It grew steeper, ever steeper as he stumbled up, reaching out with one hand as the far end of the hallway indeed scrolled up the inside of a subtly curved surface.
He made it two-thirds of the way before gravity won the battle.
He slipped, felt his center of gravity pass too far behind him, and fell.
He let out a harrowing cry as he fell backward, the distant wall flying away, and then, like hitting the surface of a black sea, he plunged into darkness, the hallway a rectangle of light that rapidly became smaller, smaller—
Then impact.
Sudden, vicious, and merciful.
A brief spasm of furious, impotent rage, and all went dark.
Chapter 5
Scorio blinked slowly, reflexively, and stared up, uncomprehending, at a vast and distant ceiling. There was noise all around him, but he focused on the huge dome that seemed to hover some two hundred feet above, ribbed and gilded with faded gold, its base resting on the apexes of four semi-domes, all punctured by narrow windows that allowed streams of syrupy golden light to sluice down through the dusty gloom.
It was beautiful. Surreal. Ethereal and light despite the massiveness of the architecture.
He blinked again, focus returning by slow degrees, an awareness of his body laid out upon a smooth, pebbled surface. The murmur of voices rising in consternation, a sense of a crowd all around him, filling the air beneath those heavenly domes.
He sat up. He’d been lying on a large bier, its beveled edges trimmed with dull gold, its surface patterned with gems and blue stones, across which swirled bands of silver. Around him, extending in concentric circles about the base of a spire, were hundreds more just like it, the narrow passages between each bier illuminated by a ghostly blue light.
Not hundreds. Thousands.
Most of them were bare, their glorious surfaces dusty and still. But hundreds more bore others like him, all of them young and dressed in plain, white robes girded with golden ropes. As one they were sitting up, gazing about themselves in confusion, some brows furrowed in anger, others in fear, a few in defiance.
He couldn’t think, couldn’t process what he was seeing. A moment ago he’d been falling, his body ruined, down an ever-steeper hallway, falling into the dark—
Scorio frowned at his hands. He turned them over, finding the whorls over his knuckles and the shapes of his fingers at once familiar and alien both. His hands.
He looked up his bare forearm, the swell of a strong bicep, and explored his body, a sense of dissonance filling him. No wounds, anywhere. Young, healthy, muscled, lean. No scars. No blood.
“Scorio?”
He looked over at the bier next to his and saw Lianshi staring at him, wide-eyed, dressed in the same white robes as everyone else. Her hair was tousled, her body without injury, her confusion writ large across her face.
“Lianshi,” he said, a wave of relief crashing over him at the sight of her. “I thought I was going mad.”
“What happened?” She slid over the edge of her bier into the blue-lit space between them, so that it looked like she stood hip-deep in swirling water. “I remember blades, that hallway, the bands of light… I told you to go on, but…?”
Scorio reached out to squeeze her shoulder, proving to himself that she was there, flesh and blood. Her eyes were glassy with tears, and she squeezed his wrist, her grip tight, desperate.
“I died,” he said, twisting about to take in more of the space. Vegetation climbed columns and spread across distant, upper balconies, as if this building had been partially reclaimed by the wilderness. The central spire rose a hundred feet right before them, a scepter whose peak was crowned with a gently pulsing gem of iridescent blue which dimmed, moment by moment, even as he studied it.
“In the same hallway?” she asked.
“The next one. I was cut up bad by the time I got into the next room, and the floor kept tilting up the farther I crawled. Ended up sliding all the way back and falling to my death.”
Lianshi shook her head in horror and wonder, but a joyous bellow startled them both. Turning, they saw Leonis heave himself off his bier one row behind them and approach, arms wide.
“You live! Better yet, I live! And we weren’t reborn into that infernal place!”
“Leonis!” Scorio grinned at the large man’s obvious delight.
“What did I miss?” Leonis stepped up to them both, placing an arm with easy familiarity around Lianshi’s angular shoulders before clapping his hand on Scorio’s knee. “What wonders, what pleasures? Was the next chamber a bathhouse, complete with willing servants ready to oil and massage us?”
“Something like that,” said Scorio, but the activity around them pulled his attention away. They weren’t the only newly born people to recognize each other—all across the jeweled biers, other reunions were taking place, many of them with similar joy and emotion. Hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women, their voices raised in wonder.
Lianshi had followed his gaze. “You think they all underwent a similar trial?”
“Where’s Asha?” Scorio cast about, then saw the woman with her saturnine features a dozen biers off to the left. He raised his hand in greeting, but she frowned and looked away.
“Some people take dying hard,” said Leonis. “Me? I find it strangely liberating. The worst part was being killed by odious little rat monsters. I can’t tell you how delighted I am it wasn’t permanent.”
“But where are we now?” asked Scorio, scanning the huge basilica. Their little group was located in the very center, at the base of the spire. Leaning sideways so that he could see past it, Scorio made out an ornate stage, thrusting its way from the far wall like the prow of a ship, sliding between the biers and interrupting the otherwise perfect circles they formed around the spire.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Those people look like they know what’s going on.”
The stage was flanked on both sides by statues thirty feet tall, hewn from pale marble, some bearing armor and arms, others clothed in flowing robes, all gazing down in adoration upon the crowd that stood on the stage.
A man stepped forward, arms extended as if to embrace them all. Being several hundred feet away, the details of his face were hard to make out, but he was clothed in heavy robes of a ceremonial cut, and on his head wore a large, scalloped hat that glittered with gems. In one hand he held a scabbarded blade, and in the other, a heavy shield embossed in gold.
“Welcome back, my friends.” By some trick of acoustics, his voice carried perfectly without the need to shout. It was the voice of an older man, rich and assured, the voice of a man accustomed to being listened to. “I am Pyre Lord Praximar, Chancellor of our fair Academy, and Autocrator of the House of Hydra. I know your fear, your doubts, your confusion, for twenty-three years ago they were my own. For you see, I, too, once awoke where you now lie, without a past, having gone through the Gauntlet, and burning with a need for answers.”
“The Gauntlet?” murmured Leonis. “That what it’s called?”
“But know peace!” The man raised the scabbarded blade and shield as if the sight of them would reassure the restive crowd. “These answers exist, and you’ll soon have them all. You have been reborn, by the grace of the power stored within the Archspire, and brought back to fight once more for the city of Bastion, to wage our eternal war against hell, and in doing so, serve and protect our distant homeworld. I know that you are overwhelmed. How could you not be? But this is not the first time you have been reborn. Nor the tenth, or hundredth. I myself have died and returned two hundred and three times.”
Lianshi covered her mouth in shock.
“Two hundred and three times have I awoken where you lie. Two hundred and three times it has felt like the first, a novel, terrible experience. Each time I have passed through the Gauntlet and died there, and each time I have awoken here. And two hundred and three times I have discovered that it was I that signed up for this fate, that consigned my soul to the Archspire, and that agreed to tie my cycle of rebirth to Bastion. Just, my friends, as you did, eight hundred and seventy-three years ago, when Bastion was founded.”