Soren straightened her posture.She looked down at the bomb.She looked back where the obelisk had been.Slowly,she stumbled forward, gazing at Isaac through a cratered face.After a moment,she pulled him into a hug, and her armor was tough, and her skin was burned,and her flesh was already cool, and Isaac returned the hug as best as he wasable, because he knew he could not do it again.
They stood together for a moment, surrounded by tremors,bone, and metal.
Soren pulled away.Clumsily, she wrapped a hand around hischeek, using her one blue eye to look into his.Isaac tried to smile, but hislips trembled, and he couldn’t maintain the effort.Soren shook her head.Before he could ask what he meant, the bunny pushed her thumb against the edgeof his mouth, completing his failed smile with a flimsy, awkward pressure.Shelooked at him, raised his smile a little wider, and nodded.
“You want me to smile?”he asked.
The bunny nodded.
“...I’ll try.”
The bunny pulled away, nodding.She clapped Isaac on theshoulder.Slowly, Soren lurched through the command capsule, roaming over tothe side of the metal bulkhead.She slammed her body into a half-opened latch,fell through a pile of ossein, and vanished into the gloom.
There was a moment of silence.
“Let’s go,” Isaac said.
Zaria waited at an opposite door.When he approached, shesmashed an opening into the metal.They squeezed through a tangle of bone,heading back into the pale orange light.A tunnel of ossein had already beendug ahead.Zaria led the way, keeping him close.He kept stumbling, leaving asmear of blood with his boots and hand.
Above, the day was bright and hot.Titanic shadows racedoverhead, buffeted with a screaming wind.He could imagine the colossus craningits head back and forth as his father began to quiver the seas of ossein,trying to stir up as much distraction as possible.It seemed to confuse thecreature.Concrete trembled as it shifted its weight.Isaac could not tell ifthe colossus was stooping to investigate, or preparing itself to strike.He didnot stop to look.
Ahead, there was an endless tide of butchered ships, full ofmetal casings, tempered glass, concave dishes, alloys of unknown metallurgy.Hesaw the flag of the necromancer’s gods emblazoned on many.He barely tooknotice.
“Isaac!”Berith shouted.
His voice echoed across the boneyard, through the gloom andshadow and ancient, weathered machines.Isaac tried to steel himself.
“Your father’s tricks won’t help you!I know he’sdistracting me!”There was a pause, which waited for areply.His voice grew angry.“Enough of this!Show yourself!”
Isaac continued through the shade of bone and metal.
“Don’t test me, boy!I’ve spent decades preparing for thismission!I will not falter where it matters!”
He gritted his teeth, wincing at the pull of his cauterizedwound.
“Do you think you’re being brave?”Berith shouted.“Do youthink your father is worth your life, when he tried so hard to spend your own?”
Zaria held up a hand, slowing him to a stop.There was a gapin the canopy overhead.Walking through would expose them to the titan above,though there was no other way ahead.The osseous fibers were no longerslithering out to protect their passage.
He wondered if his father had finally run out of energy.
“Why didn’t you leave, Isaac?”Berith asked.He imagined hisuncle pacing back and forth, ready to lecture.“I thought you would, before youentered the desert.I hoped you would run away the moment you tasted freedom.You could have walked into the hinterlands with all your supplies anddisappeared, right off the map.I would have been powerless to stop you.”
There was a pause.Isaac thought it was ironic that, now,Berith kept waiting for him to respond, when he had never once done so before.It felt like a poor effort, a token effort at reprieve.
Isaac waited for his father to provide a distraction.
“But you never did,” Berith continued, growing irritated.“Even after you survived the dragons, you refused to stop.You kept marchingthrough the desert.You had no water, no scrolls.No hope at all.”
He remembered the terror, the sand, the thirst, the gnashingmaws.
“Why?”Berith yelled.“To rescue a man you’ve never met?Tofight a necromancer you had no chance of defeating?I know you, boy.I knowwhat you wanted.I could see it in every idle moment, every training, everybook, every chore.There was sullenness.Disobedience!You never wanted this!You only wanted your freedom!”
The sights he had seen.Rivers, hills, towns.Boundlessskies.
“What is driving you, Isaac?What could you possibly wantnow, of all things?”
Father.
