Chương 20: Act 1, Chapter 20: Queens of the castle

Day in the story: 1st October (Wednesday) I aimed Noxy at the priest and fired one shot after the other. They made no sound but the bullets found its mark—his chest and shoulder—sending him stumbling back, robes twisting in the air. He fell, clutching the wounds and shouting something I couldn't hear. The silence swallowed me again. Red stood once more, wrench in hand glowing faintly with that grey light of his Authority—whatever the hell that was. The others moved behind him.

I didn't bother counting how many shots I had left, I reloaded turned and ran. I knew the terrain. We had jumped and walked at least five minutes before encountering this crew. The bridge was empty ahead. The next group, if any, would be five minutes out, minimum. I sprinted to the opposite railing and vaulted over it. Behind me, Red followed. He leaped with superhuman force and I felt the landing rattle my bones. The workers were less agile and didn't try to follow directly.

Instead, they started building, grabbing stray beams, lashing them together and laying makeshift planks across the gap. I leapt from one structural bar to the next, using the bridge's skeleton like a monkey on scaffolding. As I moved, I fired, one clean shot per head. Four shadows down before their bridge even stabilized. Each dropped like a marionette with its strings slashed. Red pounded his wrench against the bars below me. I couldn't hear the impacts, but the vibration in the steel echoed through my legs.

I abandoned the chase and doubled back, leaping across the span to the other side, where Reverend Thorne was still limping toward the corpses of his workers, dragging one leg behind him. He turned at the soundless thud of my landing and staggered backward. His mouth moved—likely a curse, or a plea—but I couldn't hear a word. Didn't matter one fucking bit. My reinforced leg slammed into his shin and the bone snapped. He screamed in silence and fell.

I raised my arm to finish him, ready to hit the head, but the world with clearly other plans than mine—went sideways. The wrench hit me square in the ribs— my fucking good side. The air vanished from my lungs and I flew away, crashing into a scaffold with a shriek of bent metal. Pain exploded through my body. Left ribs cracked hours ago. Now the right ones were joining the club. Life and it's fucking need for symmetry. I groaned, trying to stand but the entire platform seemed to sway beneath me.

Red was right over me again, while the Reverend was crawling away, still dragging his broken leg, and I was in no shape to run. That's when the light returned—silver, pure and sharp, like moonlight caught in motion. It coalesced into a familiar form of the woman-shaped shimmer. She darted across Red's vision, redirecting his focus with her frantic movements. She bought me seconds with the blindness she caused him. Precious, aching seconds. I didn't waste them thinking, I had nothing clever left to think.

Instead, I drew Noxy and raised him to Red's head. I wanted to scream, Move, Zoe, move! but sound was still gone and she was too close to his face. Too close for a clean shot. Too close to risk it. I lowered my aim toward the giant's knee. Then fired so many times I couldn't count in the haze of it all. Each shot marked just be the light at the end of the muzzle, cracked through his reinforced joint like a jackhammer. Sparks flew, shards of synthetic bone scattered. And finally the knee gave out.

With a sickening, twisting lurch, Red's leg separated from his body. He fell like a felled tree and the wrench came with him in an arc of death aimed straight at my skull. I rolled away just in time, scraping across the metal and leaving a streak of blood where my side dragged. I crawled away as my legs screamed and ribs caught on fire of pain. I looked back just to see that Red was crawling too.

One knee gone, but his rage still intact, he heaved his bulk across the platform like some broken colossus—arms pulling, body dragging, wrench still in hand. His movements were grotesque. Childlike and comical in a way, if not for the gore and silence. He moved after me and I followed the Reverend. Three broken people in a godless chase. The absurdity of it hit me like a drug. I laughed but it stayed inside my mask. I reached the Reverend first. He was struggling, dragging his shattered leg behind him.

His robes were torn and that accursed lantern still glowed faintly at his side. I grabbed his jaw, by the teeth, forcing it open. Punched him in the stomach once, to bend him. My hand fumbled into my satchel and found the page I had painted before I came here—the one marked with strokes of fire. I shoved it into his mouth. His eyes widened. I gripped his head with both hands. Become Fire. He thrashed as I rolled behind him, grabbing him below armpits and keeping the mouth shut for a change. He tried to scream.

The flames sparked from inside him, igniting the parchment, consuming his tongue, then his throat. He twitched, choked on the smoke and collapsed as I kicked him away from me onto his melting face. He was dead. Truly this time. I liked the artistry in the irony of his death—body consumed by literal fire from within, while the flame of his faith ignited others to raise. The lantern fell with him. Its glow flickered once—then died too following its master. And with that, the silence shattered.

A great crash echoed behind me. Red's spell broke the instant the Reverend's life was snuffed out. His body collapsed with it. Just a hulk of metal, meat and fury extinguished.

"Lex!" I turned just in time to see her. She was a streak of silver, burning through the air like a comet, racing to me, light stuttering as if out of breath.

"I'm so sorry," her voice was trembling.

"I was woken up. Some neighbor's stupid dog, but I got back as fast as I could. Before I reset." She reached for me with those little glowing hands, colorless now, her form reverted to an earlier state, stripped of the hues I had painted onto her. But when her fingers brushed my cheek, I felt her warmth somehow.

"It's okay, Zoe," I whispered. I collapsed beside a crooked metal bar jutting from the bridge's surface and let my back slide against it. I could feel the ache blooming across my ribs like a wildfire—sharp and angry with every breath.

"I think I broke something," I muttered.

"Hard to say. Might just be bruised. Hurts like a motherfucker, though." Zoe floated beside me, her light dimming softly in rhythm with mine. Above us, the bridge groaned once more.

"Please… just give me a few minutes," I said, leaning back against the twisted bar of metal jutting from the ruined bridge. My body screamed at me from every angle.

"I just need some time to do nothing. Okay?" She hovered there, her glow flickering faintly.

"Of course," she said softly.

"But it's almost morning. I might wake up soon and if that happens, I don't know if I'll be able to return. Maybe not for a long while. Maybe not at all. If I stay awake any longer, I'll reappear back in my room… above the bed, like always." I turned my head toward her, every muscle aching.

"I see. Still… thanks. For coming back. For coming fast." She gave a faint smile, her light trembling like a flame in wind.

"I couldn't leave you here, Lex. Not like that."

"Are you sure you can stay safely?" She shrugged with her tiny shoulders and drifted a little closer.

"Are you sure you can continue?" I closed my eyes, exhaling slowly.

"I'm a wreck. But I've made it this far. If I give up now… I might never come back. I don't know when—or if —I'll find another portal into the Ideworld." Zoe tilted her head.

"You want that soulmark that badly?" I nodded.

"When I touched my soul core crystal… I felt it. There's room for one more mark. You said this one was powerful. Strong enough to be worth it."

"It is powerful," she said.

"But that doesn't mean it will play nicely with your Domain. Power without harmony is not worth it."

"I know," I muttered.

"But still… I've come this far. I need to try. I have to. Whatever happens next, it's on me. But right now, I just need a moment. Please." She nodded gently. Then, without another sound, she drifted downward and landed on the staff the reverend had left behind. The light in her form dimmed, softening into a ghostly silver outline. She folded her knees beneath her, sitting like a child perched on a high branch. I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. Just for a second.

Around half an hour later we stepped into a narrow corridor, the air thick with dust and the scent of oxidized metal. Silence stretched between us as the walls narrowed. We kept walking. I knocked at the heavy door at the end of the way. My knuckles made a hollow sound. A pause followed, just long enough to raise the hairs on my neck, before a voice called out from within.

"Open. Come in." I pushed the door open slowly. The room beyond was a curious contradiction—small and intimate—yet filled to bursting with ideas. Blueprints blanketed nearly every surface: hung on walls, curled in stacks on shelves, pinned under rusted compasses and metal rulers. Electrical cables wormed their way across the ceiling and floor like veins, pulsing faintly with residual energy.

A desk dominated the center, bathed in the warm, flickering glow of a few candle lights, despite the clearly functioning electric light fixtures that buzzed overhead. The woman who stood behind the desk rose with a graceful precision. As she stepped into the light, her form shifted subtly in a kaleidoscopic and angular manner. Her face didn't move so much as rearranged. Eyes re-aligned, cheekbones shifted angles, her lips stretching, compressing, folding back into beauty shaped by logic. If M. C.

Escher had dreamed of a woman, she'd be the result. Her dress was grey as concrete and woven into it just above her hip in perfectly neat stitches was her name, Eleanor Glass—The Architect's Assistant. She folded her arms.

"Why are you here? Did Reverend let you pass?" This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"Yes, Mrs. Glass," I said carefully." Miss Glass, young lady. I never married." I smiled behind my mask.

"Then the men in your life must have been blind." Her mouth quirked.

"Aren't they all?" Her tone held no warmth. A wall of concrete polished to a shine, unmoved by flattery, the quip had hit a door, not a nerve.

"I'm sorry, Miss Glass," I said, softening my posture. I needed to try another angle.

"I came to meet the one who shaped this… place. The Architect." Her laugh rang out suddenly. She threw her arms up, papers fluttering in her wake.

"The Architect?" she scoffed.

"You think he made all this?" She spun in place, arms wide." He just signed the prints. Placed his tidy name on my lines. My curves. My tolerances." Her voice trembled, not with weakness, but with long-buried fury.

"Did he?" I asked carefully.

"Yes. Abram Roebling. The King. The God. The Man," she spat.

"Every plate bears his name. Every rivet signed in ink that came from my pen. But no one remembers Eleanor. Not the workers. Not the clergy. Not even the people that haunt these halls." Zoe flinched at that.

"And yet," I said slowly, "they remember someone. Which means they remember your work. Maybe not your name… but the lines they follow, the ones they build again and again? That's you." Eleanor's head tilted, face momentarily fractaling, nose where her eye should be, mouth a perfect square. Then it realigned with a soft click. Her eyes narrowed.

"You flatter well. But why now? Why have you come?" I exhaled.

"I love the artistry of it all and I want to see the mind behind the pattern." A beat passed. Then two. Her fingertips tapped against the blueprint-covered desk, her sharp nails ticking out a code I didn't know how to read.

"Do you know what it means to build?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes," I said simply.

"I know what it means to create from nothing." That got a flicker in her eyes.

"Fair," she said. She paced away, toward a large cabinet with glass doors. Through it, I could see preserved tools: a compass made of bone, a slide rule inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a drafting triangle burned along one edge. I wanted to take them, as mementos. To steal them away. But I stopped myself short—it wasn't the time for that.

"He'll see you," she said.

"But I'll warn you now, he won't be what you expect."

"I've come this far," I replied. She gave a faint, unreadable smile.

"Go then, you may pass." As she moved aside and pointed toward the final door, Zoe whispered in my ear, "That was incredible." I murmured, "No. That was lucky." But deep down, I knew better. Eleanor had seen something in me, whether it was admiration, manipulation, or a mirror of her own rage, I couldn't yet tell. But the door to the King was open now. And there was no going back.

"Yeah, well, you're good at telling people what they want to hear," Zoe said, voice half-joking, half-impressed. I gave a soft snort.

"It's easier when they're still people. When they have patterns."

"Aren't all conversations improvisation?" she asked, floating a little ahead of me now, watching our steps.

"Not in my line of work," I said, brushing a hand along the rough wall.

"Some conversations can be run like scripts. Repeated and rehearsed, until they yield the same result every time. You just make minor adjustments."

"That's terrifying," she said, glancing back.

"Are people really that predictable?"

"Most," I replied.

"Especially when they're doing their jobs. People become machines when they work long enough. Their thoughts tighten into loops. They become easy to read and easy to push." Zoe slowed.

"That's the scariest thing I've heard you say." I smiled, the curve of it hidden below my mask.

"So far." She returned the expression, but it was cautious, thoughtful. Like she'd just seen another layer beneath the one she thought she knew. And for a second, her light flickered, casting long shadows ahead of us, bending and twisting into strange shapes against the corridor's end. We emerged into thin, silver air, the wind kissing our skin. The incline had led us to a rooftop we had never seen before, despite all the time we had spent climbing and watching the tower from below.

This place, this open-air platform above the clouds, had not existed from any earthly angle. It was as if the castle had grown a secret crown, blooming into being just to receive us. Zoe hovered beside me in the pale light.

"We're above everything," she murmured. The sky here was a dome of stars and ash-colored clouds—a cathedral of firmament. And at the center of the platform stood the god-king himself. Abram Roebling. He wasn't a man anymore. He rose thirty feet tall, fused into the very floor of the castle. His form was made of bricks, steel, concrete, his bones were pillars and rebar, his skin weathered with soot and rust.

Cables ran through his body like veins and sinew, writhing faintly under his surface as if dreaming of movement. His head slouched forward, eyes sealed shut with mortar and time. A crown of iron rivets circled his brow, each one humming faintly. His beard was a cascade of hanging wire and rusting iron filings. His spine, an exposed arch of suspension cables, seemed to reach down through the floor itself, anchoring him eternally to the bridge below.

"The soulmark is here," Zoe said, pointing toward the metallic plate embedded at the base of the giant's body.

"Those rivets, they're all glowing. Each one's brimming with Authority." I squinted.

"Some are missing," I said softly.

"Others have been taken. I'm not the first to reach this place."

"Is it… asleep?" Zoe asked. Her voice barely rose above the wind.

"I hope so," I whispered. But the weight of his presence said otherwise. He knew we were here, somehow. I could feel his awareness pressing against the air like a sun behind thick cloud.

"How do I take this soulmark?" I asked her.

"I don't know. I'm a Seer, not a locksmith." I bit my lip.

"The last one, I just touched it. But that was part of a trial." Zoe floated a bit closer.

"Let's go to it. Carefully." I nodded. Together, we moved closer, our steps near silent against the stone. The platform beneath us felt old, older than any part of the castle we'd walked before. I could hear it creak beneath us. Kneeling at the base of Abram's colossus form, I stared at one of the rivets. It was massive and aged black. Yet it glowed faintly from within, a pulsing silver warmth beneath corroded exterior. I hesitated.

"What kind of soulmark is it?" I asked. Zoe's glow pulsed near my shoulder.

"Touch it and you'll know." I nodded once, swallowed and pressed my palm against the rivet. The moment I touched it, the world fell away. I wasn't standing on a rooftop anymore. I was inside something, in a liminal space between things. The rivet spoke, not with words, but with sensation. It was connection. A soulmark of union, of binding. It was the echo of every hand that had driven it in place. Of every beam joined. Of every purpose shared. It was sweat crystallized into permanence.

The invisible thread that links builder to blueprint, will to wall, dream to stone. It filled me with its power for a heartbeat. I felt the castle through it, the bridge, the strain of each arch, the ghosts still laboring. I felt Eleanor's pencil dragging lines over vellum, the hammers that answered her call and the agony of Abram as he gave himself— his body and life —to keep it all together. Then the power pulled back. The rivet burned against my hand, with heat and refusal.

"It's still his," I said aloud.

"The soulmark is bound to Abram's Authority. As long as he's a part of this structure… I can't take it." Zoe floated closer.

"Can't you dislodge one? Just one?" I tried. Fingers curled around the edge of the rivet. I pulled, gritted my teeth, summoned every ounce of force I had, Authority, technique, leverage, everything I got, but the rivet did not move.

"I can't." I fell back onto my heels.

"They're locked in."

"So much walking, so much talking," Zoe whispered, "just to get beat at the end." I looked up at Abram's still face, his eyes sealed.

"We're not done yet," I muttered.

"We've just reached the final test." I had a feeling that this time, I might need to talk a god into letting go.

"Wake up!" I shouted. A sound like tensioned cables groaning beneath strain shivered through the platform. I jumped away as cracks spread through the stone at my feet. One of Abram's colossal eyes flicked open, crusted in rust, yet glowing dimly like a forge left to smolder.

"You." His voice was colder than the deepest night, raw with the weight of something that had forgotten how to speak softly.

"Why did you wake me?" I swallowed, keeping my footing.

"I came because I felt the connection," I said carefully, choosing truth where I could afford it.

"I measured every stone with blood," he said and his massive torso shifted in place, steel cables tightening like the muscles "And you think you deserve what lies at the summit?" So he knew exactly what I sought. Damn, bloody fuck. I stepped back, my injures screaming with every breath. I felt the power of my armor supporting my moves.

"I don't know if I deserve it," I said, standing tall.

"But I've climbed your skeleton, walked your memories and met what's left of the people who built you." His head shifted. It took half a minute for the motion to finish. Steel cables creaked in his spine. One massive arm lifted from the platform, carrying a section of parapet with it like it weighed nothing.

"You walked past ghosts and thought it made you kin?" he rumbled.

"No," I said..

"But I listened. To their songs, to their grief, to their reverence. I watched it too." The air stilled. And then his arm came down like judgment. I threw myself to the side, my augmented legs absorbing the jolt, springing me away just as stone exploded behind me. I hit the ground and rolled, white-hot pain lancing up from my ribs. Zoe screamed my name in the back of my mind. Abram leaned forward, cables flexing like a tide.

"You think this bridge remembers joy?" he whispered, terrifyingly soft.

"It remembers collapse. Sacrifice. The weight of unfinished dreams!"

"I saw it!" I shouted.

"Saw the endless work! Bricks placed, bricks dissolved! Songs that tried to outlast the silence!" He growled, sweeping an arm like a pendulum. It tore through the scaffolding on the far side. I ran straight at him instead, ducking under, then vaulting onto a length of exposed cable. My breath burned in my throat and I tasted blood again.

"You're not Abram!" I called. The movement stopped. His body froze. One slow second ticked by. Then another.

"…What did you say?"

"You're not him," I said, quieter now, standing on one of his suspension cables.

"None of them were real, not Eleanor, not the Reverend, not Red or the singing men. They were fragments and impressions. Reflections in wet stone. And so are you." The forge-eyes narrowed, focusing on me.

"You're the bridge," I said.

"The bridge trying to remember itself." He didn't move.

"You're the dream that refuses to forget itself," I continued.

"And everything I saw, every person I spoke to, was a memory trying not to die. That's why it loops. That's why the bricks crumble after they're placed. Because memories fade too." The air shifted. He exhaled a gust of wind hot enough to scald.

"…Even memory fades," he echoed when the rivets began to hum. The glow intensified. With a noise like strained metal groaning free of rust, one rivet, just one, unpeened itself. It fell with the gravity of a bell toll and landed near my feet.

"That," he said, voice suddenly small, "was one of the first. The ones I placed with my own hands before I broke." I stepped down from the cable and approached the rivet.

"Then let me carry it forward," I whispered.

"So, you don't have to keep remembering alone." There was no reply. Only silence. I held the rivet in my hands, its weight more symbolic than physical, as Zoe floated closer. Her glow dimmed slightly as her gaze drifted to the sleeping giant looming above us like a dormant god.

"He closed his eyes again," she murmured.

"Sleeping? Dreaming this whole thing?"

"I think that he never sleeps," I replied, eyes still on the rivet.

"He is the bridge… and all the people building it—they're just echoes in the memory he tries his best not to forget." Zoe stayed quiet, pondering, while I turned the soulmarked object over in my hands. Its surface pulsed faintly with metaphysical presence.

"I feel like I could absorb its power now," I said, "but I'm not sure I understand it. Identity expressed through art is easy. That's what I do. But connection has so many meanings in art."

"I don't have the answer," she said, softly.

"Maybe you could paint memories to change them?" I nodded slowly.

"Maybe. That would line up with everything I've seen. A painter who doesn't just remember the world, but rewrites it. Maybe I'll even be able to change the mark later if it doesn't work out." Zoe tilted her head.

"I'm not a mage, Lex. I don't know if that's possible."

"I made my decision the moment I started climbing this bridge," I said.

"No going back now." I replied and opened myself. Not physically and not magically in any way I could describe. It was instinct. A kind of inward turning, reaching from within my soul. Life stirred beneath my skin, like light filtering through water. It moved outward, wrapping around the rivet like a cocoon. Then, slowly, the soulmark responded. I felt the power of connection reach back, threading itself into me, becoming part of the architecture of my being.

A beam of invisible light, tethering me to the soul core crystal in my Domain, pulsed once. And then the wave hit. It was too much and I dropped to my knees. A tidal surge of memory and feeling swept over me: the orphanage. The cobbled streets of my childhood. My university years. My Domain and its painted sky. Penrose's Finest. The park where I sketched. My painting of the Sanctuary under siege. The billboard that loomed above the city with my name etched in color. It was all connected. Every piece of art.

Every place. Every piece of me. I understood now that with memory of places came connection to them—the binding.

"I think…" I gasped, "Zoe… I think this might be the greatest power I could have hoped for." Her eyes widened slightly.

"How so?"

"I'll show you." I reached into my bag, pulled out my spray paints and began to work. I painted my room onto the bridge floor: the worn wooden floorboards, my bed tucked under the window, the shelves lined with sketchbooks and paint cans, my work desk covered in half-finished ideas. I painted the open window, inviting in the wind and the world.

"This is my room," I said, spitting the blood away from the mural.

"As I remember it. And now, I know, I can reach it. Through this, through connection."

"Really?" she asked, hovering over the painted window.

"Yes. But I don't know if I can take you with me."

"Don't worry about me," she said, smiling.

"If I see you go, I'll just wake up. Call me when you get there."

"Deal, partner." I placed my hand on the painting. My fingers met the painted window and I whispered,"take me home."