away. But then, it was trash, like his plans; he didn’t care about it anymore.
The blade clattered and slid and stopped short of the edge and Orholam both.
The old prophet turned and looked at it, then at Gavin, then turned back to looking at the horizon without taking any more interest.
Gavin strode over to the old man.
The old man didn’t respond, so Gavin sat. He dangled his feet off the edge of the bloody tower.
Orholam didn’t say a word. Gavin was reminded of their days rowing together. After a long hard day of rowing, sometimes, a rest would come, and they would simply sit. In such times, there would be no chatter. Bone-weary, there was nothing to say, but there was a silent communion in the rest from their mutual labor.
As they had then, now in the cool of the evening, they sat together.
What did anything matter now? There was no rush. It was too late. Someone else was steering the ship. Someone else calling the cadence. A broken-down slave wasn’t going to change history.
Gavin was about to be cut free from his oar and tossed overboard; he was human jetsam.
In his dream of this tower top, Gavin had begged the approaching giant for more time; he’d wanted to fix things. Fix himself, he supposed, as he’d held his black-marbled heart in his hands, as if he could disentangle the living and the dead flesh knotted together using instruments as blunt and clumsy as his fingers.
The truth was, he was hopelessly broken, and time wasn’t going to fix him. Now he was out of time. But maybe he’d been out of time for years. If he’d had another century, he would still be himself.
But a stillness descended on him as he sat there with the old man. He beheld the horizon, and though he saw only in a bichromatic palette made painful by his recent vision of the sunset in full color on the other side of the glass, he was filled to overflowing with wonder. What was absent to his blinded eyes was yet there.
He could remember beauty, could remember how this gray-scale tone would correspond to a lemon yellow blushing to sweet tangerine. Velvet violet was stitched with subtle seams into the soft samite blanket of night, embroidered with silver points of light.
It was there, and he knew it was there, knew it was more real than what his eyes could presently see.
“What do you miss most?” Orholam asked quietly, not turning.
They’d failed together, Gavin supposed. Orholam had climbed up here, after he’d been ‘told’ not to come, and perhaps he believed now he was being punished for his disobedience by finding nothing here. His world had to be shit right now, too.
What came to mind wasn’t what Gavin expected, though.
“When I called down that . . . holocaust at Sundered Rock, I didn’t know what it was going to do. Not exactly. I mean, I knew it was going be bad, but . . . I came to, standing there, naked. The black just devoured everything. And that hot day turned cold. Bitter cold. Frigid. Even my brother’s body was cold. I couldn’t tell how long it had been—if I’d been unconscious on my feet for hours, or if the hell-stone magic sucked in even heat and it had only been moments.
“You know, I was the one person on that battlefield who should have understood what had happened, and I was . . . baffled. My skin was hairless in spots, but unharmed otherwise, but my clothes had disintegrated? I felt I had broken the world, like I’d cracked open an egg and something terrible had been released. But in that moment, there, among the dead . . . even the dying didn’t seem to moan. Or maybe I was deaf. I don’t know, but it was so still, as if a ripple of what I’d done was traveling out to infinity. Amid all that, I experienced this moment out of time, as if passing realms had locked here and the pressure had built until the earth heaved and everything fractured. Suddenly the landscape was changed, and you could only pray that the tensions had been relieved and that the aftershocks wouldn’t destroy you.
“Something had happened that was bigger than I could even understand . . . but it had passed, and these stupid, normal, boring-ass concerns came rushing back. Like: I was naked. And I couldn’t find my friends. And first it, it, it wasn’t even