MAGUS INFINITE

The door closed behind me, I felt it, the way you feel a held breath let go, and then I was standing in the heart of the Caelith, and the heart was a woman.

I do not have a better word for it, though every word is wrong. She was a machine. She was also unmistakably a she, as her figure was in the shape of a woman, jade and dark metal, kneeling at the centre of the vast green-dark room with her hands open in her lap, and she was the size of a cathedral.

If she had stood, her head would have brushed the top of the dome I could not see... If she had a head.

This is also how I knew that she was a machine, from the cut on her neck, where I could see metallic components.

The same clean, impossible, surgical cut I had seen twice already on the bodies of her wardens ran across the base of her neck, and above it was nothing, no head on her shoulders, no head fallen at her feet, just the flat green cross-section of a wound a blade finer than thought had made eras ago.

The void had been here too. Of course it had. It had come through the door I had just opened, and the first thing it had done in this room was take her head.

It had done more than that.

From her back rose great structures... armatures, ribs, a fan of long curved spars that arced up and over her shoulders like the legs of a spider crouched there, and it took me a moment, in the cold, to understand what I was looking at.

At first, I had believed that behind her were spider legs, but they were wings.

Or they had been, now what I was seeing were the bones of wings, the frames, the long sweeping spars that something had once stretched a great span across, and the span was gone, stripped, leaving only the skeleton of flight reaching uselessly toward the dome.

I looked down, and I understood where the rest of it had gone.

The floor around her was covered in feathers. Massive ones, each the length of a man, cast in the same jade and dark metal as the rest of her, scattered across the mirror floor as though a flock had been killed in the air above the room and had fallen, slowly, over the course of an age, to lie here in the cold.

I had walked across some of them, coming in without knowing what they were. They rang, very faintly, underfoot, like struck bells heard from a long way off.

She had been a winged thing. A woman with wings, the size of a cathedral, kneeling at the centre of a prison. And something had taken her head, stripped her wings, and left her here on her knees for ten thousand years.

I stood there for a while looking at her, and a feeling of intense sadness filled my chest... How magnificent would it have been to see her in full glory?

”What was she? Is this a god?” I asked, in the cold place behind my soul, because I did not have it in me to say the question out loud in that room.

”A Jade Oracle,” the Avatar said. And then, after a pause, it did not usually take: ”I do not recognize this variant, but from her structure, this Oracle must have been quite special when she was alive.”

”She is magnificent,” I whispered.

”She is dead, and failed her purpose; in my eyes, she was defective.”

The words from the Hollow Avatar disturbed me, but I shared a soul with it, and I could understand its position. The Avatar did not understand compassion, honor, or sacrifice; it was a machine, and whatever person it was copied from, either they were a very cold individual, or their heart had been taken away, because it did not serve as a weapon to feel.

I looked at the headless kneeling woman and her broken wings, and I did not have anything to say to the words of the Avatar, because I wondered if this Jade Oracle thought like this too.

In this world of giants, was I the only one who still remembered how to feel?

Around her, set into the floor in a wide ring past the feathers, were seven discs of green stone. I think they must have been pillars once, but something had entered here and taken these pillars, leaving their base behind.

Of the seven disks, only one was glowing, and it was flickering as if it were about to go out; the other six were dead.

”I now understand all the basis for the Harvest.” The Hollow Avatar suddenly spoke, and I paused, ”You do? Tell me.”

I watched with a faint bit of amazement as the Hollow Avatar pushed itself upward, and my right hand raised itself without my command and began pointing to all the bases surrounding the headless Jade Oracle,

”There should be seven pillars suppressing the evil contained inside the Caelith. These pillars are gone, and their base has been failing over the last ten thousand years.” It paused, ”Every pillar is built with concentrated Celestial Energy... the same energy that fills your body when you open the Earth Gates.”

My eyes widened in horror and realization: ”The light of the stars... is celestial energy?!”

I felt my head nod, and the Avatar replied, ”It is; if these pillars were taken, the Caeliths would fall from the void, and their essence would bleed out into the air. I can imagine that for the inhabitants of your world, seeing a Caetlith fall surrounded by Celestial Energy must look like the stars are falling to the earth.”

I muttered Orath’s final words to me: ”The Caelith brought the light of the stars to the earth, and he claimed them all.”

I looked around me and settled on the last green disks that were flickering. I understood that even after the Sovereign of the Stars drew the power of the Caelith to rise, he was not satisfied, and now he intends to drain them all, even if it means freeing the abomination from its prison. A creature so terrible that even the Celestials had thrown it into the void to sail in the darkness for eternity.

A female voice suddenly whispered in my ears, and I froze, ”The greed of men knows no bounds, and for power, they shall take and take, until there is nothing left.”