All Light Will Fall (14 page)

Suddenly the world returned. I blinked the blueness from my
eyes, looking up at the Meridian. He stared down at me. It was a cold stare
full of spite. “What is it,
Aieti
?” his subordinate asked.

The Meridian didn’t answer. He simply started at me. He
looked frustrated. “Zurel, bind the
hai’ek
!” he ordered. “You resist me
now,
hai’ek
,” he said to me, “but I’ve only just begun.”

The blindfold fell loose. Finally, I could see. I was under a
tent, the gold curtains falling high from the treetops. The sun shined in. A
reddish hide covered the grass. The head of the beast stared at me, bearing its
teeth. Its eyes were dark and hallow. They looked haunted. I had never seen a
skinned animal. Seeing one now seemed brutal, like a horrific foreshadow of
what was to come.

The Meridians had restrained me well. The binds around my
wrists were unbreakable. They were made from some kind of hard rubber. The more
I worked to get them loose, the tighter they became. I kept at it anyway,
kneading my wrists to break the material. The guard standing watch didn’t
notice much. He simply stood there, steadfast and serious.

The chief Meridian breezed into the tent. Once again, his
beauty startled me. He was too bright. His hair was like silver. It was
beautifully woven on one side with delicate feathers and colored beads braided
in the shiny silks of hair.

Even his armor beamed under the light. Like the glow in his
eyes, it was a steely blue. Streams of jade glinted across the breast of the
armor, forming a calligraphy of symbols. He turned towards the guard all of a
sudden. And I watched him move. It was magic, the way the gloss of his cape
shimmered with the sway of his step. Of all the natives I’d seen, he was the
most striking. It was strange of me to think it, but to not think it was
unthinkable in itself.

“Leave us,” he ordered. The guard bowed then humbly left the
tent. There was only the two of us now, me and the mighty Meridian. I was wary
of him. Remembering how he subdued me, how he brought me to my knees with the
rise of his hand, frightened me.

“You have great strength,
hai’ek
,” the Meridian
spoke. “You are unlike the others of your kind, but know this . . . I will
break you. The power you yield, that mighty spirit of resistance will crumble.
I promise it. I will bring to you a misery unending.”

What was he saying—power? What power did I possess that
could stand against him? I couldn’t think of it. I wondered what it was that
this Meridian could see. “Who are you?” I asked. I had to know. I had to hear
his name. Not knowing was impossible.

“That is not the question,” he said. “The question is who
are you?”

Who was I? Not even I knew. Shouldn’t I know? Was it not a
human’s pride to know his name? Perhaps that was it. I had no pride.
Dignity—innocence—I could never have them. Not after what I had done. Not after
what I’d become. “I’m Celeste,” I answered.

The Meridian narrowed his eyes. He picked up my life pack
and came to kneel in front of me. He looked me in the eye again. I felt him
looking through me; passed the mind, passed the spirit to the other side of
some distant world. “You have a darkness within you,” he said. “Your heart is
heavy with grief... and deception.”

“Who are you?” I asked again.

When the Meridian answered, his eyes lit a fiery blue, and
the symbols on his body blazed just as bright. “
Aieti
,” he said, “keeper
of the Meridian . . . Uway Levíí.”

I wouldn’t forget it. That name of his, there was something
immortal about it. There was something that broke the waves of the sea and
stilled the voice of the wind. It was a name of destiny, a name written by
legend. “What do you want?” I asked.

He looked at me a long while, holding the question in his
mind. I saw it turning in his eyes, going round and round with his thoughts. It
seemed he had no answer. It seemed his want was not a want, but a curiosity, a
deep, unexplained river of wonder he could not understand. I noticed his beauty
again, watching him think. His face looked polished, like a plate of white
gold, like the hands of youth took up a chisel and craved beauty on the rise of
his cheeks and the bend of his brows. “I have many questions,” he said, “and
you will answer them all.”

I said nothing as he took the halos from my life pack and
held one of the vials for me to see. “This item you have. Tell me of it,” he
ordered.

Halos? He wanted to know of halos? I always knew it was an
extraterrestrial energy. I didn’t know, however, that perhaps it was from here,
from Niaysia. ARTIKA’s refusal to leave—it made sense now. As the years passed,
halos became our framework of life. We couldn’t function without it. It was in
our bloodline. Still, it was difficult to believe. All my life, war was around
me. All my life, I carried it, like a cloak of madness, like a shadow I
couldn’t see. It was behind me all this time, nurturing me, tucking me in at
night, singing death in my ear. It was disturbing to know that I allowed it,
that I laid my head on the breast of deceit and slept, night after night, with
my arms around it.

“It’s halos,” I told him.

The vial hovered over his hand. He studied it with a curious
eye. That shine of wonder made him look open somehow, like a child almost. He
seemed fragile to me in that moment. It was only a flash of invulnerability,
but I saw it. And I understood what it meant. Meridians and humans, we were the
same in that way. We were curious beings, and dangerously romanticized by our
freewill. And that freewill, while striking and gloriously invaluable, was
still a curse. Because with freewill was the desire to taint, and steal, and
destroy that will. Because no heart was pure, and the soul is always
corruptible. Nature made it so. God made it so.

“This... halos. What is its purpose?” the Meridian wondered.

“To keep me alive,” I answered. I couldn’t lie to this
creature. If I lied, he would know it. That’s who this Uway Levíí was. He was
not a god by any means. But I could tell that at some moment in his time of living,
he had seen some form of a higher power. He had seen a god. And that god had
bowed over him, with a beam of light on his lips and exhaled the flames of
knowledge into his lungs.

“It keeps you alive. Tell me.”

“It’s inside of me,” I said.

He looked at me, startled. “Inside of you?”

His voice was a whisper. It sounded something like an echo.
It was a haunted question that trembled against his lips. The Meridian was gone
for a moment. His mind had left me. He only stared, looking into a world
unknown. I wondered what he was seeing. Then I wondered if he was seeing his
god, if he was walking through the forests of heaven beside him, speaking in a
language only they could ever know. It seemed like that, and knowing it,
realizing it, made me all the more wary of Uway Levíí.

“It is inside of you,” he repeated. Rage flashed crossed his
face. It was a beautiful rage. The embers of that fire rekindled with such a
fierceness that I could no longer look upon him. The Meridian stood, and with
the halos still in his hand, he shattered the vial to pieces. “You will answer
for this,” he hissed.

I shivered at his words, at the vigor of his voice. ‘You
will answer for this,’ he had said. But it was more like a promise, like a
declaration of truth. His words were furious, punishing, condemning. And I was
afraid. The ‘you’ he spoke of, was not only me. It was all of us: ARTIKA and
its mindless army of slaves, the Ardent, who were nothing more than a dumb and
ignorant children, and the Defiant, who knew everything but nothing at all.

“You have sullied the sanctity of the Meridian. You have
robbed and chained the grace of Kurios!” His voice rose high, like a wave from
the sea. A mighty wind ripped around him, his hair lashing like a whip of
light.

The halos in his hand began to glow, surrounding him in a
nimbus of fire. The hangs of the tent rippled around him. Then there was a
shrill whistle in the jagged air. An explosion followed. A whirl of dust
blasted into the tent. I heard shouting, and the throbbing sound of missiles, beating
like drums into the earth.

Someone rampaged into the tent. It was the Meridian’s
subordinate. “An attack,
Aieti
. The
hai’ek
,” he said in Hedai.

“We shall deal with them swiftly,” the Meridian demanded.

The subordinate turned to leave, but looked back when he saw
that he wasn’t followed. “
Aieti
?”

The Meridian held eyes with me. I braced myself. This
Meridian, he was going to kill me. “Go, Zurel. Soon, I shall follow.” The
subordinate nodded then rushed from the tent.

The Meridian didn’t wait. In a flash, he drew his sword. I
rolled to the left, barely dodging the quick strike of his blade. He swung
again, faster than before, but I was ready. I lifted my arms, and with a
dangerous mind, let the blade of the sword glide between my wrists.

The restraints loosened. I was free. The Meridian attacked,
and I rose up to meet him, blocking the force of the strike. For a second, he
couldn’t manipulate the sword, so he snatched me by the throat with his free
hand.

A silent cry broke from my lips. He pinned me against a
tree, his hand a clasp of stone around my neck. I struggled, writhing beneath
him with my feet off the ground and my lungs clinging for breath. He raised his
sword. I held tight, feeling the frigid edge nick my throat.

Then… I reacted.

My hand, with its own mind, reached out and gripped the bend
of his neck. There was something there, a chain of red glistening beneath the
collar of his armor. I snatched it, twisting the metal until the chain was
tight around his throat.

It didn’t harm him, but once I touched that shining relic, a
ferocious look came over his face. He ripped me from the tree and threw me
across the way. I felt the chain break, and as I tumbled to the ground, it was
still there, smooth and fragile in the clutch of my hand.

A blast of fire whizzed into the tent. There was gold all
around me, flaming waves of silk melting into the air. I rolled from under the
flames. When I looked up, the Meridian was gone, vanished into the smoke of
battle.

I found my life pack buried in the dust. Everything I needed
was there. Everything but the mr2. The Meridians had taken it, and finding it
now was impossible.

I made my way into the open. I stood alone on an open
plateau, and down the way from where I stood, was a deep valley of gold. There
was war there in the long, gilded grasses, streaks of amber and exploding
whirls of white.

I saw my people at war, a mindless and savage people. I saw
blood, scarlet rivers flowing through the hills, those lovely starlit hills.
For some reason, I couldn’t look away. I simply stood there, watching those
golden isles burn, watching the smoke billow like a black twister into the sky.
And there were screams, clashing together in the heat of battle. They were all
one voice, clawing up the hills, thundering like a vicious storm across the
land.

For a second, I thought of moving closer, just to see it. I
had known war all my life, but seeing it in this moment was the first time. I
was tempted to feel it, to know it by another name. There had to be something
more, something mighty, and something necessary about the spirit of war. Why
else was it so long? Why else was it such an immortal soul, corrupting mortal
men? Why was it living, with more emotions than men and more consciousness than
the mind?

War. I could feel it, like a drum in my blood. It was so
alive, such a real and palpable thing. It had a mind and a voice, and I could
feel it, lingering so loudly behind me. Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t bare
it, the way it put its arms around me so warm and gentle.

I turned from the valley. A line of trees stood ahead. I
walked, one foot after the other, into that glaring wood. The trees were angry,
their leaves hissing in the wind. They should have been. I was shameless to
walk away. But I wasn’t human anymore. I was a rogue solider, an arsenal. I had
no room for shame.

I found myself wandering for a long time. My halo-com was
down. And eventually, I abandoned it. It was never said, but I wasn’t a fool.
The halo-com was just another tracker. I traveled by instinct, losing myself
deeper and deeper into the woods. As I walked, a flood of water rose over the
thicket. Beautiful.

The trees were tall, bending in and out of the marsh in
periwinkle curls and rings of violet. Strange creatures glided through the
watery forest. Some were long-legged, their colored strips gleaming beneath the
shrubs. Others were short-finned with bulbous eyes and ray-like tails.

The water was pleasantly warm as I moved along. It came to
my waist, the musk of sea flowers stinging my nose. A bluish mist rippled off
the surface, swarming the swamp. The dew was hard in the air, like tiny beads
of steel. They were slow moving too, and when they drifted, they collided into
each other. It sounded like the ringing of bells, like the wind was singing.