Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

In one spot on the map, he recognized the path he had taken. It was black. He pinpointed his location generally and mentally marked the spidery legs of the tunnels. He assumed that blue meant water, red—magma? He wondered if those substances still flowed there. Probably not; tens of thousands of years would have altered the pools or bodies of water from where they’d originated. Mikel let go of that spot on the wall and the map disappeared.

He carefully replaced the panel and positioned his hands in their previous position on the tiles. Pao and Rensat filled his vision as before, the room reappearing as if the tiles had gone transparent—or, more likely, were projecting data like the big TVs at sporting events, only at a far greater level of detail. He wondered if they were doing the same thing on the other side, feeding data to the Galderkhaani. The two were in slightly different positions; of course they were. The present day had unfolded while he studied the map.

Once more mentally present, Mikel was swept up in the shuddering feeling of unearthliness. The tiles also felt it, felt something, or maybe they were causing it: the glow intensified slightly.

What’s going on? Mikel thought uneasily.

He looked into the ghostly room. Rensat was closing a door in the glass panel behind her, having just come from the massive chamber.

“I do not understand,” she said. “You felt it, I felt it, yet the tiles tell me there is no one else out there.”

Are they feeling it too? Mikel wondered. Or are they somehow sensing me?

“Is it possible?” Pao asked, a trace of hope in his voice. “After so much time, their eternal silence—is it possible ?”

“I would like to think that devotion is rewarded,” Rensat said with a bitter smile. “But why would the Candescents wait until now to reveal themselves? Now, when we are very nearly beaten.”

“Perhaps that is the reason,” Pao suggested. He raised his shoulders weakly. “Who can know the mind and will of the Candescents?”

Unlike Pao, the woman’s voice and expression seemed utterly without hope. “Everyone has been so elusive for so long. The traitor. Our dear Vol. This witch or ascended soul or demonic Technologist—whatever she was who tore the rest apart at the end.” She looked at Pao. “Maybe it is time to depart.”

Pao looked around. “Our existence mattered, though, Rensat. We have failed to save Galderkhaan but we proved the cazh , finally. We remained bonded.” His eyes sought hers lovingly. “That is not a small thing.”

“I still feel as though I have failed.” Rensat smiled thinly. “We are denied the higher planes. We are denied the fellowship and richness of others, of rising to the cosmic plane. That was the reason for the cazh . That was the reason you joined us that first time when we were much younger.”

“I stayed because I loved you as I loved Vol,” Pao said, gently correcting her.

Rensat hugged herself. “I am afraid to leave, Pao. I am afraid to face an eternity in this way.”

“At least we are transcended, not merely ascended,” Pao pointed out. “We are not in silent isolation.”

Mikel recognized the words from the library. Ascendant… transcendent… Candescent. Was there a hierarchy, like angels? Was this the root of all faith? There was still so much he did not understand in just the few things they had said. A witch—what kind of aberration was that?

Without realizing it, Mikel’s hands had moved, like they were resting on the planchette of a Ouija board. Suddenly another image, this one clearly a window into the past, swept across his field of view. Momentarily disoriented, then horrified, he was looking at a courtyard, hearing human screams. The floor of the courtyard was full of carvings—and stones. Olivine tiles. All around him people in yellow and white robes were engulfed in walls of fire. They were shrieking in anguish as they died a torturous death. Feeling sick, Mikel forced himself to keep looking, to see the volcano erupting in the distance.

A caldera filled with lava , he thought. One of the orange spots on the map?

As he let his mind absorb the spectacle of people burning, their souls clinging to their tortured, disintegrating bodies, their hands linked and their melting tongues trying hard to utter words, he experienced some of the fury of the volcano. But this was not just a window to a disaster. It showed more: bodies falling from ethereal shapes— souls ? Some were only there for a moment before blinking out. Others rose away in pairs.

He looked desperately through the image for the Galderkhaani Pao and Rensat had been discussing: the witch, the demonized figure, the one who would not seem to belong. His eyes were drawn to a dim figure above the flames, above the city, hovering in the sky like a banshee of Irish lore. He tried to bring her into focus but lost the image when his fingers returned to their previous position.

Pao and Rensat returned, standing still and silent like clothes stored for the winter. Is this how they had spent part of their endless time as earthbound spirits? In some kind of contemplative stasis? Did time even have any meaning for them? Without periods of sleep to measure the hours, did the destruction of Galderkhaan seem no more than a few decades distant?

Mikel began to search through the images again, posing himself a scientific question: here on this side of Antarctica there were no volcanoes. The bedrock had long since been mapped. Yet if he was here watching history, there had been a volcano, at the very least the remnants of a caldera somewhere. Unless—

Absolute devastation , he answered himself. The mountain must have been leveled, then swallowed by the sea, then ice.

Rensat and Pao began to move again. They were still very silent. Suddenly, Mikel felt a very low, slow vibration pass through the room. The walls themselves were vibrating. The tiles were becoming almost blindingly luminous. The sound was deeper, much more internally loud than the erupting volcano had been. Amazingly, as Mikel’s body wavered under its force, he watched Pao and Rensat tremble in exactly the same manner and motion. Mikel felt terror return, stronger than before.

“What was that ?” he said to himself.

Rensat asked the same thing, a moment behind him.

“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.

Behind Mikel, the tunnel began to glow with a dull orange. He heard a distant cry from the direction in which he’d encountered Jina.

Something was coming. Something—tracking him or the other two? Was that what Rensat and Pao had felt, what she went in the other room to find?

Rensat looked in Mikel’s direction. “There is another… no, several others,” she said.

Pao studied his companion. “Rensat, is it possible that it is Enzo?”

“How?” Rensat asked. “She was lost, her mission unfinished. And the ascended cannot communicate with anyone, not in her plane, not in ours.”

“What if she has found another voice?” Pao asked with rising enthusiasm. “What if she has found a body?”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“You remember Sogera, his experiments with braziers,” Pao said. “Enzo was there, I remember her clearly. She saw how the flaming sunbird continued to hiss as her flesh was consumed.”

“But not her soul,” the woman said. “Blessed Enzo, if it is so!”

Rensat began to share Pao’s renewed— fervor was the word that came to Mikel’s mind. It was as if they were born again, their eyes and expressions almost manic.

The rumbling remained constant, the glow grew brighter, and now the heat began to rise. Mikel began to feel like he imagined the poor figures in the vision had felt… only in slow motion. Helpless as the fire neared, with nowhere to turn, except to each other. He wondered if the tiles had somehow anticipated his future, showed him something he needed to know, to experience by proxy—death throes,by fire—in order to escape his own possible fate.