Timestamp: 51st Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Location: The Dusk Tower
The rumbling, resonating boom stopped Alses dead in the middle of a lecture on the finer points of auristic integration, the blunt wave of sound drowning her voice with its ominous roar. Out of habit, she looked out of the window, confused – it had sounded like the distant report of thunder, perhaps some great storm rolling in from the Unforgiving, but the skies were clear and the sun shining bright.
She became aware, on the very periphery of her hearing, of a humming, a subtle and plangent ringing thrum that saw her eyes darting over the shocked, unsettled room, hunting for its source. Her gaze caught on the heavy glass of water present at every Dusk Tower lectern; even as she watched, the water inside more resembled heavy seas than the tranquil millpond it had peacefully been up until that point.
The humming, Alses realised with a jolt, was the glass vibrating; she turned again to look out of the windows, searching for anything that could be causing all the strange phenomena, distracted from her nervously chattering class, when the full force of the earthquake struck the starry city.
The Dusk Tower rang like a bell as the earth spasmed and bucked beneath its deep foundations, almost as though it were a living thing trying to cast out the skyglass pillars that had been driven deep into the granite bedrock. Every single part of it, from cellar to pinnacle, was shivering and convulsing, trying to tear itself apart from the inside out. Glass and crystal ornaments sang in sweet protest, the waves of sound dinning on the ear, even as chandeliers swung alarmingly overhead and cataracts of dust poured down from on high.
Decorations and knick-knacks vibrated off their shelves and smashed into glittering shards, whilst, as the shaking intensified, the windows sang in their skyglass frames and several exploded outwards in feathery, filigree fragments to rain down on the grounds far below. The entirety of the grand edifice, thousands upon thousands of tons of skyglass, marble, wood and metal, swayed and rocked as though the ground had turned to a choppy sea, and Alses clung like grim death to the imposing lectern through it all.
Fear danced its quickstep fandango up and down her spine, merrily filling her head with images of an ignominious end, crushed in the falling remnants of the once-proud Dusk Tower. ‘Quake!’ most of the rest of her mind wailed. ‘Quake!’
“Syna preserve us,” she gulped, fear twining its icy fingers around her eternal heart.
It was perhaps for the best that her class were all Lhavitian citizens born-and-bred. She’d not experienced an earthquake in the starry city before, despite having been resident for some time, caught off-guard and frightened by the way the solid, dependable earth had turned to treacherous water (or so it seemed) beneath her feet – beneath the entirety of Lhavit, in fact.
Alses’ students, despite the quake’s power, still knew what to do, and were old enough not to panic, sheltering under the heavy wooden desks in case the chandelier came down or – Zintila forbid – something more substantial. Heart racing, blood pounding a din in her ears, feeling oddly light-headed and short of breath, Alses followed their example as best she was able, crouching in the reassuringly-weighty lee of her lectern as the world trembled and the stones – the solid, dependable, immobile stones – danced. Skyglass flexed and bent like a living thing all around as masonry groaned, paintings and tapestries trembled and wood shattered.
As she watched, cautious and afraid, suddenly feeling very small in the grip of Nature’s violence, cracks spiderwebbed themselves across the marble and chasms dug themselves into wood panelling, adding protesting groans to the din. She flinched back as they crawled towards her, unsettlingly fast, pressing her shoulderblades back into the ornate wood.
After what seemed an age, the rumbling stopped, the crashes and smashes and the shrieking squeal of splintering wood died away. The Tower still stood, battered but unbowed, still reaching for Zintila’s heaven as it had done for nearly five hundred years. It had sailed through the fury of the earth almost – almost unscathed, and with all souls safe within its walls, a testament to the skill of the Constellation.
Alses picked herself up from the dust and debris-strewn floor with a loud and heartfelt groan, batting at her robes absently and raising yet more clouds of dust by her actions. A chorus of hacking coughs, as her students did the same, told her they were still alive, thankfully, shielded by the incredibly sturdy structure of the Tower and by their heavy desks, even if the room as a whole was a write-off.
“Everyone all right?” she called, echoing one of her students, her voice clipped and curt and worried, because even though she could see the bright flare of their auras, there were forms and motions to go through; it helped to calm her. She was their teacher, she had to get them through this safely.
She had to get herself through this safely.
A chorus of slightly-disoriented ‘yeses’ were her reply; a tiny part of the heavy, Gordian knot of tension and worry in her chest uncoiled at the news, expected though it was. They were safe…for the moment – but who knew how heavily-damaged the rest of the Tower was?
“We have to get out of the Tower,” Alses announced grimly, already moving towards the beckoning, welcoming exit. A chorus of shaken voices piped up, though, holding her back.
“What if there are more aftershocks?” came the shrill question, the most pressing and sensible of the ones offered. “The Tower’s still safe, we should stay put, Instructor!”
“For how much longer?” Alses asked, voice shivering with just a touch of fear, feeling the spacious walls close in and the Tower’s prodigious weight loom ominously over her. “Who’s to say the Tower won’t cave under the next shock? We have to get out of here; at least in the grounds there’s plenty of places to run.”
There was still dissent, confusion and rising panic. Those feelings were warring in Alses’ own stomach, too, sending tendrils to cup her spine in ice and creeping shadow, to poison her brain with indecision and fear at a world where the earth turned against…well…itself, spiting the crystal crown that yearned for heaven it bore on its ridged and rocky back.
Alses, though, she couldn’t stay in the Tower a moment longer; the sharp clap of her hands cut through frightened, cough-filled debate like an axe. “Stay if you like,” she said coldly, “You’re all adults and we can’t order you to follow us, but I am getting out of this place before it comes down on top of us all. Follow or do not; the choice is yours.”
A pause, a twisting of the knife. “I’ll try and say something nice at your funerals,” she added – that was enough to snap them out of their dazed lassitude and had them lining up. Under her gaze – hear fearful, darting gaze – her students picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, eyeing her nervously. Inwardly, she sighed; it was as though they were back to lesson one, all awed and frightened by the immortal beauty pontificating at the front of the lecture theatre, completely and utterly unaware that she had been just as terrified of them.
If not more so.
The inside of the Tower was a mess – glass and pottery crunched underfoot, sad remnants of gifts and ornaments that lined the curving hallways, and as they swept onto one of the main arterial corridors that led to the stairs they were stopped dead. It looked as though someone had Animated the furniture from one of the nearby rooms, sending a herd of chairs, chaises and divans cantering through the doors to spill haphazardly and with many a ripped spray of stuffing into the corridor.
Moving as fast as she dared, eyes always on the numinous, watching for telltale convulsions, for a fresh wave of panic and fear to overtop the current sky-high impressions of the same.
A
“Alses!” the strident cry brought a strained smile to the radiant Ethaefal’s lips as familiar tones assailed her. What seemed like half the Tower was milling aimlessly around on the grand forecourt and the endless lawns of the Tower grounds, looking shellshocked and aimless. Some were sporting rough bandages, improvised out of whatever had come to hand, but most seemed unscathed, if shaken.
Thank Syna.
“I see you got out of the Tower in one piece. Your class, too-” Chiona Dusk, sporting a rather impressive black eye and several long rents in what had once been an exquisite overrobe, swayed and nearly collapsed, along with the rest of the world. The rolling boom was louder this time, thunderous in its primal scream, sending avalanches crashing down the near mountainsides. The Dusk Tower shook and shivered like a leaf in a gale, and more cataracts of glass exploded outwards, but still the massive structure stood, defiant and proud.
The flesh-and-blood Dusk Tower, however, was not so lucky; almost everyone went over like a stack of ninepins, sprawled out on the treacherous ground as it shook in geological rage, shattering the air with its bass thunder.
This time, Alses wasn’t so lucky as to escape all injury; something struck the side of her head a glancing, stinging blow before somersaulting off into space and, in its wake, a creeping wave of warm wetness began to trickle down her skin. A tentative touch, hissing through her teeth more at the anticipation of pain than any actual discomfort, and her fingertips came away slick with bronze blood.
Blech. The smell of it – sweetness on the turn – always made her feel far more sick than the sight of blood alone.
“Aftershock,” Chiona growled, hauling herself upright. “Big one.” Her voice rose to an impressive degree, crackling back from the Tower’s façade. “Everyone all right? Alses, your head-”
“It’s fine,” she murmured in reply; it was a shallow cut, after all. Spectacular, rather than serious. Alses blinked at her mentor. “What do we do?” she asked, appealing to a higher power. One dust-matted eyebrow rose in silent query for a second, before laurelled Lady Dusk replied.
“We head into the city,” she commanded. “Look out there, do you see it?”
‘It’ was impossible to miss – a cloud of smoke and dust towering high into the sky. Alses squinted, triangulating the billowing colossus onto the city as she knew it. “That’s…the Sharai, isn’t it?” she asked, still confused, disoriented and slightly light-headed from the shaking and her own fear both.
As she spoke, Chiona paled impressively. It took Alses a few ticks to realise why; the Sharai was the breadbasket of Lhavit, a mountain riddled with skyglass hothouses and caverns that grew most of the food the city needed to survive; the farmlands of the Misty Peaks weren’t nearly enough to support the populace, and were still too much at risk of opportunistic attack to be truly lucrative – or essential.
But the Sharai…with that peak a ruin, Lhavit would suffer. Famine would carve too-prominent cheekbones into formerly-sated faces, the bellies of the children would swell in gross mockery of well-fed satisfaction and everything – everyone - would become gaunt and angular.
All but the Ethaefal, anyway. Alses’ diet of experiences and sunlight, the most insubstantial of things, still kept her sweetly voluptuous, classically curved in all the right places, according to the pre-Valterrian ideal of beauty.
“Zintila above,” Chiona breathed, and then her fists clenched and her features hardened. “We have to get over there, Alses. Gather up the instructors and the more advanced apprentices and…” words failed for a moment and Lady Dusk gestured mutely at the towering cloud, a hint as to the destruction that would surely await them. “…help. I’ll send reinforcements as we get organized here, but we need to mount at least an initial response now. I'm no Catholicon doctor, but I know enough to see that every tick is vital for anyone trapped.”
Alses blinked. “Why us?” she asked, stupidly; Chiona’s eyes flashed dangerously, emotions threatening to burst out of the iron-hard shell the Dusk had clapped on like metaphysical armour.
“Because you’re the best of us, stupid apprentice-mine,” came the sharp reply. “Put those vaunted powers – and those of our Tower – to good use. Save the citizens, save the harvest, save the Sharai. Save the city.” A pause, a brush of subtle power against a shivering aura, followed by a lessening of the fire in her eyes and the iron in her voice. “We have a duty,” she added, softer, repeating it almost like a soothing mantra, eyes fixed on the ruinous plume. “We have a duty.”
Well. That was true, at least – and now Alses let herself think about it, the silver thread of her cogitation dancing through possibility and probability, there were things she could do. Things all aurists could do. Useful things, helpful things.
She nodded, brisk – the situation called for it, called for the armour of purpose and decision over the shivering Ethaefal inside. Time to take up the mantle that Lhavit spun around its Ethaefal – all its Ethaefal – whether they wanted it or not, that gossamer gown of respect and awe woven from preconception and past actions of the patrons of the starry city.
Diamond walls around a quailing heart, she turned to see to the assembly of the stronger aurists of the Tower, only to find they’d already begun to collect and gather around her. They’d watched, and heard her exchange with Chiona, and now they looked to her for guidance.
Only one way forward, now.
“To the Sharai,” she called, voice clear and strident, carrying well, seeing determination replace fear and uncertainty in most faces – although anxiety still crackled like summer lightning between the aurists and – wider – stretched like some unnatural storm-spider’s web over the city as a whole.
Location: The Dusk Tower
The rumbling, resonating boom stopped Alses dead in the middle of a lecture on the finer points of auristic integration, the blunt wave of sound drowning her voice with its ominous roar. Out of habit, she looked out of the window, confused – it had sounded like the distant report of thunder, perhaps some great storm rolling in from the Unforgiving, but the skies were clear and the sun shining bright.
She became aware, on the very periphery of her hearing, of a humming, a subtle and plangent ringing thrum that saw her eyes darting over the shocked, unsettled room, hunting for its source. Her gaze caught on the heavy glass of water present at every Dusk Tower lectern; even as she watched, the water inside more resembled heavy seas than the tranquil millpond it had peacefully been up until that point.
The humming, Alses realised with a jolt, was the glass vibrating; she turned again to look out of the windows, searching for anything that could be causing all the strange phenomena, distracted from her nervously chattering class, when the full force of the earthquake struck the starry city.
The Dusk Tower rang like a bell as the earth spasmed and bucked beneath its deep foundations, almost as though it were a living thing trying to cast out the skyglass pillars that had been driven deep into the granite bedrock. Every single part of it, from cellar to pinnacle, was shivering and convulsing, trying to tear itself apart from the inside out. Glass and crystal ornaments sang in sweet protest, the waves of sound dinning on the ear, even as chandeliers swung alarmingly overhead and cataracts of dust poured down from on high.
Decorations and knick-knacks vibrated off their shelves and smashed into glittering shards, whilst, as the shaking intensified, the windows sang in their skyglass frames and several exploded outwards in feathery, filigree fragments to rain down on the grounds far below. The entirety of the grand edifice, thousands upon thousands of tons of skyglass, marble, wood and metal, swayed and rocked as though the ground had turned to a choppy sea, and Alses clung like grim death to the imposing lectern through it all.
Fear danced its quickstep fandango up and down her spine, merrily filling her head with images of an ignominious end, crushed in the falling remnants of the once-proud Dusk Tower. ‘Quake!’ most of the rest of her mind wailed. ‘Quake!’
“Syna preserve us,” she gulped, fear twining its icy fingers around her eternal heart.
It was perhaps for the best that her class were all Lhavitian citizens born-and-bred. She’d not experienced an earthquake in the starry city before, despite having been resident for some time, caught off-guard and frightened by the way the solid, dependable earth had turned to treacherous water (or so it seemed) beneath her feet – beneath the entirety of Lhavit, in fact.
Alses’ students, despite the quake’s power, still knew what to do, and were old enough not to panic, sheltering under the heavy wooden desks in case the chandelier came down or – Zintila forbid – something more substantial. Heart racing, blood pounding a din in her ears, feeling oddly light-headed and short of breath, Alses followed their example as best she was able, crouching in the reassuringly-weighty lee of her lectern as the world trembled and the stones – the solid, dependable, immobile stones – danced. Skyglass flexed and bent like a living thing all around as masonry groaned, paintings and tapestries trembled and wood shattered.
As she watched, cautious and afraid, suddenly feeling very small in the grip of Nature’s violence, cracks spiderwebbed themselves across the marble and chasms dug themselves into wood panelling, adding protesting groans to the din. She flinched back as they crawled towards her, unsettlingly fast, pressing her shoulderblades back into the ornate wood.
After what seemed an age, the rumbling stopped, the crashes and smashes and the shrieking squeal of splintering wood died away. The Tower still stood, battered but unbowed, still reaching for Zintila’s heaven as it had done for nearly five hundred years. It had sailed through the fury of the earth almost – almost unscathed, and with all souls safe within its walls, a testament to the skill of the Constellation.
Alses picked herself up from the dust and debris-strewn floor with a loud and heartfelt groan, batting at her robes absently and raising yet more clouds of dust by her actions. A chorus of hacking coughs, as her students did the same, told her they were still alive, thankfully, shielded by the incredibly sturdy structure of the Tower and by their heavy desks, even if the room as a whole was a write-off.
“Everyone all right?” she called, echoing one of her students, her voice clipped and curt and worried, because even though she could see the bright flare of their auras, there were forms and motions to go through; it helped to calm her. She was their teacher, she had to get them through this safely.
She had to get herself through this safely.
A chorus of slightly-disoriented ‘yeses’ were her reply; a tiny part of the heavy, Gordian knot of tension and worry in her chest uncoiled at the news, expected though it was. They were safe…for the moment – but who knew how heavily-damaged the rest of the Tower was?
“We have to get out of the Tower,” Alses announced grimly, already moving towards the beckoning, welcoming exit. A chorus of shaken voices piped up, though, holding her back.
“What if there are more aftershocks?” came the shrill question, the most pressing and sensible of the ones offered. “The Tower’s still safe, we should stay put, Instructor!”
“For how much longer?” Alses asked, voice shivering with just a touch of fear, feeling the spacious walls close in and the Tower’s prodigious weight loom ominously over her. “Who’s to say the Tower won’t cave under the next shock? We have to get out of here; at least in the grounds there’s plenty of places to run.”
There was still dissent, confusion and rising panic. Those feelings were warring in Alses’ own stomach, too, sending tendrils to cup her spine in ice and creeping shadow, to poison her brain with indecision and fear at a world where the earth turned against…well…itself, spiting the crystal crown that yearned for heaven it bore on its ridged and rocky back.
Alses, though, she couldn’t stay in the Tower a moment longer; the sharp clap of her hands cut through frightened, cough-filled debate like an axe. “Stay if you like,” she said coldly, “You’re all adults and we can’t order you to follow us, but I am getting out of this place before it comes down on top of us all. Follow or do not; the choice is yours.”
A pause, a twisting of the knife. “I’ll try and say something nice at your funerals,” she added – that was enough to snap them out of their dazed lassitude and had them lining up. Under her gaze – hear fearful, darting gaze – her students picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, eyeing her nervously. Inwardly, she sighed; it was as though they were back to lesson one, all awed and frightened by the immortal beauty pontificating at the front of the lecture theatre, completely and utterly unaware that she had been just as terrified of them.
If not more so.
The inside of the Tower was a mess – glass and pottery crunched underfoot, sad remnants of gifts and ornaments that lined the curving hallways, and as they swept onto one of the main arterial corridors that led to the stairs they were stopped dead. It looked as though someone had Animated the furniture from one of the nearby rooms, sending a herd of chairs, chaises and divans cantering through the doors to spill haphazardly and with many a ripped spray of stuffing into the corridor.
Moving as fast as she dared, eyes always on the numinous, watching for telltale convulsions, for a fresh wave of panic and fear to overtop the current sky-high impressions of the same.
A
“Alses!” the strident cry brought a strained smile to the radiant Ethaefal’s lips as familiar tones assailed her. What seemed like half the Tower was milling aimlessly around on the grand forecourt and the endless lawns of the Tower grounds, looking shellshocked and aimless. Some were sporting rough bandages, improvised out of whatever had come to hand, but most seemed unscathed, if shaken.
Thank Syna.
“I see you got out of the Tower in one piece. Your class, too-” Chiona Dusk, sporting a rather impressive black eye and several long rents in what had once been an exquisite overrobe, swayed and nearly collapsed, along with the rest of the world. The rolling boom was louder this time, thunderous in its primal scream, sending avalanches crashing down the near mountainsides. The Dusk Tower shook and shivered like a leaf in a gale, and more cataracts of glass exploded outwards, but still the massive structure stood, defiant and proud.
The flesh-and-blood Dusk Tower, however, was not so lucky; almost everyone went over like a stack of ninepins, sprawled out on the treacherous ground as it shook in geological rage, shattering the air with its bass thunder.
This time, Alses wasn’t so lucky as to escape all injury; something struck the side of her head a glancing, stinging blow before somersaulting off into space and, in its wake, a creeping wave of warm wetness began to trickle down her skin. A tentative touch, hissing through her teeth more at the anticipation of pain than any actual discomfort, and her fingertips came away slick with bronze blood.
Blech. The smell of it – sweetness on the turn – always made her feel far more sick than the sight of blood alone.
“Aftershock,” Chiona growled, hauling herself upright. “Big one.” Her voice rose to an impressive degree, crackling back from the Tower’s façade. “Everyone all right? Alses, your head-”
“It’s fine,” she murmured in reply; it was a shallow cut, after all. Spectacular, rather than serious. Alses blinked at her mentor. “What do we do?” she asked, appealing to a higher power. One dust-matted eyebrow rose in silent query for a second, before laurelled Lady Dusk replied.
“We head into the city,” she commanded. “Look out there, do you see it?”
‘It’ was impossible to miss – a cloud of smoke and dust towering high into the sky. Alses squinted, triangulating the billowing colossus onto the city as she knew it. “That’s…the Sharai, isn’t it?” she asked, still confused, disoriented and slightly light-headed from the shaking and her own fear both.
As she spoke, Chiona paled impressively. It took Alses a few ticks to realise why; the Sharai was the breadbasket of Lhavit, a mountain riddled with skyglass hothouses and caverns that grew most of the food the city needed to survive; the farmlands of the Misty Peaks weren’t nearly enough to support the populace, and were still too much at risk of opportunistic attack to be truly lucrative – or essential.
But the Sharai…with that peak a ruin, Lhavit would suffer. Famine would carve too-prominent cheekbones into formerly-sated faces, the bellies of the children would swell in gross mockery of well-fed satisfaction and everything – everyone - would become gaunt and angular.
All but the Ethaefal, anyway. Alses’ diet of experiences and sunlight, the most insubstantial of things, still kept her sweetly voluptuous, classically curved in all the right places, according to the pre-Valterrian ideal of beauty.
“Zintila above,” Chiona breathed, and then her fists clenched and her features hardened. “We have to get over there, Alses. Gather up the instructors and the more advanced apprentices and…” words failed for a moment and Lady Dusk gestured mutely at the towering cloud, a hint as to the destruction that would surely await them. “…help. I’ll send reinforcements as we get organized here, but we need to mount at least an initial response now. I'm no Catholicon doctor, but I know enough to see that every tick is vital for anyone trapped.”
Alses blinked. “Why us?” she asked, stupidly; Chiona’s eyes flashed dangerously, emotions threatening to burst out of the iron-hard shell the Dusk had clapped on like metaphysical armour.
“Because you’re the best of us, stupid apprentice-mine,” came the sharp reply. “Put those vaunted powers – and those of our Tower – to good use. Save the citizens, save the harvest, save the Sharai. Save the city.” A pause, a brush of subtle power against a shivering aura, followed by a lessening of the fire in her eyes and the iron in her voice. “We have a duty,” she added, softer, repeating it almost like a soothing mantra, eyes fixed on the ruinous plume. “We have a duty.”
Well. That was true, at least – and now Alses let herself think about it, the silver thread of her cogitation dancing through possibility and probability, there were things she could do. Things all aurists could do. Useful things, helpful things.
She nodded, brisk – the situation called for it, called for the armour of purpose and decision over the shivering Ethaefal inside. Time to take up the mantle that Lhavit spun around its Ethaefal – all its Ethaefal – whether they wanted it or not, that gossamer gown of respect and awe woven from preconception and past actions of the patrons of the starry city.
Diamond walls around a quailing heart, she turned to see to the assembly of the stronger aurists of the Tower, only to find they’d already begun to collect and gather around her. They’d watched, and heard her exchange with Chiona, and now they looked to her for guidance.
Only one way forward, now.
“To the Sharai,” she called, voice clear and strident, carrying well, seeing determination replace fear and uncertainty in most faces – although anxiety still crackled like summer lightning between the aurists and – wider – stretched like some unnatural storm-spider’s web over the city as a whole.
