THE STAIRCASE

[wouldbeking]

In the north-east region of the Chevasse province, annexed in the Year of our Lord 3015, lies the small town of Danemarch, the last mark of civilization before the great empty wastes of the north. It is a mountainous and forested region, pockmarked by deep lakes and covered by fog all the year round. There are many ruined castles and fortresses to be found there, as it was once the seat of several ancient kingdoms.

The locals have proven sullenly receptive to assimilation, though the renaming of their landmarks failed (as we have observed is often the case in remote areas) and their local traditions are assuredly still carried on whenever Imperial eyes are turned away. There are tales of sacrifices laid out to the mountain gods, or to the mountains themselves, or in some versions to one particular mountain that towers above the rest in its range. Local legends declare that no man has ever come down from the top, that it has no top but is instead a structure that holds up the sky and acts as a ladder to the realm of the gods. Other variations state that some men have returned from the mountaintop with rare and magical items that made them kings and conquerors. There are allegedly temples and castles built into its sides, some abandoned, some said to still be full of treasure when their inhabitants vanished, and there are stories of a trail up the western slope that only reveals itself to the worthy. There are an unfortunate number of people that go missing every year on the western slope, some treasure hunters, some deliberately seeking to end their lives, and the temples were supposedly built to comfort their souls and/or to give some last moments of shelter to those who change their minds.

The southern slope is home to an old military waypoint station perhaps a quarter of the way up, with a track and a motorized carriage. The track extends up beyond the station but simply ends in a bare field, according to the testimonials of adventurers that have seen the station for themselves. There are also several waterfalls that wind down the mountain and have served as paths for explorers. The locals, with their typical dourness, call these waters the Ribbons, which is close to an old word in their native language for graveworms. Bodies are occasionally washed down these rivers, no doubt accounting for the association.

Many attempts have been made to fly airships close enough to glimpse the top of the mountain, but heavy cloud cover and certain minerals within the mountain itself are detrimental to the flight of airships, and after a notorious string of crashes privately launched craft are no longer permitted in the airspace above Danemarch. Expeditions to climb the adjoining mountains have been successful; however, not a single one of the explorers standing on those neighboring peaks have been able to see the top of this one giant. Their stories of lights and strange noises are of course unsubstantiated. As it has not been conquered by an officially recognized expedition, the mountain still has no name on Imperial maps.

The locals, rather quaintly, call it the Staircase.


-- A Brief Record of Native Myths and Legends In the Annexed Regions, 3167, University of Tandem, compiled by Profs Dierson, Mellit, and assistants












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The grass crackled underneath his feet with every step as he staggered through the underbrush, tree branches clawing and scratching at his clothes. The trail had narrowed to nothing again, just the faintest winding track through the trees and rocks, so that he had to keep his eyes directly on the ground in front of him for fear of losing it, for glancing away and back only to find nothing but bare rock or waving unbroken grass. He could hear the rush of water but the trail did not always follow the water, he couldn't trust finding it again if he deviated to drink, but he was thirsty, he was dying of thirst. There was an empty canteen rattling at his belt. The last time he'd had anything to drink had been during a rainshower, mouth open and head tilted up blindly to the sky, swallowing desperately any drips that trickled down past the canopy.

A tree root rose up to snag at his feet and he stumbled, cursing, scrabbling at the dirt. He was leaving a blood trail. His arm ached horribly. It needed to be bound up again, but he did not have the time to stop, he could not stop for anything. If he stopped, he would be overtaken, and someone else would reach the end first. He might already have been passed in the night, he couldn't know for sure, couldn't know whether his rival was setting up traps ahead of him, waiting to ambush him from any shadow or clump of bushes, but he could not stop.

He saw his hand come down upon the face of a boulder, briefly resting there for balance as he staggered past, and it left a red handprint, red as the tendrils of hair that kept falling into his stinging eyes, and in a sudden vicious fury he went for his knife, yanking at his hair and sawing into it close to his scalp, one more thing getting in his way to be cut out, and he bared his teeth like an animal when the edge accidentally sliced deep into his skin and a whole bloody chunk the size of his fist lifted away at the roots--





Ashlei woke with a scream lodged in his throat.

He rolled immediately and buried it into his pillow, muffling the noise as best he could, stomach churning as his throat worked. The sound that reached his ears wasn't human. One hand rose of its own volition to fist at the side of his head in his hair, pulling, but it was still there, still long enough to tie back in a queue, damp at the scalp from his sweat. The crisp hospital sheets were damp as well, twined around him like vines from where he'd been tossing and turning in the grip of the nightmare, and he lay very still for a while, face still pressed into the pillow and preventing him from drawing breath, heart pounding loudly in his ears. It was only when his lungs were burning for air that he lifted his face and made an attempt to extricate himself from the tangling sheets.

He listened in the darkness but heard nothing out of the ordinary. Coughs and grunts in the distance of the ward, creaking metal bedsprings, snores soft and thunderous, the soft click of sensible low-heeled shoes on polished floors. Someone was singing snatches of a lullaby quietly through the walls, a woman, probably one of the nurses. The song was in some native regional tongue, ostensibly outlawed and certainly frowned upon so near the capitol, though he doubted anyone here would be reporting her. He sat up carefully, peeling back the sheets and rubbing at his clammy skin and visualizing, as he'd been taught, that he was peeling away the dregs of the dream still clinging to his flesh, brushing it away like cobwebs. Nightmares left an energy signature that he could hardly afford, here, near other sensitives already enduring greater injuries than his own, and he was grateful that he hadn't caused enough of a disturbance to rouse anyone.

The hospital had only been recently opened to receive soldiers from the front and it was so freshly scrubbed Ashlei could still smell new paint and see places on the walls where it had been smudged while wet. The building itself was ancient; converted, he'd been told, on orders of the Emperor, from a palatial 'rest home' for the wealthy ill of the capitol, a polite term for a hospital where most of the patients were never intended to leave. It had been built when the capital was still young to house mental patients and the disfigured; the crippled, broken psychics that could no longer bear life in the city. The feeble-minded who could not make their own way and whose relatives wanted their care conducted somewhere out of sight. Rejects from the Imperial Mage Corps that had lost control of their powers, back when mages were still whispered to be witches and demonspawn and couldn't be admitted to regular hospitals. Older veterans sent for the amputee program. Charity cases of the Empire, all given over to the best private care money could buy seventy years ago.

Now the permanent patients were packed carefully into the west wing to make room for the soldiers off the trains and the airships, Ashlei among them. They spilled through the great carved doors and lined the pristine hallways, pushed into rooms that had been closed off for years, pale-faced and gaunt and hollow-eyed, quietly letting the nurses bandage their trembling, cut apart limbs and shift them between surgery beds that had been set up in storage closets and basement rooms under guttering gaslight lamps. The permanent patients were typically a quiet lot and did not bother them, though they were understandably disturbed by this change in their daily routine, as some of them had lived in the hospital their entire lives. But if there was yelling in the night it was far more likely to be a soldier thrashing in his bed, lost to the demons of his nightmares. Ashlei did not mean to be that soldier. He had observed in a hospital very like this one back in his school days at Tandem and remembered clearly how the patients picked up on irregularities and distress like herd animals, unease communicating itself from one end of the hospital to the other. A scream in the night was the same as a match lit and held to a fuse.

His groping hand in the darkness met the cool bronze of his bedside lamp and he turned the small crank once, twice, until a tiny flicker of light appeared. The walls of his small private room sprang to life around him, all color washed gold from the tint of the lamp and the furthest thing from a rock-studded mountain forest. He breathed in the smell of paint, of blood and bile overlaid by ammonia, until his throat closed and he had to wrestle himself up from the mess of his bed to the tiny bathroom. The glass of water he'd taken his nightly medication with was empty and moreover sitting uselessly on his dresser across the room, so he twisted his head to the side under the faucet and took great gulps of water as best he could sideways, like a boy at the pump in summertime. The water was lukewarm and tasted faintly of iron. A shudder rippled through him at the splashes, remembering the desperate thirst of his dream and the sound of nearby water. He drank until his stomach felt unpleasantly full.

The lights in the bathroom were brighter than his lamp and cast an unforgiving image in the faintly tarnished mirror; a young man with his nightshirt hanging open, red-brown hair soaked to black clinging to his temples, hollow-cheeked and dark circles lingering under his eyes like bruises. The bandages wrapped around his torso hadn't pulled loose during the night but hints of red were beginning to show through. He'd have to suffer them being changed in the morning, which meant another round of nurses whispering behind their hands and trying to ask delicate questions.

Or not so delicate questions. He stared hopelessly at the loose empty sleeve where his left arm should have been. There was no stump remaining and not enough left of his shoulder to even fill out his shirts properly without a great deal of extra padding. It had all been sheared away cleanly, evenly. 'Like meat cleavers doused in fire,' one of the nurses had said, wondering, and glanced at him with a fearful doubt in her eyes that he could not answer. For all that they'd seen far grislier things in the injuries brought to them there were always rumors about the front and what it did to men, strange diseases and heathen curses visited upon them by savage enemies. The soldiers brought fear back with them like a contagion, slipping into villages and cities and especially into the hospitals, where otherwise rational and able-bodied men claimed to have had spells cast on them and clutched at their sheets in mindless terror, moaning about ghosts and spirits. Demons come to take their hearts.

Ashlei was extremely familiar with the phenomenon.

He gripped the edge of the sink basin with his remaining hand and breathed, in and out, counting, counting. A panic attack would undo any progress he might've made with the staff and he depended on their reports of his improving condition reaching the ears of those he'd left behind. The nurses already wondered at him, wondered at the strangeness of his injuries, wondered at the packet of sealed instructions accompanying his arrival that carried the new Emperor's signature and the old one's wax seal. It had been a battlefield coronation, the front two thousand miles away from the heart of the Empire, and there had been no time for redesigned personal seals or any of the proper trappings befitting a regime change. Only Kaien's pale face, too young and streaked with blood and grime under his helm, trying to hold up the massive Sword of Mars as he recited the oath, word after grim word, blood running in silent rivulets from the seams in his armor and glaring at Ashlei the entire time when he'd made even the slightest move forward. He'd paid for it by spending his first ten minutes as Emperor in a dead faint, half a ton of metal and blood-packed bandages all over Ashlei's lap and fingers still wrapped defiantly around the Sword's hilt.

No, Kaien did not need to hear anything but good news. The Long War was over. The rebellion led by the infamous revolutionary Silvermask was over, and both he and the warmonger Emperor Tengou were presumed dead on the battlefield somewhere, lost amidst all the other nameless corpses buried in the mud. A peace had been brokered between the Empire and the surviving free nations she had been trying for decades to annex. The assimilation laws that forbid native peoples from speaking their own languages and practicing their own customs were to be relaxed, perhaps even abolished. Kaien was young but he was angry, a fourth son never thought eligible for the throne, indeed only good enough to put down insurrections and perform ceremonies at temples in the far off reaches of the Empire, and he had not been spoonfed propaganda by the Imperial ministers from the moment of his birth like his siblings. He had seen the dregs of the Imperial war machine and how it crushed people beneath its wheels, how its own momentum pushed it forward because everyone had simply forgotten how to stop. The Empire was large enough. The Long War to dominate every corner of the globe was a fool's dream, and Kaien had no further patience for it with his people starving in the streets. On his first day he had suspended the Draft and ordered his conscripts home, to tend their fields and feed their families.

On his first day he'd made of a pyre of his father's bloodstained armor in lieu of a body they'd never recovered, and had recited the words for the passing of souls in front of the pathetic remnants of both Imperial and rebel armies, gripping Ashlei's remaining hand tightly, pretending to be the one supporting him.

Pretending that he didn't know damn well what had really happened to the previous Emperor and to Silvermask.

Ashlei drew in a shuddering breath and pushed himself away from the sink, swiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. It was over now. Everything was over.

The pipes groaned and rumbled as he twisted the faucet off, echoing all the way down the long hallway outside Ashlei's door. A fresh coat of paint and a government ordered scrubdown couldn't hide the age of the building. Some of the porcelain fixtures had tiny cracks spiderwebbing through them and the rooms that were wallpapered were also peeling, older colors and patterns showing through near the floors and ceiling. Ashlei's room might have once been a nursery or playroom for children, bare white walls covered over with faded blue wallpaper adorned with fantastical yellow birds (phoenixes, he thought) and even a tiny mobile still hung in a corner. He'd moved into it after the previous occupant, a man missing even more pieces than Ashlei, had complained of noises in the night that wouldn't let him sleep.

He could still hear the woman through the wall singing her lullabye. The melody was so familiar Ashlei could almost recall the words and his lips tried to form them as he went carefully along the wall, his shoulder choosing now to remind him that rolling about on his bed on top of severe injuries had consequences. There was a bell to ring for one of the nurses but he ignored it, having seen firsthand as a former medical student what dependency on sedatives and painkillers could do to a man. He groped for the door instead, his entire side throbbing in time with his heartbeat.

The hallway outside was dim, flickering gas lamps at regular intervals turned down low. Some of the nurses made their rounds with candles to avoid bumping into crowded bedframes or IV stands. Privacy curtains stretched upon metal racks had been erected between some of the beds in the long halls, separating the more severe cases from their fellows by a thin screen of white cloth. One could watch surgeries performed by shadow puppets, needles dipping in an out while a steady drip of crimson ran down to pool on the floor. The nurses would scrub it clean later.

Ashlei's bare feet made no sound as he drifted between the rows of beds. Around him men coughed and snored and moaned, some with their uniform jackets pulled close around their shoulders and others dressed entirely in gauze and stitches. A gleaming eye here and there followed his progress.