The Wheel of the World – Adam Fout

Hawkflame stood on the muddy bank of the great Castandar river, he and his father, the Fabricator, gazing up at the Wheel of the World, and behind them was a hovercart as large as a boat, and in the hovercart was the world’s death.

Rain fell from a sky like black fire, and the great Wheel turned, its movement as slow as the breath of the sea. Sky scars filled the air with caws and screams that drowned the rushing of the mighty river Castandar that pushed the Wheel. It rose as high as ten thousand men standing on each other’s heads, rose so high the air around it faded to black, its edges of silver and deepest purple. It was as wide as the river itself, so wide its opposite side could not even be seen, each spoke formed of untold billions of tons of fine gold filigree twisted in curling helixes woven into glistening spires that millions of sky scars filled with their black nests and shrieking spawn. The hub of the Wheel was a flickering opal of sparkling sunfire larger than the Kieradin Mountains to the east, and upon it sky scars with wingspans twice as wide as a tall man is tall crawled like ants across its sparkling surface. The Wheel shimmered as sapphire moonlight danced upon it.

Hawkflame had seen the Wheel a hundred times, and still it filled him with the feeling that he was only a speck in a world he would never understand. It was like gazing at God.

“Is there no other way, father?” Hawkflame asked, sweeping back the hood of his cloak and running a hand through hair like spun silver. The cawing of the sky scars settled as a moon the color of the sea fell beneath the horizon.

“Do you know another way to raise the dead, boy?” the Fabricator asked, Wheel-light glinting on his silver hair and eyebrows. The Fabricator wore a black cloak and hood, and he glared with eyes like cracked rubies at his son. “Every moment we delay, her spirit burns in some new hell. Are you content to condemn her to eternal torment?”

His mother had suffered the vile pangs of a broken mind. She had been filled with love, but when she took her own life, the Shadow Priests had prayed for her to suffer for a sin that was no sin at all.

His father had broken every bone in their bodies when he had learned what they’d done. Then he’d fabricated the bones whole and broken them again. And again.

There were no more Shadow Priests in the land now.

“I hate it, father,” Hawkflame said, his face falling. “I hate that she suffers, but Father, this is wrong. What if we break the Wheel? Drawing on its power is forbidden for a reason. You have always held strong when the people begged you to return their loved ones to you,” Hawkflame said, his hand curling into a fist. “You have—”

And his father turned to him, his eyes wet, and the boy uncurled his fist.

“If I am careful, boy, as I always am, the Wheel may not break,” The Fabricator said, then sighed. “Everything is different when there is love, boy.”

“But did they not love those they lost, father?”

“Who do you love more, boy?” the Fabricator whispered during a lull in the cawing of the sky scars, ignoring the question. “This world, or your mother?”

Hawkflame shook his head.

“You cannot ask me to choose. You risk too much. It is an impossible choice.”

The Fabricator’s robes came alight with the deathfire that brings the fabrications of the world to life, a power never meant to be used on humans, and as he moved his hand from this realm to the realm beneath and above and between, as his hand faded and shimmered, Hawkflame grabbed his wrist. He had to stop this, but he couldn’t go against the wishes of his father.

An impossible choice indeed.

The Fabricator shook it off.

“It is a simple choice, boy. And I have already chosen.”

Hawkflame turned and stared at the Wheel as the rain darkened his hair. He fingered the golden blade that hung in his belt. If his father would not listen to reason, he would do what he must.

“It is not right!” Hawkflame shouted. He could not let his father do this thing, Fabricator or no. If Hawkflame was to be the Fabricator one day, he had to take seriously his duty to the people and the world now, when it mattered, and not simply bow to the will of his father as he always had.

“The Replicators warn against it for a reason, father! We are supposed to be above such…,” he meant to say selfishness but knew his father did not do this only for himself. “Such emotional choices.”

“The Replicators are withered men studying withered tomes,” his father said, and he spit on the soft mud. “They answer to us. Their laws hold no teeth. We are the teeth of the world.”

“But—”

“Shhh, boy,” the Fabricator said. “Midnight comes.”

Hawkflame said no more, for he knew it was useless—his father was a stubborn man and would not be swayed. They turned to stare at the Wheel. The wind grew silent as the cawing of the sky scars disappeared. The roaring of the great river could be heard for a moment, and then quieted to burbling, to babbling, to nothing.

And the great Wheel creaked a single time.

And the earth shook as the Wheel ground to a halt.

And the river began again to babble, and then to roar, and the Wheel again began its turning, and the skyscars began to caw quietly, and then to shriek, and Hawkflame turned again to the Fabricator.

“What is the Wheel’s purpose, father?” Hawkflame asked. “The Replicators applied the rod to all who questioned the Wheel in the schools. What is its true purpose?”

Though he had never asked because of how much he feared his father and the prohibitions against speaking of the Wheel, Hawkflame no longer cared—he had to know what it was he was a part of, what crime he was committing. He knew that his father the Fabricator, alone of all people, could know such things, for it was he who brought life from the ether and created, he who filled the city of Antheselm with the clockwork beasts and carts that gave the city its economic power, he who pulled from the future recipes to treat disease, he who shaped his world, carving away death and bringing forth life.

What a horror it was that he turned those powers now to such dark arts.

“What is the purpose of the wind, boy?” the Fabricator asked, his gaze distant. “What is the purpose of the river? What is the purpose of a flower?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you understand the purpose of a flower, boy, then you will understand the purpose of the Wheel.”

They gazed again at the Wheel.

“What will she be?” Hawkflame asked, bowing his rain-soaked head and putting up his hood.

“A river, boy. And a flower. And the wind.”

Hawkflame shook his head. The Fabricator lifted his right hand. It began to fade into those realms that are above and below and in between, the realms where deathfire burns, that lifepower that only the Fabricator can wield, that the Replicators can only manipulate once shaped and solidified. The deathfire coalesced into a small orb of crimson darkness that shimmered and faded in and out of the world. Deathfire burst across the Fabricator’s black cloak, wreathing him in void and flame. Deathfire leapt from the Fabricator’s hands into the hovercart. And from the hovercart rose a coiled helix of promethium that glowed the pale blue of the eyes of a ghoul; a clear sack of eel skin filled with red phosphorus; and a smallsun the size of a man’s head and the color of emeralds, spitting ribbons of fire.

A bundle of amaranth and ambrosia and primrose and marigold rose from the cart, and an urn, and the boy reached out to the urn, but deathfire shot from the Fabricator’s hand in a beam of scarlet void, and it twirled about all these objects of unknowable purpose, and under the moonless sky, these objects sank one by one into the smallsun, which faded and disappeared into the realms above and below and between, and then…

Then Hawkflame knew he must act.

Hawkflame drew his dagger and stabbed his father in the chest.

“What have you done, boy?” The Fabricator asked, his voice soft. “The ritual is incomplete. You….”

The Fabricator fell to his knees, and the rain poured upon the Fabricator, and Hawkflame started at the sound of a giant crack that resounded through the air.

They looked at the Wheel.

It was alight with deathfire, and the sky scars were rising in a yellow cloud of wings and claws, and the delicate filigree of the spokes began to tighten and strain, and one by one each spoke snapped into a million splinters with groans like the dying of the gods. Each splinter flew through the air, shards shearing off as they sailed miles and miles, some straight into the sky, so far Hawkflame thought they must have reached the outer darkness that would one day freeze the world.

He turned toward the city of Antheselm, his home, and saw a single spoke blast through the Black Tower of the Replicators.

He turned to the Wheel. The silvery rim was fading into those realms that are above and below and in between. The hub that was a mountainous opal fell as the banks of the Castandar flooded and swept Hawkflame, his father, and the hovercart away. Hawkflame tumbled in the brackish water until he hit a stone hard. Dazed, he pulled himself up, the ragged and cracked stone full of handholds and footholds. He climbed the top of the boulder.

“Father!” he shouted. Already he regretted his choice.

And then he saw him, floating facedown in the flood.

“Father!” Hawkflame screamed, weeping tears lost in the rain.

The waters rushed around him, rising to the boulder. A shadow grew over him. He looked up and saw the great opal falling toward him. He leapt into the flood, and the opal crashed into the ground with an explosion, and a wave a dozen feet high swept Hawkflame away, and sputtering, his eyes filling with darkness, he sank.

---

When Hawkflame came to, he woke to a world ruined.

His limbs shaking with weakness and shivering in the sudden cold, Hawkflame stood on the boulder from which he saw his father die. Soft snowflakes kissed his sodden clothes from a sky gone gray and streaked with black and stars.

“What has he done?” Hawkflame whispered, gazing across the muddy flats that even now were hardened from the freezing wind. “What have I done.”

Hawkflame shivered with such violence that he almost toppled from the boulder. He had to find his cloak if he wanted to survive long. His fingers were turning white.

Hawkflame crawled down the boulder, the sharp rock scraping his palms as numb fingers exploded with pins. He lept into freezing mud that squished between his toes. He found his cloak nearby—it was pinned under the gargantuan opal.

Still he was freezing, the water turning his clothes to ice, his cloak a hardened sheet of cloth. He had to find the cart. If it had not been destroyed, he could find an extra pair of boots and clothes enough to keep him warm.

What would he do then? Find his foolish father’s corpse perhaps.

Or perhaps leave him here to rot for what he had done.

Or was this his own fault?

Should he have let his father complete the ritual?

Perhaps all would have been well if he had stayed his hand.

He thought to trade his father for the world, and he lost both.

He took one last look at the glittering opal taller than the tallest tree, a sky scar perched atop, no larger than a bee from this distance. For a moment, the opal seemed to shimmer, though no light now shone from the sky. Hawkflame shook his head and turned to look for the cart. Racing on legs like wood through the mud he could no longer feel, Hawkflame ran to a small hill overlooking the river Castandar. Mud stretched as far as he could see. The rolling hills that once led to redwood forests as ancient as the Wheel itself were seas of freezing mud, now covered in a twinkling coat of snow like powdered diamonds. The trees had been torn from the mud and washed beyond Hawkflame’s sight, holes dozens of feet wide and a hundred deep dotting the ruined landscape. He heard the cries of the sky scars, which perched on the cracked shafts of the Wheel rising into the air higher than even the kings of the redwoods. 

How did I survive all of this? Hawkflame thought. Did my father save me in the end?

And another thought came unbidden, one he had dared not consider, no matter how little training he had left.

He is gone.

I am the Fabricator now.

I am the only one who can fix this.

And I have no idea how.

Hawkflame spied the cart. He turned to look toward the boulder and the opal.

“I should find his b-body,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. “Even he d-deserves a burial, if not the funeral rites.”

I’ll not give him the funeral rites, Hawkflame thought after a moment, then spat in the snow. He turned away, stomping his feet as he began to run again.

He may be with her in death, but he will not be honored in life.

Hawkflame found the cart partially collapsed, the vehicle’s oval white sides covered in black burns, its windshield shattered, one hoverjet laying broken beside it. He climbed inside and looked at the controls of the craft.

“It may fly—but not until s-someone drags it from this wreckage.”

He rummaged through the storage containers, smiling as his spare clothes came out of the preservation chests smelling of soap and filling his numbed fingers with aching warmth. He shook as he pulled on his thick lambskin gloves and pulled a gray Trivarex cloak about his own cloak, putting up the supple leather lapels to shield his face.

“I will f-find him,” Hawkflame said, his teeth cracking together. “Perhaps his spirit has l-lingered and can tell me how to fix this.”

Or perhaps he can spit on his father’s corpse and leave the body to the sky scars.

For it had to be his father’s fault.

It couldn’t have been his own.

He had done what had to be done.

The ritual would have destroyed the Wheel either way.

Wouldn’t it have?

His body quaking and his throat aflame with each frozen breath, Hawkflame walked through the mud to find what remained of his father, the Fabricator, the betrayer of the world, to ask him how to fix this madness.

---

Hours Hawkflame spent slogging through mud so deep it reached his stomach, the darkness of the world falling and the wind and snow increasing moment by moment until he felt he had become lost in one of the great blizzards that had not been seen in the world for centuries.

Perhaps the floating ice mountains will return to the sea, he thought as he searched for a body he half hoped he would not find.

The cold penetrated even his thick Trivarex cloak. As cold as he was, he could not survive much longer.

A spell, he thought, gazing at a splinter of the Wheel’s spoke as wide as a man is tall that sunk deep into the mud and arced into the sky, its top becoming lost in the blizzard.

He had learned much of fabrication, but he had been barred by law and edict and the will of his father from ever practicing outside of their home.

But he was the Fabricator now, and though perhaps he was not ready for such a burden, he had no choice.

Better to start now, he thought, and not come before the Replicators as a begging apprentice, but as a proud Fabricator.

Speaking the runes in the harsh, guttural tongue of a race long lost, Hawkflame wove the spell for which he was named. A raptor bathed in deathflame burst from his fading hand, screamed as it flew about his head, then landed on his shoulder, light as a breath, and filled his body with a warm glow.

His hand. Hawkflame looked again. He could see the mud below through his fingers, his palm blinking translucent one moment, solid the next.

He knew that if he had the courage, he could put his hands together and watch them fade through each other like wisps of cloud.

It has already begun, he thought. We are fading into the realms of deathfire.

I must hurry.

Hawkflame waved his arm in an arc, and the burning raptor flew from his shoulder, began circling through the blizzard, seeking his father’s body. Higher and higher it flew, until it was lost in the blizzard. Then it came hurtling from the clouds like a falling star, alighting on Hawkflame’s shoulder and whispering in his ear.

“Damn,” Hawkflame said, spitting on the mud. “Damn.”

His father’s body had been crushed under one of the spokes. He pushed through the mud toward the spoke, his face grim. It was wider than the Black Tower of Anthelsem, and sky scars crawled like yellow aphids across its surface. He got as close to the body as he could, though it was buried several fathoms deep in mud that was now hard as rock.

“Rise, spirit of the Fabricator,” he spoke, calling on the deathfire as his father had taught him, his hand fading away as it was replaced with a hand of flame. If only his father had been content with raising his mother’s spirit, even for a moment, from her torment, instead of insisting on raising her body as well. “Tell me how to undo your ruin.”

Snow whipped into Hawkflame’s face as he waited for a wraith to rise, but nothing came.

“Rise you bastard!” he shouted.

All this his father had done for his mother’s soul. The price was too high. He loved his mother, but not even a single soul—let alone the world—would he sacrifice to save her from her unjust torment.

The cost was too great.

When silence met his command, he spat in the mud for his father, and with a grim face, he turned for Antheselm and prayed to the deathfire that they still studied their withered tomes.

---

With the Black Tower destroyed, Hawkflame went to the only building large enough to house the powerful guild. The Replicators had been forced to occupy the Inn of the Wheel. He found them sitting in near silence in the dining hall, pewter cups of ale clinking as they drank themselves into stupors. Many still wore the black robes of their guild, and all were in a state of ruin—covered in soot and dust, burned and torn, or covered in splatters of dark blood. They turned as one when he entered, snow dropping from his cloak in clumps. Silence fell, save for the crackling of the fire.

“Where is your father?” one ancient Replicator asked, his face covered in deep wrinkles, stained with soot.

“Dead,” Hawkflame said, and a low murmur rippled through the surviving Replicators, their shoulders sinking, and many whispered, “We are lost. We are lost.”

“Then there is no hope,” the ancient Replicator replied, his eyes hard.

“As long as I live there is hope,” Hawkflame said.

“Aye, perhaps,” the ancient Replicator said, and Hawkflame felt the defeat in his words.

“What are you called, Replicator?”

“Axlom.”

“I must speak with the master of your guild, Axlom,” Hawkflame said, undeterred. They may have fallen to fear and despair, but he was of a stronger line.

“Dead,” Axlom said.

“The Clerk of the Black Library then,” Hawkflame said.

“Dead,” Axlom said, shaking his head. “We saved only a few tomes, but even they are burned.”

“Please, Axlom—we have little time,” Hawkflame said.

“I know,” Axlom said, holding up his fading hands. A mug of ale fell through another Replicator’s hands and clattered on the stone floor.

“Can you tell me at least what tomes were saved?”

“Aye,” Axlom said. “The Histories of Carnalm the Great, though it is half burned. The Last Account of Oxhelm is in good condition.”

“They are not what I need,” Hawkflame said, his face falling. “You speak as though there are only a handful left! The tower held thousands of tomes!”

“Tens of thousands,” Axlom said, his voice weary. “The spoke hit the library first. There may be some miles from here, but these are the only three the Clerk could grab before the tower collapsed. He gave his life to save them, young man.”

“And the last tome?”

“An archaic thing. The Book of Sorrows. I know not why he chose it, but everything the Clerk did had purpose. He—”

“Where is it?”

Axlom shook his head and pointed to a nearby room, his fingers disappearing completely. Hawkflame ran.

---

“Useless!” Hawkflame shouted to the empty room, slamming the burned tome shut. “Even if it were not half burnt, an untranslated tome does me no good.” He sat on the rickety bed, his face in his fading hands.

“The Replicators were right,” he said, noticing that his cloak was now becoming translucent, the dark stones of the walls seeming to swirl and shift. “We are lost.”

Axlom shuffled in.

“Are the tomes of any use, Fabricator?”

Hawkflame looked up at the old man.

“It is written in the ancient tongue. Without the clerk—”

“I can read it. I was the Clerk’s assistant,” Axlom said, his voice flat. Hawkflame leapt to his feet.

“Why did you not tell me this before!”

“Does it matter?”

Hawkflame stared for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Please, the tome—you must look for anything related to necromancy. My father….” Hawkflame trailed off and stared into the flames that no longer cast shadows. Axlom raised an eyebrow, then opened the burned tome, some of the pages falling out, others crumbling to dust. Hawkflame raced to his side.

“What do you see, Replicator?”

The old man did not answer, leafing instead through the pages, the task slowed as his hands faded in and out of the world.

“Can you steady them with a spell, Fabricator?” Axlom asked. Hawkflame shook his head.

“If I could, I would steady the world.”

The old man smiled a sad smile. “Of course,” he said, and continued leafing through the book, then stopped, leaned forward and read closely, muttering to himself.

“It is a spell to raise the dead,” Axlom said, then looked at Hawkflame with tired eyes. “It is filled with warnings.”

“We both know those warnings were not idle,” Hawkflame said.

“What do you seek, Fabricator?”

“To fix the world.”

“Why? Why should we believe one who is of the same blood as the one who destroyed it?”

“What other options do you have!”

“My brothers and I are old,” Axlom said. “The young were at work as we rested in our quarters below. We have made peace with death.”

“And the death of the world?” Hawkflame asked.

“It will be a soft death, what your father has done,” Axlom said. “Perhaps you will make it hard.”

“Please,” Hawkflame said. “Please let me try. He did it out of love, he—”

“I know,” Axlom said, closing his eyes. “I can feel it in my bones. My replications are tranquil as they fade.” He opened his eyes. “Do you do this out of love?”

“I do it out of duty,” Hawkflame said.

“That may do. But what of the one your father tried to raised? The one he loved? Was it your sister? Your brother?”

“My mother,” Hawkflame whispered.

“What of her?”

“I killed him before he could raise her,” Hawkflame said, smiling a small smile.

Axlom nodded as though that was enough. He turned back to the book, his hands going through it, then settling on the page.

“The spell must be set in reverse.”

“Even though it was never completed?”

“Was it not completed enough, Fabricator?”

Hawkflame nodded at the truth of the words.

“You will have to gather many supplies,” Axlom continued. “Promethium, red phosphorus, amaranth and ambrosia and primrose and marigold, and,” his eyebrows raised, “…and a smallsun. That is no common ingredient.”

“My father used one,” Hawkflame said. “He may have left another in the cart.”

“Then the world hangs on its killer’s foresight.”

“And the rest? The journey back to the cart will be long, Replicator.”

Axlom’s forehead creased in thought. “Everything else we have in the ruins of the tower,” Axlom said after a moment.

“Then let us hurry before they fade away.”

“Aye.”

Hawkflame turned for a moment to leave, then turned back to Axlom.

“Tell me, Axlom… what is the purpose of the wind?”

Axlom raised an eyebrow. “The purpose of the wind?”

“It’s something my father said before he died. I asked him the purpose of the Wheel. He asked me the purpose of the wind and a flower and a river.”

Axlom smiled. “Their purpose is to be what they are, Fabricator. Nothing more.”

Hawkflame shook his head. He still didn’t understand.

---

Hawkflame leapt off the dwarf sandcrawler the Replicators had lent him. It settled back into the three feet of snow that now grew almost visibly, its high-pitched death throes ruining the silence of the land as its eight legs folded in toward its abdomen. Hawkflame was only grateful neither he nor the beast had faded through each other on the journey back to the Wheel’s burial ground. He pulled the crate of ingredients off its back, repeating in his mind the reversed runes of the spell.

“Close now,” he whispered, slogging through the snow, another brilliant hawk of flame on his shoulder brightening the dark. He thanked the deathfire that the wind had stopped.

After an hour, the snow became easier to walk through, the ground seeming to breathe, to rise and fall beneath his feet. He ran faster. The cart was now a small hill of snow glistening in the pale blue moonlight, its surface undulating. Even the great splintered spoke that rose from the mud until it towered over the rushing Castandar was beginning to disappear under a mass of frost.

When he got to his father’s cart, his chest heaving, he began to dig through the snow, his movements frantic, each motion requiring three times the effort as his fading hands and arms dissolved through the snow. Pausing for a breath, his lungs on fire, he turned to look at the massive opal and noticed again the silence.

“The sky scars are gone,” he whispered.

The opal threw no shadow, reflected no light. It seemed thin as paper, and as he watched, it disappeared for an instant, reappeared.

He dug faster.

At last the cart was revealed. He lept into it, stumbling as one of his legs passed through the cart. He pulled himself up and began ripping open the preservation chests.

“Please. Please.”

From the final chest came a soft glow. Willing deathfire into his hand, Hawkflame shaped a burning cup and lifted the smallsun into the frozen air.

“No,” he whispered. “No, no.”

The smallsun’s glow was dim, parts of it fading, and where brilliant yellows and oranges of minute solar flares should have spouted forth as the miniscule forever-burning heart of the smallsun raged, instead blotches of black and gray marred its surface. Hawkflame hung his head.

It was decayed, ruined.

A smallsun might take a decade for a skilled master Fabricator to forge, and he had barely the skill of an apprentice.

There would be no more smallsuns.

I have to try anyway, he thought. I will not have it said that the last Fabricator gave up on the world.

---

The crate of ingredients was filling rapidly with snow, it’s edges flowing, mixing with the colors of the mud. The smallsun floated nearby, its heat not even enough to melt the snow that fell upon it. Hawkflame looked over his shoulder at the spoke under which his father was buried. If he succeeded, his father was doomed to an eternity of spiritual torment alongside his mother.

And if he failed, the world was doomed, though its end could only be guessed at.

He stared long at that spoke, even his body now beginning to fade.

“What would father have done if another had asked for the same boon of resurrection he meant to grant mother?”

Hawkflame thought long on this, then turned back to the Wheel.

His hand almost invisible now, Hawkflame summoned a small orb of crimson darkness to his palm. Fading marigold and primrose and ambrosia and amaranth rose from the crate. Hawkflame waved his hand, deathfire setting his cloak ablaze. The dying smallsun rose into the air, the herbs drawn in by its gravity. A clear sack of eel skin filled with red phosphorus rose from the crate and filled the smallsun. A coiled helix of promethium followed. Hawkflame spoke the reversed words he had memorized on the trek out, tasting the strangeness of such a potent spell on his tongue. All the ingredients flowed into the smallsun, and it began to pulse, its light faint and sickly.

“Please,” Hawkflame whispered after the spell was complete. His feet began to sink through the snow and mud. He dropped to his knees. “Please.”

The smallsun sputtered, burst with white light, and rose into the air. Hawkflame gasped, a smile beginning to creep across his face.

Then the smallsun shrank in on itself, its edges flowing and fading. It shriveled into a speck of light, then in silence disappeared.

“No!” Hawkflame shouted, his words muffled by the falling snow. He sobbed in silence, then looked at the fading remnants of the Wheel.

“Their purpose is to be what they are,” Hawkflame whispered from lips that swirled and dissolved.

He had sent the smallsun from the world, but that was not the smallsun’s purpose.

It’s purpose was to be what it was—a shining, magnificent creation that filled the world with light. It was not meant to leave the world.

It was faded. Broken. Half a sun. Half a circle.

Circles must be complete.

Hawkflame waved his hand, deathfire once again setting his cloak ablaze, the words spilling forth from his mouth, a reversal of the reversed words he had already spoken.

A tiny sphere of brilliance formed in the air, grew into the smallsun. Hawkflame’s hands shook.

Now he spoke the words in the order they were meant to be spoke, for he saw now that it was he who had caused the death of the world by stopping the ritual.

He must bring someone back who was not meant to die, someone whose circle had been broken.

His father.

As he finished the words, the wind rose and began to shriek around him, and the ground began to tremble, though he barely felt it now.

And with a start he realized that he did feel it, for his legs were now encased in frozen mud. He whooped and threw his fist into the air, then gasped as the splintered spoke of the wheel that towered over the river began to quake, snow flying from it in massive clouds, then rose into the air. It began to spin. He heard a rushing sound behind him, as of a battalion of Trivarex roaring into battle, and he turned to see the spoke that had crossed the leagues to Antheselm and shattered the Black Tower come flying through the air hundreds of feet above his head, pieces of the spoke that had splintered and fallen during its flight rising up from the snow and slapping against the spoke, melding into it, and when it passed over him, an explosion like the ending of the world cracked through the air. He fell to the ground, his ears bleeding, and then some powerful force slammed into his body, and darkness took him.

---

The Fabricator and Hawkflame sat on the muddy banks of the river Castandar in front of the slow-turning Wheel, their eyes glazed. They shook their heads and helped each other out of the mud. They stared in wonder at the sky scars spiraling through the night sky. Hawkflame shivered despite the warm air as he tried to focus his eyes.

“Did you feel something just now, father?”

The Fabricator’s frown was deep. He wiped at the mud on his cloak.

“Yes. But I know not what it portends.”

“How… how did we fall, father?” Hawkflame asked.

“I don’t—”

They caught their breaths as the great Wheel creaked a single time. The earth shook as the Wheel ground to a halt, and then the river began again to babble, and then to roar, and the Wheel again began its turning.

And then Hawkflame remembered. Remembered the dying world. Remembered fading Axlom, remembered the broken smallsun.

The world had not been fixed.

It had only been reset.

It was still up to him to fix it.

“Is there no other way, father?” Hawkflame asked after a moment, marveling at the specks of sky scars crawling across the face of the mountainous opal hub of the Wheel.

“No, boy,” the Fabricator said, and sighed. “I have weighed the world against your mother, and I have found the world wanting.” His face was grim. “Every moment we delay, her spirit burns in some new hell.”

“But the Replicators warn against it, father. They do not warn without reason.”

“Hmm,” the Fabricator said, looking at his son, studying his face. “Perhaps… perhaps you are right. But still—”

“You would not grant this boon to another, father. How often have you told me that our duty lies with the people, that we must sacrifice for them?” he wiped at his eyes. “Have we not already lost enough? Is this truly what she would have wanted?”

The Fabricator did not answer. He stared for a long moment at the creaking Wheel of the World, its golden spokes shimmering silver-blue in the moonlight.

“What is the purpose of the Wheel, father?” Hawkflame asked.

“What is the purpose of the wind, boy? What is the purpose of a flower, of a river?”

“Their purpose is to be what they are, father,” Hawkflame said, his voice strong. The Fabricator raised his eyebrows. “And our purpose is to protect the people. Not to harm. That is what we are.”

The Fabricator’s sigh was long.

“You are right… Hawkflame.”

Hawkflame could not believe his ears. His father was so stubborn. He would never have been swayed by anyone’s words, let alone Hawkflame’s.

And yet he had been.

The Fabricator nodded with finality. He clapped Hawkflame on the shoulder. He even smiled a small smile.

“Let us return to Antheselm, Hawkflame,” the Fabricator said. “I must think on this more. And… and we will speak to the Replicators. We will seek their wisdom.” His sigh then was great. “Your mother… will be here tomorrow, and the next day. We don’t have to decide tonight.”

“Yes father,” Hawkflame said, smiling in the dark.

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Emerging Worlds is a Zealot Script Publication.