I am a bastion of humanity, from now until the end of life.

I seek to preserve life, and not to destroy it.

The enemy is not humanity; the enemy is the Desert.

The Aether is not the enemy; the Aether is a force.

The Desert is not the Aether; the Desert is its residue.

The world's peace is like these trees;

The world's peace will die without tending.

The tree has its own kindness;

A kindness to be cherished.

I am a Sower, one who knows the ends of all beginnings.

I swear this oath from now until we are finally free.

-The Sower’s Oath

Kivv. 243 YT, Mid-Autumn. 14 days after the death of Marga Zelenko.

“You know, I have to admit it’s strange to be working on machines likes these. They’re… rudimentary, compared to what I remember, but they’re better all the same.”

The Sower Arien, peering down the shaft of a screwdriver, spoke loudly to Aleks and with a note of clear humor in his voice. He took back the screwdriver and, leaning toward the wall slightly, rapped his knuckles against the machine. A persistent buzzing noise rose from the thing as it processed inputs from all over the city – cameras, microphones, heat sensors, Aetheric meters, barometers, windvanes. It calculated missile launch trajectories and it calculated the color of the sky. Aleks was awed by its simple beauty, lines and lattices of metal and wire and lacquer shell.

“I mean, not better mechanically,” Arien quickly correct himself, quietly. “Our technology has nothing on Paris Nouveau when it comes to sheer complexity, advanced processing capability, remote sensing… but I mean, better, as in… we’re putting it to far better use.”

In the few hours Aleks had known the Sower Arien, he felt he’d already come to know the older man quite well. Arien was nothing if not open about what he was thinking about at all times. He had once escaped from a world of machines, or so he said, a city cut off from the outside world and patrolled by robotic entities which monitored and regulated every aspect of human life. Many of those within the city were happy in what they considered a utopia – their every need taken care of, at least if they were not unlucky enough to end up living in the desolate catacombs of the underground. But Arien had escaped – almost accidentally. The idea had not come to him unbidden, of course – as a child he’d been living practically in the lap of luxury at the height of the city. But he fell, and fell, and fell.

And eventually he fell so far he managed to scramble out under the walls of the city, through a crack in the sealant, and then he learned that the outside world was not dead as all those in Paris Nouveau believed it to be. He found humanity. And then, wandering across Corod and Steriat and the Vale, he had eventually found Mirshal. The Sowers were happy to have him, because of his “natural talent and charm” (Aleks was fairly sure Arien was being at least a little bit sarcastic about that part).

“It’s strange…” Aleks ventured. “I can see that this is all very advanced, in technological capacity, but we don’t have anything like the machines I saw the Invictans use when they came to Etyslund.”

“Oh yeah…” Arien looked a bit downcast, his normally-bright expression souring when he turned toward Aleks. “But you’re moreso talking about their vehicles and weapons, right?”

Aleks nodded. “Transforming weapons, motor vehicles… I got out of Etyslund just a couple hours after they arrived, but in that time I tried to sabotage some of their gear. I got a good look at some of their machines. Some of what they were using was very compact – I remember they had left some radio equipment with their vehicles, and it was small enough to carry. Heavy, but nothing like…” he gestured at the radio cabinet, built into this room’s wall. “Everything they use is practically built for an army on the move.”

“Yeah,” Arien said, nodding vigorously. “It’s the sort of thing the Adma would be interested in. they’ve been trying to reverse-engineer Invictan technology for basically as long as they’ve been a cohesive force. It’s difficult, though, it’s harder to have a solid infrastructure for research and development when you’re constantly on the move, with no particular home base.”

“I guess so. Why doesn’t the Adma take up a base then? I don’t really know much about them, except that they’re…” he paused. “Our ally?”

Arien laughed and shrugged. “Ally, yeah, that’s a good word for it. We have some, shall we say, ideological and methodological disagreements. But not settling down in any place for too long is part of the Adma’s whole strategy. Their goal right now is to fight the Invictans, so they do that, always moving, fully organized and bureaucratized like the Invictans but unlike them, that organization of theirs isn’t bound to the land, it never stops moving.”

“Well, I guess if it would help them for us to try and reverse-engineer some of the technology for them… we could teach them how to create and maintain similar gear while on the move. Right? That seems like something an ally would do.” Aleks wasn’t sure of the logistics of this. He knew that he didn’t know anything about the functioning of an army, but what he said sounded plausible, at least to him.

Arien nodded again. “That’s part of what this whole machinist group of ours in the Sowers is trying to do. If you want to help out with that, we’d be more than happy to have you.”

“There’s more,” Aleks said, trying to still the sudden beating of his heart, the surge of nervousness. “Just as I was escaping Etyslund, I… kind of… Scried into the mind of one of the soldiers there. And I saw some things.”

Arien laughed, impressed. “Aleks! That’s… really dangerous. Scrying into people’s minds isn’t something you should take lightly.”

“I know, I know,” Aleks said. “I wasn’t exactly in the most stable state at the time.”

“That makes it worse,” Arien said. “Have you made sense of what you experienced then?”

“Not really,” Aleks replied. “Not entirely. But… I’m trying. And every time I go to sleep and wake up, it feels like some of it starts to become a little clearer. I think I might be gaining some of the knowledge that soldier had, like I’m remembering knowledge that belonged to someone else.” As he spoke, he tried to focus on what he’d seen in the mind of that soldier – not just the marches, the speeches. The technology, the organization of it all. The Gaurl Core, the Core he’d seen in bits and pieces of someone else’s warped memories, was a strangely beautiful place, and covered in machines. Glorious machines of all kinds, and so advanced, more advanced than anything Aleks knew of from the old world.

But dangerous. All of it was dangerous, every wonder a weapon at the same time. He shuddered at the thought of facing all that head-on, of marching into the abyss as the Adma did. Equally disturbing was the thought of truly turning those weapons against their creators. It would be poetic, yes. But when Aleks imagined himself turning the Invictan machines to horrors, forcing them to destroy those who made them… he felt a chill down his spine.

“It might be better not to trifle with that any more than we have to,” Aleks said.

Arien shrugged. “It can be done though, can’t it?”

“Probably.”

“Don’t forget why you’re here, Aleks.” Arien stepped toward Aleks and set a hand on his shoulder – a surprisingly close and friendly gesture for someone Aleks had met mere hours ago. “You survived because you were smart, because you had the presence of mind to survive. That’s worth something all on its own, but you also brought knowledge with you. You saw the mind of the Invictans, and that knowledge might just be the strongest weapon we still have.”

Aleks shrugged, raised his eyes from the ground, and looked around the machinist workshop.

The room was lit naturally, high windows streaming in the outdoor brightness and highlighting fine, wispy dust that floated throughout the room. On the large central table there sat an array of partially-constructed drones and pieces of machinery. Along one long edge of the table, a longsword lay with a padlock inlaid just above its handle, protruding from the blade’s flat. Devices that could have been cameras or cannons for all Aleks knew were scattered near the shells of incomplete drones. Against the exterior wall – just under the windows – a cabinet glittering with wires and lights and studded with dials stood. Speakers and radio receivers hung from coiled cords, reaching over the tangles of steel-rods and past computer terminals etched with systems named in honor of long-dead Sowers.

“Like what you see?” Arien’s voice startled Aleks from his trance.

Aleks couldn’t help chuckling, and he nodded. “I don’t know what half of this stuff is, but it’s all really impressive.”

“Well, you’d better learn quick because we need all hands on deck if what you and your sisters said is right.” Aleks’ heart lurched in his throat and he put a hand just under his clavicle. Don’t say anything, and he took a breath.

“I’ll learn quick, don’t worry. You might have to show me just how these drones work, though – a lot of the more advanced stuff here I’ve only seen in passing, purely theoretical stuff. I haven’t spent that much time in the city really, even when I was an aspirant.” At that, Arien made a noise of approval.

At that moment, a chiming noise came from the radio cabinet. Aleks nearly jumped, but Arien simply grinned, his ears perking up, as he looked toward Aleks. “That’s Kotire from the Adma calling in for the weekly update, I think. How about you go ahead and pick up the radio?”

He nodded and walked to the radio cabinet, trying not to form disastrous scenarios in his mind where the person on the other end – Kotire – wouldn’t stop asking him questions, questions, so many questions. He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“This is Kotire,” the speaker said. “We’re moving up by oranges for speech recognition. No telling if prevention is worth the countertop. Izheim might not be honey. The Only Outside is willing to give us pancakes though – they’re summertime folk but not for mistrunner, so of course they like our –”

Kotire had gotten almost through her speech when Aleks’ mind caught up to his ears and realized that nothing the speaker was saying made the slightest bit of sense. “Hold on, what was that?”

There was a pause.

“Who the fuck is this?” Kotire’s voice said, growling, suddenly harsh and urgent and aggressive.

“Heyyyyy,” Arien said, approaching from behind Aleks. “It’s Arien here. This is Aleks, he doesn’t know the codes yet. I’ll give him the codebook.” Arien found a small door in the cabinet and pulled out a clipboard with heavily-creased papers stacked on it. “Here you go, Aleks, the codebook.”

Aleks nodded. “Sorry for the misunderstanding.” Furiously flipping back and forth through the codebook, he was able to make sense of what Kotire said:

“We’re moving up north to strike at their lines from the back. No telling if it will stop them from pushing further into the Vale, though. Even Risir is willing to help us now – they’re Solists who oppose the Emperor, so of course they’re our allies at the moment.”

Aleks:

“Just to tell you, I’m supposed to be the one coordinating with you now, I think. I suppose to help the insurgency against the Invictans… though I don’t know what I’m supposed to do from all the way in Kivv. We’re just waiting, aren’t we?”

Kotire:

“We’ll handle this end of things, of course, but it’s important to have a contact on your side. Arien doesn’t want to do it anymore?”

Aleks: “I guess not.” He set the codebook aside for a moment – there was nothing there for him, right now.

Kotire: “Well, then tell him it’s been a pleasure. And one other thing – ‘insurgency’ isn’t quite the right term for what we’re doing here.”

Aleks: “Oh? What is the right term?”

Kotire: “The Adma’s a new kind of society, Aleks. Aleks, right?”

Aleks: “Um, yeah.” His breaths were shallow; this line of conversation was beginning to make him uncomfortable again. But now that he’d been put into this position, what was there to do but cooperate and serve as a contact for these Adma?

Kotire: “A country, Aleks, a country with all the organization that entails, but not bound to a place, not imprisoned by borders. We go wherever we must, and right now that is Invictan land, so that we can make them fear us the way they’ve made their neighbors afraid for years.”

Aleks: “That sounds like a roving band of mercenaries.”

Kotire: “If a roving band of mercenaries has a common purpose, a just one, and a full society of our own – is that such a bad thing?”

Aleks didn’t reply for a long while. When he finally opened his mouth to speak again, he intended to change the subject, but Kotire interrupted him before he had the chance. “Have you ever been outside the Wanderer’s Vale?”

“No,” Aleks said, glancing over his shoulder at Arien, who shrugged, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind him. Aleks swallowed and looked around the room, in which he was now alone.

“I guess I can’t blame you for not understanding,” came Kotire’s reply. “We must seem an awful lot like the Invictans from your perspective. But I promise you this, for whatever conflicts there might be between you folks and us, we are allies in this. Have you ever seen the mountains in Gaurlante – pictures, I mean?”

“I’ve seen pictures,” Aleks said. “The mountains there are really tall, right?”

“It’s not just that they’re tall,” came the reply. “The mountains are so large and dominating in the landscape that they affect where you can go, how you can move. It’s nearly impossible to move large numbers of people out of the north of Gaurlante into the Wanderer’s Vale without getting bogged down for days at a time, because they have to go through narrow mountain passes. And the people who live in those passes, though they’re officially citizens of the Empire, like to keep to themselves and only grudgingly tolerate the soldiers. That’s why the Invictans use their borders towns as staging grounds.”

“Shouldn’t you have said that in code?” Aleks asked, nervously reaching for the decoding materials.

“Nah,” Kotire replied after a shorter-than-normal pause. “Let them make of that what they will if they’re listening in.” She laughed.

“Is there anything else?” Aleks asked, hoping for a no.

“You play Keunigg?”

“No,” Aleks said. “Should I?”

“If you want to. Tell Arien: The dragon on A6 is taking his construct from G2 and leaving behind a red token.”

Aleks looked over his shoulder at the door. “I have no idea what any of that means.” There was talking in the background of the radio speaker’s output, too low and quiet for Aleks to understand what the voices were saying. It sounded urgent, though.

Kotire’s laugh was the only reply he got for a moment. Then: “That’s alright. Just let him know! I’ve got to go. You’d better be back! I want to hear all about the latest, juiciest Sower rumors.” The last thing he heard before the radio line went dead was a distant cracking sound that made Aleks return in his mind to that field in the middle of Etyslund where he’d first seen Invictan weapons in action. In a cloud of smoke and a staccato cracking sound (like a million branches breaking at once) Eksha died.

Shaking, Aleks returned the radio receiver to its handle and stepped away from the cabinet. He stopped, rested his hands on the table, and tried to steady himself. Sweat ran down his brow. The door opened, and Arien entered slowly, announced by the tapping of his steady footfalls. “Hey, Aleks… are you… alright?”

Aleks shook his head quickly. “I heard a gunshot right before Eksha signed off.” He looked up to meet Arien’s eyes. The older Sower looked concerned and his mouth was a thin line.

“Who’s Eksha?” Arien asked.

Aleks gasped. “I mean… Kotire, that is… is she going to be alright?”

Arien shrugged. “Probably. Why, are you getting attached?”

Aleks blinked at him, surprised. He stood up and let the mantle of the Sower’s Gift fall over him, returning him to calm. I should have made use of this earlier, he thought, and walked around the table and towards the door. “I’m going to go back to my apartment for now,” Aleks said. “Send me a message if you need anything.”

“Will do,” Arien replied smoothly and casually, a lopsided smile on his face. When Aleks looked at Arien he saw the same mantle that now covered him, its telltale signs the almost-invisible mist that hung around his face and especially his eyes. Aleks stopped in the doorway, unable to look away from Arien. “Is something wrong?” the older Sower asked.

Aleks, the calm now on him, did not hesitate to ask as he normally would have. “Are you addicted to the Gift?” he said, and Arien chuckled.

“Addicted is a strong word, Aleks. It keeps me at my best all the time; why wouldn’t I use it?”

Aleks’ lip curled in distaste, a disgust he did not bother to hide. “If you’d had the Gift when you fell from your city, you wouldn’t be asking me that question. And you wouldn’t be treating it so lightly.”

“Wow,” Arien said as Aleks departed, not turning back. “I can still tell that was meant to be insulting, you know. I’m supernaturally calm, not supernaturally oblivious.”

Aleks’s apartment was located just below the ground level of the Sower Monastery, in a warm corner of the building. Pipes pumped and channeled heat from beneath the earth through the hallways, and potted plants hung from the ceilings, giving the cavernous underground of the monastery a strangely homey feeling. The single ground-level window (near the ceiling of the hallway outside Aleks’ apartment) showed that the sun was rapidly declining through the afternoon.

Aleks reached for his key, turned it in the lock, and stepped inside.

The apartment, lit by a small hanging lamp in the center of the room and by the afternoon sun entering through the ground-level windows, was even warmer than the hallway outside. The warmth was slightly stifling, in fact; before surveying the place Aleks walked quickly to the nearest window and turned a knob to force it open. On a desk near the door sat a laptop computer, many cables issuing from it and plugging into a small connection cabinet in the wall. Against one corner of the desk leaned a tripod, on top of which was a small camera. Aleks leaned forward and typed off a quick message before turning around:

Dad, you there?

On the floor there was a thin mattress, covered in many layers of blankets and sheets. Several discarded blankets lay bunched up in a corner. On the bed lay a sketchbook and a set of pencils. Left behind by a previous resident, it was full of pencil-and-charcoal drawings, and Aleks had quickly taken to examining the drawings. He didn’t understand how they were constructed, how each line and the texture of the charcoal strokes created the haunting images in the sketchbook, and his imitations were flat, lacking something vital that he could not name. He looked at one of the sketches – a vaguely humanoid figure, stretched out with limbs flailing, staring into the viewer. Its face could have been fully detailed, or scratched out after just a single lazy pencil-stroke for the head. Its texture as impossible to describe in real-world terms. It hurt to look at the creature for too long – its vagueness reminded him of real people as he saw them only in his nightmares.

Over the mattress hung a lopsided painting of the Rust Gates of Kivv, only they weren’t rusted. The painting was framed in bronze, intricate vinelike patterns surrounding the canvas and holding it down. The paint was flecked with tiny spots of distortion, like sparks had struck the canvas and caused the paint to blend together, forming slurries but leaving the shapes and colors perfectly recognizable. Against the adjacent wall leaned a folding bicycle, collected from one of the workshops above and still unused. Aleks had little occasion to go to the east side of the city, where a vehicle might better serve him. He turned back toward the desk, passing by an alcove in which hung a dozen spare cloth cloaks just like the one he wore – brown, thick fabric, oversized. He brushed past them and stood by the desk again. His message still sat at the bottom of the terminal. Next to the computer sat a small tape recorder, which he wrapped his hand around and picked up. He pressed the button, thinking to say something about the day’s happenings, but no words came out when he opened his mouth.

He thought he might talk about what he’d seen in the machinist workshop, about his conversation with Kotire, but then something flashed in his peripheral vision. He looked down at the computer terminal and saw:

I’m here, Aleks. I’m glad you are okay.

Aleks pulled back the plain wooden chair, quickly sat, and typed:

Same as I was yesterday, dad. It’s safe here for now, really. I’m more worried about you.

And as the sun began to fall in the sky, father and son continued like that. One beneath the ground in the center of the Sower Order, one in the magic-warped remains of a ruined library in a ruined village. They talked for hours about things that didn’t matter, never mentioning, by unspoken agreement, the one thing neither could ignore.

How are you holding up? And how is Luca? Haven’t the two of you been planning your next move together?

As he wrote, Aleks imagined Stepan standing on the field in Etyslund, facing the Invictans as they massed, ripping up the earth from its foundations and turning it against them. He imagined his father turning the sky itself to a weapon. Icicles made spears and punctured armor and flesh and bone alike; stone caged and the earth crushed and smothered. The air filled with thick blue fog and thin red mist.

We have been, the reply came. I’m going to stay here, but Luca has other plans. She thinks there is sabotage to be done in the Invictan border town. Carakhte, she says it’s called, and that that’s where the Invictan soldiers came from. I don’t know exactly how she learned this, since the Invictans are all dead, but maybe Carakhte was built before her parents deserted.

And their conversation continued to meander, father and son reminiscing between the moments when they discussed the serious business of inevitable war, of the confrontation that in truth had already begun. Until eventually Aleks saw the message:

I have to go. Be well, and don’t forget the wandering that brought you here. You’re strong, Aleks.

And he snorted and stood up, taking only the time to fire off a quick: Be well before he stepped away from the terminal. Aleks casually picked up the camera – a truly advanced instrument, one of the latest reconstructions of old-world technology, though he held it as though it were easily replaceable. With the camera in tow, Aleks set out from his apartment, left the Sower Monastery, and crossed the central street of Kivv. He went around the back of the low wall and the gardens that separated the Reaper Monastery from the rest of the city, and came to pass a lone tree, its leaves just starting to turn. It looked like it needed to be watered, but Aleks hadn’t brought a bucket. He passed it and went for the city wall.

There was a ladder, thankfully, and Aleks climbed, careful to brace the camera’s tripod against the wall without letting the camera itself smash against the stone. When he reached the top, he unfolded the tripod, set it beside him, and leaned on the ramparts, staring out beyond the city. The lake glittered beneath the mountains, reflecting orange light and a thousand points of glittering stardust. Aleks stood behind the camera, pressing the shutter, and stared out at the mountains as the sun disappeared behind them. His ears tickled with a faint and distant vibration, a rhythm, almost a melody, but just beneath the threshold of true hearing. His instinct told him to turn his head, to look over his shoulder, but instead he stared at the mountains as they were bathed in orange light, then purple, then a deep black as the night truly set in.

The air was growing cold. Aleks would have to close his window soon if he wanted to get a decent night’s rest. He folded up the tripod of his camera, turned the device off, and climbed down from the ramparts, heading for home.