Bones of the Earth
by Jules
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Soon Esche sees a mass of angular shapes silhouetted against the gloom. Upon poling his raft closer, he sees that it is made from the very bones of the earth. Yena told him about stones. She told him about big ones, not the tiny carved tools and statues and gems carried up from the underworld.
Yena said there are stones used for the ends of ancient people, stones that have shirked their responsibility and stones that have never known it. Beyond this one, in the gloom, he can see the outlines of more structures. He glides past and into a kind of watery avenue between heaps of shirked stone.
There is a sculpture perched on one of them. Curious, he poles closer. It symbolizes an avian, albeit one with metal head, body and wings. Eshe’s heart stirs at the beauty of it. He poles closer. Precise incisions into the feathers cast back lines of light brighter than the dusk around him. Jewel eyes gleam in its triangular head.
When the sculpture moves, he is so startled that he nearly falls into the water. It shifts its wings and runs its metal beak along them as though it is preening. Eshe glances up to see if there is someone above, dancing the avian on strings too fine to see. The pale, dark branches high above are empty.
The moving sculpture reconfigures itself in his mind: this is an avian construct made of metal plates and small, ticking wheels. Its workings are more intricate than anything Eshe has made with wood. Now his awe turns to envy at whoever made this thing. How dare they be so brilliant and make something so beautiful?
The avian turns its long, narrow head toward him. Its beak opens. A curled tongue works. Its throat pulses. A voice emerges. “Who are you?”
The words are strange. He can just barely understand them. They bring to mind the first names in the Necrology. He gives his name as though it is part of a ritual and asks it the same question.
Tiny toothed wheels turn, the head dips, metal gleams. “I am the only one left.”
Eshe looks around at the shirking stones half submerged in the still water. Then he stares at the tiny wheels within wheels, the revolving bands of metal, the precise geometry of wings and tail and head that turn shapes into something representing an avian. The idea of how such a creature should look had transmitted itself across hundreds of years, from the maker to Eshe.
“What do you seek?” the avian asks.
“Immortality,” says Eshe. He feels euphoric, speaking the word aloud. He is here. He has made it to the flooded city and is speaking with the ancient. He has come by water and found something the root-bound adventurers have not.
“Oh, is that all?” The avian twists its head over its shoulder and points with its hooked beak. “It’s that way. Through the big arch, up the stairs.”
Eshe stares.
“Well?” the avian asks.
“Just... that’s it?”
“That’s where it is,” the avian says. “Is there anything else?”
Eshe longs to bring the avian back into the Crowns with him. This is a wonder greater than stone statues or even a glass cup. “Will you come with me?”
“This is where my human companion was trapped by the great flood. I spoke to her below, until she stopped speaking.” It rests its beak against the stone. “I stayed and stayed. Now there is no one else left.”
Eshe has questions about whoever made the avian, about the flood, about the city. But his stomach growls, letting him know that his time here is precious. He bids the avian farewell and poles his raft away. Here, the stone is still responsible. It holds its shape against the water.
The building that holds immortality is a smooth face of stone braced by columns and Crowned with curving geometry. It is precise and symmetrical the way trees are not. The wooden doors rotted long ago, and the entrance is half-submerged. Eshe poles through and into suffocating darkness.
The place feels thick and oppressive. It is so dark that he cannot see his hands, but their knuckles are surely white around his pole. The echoes of his breath let him know that there are heavy surfaces nearby. Had he thought the swamp was bad? No. This is being buried alive. Buried, without even a metal avian to stand over his tomb. The dank, rotten smell of trapped water is so thick he can taste it.
Ahead, he sees a grey glimmer. Faint light dances on the water’s surface. Eshe poles toward it. He turns his face upward as if to bask in the Crown’s airy light, but only sees a milky rectangle above. It is impossible to tell whether the glass is cloudy or he is seeing white mist. The skylight illuminates nothing except the six square feet of water lapping against the log-boat.
Everything is still except for Eshe’s raft on the water. Then he is under light and beyond it, into darkness. Ahead, another glimmer. He endures stretches of darkness in faith that there will be a skylight ahead.
He tries not to think about the stories of wisp-lights that lead the foolish along thin branches that break underneath them. This is not that, he tells himself. This is a building with skylights, built by people who needed to see where they were going. On long-ago sunny days, they’d want to make walking pleasant. They wouldn’t walk themselves off a cliffside, would they?
Eshe tries to convince himself he is safe... unless some subterranean creature is crouching in the darkness at the end of the skylights. Eshe’s mind tries to show him a giant sitting in the water, hunched over its own tented knees, grinning and waiting with its arms out wide to catch him.
‘Death,’ he thinks. ‘You run toward it even as you outrun it.’
The air around him is so thick that he can barely breathe. His arms are heavy. The Crowns seem like a dream of light and love and laughter. His hands are numb. Are his fingers still curled around the pole? Does he still have fingers?
‘I am not running toward death,’ Eshe tells himself. ‘I am running toward immortality.’ With an effort, he moves his arms. His pole connects with some dark thing below and pushes off. He glides toward the next skylight.
Then his raft bumps against a shore. His probing stick finds stone cut into stairs upward. Eshe leaves his raft behind. Steady ground makes him stumble, as if it should sway like water. He climbs the stairs with one hand brushing the stone wall.
The darkness lifts when he reaches the top of the stairs, almost as if a heavy branch had been pushed aside. There is a row of tall windows along one wall. Even twilight is a relief after the tunnel.
Eshe has never seen such a wide, still room before. There are no roof-boughs, no shifting silvery leaves, no billowing silk or wicker screens breathing with life. There are only flat planes set at immovable angles. The stone planes are green, with white veins, but unlike leaf patterns, they are dead and still. Even the shadows seem nailed into place. The ceiling looms high overhead. There is a wrecked mass of furnishings against the wall opposite the windows. A tarnished metal avian lies draped over a twisted skeleton. Its gem-eyes are dull with dust.
Is there a place for motion here, in the dead stillness? Is it Eshe’s place to break it? What right does he have to be here? He is so small, and the bones of the earth are so heavy and huge.
‘Kide would go,’ Eshe thinks. It’s true. Kide tested and tried and ventured. He pulled Eshe out of himself and pushed him to new experiments. He’d be halfway across this great hallway already. Eshe imagines his friend now, tall and slender, with love making wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, daring Eshe to follow.
Eshe follows. He always does. He crosses the dead stillness and finds another staircase. These steps are decorated with a woven red rug. There is a wooden banister embellished with metal. He trails a hand along it, envious of the skill. How did the makers bend metal to lie so seamlessly against wood? How did they make it serve them so?
Here is a door, frowning and heavy. Yet what is this, compared with the dead stillness? Eshe brings his weight against it, and it swings open. The room inside makes him gasp. Here is immortality.
This place is untouched by the great flood. The walls here are wood, not stone. They are carved into pillars and leaves and vines and creatures whose names he does not know. The wooden pillars soar upward, meeting overhead in an intricate pattern that reminds him of home. The woodwork itself would be enough to leave him in awe, but here is wonder upon wonder. The wood is a framework for tall panes of colored glass that cast glorious shapes across the room.
The sunlight isn’t weak here. Or perhaps the colored glass enhances it. The sun — Second Sun, it looks like — streams through in circles, rectangles, hexagons and crescents of color. Everything in this room is touched by these patterns. Shelves of scrolls blush red. A workbench is dappled with purple. Metal tools gleam honey-yellow. No pollen or dust motes swirl in the air. Leather looks as supple as though it were just oiled. There are no signs of wear or age. The stones in the floor gleam. The edges of the tools are sharpened to invisibility.
When Eshe hesitantly puts his hand out, it is suffused with cobalt. He can feel that color on his skin, running over it like warm water. He steps into the colors and opens up to the glow. Even the sun through the Crown canopy doesn’t feel like this. Eshe’s knees would be weak, if he didn’t feel stronger than he ever had in his life.
‘This is it,’ he thinks. ‘This is immortality.’
He basks in the colored light, breathing deeply of the smells of paper and oiled metal and polished wood, fortifying himself for the trip ahead. Why leave right away? Eshe tours the room. He finds shelves of boxes for nails, screws and an infinite variety of small, toothy wheels.
There are pictures along the walls, real as life except for the sepia tones. The pictures show people, mostly, with buildings or bustling streets behind them. The common element between them is a short, curvy woman in a heavy leather apron and gloves. Her hair is pulled back. Her face full of freckles defies constellation. Here she accepts a scroll from an older woman. There she shakes hands with various men in high collars. In yet another she shows off a metal avian perched on her forearm.
She, Eshe understands, is the maker of the avian he’d wanted so badly. This is her workshop.
He finds tools, some of which he understands and most of which he doesn’t. He finds a half-constructed metal creature, not an avian, but something more like a dragon with big, expressive eyes and cunning forelimbs. Drawings of forelimbs are tacked to the workbench nearby.
The scrolls on the shelves do not crumble at his touch but unroll easily. The ink is so vibrant that it might as well have just dried. Eshe cannot read the strangely regular, blocky writing, but he pores over detailed drawings of anatomy, botany, mechanics and — joy of joys — woodcarving. Once again he is struck by kinship with this long-ago craftsman.
‘I could stay here forever,’ he thinks. He startles guiltily at the thought, wondering how long he has spent here already. He isn’t hungry or thirsty. He isn’t sleepy or even weary despite his long journey. The sun hasn’t moved, yet he must have been here for hours. There are opened drawers and scrolls all around him.
He makes an effort to put back what he disturbed. One by one he takes down a hand plane, a chisel, a saw. They are better than anything he has. Their handles are darkly lustrous, the edges of the metal white. Would the long-ago inventor mind if Eshe took her tools? They aren’t being used. They’ll never be used again, if they remain here.
Somehow it still feels like looting the dead. Sure, adventurers bring items up from the drowned city all the time. That is how Eshe has metal wood-working tools at all. This is different. The craftswoman beams at him from her pictures.
‘One,’ Eshe thinks. ‘Surely she wouldn’t mind gifting me one.’.
So he takes a palmful of nails and a carving knife. He braces himself, then pulls open the heavy door. As soon as he passes the threshold to the gloomy staircase, the sense of well-being leaves him. The strength of immortality evaporates like dew off of leaves. Weariness falls down on him so suddenly that he staggers against the stone wall. Eshe looks down into the darkness, knowing this is more than his own dread of the dead stillness and the flooded halls.
When he returns to the light and warmth of the workshop, his strength comes back in a rush of red and orange and blue. The workshop room itself bestows immortality. The craftswoman could have spent days there without pausing in her work. ‘Did she invent those windows?’ he wonders, ‘Or did a glass artist make them for her? Were there many rooms like this? What must time have been in this city, before the flood?’
Eshe stares at the intricate patterns and beveled planes of the windows for a long time. Then he pulls a likely piece of wood from a collection against the wall and selects a hand-saw. There are enough wonders in this room to last him a lifetime or two.
So he studies the long-ago craftswoman’s woodworking plans. He saws, he planes, he joins, he glues. He makes the wood smooth as Kide’s silk and graceful as a bird’s wing. When he is done, he has a tiny wooden glider. It floats on the air just like silk.
The shadows of the wooden columns never move. Jewel-toned colors glow all around him. He never grows hungry or thirsty and has no needs of the body to attend to.
Eshe could stay here forever.
He carves a boat from the craftswoman’s plans, in miniature, discovering the glue-pots as he goes. He tries to decipher the meaning of metal parts. He studies the metal dragon. He pores over scrolls in a patch of green light.
He wishes Kide were there to speak with and to show his new works. He wishes anyone were there, but they’re all up in the Crowns, celebrating the coming and going of the suns, the moons, the birds, the flowers. Here, around his sanctuary, there is only wreckage, black water and skeletons.
Eshe is seized with terror, there in circles of orange and violet. How long before everyone he knows believes he is dead? How long before he is part of the Necrology? When will his face fade from their memory? When will it be as though he’d never lived at all? Immortality would be a living death as life went on in the Crowns.
Eshe rushes from the workshop and staggers down the stairs under the hammer-blow of fatigue. His harsh breath disturbs the dead stillness. His ungainly raft is still drawn up on the stairs. His hurry makes him so clumsy that he nearly drops his pole before he takes his own fear in hand. He rides the rush of it, rather than allowing it to ride him, through the dark and out the stone archway.
The metal avian lifts its head in greeting as he poles toward it. “You’re back.”
“You don’t sound surprised. Why didn’t you tell me?” Eshe demands.
“Tell you what?”
“All the stained glass room does is allow you to continue. It isn’t really immortality.”
Tiny wheels turn inside the avian’s body as it tilts its head. “What is immortality, then?”
Eshe casts about for words. “I want to be remembered. I want my works to endure even after I am gone. After my face has been forgotten, I want what I make to have changed the way the people of the Crowns live.”
“Immortality is in your legacy,” says the avian.
“Didn’t your maker know that?”
“Of course she did,” the avian says. “Why do you think she put the glass in her workroom? It allowed her to create her greatest works.”
That is exactly what Eshe would have done. It is what Kide would have done, as well. “I will return to the Crowns. I will perfect the glider that Kide and I made, so that anyone can travel down the Boles if they like. I will make baskets to travel on cords from Crown to Crown so that we won’t be limited by slender branches. I will change what travel means.”
“Go, then,” the avian tells him. It trills a sweet, sad round of notes that echoes through the underworld as Eshe poles away toward the Bole.
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
