Sunless Ezthamic's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Sunless Ezthamic had asked the dead a hundred questions, and the dead only gave him riddles. He stood in the ruined city beneath the black sun, where upside-down towers hung from nothing and golden rivers lit the broken streets. For 312 years he had not aged. Somewhere out there walked another man with his face, his dreadlocks, his golden rings. One of them was the original. Ezthamic meant to prove he was the one. But every memory source he found answered in circles, never with a straight word. Ilyra crouched beside a dead machine, prying a triangular shard of golden metal from its frame. She was the scavenger he trusted most, a small woman with silver eyes and old tech on her belt. She frowned at the shard. "This one still breathes," she said. "I've seen you hold it before. You just haven't done it yet." Ezthamic had stopped questioning how she remembered things that hadn't happened. The light died around them. A Sun Eater stepped from an alley, six skeletal legs clicking, a small black sphere floating in its open ribs. It swallowed the glow of the golden rivers until only darkness remained. Ezthamic's left arm split open. Black flesh peeled back, bone framed a glowing core, and a long golden blade of energy burned out from his forearm. He drove the Solblade through the beast's spine. The sphere cracked. Light rushed back into the street. The shard in Ilyra's hand flared. A single symbol lit its dormant core, and Ezthamic knew it at once. It was his symbol, the mark burned beneath his skin. The shard answered the Solblade like a thing recognizing kin. Then the black sun moved. It swelled, dimmed, swelled again. A heartbeat. The ground shook with each pulse. Deep machinery woke under the city, and a voice rolled out of the towers, flat and ancient. "EZTHAMIC INSTANCE DETECTED." The word stopped Ezthamic cold. Instance. Not man. Not original. A copy, counted and logged like the rest. He turned to Ilyra. "What does it mean, instance?" She would not meet his eyes. "You weren't supposed to hear that yet." Her hand tightened on the shard. "The engine made all of you. It keeps count. It knows which came first." She paused. "But it doesn't call any of you the original. To it, there was never one." The heartbeat quickened. Far off, the other man with his face would be hearing the same voice, drawn to the same source. Ezthamic understood now why the dead only gave riddles. There was no first life to find, no record to clear him, because the machine had never built a first. It had built many at once. He looked at the pulsing sun. His whole arc, proving he was the true one, had just broken apart. If no record named the original, then he would have to take the answer from the only place left. He sheathed the blade and started toward the beating heart of the engine. "Then I'll ask the other me," he said. "Face to face."