Chapter 11
The wind at this altitude didn't just blow; it bit. It carried the scent of old ice and thinning oxygen, a sharp contrast to the sulfur and smoke of the world below. Silas was struggling. His breath came in ragged, white plumes, and his hands, wrapped in scavenged leather, were trembling as he gripped the jagged granite of the Great Divide.
I didn't have that luxury. My new body, this twenty-two-year-old vessel I hadn't asked for, didn't feel the cold. My skin, now as dense as polished obsidian, radiated a dull heat, the internal friction of my own mass acting like a furnace. But inside, I felt like a stranger. I looked at my hands, now large enough to crush a man's skull with a casual squeeze, and I missed the boy who had fallen.
"We... we have to stop," Silas wheezed, collapsing against a frost-covered shelf of rock. He looked up at me, his eyes wide with a mix of exhaustion and a new, lingering fear. "You don't even look tired, My Lord. You look like you're made of the mountain itself."
I sat down beside him. The rock groaned, a deep, structural protest against my four-thousand-pound weight. I had to be careful now; if I sat too hard, I'd trigger a rockslide that would take us both down.
"I am tired, Silas," I said. My voice was a low, resonant rumble that seemed to vibrate in my own chest. "Not in my lungs. In my head. I went to sleep a boy and woke up with the weight of a decade on my shoulders."
Silas took a swig of melted snow from a flask. "You're thinking about her again. The one the Priests called the 'Aether-Relic.' Your... sister."
I stared out at the horizon. From here, the world looked fragile. The Sun-Spire of Oakhaven was a tiny, broken needle in the distance.
"The Zenith doesn't have families, Silas. Not the way you understand them," I began, my voice softening as the memories bubbled up through the grime of the present. "Solas—the one they call the Sky-Father—isn't a parent. He's a cosmic architect. He didn't conceive us; he harvested Star-Seeds, raw fragments of the universe's fundamental laws, and poured them into human-shaped molds. He called us his 'children' because it was easier to demand worship from a son than from a slave.
I picked up a piece of loose shale. I didn't crush it. I just held it, feeling its pathetic lightness.
"Aurelia and I... we aren't related by blood. We were just the two 'glitches' in his perfect garden. He was the Light, and we were the shadows. I was born with the density of the Earth's core, too heavy to ever fly. And Aurelia was born of the Aether, the void between stars. She was born with Negative Mass."
I looked at Silas, trying to find the words to describe a bond that defied physics.
"In the Marble Gardens, while our 'siblings' were off soaring through the clouds, she and I were trapped on the ground. She couldn't walk, Silas. If she took off her lead-weighted shoes, she would drift upward like a stray balloon, higher and higher until the air ran out and the cold claimed her. She lived in a constant state of falling into the sky."
A ghost of a smile touched my lips—the first one in years.
"I was the only person who could touch her without a harness. Because of my mass, I was the only thing in the world that felt 'solid' to her. I was her Anchor, and she was my Kite. She would hold onto my arm just to feel what it was like to stand still. We weren't siblings, Silas. We were two halves of a broken law, holding onto each other so the world wouldn't swallow us up."
Silas stayed quiet for a long time, the wind whistling between the rocks. "If she's that important to you... why did he keep her when he threw you down?"
My jaw tightened, the obsidian of my skin darkening. "Because I was a burden, but she was an engine. The Zenith islands shouldn't be able to stay in the air; they're too massive. They stay afloat because Solas has her locked in the Sanctuary of the Void, strapped into a machine that drains her Negative Mass to keep his kingdom buoyant. My 'sister' is the only reason the Gods don't have to touch the dirt."
I stood up, and the ground cracked under my heel. The vulnerability was gone, replaced by a cold, tectonic fury.
"Every Spire I pull down makes the islands wobble. To compensate, he'll drain her faster. He'll turn her into a ghost just to keep his throne from tilting." I looked up at the first faint stars appearing in the twilight. "She's not on Earth yet, Silas. But I'm going to climb until I can reach out and pull her back down. And this time, I'm never letting go."
Silas stood up, his legs shaking, but his eyes were clear. "Then we don't stop for the night. We keep climbing."
I looked at him, a mortal boy willing to challenge the stars for a man he barely knew. "We keep climbing."