It was the end of just another meeting, the tenth since Aili’s unexpected encounter with the abbot. She was listening with just a marginal portion of her attention, while the rest of her was engrossed in yet another experiment involving viss. She felt a tiny bit of guilt about wasting it, so she only worked with a tiny bit of her total energies.

She followed a strict procedure, each step carefully cataloged on a sheet of paper with her uncertain handwriting. First, she took a fragment of the material she was currently analyzing, noted the dimensions - usually smaller than a grain of sand - and filled it up with all the viss it could hold on its surface. It wasn’t a straightforward endeavor, because some materials had much more surface than expected; she learned to hate limestone for all its small holes. Once she was done, she noted how many days of her viss the fragment could hold, then proceeded with a smaller one.

The stacks of paper were hidden behind a heavy green curtain inside the temple. She’d hung it between two semi-columns to section off a small area from the rest. She’d briefly considered the ethical matter of seeking privacy from Suimer’s citizens while they couldn’t obtain it from her, but she just added it to the pile of things she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Besides, they could always search her private corner while she was temporarily deactivated.

The sound of chairs scraping on the wooden boards of the gym-turned-library alerted her that the meeting was wrapping up. As usual no decision was taken, nobody advanced new ideas, the only thing everyone agreed with was keeping the gods deactivated and the holders full. Aili was fine with that: the thought of what could have happened at the village a few nights before while she was away still haunted her. She could still see and feel monks lurking outside of the walls. She’d been lucky that the pattern for the explosions had worked, that two volunteers had agreed to hang over the void for hours and risk being involved in the mayhem, but she was under no illusions it would have worked a second time. The monks would have adjusted, if she was ever so foolish to leave the village again. Not doing anything risky was the right choice, and Rabam could brood, mope and spread guilt on every surface he touched all he liked.

She finished up her last experiment for the day while the council member designated to deactivate her left the table and started climbing up the road to the temple. Nobody enjoyed that task, both due to the fatigue and the bad memories the place evoked, but they all agreed to leave the shard on a neutral ground where it could be easily found in case of necessity. A small group of trustworthy guards kept watch over her sphere and shard day and night, in case of attempted theft. Aili was grateful for that: every once in a while, she noticed groups of people aggregate in the area of the temple, even if they never spoke or gestured about anything important while she was awake. In fact, they never gestured at all. She had suspected they were the pious Saia had talked about even before Lada confirmed it to her with a voice so sharp it could have been a hiss.

“Whatever they do or say, don’t trust them.”

Which wasn’t difficult for Aili to do, because she’d stopped interacting with much of anyone, aside from sporadic speeches during the meetings and brief chats with Rabam. The memory of her conversation with Dore had resurfaced violently and floundered on the surface of her mind until she’d granted it a big portion of her attention. It had all started when Rabam had mentioned the crater room. The only topic in common between both conversations seemed to be the disposal of corpses.

She wished she could ask Dore for clarifications, but she didn’t know where he or Lorin were, nor whether they were still alive. She still had hope, since they hadn’t been replaced yet: the monks still occupied part of the neighboring villages, and she didn’t feel any other presence against her domain.

All she knew was that funerary rites varied wildly around the mountain: in some villages burying was the most common procedure, cremation in others. Some people sunk the corpses into the sea or left them as far into the forest as the inhabitants dared to go, where she suspected the monks had a hand in disposing of them more than the animals did. In the end, it came down to the personal preference of the deceased and their families.

Monks, apparently, used to bury their dead, then started burning them and dumping the ashes into the crater, apparently to preserve the infinitesimal amount of viss left in their remains. The only exception were criminals, whose heads were cut off and the blood drained into the crater as the ultimate sign of spite, as Rabam had told her in details. Aili couldn’t understand why they did that when they could just as easily scatter the ashes inside the forest. The average monk could maybe consider it a purely spiritual custom, but the abbot and priors certainly knew better.

She was mulling over those facts while putting away the material for her experiments, when her mind conjured the image of a giant hole inside the mountain, filled to the brim with ash from centenary corpses, every particle covered in viss.

“Rabam,” she called him, without bothering to hide the panic in her voice. “Come to the temple.”

He was returning home, or rather, to the house he shared with twelve other people, some of the unlucky inhabitants that had seen their houses being buried by a wall of debris. Rabam turned around at the entrance and immediately started the climb toward the temple, almost in a run. He briefly stopped to inform the council member that was supposed to deactivate Aili that he would take care of that instead, then rushed away without waiting for an answer.

He only slowed down after entering Aili’s makeshift tent, under the surprised gaze of the two guards on duty. But Aili’s sphere was still on the pedestal between them, her light still golden, so they didn’t stop him.

While she’d been waiting for Rabam to arrive, Aili had managed to fill a sheet of recycled paper with a web of calculations. She made it fly toward his hands.

“Check it. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

He began uttering a sound of protest, but it was cut short by his heaving breath. In the end, he seemed to decide that he didn’t have energies to spend arguing and sat down on the floor with the sheet in front of him, muttering numbers.

“As far as I can tell, it’s correct,” he said in the end. “What is it for?”

“So it’s not all ash,” Aili said, her relief echoing all around the temple. She wanted to move on to her next theory, but she needed to ask Rabam some questions and he didn’t seem keen to answer them without first receiving an explanation.

“Remember that time when I talked to Dore?” she asked, then proceeded without waiting for an answer. “I thought about it and wondered if all the viss in the mountain was, maybe, stored inside ash? As if the monks had burned some thousand people at some point in the past and are still using their remains to create gods.”

Rabam opened his mouth, but Aili continued without giving him the chance to utter a sound.

“But it’s impossible. I know exactly how much viss an average speck of ash can hold, and even if the mountain was filled with it, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to create eight gods, let alone all the ones who have existed until today. And the crater is a lot smaller than the mountain, otherwise there wouldn’t be enough space for your… the monks’ village, I mean.”

She paused, more to collect her thoughts than to wait for an answer. After the immobility of the last few days, they were rushing so fast she was finding it hard to keep up.

“Why did you even think that in the first place?” Rabam asked.

“I just… Nevermind, listen: the room you talked about. Does it have a hole that leads into the crater? Like an actual, physical hole, not a metaphor or a tunnel or something else?”

Rabam glanced around the makeshift room in confusion, as if noticing all the stacks of sheets for the first time.

“Yes, as far as I know.”

“How big is it?”

“I don’t know, I was never allowed inside. But a monk should be able to enter the crater and fix whatever problem might happen, so… Big enough to allow a person through?”

While he was speaking, Aili started another series of calculations on a sort-of-fresh sheet of paper.

“You said it’s deep enough that a god situated inside the village might not reach it with their domain,” she said. “How come?”

“Well, it depends on where their sphere is, of course. The rooms aren’t all on the same level, and the craters’ room is the lowest. If a god is near enough to include it, they’re probably leaving out some of the upper rooms, plus the lake and most of the outposts. If the goal is to protect the village, it wouldn’t make sense to leave out those places just to include the crater’s room. It doesn’t have anything special, just… a hole.”

“They don’t fear sabotage?”

“There are sentinels inside and it’s on top of the crater: it’s a long fall to the bottom if you enter unprepared, and I expect any rope long enough to reach it would be locked up somewhere safe. If it even exists.”

Aili stopped writing with her winds, the stick of graphite rolling off the page.

“I don’t understand why Saia didn’t mention anything about it.”

Rabam shrugged.

“Maybe she didn’t see it?”

“She found the shards room, though.”

“But that’s different. I mean, I don’t know where it is, but it’s supposed to be so far away from the village that it would be outside of a god’s domain no matter where they are. And at the same time, it has to be connected to the village so that it can be reached by the sentinels. The crater room isn’t so far away, it’s situated near the other rooms, just… Beneath them.”

Aili tried to imagine what it must have been like for Saia to observe the village from inside and from above at the same time. She imagined the rooms, the corridors bending and twisting to reach them all. The incline, when it existed, was never steep, but it kept going for a while, resulting in several rooms juxtaposed with each other, on different levels. Normal-looking rooms, to live or work in, with the crater room beneath them, not hidden but not advertised either, just enough out of reach to guess its presence without seeing what happened inside. Then, a corridor shooting off into the distance, no end in sight despite the size of her domain.

It would have definitely caught all of her attention too. Especially at the beginning, when the all-around vision of the spheres was still new and confusing.

“And as I said,” Rabam added, “that room has nothing special. Just…”

“A hole,” Aili concluded in his place.

Just a hole, but it was the key to everything.

“Follow my reasoning,” she said. “Tell me if something feels off.”

Rabam left the sheet aside and sat more comfortably, legs splayed in front of him.

“If my calculations are correct,” Aili began, pushing the most recent ones into his hands, “The viss inside the mountain should be anchored to something. If it wasn’t, and it floated around like mine does, it would disperse a bit or completely every time the hole gets opened, for any reason. That’s why it’s sufficient to crack a sphere to immediately kill the god it contains. The viss could be anchored to the walls and floor, but the calculations show that there’s just not enough surface for all of that energy, even considering an ideal material and a bigger chamber.”

She waited for Rabam to examine her notes. He nodded, and she took it as a sign she could go on.

“So the only possible conclusion is that there’s something in there, an object or objects that contains or otherwise anchors the viss. I don’t know what it is, but I could maybe guess the material it’s made of after some more experiments.”

Rabam looked at the sheet for a few seconds, his eyes unmoving. When he spoke, his voice was slow and careful.

“Interesting, but why is it so important?”

“Dore,” Aili said as if it was an explanation by itself, then forced herself to slow down her thoughts and actually produce one. “He knew things about animal people that he wasn’t supposed to know, like that some of them ate animals that don’t exist around the mountain. He was very secretive about his resources, so it made me think… what if he didn’t use books, but whatever are the objects inside the mountain? The viss they hold must be ancient. What if he was authorized to access them, and somehow knew how to read the viss, and thus discovered what happened when the villages were founded? Or even earlier than that?”

She paused for a few instants to let her words settle in both of their minds.

“If we could access those objects and read their viss, we could discover the whole truth about the monks. About how all of this came to be.”

Rabam’s eyes were wide and unfocused, as if he was imagining which truths they might find.

“Right, and then…”

He trailed off, his enthusiasm slowly subsiding.

“I mean, it’s interesting and all, but…”

“But it won’t help us with our current problems, no.”

“Unless you want to proceed with Saia’s plan. Tell everyone the truth.”

Aili’s light flickered with mental exhaustion.

“Discussing what to do among us is pointless,” she said. “I’ll talk about our discovery at the next meeting. Let’s fight about our disagreements there, where everyone can hear the arguments.”

Rabam smiled a bit, even if his downcast eyes were half-closed with bitterness.

“Let’s,” he said, then went to deactivate her.