The Firmament of Flame by Drew Williams

Author:Drew Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER 15

Esa

It was time to go. The desire to stay, to investigate more, to learn everything we possibly could about this place: we all felt it, but the truth was, that was a job for scientists, for historians, for people with tools and knowledge that we lacked. When we finally returned to Sanctum, we could send a team back here to do a full study, but that wasn’t us—that wasn’t the mission. We were operatives: our job was to identify, analyze, and dismantle threats to the Justified, and one such threat was looming over the metaphorical horizon like a storm front in the distance, ready to break and drown us all.

Whatever the forerunners had been doing when they created the Cyn, whatever it might mean that they’d terraformed the worlds of the species evolving toward sentience during their eons-long dominion over the galaxy; those were questions that had gone unanswered for hundreds of thousands of years. They could wait, just a while longer. Whatever it was the Bright Wanderers were planning, by contrast, could not.

I went to find the Preacher.

Jane offered to go; I told her I would handle it. The bond the Preacher and I shared was a strange one, all wrapped up in guilt and grief and sadness, but it was a strong one, too. The hurt she was feeling right now—it would take that strength to reach through it.

I found her standing on a series of long steps, descending toward what might have once been a canal—assuming running water was something the forerunners had needed, the same as we did—but now was just … empty, a long stretch of nothing that cut through the broken city, once an artery for its populace, now lacking any purpose at all, given that the populace it had once been meant to serve was long since dust.

That might have been what had drawn the Preacher there to begin with: a thing without function, its purpose long since lost.

“It was always … such a comfort,” she said, staring down into the emptiness of the canal. She hadn’t even turned when I approached; didn’t need to, had sensors that could “see” me coming by changes in ambient temperature and pressure and air flow. The Barious walked through a very different world than the rest of us did: more vibrant, or simply more telling, perhaps.

I sat beside her; she kept standing. “Knowing you had a purpose?” I guessed, staring out at the metal ribbon of not-a-canal-any-longer as well. “Even if that purpose had been taken from you?” I understood, in my own way. “Sometimes not knowing a thing is better than knowing,” especially when it came to faith. Mo had taught me that.

The Preacher nodded. “For thousands of years, my species watched the other sentient races—the organics—struggle with those questions: why are we here, why were we born, what are we meant to do? It all seemed so pointless; inapplicable to us. We were alive because we’d been built, or built each other; we were born for a specific reason, just as we were meant to achieve something specific.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.