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Castles in a Black Sky
Seven clans, seven banners, seven versions to make one. Indeed, the story that follows has been compiled from Bannerbound sources, much to the presumable chagrin of some of my readers in the Great Dust Gyre. To them I say: I apologize, but I know a common narrative when I see one.
If it helps, I must commend the effort each of the seven clans put into the preservation of their particular version. All the usual work of collecting the scattered scraps, combing through the dust and dirt of pre-Refuge history and scouring the embellishments of overenthusiastic or agenda-driven writers and tellers? All practically done for me before I got started. It’s preservation done right, in a way a jaded soul like me can appreciate and even celebrate. I will say: If retaining all you can of who you used to be is truly what the Seven are looking for, you are doing it right.
It’s thus almost a shame that the work I had to do was to find the parallels and common themes, and step forwards with the apparent sacrilege of weaving them into one. All I’ll say is this: Someone had to.
They say death is one of the only things we all have in common, but they barely know how right they are! It hardly matters where you were born, where you moved, where you died, and where you’ll go, everyone gets plucked off the world. And more importantly, one thing we can all agree on? We all get reaped by the same Harvester[1]. Pits, Skies and whatever else the others have, wherever you’re going, you’ll be sent on your way by the exact same fellow as everyone else. And she’ll[2] find ya anywhere and everywhere.
But is that all she is? One who lives for the job and nothing else? You would think so, and dare I say even she might have, once. But in those rare lulls between each passing? In those quiet times between wars where all flourish, or in those places where there’s nothing left to drop? In those time well before us, even? Turns out there’s a lot of time to fill. And even those diligent, stone-minded sorts who live to work have to find something to do in those bits of meantime.
Of course, someone like her took a long while to realize this. Still well before our time, but plenty had stood up and fallen by the time she started to wonder, maybe there was more to these interims than waiting. One can guess the thought caught her right as she was looking at the bones of someone she’d sent off a little later than usual, on a busy day. Maybe a catch-up sort of day. It was one of those fellas that never got sent off right, though, that one’s clear[3]. One of those fellas that scatter their bones all over her foyer, so to speak, because they came right along with the part of ‘em that mattered most. She just shooed ‘em along before that, made the lot take those bones with ‘em to whatever came next. But that one time, something must’ve happened for her to start wondering, maybe she could do something with those, with the wait ahead of her.
Quick as she is – don’t need to waste time moving when you’re already there – she’d have them tucked away before the next one came in, saving them up in some forgotten corner, some place so dead, so bereft of anything that she had to pluck it from the rest of the realm like a common soul. But the pile seemed disorderly, chaotic, didn’t seem like it was making the most of its space, so she tidied it up. Then did it again, after the thought there’d be more bones crossed her mind, they’d need to fit somewhere, may as well make them support each other! Halfway through making the base of a decent pillar before duty called again. Or at least, that’s what she saw it as when she got back to it later… How much later? Doesn’t matter. What matters is she had another handful of bones with her once she did, from another poor fool who dropped dead where no one but her would find ‘em.
Something about this caught her, practically entranced her. Maybe she finally realized there was something else other than her job and the wait. Or maybe she saw a future in these shapes she was putting together, or the potential ones in her head now that she had something to think about. But before she’d realized, she had built herself a room. A proper, actual foyer, where the metaphorical one had been. That’s the one you see in paintings[4], though she’d done work on it since then. And she thought what any of us would’ve, by then: “Maybe I could build a big house to go with this”. And so, she got started on that, and what was once a house became a manor, and then a proper Castle. Oh, she had to wait for wars to sweep across the olden lands for it, for drought and ice and plague to sweep by a few times, but sooner than she or anyone would realize, she had a Castle to herself, that would put anything we’ve built to shame. All of it from the bones of the forgotten.
As she who reaps us all took a moment of peace once the living had found accords, and the passings slowed down, she started to notice a few things amiss. For even the cleanest, most bleached of bones still have their scraps – bits of carrion, the little pests that feast on it, whispers of mourning, all wisps of clingy life. Very little of it manages to hold on when passing into her realm, but something always does when you move enough bones to dwarf even the tallest of Ironbound Keeps[5]. These scraps of rot and life had piled on enough that she could see figments of actual life in her realm, skittering and wandering the halls, taking shape little by little as it found more to shape itself. And the more scraps they found, the closer each little wisp could get to becoming something…
And it fascinated her. As someone who’d seen life come and go, but never stay, the keeper of a threshold where no one lingered more than a few moments, the idea of having something in her realm even remotely close to alive was thrillingly new. She had something to look forward to beyond her job now! Even if every realm fell, and her work came to an end, there would be something still!
So she committed to these collections, these architectures, more than ever before. She looked forwards to those neglected souls that weren’t sent off right, because there would be more for another Castle, one greater than the last. More scraps for the entities that slowly came to be within these structures. Now even a simple delay could mean she’d get there before the mortals could do their part, and rake as much of life’s detritus as she could into her ever-greater foyer.
Well, it paid off. Castle after Castle arose by her hands, each far greater and more luxurious than the one before it – luxurious as bone can be, at least. But when the time came to assemble her next masterpiece, with a bundle of ivory where her shears usually were, she turned around and found there was no room. She’d gotten deeply invested in these Castles when there was no harvest to pursue, that she had utterly filled her own liminal realm. It seemed so utterly empty once, she never thought it would happen!
Then she looked back towards mortal lands. Not towards those places where all the dying had been done – those were hers already – but those that were almost there. Those that just needed a few more lives to go, a little push, and they would be right in her realm, too dead to contest. She turned her gaze towards one island in particular, surrounded by so many, greater than the rest and yet so much emptier, with but a few souls still standing upon it.
She reached for her shears once more.
And just like that, the island was gone[6].
The Castle she built after that was magnificent, and perhaps the liveliest of all. After all, it had come pre-inhabited, hadn’t it? And there was still plenty of room left for more. She had the ideas, too, the grand architecture for the next one whirling together in her immortal mind. All she needed was material.
You wonder why we take all the time and measures with the dead, no matter who? Strangers on the roads, enemies slain by our hand? You ever asked yourself why we bothered? This is why.
[1]An aggregated sort of translation from various different terms, with most referring to one whose job is to cut down and gather crops once grown and ready. Zau and Issouf are exceptions, both going with something closer to Gardener, with emphasis on trimming rather than reaping. In this, I am afraid I had to resort to the majority “vote”.
[2]Most of the seven Clans (Zau, Heese, Norrish, Vesnor) refer to this Harvester by female pronouns and terminology, while the remaining ones either use gender-neutral terms (Vesh, Issouf) or go far out of their way linguistically to not bring the matter up at all (Sofize).
[3]A branching point, with every clan referring to a different funerary method as the proper, loss-less way to send off the dead; all of them either permanently confine or destroy the body entirely. Levels of acceptance for other methodologies varied, but non-Clan methods were generally seen as passable, just not ideal.
[4]There are no less than 15 known artworks by the title of Atrium of the Harvest in the history of the Urul Peaks Clans and their predecessors, and it receives repeated mention and description in their fiction. Descriptions and details vary wildly beyond the ample use of bone, and even individual clans don’t have a unified vision of how it would look.
[5]Similar terminology is used in Bannerbound language to refer to the Ironbound Keep that gives their capital its name. The way it’s used seems to imply Ironbound Keeps were a class of fortification outright, and while the one the Seven currently occupy is the greatest of all, it’s by no means the only one (assuming, of course, that the ones in their realm still stand).
[6]This coincides with certain tales from Sofize, Norrish and Vesnor about “Azure Barrens”, a patch of water at the center of an archipelago where no wind stirred the waves, and where by all metrics there should be land, but they couldn’t find any. Given the current glacial state of the Urul Peaks realm, I imagine it’s become something of a moot point since then.