The first time I threw myself at the claws of the reaper, everyone assumed it was a mistake. Surely, said the reapermaster, she must have stumbled into its track. Though, we’d all been taught since we could walk to avoid the great creatures.
I had assumed it would carve me up, and those steel claws would shred me into a fine dust.
But instead, the godmachine delicately picked around me, and when it was all done, I lay in a tiny island of grain swaying in the soft wind.
The reapermaster, who was sitting on the carapace, eating an apple and reading a book, saw the island. She shouted and pointed, then the village came to me and surrounded me, petting me to see if I was harmed.
“I’m unscathed,” I said.
Only the soulkeeper, Uru, looked at me, his necklaces humming to him as he listened to the tone of my voice, his brass eyes flickering in the late day’s sun. He *truly* looked at me, and he saw something that concerned him. It made his face sadden.
But the first time, Uru did nothing. Just cocked his head contemplatively as his dreadlocks tapped his shoulders.
So I did it again. For we were a free people.
***
The second time I tried, I ran straight for the thresher. There was no mistaking what I was doing.
I should have died, but instead the reaper screamed in horror, and every blade of the great machine came to an instant, shuddering stop. The metal hands pulled me away from the hopper, and I had a long slice across my shoulder that bled badly enough to drip over its arms.
“Ahadi,” my cousin said, holding me in his arms while the Reapermaster consoled the machine. “What are you doing?”
But the question was rhetorical, and you didn’t have to be a Soulkeeper to look at me and know what was in my mind. I felt shame, and the heat of it rose through me to break my surface as a single tear.
***
“You can feel the pressure, the toil, and the fear,” said Uru. “And you should have come to me first.”
The clean white surfaces and great glass palace hung over the Rupikiita River. He made tea from a solar orb and blessed it, set the dainty porcelain in my hands, and sat near me.
“I am not sick,” I said.
“I never said you were.” Uru regarded me, the tall cheekbones and their rusty skin twitching as he came to some sort of conclusion. A soulkeeper’s verdict. “It is the miasma of an uncertain time. It is a part of the war. It is a weapon.”
“What is?”
“To say that a heaviness of the soul is a tool of the enemy is to cheapen the emotions and experiences of the soul,” said Uru. “Some people can become heavy with the weight of the world without the enemy’s help. But in your case… in the case of others I’ve seen this year, it is.”
“I feel weak,” I confessed. “We need to keep harvest. We need to help the people who are holding the Great Line. They are sacrificing far more than those of us safe in the valleys.”
“Even the creators at the line have to sleep, eat, have sex, play games, and make jokes. Or they would die. It is one thing to fight for survival. But you cannot stop being what you are in the middle of it, or you’ll have nothing to go back to afterward.”
I wanted to cry again, but that felt like I would have to go digging for the energy to do it. I was mud at the bottom of a dead well.
“My brother is on the line,” I told Uru.
“I don’t care,” Uru said, shocking me. “Our job, right now, is you.”
***
How long was the Great Line? A thousand miles? A million? It pulled people from its past, its future, from other worlds gauzily next to ours. When we took Ysny to the first camp, I saw what he called a skyscraper. Our steamhorse had blown its pressure stomach and reared back when it saw the building of steel and glass that was tall as a mountain. It flickered out of our reality when we turned a corner in the road, replaced by a walnut tree.
Ysny would join the mage corps. Standing with brothers and sisters in arms, their staffs high, throwing their minds against the chaos breach seeping through into our worlds.
The Entropic War could never be won, could it?
But they would hold the Great Line.
And we grew the food to feed our creators, who made order at the boundaries to hold the chaos back on the other side.
I missed Ysny. So much.
***
“There are rumors every day,” Uru said. “Rumors that the breach has widened. The speakers claim that the Evening Parliament is leaving for another world. The Alliance had a falling out. I’ve even heard that the entire subcontinent wavered last week, and disappeared for twenty minutes. Its people came back, but were sick for days afterwards.”
I had come to know worse things. And many of them were even true. The mountain lords had gone to their protected caverns. There was a draft for more creators, as they were needed at the line.
The crops in Valley Two Hundred and Nine had failed.
Manna production to power the godmachines and instruments of order was down fifteen percent.
Just thinking about those things gave me a wave of despair, and as that happened, Uru sprang forward to blow powder from the palms of his hands at me. I coughed and swore at him as the air around me sparkled.
“See?” Uru said, leaning forward, his locks tinking against each other. “Do you see?”
There was a tendril of deadness in the powder, some absence that clung to me.
“We cannot know if the miasma is entropic in nature, and with the vagaries of a mind being vast, even a soulkeeper cannot say one way or another that it is the enemy that is bearing down on you and causing this. But, Ahadi, it cannot help. All of this cannot be helping.”
“But this isn’t happening to anyone else,” I protested.
“You don’t know that,” Uru said. “You don’t know who has made it through, who is yet to experience it, and who is now quietly living under the great emptiness. You cannot look into their souls. Not even I can. I can only try to make sure we keep them.”
I did not want to hear that, because it terrified me even more. That so many other people might feel so tired, cored out from so much that they were less a machine than even the brass golems of San Urtep? I had been so deep within myself, I wondered how vast this epidemic was.
And surely, surely we could not keep order against the breach if so many were fighting even more desperate wars within themselves?
I had to reject it.
“I am not any weaker than anyone else who is here in the valley,” I said.
Uru sipped his tea, then rubbed his forehead in a tired gesture. “When did I ever say you were weak, Adahi? You are strong, and smart. Weakness has nothing to do with it. When someone snaps their leg in a fall, does weakness have anything to do with how they stand next? It does not matter whether it was the enemy that snapped your leg, whether you fell, or whether your bones were more brittle. What matters is that you let me splint the injury, and that you heal it. Or you will never walk right again, if at all.”
It was a simplistic metaphor.
But it contained clarity.
“What do you plan?” I asked.
“I want to send you to a dragon’s lair,” Uru said.
***
We rode in the belly of a gryphon that smelled of sulfur, and then in a sling carried in the great talons of rocs. The great rift beyond the valleys fell away behind us. The eye-watering unreality fell away. The Great Line faded. Not in the way something in the distance did, but as if it never truly existed.
And away from the space of the Thousand Valleys we coasted over the strong rocks of Gibralter and onto to old London.
At Gatwick, after a change of clothes, we caught a creaky godmachine of some design called a seven-forty-seven, and that took us to the city of New York. And many leagues north of there, we came to the dragon’s lair in the side of a mountain near a ski resort that was closed for the summer.
I should have paid attention to the wonders and wonderances of a strange time and place, the far-off fantastic. But I had retreated well into myself. I was numb. And I hated myself for leaving the Thousand Valleys. Leaving the line.
Uru gave me strange new beverages, and the food of another people. And it was ashes to me. Even the bar of Twixes.
***
I would like to say I made that journey after the second attempt.
I did not.
There was a longer story between that conversation and the offer of the lair, and when I finally broke and asked Uru to take me there. It was a war. A fight. A battle against the miasma.
Now I was less of a thing. The rot of a chemical fire in me that had given me strength. For a time. The tremor of insomnia. The ravages of a year of… limping on a broken limb.
Uru did not blink when I asked to go. Did not upbraid me for taking so long. He and reapermasters and the village hugged me and praised me and surrounded me with love so deep that even down in the bottom of the well the mud stirred.
The reapers danced and followed me along the dirt road to the soulkeeper’s house. The massive farming machines even gifted me with bread and ale that I threw out when the gryphon came for us.
***
“Welcome,” said the dragon. “You may call me Toni.”
Long and slender, her scales glittered adamantine in the glow of the cave. As we walked, Toni sinuously gliding ahead of us, she told us about each item displayed in the walls. A coin given to a beggar outside the chapel of St. Paul’s Chapel in 1789. Gold from the wreck of the Merchant Royal. A pearl tooth from the Visintine Emperor Gax.
Each piece of her hoard had a small, papyrus note underneath detailing provenance. Each item sat behind a glow of powerful magic, as safe as if in a vault.
Toni showed them the spas, the sitting rooms, and the gardens inside her lair.
“And this would be your room,” she said.
A beach outside one window, and a forest with soft treefrog song in another. A bed with soft curtains draped over the posts, fit for a queen. Marble floors.
“What do I do here?” I asked, scared to be left with the fifty feet of magical creature.
“All you have to do, is *be*,” said Toni. “I guide the rest of it.”
When Uru left, the half-mile thick stone side of the mountain sealed shut. I felt a tiny pang of fear as the dragon said, “There is nothing outside there. Nothing outside this lair exists now. It never has. It never will. Until I open it again.”
“When will that be?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“Once a week, my assistant Janice goes down to a beautiful little town at the foothills near the lakes, and she buys fresh bagels from a deli with cream cheese that has *strawberries* in it. I can’t wait for you to try them. You, however, are here until you need to leave.”
I would have asked how that were possible, but dragons were older than gods themselves.
“What if I never get better?” I asked.
Toni wound around me in that disconcerting way that only a dragon could. “I told you. Nothing outside this lair exists now. It never has. It never will. So, whenever you can, that will be the time. Remember, Adahi, this too shall pass. All those people out there fighting, some will come here. And some will leave here to go back to battle the miasma of entropy. The line will still be there. It always has been.”
And the dragon Toni hugged me, a surprisingly gentle thing from a creature with battle-armor scales.
“I know this,” the dragon said, “because I was once there on the line too, until it shattered for a moment, and a shard caught me. Then I came here to create a place of healing. I think, maybe I did more for the war here.”
The dragon showed me scar in her flank. It was deep, and it had been soldered over in pure gold that flexed with her military scales.
“And now I am always here,” she said.
“And those I let down, I abandoned?”
“Are they not happier to not bear the burden of worry for you? Have they not taken on their work with more verve because they know you are safe? Will you not do more, if or when you return, or even if you find a new path?” The dragon laughed. “And have you forgotten that none of that exists now that you are in my lair, a powerful singularity, the event horizon warped such that nothing leaves or enters without my will?”
With that, she had drawn up in the corridor, tall and vast, with fire licking her lips. She was not all hugs and softness, but strong in her admonition.
The dragon took my hand. I turned my back away from the universes that didn’t exist now that I was in the heart of the dragon’s lair. Away from the miasma, away from the news of entropy, I would be here to recuperate. Until I was ready to leave the lair and find my path again.
“Come,” said the dragon. “Let us go to the beach and sun ourselves, and you will tell me about your war.”