Gilded Ashes

Chapter 414: Where Nobody Looked

The cut continued.

Completely in line with the fracture in the cloud cover, across the Anathema’s torso in the same straight line, the same perfect diagonal, the same single motion that had split the sky. The Anathema’s torso, contorted under the weight and the vines and the gathered force of the entire surviving Phalanx, received the cut along its centre. The line opened the body from upper-left to lower-right, a single diagonal fissure across the bloated mass of accumulated mass.

Golden light poured from the wound.

The Anathema did not struggle. It did not roar. It did not produce the death-cry that lesser beings produced when their bodies failed. It turned its head, slowly, with the patience of something that had eternity inside it, and it looked toward its killer.

The Leader was somewhere outside Kori’s narrowing field of vision. She could not see what the Anathema saw - what attack could have possibly produced such a powerful strike. But she saw the way the Anathema was looking. The thing’s three eyes - small, dim, sunk into a face that had no features other than its eyes - focused. Tracked. Found.

It did not glare.

It looked.

The look held for several seconds. Whatever the Anathema saw in its killer’s face, it received with the equanimity of a being that had known this moment was coming and had simply not known when.

The golden light from the diagonal cut intensified. The body began to fold inward along the wound.

Slap to the ground like an oversized octopus, Kori thought, somewhere very far inside her own head. That would’ve been satisfying. Mad satisfying: a big wet slap.

But the Anathema did not slap. It dissolved in the air, the body disintegrating along the cut, the golden light pouring outward as the accumulated mass that had once been Greed died from the inside.

That’s the last things she saw back there, before blacking out. he came back to herself in the air.

The memory released its grip. The yellow sky and the falling Anathema receded, replaced by the present - the cold air, the warmth of recent Eon channeling, the rush of wind across her face. She blinked - the flashback had occupied her for what felt like minutes and had taken, in real time, perhaps two seconds.

Those had been good times.

The thought arrived in her mind the way it always did - not as nostalgia, exactly, but as a simple observation. The Chasmis didn’t let her feel nostalgia the way other people felt it. What she had instead was a flat recognition that those years had contained certain qualities - exhaustion, friendship, the constant proximity of death - that had been worth carrying. Hardest times in recorded history - Phalanx records. Half the unit gone within the weeks of Velarion. The kind of days that no one wanted to live again.

Yet still - good times.

Plant girlie’s vines. Osamu’s grip. The Old Fart’s rapier. Kenzo’s grin. The Leader – Solomon’s brother - apparently cutting open the sky.

She felt her mouth pull into something. Not a smile, though, but the closest thing to a smile the Chasmis allowed. A small, internal acknowledgment that the body had once been part of a unit, and that the unit had once held a battlefield together, and that the world she now lived in was a world the unit had paid for.

Good times. Even with the cost.

She opened her eyes.

The cold air hit them. The flashback’s afterimage drained away. The wind was loud, the night sky was glowing, the eastern district was -

- Way below her.

Far below her.

Much, much further below her than she had expected to be at any point during this throw.

She was still moving, her body still travelling on the trajectory Osamu had launched her on, and the buildings of Neoshima had become small enough that she could see entire blocks of them at once from her current altitude. The petals - the closing dome that should have been way above her at her altitude - were no longer that far. She was rapidly approaching one petal – the northwestern one, slowly finishing its defensive closing movement.

Her expression went through several stages very quickly: The first was the residual softness of having just emerged from a memory she had cared about. The second was confusion – she had been taken by surprise by the throw’s actual strength. The third was the precise recognition of how high she was, how fast she was still moving, and how much trouble Osamu was about to be in when she got back down.

The fourth was oh shi-

Tonight her body was threaded with amplification, but her mass had not changed, her density had not changed, and her responsiveness was still the same – but the air resistance she generated, the friction she shed, the speed she carried through atmosphere - every one of those variables had shifted ever so slightly because her Eon was operating at multiplied output, and the sheer output was enough to displace air, just enough to make the whole thing feel smoother than it should’ve.

The cliff‑edge of Neoshima fell behind her- and through the narrowing gap between the petals, she could see them.

To the west, the plains stretched out in a vast, rippling sheet of darkness, their contours lit only by the shifting glow bleeding down from the glowing ceiling. The petals’ inner surfaces-still sliding toward each other in their slow, deliberate closing framed the view like a pair of colossal gates, and through that shrinking corridor she caught a glimpse of everything beyond the city’s reach.

The far cliffs were visible even from here, a jagged pale white line against the horizon. Beyond them, the sea spread out in a broad, trembling expanse, its surface catching the colors of the clouds above-violet, gold, and that strange auroral green that reflected in the water most beautifully, each wave reflecting a different shard of the sky’s impossible palette.

For a moment-just a moment-she could see all of it at once: the plains, the cliffs, the sea, the sky, the petals closing like a titan’s eyelids around the city she’d almost been thrown out of.

Then the gap narrowed further, the view began to collapse into a sliver, and the wind tore the breath from her lungs.

She started laughing again. A different laugh from the one Osamu had launched her with. The first laugh had been thrill. This one was pure delight – enjoying a scene you’re not sure if you’ll be able to live again. She was still rising, her momentum not reaching its apex quite yet.

And there, somewhere down there in the dark - visible only as a faint disturbance in the air, a thermal trace barely registering against the cooler plains below -

It wasn’t an Eon signature. But Kori’s Chasmis caught a small glimpse – human body heat. But the heat was wrong, hotter in some places and colder in other.

A figure was moving.

Fast. East. Away from all of the Wardens, and away from where Kori was launched from.

Whoever that was, it knew exactly where Kori and Osamu had been, knew exactly where they’d go, but nobody in their right mind could have predicted a throw across an entire city.

...Headed exactly where nobody had thought to look.