Now I am
filled with the weight of the dread occasioned by the coming battle. That is my
preoccupation. Sharing with the mastodon only helped me bear it, as Jerem Cozak
must have meant. But the dread increased when Marcus came to urge me to come up
on the deck again.
“There is a
thing I would have you explain to me,” he said.
The clouds
were glowing orange and red and purple over the western horizon when we climbed
through the hatch, and I thought for one absurd moment that the Neverborn did
not understand a sunset. But then he gestured to the south, where dark shapes
reared up, jagged edges and cutting peaks climbing higher and higher through
the clouds until they overwhelmed all expectation.
“The Spine
of the World,” I said, “the highest mountains Thaeron has.” I shrugged. “I have
always wanted to see them. There is, or was, great debate in the Temple as to
their origin.”
His eyes
widened. “Not Earth nor any other world had mountains such as these. These must
be twice as high. How are they traversed?”
I shrugged,
wondering if he had become more like Julius now. “They are not, or at least
they are no longer. In the wars between the cities, Kasora once had great
advantage because of it Arks, which could fly even over these. Now everyone
travels Ostara by ship, just as we are.”
He frowned.
“These Arks,” he said. “What are they?”
I shrugged.
“Few living have seen them. Since they closed, they are sealed away in the
vaults beneath Kasora, tended only by the highest-ranking Historians. But they
are said to be golden spheres as high as a man standing, and that they went
wherever their riders wished, and unleashed great energies.”
“They are
closed, you say?”
I nodded.
“Sealed, and inert. It is said they stopped responding sometime before the army
of the first Faith marched on Kasora to end the wars between the cities. There
is no record of him fighting them, as there surely would be if he had.”
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