The Last Human IV - Ch. 19 - The Highest Stair (Patreon)

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***

A line of dugout canoes, each one brimming with piles of glistening rocks, snaked through the white dunes. At the front, Poire stood with one foot on the bow, his brown hand cupped over his brow to block out all the shifting colors of the sky.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was staring at.

Like a lone tree, stripped of its branches, stood the Old Man’s tower in the far distance. Only, there was a mirage—or something—playing with its features. One moment, it tilted in the sand, as if collapsing in slow motion. The next, it stood tall once more, though the stones had pushed out of the tower until it resembled a wayward cairn stacked by some bored giant. And once, when he took his eyes off it, and looked back, individual floors had broken off and floated in the sky, with moss-covered chunks of stone orbiting the shaft.

The sky, striated with black lines that refused to keep their shape, was broken into myriad hues, like windows of swirling color. As the windows flowed past, bending the shape of the sky and painting the dunes and the tower red, or gold, or gleaming white. Every change was more beautiful than the last, but Poire felt a longing tug at his heart.

Never before had he wished so badly to sit on a balcony, made of real wood. To hear the sounds of a city, filled with real people. He would even trade al this to go back to the cozy business of the Conclave, deep underground.

Then, the storm rolled in…

The black lines that broke up the windows of the sky started to jump and dance. Some of them jagged like unbound electricity, while others forked into each other like black bolts of lightning, until the sky was a web of sizzling fury. Then, the black lines started to drip from the sky, like candle wicks burning in reverse. When they touched the white dunes, the sand exploded, sending up huge plumes of dust.

He pulled his cloak over his face, trying to hide from the whipping wind and the blasting sand. He planned to hunker down, and wait it out, until he felt the grinding rumble, somewhere deep below the sands.

The first black peak crested up from a nearby dunes. It started small, no larger than a house, but as the grinding vibrations grew, so did the glassy stone shape. It climbed higher and higher, like a cresting wave, pulling a mountain of black, transparent stone up from the depths of this world.

More peaks erupted to his left and his right, and shadows clawed across the dunes as mountainous waves rose behind him. Poire leaped out of the boat, and fell on the banks of the burning river, pulling his feet away from the flames. He kicked up his own plumes of dust as he sprinted toward the tower, trying to scream at the same time.

“It’s coming! We have to get out of here! It’s coming!”

A man darkened the steps of the tower, deep brown skin cracked with wrinkles. He frowned hard at Poire, his white eyebrows almost knitted together in disapproval. Then, the Old Man’s gaze slipped past him, and his mouth tugged into an even deeper frown.

“The mountains—” Poire huffed, and put his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, “They’re—”

“Oh, shit. Not again.”

“Again?”

“Go inside. Now. Get as high as you can, and stay there.”

“Why? What am I supposed to do?”

“Nothing.” The Old Man turned on his heel, and marched out into the dunes, with nothing but his ragged sandals and that flowing, metallic cloak.

Sweating and gasping and clutching at the stitch in his side, Poire climbed. Drenched and moaning, he finally came to one of the narrow beams that stretched out from the spiral staircase to the wall of the tower. Ignoring the dizzy spell that came over him when he looked down, he walked a tight line out to the nearest window, too winded to even think about falling.

Even up here, the long shadows of the mountains fell over the tower.

Down in the dunes, he saw a figure, bent with age, standing before the might of those colossal black mountains. The dunes seemed to crumple and burst before the rising might of the mountains, and the black peaks curled as they began to break. The Old Man, little more than an ant before those natural forces, straightened his back, and pressed his hands together, as if preparing to dive into the bow wave of bursting dunes.

Poire yelped as the first clouds of white roared over him, obscuring the Old Man entirely.

A wind, or something, caught the sands, and turned the churning dunes into a twisting cyclone. Still dwarfed by the rising, crashing mountains, the cyclone tightened and climbed higher, until it resembled a thin, white line, gyrating before the oncoming waves. The white line bent, piercing into the mountain, drilling a jagged crack down the center, and the mountain began to split. Its bulk continued forward, but in two halves now, their momentum widening the gap.

The white line released itself from its spin, and became nothing more than dust slowly cascading down through the gap between the mountains. And there, far down at the bottom, between two bergs of stone that dwarfed any terrestrial mountain, stood the Old Man, with both hands stretched out, as if with a mere touch, he could guide the split mountains and keep them on their course.

Black bolts of static poured down from the sky to lick at the dregs of the white cyclone, burning the churning sand to gray ash, raining down on the Old Man below. Then, one of the bolts forked out and stabbed at the tower, exploding rock and mortar. Poire yelped, and raised his hands as if he might shield himself from the tons of falling stone.

He was going to die. He knew this. He should have listened—he should never have stuck his head out.

And maybe he would have, had he not just seen the power the Old Man, his own future self, had just wielded. Poire forced himself to look up at the falling avalanche. Not to cower from it, but to focus on it. He spread his hands wide and concentrated. It’s all the same. Stone, or sand. It’s all the same—

Shards and splinters pierced his open palms, but he didn’t have time to react before the first chunks of brick slammed into him… and burst open, splashing him with white dust. A scream built in his throat and he braced himself for the huge boulders of brickwork that cracked against the side of the tower, and tumbled toward him, loosing a feral cry as the first one rushed toward him. Sand blasted him, and an errant splinter cut his mouth open at the lips, sliding through his cheek, but the stones he touched all turned to sand. Even as the stones cracked the ledge he stood upon, Poire kept his hands up, shielding himself with nothing but the power of his own body.

And then it was over. Nothing more but a skittering rain of loose pebbles, and slowly settling clouds of sand. Blinking the stinging sand out of his eyes, he stared dumbfounded at his hands. He touched at his cheek, where the sliver of stone had embedded itself, only to find that it, too, had melted at his whim. Blood dripped down his jaw, and more lacerations started to bleed along his arms and his back, but I’m alive.

His hands started shaking.

I’m still alive.

He started to swoon, and caught himself on the edge of the tower. He didn’t know how long he stood there. His mind was racing, and he couldn’t catch his breath.

A gnarled, brown hand grabbed his arm, clawing into the flesh, and almost pulled him off the ledge. “What do you think you’re doing?” the Old Man spat in his face. “You were supposed to stay inside.”

“I’m fine,” Poire said numbly, still touching at his cheek. Even now, the blood was drying, and with a thought he sealed the hole in his jaw.

“You have no idea how much you just risked sticking your head out like that. What were you trying to prove?”

“I’m fine!”

“And if you had died? Where would that leave me?” the Old Man growled. But now, Poire was too angry to hear the worry, the fear in the Old Man’s voice.

“I wouldn’t have to risk anything, if you would just answer my questions!”

“Questions? Questions? All you have are questions. Endless, infinite, never ending. And every answer I give you, only yields more. It will not wait for all your damned questions. You don’t understand how little time there is left—”

“For what? What are we even doing here? What is this tower and why are you so obsessed with it?”

The Old Man chewed his lip, and cast his eyes down to his feet. It was a shockingly familiar movement, one that Poire had caught himself doing many times before, just like that. The strangeness of seeing his own elder self act just like him cooled Poire’s anger, just a little.

“I want to know,” Poire said more softly. “So that I can help.”

Brow furrowed, the Old Man pressed his lips together, as if he was afraid of the words that were about to spill out of his mouth. “Fine then,” he barked. “It’s time.”

And without another word, he turned around, and stalked across the beam.

Poire rushed to keep up—rushed to follow him up the winding, spiral stairs, even though his legs screamed at him, and his lungs struggled to find air. Coughing up mucus and sand, he kept his focus on the moving, on keeping up with the Old Man as they headed to the Seeing Room, and the pools within.

A hundred stairs, or two hundred, he couldn’t tell. Unlike the human-built Towers back in the Cauldron, the steps here had no signs of age or wear, and every step looked exactly the same. Each turn was exactly like the one before it, and the one that came after. He didn’t have enough oxygen to let his mind wander, all he could do was focus on the task at hand. One step, followed by another…

The open silence made him stop. He hadn’t noticed the ceiling, until his head poked through it, giving him a glimpse of a vast, shadowy chamber. Towering columns marched away into the gloom, their bases illuminated by soft light, reflected off the surface of a thousand shallow pools. The Seeing Room was so quiet, he thought he could even hear the stillness rippling of water.

But the Old Man wasn’t among the columns and pools. He was still standing on the spiral stairs, several steps above.

“Come on,” the Old Man said. “I know you want to know what’s up there.”

***

If the Old Man had told him that the steps spiraled into infinity, he would have believed him. They were miles above the tower’s highest parapets now, climbing a free-standing set of stairs. Nothing around them, except for the endless horizons of the world, curving in strange, impossible ways. On and on, up and up.

Poire figured out he could take in the air, and will it to change into richer oxygen. His legs still burned, and it was almost impossible to think, but as long as he focused on cycling the air, at least he could breathe. Always a few steps ahead, the Old Man would stop and wait for him, and when Poire caught up, he would move up as easily as if he were walking on flat land.

“You’d think,” the Old Man said over his shoulder, “After all these years, I would understand the patterns of this universe. But the only constant is change. The only patterns are the ones we’ve made. And even those don’t stay forever.” He pointed over the edge of the stair, where chunks of crumbling stone floated free, colored red by the shifting sky. “One of the Poires before us figured out how to make all his bricks float. I still don’t know how that’s possible, and maybe I never will.”

“Did you build this tower?” Poire asked.

“Most of it,” the Old Man said. “The foundations were already there.”

Then this one will fall, too, Poire thought. “Why build it at all?”

“We are human. It is ever in our nature to reach.”

“What are we reaching for?”

“Anu.”

“I thought you said Anu was everything. I thought you said that we were made of it, and that—”

“Yes, yes,” the Old Man flapped a hand dismissively. “We build with its bones, we breathe in its blood. But I want more. I want to speak with it.”

The way he spoke reminded Poire of the avians in the Cauldron temples, or the cyrans once they realized he was a human. “You speak of Anu likes it's a god.”

The Old Man’s nostrils flared, and his mouth twitched. But he said nothing.

“You do think Anu’s a god.”

“Those are your words,” the Old Man said, and spun around, and stormed off.

“My words are yours,” Poire said. “We’re the same person!”

But the Old Man hurried up the steps now, climbing them three at a time, and Poire had to focus on cycling the air just to keep up with him.

“You think you can find Anu?” Poire gasped up after him.

“I already have,” The Old Man said with bitter conviction. “The problem is figuring out how to reach it.”

“The stairs?”

“The stairs are only the beginning.”

“And what if you’ve said that before? What makes you think this time will be different?”

But the Old Man was too far up, or perhaps he simply refused to answer.

***

If there were clouds on this world, they would have covered the steps. Instead, this high, the air grew warm, and beads of water collected on the featureless, white steps, drops dripping slowly up as if pulled by the sky.

Poire looked down, and tried to get a sense of the world below, but the aspects of distance had no meaning in this universe. Valleys rippled forever, and mountainous waves crashed through endless planes of white and red. Floating objects, stars or moons or tiny asteroids, trickled in flocks towards the horizons, which flanged and warped so wildly that when he looked at them, his brain tricked him into thinking he was falling from a great height.

And with every turn of the spiral stairs, the proportions and distances changed so that no sight was ever the same twice. The mountains shrank and swelled, the dunes curled on top of each other, or stretched away, bleeding into the other impossible features of the world. It made his head throb just to look at it, so he kept his eyes glued to the steps, and the backs of the Old Man’s feet.

Up here, the light from the sky grew brighter and brighter, until Poire was squinting, trying to keep his eyes in his own shadow. The Old Man elbowed Poire before he walked off the edge, because suddenly, the stairs stopped.

Somewhere, they had passed through the colorful conjunctions of the sky, and there was nothing up here but Light. It glowed so harshly, he could barely look at it, even when peering through his fingers. Something huge and heavy moved in the Light, and yet when he tried to understand its shape, he couldn’t see it at all.

“It takes some time,” the Old Man said, “But you get used to the brightness.”

Poire squinted as hard as he could, and tried to look again. He thought he saw a jagged, serpentine shape rolling and winding through the brilliance above. Sparkling shadows rolled after it, leaving a wake of soft-edged drops of color, like gems, floating in the air. Topaz and ruby and emerald, they expanded and lost their color, until each one looked like a shard of ice, cloudy and pale.

At his side, the Old Man wore a smile that stretched almost from ear to ear. He stared with his naked eyes, which reflected all the slow, great movement above.

“What is this place?” Poire asked.

“This is the closest I’ve ever been,” the Old Man said.

“I still don’t understand. How can it be here?”

The Old Man raised his arms, as if praying to all the Light crashing down from above. “Anu is not a being, but a colony. Every molecule contains itself. Every grain of sand. Every cell in your body. There is Anu, complete and whole. The first among firsts. The last among the never ending. But though you and I are made of Anu’s matter, we are not Anu. We may only be in one place at a time. Thus, when you and I stand here, Anu is forced to exist in a single place, at a single time. And I can almost reach it.”

Poire squinted up at the strange shadows that wriggled and rolled across the too-bright image above, “So we’re building this tower to reach Anu?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The Old Man bared his teeth, his face pulled tight in a mad grin, “So we can kill it.”

***

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