ONE
The Tower, dressed in moonbeams, its belly full of sleeping heads, shivered its stones to the wind and was pleased.
Vost stumbled inside, braced, then with the full weight of his back bumped shut his chamber door. He spun around to face it, pursed his lips, and let out a hum. The door rattled in turn. Vost had carved long, sharpened bits of bone into its wooden frame, and now they danced to the rhythm of his song, boring themselves snug into the door’s planks, an improvised lock in lieu of the broken one waiting to be replaced. There could be no unwanted guests tonight. Satisfied, he went hopping across the two mislaid stones that always threatened to trip him.
The glow of the unborn hours shone through Vost’s small window, a brick-sized light slowly snaking up his skin. He had come to grow comfortable living in this dormitory, an almost hidden corner of the 106th floor. Through his peephole of a window the sky was haunting the land, a foam of clouds painted with glowing blues, yellows, sickly greens that in their eerie oatmeal pattern stretched off to the horizon. Behind their curtain danced the twin moons, Wend and Wain, a symmetry of lights both revealing and lonely. Beneath that cloudline, beneath the incomprehensible hulk of the Tower, was nothing of substance. Only a perfectly naked sheet of land lit by stale, acrid moonlight. Still enough time left, he hoped. Soon enough the night colors would give way to the unrelenting white-yellow of day, when Vost would join the others in the giving ceremony.
From the table he grabbed a coil of thin sharpened wire. He felt it cling to the grooves of his skin. Main tool in hand, Vost began pacing back and forth around his chambers, nervewracked after finding one thing only to feel like he had lost another.
One wall had been crammed with all sorts of shelves, which in turn were cluttered with tools and ingredients used in the magick of manipulating bones. Vost held out a slender finger, scanning through clay jars full of clinking shards of bone, the skulls of small, rare animals, bowls of dirt for mudmaking. Mud was a useful adhesive in boneworking, and Vost had to make sure there would be more than enough for tonight’s work.
There would be plenty, of course. He had just spent the past two days around the Tower grounds, shoveling under the milk-hot sun. The dirt on the surface was too dry and heat cracked to properly carry the current of his spells, so necessity dictated he dig until his hands were sufficiently blistered and the soil was cool and innocent. His arms were sore now as they shuffled through his belongings, but the dull pain gave him a sense of satisfaction, of materials well earned.
Vost realized it was twice now that he checked his jar of flimfrog legs. His fingers paused compulsively before combing through a head of messy white hair. His face was still young and unhardened, only a handful of years into proper adulthood, his dark reddish skin covered in a sheen of nervous sweat. He turned around impulsively, only to barely avoid toppling into the uneven floorstones. The near accident gave him enough pause to abandon all this precautionary worry and to set about his true work.
The ritual pit was Vost’s personal addition to the chamber. It took up nearly a third of the room, which, after being sparse to begin with, left comically little room for everyday living. The floorstones had been cracked and pried out one by one into a diamond shape, revealing the rough cement a half foot beneath. Gray and gritty, rising in uneven crests, it was like a little stone sea frozen in place.
Vost stooped over barefoot into the pit. He laid a large bowl of dirt at his feet. The coiled wire now stung as he gripped it.
Slowly again he began to hum, but this time a different tune. It was a low and disjointed un-song, but one that would lay the foundation of his spellwork. Soon a thin layer of pit dust shifted and swirled against the floor, hung to its tiny peaks and valleys like a rolling fog. Vost took note in silent approval, the first step complete, and turned his attention to the stone sculpture lying in the center.
That sculpture, slightly taller and larger than Vost’s human frame, depicted a kind of figure he had never seen in his travels before coming to the Tower. Limbs thick and curved, it sat in what appeared to be a meditative pose, one arm pressed against its chest, another angled downward. Its two thin eyes were carved quite a distance apart from each other, closer to where the ears should have been compared to the nose, though this figure had neither the former nor the latter. What stood out most in its design was the hole that reached clear through its neck, stretched and gaping like some sort of haplessly misplaced mouth. Since this strange figure came into his possession, Vost had wondered how that peculiarly thin and hollow neck kept the head attached to the rest of the body.
The carved stone was a dark ashen red, flecked with small minerals that caught the blue-green glow from the window, outlining the figure in a kind of nighttime aura. The material was direstone, but Vost could not say much else about it. Named so because of the treachery in mining it, direstone only formed in the deep, craggy, mean-most regions in the old country of Keln. Vost had never been, but the Kelnish land held a space in his cultural dialogue as a kind of dark joke, almost a caricature of the most inhospitable and dangerous place imaginable.
“How could Beshtl not have wanted you, eerie thing?” Vost teased aloud to the statue. He and Beshtl had not met before the Tower, but Vost didn’t think of him as the type who would throw his life to the wind in a place like Keln.
No, Beshtl was the type to know many people. The statue could have passed through any number of hands before coming to him. There was little else he told Vost about it when he gave it away. To be friends with someone like Beshtl, a vaunted Tribute Instructor, and then to come into possession of this direstone relic – it felt like a rare omen indeed. Vost felt a shivery significance to the meditating figure as soon as he laid eyes on it, as if the negative space in its neck was just holding back an all-encompassing scream, a rolling wave fueled by the fury of creation, the possibility of something, though he knew not yet what. What he did know, however, was that this must become his gift. He was very hungry.
Vost set the coiled wire down by his side, bending around awkwardly to bring the bowl of dirt he had laid out into the pit before him. Without hesitation he brought a small blade from the pocket of his coat up to his mouth. Holding his tongue flat, he dragged the blade tip across the width of it, to the east, and then down the length of it to the south. Tongue still flat, he tilted down his head to let the blood drip pit-pat into the bowl of soil before him. Hovering there slackjawed, some saliva had begun to drool unceremoniously into the mixture. Vost entertained the idea of a sudden intruder to the whole scene, how in this moment he must have looked a crazed sorcerer. “That’s a true thought, ritual or not,” he mumbled, self-satisfied. Ever since he began his study of bone magick, ever since he had set out on his own, Vost quietly felt his true strength came not from the sum of his knowledge or the precision put into his craft, but rather his will to embrace foolishness.
“This can work,” he told himself, “it’s just another kind of mineral.”
With his bare forefinger he stirred the blood, spit, and dirt into a soft amber muck. Taking a glob on the same finger, he began to work it into cracks that lined the meditating sculpture. The tinge of his blood made the paste match rather well with the rest of the stone, though he hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to touch it up for aesthetics. He had to truly give himself to this spell for it to work, and a bit of blood was only a minor sample of what he had prepared to give.
The work did not take him long. After tracing through all the cracks visible under the dim nightglow, Vost surveyed the reddened gargoyle and decided he had done enough.
The dust and dirt still swirled and pulsed low around him, in tune with the song he had hummed for it. With a bracing breath, Vost grabbed a length from the wire beside him and coiled it around his left ankle. It stung. He steeled his nerves, wanting them snug and firm in the armor of his consciousness, keeping a keen focus through the helmet slits of his eyelids.
Both hands grabbed firm at each wire-end, squeezing with enough pressure that blood already began to bubble up like dew around his heel.
Vost had smoked three full bulbs of sleepywax hours before the whole undertaking, hoping it would numb both his heart and senses. It had calmed him, just slightly, like watching his own ordeal through a telescope lens.
He knew well not to let a spell run wild with feeling. Of the countless magickal arts Vost knew of in the world, all taught the importance of keeping a leash on one’s emotions, how their nature warped one’s intent, how it could fracture a spell’s power or increase it one hundred-fold. Emotion flowed and raged like a molten energy behind the layer of the physical world, only able to escape, controlled or not, through the narrow spouts of living beings. Vost knew that while they could be a great boon, the powers of sentiment could sometimes impose a will of their own.
Sitting there mid-ritual, the razor wire slicing into his flesh, he decided it best not to wonder how much worse the pain would be without the waxsmoke. Though Vost was a bone mage, he always thought it best to work with bones that were not attached to the living, mostly because of the exponentially greater power it would take to do so, but also because the possible sight of gore made him cringe. Yet this very fear was what drove him to carry out the spell in such a gruesome way – to make a sacrifice he felt like he could not bear. Vost sighed deeply and forced a grim grin across his face, calmly drooping his eyelids. It was a mask he had worn before, and again it was the costume he wore for his role in the ritual. The meditating statue was already playing theirs, its pose frozen as if forever waiting for its cue to act.
Vost gripped the wire and began to saw.
The minutes that passed weighed hours long. Blood had been dripping from his leg now in a steady trickle. Curiously it was not puddling outward, but instead disappeared completely into animated pit sand, never soaking it darker. Vost’s attention was elsewhere, somewhere beyond the statue he was staring at. He kept his breathing steady, and despite the sharpness and intensity of the pain that ever slowed his work, he managed to cover his discomfort with a face of nonchalance.
He had reached the bone already. The work of the cutting wire was made easier by a coating of caustic oil Vost knew ate away at most fleshy things. What he did not find so easy was bearing the noise made by the wire against marrow. He wished he could do it all in one go. Still, he was careful not to be spurred by impatience in these final moments. He began to sing a song used to animate and control small bones, this time using it to bring calm to his own.
Vost heard it plop onto the sand before his eyes reopened – his foot, the mangled thing that once dragged him across so many lands, now something separate from himself, lying in the sand like some strange artifact. Before he could take in the true horror of what he had just done, the magicked sand reacted to the impact of this new offering, standing as still and stiff as a nervous cat.
In an instant, a hand-like pillar of sand leapt into the air, almost to Vost’s head, before falling and toppling wave-like over the severed appendage. It disappeared – gone to the same unknown space that had taken his blood. With that, the sand relaxed back to its natural state, shifting lifelessly into a uniform surface. Then, after cleaning off the caustic oil, and after his bandages were bound tight, Vost waited.
He waited for a long time in the same position, sitting in the dim gloomlight cross-legged across from the statue, staring into its carved eyes like it too had known how to see. But it could not. It had not moved, never stirred at the slightest after his spell. Not even the depth of his sacrifice seemed to have made a difference in the outcome. There was no time for anything else now. In that long waiting, the realization of failure became an unhappy dawn that seared across his mind, flooding his body with a warming pain.
Enough time passed that the gauze needed replacing again. Vost had lost a lot of blood in this fruitless trade. Though he was only somewhat aware of that fact, as a heaviness formed at the back of his brain, dragging on his consciousness like a tight coat about to be pulled up off his head. He now had to find something new to offer to the Tower. He had to find more bandages. He had to keep his eyes open. The night was not yet over.
Instead, Vost’s body chose for him. It draped itself against the stone, under the cool and calm dark of his quarters, unmoving as the stone figure that lay before him.
