The Capitán let her hand brush against the cold concrete buildings, holding her cane under her arm. Her way was unobstructed, if someone could see her, they didn’t make it known, and so she walked confidently, her steps light and her ears focused.
“Here, you can see the canals.”
“Is that what those are?”
“I swear, they just look different underground.”
She had spied on the voices, as focused as she currently was. They weren’t paying attention to anyone else around them, letting her slowly inch closer.
“Then what do we do? We dig?”
Three voices had spoken up, but there could’ve been more. Being well into the dark corners of the Caldera, the Capitán could guess what this reunion was about, but stopping just short of intruding on them, she waited, her head and ear against the concrete wall.
“No, we follow, we make some checkpoints every few meters and check we still have a lead, eventually we’ll find the building where Volantis is hidden…”
The Capitán smiled earnestly to herself and unsheathed her cane, letting it fall on the ground, a single tap against the pavement echoing through the whole block. All of the voices grew silent, and the Pillar of Order made her appearance. Her cane repeated the rhythmic tapping, accompanying her steps as she entered the alley.
“My, my,” The Capitán said, not hiding her delight, “What could nice and proper youngsters like you be doing in such a place, at this hour?”
She didn’t need to hear a reaction, their frozen silence after conversing with such energy proved they hadn’t expected her arrival. Intent on verifying their findings for herself, the Capitán headed deeper into the alley. She heard timid steps, slightly backing away from her. Carefully letting her cane probe the ground, the Capitán found the object of their attention. A depression between old stones, deeper than one could expect. Letting her cane burrow deeper, she felt the gentle texture of Volantis canals against the pressure she weighed upon it, akin to the Major’s skin. Despite their plan being outed to her, noone from the group had turned tail to run. The Capitán paid it no mind, pulling her cane from the hole in the ground and straightening her back.
“Where is he?”
She heard one whisper, one far away from her who hadn’t spoken yet, their voice half afraid, half expecting. The Capitán didn’t answer, choosing not to react. It was better, always, if people like them expected less of her. She could then more easily spear her cane into their heart, if they thought her to be more disabled than she was. Not that it ever came to that.
“A word of advice, from me to you all,” The Capitán whispered in turn, “If the nameless group that leveled the Caldera into giving the district its name couldn’t find even the slightest bit of evidence as to Volantis’s location, do you think playing with loose pavement will do the trick? You’ll lose your days getting lead on by stray canals. Can’t you hear it? Even here, the music from Versal reaches us. If you want to get lost somewhere, might as well be in better company, no?”
“Of- of course you’d want us to give up.”
“Hmm?” The Capitán inquired, shifting their foot to follow the voice that had spoken.
“You know where it is, the fact you’re here… that has to mean that we’re close!”
Such hope, such deluded, unbridled hope, it could have blinded her. The Capitán had figured that some of the population thought she had the keys to Volantis for herself. Neither her nor the Old Man ever made a public statement as to the primal core’s whereabouts or its ownership. This worked to the benefit of the Cors, unlike Volantis acting a tool that the masses wouldn’t want them to have, it was better for them to think they already did, and were being merciful about its usage. However, the Capitán couldn’t make use of public goodwill against World-Eater, and the cocky interlocutor was playing with her patience.
“It means that you’re upheaving the street on a treasure hunt that could get someone killed. I, unfortunately, am not equipped to simply fix what you have broken. But maybe you could do so yourself, so that what’s been buried stays that way?”
Whispered chatter broke out all around her, anxiety and unrest growing. Good, perfect. The Capitán knew the ringleader, or whoever spoke up to her was loosing grasp on the situation. Volantis seekers, in this day and age, would need some manic obsession to drive them forward that would inevitably make them run into her. This ragtag group seemed barely interested in the idea, only acknowledging Volantis as a concept. They didn’t have what it took, not in this decade or the next.
“Is he waiting somewhere?”
“I’m not taking the risk.”
“Who cares about that anyway?”
True music to her ears, her smile warm and tranquil, still facing the one who had spoken up. What face were they making now, were the futility of their goals sinking in, deep within their bones? She wished they could see her eyes, wordlessly sending a message she had already communicated before. Flee, find solace in some other waste of your time, one that won’t put you in the Capitán’s way. And so they all did, one by one, faster and faster as the herd thinned. They were more numerous than she had expected, at the end, the only thing she could hear was the gentle pulse of air coming from the canals. The Capitán swiped the ground with her cane, finding the tile that had been taken out of the ground. It was light to move, she slid the slab for it to rest perpendicular to the empty slot in an attempt to hide the canal from view. The Capitán had to trust this would be enough, alone in the Caldera, this was as much repairs as she could manage.
Passing through the Glassway before coming to snatch Raime, The Capitán had paid attention. As part of his reconnaissance work, Dove kept her informed of the ins and outs of their meetings in the Glassway, that group of four whose intentions had remained unclear until now. She had assumed they were all consumed by World-Eater, knowingly or not, but was there anything left at their old meeting place that they could dig out? In that, the Major wouldn’t have been of any help, using Raime as an excuse ended up being a delightful optimization of her time. The expedition itself, who had been rummaging through the underbelly before their demise, was a dead end. Whether they were really looking for Volantis or not mattered little now. Three of them were part of the soup probably still getting picked apart by Willow, Armageddon and Closer. The last one had chosen the easy way out, billowing fire to be his only witness as to what he might have felt in those last moments. If there were any answers to be found in their desire to delve into the underbelly, they had taken them to the other side in unceremonious silence. Reminiscing over what had transpired under the Glassway’s canopy, the Capitán headed through the silent streets of the Caldera to join the Major where she had left him to wait.
The Funerarium was a bleak and dreary building, ominously towering over a dead street of the Caldera. No other district would’ve fitted the place better, all of the higher levels were remnants of a bygone era making it so that at night, the entrance, brightly lit in white was crushed under seven levels of unused floors. The pouring lights from Versal and the Glassway made a valiant effort to save the street from sinking in its own darkness. That was as much as the Capitán remembered from the Major’s description. Admittedly, her mind was elsewhere, so her cane did extra work in making sure the ground ahead of her hadn’t caved in. If the easily removable street tiles from a few blocks away were to be any indication of the work she was doing, the Pillar of Architecture had a bad habit of ignoring a particular district that seemed like too much work to handle, which the Capitán could empathize with. None could judge them but themselves, as their line of work was in another atmosphere to the average citizen’s mundane plights.
Her nails mindlessly scratching on the cover of the book Raime had given her, the Capitán entered the Funerarium, immediately feeling goosebumps form on her arms from the air conditioning pumping endlessly through the whole building. Instead of upward, this place extended downward, piercing through the underbelly. In Freeway station and some other places in Last Kunlun, the Capitán had made sure to deter anyone from getting too comfortable about laying their asses where she didn’t want them. The Funerarium was one of those places, the staff should at least be used to her by now. She heard hurried steps head over to her. The Capitán extended her cane forward, halting the advance of whoever felt like greeting her at such speeds.
“Capitán!” one of the Funerarium workers blurted out, stopping just short of being impaled on her cane, “Please, please tell him to let me go I’ve been up there for the whole day!”
“Couldn’t have been longer than three hours, are you the only one here?”
She heard the Major catch up to them, barely hiding his contentment.
“I could only hold one in place, they dramatically planned an escape plan using this one as a sacrificial martyr so that the rest could go back down.”
“You can’t contain us like this!”
Still feeling the weight of their body against the bottom of her cane, the Capitán swerved it towards their legs to trip them up, landing them in the Major’s arms. While she let him handle the worker, the Capitán found the reception’s few remaining comfortable chairs, signaling to the Major that she wanted them sat down and still. The Funerarium workers had no hierarchy, even before the Capitán swatted away breakers and squatters from around and up the building, its internal ecosystem had been a long lived independent farm that she didn’t bother restructuring. They all hid their bodies and faces, perpetually smelling like char and disinfectant, an almost stereotypical representation of cleaners. But even cleaners stayed clear of this place, only dropping bags at the entrance and scurrying back to where they came from or where they would go next. Most importantly, none of the workers named themselves. They had to be a dozen still, too neurotic to consider ending their own lives, losing one or two a year would be a miraculous occurrence. The Capitán didn’t have to know which one she would be talking to, as far as she was concerned, all of the Funerarium workers were a hive mind that barely counted as terrans. But they kept this place running, and without them, she would have a thousand more problems to take care of, so she kept them safe from anyone that could bother them.
“You want out fast? Answer fast,” The Capitán proclaimed, sitting down as she heard the Major sit the worker, likely pressuring them under the weight of his hands.
“Ask, ask, ask,” The worker replied impatiently.
The Capitán liked that, even after muttering insults under their breath the whole time they were held up by the Major, they had swiftly decided that following her instructions was the best outcome for them.
“Has there been an unusual surplus in the amount bags coming your way in the last month? Enough to spike your charts.”
“No.”
“What about in the last three days?”
“No.”
The worker would not elaborate on their answers. The Capitán knew it was not out of pettiness but it still required her to step around with more questions if she wanted the full picture before they sprinted back down to their burrow.
“Has there been an unusual decrease in the amount of bags-”
“Yes.”
“Alright, describe what that means.”
“The chart is steady, always, always steady. Yesterday and today there was a dip in the amount of bags we received.”
“It’s truly that unusual?”
“Always, always steady. Less bags, we don’t notice, garbage comes and goes. No bags, we notice, garbage does not vanish.”
“Which means that some are taking their garbage elsewhere?”
“Could be.”
“Would you perhaps have any inkling of where else they would go for that purpose?”
The workers were always absorbed in their own fiefdom but they were still citizens of Last Kunlun, some of them moved around, talked with cleaners. It was a shot in the dark, but this one must have paid more attention to where litter ended up than the Capitán ever did.
“Some used to dig under trees, outside Volantis, not possible now.”
“So?”
“Black Lake.”
“I assume,” The Capitán groaned, passing her hands under her glasses and resting them against her eyes, “that even if they don’t end up in the Funerarium, the missing garbage still end up getting processed as lost.”
“Yes.”
“And who holds those records? Say it with me!”
“Van Kalkain,” the Capitán, the worker, and the Major all said in unison, in different tones.
This settled her visit to the Funerarium. If Raime were to wimp out of their agreement, the Capitán would likely be back to her own mental stalemate. The impulse to sic the Major onto the Pillar of Life and rip all the data she wanted out of his cold dead hands felt increasingly alluring. What she had failed to mitigate by intimidating San Carlo came back to bite her, as expected. City Hall held all of the personal imprints that people left behind, with this kind of tool in hand, she could have traced back the garbage discrepancy in mere minutes, World-Eater’s exact location in hours. The doors to the Funerarium swung open, letting way for the loud rolls of what the Capitán assumed to be the gurney holding June’s parent. She heard the worker shift in their seat.
“Can I go now? Please?”
“Knock yourself out,” The Capitán replied, waving them off.
They sprinted out of the Major’s grasp to welcome in the cleaner and most importantly to them, the gurney. The Major hesitated taking their place, he struggled to move at all. She could tell when he started to doubt himself, a hulking frame of his stature, unsure of where to put his foot next. Hadn’t this been what she had worked towards?
“I’d prefer if my next course of action didn’t solely rely on whether or not this Raime character shows up to our door at the crack of dawn. Did your sortie at the museum go well?”
After successfully dislocating him out of his staggered state, the Major finally sat down.
“I believe, I may have found the point of origin. If the representations are to be trusted, the phenomenon we dubbed World-Eater might be a reincarnation of the Marrow Knight, from the tale-”
“From the Marrow Tree?” The Capitán couldn’t help but twist her smile, “From what, a thousand years ago?”
“Yes,” The Major’s voice grew softer, “The murals, what had inspired the tale, showed a sight not dissimilar to what I have seen in the underbelly.
The Capitán focused on the noise surrounding her. The cleaner had left without lounging around and the worker sped through to the stairs after sending the body bag down a chute. They were now alone with only the faint buzzing of the lights above them for company. The Capitán dropped her smile and pouted.
“Interrupt me if I’ve misinterpreted something, but wasn’t the point of that story that the knight sacrificed themselves so that we’d be spared from whatever bullshit was going down before Jiù ēn?”
The lack of sleep was getting to her. Since letting Dove go, the Capitán had to make a lot of the leg work herself, which wouldn’t have been so exhausting if she had the Major next to her at all times. But she was the one who sent him to play in the dirt, and he came back bringing old rocks. History so ancient that it only still existed by sheer luck, what was she supposed to make of this? If this truly was the origin, what hope could she had to put a stop to a millennia old curse.?Was there even any in the first place? The Capitán squinted, the Major hadn’t interrupted her, waiting in obedient silence.
“Have we been lied to from the start, Major? Was this world always rotten to the core? Is this why we’re still here, even now?”
The Capitán remembered it, the faded lights against her eyes of that day where the Old Man addressed the city after the False Dusk. She had been in the middle of the crowd, small, alone, defenseless. It had taken all of her willpower and clawing at people to not get trampled to death. Finally hearing him talk, she had felt such disgust it still pulsated inside her heart, more than fifty years later. But had this been what he had faced? Incomprehensible oblivion. She knew where he ended up, his entire being becoming the embodiment of failure and abandon. The Capitán wouldn’t suffer the same fate, if the Marrow Knight dug its way out of the darkest corners of history, then she’d be the one to face it head on. Her smile comfortably took back its place. Enough foolishness. The Capitán raised a finger.
“Good job on your first independent mission. I wouldn’t have been able to do what you did.”
She could have but the Capitán had to admit the circumstances had been favorable for the Major to get his answers faster. The Major had been completely silent, not letting his joints even wheeze out a single whiff of air. It’s clear he wasn’t as validated as he imagined he’d be. It was still his first go at it, and while he did bring a tangible part of the puzzle, it lacked any foresight about what to do with it. Making any progress on a puzzle without a clear idea of where you’re going amounted to little more than plucking grass off the ground.
The piece of the puzzle that they just acquired also hadn’t been one she expected. An unusual lack of garbage was making its way down to the Caldera, this could mean that World-Eater was not as idle as the last few days of calm would’ve made her think. This was what the Capitán had been fearing, as Closer suggested maybe the anomaly had a gestation period that needed to be sated. If so, the slower she moved, the harder it’d get. She wondered if it would have been easier for her to grasp the situation if too much garbage was being produced instead. It would have accelerated something,at least. General unrest, panic, a disregard for discretion that would give her the justification she wanted to trample City Hall underfoot. The Capitán of the Cors would be forced to act, in defiance of whatever institutions they were still pretending to keep. But World-Eater proved itself to be a subtle sort, keeping her delicately walking, step after step, trying to understand if it even had a will to make this sort of elaborate plan with.
The workers in the Funerarium would provide no more help, they treated everything that ended in their arms the same way, privileged guests headed as fast as possible to the Hearth. The other option, reckless wishful thinking, was that there was only a shift in their data because moronic fucks in the Hull got tired of sending their garbage too far and decided to use Black Lake as a local dump. Either or, the Capitán would need Raime’s neck in her hands to get any answer from this cesspit they called a district. She should have dragged them directly with her but seeing how flustered and rattled they had been when they parted ways, giving them space still felt like the safest option to get them to come back. She was always careful, knowing full well the power the touch of her hand held against whoever knew her name. This one perpetually inched away from her, in a way the Capitán doubted they even noticed. Walking side by side, standing in the apartment, they held an instinctual distance, as if avoiding her grasp. How long until she would get to stick three fingers in their mouth, and them being thankful for it? Until then, Raime would be another one to the list of people she’d need to walk on eggshells around to keep them from fleeing like minnows. The Capitán yawned.
“How long until the Knight regales us with their morning call?”
“A few hours still,” The Major finally answered, his voice low.
“That’s as many hours of sleep I’ll get before I need to dive back in,” The Capitán rose, “Shall we? If I stay here any longer I’ll get brain fog.”
The Major followed without a complaint. It was obvious to her how insecure he was feeling, but the Capitán had no mind to pay attention to this now, he’d have all the time in the world to ruminate over this in class tomorrow.
“What are you planning, with Raime?”
“Do you want to know what I said to them or what I won’t say?”
“Ulterior motive…”
“Of course I had one, I wouldn’t bother bringing in a wild card like this otherwise, especially now. They’re my ticket into the Hull. The Old Man admitted in full confidence that he passed down the keys of Volantis to someone in the district. It’s a complete shot in the dark but bar from an uncharacteristic turnover from the old fart, this is our only hope of being granted this advantage.”
Walking together, for the first time since they stumbled upon World-Eater, Last Kunlun still recoiled around them. She could never see it, only appreciating it by hearing scattered steps, hidden gasps and the tempo of instruments, shifting with their arrival. Had rumors started to spread? “I’ve seen the Capitán in Freeway, alone!” “No way, is the Cors splitting up?” The kind of business the Knight took part in. They talk and they talk and they talk and then maybe, for a second, they start believing themselves. The Capitán had heard enough mindless prattle in her life to make up convincing chatter in her head. Seeing tentative Volantis seekers crumble under the weight of their own presumptions vindicated the Capitán in treating them like cattle. Let the masses gossip, it’s what she decided to protect, it’s the mantle she was born to wear. She extended her arm and the Major took it, the Capitán looked to the sky. Across the blurred sea of lights, she tried to discern the stars. From old stories and buried memories, she had kept their description with her, always. Lone points of light, from bright to fading, twinkling desperately across the endless expanse, like fireflies. But they were always out of reach, their fire too far away to ever reach her. The stars blessed the rest of the city, indiscriminate, but at that moment wasn’t she the only one looking up?