The World Above

They had always called it the moon. They had watched it thin and darken and thought it a light, or a wound, or a window. None of them had thought it a hole — or that a person might stand at its edge and look down through it, and see the whole of the world they were born in lying small and dim below, and the fires they had set still burning on it.

Nothing had moved since the fire took the glade. The company stood in the scorched ring where Retta's ember-garden had been, most of them down to a hurt or two from death, and watched the blaze they had started walk outward from them. The buried coals had gone up all at once and then eaten through the fuel nearest them, so the centre was spent and smoking while the edge marched off into the wood in a widening circle — away from them, for now.

They took stock of what the blast had bought them. Sylvie read it plainly: it had been a holy hand grenade. Whatever might have been waiting in the dark of this wood — the things that do not come near a Sacred Pyre — was simply gone, burned out of being. But so was the rest of it. The fire had consumed the greater part of whatever power had been gathered here; they had not harvested the garden, they had detonated it. To Draz's Splendor-sight the air hung like a shaken snow-globe, magic scattered loose through the atmosphere and settling nowhere. And Heyou, looking through the borrowed eyes of his shadow, found one thing the others could not see: off to the southeast, within the burned clearing, reality was **wobbling** — a ripple across a still surface, a soft place where something else pressed close to the world. Nothing was pushing through it. It was only thin there.

They sheltered the night in Retta's hut while the fire burned its ring around them. Jamal found the old woman's body and took back the suppression amulet he had forced on her; she had no more use for it. Heyou, who does not sleep in the shadow-shape, spent the dark hours with the heart he carries — the one Sylvie has gone without. Through Kreth's eyes it was no machine at all. It was organic, and more floral than animal: a knot of thick, coiled vines, and along it small dormant buds. As the night wore on the pale motes that drifted everywhere in this wood began to fall toward the heart as toward a magnet, gathering in close, and where they touched it the buds swelled. One opened. It wept a little bead of thick, brilliant liquid — Splendor rendered down to its essence — and went on doing it, slow and steady, for as long as he held it there. He gathered a vial of the stuff and, come morning, tossed it to Draz, who thought it pretty and kept it.

Sylvie spent the night at her books, beating her head against the question of the gods and getting, from the volume she drew, a competently argued heap of nonsense she was sure was wrong. But she had also been reading for places — for the spaces her paintings might open onto — and two came clear enough to chase: a waterfall somewhere in high country, tied to one of the sites marked on the vault map, and the Amber Reach as it had been when it still lived, a dense and shining city. Somewhere in the small hours her sleeping, floating body drifted up into the rafters and bumped Draz awake; he caught a beam before he fell, glared into the middle distance, and did not sleep again.

In the morning they weighed the waterfall against the nearer thing, and chose the nearer: the wobble to the southeast, where the world did not sit right. Jamal rode Pinchie at the front — the two of them bonded now, not by the crab remembering him so much as by a long accumulation of good will — with Heyou behind carrying the heart, then Sylvie, then Draz, and Speaker among them.

The threshold did not so much open as bend. Past it the geometry came apart: Jamal hung upside-down above the others and did not fall, the ground still down wherever a body happened to stand; trees ran straight ahead and curved like a fish-eye at the edges of sight. When Sylvie ran to close the gap the space between her and the others only stretched the faster, the way raisin-bread swells in the baking, until she was far off and alone and had to feel her way back along some crooked path that let distance shrink again. And everywhere the **Umbra was simply absent.** The whole place lay sun-kissed and even, Splendor not hoarded in any object or person or shrine but loose in the air like late-afternoon light with no sun to cast it. None of them had ever seen the world wear Splendor that way. It did not feel like the world they had lived in all their lives.

There was a carcass in it. A sphinx — lion-bodied, near human-faced, winged, and bigger than an elephant — lay dead and half-turned to honeycomb, a cloud of bees the length of a finger working it over, none of them hostile. The hazards here were larger game. A flat thing buried in the ground erupted under Heyou like a landborne manta and struck him hard, but he was not solid enough to seize and puffed apart and re-gathered under its grasp; Sylvie threw up an Arcane Deflection and turned the blow aside entirely, and her black coiling magic so disagreed with the thing that it recoiled and fled up into the sky. Draz took his Legendary Beast shape — a Kodiak the size of a small cabin, the first time Jamal had seen it — and set to gorging on the comb and on a slab of fatty leech-grub that dropped nearby. Then a true predator came: a leaping thing the size of a house, long-tailed and spring-legged with great eyes and sticky, spidery hands — a monstrous bush-baby — that landed on the carcass with a crack of ribs and then turned on them.

As they fought, the place worked on them. The GM's word for it was unstuck from reality — here every Hope spent, every point of armor or flesh or nerve marked, counted double, until one fixed one's footing in the world again. It sat on each of them differently. Draz's senses blurred together until he could no longer tell quite where a body ended and the air began, scent and sight running into one gradient. Heyou, who had been all weightless vapour, turned suddenly solid and heavy, moving as though in a lead suit. Jamal's eyes went red with a borrowed heat-sight — he could see the leech-things waiting high in the trees and a larger shape deeper in — and a fury came up in him. And Sylvie felt the pull of the place: the Umbra was the power she had made her own and trusted, and the Splendor that had come flooding back to her felt unearned and alien — yet the way **forward and up** had a strong draw in it, stronger even than the way home, as though home lay that way now.

They could not put the leaping thing down. Pinchie charged it and Draz raked it — its tail sheared off like a gecko's and flopped away stinking — and Heyou blinded one of its eyes with a called, fire-fletched shot. When it would not fall, Jamal and Heyou went in together, spending their Hope on a joined strike that landed as Heyou's first blow of the fight and so struck double; it carried clean past the creature's severe threshold and left it reeling — but still up, and still in the fight — and Sylvie marked it for death. Further in, a feline big enough to carry that bush-baby in its mouth the way a cat carries a mouse sat watching the whole scene, and chose, for now, not to join it.

Sylvie, running ahead through all of this, came to a precipice — the dark edge that had been drawing her — and looked over. And it was the old vision turned upside down. Once, hunting Ygva, she had gone down into a cave and found a hole in its floor and been carried up into the sky of another, older, dead world below the world — the one the gods were said to have kept before they came down to hers. This was that, inverted. She was not looking up into a sky. She was looking **down** through one. The rupture she stood at the lip of was the hole the Runt God had come through; it was the thing they had always called the moon — a tear in the membrane between worlds — and through it, small and dim and far beneath her, lay the whole world she had been born in. They were in the **World Above.** That was why everything here was vast and terrible, and the least of its creatures deadly: they had climbed into the world the gods had left their world for, and the leaving had been an ascension — up, and out, the very way the Splendor pulls. Through the same gap she could see, down on the dark world below, the island of Talis she had teleported them to — wholly ablaze now, the fire she had lit run clean across it, its faerie people and its beasts by the thousand gone into smoke. The water around it would likely keep the burning from the continent. Likely.

And standing at the hole in the sky, with the world laid out small and entire beneath her, Sylvie found she could see it all at once — clearly enough, and accurately enough, that she might set a door down anywhere upon it she could hold in her mind. Whatever else the climb had cost, it had given her the whole world to aim at. Behind her the fight was not finished — the leaping thing still up and marked, the great cat still watching from the trees. They had not gone back down. They stood at the edge of the moon, in the middle of a fight, and looked in.