At the nord-west edge of the city, in the Minnow Gardens, sat the most secluded habitations in Last Kunlun. Most had been demolished prior to the Exodus, as they had begun sinking in the artificial marsh that made up most of the district. What remained were isolated wards, grand and intricate houses that didn’t attract many. The most unsociable people still preferred to live in smaller nooks, in districts like Freeway or even the Hull, where they could blend in shadows and not attract any attention. The last who decided to live in this place had to thrive in silence and humidity, as such, the few homes left standing had no lights turned on as the Sun set over the gardens.
The Capitán had taken the same route along the green line, taking her back past Universalis. The last of the attendees would take the aerobus going in the other direction, the few that boarded the bus with her hadn’t struck a conversation. She paid attention to their voices, if they could focus on her then they hadn’t encountered more of what she saw in the underbelly. A temporary respite or the calm before the storm? She was now alone with her thoughts until reaching the line’s terminus. Was it unfair for her to pity everyone else that lived their lives today as if nothing had changed? It wasn’t the first time she felt this way, two decades had passed but the Stillborn remained the biggest challenge she had to face as the Capitán. She undoubtedly came out of the situation with an even stronger grip over the city, she was happy about it, the Major was happy she was happy about it. She doubted any goodwill garnered since would change the outcome of the situation she was about to get herself into. She had a list of people she had to visit to draw a mental perimeter for this situation, better get the worst one done with as soon as possible.
“Terminus, Aery. This vehicle will turn back in the direction of Grande Gate in twenty minutes.”
The monotone announcement of the conductor frame indicated her time to break out of her planning. The chill air of sundown told her she’ll head back to check on her flock once she was done, there were limits to what she could manage alone. Had the Capitán been granted sight at birth, she’d have taken a scenic route in the gardens at night. She only knew by hearsay of the enthralling walks one could do, accompanied by fireflies, through the abandoned wards of the gardens to the station of Freeway. As she was, attempting to do so would make her sink in even the shallowest lake and her glorious life would end by sleeping alongside the minnows. The prospect seemed appeasing now, unfortunately she reached the entrance of the Aery.
One of the few utilitarian buildings of the nord wards, the place had once been a sanctuary for the last birds of the world. Aside from worms and minnows, small avian species had stuck around the longest. A true effort had been made to let them live in this enclosed glass case as the outside world grew colder. Over the years, even as generations were born in captivity, the different species had all decided, in an unspoken agreement to stop breeding. It was sudden, silent, there was no forcing them. All of these frail beings would rather let themselves starve than to nurse their eggs. Who could even treat such a widespread decision? No consensus was reached by City Hall even as their change of behavior had already led most of the species to extinction.
The possibility of defying Jiù ēn’s deprecated laws and artificially keeping the birds alive, forcing the cycle to continue despite their inexplicable desires must’ve crossed the minds of the Aery. Yet they did nothing, letting the glass cage grow more and more silent. Once the last sparrow took its last breaths, the true last bird, the magpie of Kunlun’s flag, was let go. It flew away, even when it had nowhere to go, and noone saw it again. It was a story she’d been told as a child. The Capitán often wondered, with some strange bitterness, why the Aery hadn’t released them all once they understood there was nothing to be done. The last magpie was freed decades before she was born, only living in tales, but she had dreamed about it. She had to imagine the movements of its wings, the colors in its wake, the sounds it used to make, but she knew its form.
The Capitán opened the great doors of the Aery she knew were never left locked and entered the inner sanctum. Without utilities and birds to populate it, the place echoed her arrival and she made her way through the sanctum, following sounds of scraping against wood. Her hand brushed against the flat of workshop tables along her path, collecting sawdust on her fingers until she encountered a sculpted object. The sounds of woodwork hadn’t stopped but the Capitán held her approach, taking the object in her hands and tucking her cane under her arm.
“Which one is this? It feels smaller than most,” the Capitán announced nonchalantly.
The sculpture fit in her hand, light in her grasp. She went over the details in the carvings with her fingers, discerning small and unfurled wings, a short beak and an even shorter tail.
“A robin,” A stern voice answered, as the sounds of knife against bark continued. “I have never seen one myself, I don’t know whether I’m proud of it just yet.”
Across a labyrinth of tables, hidden in the intoxicating smell of freshly cut wood, sat the oldest living person in Last Kunlun. The majority of the population, as they do, only called him the “Old Man” even before the title truly fit him. A legend for many, as the human had long left public appearances behind him. But he was still there, in the derelict Aery, sculpting alone.
“You’ll run out of birds to make one day,” The Capitán sneered, gently placing the robin down on the workshop.
“Not before I run out of wood.”
“I know you still have the Scavs deliver you every month, you will run out of birds first.”
“Mhm.”
How old was he now? She had met him last during the year of the Stillborn, he had been 138 years old then. Life took its time with terrans, most everyone had the opportunity to leave on their own terms and a lot of his generation did. He stayed however. The Capitán only supposed she was his only visitor in years, he was truly invisible for all and yet. She had asked, some times, in some places what people thought of him. Opinions differed but they all treated him like an untouchable entity. He was there, they all were sure of it, but where? Noone could tell. In the end, in the public consciousness he was a respected spectral presence not unlike the Doctors.
The Capitán knew he didn’t sleep among the sawdust, the Old Man lived in an unimpressive apartment at the border between the gardens and Helix, west of the city, and walked to the Aery every single day. There had been a time where she was monitoring his movements with zealous efficiency but none of her efforts yielded anything of value. She would have kept going if she had a Dove to spare then, but she couldn’t waste the Major on observation duty for years on end. She thought, in the silence left in the conversation, that everyone would be better off if he was truly dead, instead of living like a ghost. It would also spare her from the present moment where she came to terms with the fact the conversation had died.
“We need to talk,” the Capitán declared, with a confrontational sharpness to her tone.
“You know how we talk.”
The Old Man had stopped working on his next sculpture, and rose from his station. They both headed in one motion to a table in the center of an atrium. The Capitán had to maneuver around statues of tall birds that reached her waist, some with wings that spanned so large they felt like intentional obstacles. She groaned under her breath, mentally torn between making her annoyance known and not giving him the pleasure of inconveniencing her.
“I would rather we skip the pleasantries, I have more people to visit as soon as I can,” the Capitán said.
“Then you better play well, or has it been too long? You can go back and learn the rules again.”
“Spare me.”
They both sat opposite of each other, the table had a board, two bowls of stones and a small tablet the size of her hand. The tablet had garnered dust, the Capitán sighed loudly and cleaned it against her elbow. She had sought him out for the first time after having publicly announced herself as the Capitán of the Cors. He had refused to talk, rather, he refused to speak with the Capitán as an entity and to the Major entirely. She found him almost amicable when talking about his own sculptures and their significance, however once she brought up any topic related to her station, he clammed up and didn’t entertain any argument. Instead, he offered a game. It came off as a needlessly cruel joke, but appealing for fairness hadn’t worked. “You’re playing a game, you come to me to strengthen your rules. If you want me to talk, you will play mine.”
The Old Man’s game was simple, four round stones, two of black and two of whites were placed in the center of a nineteen by nineteen grid. In turn, both of them would add a piece of their own color on the board. Following a strict rule of action, they worked towards control of the board, choking out the possibilities of their opponent.
Their first game had left the Capitán trembling with rage. She couldn’t even pretend being naturally unable to play, the Old Man had anticipated her arrival and carved symbols that she could use to differentiate her black stones from his whites. The accomodation felt so insulting that her pride forced her to follow thorugh but the mental burden of keeping track of the entire board on her first game against a clearly weathered veteran ended in a swift defeat. Even if considerable time had passed for her to speak her mind, she had not strung a single coherent sentence, too focused on trying to stay afloat, spreading her pieces erratically. The more she’d struggle, the more she felt control slip away from her at every turn.
The newly appointed Capitán had left him for last, the city was hers, the Old Man was supposed to keel over and bow to her. As their first game ended, her mind was throbbing, a pulsating desire to claw at his throat and make him spit out what she needed to know clouded her eyes. She remembered vividly having to bite down on her tongue to stop herself from hurling insults. She could not lose herself this early, he had warned her that as he’d entertain a dialogue under these rules, any transgressions to his boundaries would be a door forever closed to her. The Capitán could not have risked it.
Wordlessly, they set up the board, digging in their respective pile of stones. The tablet she had cleaned whirred itself to life, presenting a mirrored image of the board and its current pieces. It was not a gift from the Old Man, she had commissioned Armageddon to build it for her as the myrrh’s first assignment. The device would allow her to feel on her right hand the position of every piece in real time instead of having to map out the board constantly, a task that deeply strained her and stretched the outcome of the game whithout leaving her any time to speak. It was a long shot, she’d expected him to reject the idea, as the tablet needed to be actively connected to his old fashioned board, but he waved it off. “I don’t see an issue, it won’t make you play any better.” She wanted to kill him then.
“What do you want from me now?” The Old Man spoke, as she made her first move, “I thought you finally gave up.”
“You taught me to save my breath, do the same and look at those.”
The Capitán took out the camera from her coat and slid it on the left side of the table, the well polished wood offering smooth travel to the other side where the Old Man caught it. They both exchanged moves with little downtime as she heard him flipping through the camera’s contents. She had been sixteen during her first game, she had had the time to get better. Their conversation was limited from the first move to the last both would make. She had tried stalling, but he noticed immediately and she never attempted cheating him again. The fragility of this agreement was unbearable. The Capitán needed things, words from him that no other still living could offer and he needed nothing from her. She’d dream of his death, his secrets would die with him but the inevitability of the situation offered her comfort. Yet every day he was there, as if taunting her, as if he woke up every morning, following the same dull routine, just to spite her. So she learned his game, she got better, their meetings would be more productive to her own gains. He always crushed her, even when she tried researching books from masters who lived before the Exodus, even prior to Jiù ēn’s arrival. Words on paper so old they had been encased in dry ice couldn’t help her gain an upper hand. The game was older still, the Old Man had pushed her in a bottomless lake of millennia of strategies that she needed to claw herself out of. A few minutes had to be enough, a few minutes where her hand needed to be swift and her mind ready.
“Do you want to tell me what I’m looking at?” The Old Man sighed, putting down the camera on the table.
“Floor minus 1, 2 and 3 of the calderan underbelly, entrance under the abandoned vehicle depot near Versal. The photos show only around the entrance but it goes deep. Rogue excavation crew had been digging in pre-Exodus garbage for a few months, went dark at sundown yesterday. This morning Major and I went to check ourselves. What you saw is all that welcomed us.”
“It took the pictures?”
“Closer did, don’t be jealous I called him first.”
The Old Man didn’t comment on that. Their dialogue hadn’t interrupted the game, she had learned that he was always mentally a few steps ahead of her, making his plays almost absentmindedly. Any time wasted on her turn widened this gap.
“Talk to me,” The Capitán snapped impatiently, “You don’t have to describe to me what you saw, I smelled it. This is completely unprecedented, I doubt you’ve seen anything like this from before I was born but if you did-”
“I didn’t, not ever.”
“Closer told me it would be apparent, the aftermath of what happened down there isn’t just a horrific mess. Everything is in a state of stasis. Exposed flesh, organs and blood, nothing is rotting or clotting. ”
“Alright,” The Old Man interrupted her again, sliding a stone between his fingers and depositing it gently, forming a coil around her advance at his side of the board.
The Capitán lightly bit down on her tongue, feeling the pressure under her right hand from the tablet’s adaptive protrusions. He had perked up at the mention of stasis but deep in her soul, she truly expected him to react more. He had lived outside of Last Kunlun, he had seen the sky illuminated by a warm and reassuring Sun, he had been raised under it, cradled in the merciful embrace of Jiù ēn. When they left, leaving Terra to its final days, he had stayed. Carried Volantis to Last Kunlun, leading the last terrans to their sepulcher. More than a century had passed since, the Sun slowly fading out of its strength, putting the rest of Terra in a cold, deep sleep. Half a century had passed since the Sun was expected to flicker out of existence, yet life went on, she remembered that day as if she were still living in it. She had been in that crowd, looking to him for guidance, to the man who took them home, to the one whose name everyone had forgotten or noone had ever known.
“Keep talking to me, Old Man,” She continued, attempting to hide the desperation in her voice, “1 is dead, you’re the only one left who was alive during the Exodus. Do you have anything, and I mean anything for me, that I can use so that whatever happened down there doesn’t happen again?”
The Old Man scoffed loudly, pressing hid advance without a hint of hesitation. She recognized that tone, inevitable once she sat at this table. The Capitán didn’t have to suffer his gaze but his voice was enough, towering, relishing in the pity he bestowed upon her.
“You talk in broad strokes, invoke a distant past only I remember. The Capitán doesn’t know how to play pretend because she doesn’t need to. You make yourself sound apologetic, humble even, you eat your tongue and play my game in hopes I see something in you, worthy of my blessing. In hopes I give you Volantis.”
The Capitán slapped a stone on the board, indicating she was abandoning her doomed platoon to focus on expanding elsewhere. She raised her hands dramatically.
“You got me! Wouldn’t that be useful? Feel free to interrupt me if I’m wrong again but if you don’t have any more idea about what could cause a dozen able bodies adults to burst into gore then you can agree that having access to the city’s complete power grid would be a sensible idea?”
Had she truly lost touch? The board felt so hostile to her, she hadn’t practiced in two decades even though she had forced the rest of the Cors to learn the game so she could stay in shape. After the year of the Stillborn, the Capitán truly thought she would never set foot in the Aery again. She wanted to know what his face looked like. Had the images shaken him? Surely the bastard wasn’t so much built of the same wood he was carving as to not be a little rattled by such a sight. His rhythm of play hadn’t faltered so she could only guess.
“A sensible idea to give the Capitán of the Cors, her war machine and her lobotomized apostles access to Volantis, hm. You didn’t come more convincing than twenty years ago.”
“Give me a break, think in the now. You woke up today and I doubt you use the Knight as your alarm. You will wake up tomorrow as well, do you want whatever caused this mess to catch you in your sleep, catch anyone?” The Capitán leaned forward, “Catch your kid?”
She couldn’t help but crack a smile when she noticed his moves had stopped, halting his relentless assault for the first time. She hid it as best as fast as she could but did not kid herself, he’d seen it.
“I don’t mind if you don’t let me be the one managing Volantis, truly I don’t,” the Capitán pressed on, “I’ve changed in those years, my goal hasn’t but I’ve grown as the Capitán. I don’t want anybody to get hurt and I know we can agree on that. You’re not dead yet, take it in your hands once more like when you brought it to this city! Root out whatever tumor I’ve found, keep all the glory I couldn’t care less.”
“Glory,” The Old Man spat the words, “You claim to have changed but even uttering this word right now betrays you.”
His plays didn’t stagger for long. Her pieces on his side of the board hadn’t been conquered yet, he must’ve predicted her intent on sacrificing them, starting another offensive would only make the game end faster. She had to expand, fast, play as erratically as she could to take advantage of this crack in his armor. She had known he had sired a child, but like his partner the details had evaded her. All that had mattered to her then was finding ways to get through him and she had only met a wall. The Capitán didn’t present herself as a gossip machine, but while the Old Man was crushing her on the board she had to make an advance on her own terms.
“You will never understand me or what I do, I came to terms with that. Look beyond me, in the name of the entire city, of everyone that’s left, do something.”
“Has anything else happened since then?” the Old Man replied calmly, his voice already losing its bite, “Have you heard word of this… plague spreading?”
“Not yet, I would rather not wait for whatever it is to start moving on its own terms.”
“Then you have work ahead of you, Capitán.”
His pieces were encroaching on both of her active fronts, her attempt to climb back to surround him amounted to nothing. Once again her efforts felt pitiful but she had given up on beating him before stepping foot in the Aery. Her attempt at a verbal joust had only mildly irritated him, she should’ve known better. Only a few moves left until she’d be forced to surrender, she felt every second slip away from her.
“Could another ever inherit this knowledge from you?” she hissed, sweat had begun pearling between the fingers laid on the tablet, “I have met your son today, there is a light in his voice that made me sure of it. You are not present in his life, haven’t been for a while. If not him then could someone else?”
“You’d hope I haven’t yet, and what? Send one of your apostles to the Aery in your stead? Do not embarass yourself further. I have already passed on the location of Volantis. To someone from the Hull”
The Capitán barely restrained herself from hurling a very vivid insult. The Old Man knew it was the only district she had little to no influence in, for a man of such little activities he kept up well with her current affairs. She could blame the Knight for that, the list of people she wished would join the underbelly’s meat festival grew by the second. The irritation had backfired on her as she placed her last piece. The Capitán had at least retained enough knowledge from her numerous games against the Old Man to know when she had lost. She laid back in her chair, keeping her back straight and her eyes to the ceiling. She kept a stone rolling between her fingers, the markings on both sides of the piece brushing against her skin. The veil covering her vision only offered muted grays, the Sun had to be setting by now. Last Kunlun would be reborn in its full luster and she would go back empty-handed with an incomprehensible crisis incubating. Such was the Capitán’s burden.
“So be it then,” she sighed, “I yield, I yield.”
The Old Man didn’t reply, placing his final stone, fully controlling the position she had attempted at the start of the game, for good measure maybe. He picked up the pieces from the board and put them back in their respective bowls. Without her hand or stones on the board, the tablet hummed to silence. He stretched out his hand to her wordlessly, a movement the Capitán could not have heard. The silence prompted her to let go of the stone in her hand and she dropped it in the bowl on her side of the table.
“I ask this to you directly, do you truly not care? Do you think maybe I lied?”
“I think you are too proud to lie, and I think you are not capable of speaking to me directly.”
“That so?” the Capitán scoffed, “All of the conversations outside of our games were not from me?”
“I thought so, maybe I was wrong, age does not always make you right.”
The Capitán was weary of his attitude. She got up of her chair and headed for the exit, brushing against the tall wooden birds in her path. She’ll miss them. It was undeniable the man had garnered an impressive collection, one his self inflicted exile prevented many from ever seeing it. The last birds of Terra would never leave this place. She tapped her cane on the tiled floor to catch his attention one last time.
“Even if we make it out of this, I don’t expect to come back. I’m sorry it hasn’t been a pleasure, this city could’ve been a better place for everyone if you had worked with me.”
“It won’t haunt my dreams,” the Old Man said dryly, having gone back to work on his sculpture.
“Who knows what could.”