Knights of the Grey City

Chapter 64 - STORY

Things are getting tough, read my text from last night.

Esther had been quick to respond: Anything I can help with?

Rubbing at my temple, I scrolled further down the conversation. It read:

Me: There's a force at play in here that's stronger than us. We're doing our best to figure out how to deal with it, but I don't know if we can. We're out of our depth.

Esther: The Grey City chose you to defend it, right? It knew you'd be capable of doing that.

Me: This stupid place doesn't know what the hell it's doing. It just acts, it can't think. It didn't know about this force that's coming for us, so it couldn't prepare for it.

Esther: Will you be safe?

Me: I don't know. It wants to kill us. I'm scared.

Esther: Can I call?

Me: Can't right now.

Esther: Okay. I wish I had the power to help you in some real way in there, but all I can say is that you can't lose hope. You've already overcome impossible odds just to be alive. You need to concentrate on what you can do and do that well.

The conversation went on from there, but my phone's battery was getting low. I sighed and put it back in my coat pocket, then leaned back on the stairs of the healing platform and looked over to where Rayne stood on the flat of it.

"How is it going?" I asked. According to my phone, it had been roughly twenty minutes, though it had seemed to linger on a few of those minutes for longer than it should have.

She sighed and sat down. It was a strange thing to see, this ordinary young woman casually seated on a mystical platform, her purse and coat piled beside her, in a strange cathedral-like structure with a golden sky shimmering above. Strange and beautiful.

"It's hard to know," she said, a little too softly for me to hear clearly.

I stood up and climbed the few intervening steps so that I could sit beside her. "How so?"

"It's like a dream," she explained. She retied her bandanna around her head where it had begun to come loose. "And not like how you describe your dreams of Leviathan, where you can still move around and speak and do things. It's more like things are happening around me, things that make no sense and that I can't really understand."

"At least you're making contact," I pointed out. "Leviathan said that this place wasn't really designed to store memories, so he wasn't sure if you'd get anything."

"Here's what I learned today," she said, then took a deep breath. "I saw a city that was made of gold. It had tall buildings and spires that reached far up into the sky, and it was on a high green hill with nothing but plains around it."

"I've seen that place," I said quietly.

"In that city, there lived a kind of people. They looked like rocks or gemstones, and they had these soft echoing voices—I think they communicated via quiet vibrations in the stone, or something like that.

"I suppose they lived out their lives as they chose, until something new arrived. I saw the blue skies close over with storm clouds, and a being drifted down out of them. It had coppery wings, a long tail, and very sharp teeth. It landed on the tallest building and started to eat the gold.

"The people called up to it and demanded that it stop. Some of them brought baskets of gold for it to eat in the hopes that it would accept them as offerings and stop eating their homes. But the being couldn't understand the stone people at all because their voices were too soft, and the thunder and the rain of the storm were too loud."