CHAPTER THREE
And He looked upon the second.
"You shall be Land." He said.
"You shall seek to create."
The next morning, as every morning since Light returned to the First Man, the sun rose across the world.
In every place it rose in the same instant. Be there a difference of a meter or a billion, the sun lit the world and burned away the creatures of the night everywhere at once.
Almost immediately after the first light touched Kahl's stone shed he was out of its doors, rotating a shoulder that seemed to have taken a sizable sword strike around the collarbone area, but that was already closing up.
"Good morning, world." He groaned. "What surprises do you have for me today?"
He'd spent the night in the mines. He didn't get tired, although he was of course capable of sleep. His bed had been occupied by his guest, and he hadn't felt like spending the few minutes it would take to build a new room.
"Sugar?" He looked down. The girl, the one from yesterday… Mira… was standing in front of him with both arms wrapped around a bushel of canes. "They looked over a meter tall, which my dad always said was when you should cut them, so I cut them down with a machete I found in your box!" she shifted her grip on them to one arm. "Here." She passed him the machete.
Blade first.
"Don't bother testing me, girl." He reached down and took it with his left hand, fingers closing around the sharp edge. As he stood up the machete vanished from his hand. He held it open- fingers splayed. "I'll pass." There were no cuts.
Mira's eyes were wide. "So, it's true you can do that. Will I be able to?"
He shrugged, extending his right arm. "Perhaps, it's simple enough." The machete appeared in his extended hand. "But for now, we'll be focusing on the tests." He turned and pointed at a box by the door. "Put the canes in there, then meet me on the top of the cliff behind the house."
Mira followed his instructions to the letter. By the time she reached him there was a pit exactly three metes cubed dug into the ground of the clifftop. Kahl was crouched at the bottom of the hole, passing his hand over the loose soil. The fragments of dirt vanished as his open palm passed them.
"Absorption." He said, without looking up at her. "Same principle as with the machete. Well, in a sense at least." He stood up and held out a hand. She took it and he helped her down.
"What's that for?" That was a piece of white cloth held at eye-height on the side of the pit. It was clearly draped around something flush to the edge of the hole- a painting perhaps, or a sign.
"That is for the test of light, which is what you're about to do." Kahl walked to the corner and crouched, hand to the floor. The earth beneath him rumbled, and he slowly rose back up to ground level on a pillar of dirt. "I'm going to block all the light out of this pit. Once I have, remove the sheet and tell me what the sign beneath it says."
Mira nodded. "Okay, will do."
Kahl made eight quick motions with his right hand, and everything went dark. Pitch black. No light at all.
Mira turned, and felt for where she remembered the cloth was. After a short fumble, it was in her hands, and then it was on the floor in an invisible heap. She peered at the space she assumed was behind it.
She couldn't read anything.
She couldn't even see anything. The absence of any kind of light in the pit turned everything into the same featureless blackness. She could see nothing because there was nothing to see by.
Ten minutes passed. Mira sat with her eyes closed, attempting to adjust her night vision. It didn't get her anywhere. She tried again.
Still nothing. And now even more time had passed.
"What's it say?" Kahl's voice was muffled almost to imperceptibility by the metre of soil between them.
She sighed in the total darkness "I… I don't know."
There was a silence. "Do you want some more time?"
"Would it help?"
Another silence. "Probably not."
"Then no thank you."
"Alright." There was a krump, and light flooded into the pit, illuminating where Kahl's arm had punched clean through a meter of dirt. The soil around it vanished into wherever the absorption ability put things, and he hauled her out by her hand. "Up you come, girl."
She dusted herself off. "So are we done with that test now?"
"I'll have to fill in the pit later to stop anything nasty popping up in it, but yeah." Kahl crouched down to look the girl in the eye. "So, how do you think it went?"
Mira looked at the floor and kicked her feet idly, a habit that came up whenever she knew he was going to get scolded. "Not great."
"No. Not great at all. Could you really not see anything in there, girl?" She shook her head. Kahl sighed. "Come on then. Next test. Land."
/
Sister Skani looked into the pit. The power that was coming, it had to come from somewhere. Who-
"I sought, and I found!"
"You found a grave! "
"I am the one truth left now. None can hold me!"
"The creeper king is come!"
"All your resistance, all your strength… It's NOTHING!"
"Terawatt… cannon!"
"Welcome to the End of the universe."
"You're wrong, it's the one you'll die in!"
"THE. CORRUPTION. CREEPS."
She screamed.
/
"Land is simple." Kahl explained. "Lady Land gives us but one of our skills. Light lets us see in the dark and manipulate redstone. Law gives us matter levitation and, if we're exceptionally devoted to the cause, flight. Life gives resilience and regeneration. Land, though…" He patted the stone block he was sat on. "Strength. Strength and nothing but." They were back in front of the house, on the closest side of the expanse of grassland that started beyond the animal pens and went on until it hit the next biome. "Strength enough to kill a cow bare-handed, to punch through a wall, and certainly enough to lift this block." He hopped off it and stood to the side.
"You… you think I can…" Mira stammered, daunted. "How much does it weigh?"
"Getting on for three tons. But I don't expect you to lift it. Just move it a little."
Mira grit her teeth. I can do this. I know I can. People have been passing these tests for… forever!
/
By the time the other sisters reached Skani she'd stopped her screaming. Now she'd passed through fear and into a quite plateau of lucid terror.
"Skani." One asked. "Are you hurt? Is everything alright?"
Skani picked her word very carefully. "Yes. For now, all is well."
/
Kahl gently turned over Mira's wrist, noting the way the flesh lumped in odd places. "I've never see a series of bone fractures quite like these before."
"It's… nothing… I'm fine…"
The Landstrider raised his sole remaining eyebrow. "It's broken in three different places, and the fingers are a mess. Although I admire the stoicism, it really isn't necessary." He laid the arm carefully down on the table. They were inside the house now, in the one large wood panelled room that dominated the majority of the internal floorspace. Night was falling outside, and he had lit the hearth fire to light the room and keep his guest warm.
Not, it seemed, that she'd be saying for long.
"I need you to keep it still." Kahl got to his feet. "I'll be back in a minute."
Mira lightly prodded her am, and winced at the result. It hurt like nothing she'd ever felt before, worse even than when she'd burnt herself picking up a coal from the forge as a baby. That had been… sore. Really really sore. But this was worse. It was a stabbing kind of pain, mixed in with an acute ache. She'd really done a number on herself.
She sighed. Welp, that was it. Three months of travelling, all her possessions pawned to pay for food and passage, and for what? To break her arm on a… a goddam rock! She couldn't even pass the tests. Two tests failed out of two…
Wait. Life gave resilience. She wasn't resilient at all. Three tests failed. Out of two.
She could feel herself starting to cry, but she bit the impulse back. She hadn't cried in years, she wasn't going to start now.
Blinking repeatedly to keep the treacherous drops of saltwater back, she realised that it was going to be her last night not on the road home. Back to the smithy and a life that would be mostly just minding the forge until she had her first child in a couple of years, and then just killing time until time killed her.
So much for dreams, eh?
It wasn't a bad place for your greatest aspirations to curl up and die in, on reflection. Entirely oak apart from the windows and around the hearth in the back wall. The left hand side as you came in through the door opposite the fireplace was for sitting in, with the huge woollen cubes that were proverbially what landstriders relaxed on scattered around, as well as the bed she had slept in the previous night. There was also a small table that could seat two at a pinch and she had had her lunch at, which had been the last slice of pumpkin pie that she'd brought with her since she didn't like the idea of taking Kahl's food. Currently she had her arm resting on it.
The opposite side of the room- the right hand side- was all work. A row of ovens that pulled double duty as heavy-grade furnaces were arranged along the rightmost wall, double-stacked on top of each other. Some smouldered away, smelting iron ore into metal, and one was cooking fish for dinner, she knew. The rest were sat idle, cold. Apart from the furnaces, all that side of the room held was an iron barrel of water, an anvil, and a workbench, both of which were currently unused.
The rear of the room housed, along with the hearth, a ladder up which Kahl had left a few moments ago. He came back holding a glass bottle filled with a red liquid that glowed strangely under the firelight.
"Here. A potion of healing. It should be able to patch you back together."
Mira thanked him and took the potion, downing the entire thing in one go. There was a stabbing pain from her arm, but she managed to keep her only reaction to it a wince as her bones started to move under her skin, redistributing and re-fusing themselves to how they should have been
Kahl sat at the table opposite her. He leaned forwards, resting on his elbows. He looked decidedly uneasy. "So… how do you think today went?"
Mira couldn't meet his gaze. "Not… well. Awfully."
"Awfully is the word I would use. I admire your dedication and resolve, and I'll admit that it's normally those traits that cause the Dream." Kahl sighed. "I don't understand it, really. After the Last appears in your sleep-"
"The who?" Mira was looking at him now, quizzically.
"The Last. The fifth god. Light Land Life Law Last, it's domain is th-" he saw Mira's face had gone blank. "You never had the Dream, did you?"
"Of course I had a dream, otherwise I wouldn't be here!" she was angry now. She wasn't sure what at, but she was angry.
"Not a dream, the Dream. Capital D. the appearance of the Last and…" Realisation hit him like a sack of bricks. "You meant an aspiration when I asked before, didn't you?" Mira nodded, quietly seething. "It doesn't work like that. It's a factor, but…"
"But I have to be picked by some half-existent abstract… thing that I've never heard of if I want to be part of the super-secret club! That's… that's…" She yelled out and buried her head in her hands. "What do I have to do? Is there anything I can do? Tell Me What To DO!"
"You have to have a drive, and you have to be worthy. I'm sorry but it's not my decision."
"I… I have no worth?" Mira was properly crying now, but they were angry tears. She had never been so furious in her life. She wanted to lash out, to hurt someone, kill something. The anger was building up something fierce, effectively percolating out of her into the air. Kahl could feel it, essence of rage to an intensity he had rarely seen before.
"I didn't say that. You're smart, you're determined, and you have your life ahead of you." He reached forward and tilted her head up to look at him. "When you have the Dream, come back here. I'll teach you everything I know, alright?" the mist of anger around her started to fade away. "But until then, you have to go home. It's too dangerous here. Around me. You can stay the night, but tomorrow you need to go home."
/
Radel had taken over Skani's watch. There weren't many sisters strong enough to see into the void directly, and they were lucky to have a second on hand to take over down here in the lower levels.
The Jhavoor coiled through the void, black on black, invisible to the untrained eye. A lazily snaking coil of…
Spiking, jagged blue lines, cracking like lightning. Coiling and twisting and…
Radel screamed.