Kei

  Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

  --Frank Herbert

  Falling to my death should be terrifying. Or dizzying, since I’m just as much spinning to my death.

  But as I fall, forearm-deep in the Hound I’m using as a rotor blade and surrounded by infinite, incomprehensible clockwork in the sky, my human brain overloads and something else takes over.

  Something distant and alien, yet somehow a part of me. Whether it’s a deeper part of my mind or another intelligence altogether, I don’t know.

  But I look up at the sky and suddenly see something moving through the blackness. Not exactly the alphabet rain of data you see in The Matrix, but a strange suggestion of invisible sigils etched across the void. Like infinite scrolls of knowledge unrolling in front of me as I whirl without ceasing.

  I can’t comprehend a word, yet some part of me is calmly reading all of them simultaneously. Before they can slip away. My head pounds, and I try to force my eyes shut, but something else holds them open.

  So this is the secret, a voice says inside my thoughts, resonant and powerful, for all that it speaks in silence. A path for dreams became a lighthouse in the void. A route for knowledge long before it was fit for living travelers. And then a highway for shades before flesh and steel. Cleverly done, Falcon. Cleverly done.

  What are you saying? I ask back, gritting my teeth and struggling to keep my grip and my coldfire fixed upon the slowly writhing, flattened substance of the Hound. Lose this little propellor now and we’ll stop spiraling… and just plunge. Still, I can’t ignore what’s in my mind or before my eyes. My eyes that something won’t let me close. Who are you?

  Shh, child, the voice replies, gently. You’ve finally found me something of interest. Don’t spoil it.

  I hear the roar and hiss of clashing plasma below and finally rip my unblinking gaze from the skies.

  And down to the battling titans we’re almost on top of.

  The Akashic records, the voice in my mind muses. Did they always exist, or is this another instrument of the Tower?

  I push the foreign thoughts away and concentrate on my trajectory. If I can’t steer this twirling ‘maple seed,’ I’ll fall forever or end up as flat as the Hound in my hands.

  I look down. I see the grappling mecha and Dragon whip past as I turn, wrench my body one way on instinct, and plunge. I let the Hound-samara flip skyward, losing all purchase on the air, and point the entire length of my body, from toes to spine, like a spear.

  And that spear flies unerringly towards the Dragon’s head as it whips warily around the mech, glancing downward for any more attacks rising from what’s left of the Library’s grounds.

  He looks up just in time for me to land squarely on his snout, right between his eyes.

  We stare at each other for a frozen fraction of a second, his eyes crossing as he focuses on me.

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  I drop my Hound-parasail over the side. Which transforms into a scrabbling Hound on the Dragon’s jaws as it falls. I ignore it. And so does, after a slight twitch of his head, the Dragon.

  The Dragon moves like a striking serpent, flinging his head back to knock me off and opening jaws which could swallow me a dozen times over.

  But I flow with his momentum, gather my power within me… and run.

  The Dragon’s scales are stronger than a Hound’s flesh, but still sculpted from something similar. Something malleable. Clay in the hands of my Gift. Which means, terrifying as all this is for anyone sane, the coldfire roars up in my heart like a conflagration and sears its way down to my pounding feet.

  And somehow my running shoes dig in impossibly deep yet still move incredibly fast. A thunderous whoosh comes from behind me and I feel the sting of heat and electricity at my heels as I sprint atop the Dragon’s coils, looping around the mech as the two still battle.

  A giant steel fist shoots for me but hits just behind as I accelerate further, striking something else with a resounding crack. I turn into another loop and out of the corner of my eye see the Dragon’s head reeling back from the punch. Then its jaws snap open and closed, clenching on the mecha’s fist.

  Tiny Dragons whirl around mini-drones all over the fight, plasma, lasers and other weapons lashing out point blank, while claws, jaws and explosions tear into each other. The smaller combatants seem even more savage than the two great champions at the heart of this battlefield.

  I see all of this, and the mysteries in the sky above. And still I run.

  Energies flow into me with each breath, noise burns out of my system with each exhalation, and imaginary sparks purge my body of weakness as my feet fly. The meditation which normally purges me of any barrier between myself and who I truly am is exponentially more powerful now.

  I breathe out sparks like they’re my own dragonfire. Only it’s as if what they’re burning away is my own weakness. The fragility that’s distinctly me. I think I may die here, still running. Burned into a single pure flame, existing for a single purpose.

  My feet pound like a drumroll. Fire burns in my chest and the air I breathe, while coldfire pulses in my heart. Lightning courses through my limbs. And all of this means something, though I cannot say what.

  The coils close, and I ride the lightning of the mecha’s last, desperate defense. Somehow the Dragon has attuned himself to the frequency of the machine’s plasma, drawing it in through scales like life’s breath, and each counterattack flares within the creature’s veins. As if the fire only feeds it now.

  Somewhere within the mech’s core, I hear a girl screaming. And I know we are out of time.

  But time stretches. Infinity in an instant. A tempest in this teapot. And for once, I am not at its center, but am somehow riding its edge. The battle is the storm’s eye, and my footprints on the Dragon himself are the storm’s living eyewall.

  And the eyewall is collapsing as the serpent tightens his coils. But now, the Dragon is my only road. And the storm is rising behind me with every footstep.

  I whip around like a weight on the end of a bullroarer, thunder echoing in my wake. I follow each coil as they tighten, accelerating at every footfall. My stride is a drumroll of thunder, and I can at last feel the substance of the Dragon beneath me being drawn into my orbit. The ethereal blood in its veins, the very energy giving it life, now flows after me, as though my tread is its heartbeat. As though I am a magnet, my field reaching into everything.

  The creature writhes, confused and desperate. Patches of the mech are turning red and even white hot, not a last defense, but a consequence of the powers seething around us. The strangely flowing flesh beneath the Dragon’s scales is now a rapid river. And then a whirlpool.

  My head rings, my feet pound, my bones ache. My skin feels fire, ice and lightning lashing around us.

  And still I run.

  Faster and faster. My mind goes blank, and I know nothing but my run and the terrible riptides of my power.

  Finally I hit the wall. Not the limits of my body’s strength, or my mind’s. We’ve long since passed those, and something else drives me through my paces.

  No. The air itself explodes in blinding radiance and though my will to run is inexhaustible, my only road has failed me.

  Whatever it was, however it came here, I know only one thing in the chaos.

  The Dragon is dead. And in its place a ring of blazing blue-green fire rises from the battlefield above us.

  Even as I fall below it, a spent and spinning leaf. The void opens beneath me, and I can no longer move. My coldfire is a single frozen spike running through my heart, pinning me to whatever path my Gift has chosen. But I have nothing left to do. Nothing left to give.

  And so I fall.

  I strike hard. The metal beneath me is unyielding. A great, outstretched steel palm is now my resting place.

  My gaze rises, and I see the softly glowing eyes of the great mecha staring back at me.

  And then the sky around us rumbles, and we both look up at the ascending ring, rising towards the heart of the Maze.

  And suddenly, the chains and words and clockwork gears all begin to fall.

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