Unsleeping Patron - Ascent Beyond the Clouds

Thin enough at nine thousand meters to lose its whistle, the air hissed it didn’t whistle through the rocks. It hissed a high, dry whisper that carried the sharp smell of frozen iron and ancient ozone.Silas stood on a shelf of black slate two miles above the valley floor. Above his head, the sheer granite cylinder of Nine Ten-Thousand Miles Peak shot straight up into the pitch-black void, its dark, polished surface breaking through the upper cloud deck like a pillar holding up a ruined ceiling.Five hundred yards back, parked on a spur of reinforced iron track that ended right at the edge of the wilderness, sat the armoured cab of The Pioneer Express. Its brass boiler vented a single, thin plume of white steam into the freezing cold.Gideon stood near the edge of the slate shelf, his leather coat buttoned up to his chin, his hands clasped behind his lumbar belt. His right knee was stiff in the high-altitude chill, but he didn’t lean against an ash pole. Beside him, Hester adjusted her wire-framed spectacles, her wool cloak pinned tight against the wind with her Pioneer’s bronze brooch.Silas didn’t wear a tunic anymore. His Astral Sentinel vessel forged of liquid silver armor that moved seamlessly over his chest and shoulders caught the flat, directionless light of the ochre sky.He reached into his left chest plate, pulling out an iron lantern.It was smaller than the original Blood-Lantern, forged from the brass fittings of Wei’s oldFoundry and tempered in the cold fire of his own dual-core. Inside the thick lead-glass casing burned a steady, silver-and-crimson flame that didn’t flicker in the high draft.”It’s anchored,” Silas said. His voice carried that deep, clear resonance, entirely free of the metallic rasp of his early sequence. “Set it in the vault beside the Slate. If the Miasma density spikes at the outer rail stations, the flame will flare. The soldiers will know where to hold.”Gideon reached out, his calloused, gloved fingers taking the iron handle. The artifact was surprisingly warm, radiating a soft thirty-six-cycle pulse that settled Gideon’s shivering knee instantly.”It feels like you,” Gideon rasped, looking down at the silver-crimson flame inside the glass.”It holds ten percent of my core imprint,” Silas replied. “As long as New Sanctum prays to the Monument, the flame won’t die. You don’t need me on the wall to hold the boundary anymore, Gideon. Chen’s regiments have thirty Sequence Nines. Gold’s steam-engines are running to four outposts.”Hester took a half-step forward, her boots crunching on the thin ice covering the slate. She didn’t offer a poultice or a clay jar. Her fingers reached out, touching the starlit silver armor over his shoulder.”The inscriptions Chen brought back,” Hester whispered, her wire frames reflecting the black granite pillar behind him. “The one thousand solar cycles. The Blue Sphere.””Earth is falling,” Silas said flatly. He didn’t look back toward the distant south where half a million humans lived behind brick walls. “If I stay in New Sanctum, I can expand the dome to three hundred kilometers. I can build ten more trains. But when the tether snaps, three hundred kilometers of golden glass won’t stop a planet from plunging into the Ash.”Hester’s fingers tightened against the cold silver edge of his armor, then slipped slowly away. “What’s at the top?”Silas looked up at the sheer, vertical face of Nine-Miles Peak.The Parchment inside his mind was silent, its yellow hide lying smooth, its obsidian quill resting flat. But deep in his dual-core, he felt it the ancient, living pull of the living anomaly mountain. It was the spine of the basal plane, the central conduit through which the Overlord’s fallen marrow had first flooded the universe.”The core furnace,” Silas said. “The throne.”He stepped off the slate shelf.He didn’t wait for a final handshake. He flexed his shoulder blades.TEAR.The ten-meter wings of golden light and spatial crimson unfolded from his back, their membranes humming with a deep, starlit resonance that blew the loose frost off the rocks. Silas launched himself upward, his boots leaving the black slate as he angled his body toward the vertical granite wall of the cosmic spire.Gideon and Hester stood side by side on the narrow ledge, watching the streak of starlight cut through the freezing grey mist, climbing higher and higher into the pitch-black void above the world until the red-and-gold wings became a single, unblinking star against the dark.