Demolished in the space of a heartbeat.
The Survivor had watched, not so much stupefied as numbed. Unlike the Shriekers, who had descended the eastern glacier, the Singers had appeared out of the west, mail-armoured figures filing across empty air. Each bore a lozenge of light within their mouths—one so bright it seemed they chewed miniature suns. They sang, their voices like a waterfall boom, hanging indecipherable, the sound falling inward from all directions, as if they called from beyond the very frame of the World.
No miracle could be more violent. Words—words had called forth death and energy from emptiness. He had watched that which comes after determine what comes before. He had witnessed the rank impossibility that the Manuscripts called sorcery, the overthrow of his every assumption. And what was more, it seemed that he could see its residue, as if its exercise stained somehow, cast shadows across the light of the mundane world.
The Singers approached their hallowed bastions, their voices thundering in white unison, rising with impossible resonances, echoing across spaces and surfaces that simply did not exist. And the Brethren had stared without breath or comprehension.
This, the Survivor would later realize. This was the moment of their destruction. The instant before the looms of glittering light had crowned Ishu?l’s heights with fire and destruction. The lull preceding … when each of the Brethren realized they had been deceived, that the compass of their lives let alone their assumption had been little more than errant fancy …
The towers of Ishu?l burned. And they fled through the groves and gardens, withdrew into the bosom of the Thousand Thousand Halls.
Took shelter in the very judge that had so utterly failed them.
The Siege and Fall of Ishu?l …
The loss: a mere place. What was this compared to the revelation that accompanied it?
That which comes after could determine that which comes before … The impossible made manifest. The world was an arrow with one and only one direction, or so they had believed. Only the Logos, only reason and reflection could bend the world’s inexorable course. Thus the D?nyain and their hallowed mission: to perfect the Logos, to grasp the origins of thought, bend the arrow into a perfect circle, and so attain the Absolute …
Become a self-moving soul.
Free.
But the Shriekers and their Singers cared nothing for their doctrine—only for their extinction.
“Why do they hate us?” the boy asked, not for the first time. “Why do so many wish to destroy us?”
“Because in our deception,” the Survivor replied, “we became a truth, one too terrifying for the World to countenance …”
For years the Brethren had battled through the Thousand Thousand Halls, entombed in blackness and butchery, living by touch and sound, disguising their scent by wearing the skins of their enemy. Killing. Slaughtering …
“What truth?” the boy pressed.
“That freedom is the measure of the darkness that comes before.”
He had fallen like fangs upon them, sent them gushing to the dust. Limbs like chains tearing the seams of his unseen enemy. Hands like vindictive teeth. He stepped between their frenzied exertions, cut and cutting. Their blood was thinner than that of the Brethren, but it clotted faster. It tasted more of tin than copper.
“They think themselves free?”
The reek. The mewling screams. The thrashing. For years, he had battled through the bowels of the earth. The innumerable cuts as the lines he pursued had become wanton with desperation.
“Only so long as we are dead.”
He had been broken—the Survivor understood this.
He had gone mad for enduring.
The Thousand Thousand Halls had swallowed the Brethren whole, delivering them one by one to the homicidal ardour of their enemy. Every one of them had fought, using all the skill and cunning two thousand years could muster. But not one of them doubted the conclusion of their fell battle.
The D?nyain were doomed.
The old and the young fell first—one miscalculation was all it took, so capricious were the margins. Some were killed outright, vanishing into rutting heaps. More died of sepsis from their wounds. A few even became lost, despite having survived the labyrinth in their youth. The cataclysmic sorceries of the Singers, in particular, threw whole galleries from their mathematical hinges. These wandered out of light and life.
Sealed in.
And so the D?nyain dwindled.
But somehow the Survivor had persevered. No matter how sopped with blood, his strength had never failed him. No matter how ruinous the destruction, he never lost his way—and more importantly, never found himself shut in. He always prevailed, always emerged, and always tended to the babe he had stolen into the depths with him.