“Of course.”
He began down the Road. Away from me, from the bareness of the sky. I tucked my wings over my shoulders, and watched him walk away.
* * *
I let the city swallow me up. But unlike Hei, my road was the wind.
Serenity was a greedy place. The lip of the mountain cropped over the city, drawing shade across the expanse like a sundial. The sunlight at its height only ever touched half the city, leaving the rest permanently in shadow. Everything was organized around that half-night, how long the sun would actually touch each region of the city. Only the outer ring, along Bare-Sky Road, caught the day’s full gaze. At the occult depths, the night-streets, the darkness was never spoiled, never touched even by moonlight. And anything that wandered into Serenity, especially its shadowy core, tended to stay there.
That was where I had first awoken here, the night of my earliest memory. I’d already had wings then, wide and sand-colored. The dove spirit had given me many gifts upon my rebirth—immortality, supernatural strength, the virtue to heal others’ wounds. Speed and acute vision, the bird-shape I could take if I shed my human form completely. But best of all were those wings, which I wore even now. Before I had known even my name, found my feet, I had found my wings. I may never have had the freedom to come up to the bright outsides without them, see hints of the world I’d forgotten.
Now they took me home, to my spire. The only place I could quite breathe. It was an old spiraling tower that must have once been part of some elaborate building, its other parts worn away by ruin or neglect. Its derelict solitude had a kind of majesty to it, a testament of what this city once had been. One of my first projects in Serenity had been poking around to learn why so many parts of the city looked like the dried bones of a cadaverous palace. Some towers reached up into the sky almost as high as the mountain crags, more storeys than I could count. The tales always varied: that this had been the domain of a witch who wove architecture out of thin air, that it had been his personal canvas before death took him, and most of the buildings served no purpose. That the high spires were designed for bird-souls, for flight rather than climbing, even though the night-streets were more popular homes now. One story that particularly enchanted me was that Serenity had been the last bastion of a time-blasted mortal empire, whose prowess of construction was so great that without its human members, the integrity of the structures couldn’t be reproduced over the centuries. What an impact that must be to make, so that no one could reimagine the shadow you left when you were gone, even as the outline of it was everywhere.
It was also just a convenient space. It stood just under the mountain’s face, deep enough that the sun wouldn’t fall much through my windows while I slept, but not so deep to be in the night-streets. I could see almost the whole city from its height.
The moon was hitting it now as I ascended, glossing the stone exterior pale silver. I swept in through the window, into the dilapidated apartments I kept tidy for myself. This probably used to be some priestly chamber; once-narrow windows were chipped wide enough for me to glide through. A small space, but clean, and mine. A door separated it from what had been the stairwell winding down the tower. Much of the stairs had crumbled away over time, and I had pushed apart many of the pieces that had remained. Couldn’t have random guests knocking on my door, and it also kept curious mortals from exploring.
I shoved the thick curtain over the opening, then sank to the floor. I slid halfway under my bed, pulled out the box I hid there. You could count on one hand the number of people I actually knew, names that went to faces that I’d seen more than once. No wonder it shook me to have another one added; I needed to relax.
But it bothered me.
“Ari. What do you remember—anything?” That voice had drawn me out of my sleep. I’d been lying on the silver-laced examining table, arms bound, wondering how the metal could be so cold and still burn like that. The gaze taking me in then had been bladelike, incisive. Smiling. Eyes red as spots of disease.
My response had been so eloquent. “Ari?”
How satisfied that smile had become.
It bothered me that a person could be so blank. It didn’t seem physically possible. Surely something else had to be tangled in the framework of my body and the years that had built it. I’d woken feeling that I existed, had already existed, only that none of the details were there. I’d died, they’d said. Died and been resurrected by the mercy of the dove spirit now sharing my soul. And I would never die again.
Surely the person who’d died had to have been someone. But this was the next thing they’d told me. I had sold that person in exchange for blankness. All of my past self had been given to the merchant of amnesia, and I couldn’t remember why I would have wished that self away.
The box was full of scraps. My theory was that some of them must have been letters. I’d simply found them under me, scattered in my room, one empty day under the new moon. There should be a logic piecing together where they’d come from, but that was also blank. Some of them could have been book pages, drawings. I couldn’t make out any sentences now, but the pages must have been mine. Only one word had any context, occurring at the edge of some of the scraps, as if written at the tops of letters. Ari.
Someone knew my name.
A force struck the door, making me jump. But it was soft, repeating itself: just a knock. Total shit hell. Only one asshole came and actually knocked at my door, thinking he was brilliant for it. Everyone else sent a message to my window or waited for me to appear elsewhere.
I jammed the scraps and box back under the bed, replaced the layer of blankets, and went to the door.
Sure enough, there the fucker was. Kadzuhikhan. One brow cocked, pipe between his lips, clouding his scent with tobacco.
Half the point of my spire was that the moon-souls without wings—in other words, most of them—couldn’t be fucked to reach it, which resulted in a hell of a lot of privacy. But cat-souls, with their power to step through nether space and appear anywhere, had to cock that up. Always underfoot.
I bowed. Kadzuhikhan was one of the city’s perpetual big brothers; I didn’t mind paying him a bit of respect. He looked the part. Moderate height but broad and stout, with impressive musculature, half on display through the bandages he kept wound around his midsection. Pale skin caught the moon, and the glow tingeing his pipe smoke gave him an air of ghostly majesty. He entered at my gesture, and then I saw it—he had his damn sword, Lightray. It brushed me as he passed, its silver plating throwing off a sting like hot coals. Explained the bandages around his hands.
“Would you watch that thing? Damn. I don’t want to spend all day trying to sleep on burns.”
His flat expression warmed. A bit. “Fear not, Your Delicacy. He’ll stay in his sheath like a good boy.” He puffed a bank of smoke out. “I saw you dive in, so decided to pop up.”
I couldn’t restrain a sneer at the tobacco. Still hadn’t gotten used to smelling everything so acutely, but then, one never really did. Hence the pipe; deadened the nose somewhat. “I’ve got liquor.”