In Check

Despite all the time he has spent this month familiarising himself to Aquila, and learning how to approach him casually, Raum instantly tenses in place.

Even his foot freezes at the head of some mound of wood, reined by fear from pressing properly down. That debris may crack or creak under him. Allowing that to happen, somehow, would mean firing a shotgun.

Something is off.

Though it looks normal at first glance, Aquila’s posture is wrong. Raum struggles to pinpoint how — are his shoulders sagged? Is his gaze lowered? — until he realises that every individual feather holding Aquila’s form together is subtly loose, as if tied on flimsy string, and near spilling.

Seeming not to register Raum’s obvious unease, or his own abnormality, Aquila tilts his head and does that helpless smile. He mildly jokes this is a weird place to read books.

“Just getting myself immersed in the atmosphere. Don’t help though," Raum presents the surrounding ruins while flashing the cover of the logbook. “Novel’s a bit crap." Aquila’s eyes lock on the book with instant recognition, then jitter about in that analysing way. Before he can get wrong ideas about what Raum’s implying, Raum flips its pages cover-to-cover while clarifying, “too old."

Aquila’s feathers deflate slightly. He looks aside, then again lightly jokes that he’s surprised the moths hadn’t eaten it.

He’s stalling. And that both unnerves and agitates Raum. Though he plays along for a while with Aquila’s bland chitchat, waiting for him to collect himself properly for whatever topic he’s actually trying to push, Raum quickly tires of this circuitous game. Despite the warning bells reminding Raum that Aquila likes setting the pace, he asks frankly what Aquila wants to talk about.

Aquila tilts his head as if this is an odd question. By the messages he received upon returning to the palace, Raum was the one who wanted to speak with Aquila?

Erm. Crap, yeah, well, but… oh no.

Semantic judo with this guy will land Raum concussed on the floor while Aquila prances in the clouds shooting arrows. Forcing himself not to fall into that pace, he sincerely, and weakly tells him: you look terrible.

Aquila dramatically combs his hair aside like a matador flaring his cape. “To hear that from you, especially—" he cheerily begins, when a moderate gust sweeps over the ruins of the cathedral. Though by no means a strong wind, or one Raum has not seen Aquila withstand before, this time it rips off the edges of his silhouette, plucks off chunks from his extremities, splays a stream of white feathers into the sky like a surface-to-air missile ramming into a dove.

Aquila’s levity drops instantly and he snaps his palm forward. The stolen feathers freeze midair, rippling like flags in a storm, then return as if magnetised to Aquila’s body where they belong. He smooths them back into place on his hair, his breast, his arms, curled small as he focuses on nothing but staying together until the gust dies down. Every inch of him ripples.

Raum can’t help but wince.

The wind passes. Raum prays for Aquila not to ignore what just happened, or to downplay it. He is rewarded, as Aquila sets his arms evenly back to his sides and flatly purses his lips. Without a word, he gestures for Raum to follow him, then pivots to depart down the hill without even checking that he obeyed.

Without question, Raum follows.

Aquila leads them into the city, then down a corridor of alleys and onto a vacant lot. There he instructs Raum to winch open a neighbouring building’s basement window, which Raum does despite reservations, so they both may enter it.

Inside is another of those tunnels, like the one Raum and Reyl found under the cathedral. As Aquila leads Raum down it, Raum intuits both by the span of these tunnels and by the number of forks that this is indeed part of that massive tunnel system.

Only Raum’s steps peal off the quiet stones; Aquila’s footfalls make no noise. Raum wishes to break the eerie silence with chatter and questions, if only to confirm Aquila truly present, but restrains himself to just one: where are we going?

Aquila curtly answers, ‘to privacy’.

They come to a section of tunnel that strikes Raum as familiar. Cross-checking his direction sense, he realises this is where that membranous red screen formerly was blocking the way. Raum cannot help but note: it’s gone…

Aquila answers that it’s been deactivated, temporarily. He then gazes off to nowhere, sending his mind away, and with a burst of fragrant summer flowers and ozone, the glowing red screen crackles back into life behind a startled Raum. Aquila grins at Raum’s reaction, but then drops that amusement and strides forward.

The nation of Asphodel, that of my forefathers, Aquila announces to nobody in particular. Is before all, a nation of death. What land but ours could claim, we are the asylum of the individual soul? Whether perverted, broken, or damned, the curses of our unsanctified sun will dissolve all bones gilded or whittled into hell — then shall you escape by the diviners or by the sabbat, forfeit your self to the all-dominating architect or to the animal dirt. Look to the celestials in the night sky: it was not always like this.

It is our branch alone that adheres still to our maker’s funerary sensibilities; that was indeed, made to adhere to them…

So might you pledge your death to this divine steward, and in doing, know him as your master…

Carved reliefs of flowers and baroque ornaments seep progressively into the flat stone. Then crowned upon an archway overhead: ‘by the blood of God, we rest’.

To me, that yoke is quite comfortable. With that, Aquila stops still.

They stand at the entryway of a vast chamber. Unlike that of Ecqoi, this one is neither utilitarian nor Ordish. It is more like a large ballroom, with grand columns, vaulted ceilings, and intricately artful brickwork. Strange sculptures stand on bases all across the floor like gallery exhibits. These sculptures look like fountains, ornate vertical structures with ten tiered rings. On each of these rings are sconces, chambered inside themselves like doors to a cathedral, and decorated again just as artfully.

From those countless sconces of countless sculptures, there shines the flickering blue light of souls. It is like the stars have been plucked from the night and enshrined here, in this room.

And in fact, that’s exactly the case. Raum realises, gobsmacked, that Aquila has just introduced him to the national crypt of Asphodel: terminus for every good, loyal, average, and repentant citizen that was ever born to die in this country.

This room is not something anyone is ever supposed to see, or ever talk about afterwards. Raum would like to feel privileged for the exception — but in truth, it just makes him uneasy.

Seeing that Raum has grasped where they are, Aquila guides him up a spiralling stairway. Here and there he glimpses other floors in their ascent, some filled with discrete mausoleums, but most with more of those sconces.

Aquila stops them at their destination: a smaller floor dominated by an odd stone contraption inlaid with a glowing red gemstone. A beam of shifting fractals descends from this gemstone into a stone basin, on the rim of which is a white feather, and inside of which is a fresh splash of blood. Though he can’t certainly say how it works, Raum correctly figures this is the mechanism powering the teleportation field.

Aquila, for the first time since leaving the cathedral, pivots to face Raum properly.

His expression is complex. He squints, as if trying to unpuzzle something, but folds his arms behind him, as if too disgusted to reach out and pluck that ‘something’ to where he can see it. Beneath that lingers guilt, confusion, indecision — fear? No, not quite…

He straightens his back.

“Open your mouth," he orders.

Okay. Raum does.

Aquila inserts his middle and index finger into Raum’s open mouth.

Though ostensibly something he could squawk at, laugh at, and turn into a joke, this isn’t a frivolous tease.

Actually, all of Raum’s survival instincts are screaming at him to stay deathly still. It is as though the thing in his mouth is a grenade, and if he bites down, Aquila will pull back and leave him with the shell. He strains his jaw open, stretches the corners of his mouth wide, and presses his tongue flat, frantically aware that if he lets his gums or lips or tongue touch those fingers, he will actually die.

Not by some metaphor where Aquila pulls out a gun. Literally. Literal. Those fingers reek of cyanide.

Aquila holds this position, staring at him, watching, but at the same time looking far past him into some crevice of his own mind. Raum cannot figure what he’s thinking or what signal he’s looking for, but…

He can imagine Aquila, right now, is stuck.

Raum’s mouth is pinned, so he can’t talk. In fact staying paralysed in acknowledgement of Aquila’s control feels like the correct choice. But he hopes if he thinks hard enough, the following sentiment will communicate:

He’s scared. He’s been scared this whole time. From the moment he chose to follow Aquila, he knew this was on the table. Though—despite the claims he made to embolden himself, that doesn’t mean he ever truly accepted it. He’ll panic and regret and curse everything and beg for Reyl the second he knows he’s dying. No, it just means he has strong faith.

Even in this situation, he still has strong faith in Aquila.

Aquila cracks a single bitter laugh as he withdraws his fingers. Then he spills another, and another, convulsing like a sick man. His entire body drops as though gravity clicked its fingers — his palms barely catch the rim of the basin — that everything from his waist down compacts upon the floor. What were previously his legs and coat have now melded together into a quivering, shapeless fan of feathers.

He hisses at the sight of his own deformation, flares out his coat, and pushes to hoist himself up by the knee. Like some crude, scrambling effigy, melting and unmelting as clay, this effort fails both to stabilise his form or to lift him from the ground. He tries instead to pull himself up by the shoulders, only to dislocate his torso and nape from his stomach and collar. Blood cascades from the splits.

He eases forward, carefully letting his upper body lace itself back into shape. The feathers across his whole half-melted form relax flat, still, and calm, in surrender. Finally, he lets himself slump upon the basin.

There’s falling apart, and then there’s falling apart.

“Dude," Raum can only say.

Raum looks for anything that might help Aquila compose himself, or some chair to scoop him into, but Aquila grumbles for Raum to stay put, not approach, and not bother. The bitter familiarity in his tone tells Raum that this is not the first time this has happened for Aquila, though it may be the first time it’s happened in front of another person.

Blood oozes incontinently from his misshapen lower half. It pools on the ground in floral patterns and flashes red in Raum’s vision, hallmarks of its divine pedigree. Raum’s feet instinctively inch away from the spreading puddle, every nerve from the top to the butt of his spine warning him that this is poison and that letting it touch him is a bad idea. Raum offers a towel from the basin’s shelf, but Aquila struggles to manipulate the weight of even this, and it lies quickly abandoned.

Aquila taps his thumb to his forehead, gazing at the grey stone face of the basin.

“I am coming to terms," he says carefully, as if defusing a bomb in his mouth, “with the purposelessness of my efforts for the past twenty years."

Raum kneels aside him.

Tell me everything.