speaking, impossibly small and clear.

She stood in the middle of the crowd and no one walked around her. They walked through her, or she through them, and the sound of the street, the roar of metal vehicles she could not identify, the voices in a language that was almost intelligible, the music coming from somewhere above, pressed against her like a physical force.

One of the flat objects, lying forgotten on a low surface near a stall selling food she did not recognize, lit up briefly as she looked at it. Its surface showed shapes. Marks. The marks shifted as she focused on them, resolving from meaningless pattern into something at the edge of understanding, and then, for one moment, into words.

Then the surface went dark and the moment passed, and she was left with the afterimage of something she almost understood.

The third location was quieter than the others.

She stood in a field. Just a field. Flat, green-gold, stretching in every direction under a sky that was enormous and pale and crossed by thin white lines she eventually understood were left by flying things moving very high up. The grass was thick and short, and the air smelled of animals and earth and something dry she had no word for.

Large animals moved in the middle distance, not completely unlike the cattle she had seen at home. Four-legged, heavy, with broad flat faces and hides the color of old wood. They moved slowly, unconcerned, their scale remarkable, as large as horses but built differently, carrying their weight low to the ground. A fence of wire strung between wooden posts enclosed them, the line running straight farther than she could see in either direction.

A man was sitting on the fence.

He was not paying attention to anything in particular. His hat was wide-brimmed and worn, his clothing simple and practical, and he had one foot hooked over the lower rung and his arms resting on the top in the posture of someone who had sat in this exact position so many times that his body had memorized the shape of it.

He was not like the people in the street. He looked nothing like her.

He turned his head in her direction, not as though he saw her but as though something had shifted in the air nearby.

Then a bird called from somewhere in the grass, and the man looked away, and the field was just a field again.

Marissa surfaced slowly.

The ceiling of the hospital wing was stone, familiar and unchanged. The mana lamps had been turned low for the night cycle. The room was quiet except for the particular ambient sounds of a fortress that had not fully returned to stillness after a siege, distant footsteps, the occasional voice, the structural settling of old dwarven stonework adjusting to temperature and weight.

She lay still and let the visions drain away.

They left residue the way dreams did, except residue with edges. She could still feel the heat of the desert floor through boots she had not been wearing. She could still hear the roar of the street. She could still see the vast flat sky over the field and the easy posture of the man on his fence, as though the world were a manageable thing that simply required patient attention.

Stolen novel; please report.

That world had no mana. She was almost certain of it now. She had reached for it in each dream and found nothing. It was so strange to reach for mana, to pull it in from the environment or drive it from your own core, only to feel it refuse to answer. She looked for it the way a blind person looks for light and simply did not find it. The people in those places moved through their lives without ever touching the current that ran beneath everything in her world, and they had built those towers and those streets and those flat objects that lit with images out of nothing at all.

Or out of something else. Something she did not have a name for.

She shifted against the pillows and felt it immediately: the demonic corruption.

It had receded. Yu Meishan's work over the past days had done what conventional treatment could not, loosening the thing's grip on her channels without triggering the contraction reflex that had made direct approaches dangerous. The blackened skin on her arm had begun, slowly and at the edges, to return toward its natural color.

But receded was not gone.

What remained sat deep, and it was moving. It felt like something that carried its own will and its own mission, poisoning her slowly from within.

She pressed her awareness into it carefully, the way Meishan had shown her, avoiding the force-against-force response her body wanted to produce against something so unwelcome. The corruption answered attention the way a predator answers being watched. It went still. Then it resumed its slow lateral movement, as though it had decided she was not an immediate threat.

She did not like that at all.

The door opened.

Elizabeth came in the way she always did, quietly, efficiently, carrying something. Tonight it was a covered tray and a small lamp, which she set on the table beside the bed before taking the chair with the ease of someone who had occupied it enough times to have a claim on it.

"You're awake," Elizabeth said.

"I've been awake for a while."

Elizabeth looked at her with the specific attention she had developed over the past days, not a healer's assessment, something more personal. She had stopped pretending the visits were entirely practical.

"The dreams again?" Elizabeth asked.

"Different ones this time." Marissa considered how to describe them. "A tower of refined steel and perfect glass in a city of sand, where thousands of people seemed to congregate and the heat was borderline unbearable. A city full of people who looked like me but dressed like nothing I've seen. Elizabeth, it was a single city with millions of people. There was a crosswalk that had to have held thousands at once, moving from place to place while giant metal machines sat and waited like it was the most normal thing in the world. I saw a field full of large animals, thousands upon thousands of them, flat in every direction, sky so wide it felt like it was falling toward you. And a man in a hat, just sitting on a fence. I think he was eating sunflower seeds."

Elizabeth went very still. She raised an eyebrow, mildly amused.

"Why do I feel like you know what I'm talking about," Marissa said. It was not a question.

Elizabeth looked down at her hands. "You're not the only one. I've seen those fragments too. Things we don't have context for."

Marissa watched her. "What do you think it is?"

Elizabeth took a slow breath, like she had been holding onto something for so long and was finally ready to set the burden down. "I think you're seeing fragments of another world. Another world connected to ours, with people similar to ours, but with no mana."

"How on earth could you know all that?"

"Like I said, I saw them in a vision. I've been seeing them every night since—"

It was then that it dawned on Marissa. "Elizabeth, you're the only one who never spoke about her trial with the Goddess. Are you saying..."

Marissa let the words hang. Elizabeth did not confirm them. She did not deny them either.

Marissa had not pushed on this. She had been too injured to push on anything, and afterward there had been an unspoken agreement, or something that felt like one, that certain things would be addressed when the time was right.

She felt the corruption shift again inside her and decided the time was now.

"Elizabeth, why would the Goddess show you visions of another world? Why would you keep it from us? What do you know that we don't?" Marissa said.

Elizabeth was quiet long enough that Marissa thought she might not answer. Then she said, "That is the question, isn't it. I haven't even told Sophie. What I saw in the trial were threads. Possibilities. Do you remember the conversation we had about the hierarchy of godhood? About mantles and remits?"

Marissa nodded. "Frankly, I think I was busy thinking about how handsome Ethan was at that point."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes, but the smile stayed, and the joke was not lost on her. "Well, I think there's more truth to that hierarchy than we give it credit for. Whether our understanding is pure and complete doesn't concern me. But the Goddess we're dealing with, I don't think she sees the future the way we picture seeing. She doesn't hand over something complex in simple words. She sees projections. Shapes of what could be, depending on what is chosen. The way water moves according to the slope of the ground beneath it."

She paused. "I saw enough to understand that something is coming that changes everything. Not just for this world."

"Wait, what," Marissa said. "The Goddess showed you visions of our world, and that other world, and it's real, isn't it. An actual place."

Elizabeth looked at her directly. "Yes. The world you saw is almost certainly another world, full of humans who probably aren't that different from us. It has no mana. It has physics and natural science and a complete, astonishing development of that natural philosophy. I don't know how it works. Don't ask me."

If Marissa had been standing, she would have needed to sit down. This was heavy.

"That wasn't all I saw, and it probably wasn't the most important part. Just context. The stakes."

Marissa did not like the sound of that. She stayed silent, wanting Elizabeth to keep going.

"The important part of the vision came later."

"What did you see?" Marissa said, the words barely a whisper.

"I saw two men, starting from two different places, moving in opposite directions, until they converged on a bridge that should not have existed. Marissa, I saw two men standing at the forefront of a darkness so black that nothing escaped it. Everything was swallowed and consumed in its path. I have never been so afraid in my life. And the only thing holding the darkness back was those two men."

"Who are they," Marissa said with a gulp.

Elizabeth shook her head. "You're treating that as the question. It isn't. The right question, Marissa, is why I'm telling you this now, after all this time."

Marissa absorbed that and turned it over. It was a good question. Why would Elizabeth tell her this now, when the implication was that she hadn't told Vivian or the Princess or Anmei, any of whom mattered far more, politically, than Marissa did. Any of whom might have the knowledge, the resources, and the leverage to actually help with whatever the Goddess had set in motion.

Before she could ask, the corruption moved again, and this time the movement was sharper, a pulse, lateral and deliberate, as though something in the environment around her had changed and the corruption was responding to it. She pressed her awareness into it and felt it push back.

Something was wrong. Not immediately catastrophic, but wrong in the way that preceded catastrophic, the way a sound changes pitch before something breaks.

"Elizabeth." She kept her voice level. "I think it's time you told me why you're telling me all this. And I'm going to assume it's nothing good."

Elizabeth's expression did the thing it did when she was managing a reaction she had not fully processed. "I'm sorry, Marissa. I can't tell you exactly why."

"This seems like a lot of storytelling just to land on the part where you can't follow through with it."

"Yeah. I was thinking the same thing."

"So why not simply tell me?"

Elizabeth shook her head. "Because the future is going to depend very heavily on a choice you're going to make. I can't tell you what that choice is beforehand."

Marissa considered this. "Can I ask why?"

Elizabeth smiled. "You can ask. I can't give you an answer I don't have."

Marissa closed her eyes briefly and was about to respond when the corruption pulsed again. She felt it at the edges of channels that should have been clear, testing, searching for something. The sensation sat somewhere between pain and the feeling of a door being tried from the other side.

She opened her eyes.

"There's something happening with the corruption," she said. "Right now. It's changing direction. Looking for something."

Elizabeth rose from the chair at once. "What are you saying? What does that mean exactly?"

Marissa knew. She knew without knowing how. Not the why, not the what, not the what-for, only that she needed to go, and that she needed to go now.

"We need to get to the main hall," Marissa said.

"You're not supposed to be moving."

"I know." Marissa was already sitting up, which her ribs registered with immediate and specific objection. "Something is coming. I don't know what, but I can feel it the way you feel weather before it arrives." She looked at Elizabeth. "Whatever your Goddess showed you, whatever is going to happen, I think it's closer than either of us thought."

Elizabeth considered her for a long moment, with the expression of someone who had been handed a set of instructions and just realized the moment to use them had arrived ahead of schedule.

Then she reached into the fold of her robe and produced something small.

A vial. The glass was ordinary enough. What sat inside it was not, a liquid that held its own light, a faint gold, moving in slow internal currents that did not respond to the angle of the container.

"The Goddess gave me this," Elizabeth said. "During the trial. She told me I would know when to use it." She paused. "I kept wondering what she meant. How was I supposed to know when to use it when I didn't know who I'd use it on, or what it was even for. I still don't know what it does. But I'm positive this is the moment."

Marissa looked at the vial. "You really have no idea what it does?"

"No." Elizabeth's voice was honest rather than evasive. "She only said the passage has to be reciprocal for the purpose to be achieved. That a bridge must be anchored on both ends."

The corruption pulsed again, harder, and Marissa felt it reach a channel it had not been able to touch before and begin to move through it. The sensation was not pain, but it was close enough that she recognized what it preceded.

She looked at the vial. She looked at Elizabeth.

"Elizabeth, I need more than that. Why do I need to take this vial? Can you tell me that much?"

Elizabeth met her gaze directly. "The Goddess needs you to take it. Because Ethan and Daniel are needed to save the world. Both worlds." She held out the vial. "And you're going to help them do it."

Marissa reached out and took it.

Wait.

Who the hell is Daniel?