Chapter 55- White Choir’s beliefs

Chapter 55: 55- White Choir’s beliefs

"What did the pages say?" Sol asked, picking up the priest’s crystal and rolling it in his palm.

"They think the sun was a tyrant, an evil being" Valera said, her voice dropping into the low, quiet cadence she used when she was trying to remember something from ten years ago.

"Before the Silver Eye opened in the sky eighty years ago, the world was dying of heat, or at least, that’s what the Choir teaches in their quarries. They believe the Moon came down and swallowed the sun to save humanity from burning alive in our sins. According to them, every drop of warmth left in a human body is stolen property that belongs to the old dead god."

Sol snorted, looking down at the faint orange heat rising off his own knuckles. "So when I burn their lunar energy..."

"To them, you aren’t just killing a man," Valera looked across the dark trailer into his glowing eyes.

"They believe that when the Silver Eye pulls a corpse up into the sky as mist, their consciousness goes up to live inside the Moon forever. When your fire caught that acolyte’s mist and turned it into black grease on the snow, they watched you destroy his heaven right in front of them."

Sol turned Father Julian’s gnarled purple crystal over in his fingers. "Good. That priest was putting rocks under kids’ skin until their ankles broke. If there’s a heaven up inside that big silver eyeball, a bastard like him doesn’t belong in it anyway."

"If those twenty pullers make it back to the Sanctuary, the Choir won’t send one wagon next time, Sol," Valera warned.

"They have Confessors and Priests at Level 2 and Level 3 who have mutated their own bodies so badly they don’t even walk on two legs anymore. They’ll send Hunting Choirs up the western roads."

"Then we don’t stay here," Sol said, setting Julian’s crystal down and picking up two of the High-Stage acolyte stones instead.

"We have two hundred kilometers of flat salt between here and Gomorrah. If we try to haul ninety kilograms of scales and meat across open ground while sitting at the bottom of the Peak-Stage, anything that spots us from a kilometer away is going to run us down. We stay in this box for two days, and we eat everything in this bag."

Valera looked at the pile of seven crystals.

"Julian’s core is filthy, Sol. Look at the color of it. The Choir doesn’t filter their mist, they actively cultivate the beast-madness because they think the voices in the taint are the Moon speaking to them. Even with your furnace, if you crush a human Peak core that rotten all at once, the mental echo inside it is going to hit your head like a hammer."

"I’ve got a thick head," Sol said, shifting around on the steel floor to face her and crossing his legs.

"Start with the three High-Stage stones and the three beast shards to build up our momentum. Save the priest for tomorrow night."

It took them forty hours to empty the leather pouch.

Valera had been right about Father Julian’s crystal.

When Sol finally cracked the priest’s gnarled violet stone between his palms on the second night, the energy that poured out wasn’t just cold, it was loud.

For three hours, while Sol’s furnace roared at the edge of its safe limit to boil the necrotic purple sludge out of the mist, his ears were filled with a phantom, howling chorus of bells and weeping voices that tried to convince him to take his own fingernails and claw his chest open to the sky.

Sol didn’t let a single whisper cross over into Valera’s hands.

Sitting knee-to-knee in the pitch-black trailer, he locked his jaw, kept the mental filth trapped inside his own sternum until his solar fire burned the voices into silent gray ash, and fed only the clean, heavy Peak-Stage essence across his knuckles into Valera’s palms.

When they kicked the rusted door-bar down on the third morning and dragged the sled out onto the Salt Flats, the needle had moved significantly.

Sol sat at 29% Peak-Stage, the muscles across his back and shoulders corded like twisted iron wire under his wolf-fur coat. Valera had climbed to 51% Peak-Stage, crossing the halfway mark of the entire realm.

And then the real march began.

The Salt Flats were worse than the Sunken Flats. In the bogs, there were trees to break the wind, rocks to hide behind, and streams to drink from.

Out here, there was nothing for a hundred kilometers in every direction except a blindingly flat pan of hexagonal white salt crust, covered in five centimeters of blowing gray dust beneath a low, motionless ceiling of slate-colored clouds.

To Sol’s thermal vision, the landscape was a nightmare to navigate.

Because the thick salt crust acted as a gigantic natural insulator over the dead seabed below, the ground fifty meters ahead looked the exact same dull, uniform violet-blue as the ground five kilometers ahead.

There were no hills to judge distance by. If he didn’t look down at the sled tracks Valera was leaving behind them every few minutes, it felt like they were walking on a treadmill in an empty room.

"Check your left boot," Sol said on the fifth day out from the overpass, his voice muffled by the cloth wrapped around his nose and mouth to keep the alkali dust out of his lungs.

Valera stopped walking and lifted her left foot out of the salt dust.

The caustic white powder had eaten straight through the waxed boar-hide stitching along the welt of her boot.

The leather sole was flapping loose at the toe, letting gray salt pack directly against her wool sock.

"This place is eating our clothes," Valera muttered, leaning one hand on Sol’s shoulder to keep her balance while she knocked the salt clump off her heel against the sled runner.

"If my soles come off with ninety kilometers still to go, I’m going to have to freeze ice-soles onto my feet every ten minutes."

"Sit on the sled," Sol said, dropping the tow-rope and kneeling in the salt in front of her.

He didn’t have a needle strong enough to punch through frozen boot-leather, and he didn’t have his hatchet anymore, only the three-kilogram broken iron head lashed under the tarp, and the two ten-centimeter Level 2 Silt-Serpent fangs he had tied to his belt with raw-hide cords.

Sol pulled one of the curved serpent fangs from his belt and cut a wide, thirty-centimeter strip of cured elk-hide from the spare flap covering their meat stack.