Unsleeping Patron - Pressed into Marble

The soles of Silas’s boots were wearing through. Every step over the sharp slate sent a cold pinch through his heel, but he didn’t stop to bind the leather. Three hundred kilometers was a number on a map inside his head; on the ground, it was simply an endless series of grey stones that looked identical to the ones behind him.The sky changed at three in the afternoon.It didn’t darken with night. The grey ceiling of Miasma was pushed downward, descending in a solid, heavy sheet as if a piston were lowering into a cylinder. The air pressure spiked so fast that Silas’s left ear popped with a sharp, wet crack. He dropped to his knees, his palms slamming against the gravel, the air dragged clean out of his lungs.Then came the weight.It wasn’t a roar. It was a sound below hearing a low, seismic thrum that shook the marrow inside his thighbones before it reached his ears. Somewhere ahead, through the lowering mist, something colossal moved. He couldn’t see a foot, or a leg, or a hide. He only saw the clouds curve around an invisible column three miles wide, a shape so vast that the human eye refused to assemble the outline.The sky shuddered. A single, downward stroke of pressure hit the earth.Silas was slammed flat against the shale, his forehead driven into the dust. The breath tore from his throat in a choked squeak. The ground beneath him didn’t shake side to side; it dropped two inches, compressed under a force that felt like a mountain dropped from orbit.Silence followed. A dead, suffocating quiet that lasted for ten seconds while the dust settled in a slow, grey rain.Silas dragged himself up. His chest burned, his flannel shirt sticking to the open scrapes along his belly. He coughed, spitting a dark speck of phlegm onto his knuckles, and stumbled forward.Fifty yards ahead, the shale hills ended.They didn’t slope down into a valley. The earth simply dropped away in a sheer, vertical ledge, two meters deep, carved with the geometric precision of a mason’s chisel.Silas stopped at the edge. The ledge extended to his left and right in a vast, gentle curve that swept out for miles before vanishing into the fog. It wasn’t a natural ravine. It was the rim of an imprint.He slid over the edge, his boots scraping down the two-meter dirt wall, and dropped onto the floor of the depression.The ground here wasn’t gravel. It was smooth.Silas walked three paces, his footsteps making no sound. The floor beneath his boots was as level as a sheet of ice, yet it wasn’t ice. He crouched, brushing away a thin layer of grey ash with his sleeve.Beneath the ash lay a painting.No it wasn’t a painting. He pressed his fingernail against the surface. It was marble, crushed so hard that the grain had fused into a solid, seamless red slate. Embedded directly into the stone was a pattern of crushed tiles, flattened silk banners, and paper-thin strips of dark oak.He moved his hand five inches to the left. His fingers brushed against a patch of blue fur.It had no depth. The fur, the skin beneath it, and the small, delicate bones of a canine paw had been pressed into the marble like a dried leaf between the pages of an encyclopedia. Next to the paw was a bronze kettle, flattened so completely that its handle was a thin foil wire flushed against the stone floor, without a fraction of a millimeter rising above the surface.Silas stood up slowly.He walked fifty yards deeper into the imprint. Everywhere he looked, the story was the same.An entire avenue lay stretched beneath his feet, two-dimensional and sealed beneath a glassy sheen of compressed pressure. He passed the outline of a two-story timber house, its carved gables and roof tiles squashed into a five-inch layer of grey-and-brown grain. In what must have been a courtyard, three figures were captured in the stone Fox-kin, their long ears and bushy tails spread wide like ink-blots on parchment, their clothes fused with their flesh, their skulls flattened into coin-thin discs of white bone.There were thousands of them.As far as his eyes could reach through the low mist, the floor of the footprint was a single, continuous tapestry of compressed lives. A citadel. A city of a hundred thousand souls, with its market stalls, its stone wells, its children, and its iron lanterns, all flattened in a single fraction of a second when an unseen heel touched the earth.No blood had run. The pressure had been so absolute that the fluids had been forced straight into the porous stone, staining the pale marble with dark, plum-colored veins that traced the old streets.Silas stopped beside the compressed form of an elder Fox-kin holding an iron staff. The staff was a grey line in the floor. The elder’s hands were two pale shapes etched beside it.His own breath sounded horribly loud in his ears a wet, rasping suction that echoed off the two-meter dirt wall behind him.The wasteland didn’t fight cities. It didn’t lay siege to walls or starve out garrisons. It simply stepped, and where a hundred thousand people had traded grain and built fires an hour ago, there was now only a level floor for the fog to rest upon.Silas rubbed his collarbone where the cold rot of his internal organs throbbed in its slow, thirty-six-beat rhythm. He pulled his canvas tunic tighter around his ribs, turned his face toward the far edge of the footprint two miles away, and kept walking across the flat, dead faces beneath his boots.