A Borrowed Memory

He reached the tower because the road decided to stop leading ever more into a blinding white nothing.

 Heavy falling snow confused everything into continuous, unyielding sameness.  The door to the tower yielded, and the round room beyond met him with smooth walls that were not mirrors but behaved like them from certain angles.  A coiled stairway leading upward greeted him from strangely off-center.  Pushing the door shut, he collapsed to the floor and breathed into his freezing cold hands.  This room was well-lit, owing to the beautiful tall windows, but he noted it might become quite dark once the sun set, and he saw no sconces for torches anywhere.  The ceiling overhead was beautiful and strange in shades of turquoise, chips of emerald and motes of ochre, all undulating like the far southern oceans.  In fact, panels of ceiling were separated by stone that reminded him of ropes of sea foam.  Those ropes coalesced into archways down the walls that formed shelves and a cascade that became the oddly welcoming stairway.  One hand rested on the dark black floor—a strangely smooth floor punctuated by…metal filigree?  He couldn't reason why the floor seemed warm, or why the entire room seemed warm; surely, the biting cold outside would have leached away any heat that sought refuge in here.  His breathing slowed and the room seemed to stretch and expand with his lungs.

He pushed himself up on his feet, and decided to see where that stairway would lead him.

 The second floor was a markedly different place.  The architecture was more modern, or at least, far less strange.  Here the floor was tiled granite stone, and decidedly cooler to the touch.  An iron chandelier hung from the buttressed ceiling, filled with unlit candles that had hours of life left in them.  This room will do for a bit of rest, he thought.  Another stairway leading up to a third floor stretched out along one side of the room, but he figured further exploration would best follow some time spent off his feet.  This room also felt warm, though he sorely wanted to expel the chill that had worked its way deep into his bones. 

 "Ah, a fireplace!" he exclaimed.  But as he walked to one end of the room, he noticed the large verdigris carved recess that occupied the wall lacked a chimney.  Not a fireplace.  Damn.  But what he thought was the hearth was merely something like a bench seat, making the recess a very attractive but odd—and hard—seatback.  Why a seat and not a place to set a vase…or a basket of fruit?  Fruit sounds particularly appealing at the moment, he mused, stomach growling.  He realized why he thought it might be a seat: the stone of the bench was worn smooth near the middle and its edge, as though hundreds of people had in fact sat there over a very long time.  How old is this tower?  He looked around and wondered how it could be that an old place could be so clean.  A notion came to him as he settled down on the bench and leaned back into the recess in the wall.  There are some cobwebs on the chandelier, but surely that's one of the newest things in this room.  Sleep doesn’t take him; it loosens him.  The edge between early afternoon daylight through stained glass windows and forested dawn grows gauzy, a breath held and not returned.  Forest?  Dawn?  That's not right.  It was bright outside.  The round room tilts—no, steadies—and the stones of the walls decide they are not stones but weather.  Frost curls into script, and wonder climbs the curl like ivy.

 A different breath fills his chest.

With that breath, the smell arrives first: tallow smoke, cold iron, oiled leather, and the sharp, medicinal bite of crushed thistle.  Boots grind grit.  A strap is tugged once, twice, checked.  The world resolves in a line of companions, their gear dark against early light, their tusk-rings muted with ash.  He knows their names without putting his mind to it: Orzan of Fast Rain Hold, Seli of the Fifth Coil, and young Hurg, with the spider tattoo on his throat.  Hurg, whose laugh always starts before the joke knows it’s been butchered.  Their faces carry the quiet readiness of those who have practiced readiness until it is only repose.  These are my people.

People.  Wait, aren't these—am I surrounded by orcs?

Not orcs—Ar-Garalyn, says the body he now wears, with patient certainty.  His body is already established in the stance taught to them as children: knees just soft, weight through the ball of the foot, the calmness behind the eyes, and the mind paused, like the stillness when holding one's breath.  Tranquil Position: a Psion's first form.  Prepare the body, and the mind can follow.  I am on the path to become a psykinetic someday soon.

A what, now?  A sighing connected…or a sign of…prosthetic?  Something. 

No, psykinetic, the body answered.  One who moves the world through telekinetic magics, if they have the psion's skill and the will to specialize it.  He looks out and surveys that beautiful world.   Beyond the line of companions, the valley spreads, rime on grass, cedars holding their green in a promise they intend to keep.  The air is so clear and morning-cool it feels sharpened.  Thin clouds drag a white knife across the blueing veil.  “We are here for the Listening,” says Mira-of-Two-Marks, the keeper whose hair is braided in the pattern she uses when the work is serious.  “The sky is a vault today.  And so we will practice Vaultkeeping under open dome.”

 Hurg shifts his weight, and Seli presses a knuckle between teeth to fix a loose thought back in place. 

When is a sky a vault?  No, that sounds like a riddle.  This is practice… what exactly are we—

“Breath,” Mira cuts through, but not aloud; she has moved her thoughts through ours telepathically.  They all breathe together—mouth, chest, the calmness behind the eyes.  The valley seems to step closer, interested in their subtle movements.

 On the horizon, something gathers where no “something” belongs.  A black seam appears in the sky out at the horizon.  Birds turn in a punctuation of alarm and then flatten against the far air, trying to press themselves into an arrow shaft, streaking away from whatever is happening.  The seam brightens at the edges, then reveals depth: not a seam, a shadow.  An unbelievably sinister noise cries through the intervening miles.  Creaking, crying, scraping, moaning, all at once.  It sounds like a faraway roomful of metal chairs dragged across a metal floor, reverberating through a metal cavern.  That shadow…it is…

Is that… a floating city?!  It's a city on a floating upside down mountain!!  Where in Faerŭn am I?

—an island that has forgotten the incredible magical spells that had kept it aloft.  It is the Netherese city of Djemris, built on the flat top of an overturned mountain that hovers nearly three hundred meters above the earth.  As Netherese cities do.  But one side of the floating island has dipped toward the ground and it is descending fast.  It has also tilted forward toward us and away from the rising sun—all those people in Djemris are cast in darkness!  From this distance, he can almost make out tall towers, delicate as written script, jutting up from the island like spindle-crystals; regular planes on the topside shine and glitter one last time in the dawning sun as they bow down to the earth below.  It is many miles away, but he can surmise it is enormous: that island must be a mile across.  Even the air seems to bow out of respect…or fear.

 “Karsus,” Orzan whispers, almost a croak.

I know that name!

Miras lowers her hands from her face.  “How do you know this is the doing of Karsus?” she asks.  “Do not give this your breath.”  Orzan looks to Mira in wide-eyed horror: "You know I was a mage—a…wizard, in the Outers' Tongue—before learning the psion's ways.  I can still feel The Weave."  Terror gripped the corners of his mouth and tears welled in the creases under his eyes.  "The Weave is…torn!  I can feel it ripping like rotten sailcloth!"

He cannot move.  He is pinned with fear and a dear wish that someone can reverse Djemris' plunge.  The island sinks below the treeline, and after maybe fifteen seconds, a rumbling pressure like a rolling procession of Rengarthan barbarian war carts shifts the ground under his feet.  The cedars complain in one long sway.  Across the valley, sheets of dust lift and hang in the air.

His hands fling themselves out—not by his command, but following his terror.  The green cast of his skin catches light; the veins are a road-map he has never traveled but somehow knows by heart.

Those aren’t my hands.  They seem so.  But I don’t recall ever having a green cast to my skin.  I must have: what other color would they be but that of sage leaf?

Hurg beside him is crying silently through a slack jaw; tears sit in his beard like dew on low branches.  Seli has a tusk buried into her hand.  Orzan has turned away and slumped down to the grass.

“Witness,” Mira says.  “And remember.  Karsus has destroyed a city and all who lived there.”  Orzan looks up at her and whispers with a ragged voice, "This tear in the Weave is not a matter of locality.  Its effects will be everywhere.  I fear all the Netherese cities are falling."  Mira's eyes widened in the shock of this realization.  "Eldath have mercy!" she breathed.  "I could never wish such a thing on the world…even on the Netherese.  One must return to record this event at the Memory Vault at the Zek'arh ffichh Ai'mal…."

The sun-bright room wobbled back into his conscious view and a wooziness crept through his head.  "I was falling asleep but failed to get any real rest!" he muttered.  "Bizarre dream!  Of Netheril…or the literal fall of it, anyway.  I wonder if it actually happened that way!"

He pushed himself up to his feet and marveled at the warmth in this tower.  "Perhaps there's a bed in this place," he speculated as he shuffled up the stairs.  But here, somewhere in the wall, something perhaps as small as a pocket watch clicked shut.  Outside, the storm kept erasing and re-erasing the world; inside, this chamber held on to what mattered.  Of course, he did not know the Memory Vault had already kept a little of him, too.