The world let me in, and then there was no world.
No floor, no ceiling, no walls. No meadow, no shimmer, no friends a step behind me. The crease closed at my back without a sound and left me standing in a dark that didn’t press or threaten, that simply was, the way deep water was when you stopped fighting it.
I couldn’t have said whether I had a body. I decided I did, because the alternative was worse, and stood there in the nothing waiting for it to do something.
It did.
“Welcome.” A voice. Male, coming from no direction because there were no directions, settling into the dark as if it had always lived. It wasn’t Cloudy. “What do you desire?”
Right to it, then.
I appreciated that a little. “I don’t actually know who you are,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I’d have liked in all that space. “Or what? So forgive me if I don’t curtsy.” I let out a breath. “I want to administer the fragment. That’s what I came for. I put my hand on the obelisk three months ago and I came back to run the place.”
The voice laughed.
Warmly, as if I’d said something endearing without meaning to, like a child announcing they’d grow up to drive the train. “An administrator,” it said. “You’re certain that’s the desire?”
“...Is it a trick question?” The dark didn’t answer, so I kept going, because filling silence is a sickness I’ve never cured. “Every world fragment I’ve ever heard of has an administrator. That’s the whole arrangement. You hold it, you run it, you keep the lights on. I’ll admit I don’t know the fine print, nobody who walks into one of these seems to walk back out and publish a guide—” the joke landed flat in the nothing, “—but as far as I know, administrator is the job.”
“Of course it is,” the voice agreed. “For the most. Because none of them were you.”
I blinked at the dark.
“Sorry?”
“You carry a divine soul,” it said. “And divine energy. But there, threaded all the way through the thing that walked in here. I felt it the moment the crease took you.”
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it; it came up out of me before Lola could vet it, and it sounded thin and a little hysterical in that endless room. “Okay. Okay, I see what’s happened. My mother is a mythical queen; she’s got the divine résumé. You’ve got the wrong elf. I’m the daughter who can make a decent ice bridge and lose an argument to her own assistant. The divine soul is one floor up.”
“I have the right one,” the voice said. “There are, at this moment, somewhere upward of a hundred thousand people who would not call you an administrator if you asked them. They have another word.”
I didn’t want to ask. I asked anyway. “...Which is?”
“God-Queen.”
“That’s—” I didn’t finish. There wasn’t a sentence that wouldn’t have been a lie in one direction or another.
“You came to administer,” the voice said. “To caretake. To hold something in trust for whoever it really belongs to. But it could belong to you, Charlie. You could claim this fragment the way you claimed the obelisk, except this time you’d claim it as what you are, and not as the apology you keep making for it.”
“I’m not a God-Queen,” I said. The protest came out automatically. “I’m—I’m a person who got lucky and inherited a title and panics about the budget. I’m weak. You’ve got divine soul and divine energy and a hundred thousand bowing heads, and underneath all of it is someone who throws pencils at her staff when the math gets hard. That’s the truth of it. I’m not what you think you felt.”
“You have your knight right outside,” the voice said.
I stopped.
“Standing in the sun where she hates to stand,” it went on. “Out in the open, no shadow to fold into, because you were going in and she would not have it any other way. Do you call her weak? She does not. She calls you her queen, and she means a thing by it she has never once said out loud. A weak thing does not earn that. You have a great deal of evidence walking around outside this fragment, Charlie. You simply refuse to see it.”
I closed my eyes. “What would it be different,” I mumbled. “if I did. Owned it instead of minded it. What changes.”
I felt the lighthouse turn back toward me, pleased.
“Everything, including the temples,” it said. “An administrator keeps them swept. A God-Queen claims them. The stronger your nation grows, the wider the channels open, the more there is to draw on, the stronger you grow. It compounds. Power that makes more power. You of all people should understand the appeal of an exploit that pays its own interest.”
It had me there, and it knew it.
The darkness dissolved before I got the word out. It just stopped being dark, all at once, and I was standing in the valley.
My valley. The one I’d anchored off an hour ago, the lake gone glass-flat and the green spilling up from its banks and the dark forest pulled back to the tree-line; except I was above it, hung in the bright afternoon air a few hundred meters up with nothing under my heels and no inclination to mind that, looking down on the whole of it like the system gives you the map.
And the green wasn’t empty.
A city stood on it.
Not the few hopeful stakes Qomén’s people had been pacing out along the bank; an ancient city, finished, sprawling, sun on a thousand pale roofs, streets I could trace running clean from the water’s edge back into the land, plazas and bridges and the small bright crawl of distance too far to name. It went on. It kept going where I expected it to stop, filled the meadow I’d left my friends standing in and ran past it, an entire living place laid down over the ground I’d been about to break.
“Amazing,” I breathed, because nothing else was available to me.
“Turn around,” the voice said.
So I turned, standing on nothing, which felt right, and looked at the mountain.
The city had reached the mountain and not touched it. It had run all the way up to that gray rising shoulder of stone behind the lake, and then it had stopped at its feet and gone up instead.
Temples.
Pale stone, columned, the marble Lumi had been dreaming out loud about in a dead square that morning, except she’d been imagining a town hall.
Three of them, each easily three hundred meters from foot to pediment, white and bright and catching the afternoon off the lake. Spaced around the slope at even distances, broad pale paths threaded up between them, and every path bent inward as it climbed, and where the three gathered near the top they fed into one.
The one in the center stood half again as tall as the rest. Five hundred meters if it was a foot, rising off the mountain’s crown like the mountain had grown it, and near the top, set into the pale stone where the entire valley would see it catch the light—
A snowflake.
It was so large. I stood in the empty air above all of it and could not find the bottom of how large it was. The air folded again, and this time it took me down, near the bottom of the mountain.
There was a stele.
It stood twice my height, a slab of dark stone set upright in the floor, and it was carved all over in writing I didn’t know, but I was sure Yuki would find out eventually.
And from the foot of the stele, three paths climbed.
They cut up and away into the mountain, three roads of pale stone splitting off at angles and rising. One path for each temple in the ring.
“Four,” the voice said. Four challenges,” it went on, “to claim the first part of what’s yours. Three of them wait at the heads of those three roads, one to a temple. You’ll take them in turn—one temple, then the next, then the last—and you will not take them alone. You’ll bring the ones who follow you. Each temple, different group, and you watch, not help, except for being their God-Queen. The trials don’t measure you. They measure the strength of what you’ve gathered.”
“And the fourth?” I said.
“When the three are done, the three roads have only ever led to one place. You’ll go up into the great temple, all of you, together, and that is where the last challenge waits.”
“Which is.”
“Decided on entering.”
I waited for more. The dark declined to provide it. “That’s not an answer.”
“No,” the voice agreed pleasantly, “it isn’t. The fourth challenge isn’t fixed any more than neither are the others. Each of the temples takes the shape it needs to take when you walk through the door, and not one moment before. I could tell you what it was, but I’d be lying, because it hasn’t happened yet, and it’s waiting to find out who’s standing there before it decides. You’ll like that less the longer you think about it. I’d recommend not thinking about it.”
Good advice, I had no intention of taking.
“And when it’s done,” the voice said, and here it slowed, here it laid the last of it down with care, “when the four are passed and the temples are unlocked—they’re yours. Not in here. Out there. They’ll stand where you stand, on that mountain, over that lake, in your world. They will serve as your temples in the waking length of Rimelion, real stone on real ground, the seat of what you are.” The cold light off the stele seemed to lean toward me. “Reach the center. Pass the four. Unlock every one of them, if you wish to claim me.”
There it was again. Me.
I’d let it slide the first time. I didn’t, the second. “Claim you,” I said slowly, and turned in the dark to address a voice that had no place to be. “Right. About that. The thing I’d be claiming—the fragment—that’s you? I’m standing here negotiating terms with the prize?” I let the question hang, but there was no answer. “Am I talking to the world fragment?”
The dark still said nothing.
It said nothing for a long time, the silence of something that had heard the question perfectly well and was choosing, with great patience, to let me wait. Of course it did. Of course the thing offering me a city was the thing I’d be agreeing to own, and of course it wouldn’t say so out loud, because the moment it said so out loud I’d start asking what it meant to own a thing that could talk back.
I didn’t like owning things that talked back. That ring with the prince was still on my enemy’s finger and I hated that more than anything.
So, it said I was God-Queen, okay, great. I was a weak God-Queen, but nobody cared until now, so maybe that was fine. I took imaginary Lola’s page and filled it next to a future and not the future, in the growing drawer of things this place had handed me sideways and let me find the weight of on my own.
Then I looked at the three roads climbing up into the smaller temples, and the great temple they all ran toward, and the snowflake I knew was waiting at the top of it.
I let out a long breath, all the way to the bottom of my lungs.
“Yes,” I said.
The world fragment spat me out.
Author's note: Okay guys, there was a talk about longer chapters and I was thinking about the length of the chapters and I'd like to ask you what would you prefer. The count of words will be the same per week, I don't think I would be able to write more than I already do, but we can either get three shorter chapters, or two longer.
I like things about both word counts, so I'll let you decide what you prefer and if we pick longer ones, we'll start next month.