The Weight of the World on Her Shoulders Read online

The Weight of the World on Her Shoulders

  Episode 3 of Staring Into the Abyss

  A Story of the Second Realm

  By R.J. Davnall

  Copyright 2012 R. J. Davnall

  This ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.

  The Second Realm

  Van Raighan's Last Stand:

  Episode 1: I Can See Clearly Now

  Episode 2: You Can't Go Home Again

  Episode 3: A Hole In Her Mind

  Episode 4: Touching the Void

  Falling With Style:

  Episode 1: Wild Hawk Down

  Episode 2: She Stoops to Conquer

  Episode 3: Falling Off the Face of the Earth

  Staring At the Abyss:

  Episode 1: A Knot Better Tied

  Episode 2: Mind Over Matter

  https://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.com/

  Contents

  The Weight of the World on Her Shoulders

  About the Author

  Staring Into the Abyss

  3. The Weight of the World on Her Shoulders

  Dora had learned the hard way not to sit down on the beach. After two hours' walking through the ruins of Old Vessit and across the sand, though, her feet were telling her it hadn't really been that bad getting all that sand out of her petticoat. She stayed standing. It would be bad enough getting the sand out of her boots, never mind her underwear.

  The sea held the muddy grey colour of wet clay, the sky above it as dreary as the concrete tombstones of the old city at her back. Salt freshness hung in the air, chill and wet to the point of chafing her cheeks. It had rained twice already that afternoon, and out across the bay, the fine black line of the horizon blurred behind the next shower's advance.

  There was no solace anywhere between her and the horizon. The twig-like masts of distant trawlers marked the boundaries of a near-blank expanse of water. Something in Dora felt much the same way. She could remember her borders, or where they were supposed to be, but there was very little to fill them.

  Only the memory of a delicate golden flower cupped between Keshnu's and her hands offered her anything to tie herself to. It is our child. Nameless, genderless, little more than a tight knot of raw awareness, it was a Wilder, born of the Gift-Giver, but born by and through Dora's actions. Keshnu had promised to take her to see it in the crèche in the Court, deep in the heart of the Second Realm, as soon as her condition had stabilised a bit more. If it ever would.

  The world lurched, and for a moment Dora just gritted her teeth, willing the disorientation to pass. It was only when the ground slapped her hard on the bottom of her feet, the shock buckling her knees, that she realised something else was up. A third jerk from the ground caught her, sent her sprawling into the sand. The sea had turned choppy, and Dora spluttered as wind-caught spume pattered across her face.

  She managed to roll over, away from the water, as a wave ran up towards her. The ground kicked again, then again, and her mind finally dragged up a name for the phenomenon. Realmquake. They'd been common during the early stages of the Realmwar, soon after the Crash, but there hadn't been a quake in Dora's lifetime.

  But if the Realm was splitting apart along the line of the Abyss below the city, that might feel like a quake. Dora pushed herself up to a crouch, staggered up the beach with the ground still writhing beneath her. Soft sand made the footing doubly treacherous, and her ankles ached like blazes by the time she reached the stone steps up to the decrepit promenade.

  She slipped once on the steps, sharp pain exploding through her knee in counterpoint to her weary feet. She didn't bother pausing to check for blood; that was inevitable. Ahead of her, the ruins of Vessit rang with the crashes of crumbling stonework. Even with her legs bent, trying to hold steady, the quake threw her around too much to give her a clear look at the tower-blocks half a mile up the coast. It was going to be a long, frightening haul just to get back underground.

  By the time she ducked down the tunnel to the black gulf of the Abyss, Dora had a half-dozen other bad cuts and bruises. Most of them came from being thrown against the walls of the tunnels that led down here, but the worrying one, the one that she could feel trickling blood down her neck, had been from a small chunk of falling building. It had been warning enough to get her out of the way of a much larger chunk, but by the way her hair now stuck to her collar, if she didn't get someone to look at it soon, the result would be the same.

  She leaned on the tunnel wall with her less-damaged hand, feeling the rock still twitching periodically. She'd done her best, but with the terrain so treacherous, it had to have taken her twenty minutes or more to get down from the beach. She'd seen no-one on the way.

  From ahead, Dora made out the sound of a torrent of water. Not the usual faint trickle, lost somewhere in the darkness, but the full-on roar of a substantial waterfall. Voices poked up through the sound here and there, but not high enough for her to catch their words.

  It took her all too stumbling long to get down the tunnel to where she could see what was happening. The crowd standing by the lip of the Abyss must have included almost every Wilder in Vessit. They made no attempt to stop Dora, even after she staggered into one of them. The Wilder barely moved under the impact.

  The sound ringing in her ears was nothing next to the sight of the white wall of water concealing the far side of the chasm. Scattered rainbows floated in it wherever the torchlight was strong enough, their normal beauty spoiled by the sheen of Second-Realm colour overlaying them. Dora could make out one end of the cascade in the gloom off to the right - the landward side, she thought - but it seemed to go on forever the other way.

  Her eyes found a tiny figure hovering against the backdrop of the torrent. Keshnu. She no longer needed eyesight to recognise the father - or mother, as he insisted - of her child. His logic formed a pattern of neatly overlapping chevrons that curled together into a tight-petalled flower, and Dora saw it half the time just by closing her eyes.

  Comforting to think of him that way. Less comforting to realise just how far away he was. Had the Abyss always been so wide? The tiny figure, dark grey against the sparkling white water, was taller than she was. A wave of dizziness washed over Dora, helped along by her spreading headache. The blood-loss couldn't be doing her any favours either.

  What was Keshnu doing out there? Dora squinted past the coloured blotches blighting her vision, fighting to escape the hypnotic motion of the waterfall. As her eyesight blurred, the image of waterfall and tiny Gift-Giver fragmented into an unintelligible mess of particulate motion.

  No, not quite unintelligible. There was a pattern to it, a pattern that had nothing to do with First-Realm physics. Something radiated through the flux, out from Keshnu and up towards the ceiling of the Abyss. For a moment, she thought he was pushing against it, that Rel had been right all along and the Gift-Givers-

  She shook the thought away. If Keshnu was doing it, whatever it was, it was no attack on mankind. She'd tasted the Gift-Giver's compassion directly, mind-to-mind. But if he wasn't causing the quake, what was he trying to do? Something to stop it?

  Whatever it was, she could follow the shifting, flickering currents of power up into the ceiling of the Abyss. As she balanced the blurring of her vision with the scattered concentration that disrupted her First-Realm Logic, the veil of the cascade faded. A twisted net of shimmering lines that might have been cracks in the rock or the jagged edges of its surfaces sprang into relief behind it.

  Dora watched open-mouthed as the filaments of the web slowly began to weave themselves back together. It
was a jerky process, inconsistent and unfocussed, but it had to be Keshnu's doing. She squinted hard, expecting to see the grainy texture of his influence building up behind the lines, pressing them together.

  Instead, the Gift-Giver's power seemed to vanish into the fissures. They brightened wherever he touched them, pulling together like a stitch tightening. Each stitch, as it closed, bore the weight of the entire Abyss. Every pound of force the Second Realm pressed onto the First went through Keshnu's grip.

  No wonder he seemed so tiny. Little more than a man, he wrestled an entire plane of reality. Why were the other Wildren not helping? Dora tried to focus her attention back to them, to rally them to their leader's aid, but her sight seemed caught in the weave of Keshnu's craft. Anger welled up inside, and with the surge of emotion, she felt her Gift stir.

  Well, if she couldn't reach the Wildren to convince them to help - and maybe they were staying clear for a reason, or at Keshnu's instruction - she could at least try herself. Her hand didn't shake as she reached for the seal on the Sherim in her head. The Sherim spun apart effortlessly, the motions familiar and comfortable in the face of desperation.

  Dimly, she felt the air around her rippling with alarmed communications. Something gripped her at the waist, steadied her as a tremor ran through the world. Cautiously,