Spire City, Season Two: Pursued

Zoken stands in the middle of the room, feet planted as if trying to push their way deeper into the stone floor. The scales on his neck are a painful red, bright and pulsing with his heartbeat. They are a warning. It isn’t necessary to be an animal to recognize that fact, to know one should step away. His hair is red, too, but a calmer shade. His face is drained of color, as if to feed the chameleon scales, leaving his skin an ashen grayish-brown. His jaw is clenched. His clothes are smudged with ash, but he has no smell of charred wood, as if the ash is as old as the building itself. The light from an uneven wick in one lantern flickers, stutters across his face, makes the shadow opposite jerk in convulsions.

A brimless smoking cap lies on the floor behind his feet, as if cast down in anger.

In his hand, a gear gun, cocked and aimed.

Most of the other denizens of the Weave are there as well, staring in shock, a tableau of uncertainty and budding horror. All but Williver, in the watch tower—though his watch is nearly over—and Khet, upstairs.

Chels stands nearest the flickering lamp. She clutches a newspaper in one hand, rolled and now crushed by her fist. Her clothes are a faded blue that is almost white, as if the force that has drained color from her light brown face has leeched it from the cloth as well. Her eyes flash wildly but are entirely human, no hint of the flat, dead-seeming eyes of beetles in them. One antenna pokes out from the tangled curls on her head, though in no way does it appear to respond to the scene before her. Her mouth is open in a shout of alarm.

The walls here are splotched with stains and patches of mold that come back no matter how much they’re scrubbed. A film left by the invisible kerosene smoke darkens the ceiling overhead.

Anda lies curled on a blanket. She has no tail, at least none visible, but it would be easy to mistake her for a real dog at a glance, her clothes for just another blanket. She lifts her head, and her ears stand back. The fur on her head stands up. A fully human hand, dark brown and smooth, rests on the bag beside her. The bag, her latest gift from the priestess to her and her new friends in the Weave, releases its scents into the room to mix with the smell of kerosene. Sliced meat and heavy seed bread. A handful of raisins has spilled free. She may not know it, but her lips pull back in a snarl.

The floor in the room is stained with the years, with spilled dye and the drips of rust-rich water. Where the residents of the Weave don’t walk as often, a layer of coal dust darkens the floor.

Sairen leans against the exposed boiler, his strength not yet recovered enough for him to stand straight. His rat whiskers, which haven’t been trimmed for some time, quiver, and his nostrils flare. He has goggles over his eyes and wears thick clothes to protect his body from the heat.

Even injured, he is tinkering, trying to wring every last breath of warmth from the fire within the boiler. The machine coughs into the room’s tension. Sairen’s arm is deep inside the boiler, held prisoner by the inner mechanisms, so that he can only watch the scene. His tools lie on the ground beside him, spilling from their box onto the stone.

Despite the low uneven light of the lanterns, dust motes hang in the air, defying gravity as they float between the people in the scene, as if to mark off the boundaries of their individual spaces.

A stranger to the Weave stands a few steps behind Zoken—and perhaps the smoking hat is his, resting as it does between the two of them. His hair, though receding, is a similar red to Zoken’s hair, his skin the same dark shade. Certainly a native of Aopthen, or at least a descendant of that distant city. He is shorter than Zoken, though, and slighter. A pair of spectacles rests on his nose, elaborate things with a geared dial on one side to change the lens’s thickness. He wears an oddly cut black coat, tight at the waist before flaring out wide as it reaches down below his knees. The collar and lapels are wide and outlined with a key-shaped design in silver thread. It looks like it was once fine, but now its edges are dirty and beginning to grow ragged.

His face shows his uncertainty about the room’s happenings. He appears ready to slink away, to fade into the walls or the steam pipe that crosses the ceiling and be seen no more.

He has scales on his temples and pushing back his hair, but they do not resemble Zoken’s color-changing scales. His are varicolored, making a spiral pattern of some sort, though there’s a sense that the patches are too small to divine the full pattern. The tongue just poking out of his nervously clenched lips has the barest hint of a split down its center.

The doorways leading from this room to the rest of the basement are dark. They seem almost painted on the walls, mere illusions that anything else exists apart from this room. There is no escape through them. This room is the whole city, the world, the cosmos.

Marrel is also planted firmly in the center of the room. Light gleams on her lips, as if they are already beak and not flesh. Her skin is the color of sun-bleached bone, like a cow’s skull left to dry on the high plains. Her grayish-brown hair looks dark beside that sickly skin. There are flecks of something iridescent in her hair and on her neck, perhaps the edges of tiny feathers. The one wing that has replaced her arm is held stiffly away from her body. Its feathers are mottled with gray splotches, but their base color matches her flesh. She wears light-colored clothing, the one sleeve torn off to accommodate the wing. She coos, not a soft comforting sound, but an aggressive, guttural coo that churrs up and down in volume.

In her other arm is a long knife. She holds it out and pointing up, so that the tip nearly touches Zoken’s throat. His gun rests against her head.

A clatter shakes the scene as Williver drops through the door from above. In another scene there might be something comical in that first view of just his legs dangling into view, but in this tableau they are something absurd but dangerous, as if they might be the trigger to unleash the chaos that has been frozen.

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