Gilded Ashes-Chapter 88: Idiot Who Rode the Sky

The terrain had changed an hour out of Ukai. The canopy thinned, then broke apart, then disappeared. What replaced it was open ground - flat, dry, cracked clay stretching in every direction under the pale gray afternoon sky. No shade. The sun sat behind the permanent cloud cover at about three o’clock, painting everything the same washed-out grey-white. Heat came off the ground in visible ripples.

The lead car braked hard.

Raizen saw it through the windshield before the driver announced it. A ravine - cutting across the road from left to right, forty meters wide at least, the edges sharp where the ground dropped away. The far side was visible: same flat clay, same cracked surface, the road continuing as if nothing had interrupted it.

Between the two sides, the bridge was destroyed.

Not destroyed - more like... Completely gone. What remained hung in two ragged sections from either edge of the ravine - ropes torn, lattice beams split. The wood hadn’t been cut or burned - the fibers at the break points were fused together in places, melted and re-hardened into shapes that wood shouldn’t be able to make. The stone abutments on either side had warped inward - pressure-bent, the surface cracked in radial patterns, as if something had gripped the stone from the inside and twisted.

The convoy stopped. Both cars, a few good meters from the edge.

In the daylight, every detail of the damage was visible. Raizen stepped out of the car and the heat hit him - dry, close, nothing like Ukai’s wet warmth. The ground was hard-dry, pale brown, cracked everywhere. He walked to the edge and looked down.

The ravine went deep. Thirty meters, maybe forty. The walls were layered stone and compressed earth, striped in bands of brown and grey. At the bottom, a thin line of moisture - not a river, just a seam where underground water seeped through the rock. The far wall mirrored the near one. Between them: empty air, the broken remnants of the bridge, and the faint mineral smell of deep stone.

Solomon stepped out of the rear car. He walked to the edge and studied the warped abutments - the radial cracks, the bent stone, the fused rope fibers. His face was still. He turned to the nearest Warden.

"This isn’t human work, is it?"

The Warden looked at the damage. His throat moved once. He gave a small nod.

Solomon didn’t respond. He looked at the far side of the ravine - forty meters of empty air - and then at the eight.

"Options?" Raizen asked.

"Turn around" the Warden said. "Detour adds... Uh... Four hours."

Ichiro was already near the edge.

He rolled his right wrist once - loosening the joint. Then he threw his cloak on the ground, and stepped forward. The stone at his shoulder brightened a degree. He crouched and pressed his palm flat against the clay at the ravine’s lip.

A slab of compressed stone pushed itself out of the ravine wall - three meters wide, a meter thick, extending horizontally over the drop. The mud darkened as it compressed, the surface hardening from loose earth to solid rock in less than a second. The slab reached five meters and stopped. Ichiro held it, adjusted the density, then pushed another slab up beside it. Then another. Each one flat, heavy, overlapping the last by half a meter. A stone bridge assembling itself over the void below.

Lynea stepped forward. The fragments at her wrists activated - dozens of small crystalline pieces lifting from their resting positions and spreading outward. She raised both hands, fingers spread. Thin planes of translucent energy stitched over Ichiro’s slabs - layering at the joints where one slab met the next, reinforcing the seams where the stone was weakest. The fields overlapped, doubled, tripled.

"It’ll hold" she said, a sweat beam appearing at her temple. "No sudden weight shifts. Keep speed even across the whole span."

"No braking on the bridge, ya hear me?" the Warden relayed to the driver.

Keahi walked to the lip and looked across. "I’ll go ahead on foot. If anything shifts, I’ll signal."

"And if anything breaks?" Arashi asked.

"Then I’ll be very unhappy with everyone." She stepped onto the first slab, tested her weight, and started slowly. Eyes on the stone ahead of her, tracking the surface for cracks.

Everything held. They passed the distance, one by one, even the first, smaller car.

Esen bounced on his heels twice, shook out his arms. He stood behind, insisting to go last, after both cars, blabbing something about doing a stunt over the ravine.

The second, bigger car eased onto the first slab, tires squeaking on stone. The surface held. Lynea’s fields brightened at the leading edge, reinforcing as the weight crossed. Ichiro stood at the near lip with his palm extended - feeding density into the slabs as the car moved across them, thickening the stone under the wheels in real time.

Second slab. Third. Keahi was five meters ahead, pace steady, one hand raised at hip level. The car followed.

Fourth slab. Halfway across. The ravine opened below - deep, layered stone, that thin seam of moisture at the bottom barely visible in the afternoon light. Heat rose from the walls in ample waves.

The rear car rolled onto slab two.

A crack.

Not loud. A sharp pop - like a knuckle cracking - followed by silence. Then a second sound: deeper, structural, the noise of compressed stone fracturing along a stress line. A crack spiderwebbed across the surface of slab two, branching from the center toward the edges. The rear car’s weight shifted, right side of the slab sagging three centimeters. The tires started sliding sideways on the tilting surface. The driver’s foot went for the brake.

"Don’t stop!" three Wardens shouted at the same time.

The driver braked. The car lurched. The slab sagged further. The crack widened - a line visible through the fracture, the ravine below it.

Esen moved.

He was beside the rear car in two quick steps. He leaped forward, and raised his right fist, rings flaring. He punched the rear quarter panel as hard as he could - a directed shockwave - force traveling through the car’s frame, transferring momentum forward.

The car shot forward. Tires skipped across slab three, four, five - barely touching each surface before reaching the far lip of the ravine. It bounced onto solid ground and kept drifting. The driver braked on clay and the car slid to a stop, dust rising behind it. He was swearing through the open window.

Esen wasn’t on solid ground.

The shockwave’s recoil had pushed him backward. His feet were still on slab two. Slab two was... No longer a slab. The fracture had split it in half, and both halves were tilting - the near edge rising, the far edge dropping. The stone under Esen’s boots was angled thirty degrees and steepening.

He scrambled for footing. His left foot found the rising edge, but his right foot slipped and the whole section dropped.

Esen fell.

"ESEN!" Feris was running before the stone finished crumbling.

Full daylight. Everyone watching. His body disappeared below the edge of the ravine, arms wide swinging for anything he could grip, and then the broken slab followed him down - a flat mass of stone tumbling.

Arashi’s arm caught Feris at the edge - a hard bar across her chest that stopped her cold. Feris fought it for one second, then stopped. Arashi swore - one word slipped his mouth - and then clamped his mouth shut.

The Warden shouted at them to stay back. Ichiro was already at the lip, palm down, trying to extend a slab inward to catch him. Too slow. Too far.

Below: the sound of stone hitting stone. A crash. Then silence.

Two seconds. Then five. Then ten.

Raizen was frozen in place. He just watched one of his comrades fall into a fourty-meter-deep ravine.

He just stood there, shaken, not knowing what to do. Nobody dared speak. Nobody dared move.

Then the ground shook.

A low vibration – like a precise earthquake. It came from directly below them, from the ravine floor. The clay at the edge trembled. A deep bass note traveled up through the soles of Raizen’s boots and into his knees.

The ravine walls hummed. A smell hit them - hot mineral, sharp, metallic. The air above the gap rippled with heat.

A column of water erupted from the ravine.

White. Scalding. A compressed jet of heated water and steam, over thirty meters tall, blasting upward from the ravine floor with a roar that drowned every other sound. The broken slab that remained up was now gone - shattered by the pressure, fragments spinning outward in the spray. The column punched through the heat shimmer above the ravine and kept going, higher than the convoy, higher than anything on the flat horizon.

Esen was inside of it.

He was riding the center of the column - not gracefully, not in control, but alive, his body held in the jet’s upward force. His head was back. mouth wide open.

He was laughing.

The column arced. The pressure dropped. Esen reached the top of the trajectory and the water released him. He was falling again - thirty meters up, nothing under him but wet air and a very hard landing.

He clapped his hands together. Palm against palm. A dome of force discharged downward from his palms - a concussive burst aimed at the ground below him. The air between him and the surface compressed, slowed his fall, bled off speed. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten. His rings pulsed again - a second burst, smaller. Five meters. Three.

The last two meters were still a bit too fast.

He hit the clay on the far side of the ravine. Flat on his face. Dust exploded outward. Water from the column came down a second later in heavy sheets, drenching the impact site, drenching the cars, drenching Solomon - whose white sash went transparent against his ribs and whose expression went blank.

For three seconds the only sound was water falling and someone laughing through a bloody nose.

Esen pushed himself up on his elbows. His hair was plastered flat. Blood ran from his left nostril across his upper lip. He had a scrape across his forehead and his right sleeve was torn. He was grinning.

"Best. Thing. EVER!"

Arashi made a strangled noise. "Let me guess. You blew up a river."

"Geyser" Esen corrected. "It was already there. I just... Make it cough." He wobbled to his feet, swayed, planted them wider. His rings were still flickering at his fingers - residual charge, or his hands shaking. Hard to tell.

The Wardens stared. The Ukai Warden who’d nodded at the Anathema damage earlier pinched the bridge of his nose. "Please don’t do that to the hot springs."

"Hot springs!? Where, where?" Esen asked, immediately interested.

"The Canyons, at Haldor. But that’s - that’s not the point."

Arashi’s arm dropped from in front of Feris.

Just as the barrier lowered, she walked straight to Esen. Fast. Menacingly. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket – she always had it ready, or close to ready, - and slammed it against his nose. Not gentle at all.

"You absolute idiot" she said. "You could have died."

"The car could have been destroyed" Esen argued. "And here I am, more alive than ever!" He was still smiling. The handkerchief was turning red at the center.

"Th- That’s not the point!" Her voice cracked on point. Her face was red. She adjusted the handkerchief with both hands, dabbing at the scrape on his forehead.

Esen’s grin softened, and decided to stand still. For Esen - who bounced, swayed, fidgeted, and generally treated stillness as a personal insult - standing still was the biggest thing he could do. He stood there and let her clean his face.

"Alright" he said, muffled by the fabric. "I’ll try to explode less stuff in the future."

"Good" Feris said. She was looking at the scrape. Maybe more than just the scrape.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raizen let his hand fall from the hilt he hadn’t drawn. He walked back to the edge of the ravine and looked at the damage again. The warped abutments. The radial cracks in the stone. The fused rope fibers. In full daylight, with the geyser’s spray still misting the air, the details were sharp. This wasn’t erosion. This wasn’t structural failure. The stone had been deformed by pressure applied from inside the material itself. Whatever had done this could reach into solid rock and reshape it.

He filed the images. Stored them next to everything Solomon had told them about Anathemas in the convoy.

Solomon peeled wet hair off his forehead. He looked down at his soaked sash, then across at the repaired span - Ichiro’s slabs still holding on the far side, Lynea’s fields dimming as she relaxed. He almost smiled. One second. Then it passed.

"Let’s go" he said to the Wardens. "While conditions hold."

Arashi clapped Esen’s shoulder as he passed. "If you ever die, I’m going to be very annoyed. I’ll bury you in a plastic bag."

"Deal" Esen said through the handkerchief.

At the edge, Solomon stopped. He wasn’t looking at Esen. He was looking at the damage - the warped stone, the bent remains of the bridge, the way the beams quite literally reshaped. As if whatever had done this had complete control.

"Ruler?" Raizen turned around.

Solomon’s jaw was tight. He spoke quietly. "If this was Anathema work" he said, "it wasn’t an attack."

He looked into the ravine one last time. The geyser had subsided. Water dripped from the fractured walls in thin streams. The mineral smell was fading.

"...It was a warning."