Dear Aleks,

This one is just for you (Kamila do NOT read this!!!)

She gone? Okay…

Remember when you asked me about the machines in Kivv? Well, I got to see some of the machines today. In fact, I’m writing you this letter on a computer, that’s why the print looks all blocky and black. They have this insane old-world device that takes something you wrote on a computer and puts it on paper, with lots of clacking and buzzing and other weird noises I don’t have words for. At first I thought that was pointless, but it’s so much faster than copying it all down by hand! They had me run the generator while they were printing the last set of letters, before they’d let me write mine… my arms are tired after that one.

But! One of the operators said that they’re always looking for people they can trust who are actually interested in machines like this. I told them about you and they said that since you’re already a Sower aspirant, they can’t take you on as a full-time apprentice… but if you come around sometime they’d be happy to show you how to work the machines anyway!

Love,

-Hilda

-From the letters of Hilda Zelenko,

Dated 241 YT, Winter 9-3.

Etyslund: 243 YT, Autumn. The day of the execution of Marga Zelenko.

Aleks Zelenko ran, though he hardly knew where he was going. He ran as though the spears were at his back, and he had to outpace their wicked points to survive. Shouts and angry whispers and agonized screams – screams of death – echoed through his ears. Through his blindfold, Aleks could mostly only see the vague impression of light, telling him when he was in shade and when he was in direct sun. but there were a few tiny holes in the fabric. Earlier, pressing the side of his head to the ground and shifting bit by bit, he’d managed to maneuver the fabric so that one of the holes was near enough to his eye that he could see an image through it, not just a pinprick of bright light amid the muffled dimness.

It was through this hole that Aleks Zelenko saw his mother die.

Sprinting through the village with this tunnel village disabling him, he found himself dwelling on a few thoughts again and again, his panicked mind running over the questions like stumbling blocks. Find dad. Find Hilda. Find Kamila.

No. His sisters were being hunted. His father, most likely, was being intimidated into silence and inaction by the soldiers. He was an unknown to the soldiers, a non-threat. No Reaper. Clueless. For now, perhaps. Soon enough, however, the soldiers would find out. Soon enough they would cease to consider only the Reapers, and if they knew anything about the organizations whose members they were hunting, they would ask themselves:

Why are there no Sowers?

As Aleks ran, he reached out with his mind to pull and guide the rolling strands of mist, bending the residue of the other world to his purpose. He felt the other spots and nodes within it: people, the soldiers and the villagers, mostly standing in two masses, shifting and roiling nervously. He severed his connection and felt at the threads of the Veil itself, tightening and patching them and forcing the mist and the sand alike back into their separate place.

When the mist rolled over Aleks from the other side, it calmed him, made him think rationally. His grief became something of another body, something almost suppressed in the cold halls of his mind. The Sower’s gift, the rational, distanced mind, failed him when he surrendered that connection. Tears welled up under the blindfold and flew from the edges of his eyes as he ran. He nearly fell, turned to the north, and braced himself against an old house, struggling with the ropes around his hands that kept his arms bound behind his back. He tried to lift his arms over his head, but could not. He tried – failed – to suppress a scream, a scream so raw it made his throat burn and his ears pop and made the air feel like it would rend at the cutting touch of his voice.

He tried to remember his mentor’s guidance. Words were beyond him in this wilderness. Her face briefly flashed in his mind and was overrun by darkness in seconds. The elder Sower’s wordless voice vanished, as though caught in the wind and carried off to the east. He… he couldn’t even remember her name. his eyes burned. The sounds surrounding him blended into an indecipherable slurry. His breath refused to leave his lungs.

I need… to focus… He reached out for the Aether again and pushed himself away from the wall, feeling the crushing pressure leave him in an instant. Aleks became calm – cocooned and sequestered from the world, from himself.

As he began to run again, he went back over the cacophony that erupted when he broke free, moments after his mother’s death. One half of him was screaming for him to run to her, to beg for aid, sit by her side, anything. He remembered the shouts of the crowd, the cackling of that horrible man with the spears, shouting at his fellow about how they should kill Aleks as well.

His father’s voice cut through it: “Aleks, wait! Be careful! Aleks!” Stepan Zelenko shouted with a broken voice.

There was more shouting, more movement in the press of the crowd, but instead of listening, Aleks snapped back to the present.

He was out of the village now, in the marsh. He moved slowly across that unstable land, but the earth was harder and drier than he remembered, and that made the going easier than he expected. Without the threat of falling and becoming stuck in the marshy dirt, Aleks began to pick up his pace, searching through his tiny window into the outside for the pass.

North.

North to Kivv.

Of course it was the only place he could go. There was where he would find help – the Sower Monastery, security in numbers, perhaps even a force to liberate Etyslund.

Though he knew he was not being followed any longer, Aleks rushed for the cave as though the spear-thrower was still preparing to take his throw. He imagined the weapons ripping through his body, tearing flesh and organs and spilling them out, a hot slush, into the bog. Only the Sower’s gift prevented the bile in his throat from spilling. He made for the pass. The cavern yawned before him, its inner shadows dominating the tiny pin-point of his vision.

Aleks entered the cavern and moved quickly along the edge, running his bound hands against the stone, searching. With his back to the rock, he braced his feet on the wall, keeping his balance and preventing himself from falling over. He felt his way over obstacles, potential tripping-rocks, and then he found it.

One of the rocks he’d nearly tripped over was sharp. He kicked off a shoe and ran that foot along the rock. Searing pain in the sole, and a trickling wetness. He bent down in front of the sharp outcropping, stretching out both feet and carefully ensuring he did not sit on the knifelike stone. He braced the soles of his feet against the ground, stretching his back so that he could reach down to the sharp edge.

As he sawed at the ropes around his hands, Aleks sought further in the Aether, for the impressions of those close to him. He felt the presence, too distant for him to locate, of his father, of Kamila, of Hilda. His mother… whatever was left was not recognizable in the misty residue of the Aether.

With a final tug the ropes tore and came loose, and Aleks stumbled back. The sharp rock scored across the edge of his left wrist and he scrambled back, falling, rolling, nearly striking his head against the wall. His focus broke, and the grief and fear rushed back in, along with the fresh pain of an unfamiliar injury. With his right hand he reached up and tore the blindfold from his face. It was dark in the cave, but not so dark that he could not see his own hands. Sitting next to the wall, breathing heavily, his mind racing, Aleks held his left hand up near his face and saw red streaked across it.

With the fingers of his right hand shaking, he probed and brushed at the wound, wiping the blood away.

Only a small cut. He let out a shaky breath, his eyes burning with tears again mixed with a sudden relief. He placed his other hand on the injury and held it there, shifting so that his back was to the cave wall, giving him a tiny view of the outside through the twists of the entry corridor. Aleks reached out again through the Veil, and when he reclaimed the calm that lay there breathed in a slow and luxurious breath. Around him, sounds began to come into focus again, the distance rushing distinguishing itself to the dripping of water elsewhere in the halls and tunnels of the cave pass.

Aleks sat there for an hour or more, steeling himself for the moment he would have to let go of the Sower’s gift. He reached out then, through the Aether, to the soldiers where they still gathered around the site of the execution. With minutes of focus, he began to hear their voices, from inside their minds, connected by the wisps of incorporeal mist to the weave of the Veil he crawled along.

“Ha… shoulda killed the scout, that traitor. Captain won’t be happy if I do it. He’ll get over it. I could just slip right in there and… nah… too risky…” Even with the gift of the steady mind, this man’s voice repulsed Aleks.

“What a mess… it shouldn’t have turned out this way, but nothing we can do about it… I have my duties…”

“Just what am I fighting for, anyway? What would my family think if they could see me now?”

“Oh Emperor, Host… My devotion to you cannot be questioned. I remember well the day you saw us forth on this mission, and I, long in your service but only new to your army, I could not stop cheering…”

A thread spiraled and wove its way back. Not “back” in the sense of a direction, the opposite of whichever way the speaker faces. The weave of the Veil cannot be described in perfectly spatial terms, exactly, being a dividing force between the world of the physical and the world of the beyond-physical. When the human mind is forced to interact with a thing that does not fit its paradigms, it simply… translates. To translate is indeed vital to human survival – to see things exactly as they are, and only as they are, might well render the earth incomprehensible.

So, to Aleks’ mind, the thread ran back, and he followed it, let it guide him along through that which was not quite space and was not quite time and was not quite divorced from either, indeed. And he found himself losing sight of the entrance of the cave, forgetting the dripping of the water and its echoes through the caverns around him.

He was Plato Arap, his knees shaking as he stood surrounded by his fellows on the parade grounds, looking up at the great platform where stood Emperor Aivor the First, for decades the ruler of Gaurlante, the rightful emperor of the world, the one Plato revered from his youth.

He was Aleks Zelenko, small and scared and surrounded by soldiers, men and women who’d cut him down in an instant if they knew who he was.