Chapter Text
It is the middle of night when the ground begins to sing. From the huddle of Banuk tribesmen in the tent, only two are disturbed enough to be drawn from their warm, deep sleep. They open their eyes in tandem when the first vibration gutters beneath the ice, and despite being wedged between bodies and furs at opposite ends of the shelter, each feels the alertness of the other.
The song continues in a sustained, shrill whine so high-pitched that it blends with the rushing blood in their ears. Then it drifts upwards, passing the point of audibility, though it can still be felt. A low, rhythmic thrum climbs the register in reverse.
The two children extend the noise for a moment longer, through dazed imaginations and straining ears. When they are convinced that the strange moment has ended, they jostle gently upright and lock eyes over the throng.
It is not unusual to hear disturbances beneath the ice in winter, and their newly-pitched shelter perches on the edge of a wide lake. Machines go about their light-given work in the lower currents, jostling at the frozen shelves. But the children recognise the truth in one another’s gaze, despite the darkness which makes the eyes it spills from invisible. There was more to the noise that woke them than a random shift in the earth.
They both sense, in their opposing ways, a disturbance in the fundamental nature of their world. Through extrapolation, or premonition, both understand that they will never sleep soundly again after tonight.
The children discuss their suspicions over a breakfast of cold fish and scalding Rimeroot tea.
“It was a machine,” says the taller of the two, with calm, upright certainty.
“I’ve never heard a machine like that,” the other mutters doubtfully. Then he throws back the rest of his steaming tea in one mouthful, wincing through the burn. The taller boy casts him a disparaging look, then says reasonably:
“It sounded a bit like a Watcher. You know, that high-pitched song that calls in the bigger machines.”
“It didn’t sound anything like a Watcher!”
“I said sort of.”
“Ok, but Watchers sound like this.” The smaller boy proceeds to screech at a piercing pitch.
“Cut it out, Brin!” the other boy exclaims, elbowing Brin in the side. His layered furs keep him well protected from the blow, but he falls silent, eyeing his friend with amusement.
“See, Sylens,” Brin says innocently. “Not the same at all.”
To his credit, Sylens thinks, it was an alarmingly accurate impression.
“Ok, fine,” Sylens concedes. “If it wasn’t a machine, then what do you think it was?” He sips the rest of his bitter tea in a far more measured and sensible manner than Brin did.
Brin’s expression turns suddenly grave; a switch from gleeful to solemn, quick as cold snap.
“Something old. From the Old World.” Brin says.
“What, some sort of ruin?”
All trace of severity leaves Brin’s expression, and he shrugs. “Are you going to finish that?” He points toward the remains of Sylens’ breakfast. Sylens rolls his eyes and relinquishes his fish, which Brin scarfs down in a few frenzied bites. He has Sylens hooked now, and he knows it.
“We should help pack up,” Sylens suggests, privately hoping that Brin has something better in mind to pass the time. He usually does, and Sylens is quite happy to go along with whatever reckless plan Brin thinks up on the pretence of trying to stop him.
The two of them share a long-standing, unspoken agreement wherein Sylens gets to keep his dutiful reputation while reaping the benefits of a day that isn’t mind-numbingly boring every once in a while. Brin, on the other hand, has never spared a thought for reputation in his life, but probably wouldn’t survive a half-day alone in the wilds. The exchange is as fair as any.
Brin eyes the camp warily. The fishermen are packing their machinery onto flat sleds, securing picks and mechanical hammers and wired netting and fishing lines. Leather wrappings are being stripped from shelters pegged securely in the ice and draped over the metal hauls.
It’s their first full day at the new site, and so far their fishing grounds have proven less bountiful the further South they travel. This means that the hunters will be looking for all the help they can get. If the boys stick around any longer, they will be given a job to do.
“Or…” Brin begins smirking in mock-innocence, “we could try to find the ruin.”
“That might not even exist.”
“It exists,” Brin insists.
“Why are you smiling?” Sylens is almost afraid to find out. Whenever Brin gets smug like this, it always leads to trouble.
“I’ve got something to show you.”
Brin leads him behind the shelter where they and the rest of their Werak spent the night. There, by a collapsed shelf of snow where a wooden peg pulls the tent rope taut, there is a thick bundle of hide. Brin motions at Sylens to stop a few paces in front of the pile. Then Brin steps gingerly around the mass, poking at the snow with the toe of his boot. He kicks the bundle of skins aside in one darting movement, bearing his teeth in a grimace.
All that Sylens can make out is a top-heavy, bent metal rod lying edgewise in the snow. After all the build up, he is summarily disappointed.
“I saw it outside the shelter last night,” Brin explains. “It was coming right through the sheet. Kept getting in my eyes.”
“What did?”
Brin’s mouth twists into a disheartened frown. “Well it’s not doing it now. There was this flashing light, that’s why I came out here and heaped the blankets over it.” Brin crouches down beside the mound, again, Sylens notes, with considerable apprehension.
Brin scoops out some snow from around the top of the metal trinket to expose what Sylens can only regard as its head. Sure enough, when Brin turns it over in a gentle cradle, there is a circular bulb inlaid there, similar to the eye of a machine. The metal plating around it is darker and more roughly-hewn than any machine eye-stalk he’s ever seen. It’s bulky, many-jointed. It doesn’t look like any Old World creation either—all of their instruments are so ancient that the elements have long since eroded their shine and grown rust thick as mould on their bodies.
Intrigued, Sylens goes to touch the contraption, but Brin covers his prize with his palms.
“It could be dangerous,” Brin whispers, his eyes sharp with warning. Brin has a talent for finding trouble, but this comes with a tendency to make mystery from the utterly mundane.
“Whatever. I’ll look at your scrap later,” Sylens says, turning away, knowing that before he can take more than a step back toward the camp, Brin will stop him.
“Wait!”
Sylens waits, hiding the satisfied smirk that tries to crawl across his face.
Brins eyes flick left and right in a paranoid dance.
“When I found it last night, it was still and its light was just a dull flash. It was lying in the snow, half-buried in the shelf that collapsed when we put up the shelter. I dug it out properly, and when I touched this part, here—” Brin indicates a metal slate which extends from under the head of the stalk. There’s an intricate pattern laced over the surface; gauze-thin white lines that make a grid. “—I got this weird feeling under my skin. A warmth, but not like the metal was hot. I mean, it was buried in the snow, it couldn’t have been. It was like touching it made all the blood rush to my fingertip, making it all hot and tingly. And then—”
“Did it leave a mark?”
“No,” Brin replies distractedly, “it went away ages ago. Anyway, the eye lit up with this bright green colour. A yellow-green, like the shallows of a salt-pool. So I jumped back, but it just got brighter, beaming straight up into the air. When it went dark, I waited a minute to see if it would do it again.”
“And did it?” He sees no point wasting time with exaggerated incredulity.
Brin frowns. “Not this one, but there was another light. Another green shoot that sprung up from the snow along the Southern edge of the lake. Brin points uselessly; the shelter is in the way, sapping the gesture of any of its potential gravitas. He looks up to the Southern skies as if expected to see another bright streak splitting its grey hemisphere. “But even after I came back inside the shelter, the light kept flashing sometimes, but only faintly compared to that first blaze."
“And the quake we felt, that screeching it made—”
“You mean the music?”
Sylens remembers it being far too shrill and grating to be mistaken for song, but there’s no use arguing over nomenclature. “Sure, the music. That came after, right?”
Brin smiles, enjoying these final moments of leverage he has in keeping this knowledge to himself.
Taking this as confirmation, Sylens kneels down in the snow and grasps the bottom of the rod where it disappears into the shelf. Brin flinches and moves to stop him, still protective of the thing, but chooses to let Sylens work.
Digging into the hard-packed snow, the metal stretches along and, to Sylens’ excitement, downwards. He tugs the metal strand out like a tough weed, and finds the lower reaches of it stringy and pliable, segmented by ringed notches, like a spine.
A head, with an eye like a dead-machine’s, and vertebrae extending from it like a long, singular root. Suddenly, Sylens is committed to shirking his duties today on the ice.
“Why didn’t you follow the second beacon?” he asks Brin, who remains crouched next to the discarded pile of furs, cradling the head of the metal creature like a pet.
“I wanted to, but you’re always telling me not to run off alone into the freezing night.”
“Unless there’s a good reason.”
“Well you never said that.”
“It was implied,” Sylens mutters, up to his elbow in snow and soft metal. “Well, maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t go after it. If you’d died, you never could have shown this to me.”
“Did you find the end of it?” Brin asks.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—” Sylens stops, feeling movement against his thinly-gloved hand while it explores the rod’s passage through the ice. He fights the instinct to flinch away, instead searching the feeling out a second time. It is not unlike what Brin described; a tingling warmth, accompanied by the slight pressure of particulates rushing past like a flurry of insects.
“What is it?” Brin shifts his weight, moving closer.
“Don’t move.”
Keeping his hand in place, trying to catalogue the pattern of the movements, Sylens leans forward and puts his ear up to the hole in the snow. A high chittering, the scrape of metal shrapnel. He tries to cup the culprits in his palm and yank them out, but there on the grey of his gloved palm is only a scattering of black spots, fragments of deep soil or ash. They smell metallic.
“It’s obvious that the light flared because you touched the machine that cast it,” Sylens says, brushing the soil off his gloves. “And it’s also obvious that the light was a signal—like a beacon or a lantern sent aloft.”
“Like the path through a Shaman’s trial,” Brin mutters. It’s not a connection that Sylens would have made, but yes, the Shamans’ rites are set up in such a way, where one marker casts a beam of light to fall upon the next turning.
“So there should be another marker after that,” Brin says eagerly.
“That will lead us to the source of the quake.”
“And the music.”
But there is more to Sylens’ theory; the spine of Brin’s metal friend reaches far underground, and so must the other beacons along the way. There must be someone at the other end of the path, who saw the nearest marker flare and caused the sound that woke him, and that low shuddering underground. He calls it a ‘quake’ but that word is too harsh for what that motion truly felt like. It was more like a breeze flowing shallowly underground; a persistent tirade of subterranean insects, the gentle motion of which he just felt along his arm.
He thinks of a metal forest rooted to an underground reservoir, making the world quiver around its breadth. If it wasn’t fashioned in the Blue Light, or built long ago by the Old Ones, then who built it? Why construct this path of markers?
What do they know, and what could they teach him that the Shamans will not?
“We should get going before everyone finishes breakfast and we’re dragged along to the lake.”
Brin grins, then tries to compress his delight into a sensible line, unsuccessfully. He lays his cherished beacon down in the snow.
No one has come to find them yet, and to protect their discovery, Sylens shoves the bundle of furs back over the little mechanism and the hole dug out under it.
Sylens lets Brin lead him around the outskirts of the camp, avoiding the prospective hunters hauling their tools toward the lake. He feels slightly guilty for abandoning the Werak to their work, but if the pattern of their last few stops is anything to go by, then there won’t be all that much for him to do. It would have been another day spent watching the heavy, oil-choked drilling machines as they made their rowdy incisions, and waiting for their sparse prey to chance upon the bait set in the centre of the blue circle carved out. A useless waste of effort, while this metal thing underground—this construction not wrought by the spirits or by the ancients—may just be the answer to all the Werak’s troubles.
No one seems to notice as the boys slip away.
That’s the thing about Brin that lets him find trouble in the unlikeliest of places; he is inherently overlooked. It’s a talent. When he eventually returns to camp after a long, wayward escapade, he is duly reprimanded, but slipping away is as simple as a thought followed. The Werak don’t tend to notice when he is missing. That’s not to say that he is quiet or disliked, or worst of all weak, and therefore expendable. In fact, Brin is loud, tolerated by most in short periods, and if not strong, then at least agile. This phenomenon isn’t even exclusive to the Werak. Animals, normally quick to spook, will pass close by him like he isn’t there.
This would make him an exceptional hunter if he wasn’t such a dismal shot.
The white-clad rocks on the Southern bank are enough to hide his and Sylens’ bodies as they search for the second beacon. Brin leads the way with confidence, moving erratically, as if following a shifting wind current. He holds the hand that the metal’s burn touched slightly aloft, as if it were guiding him.
Whether by chance or some deeper connection, they find the marker tucked down in the juncture between three large boulders, so that they have to lean against the sloping surfaces head-first to reach down and touch it.
Again, Brin treats the situation with the utmost caution, and Sylens humours him, allowing him to make the first move. Brin removes one of his gloves. Here, protected in the rocky divot, the cold wind doesn’t bite. When his fingertips brush the patterned slate extended, almost tongue-like, below the beacon’s eye-socket, Brin flinches back.
“Did it burn you again?” Sylens asks. He tries to slide forward, keeping his toes rooted in the pitted stone surface. But when his own hand touches the metal, he doesn’t feel anything.
“Come on,” Brin says, “we need to be able to see the next marker.”
Disappointed, Sylens pulls himself up to perch on top of the stone. A thin line pierces the sky, so faint that it could be imagined in the folds between clashing blizzard currents. Then it widens, yawning outward into a bright green cone. It only hangs in the air for a few moments before collapsing back into a dense, upward line, before slipping back down to earth.
Some of the people on the ice must have noticed the projection. Sylens observes their distant, dark squashed forms stop their work and turn, in mixed curiosity and panic, toward the light. He watches a few of them start back across the ice, likely going to fetch one of the Shamans for spiritual guidance. The Shamans will reassure the Werak, offering some vague, flimsy allusion to myth to explain the apparition, and the people will go back to their work undisturbed.
“What’s with that look?” Sylens jumps; he didn’t notice Brin looking at him. Carefully, he unpicks the scowl on his lips.
“It’s nothing. Let’s go to the marker.”
Just as Sylens predicted, and as he’d hoped, the position of the next marker will bring them closer to the ruins of an ancient settlement that he has only ever seen from afar.
“Race you there!” Brin cries, before sliding off the flank of his snowy boulder and taking off toward the next beacon. Maybe he’ll tire himself out before long. It hasn’t happened before, but this could be Sylens’ lucky day.
The way to the marker is clear; an open, welcoming path boarded either side by bare woodlands. In the distance, the lofty, gnarled peaks of ancient structures jut through coarse, low-lying mists.
Every deep-winter when their band of allied Weraks trek out this way, seeking the fish that rise in the frozen waters in the vast lakes surrounding, Sylens relishes the chance to see those dark edifices, even if only from a distance.
The Werak’s summer haunts are far less exciting; dense forests and mountain ranges teeming with wildlife that slink away to their hovels in the cold. Then they make their trek up North, where the lands flatten out in an abrupt manner as if spread thin by some great, torrential force. There are huddles of ruins along the way, growing fat and flat-topped and rusted from the ground instead of trees. But these distant structures are different; they brush the sky, forming a vast, silent copse.
The relics of the Old World have been a constant backdrop to Sylens’ life, and to most others that is all they ever will be: a curiosity of the natural world, stagnant and boring as a mountain, the secrets of their formation lost to time. The past is a vague, existential warning—a shadow over the backs of Sylens’ people—and the future is only a hardship to be endured.
Banuk find the virtue of their lives in continuing that struggle in strength and honour. Their harmony with the machines and their collective spirit, the Blue Light, is what the Shamans say will save them from the doom that killed the Old World. The mystery of that doom is discarded as a distraction from the pressing goal of survival.
To Sylens, this seems like a rather large omission. All that is said is that the world of the Old Ones fell. Then the Blue Light came, and flooded into the dark spaces that the Old Ones left behind to birth new metal.
Every year they pass by those distant structures, and every year Sylens is forced to grapple with a malignant sentiment that for the rest of the seasons can be willfully ignored: there must be more to life than keeping the strength to survive.
Thinking that today’s discoveries might bring him closer to a more complete picture of the quiet, broken world, Sylens follows Brin at a far more conservative pace toward the trees that separate the safety of the tribe from the answers he will never stop craving