Chapter 01 - New World (Patreon)

I woke up on grass, and that was the first wrong thing.

My bed was where I had gone to sleep, under the glass roof, with the moon in one corner of it. A thousand and twelve nights in that bed, and my back knew it better than it knew anything else in the world. This was grass, cool and a little wet through my shirt. There was water somewhere to my left. When I wake up, the sea is on my right.

When you wake up somewhere you didn't lie down, you don't move. You listen first: water on sand, wind in leaves, a bird I didn't know making a sound like a door that needs oil. Nothing was groaning. There was no rattle of bones and no hiss. The light coming red through my eyelids was morning light, and nothing that burns in the sun would be walking around in it.

Then I reached for my sword, and nothing came to my hand.

My things are always where I can find them without looking. The sword first, then the pickaxe, the axe, the torches, the bread, and after that everything else in the order I need it. My hand closed on air, and where the pickaxe should have been there was the same air. Sitting up, I went through all of it, every place I keep anything, slowly, the way I do after something has found me in the dark and I've lived, counting what was gone. When the counting was finished, I had counted everything.

The armor was gone too. I sleep in it, and have slept in every set I ever made, and the diamonds for this one had taken most of a year to find, one at a time, at the bottom of the world. Looking down at myself, I saw my blue shirt and my arms and my knees in the grass, and nothing between me and anything that wanted to hurt me.

Standing, I could see where my house should have been, up the slope to the north: a hill with nothing on it. There was no lighthouse on the point, because there was no point; the shore ran straight to the east and straight to the west, as far as I could see. There were no fences and no farm and no torches along the path, because there was no path. The water on my left was a sea I had never seen, the land was land I had never walked on, and when I turned all the way around, every direction was new. Where home was, or whether it was anywhere, I couldn't have said.

Once before, I had started with nothing. That time I hadn't known what a tree was for, or what the dark was, or that you only get one try at it. This time I knew all of those things. The nearest oak stood at the edge of the grass where the ground started to rise, and I went to it and hit it.

It took four hits, the same as always. The bark split along a straight line and a piece of the trunk came away clean and floated in the air at the height of my knee, turning, waiting. I walked into it and it was mine. I hit the next piece and the next, until the leaves hung on nothing above the stump, and I took them down too, and two apples fell out of them into the grass. I took those.

The logs made planks, and the planks made sticks, and four planks made a table, which I set down in the grass at the bottom of the hill so that I had somewhere to make things. On it I made a pickaxe of wood, which is barely a pickaxe, but it will get you into stone. There was stone in the bank where the hill came down to the field, grey and close under the grass. I dug in, and the stone came out in pieces, and I went back to the table with my hands full of it.

With the stone I made a pickaxe, and then an axe and a shovel and a sword, and a furnace out of eight stones, set next to the table so the two of them stood together in the grass like they had always been there. By the time the shadows of the trees had gone short and pulled in close under their trunks, I had more than I'd had when I woke up, and I had used most of a morning to get it.

My eyes stayed off the sky while I worked, the way they always do, because the sun is the sun and you know where it is by the shadows.

When it was done, I stood by the table with the stone sword in my hand and looked at the empty hill where my house should have been.

Home. The night before.

At dusk, the way I did every night, I walked the path from the farm to the door and counted the torches.

There were forty-one of them between the wheat and the house, one every six blocks, on posts I had put in on my ninetieth day and never moved. A torch doesn't go out, but I checked them anyway, and had checked them every night since the night one of the posts fell into the creek bank and the dark came in through the gap, and something with too many legs came in through the dark. That was a long time ago, and I still checked.

The cows were lying down in their pen, and I shut the gate on them, and the sheep were standing in theirs, which they do, so I shut that gate too. The wolves came out from under the porch when they heard the gate and walked the last of the path with me, one on each side, and lay down in front of the door when I went in.

Inside, in the room that used to be all of the house, I took a stone from the shelf and scratched the day's mark onto the wall under the others. The wall is packed dirt, the first wall I ever made, on my first night, and I built the rest of the house around it and never took it down. The marks go in rows of ten, and the new one made a thousand and twelve.

Upstairs is the room with the glass roof, and from its window you can see the statue on the hill. It took most of a summer, two years ago, to build it in stone from the ground up: legs, then a body, then arms, then a head, the shape of a man as well as I could guess it, because I had never seen another man. What I had seen were the groaning ones at night, the villagers on the far shore, and myself in still water, and out of those I built what I thought one would look like, standing, looking out at the sea.

The moon came up square behind its head.

My armor stayed on when I got into bed. Lying on my back, I watched the moon cross the glass, one pane and then the next, until I slept.

When I come to a new place, I walk its edges first. You find out where the water is, and where the high ground is, and where the dark places are, and then you know what you have.

The way I took was south, along the line of the hill and away from the sea, through ordinary grass and the oaks and birches I know. Without meaning to, I counted the blocks, because I always do, and at two hundred and sixty the grass ended.

It ended in a single step. On my side of the line there was grass, and on the other side there was something else: ground that wasn't flat. It went up and down in small ways under a layer of brown, dead leaves, and out of it grew trees I had no name for, tall and thin and bending, with leaves at the very top like hands held open. The line went off to my left and my right as far as I could see, straight through everything, even through a tree. Half of the tree stood on my side and was made the way trees are made, square and honest. The other half stood on the far side and was something else, and where the two halves met, the bark stopped like it had been cut.

Carefully, I put one foot over the line.

The ground moved under my boot. My foot came down and found the ground at a slant, and then found more of it under that, and I had to put my weight on it twice before I trusted it. In my world the ground is flat, or it goes up one block at a time, and you step up or you step down. This went up and down at the same time, a little, everywhere.

There was a stone between the leaves, and I bent and picked it up.

It was round, and when I turned it over in my hand it had no side to it, no edge, no corner where one face met another. It went around and came back to where it started, and my thumb went around with it. Up close to my eye it was grey and a little rough and not at all heavy, and there was no part of it that was flat, and nothing like it had ever been in my hand before. It went into my pocket, the ordinary pocket of my jeans, because I didn't want to put it away anywhere I couldn't feel it.

The air on that side was heavier than mine. It was wet and warm, and it smelled of more things than I had names for: rot, and something sweet, and salt, and green.

The nearest of the tall bending trees was a few steps in. I walked up to it and hit it.

It broke the way my trees break, in four hits, and a piece of its round trunk came away and floated, and the piece was square, though I don't know why it should have been. The tree had been round all the way up, and the piece that came off was a block of wood like any block of wood, turning slowly at the height of my knee. The trunk above it stayed where it was, in the air, with its open hands of leaves at the top. I took the block, which at least was something I understood.

The birds over there were loud, and I didn't know any of them.

The square block of round wood was in one hand and the round stone was in my pocket when the sound came.

It came from above, and it was bigger than any sound that has ever been near me. I have stood next to the green ones when they went off, and the ground shook, and the noise was a single hard noise, but this went on. It was a roar that came out of the whole sky at once and kept coming, and under the roar there was a scream, high and thin, like metal being bent.

When I looked up, there were two of them. They were birds, or they were shaped the way birds are shaped, with long bodies and wide flat wings held out stiff and still, and they were enormous. How big, there was no telling; nothing up there gave me anything to measure them against. They were high, and close together, coming over the trees from the east, one silver and one painted in colors, with pieces of it that didn't match the rest. Behind them was the sun.

The sun was round.

Looking at it hurt, and when I looked away the shape of it stayed in my eye, a white circle with no edges, and when I looked back it was still round. Every day of my life the sun had come up square and crossed the sky square and gone down square, and I had never once thought about its shape any more than I thought about the shape of the ground. Here, it was a circle, burning, behind two metal birds that were screaming, and I didn't know which of those things was wrong, or whether both were, or whether I was.

There was no time to decide. Both birds shook at the same moment.

It was the same shake, in both of them at once, like a hand had come out of the sky and taken hold of each of them by the back. The silver one rolled and the painted one dropped its nose. They were close, and for a heartbeat I thought they would come together, but they didn't; I could see the sky between them the whole time, blue and then a wider blue.

The silver one came apart. The back of it broke away and went spinning off on its own, end over end, small and then smaller, out over the sea to the west. The front of it went another way, over the trees. The long middle part went down beyond the jungle toward the water, slow at first and then not slow, trailing smoke behind it in a black line. The painted one went down after it, in the same direction, with smoke coming out of it in pieces and things falling off it as it went. It was louder than the silver one, and it was crooked.

They went below the trees, and then the ground shook under me, once, and a moment after that, again.

Two columns of smoke went up past the treetops, close together, black at the bottom and grey at the top, leaning in the wind.

Dirt went under my feet, one block at a time. Each time I stood on it and put down another, until I was higher than the tops of the bending trees.

The land ran down from where I was standing, through the jungle, to a long pale beach and the sea. Both of the birds were on the beach. The silver one lay near the trees, broken open, its middle a long round shell, black with smoke on one side and shining on the other. The painted one lay farther along the sand, to the north, closer to my side of the line, on its belly with its nose in the water and a long scar plowed behind it. There was fire around both of them. There were pieces of them everywhere, scattered up the sand and into the edge of the trees, some burning and some not, and around both wrecks a lot of things were moving, small and dark from that far away.

Then I came down off the dirt and went.

It was a long way through the uneven ground. I fell once, when the ground went down where I had decided it would go up, and after that I watched my feet. The smoke was easy to follow. As I got closer I started to hear the beach: a sound under the sea that wasn't the sea, high and broken, a lot of voices at once. Then I came to the end of the trees, and I stopped there in the shade and looked, and the beach was full of people.

At first I took them for the groaning ones, because they were shaped the same: two arms, two legs, a head, standing up. There were more of them than I had ever seen of anything, moving in every direction. My hand went to the sword, and I waited, because the sun was high and bright on the beach, and I knew what would happen next to anything shaped like that standing in it.

Nothing happened. Nobody caught fire, and nobody smoked. They stood in the full sun and ran in it, and dragged each other out of the burning pieces, and held each other, and shouted.

So they weren't the groaning ones, and I thought of the villagers, then, on the far shore, who were shaped the same and who never hurt anybody and who couldn't do much of anything. That seemed closer. Except that the villagers only ever made one sound at each other, and these people made sounds all the time, long strings of them, back and forth, and seemed to know what each other meant.

What they meant, I knew too. The sounds came into my head as words, the same way the marks on a page always had when I read. Help me. Over here. Where's my son. Somebody. Is she breathing. Until then I had only ever met words written down, in books from chests in the ground, and now here they were in the air, coming out of people.

The other thing I saw, and kept seeing, was that they were all different.

The villagers on the far shore had all looked like each other, and so do the groaning ones, and I had always thought that was how it went with anything shaped like a person. These people were tall and short, old and very young, thin and wide. Their hair was every color, long or short or gone, and their faces were every shape, and their skin was dark brown and pale and pink with the sun and a hundred colors in between, and no two of them were the same as each other. I looked from one to the next to the next, and each one was new, and that was stranger than the talking, and stranger than the sun.

A dog went past below me, running, with its ears back.

Dogs, I knew. Mine were lying in front of my door, a long way from here, if my door was anywhere. This one was brown and yellow, and it ran between the people with its nose down, and nobody stopped it. It was the only thing on the beach I recognized.

At the end of the silver bird's wing there was a great round thing, open at the front, still spinning, and the air around it shook. A man stood near it with his eyes on somebody lying on the sand, and he took a step back without turning around.

The round thing pulled him in.

It happened faster than the green ones go off. One moment he was standing and the next he was gone into it, all of him, and then there was a sound like the inside of the earth breaking, and fire came out of the round thing in a ball, and the people near it fell down flat on the sand.

In my world, when a thing dies, it goes red, and falls, and goes up in a little puff of smoke, and it's gone. There is nothing left of it but what it was carrying, and there was nothing left of the man at all. But there were others on the sand already, people who weren't moving, and they didn't go up in smoke; they stayed, lying where they were with their arms where they had fallen, and nobody had made them go away. Somebody had put a piece of cloth over one of their faces. I stood in the shade with the sword in my hand and looked at the cloth, and at the shape under it, until a shout from farther along the sand made me look somewhere else.

A long piece of the silver bird's side had come down across a man. He was on his back on the sand with it lying over his legs, making a sound through his teeth, and the sand under him was dark, and two others were trying to get it off him.

One of them was tall and wore red from his neck to his ankles, and had a red band tied around his head. The other was shorter and had his hair cut away to nothing except one stripe down the middle, standing straight up and colored green, and there were pieces of metal in his face, through one eyebrow and one ear. They each had their hands under the edge of the wreckage, and they were pulling, and it wasn't moving.

"On three," said the one in red. "One, two. Dude. You have to actually lift."

"I am lifting." The green-haired one let go and shook his hands out. "You're doing a squat and calling it help."

"I bench, like, two hundred and twenty pounds!"

"Then bench it."

"You bench it! You're weak as hell, man."

"I'm weak as hell? You've been grunting at it for five minutes." The green-haired one put his hands back under. "It's not even moving. You know why? Because you're weak as hell."

The man on the sand made the sound again.

When I came out of the trees and walked down to them, neither of them looked up until I was standing there. The stone sword went away where I keep it, and I bent and put my hands under the edge of the wreckage, between theirs, and lifted it.

It was a heavy thing, long and made of metal, and there was a lot of it. I lifted it off the man's legs and carried it two steps to the side and put it down on the sand, flat, so it wouldn't fall over onto anyone.

When I turned around, the two of them had both straightened up and were looking at me, and the one in red had his mouth a little open.

"Okay," said the green-haired one.

"I totally loosened that," said the one in red.

Then the man in the suit was there.

From the trees I had seen him running from person to person up and down the beach in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a black coat he had lost somewhere. He went down on his knees in the sand next to the man's legs and looked at them, and his mouth went thin. He pulled a strap out of the loops of his trousers and put it around the man's leg above the worst of the blood and pulled it tight, hard, and the man on the sand shouted.

"I know. I know. I'm sorry." The man in the suit looked up, at me, because I was the closest. "Hold this. Here. Keep it tight. Don't let go of it until I come back."

Kneeling, I took the end of the strap from him. He put my hand where he wanted it and pressed down on it with his own, once, to show me how hard.

"Like that. Good." And then he was up and gone, toward somebody else who was shouting for him.

So I held the strap, without knowing what it was for. The man's leg had been bleeding hard, and after a while the blood wasn't coming out as fast, and then it was barely coming at all, and I understood that a strap pulled tight around a leg was doing that. My hand held it exactly as hard as I had been shown, and the man on the sand looked at the sky and breathed through his teeth and didn't die.

When I looked up, the green-haired one was still standing there, looking at me. The one in red had gone, but the green-haired one didn't say anything; he looked at me, and at the piece of wreckage on the sand, and back at me, and then somebody called out for help farther down the beach and he went.

The man in the suit came back and took the strap from me and said "Thank you" without looking at me, and I went where there was something to carry.

There was a lot to carry. There were people who couldn't walk, and the sun was on them, and the ones who could walk were dragging them up the beach into the shade at the edge of the trees, two and three people to each one. I picked them up and carried them, and they were lighter than they looked, and a woman with her arm hanging wrong told me where to put them, and I put them there. There were pieces of the birds on fire near people who were lying down, and I pulled the pieces away. There were cases, hundreds of them, square and soft-sided with handles, scattered all along the sand, and people wanted them out of the water and up the beach, and I brought them up.

Nobody asked me who I was. I had been waiting for it, and it didn't come. People spoke to me the way they spoke to everybody: can you get that, can you help me with him, over here, careful, and I nodded and did the thing. A girl gave me water out of a clear bottle that bent when she squeezed it, and I drank it, and she said "You're welcome" before I could do anything at all, and went to give water to somebody else. There were too many people on the beach who didn't know each other for one more to be strange.

There was one man I kept seeing. He was older than most of them, with a dark beard coming in and a bag on a strap across his chest, and he didn't stop to look at things. Everyone else on the beach looked at a thing first, a fire or a hurt person or a piece of wreckage, and then decided what to do about it. He went straight to the place where something was about to happen. I watched him crouch under the belly of the silver bird and turn something on a pipe there, and the clear, sharp-smelling stuff that had been dripping out of it stopped, before anyone else had noticed the smell. Later I watched him take two people by the arms and walk them out from under the big wing, talking to them the whole way, and a little after that the wing tore loose and came down across the sand where they had been standing. Nobody thanked him, because nobody else had seen it coming. He moved the way I move in a cave I've already lit: he knew where everything was before he got to it. Once, from across the sand, he looked straight at me and kept looking, longer than anyone else had all day, and I didn't know what he saw.

They did look at me. I noticed it in the middle of the afternoon. I would lift something, a piece of the silver bird's wall or a person, and when I put it down, the people near me would be looking, not for long, only a beat longer than they looked at anything else, and then something else would need them and they'd go. But it kept happening.

After that, when I could, I watched them. A man spent a long time trying to break a branch off a tree for the fire, pulling it and bending it and putting his foot on it, and the branch bent and didn't break, and he swore and gave up and went to find a smaller one. Two women together couldn't roll a case up the sand that I had carried up with one hand an hour before. A boy wanted to see past the crowd and couldn't, and didn't build anything to stand on, and didn't think of it.

They couldn't do any of it. They weren't lazy, and they weren't foolish, and they were doing everything they could, all day, as hard as they could, and it was very little.

There was nothing to do about that yet except carry the next thing, so that's what I did.

The sun went down round. I watched it go into the sea, and it was round the whole way, and it made the water red in a long road straight to the beach, and I didn't like it any better than I had at midday.

The people built fires on the open sand. They made them big, out of the pieces of wood and the pieces of the birds that would burn, and they sat close to them in groups, facing in, with their backs to the dark. There were no walls and nothing over their heads, and no light at the edge of the trees, and the jungle behind them went black first, and then the sky over it.

Nobody was looking north. North was where the line was, and on the far side of the line was ground like mine, flat and square, without a single torch on it.

Of everyone on that beach, only I knew what the dark was for. Nobody saw me stand up from where I had been sitting at the edge of the trees, and nobody saw me walk back into the jungle.

It was full dark by the time I got back over the line, and I didn't light anything until I was on my own ground. On the flat grass I felt my feet trust the earth again. I went to the hillside at the bottom of the field where I had found the stone that morning, and I dug in until I found the black flecks in the grey, and I took the coal out of it, piece by piece, and with sticks and coal I made torches until I had a stack of them, and I lit one, and the light came out of it the way it always had, yellow and steady, and I stood in it a moment longer than I needed to.

The two apples from the oak were next, because I'd been working without eating since morning, and I felt them go into me, the way food does, and felt better, which is what food is for.

Then I went back to the line, to the place where it came closest to the beach, and I put torches down on my side of it, on the flat ground, where nothing on the beach could see them through the trees. Nothing would come up out of the grass where a torch was burning. Everything farther back, in the dark of the field and the woods and the hill, was another matter. I crossed back over, onto the uneven ground, and found a place at the edge of the trees above the beach where I could see the fires below and the black of the jungle on either side of me. I sat down there with the sword across my knees.

The fires were small from up there, with people lying down around them, some of them asleep and some sitting up and talking low, and some were crying, and somebody was singing low to somebody else, a song I didn't know.

The sound came from the jungle behind them, to the west.

It started as a ticking, like a hundred stones being knocked together very fast, far away, and then it was closer, and there were big trees breaking in it. I heard the trunks go, cracking all the way down and then crashing, one, and another, and another farther on, as something moved through them. Under the ticking was a roar that wasn't an animal and wasn't the green ones and wasn't anything I knew. It went on, and moved, and stopped, and started again somewhere else.

On the beach, everyone woke up screaming and pulled close together around the fires and stood up and looked at the jungle, at the dark to the west where the trees were falling, all of them, with their backs to the north.

Whatever it was, I had never heard anything like it in my life, and there was no telling whether a stone sword would do anything to it, or whether anything would. With the sword across my knees, I listened to it go farther away into the island, and fainter, and stop. The people on the beach stayed on their feet after it stopped, and nobody lay back down.

Then, close by, from the north, from my side, I heard a hiss.

Before I had thought about it I was up and moving. The hiss is the only warning they give you, and you have about as long as it takes to breathe in and out. There was a green shape at the edge of the trees, in the gap between my torches and the beach, walking toward the light of the fires on its four short legs, silent, the way they always are.

One hit with the sword, and it jerked back, and I went after it again before it could start, but it had already started. It was swelling, white at the edges, shaking.

When I turned to get away, it went off.

The sound of it hit me before anything else did, and then the ground came up and hit me, and I was on my back in the leaves with dirt coming down on my face and a high whine in both ears, and my side and my arm hurt. I lay there and knew how much of me was left, the way I always know it, and it was about half. Where the green one had been there was a hole in the ground, a crater, scooped out of the uneven earth at the edge of the trees, smoking a little.

Down on the beach they had heard it. Some of them were shouting. All of them were still looking west, toward the jungle, where the other noise had been.

Getting up hurt, but I had eaten, and if you've eaten, and you rest, the hurt goes out of you by itself. If you haven't, it stays, and the next thing that finds you in the dark finishes what the first one started. That was the lesson of my first night, lying in a hole in a hill. Holding my side, I went back over the line, onto my own flat ground, to the hillside where the coal was.

Three blocks in, I turned and put the dirt back behind me, one block, so there was no way in, and it was completely dark, with the earth close on every side, cool, and smelled of nothing but earth. My sword lay beside me on the floor of it. Through the dirt the sea was faint and far, on the wrong side of me, and I listened to it until I slept, waiting for the sun to come up, whatever shape it was going to be.