S. Grove - The Glass Sentence

“More than an entire day,” Sophia whispered, her voice choked. “I thought perhaps an hour—or two.”

“While you have been contemplating the maps of the Great Hall,” Blanca said, facing Sophia once again, “I have lost my chance to save the Glacine Age. The glaciers have advanced quickly. They have already covered the carta mayor . We are too late.”

“I don’t understand. You wanted the Glacine Age to cover the earth. Why didn’t you just wait for the glaciers to follow their own course? Why even bother to find the carta mayor ?”

“You have not yet gone beyond the hall,” Blanca said, with a weary wave of her hand. “You have not seen the Glacine Age as it exists now.” Her sigh seemed to carry years of exhaustion. “From the moment I learned who I was—from the moment your uncle freed me—it was my goal to return to my Age. I finally found my way to Tierra del Fuego, where I discovered a portion of the Glacine Age, whole and intact. Do you have any idea—can you imagine—the joy I felt at the chance to walk once again in my own Age? To be home ? I had so longed to hear my own language. To hear my name—” She uttered a sound that seemed unlike speech, but that suggested by its intonation a vivid lightness: glad and bright and somehow young. “You must know what I mean. You have hardly been gone from New Occident, and yet I am sure you long to return there.”

Sophia knew it was not the same, but recalling her home on East Ending Street, she had some sense of what Blanca felt. “I think so.”

“Well then,” Blanca said, her voice catching, “imagine what it would be like to return to Boston, your beloved city, and find it deserted—in ruins. Not a living soul anywhere. Only the remains of the lives that once filled it.”

Sophia could not help but glance through the pyramid’s wall at the ice city below. “The Age was deserted?”

Blanca gave a bitter laugh. “Entirely deserted. The whole of the Glacine Age was an empty shell—a lifeless husk. Its people were long since dead. Its cities were falling into ruin. All that remained was ice and stone. The world I remembered was gone— is gone.”

“But I don’t understand.” Sophia moved back to stand against the wall. “Isn’t this the Age you belong to? An Age with living people in it?”

“No one, it seems, can return to the world of their own past.” Blanca moved to stand beside her. “It is, indeed, my Age. But I was twenty at the time of the Disruption, and by the time I returned, more than eighty years had passed. The Glacine Age as I knew it was destroyed. The ice triumphed. Every living thing perished. Nothing but the glaciers survive.”

“But I saw people walking below,” Sophia protested.

“You saw the Lachrima,” Blanca said dully. “The Lachrima born of this new border. There are hundreds of them. Those are the only cursed creatures who will inhabit this Age now.

“Comprehending the full destruction of my Age, I gave it up for lost. But then I heard the Nihilismian myth, and I believed there could be truth in it; I felt hope again. If I could find the carta mayor, I would be able to rewrite history, avert the destruction; I would be able to make the Glacine Age whole, living once more.” Blanca stared out at the frozen expanse beyond the walls. “While searching for the carta mayor , I learned that the Age was advancing northward. Like an expanding tomb, the glaciers were overtaking the earth, and my Age—the wondrous Age I knew and loved—would never exist.” She put her hand against the pyramid wall. “I was too late. I am too late.”

Sophia gazed out over the empty city, stunned. She looked south across the vast white expanse, imagining the thousands of miles of deserted ice, the frozen cities slowly crumbling, the underground warrens disintegrating. The glaciers were reclaiming everything in their path. Sophia glanced up at Blanca’s scarred face, and she was sure that she could see grief in her featureless expression. What could possibly be worse, she thought, than losing not only one’s family, one’s friends, one’s home, but one’s entire living world? Sophia extended her hand tentatively and placed it in Blanca’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Blanca pressed Sophia’s hand. As they watched, the storm overhead drew north, passing over the pyramid and following the advancing glaciers. Blanca turned her back, releasing Sophia’s hand. “The storm is moving quickly,” she said, more to herself than to Sophia. “There isn’t much time.” Reaching into her cloak, she pulled out the four maps and handed them to Sophia, who held them for a moment, surprised, before stowing them in her pack. Then Blanca drew from her neck the silk scarf that had once been her veil and dropped it over the pyramid that stood on the round stone. “Take this map,” she said. “It will hold some of the answers you seek.”

Sophia took the wrapped pyramid-map in her arms. “What are you going to do?”

“We must disperse the waters of the carta mayor .”

“But why?”

“I know it is difficult to accept without explanation, child, but the glaciers will stop their advance if we take the carta mayor out of its path. The map must be prevented from joining with the glacier.”

“I don’t understand,” Sophia said desperately.

“It is a living map of the world. As its contents freeze, so does the earth freeze. Do you understand?” Sophia nodded hesitantly. “Then understand that, if we can ensure that the waters of the map travel into the warm soil below ground, the glaciers will halt.” She paused. “You know what we must do—you have seen it.” Blanca’s voice was gentle, reassuring “We will roll this stone into the lake. When the stone falls, it will rupture the lake bed, and the waters will channel into the underground tunnels. Unreadable, yes. But safe.”

“But the hall will collapse! All the maps—and the waters below. Shadrack will never read them. I’ll never find out . . .”

Blanca looked at her in silence, her scars furrowing with pity. “I know, child, I know. I know what a loss it will be. But you must understand: the carta mayor below us is freezing as we speak. The living map of the world will turn into a solid block of ice. It is too late for me to rewrite the history of my Age, and it is too late for you to read the history of yours. If we preserve the map, you will not read it, but perhaps someone else, in the future, may. The waters could be pooled together, made to figure the world once more. Would you stand in the way of such a possibility?”

It seemed to Sophia that all the loss she had felt over the years had swelled, drop by drop, into a vast pool as wide as the lake. Now she hung suspended over it. She would fall into it and drown, she knew, and there was no choice but to plunge in. “No,” she whispered.

“I knew you would say so,” Blanca replied gently. “Then help me bring it down.” And she threw herself against the stone. Her face contorted horribly as she pushed with all her might, but the sphere remained immobile. Sophia stood, paralyzed with indecision, then she put her pack and the map down and moved to help her. The moment she added her own weight, the stone gave way and began rolling. “Hurry!” Blanca cried. “Step back!” She heaved with all her strength, so that the sphere rolled more and more quickly and finally reached the edge of the balcony where it burst through, shattering the railing, meeting a long silence as it fell toward the frozen lake below.

Time slowed, and the stone hung in midair. It was as if Sophia stood before a window, through which she could see the disappearance of all the truths she would never learn—the mysteries that would remain mysteries. And then, to her surprise, she saw a face. It was her own: the sad, forlorn child who had waited by the dusty window of her imagination. The child did not seem frightened by the prospect of seeing the glass shattered; on the contrary, she seemed relieved—even glad. After all, the window had never given her the vision she so wanted; it had only kept her closed in, away from the world.