The Everburning City

Act 1, Part 6, Chapter 23

Vincent

The sun had set hours ago, and as the world cooled with the coming of night, the winds had picked up. It always did; the hours after sunset were called the whistling hours in the fields. As the heat in the air faded, the difference in temperature from the air near the Spire grew, and the winds rising up and away from the City's inner districts grew.

This close to the City, barely ten miles from the outer districts, the Spire itself was a solid bar of light so wide it took his entire hand to cover the breadth of it. The shadow behind Vincent was pronounced and had clear edges, a shrunken thing hiding in his wake, barely extending half a foot from where he stood. On this cloudless night, the Spire's long arc was visible, bowing west as if it were chasing after the setting sun.

Vincent had been staring at it for the last few minutes. He could hear the single note of its roar even from where he stood, a single constant note that likely hadn't changed its tenor or volume since long before he was born. Starting at the Spire, listening to the call of its fire, helped keep him from thinking about a feeling that had been gnawing at his stomach in the recent hour since his master arrived.

It was partly because he felt guilty about feeling it. He had, just today, witnessed people getting chopped to pieces because they were trying to do the same to him. He had caused Barleybarrel a lot of grief by saving them, and then by letting himself be saved. He had comrades to grieve, and an unrelenting enemy that had proven itself even more dangerous than just Golems or Gloamtaken. And even with those griefs weighing on his shoulders, it wasn't what occupied his thoughts.

And it wasn't until he started listening to the Spire, that he could stop thinking about the fact that he now needed to leave the Rangers. He knew what would be expected of them now, that he had spent some time with them. They would be the vanguard in any offensive action, the rearguard of any retreat. And Vincent had a sense that whatever lurked in the Gloam recognized them now. Perhaps, if it was as conscious and deliberate as Vincent feared, it remembered the red coats or white scarves from previous invasions. But despite their courage, even Poe and Cadmus, Volenski, Varnell, even Redgrave, were all just flesh and blood. They didn't have a will to oppose the ruinous powers the Gloam could bring to bear.

Vincent didn't realize how much being a part of the Rangers meant to him, until now. When he had to give it up.

"Garland liked to claim that thing was perfectly straight," Olivia Polden said.

Vincent blinked, and shook his head. It took him more than a couple of seconds to realize what his master was talking about. He pointed up to the long bow in the sky, before the Spire either ended, or was obscured from even his sight, empowered as it was by the Craft. "He thought that looked straight?" he asked, and laughed a little as he stared up. "Not that it's my place to second guess Crafter Kohl, but..."

"He said the only reason it doesn't look straight is a trick of our perspective. The world turns, and so our perspective of that tower of fire is distorted to make it look like it bends. He believed our eyes were never meant to take in something as massive as the Spire." Vincent's master took off her glasses and brushed the thick glass on her coat. Given all the dust she tended to carry, the lenses had already developed several scratches. But despite how little the glasses helped, his master kept using them, despite how easily she could conjure up eyes that worked far, far better.

"He was also fond of saying our imaginations were attempting to devour reality. That our minds could someday devour all that was real, and begin to consume everything that was possible," Vincent recalled. "I think that point deserves to be recalled, considering what he did for us."

A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Vincent turned to see a Crafter he didn't recognize. "Crafter Kohl was also fond of saying that you had to strive to make a bad idea work, on the possibility that your opinion of it is wrong. It was his last lesson to me, just yesterday morning."