Chapter 3

More than a year had passed since the Planet's scream. At first, their clan's numbers had swelled as they took in Cetra fleeing from the north, where their foraging dwindled from fire and damaged sunlight.

They had soon learned not to be so welcoming. The northern Cetra brought with them not only tales of soot-stained skies and a great impact from the heavens, but something else.

His bow strung and ready, Harith went out to the pit again. It had only one occupant now, an older man whose skin had reddened after several days under the sun. Fewer refugees came to them, and Harith wondered grimly if it was because there were almost none left who could.

"Please," the man begged on seeing him at the edge of the pit. "Please let me up. I don't have it."

He seemed healthy, but the disease made good liars of them. Harith supposed the man might not even realize he was lying. It touched the mind first. Memories didn't slip away so much as the sense of self eroded. They might recall a brother's actions as their own or even take on the name of someone long dead. When there were groups of them together, knowledge might be shared between them without a one ever speaking.

The Cetra weren't unused to this kind of decay, but it was unnatural in the living. It was only meant to happen within the embrace of the Lifestream, when they surrendered their memories to the Planet.

This was some kind of perversion of that, and it wasn't the Planet into which their selves dissolved. Harith had heard stories of a monster that appeared among them from time to time, masked in the faces of the dead. No one knew what it really looked like, but from the grotesque shapes it forced on their people, Harith knew it could only be something worse.

One day, he hoped to loose an arrow into the heart of that monster, instead of the ones that grew out of the bodies of strangers and people he loved alike.

"Please," the man repeated. "It's been days."

Harith shook his head. "The only thing I'm certain of," he said, "is that you are not the monster itself. The sickness acts slower in some than in others. You may not even know you carry it."

"I know," whispered the stranger. His voice scratched, and Harith tossed down a fresh water skin, though he didn't think that was the reason. The man scrambled for it anyway.

"Tell me about yourself," said Harith.

"I already have."

"Tell me again. Tell me about the time before the sickness came. Tell me about your parents, your brothers, your children."

The man shook his head slowly, clutching the water skin to his chest as though it were something precious. "I fear they're all gone. Most of them are. My daughter... Maybe my daughter escaped it. She was carrying a message when they came. She never had to see..."

Briefly, Harith entertained the thought of letting it go at that. He could leave it for today, and ask again tomorrow. But he needed to know if the man's recollection held steady from day to day.

"What message was she carrying?" he decided to ask.

The man looked up at him. "Do you think they can still return to the Planet, after they become that?" he said instead of answering. "I hear my wife, I do. But they say when you have the sickness, you start hearing voices. I don't know if it's her, or if I'm going mad, the way she did. I don't want to go mad. I don't want my daughter to see that."

Harith let out a soft breath and crouched down by the edge of the pit. "None of us do," he said. "That's why we're having these talks, you and I."

"You'll kill me if I turn," the man said.

"Yes."

"My sons were so young. I couldn't... I couldn't do it."

"But someone else did?"

The man nodded. "We burned the bodies... Everyone thought that would be safer. We burned everything they touched, and we fled. We left all those parts of ourselves behind."

"And that may have saved you," said Harith. "You may not carry it."

"And my daughter? If she went back there, she'd find nothing but ash. How will she know who survived? That anyone did?"

"She'll hear her mother, and her brothers. They'll guide her."

The man nodded to himself, though he didn't seem convinced. "I hope so," he said. "I hope so..."

Harith pressed him a little longer, but the details held. It had been a long journey from the Knowlespole. A recent storm had separated him from his companions, as other dangers had slowly atrophied his band. He recalled each name the same, and Harith committed them to his memory even as he refused to call this man by name in his own mind. Not until he was certain. If this was a monster waiting to happen, Harith didn't want to think of him as a person.

He crossed the bridge across the moat to their encampment, and the others let him back inside the wall. A year ago, they hadn't had such fortifications. Now, they spent every waking thought on protection.

There was no warmth to greet his return. A few wary glances, wondering if he had had to deal with the man in the pit. He shook his head to tell them no, and they never quite met his gaze.

Harith made his way to one hut in particular and ducked inside. Baqir, Diya, and Nadra were already there waiting for him, and they looked up as he entered.

"He isn't showing any signs yet," Harith told them. "If he has it, then he's one of the slow ones. We have a few days before we'll have to deal with him."

"When was the last time anyone made it here who was healthy?" Diya wondered. "We should kill him now."

"No," Baqir said firmly. "We aren't killing anyone without knowing for certain. Our cousins to the north have suffered enough losses."

"And we haven't?"

"They didn't know," Harith said quietly. "None of us knew."

No one had noticed the signs at first. Their northern cousins were already so pale, and they struggled in the heat. No one knew them well enough to notice if there was anything off about the stories they told, or even if they gave the wrong names. If they laughed at inappropriate moments or clutched their heads in pain, then their harrowing journey had seemed explanation enough.

But then their bodies had begun to deform. Their skin turned ashen grey and violet, their limbs stretched and merged as though the bones within had turned to liquid. Sometimes their shifting flesh even exposed their organs to the air, and they lived on through it all, their bodies rearranging themselves according to some madman's design.

They killed most while they were in this stage, but they knew it to be a stage because of the few who couldn't bear doing what had to be done. The monstrous shapes would settle, eventually, but they were still monsters in the end. Swarming with tentacles and eyes in strange places, they would set on those who had protected them, spreading the infection.

They began to tell each other they were lucky for the loved ones who had died before the plague, the ones who had died simple, natural deaths. Old age had taken Harith's mother a few years past. Harith's own hands had taken his father, in the early months. He didn't feel the same kind of grief, but a numb sort of anger.

This had taken so much more from them than lives.

"What we're undertaking," said Baqir, "is about preventing further loss. For all of us."

"You really think you can do it?" Harith asked.

Baqir nodded. "We've made enough practice attempts. I'm ready."

"And who knows how long this lull will last," Diya added.

Efforts to scout the island had reported back with no monster sightings. With only the man in the pit outside, it might be the best opening they would have.

Behind Baqir sat a basket of full of their practice attempts, their efforts to replicate the much slower process by which the Lifestream sometimes condensed into crystals. Materia, Baqir called it, a way to concentrate power for the purpose of amplifying spells. The kind of magic they had worked for generations became harder as their numbers dwindled. With these, they could borrow more from the dead.

But the dead weren't passive, particularly not these days.

"The kind of magic you're talking about..." Nadra began carefully, looking around at all of them. "Are we sure this is something we want to create? With the Lifestream in the state that it's in, there's no way to do it without the byproduct."

"We can't last the way we have been," said Baqir. "I fear we've come to understand this sickness too late. How many Cetra remain? What are the chances that we can outlast it, hiding safe inside our walls like the humans? What of the Planet's own suffering?"

"I know," said Nadra, frowning as she bowed her head. "I know we can't ignore it. I only worry that in our haste, we may be missing a better solution."

Harith shook his head. "Those who had better solutions might be lost to us already. If this works... then I look forward to the days when our greatest fear might be that some idiot will come along to try using this 'Black Materia,' as you're calling it."

"That is my fear," said Nadra.

"We'll protect it," said Baqir. "But if we don't do something now, there won't be any of us left to protect anything."

Nadra met his gaze for a long moment before she nodded. "All right. I suppose we'd better get on with it."

The Black Materia wasn't their goal—of course it wasn't. But for all their practice, they were developing a new art under the most chaotic conditions the Lifestream had ever seen. It swelled with the voices of the recent dead, thousands and thousands of Cetra lost in one way or another to the plague. Cetra whose final coherent thoughts had been of wanting an end, any end, to their suffering, who had seen that same suffering inflicted on those around them, and wanted that to end, too.

That desire rushed out of the Lifestream with an unparalleled destructive force. Maybe, if somewhere in each of their hearts, they hadn't shared that desire, it would have been easier to push aside. Maybe they need not have siphoned it away into its own crystalline prison. But they did, wading through that despair to find what remained beneath.

None of them wanted the Planet's life to end. They wanted it to heal. Beneath its anguish, they could remember its song, from the time before. If the Cetra could not flourish again, then let cleansing the Planet of this disease be their legacy.

The White Materia that formed in Baqir's hands was so much smaller than the Black. Harith wondered if it would be enough. Maybe there wasn't enough strength remaining in the Lifestream for their magic to save them.

None of them voiced the observation aloud. Instead they agreed to rest. Afterwards, they would try to use this thing they had created.

Days later, when Harith went out to the pit, the man's fingers had begun to lengthen into claws. His pupils were like slits in the sunlight. Harith put an arrow in his heart before he could speak.

Whether Holy answered them or not, it would be too late for most of them.

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