Rennanis isn’t what you were expecting, quite. Oh, it’s a huge city: Equatorial styling all over the place, still-functioning hydro and filtered well water running smoothly, tall black obsidian walls etched over with dire images of what happens to the city’s enemies. Its buildings aren’t nearly as beautiful or impressive as those of Yumenes, but then Yumenes was the greatest of the Equatorial cities, and Rennanis barely merited the title. “Only half a million people,” you remember someone sneering, a lifetime ago. But two lives ago, you were born in a humble Nomidlats village, and to what remains of Damaya, Rennanis is still a sight to behold.
There are less than a thousand of you to occupy a city that once held hundreds of thousands. Ykka orders everyone to take over a small complex of buildings near one of the city’s greenlands. (It has sixteen.) The former inhabitants have conveniently labeled the city’s buildings with a color code based on their structural soundness, since the city didn’t survive the Rifting entirely unscathed. Buildings marked with a green X are known to be safe. A yellow X means damage that could spell a collapse, especially if another major shake hits the city. Red-marked buildings are noticeably damaged and dangerous, though you see signs that they were inhabited, too, perhaps by those willing to take any shelter rather than be ashed out. There are more than enough green-X buildings for Castrima, so every household gets its pick of apartments that are furnished, sound, and still have working hydro and geo.
There are several wild flocks of chickens running about, and more goats, which have actually been breeding. The greenlands’ crops are all dead, however, having gone months unwatered and untended between you killing the Rennies and Castrima’s arrival. Despite this, the seed stocks contain lots of dandelion and other hardy, low-light-tolerant edibles, including Equatorial staples like taro. Meanwhile, the city’s storecaches are overflowing with cachebread, cheeses, fat-flecked spicy sausages, grains and fruit, herbs and leaves preserved in oil, more. Some of it’s fresher than the rest, brought back by the marauding army. All of it is more than the people of Castrima could eat if they threw a feast every night for the next ten years.
It’s amazing. But there are a few catches.
The first is that it’s more complicated to run Rennanis’s water treatment facility than anyone expected. It’s running automatically and thus far hasn’t broken down, but no one knows how to work the machinery if it does. Ykka sets the Innovators to the task of figuring that out, or coming up with a workable alternative if the equipment fails. Tonkee is highly annoyed: “I trained for six years at Seventh to learn how to clean shit out of sewer water?” But despite her complaining, she’s on it.
The second catch is that Castrima cannot possibly guard the city’s walls. The city is simply too big, and there are too few of you. You’re protected, for now, by the fact that no one comes north if they can possibly help it. If anyone does come a-conquering, however, nothing will stand between the comm and conquest except its wall.
There’s no solution to this problem. Even orogenes can only do so much in the martial sense, here in the shadow of the Rifting where orogeny is dangerous. Danel’s army was Rennanis’s surplus population, and it’s currently feeding a boilbug boom down in the southeastern Midlats—not that you’d want them here, anyway, treating you like the interlopers you are. Ykka orders the Breeders to ramp up to replacement-level production, but even if they recruit every healthy comm member to assist, Castrima won’t have enough people to secure the comm for generations. Nothing to do but at least guard the portion of the city that the comm now occupies, as best you can.
“And if another army comes along,” you catch Ykka muttering, “we’ll just invite them in and assign them each a room. That ought to settle it.”
The third catch—and the biggest one, existentially if not logistically—is this: Castrima must live amid the corpses of its conquered.
The statues are everywhere. Standing in apartment kitchens washing dishes. Lying in beds that have sagged or broken beneath their stone weight. Walking up the parapet steps to take over from other statues on guard duty. Sitting in communal kitchens sipping tea long since dried to dregs. They are beautiful in their way, with wild smoky-quartz manes of hair and smooth jasper skin and clothes of tourmaline or turquoise or garnet or citrine. They wear expressions that are smiles or eye rolls or yawns of boredom—because the shockwave of Obelisk Gate power that transformed them was fast, mercifully. They didn’t even have time to be afraid.
The first day, everyone edges around the statues. Tries not to sit in their line of sight. To do anything else would be … disrespectful. And yet. Castrima has survived both a war that these people initiated, and life as that war’s refugees. It would be equally disrespectful of Castrima’s dead to let guilt eclipse this truth. So after a day or two, people start to simply … accept the statues. Can’t do anything else, really.
Something about it bothers you, though.
You find yourself wandering one night. There’s a yellow-X building that’s not too far from the complex, and it’s beautiful, with a facade covered in etched vinework and floral motifs, some glimmering with peeling gold foil. The foil catches the light and flickers a little as you move, its angles of reflection shifting to create the overall illusion of a building covered in living, moving greenery. It’s an older building than most of those in Rennanis. You like it, though you’re not sure why. You go up to the roof, finding only the usual apartments inhabited by statues along the way. The door here is unlocked and stands open; maybe someone was on the roof when the Rifting struck. You check to make sure there’s a lightning rod in place before you step through the door, of course; this is one of the taller buildings of the city, though it’s only six or seven stories altogether. (Only, sneers Syenite. Only? thinks Damaya, in wonder. Yes, only, you snap at both, to shut them up.) There’s not only a rod, there’s an empty water tower, so as long as you don’t go leaning on any metal surfaces or linger in the rod’s immediate vicinity, you probably won’t die. Probably.
And here, poised to face the Rifting cloudwall as if he were built up here, gazing north since the building’s floral motifs were new, Hoa awaits.
“There aren’t as many statues here as there should be,” you say as you stop beside him.
You can’t help following Hoa’s gaze. From here, you still can’t see the Rifting itself; looks like there’s a dead rainforest and some hilly ridges between the city and the monster. The Wall is bad enough, however.
And maybe one existential horror is easier to face than another, but you remember using the Obelisk Gate on these people, twisting the magic between their cells and transmuting the infinitesimal parts of them from carbon to silicate. Danel told you how crowded Rennanis was—so much that it had to send out a conquering army to survive. Now, however, the city is not crowded with statues. There are signs that it was, once: statues deep in conversation with partners that seem to be missing; only two people sitting at a table set for six. In one of the bigger green-X buildings there’s a statue that is lying naked in bed, mouth open and penis permanently stiff and hips thrusting up, hands positioned in just the right places to grip someone’s legs. He’s alone, though. Someone’s horrible, morbid joke.