12-67. Tainted Paradise
Elijah watched as the rays sliced gracefully through the air, each one leaving a glittering trail of blue ethera in their wake. They weren’t natural creatures. In fact, they didn’t feel like animals at all. Rather, they were conjured entities whose sole purpose was to act as a means of conveyance.
That made them no less beautiful, though.
It was especially poignant when held against the backdrop of the city, which looked like nothing so much as a carbon copy of the destroyed Eden Elijah and his companions had left behind. The only difference was that it was entirely intact and, from what Elijah could tell, thriving.
The buildings soared, tall and proud, alien in their architecture but somehow familiar. A skyscraper was a skyscraper, after all. Certainly, the ones below bore shapes that never would have been possible back on Earth, twisting into geometric patterns that gave Elijah a headache. But they were still just buildings, albeit ones that reminded him of the Bosco Verticale in Milan, where trees and bushes had been integrated into the design to create a vertical forest clinging to the sides of a building.
Elijah had seen much the same during his forays into Eden, but he’d had very few opportunities to appreciate the grandeur and integration with nature. But now that he didn’t need to worry about an impending explosion, a time loop, or a giant automaton, he was free to give it all the attention it deserved.
So, as he followed the mounted djinn, he was admittedly a little distracted. That lasted until they were directed to land on a circular platform jutting out from one of the skyscrapers. Elijah did as he was bidden, and once Benedict and Hu Shui had dismounted, he resumed his humanoid shape.
As he did so, the rays dissipated into motes of ethera. Their riders approached, giving Elijah a good look at the djinn.
They were as he expected – blue skinned, four-armed, and three-eyed – and none of them wore clothes. However, they each sported elaborate silver torcs, gold bangles around their wrists, and unadorned rings of twisted silver on every finger. They also glowed in his senses, emitting waves of ethera that distorted the air all around them.
Elijah could only estimate their power, but he suspected that each of them had reached the upper levels of ascendency.
“Welcome,” said one that glowed a little brighter than the rest. They bowed at the waist, extending two arms while clutching the other two hands in front of their chest. “We are most pleased to have visitors. It has been so long.”
“What is this place?” asked Benedict, cutting through the niceties.
“We refer to it as Sanctuary. It is our home. A means of preserving our species while the great work proceeds.”
Elijah asked, “Great work?”
“All will become clear,” the djinn stated. “You must be fatigued from your journey. Please, follow me so you may rest.”
Elijah wanted to know more, but he could recognize a dismissal when he heard one. Perhaps the time to insist – or to fight – would come, but at the moment, he was content to take the offered respite at face value. So far, he’d convinced himself that he’d risen above the strain of the previous months, but now that he had a chance to rest dangled in front of him, he couldn’t deny himself that luxury.
He and the other two followed the djinn through a circular door at the other end of the platform. It sizzled with ethera, but it didn’t feel malicious to Elijah. So, after only a moment’s hesitation, he stepped through.
A wave of vitality and magic swept over him, enveloping him like a cocoon. He couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief as his remaining wounds began to heal.
As was the case with the psychological aspect of the trials he’d endured within the Labyrinth of Dead Gods, Elijah had underestimated the toll it had taken on his body. For better or worse, he had become a creature of magic, and being deprived of it had more than weakened him. It had left him parched. Dried out like he’d been trekking through a desert. He hadn’t even realized how weak he had become as he’d traveled through the null zone, then the vacuum surrounding the bridges.
The atmosphere inside the building felt like it had been designed specifically to counter that, and he immediately felt himself relax. Muscles long kinked suddenly loosened, and he let out a sigh of immense relief. Echoes came from his companions as they followed him inside.
What’s more, when Elijah checked his escorts, he found that djinn seemed to have solidified. Thickened. Their bodies became denser with both ethera and vitality, and they too relaxed, if to a lesser degree than Elijah and his allies.
He barely noticed it.
In fact, he scarcely noticed anything other than his own relaxation. Or at least that was the case for a few moments until he reasserted control. The memory that he was still within a Primal Realm shoved its way into his thoughts, refusing to allow him to fully unwind. To keep himself from backsliding, Elijah focused on his surroundings.
The interior of the building was just as alien as he’d expected. The walls were subtly curved and adorned with geometric patterns. Outside those patterns was solid stone, but inside was something that seemed like glass and allowed the passage of light. With Soul of the Wild, Elijah knew it was organic, though. A solid membrane of some sort, and it pulsed with enough vitality that Elijah suspected that it was the ultimate source of the dense atmosphere.
The corridor through which they were led turned into a spiral that functioned as the spine of the building. From that spiral grew periodic offshoots that led to various floors. Elijah couldn’t sense anything through the walls, but he could imagine that a building of such size could house thousands of djinn.
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It reminded him of the structures he’d seen in the Broken Crown. Not in style, but rather in scale. Opulence seemed the rule, though the djinn artists seemed disinterested in paintings or sculptures. Rather, they were obviously obsessed with geometric designs built into the structures themselves. Only when Elijah looked more closely did he realize that those patterns were more than cosmetic in nature. They were part of a much larger array.
Perhaps that was the case with the entire city.
When Elijah looked a little closer at his escorts, he realized that they were covered in dense, barely visible lines, suggesting that they too were subject to a series of arrays. The implications – that living creatures could somehow augment themselves with such decorations – were staggering.
Elijah thought on that until they reached their destination – an off-shoot that ended in a set of apartments. When the door opened, he caught a glimpse of unfamiliar décor.
“Please. Rest,” said the djinn leader. “A feast is planned in your honor. We shall fetch you at the appropriate time.”
Almost in a daze from the sudden changes, Elijah and the others followed the djinn’s invitation and entered the apartments. The door slid shut behind them before Elijah realized how passive he’d been. He wanted to ask questions, if only to know how long it would be before the feast took place. A hundred other queries flitted through his mind, but it was too late.
“I feel drunk,” Benedict complained, wavering in place before finding an oddly proportioned couch in the center of the room. He collapsed with a sigh. “In a good way, though.”
“I feel the same…intoxication,” Hu Shui agreed, though his stance was steadier. More importantly, his eyes were alight with manic interest. He too had noticed the arrays honeycombing the walls. “This building…this city…it is a marvel.”
Elijah shook his head. “I wish Carmen was here,” he said, his filter having faded with the influx of ethera and vitality. His thoughts weren’t as clouded as Benedict’s clearly were, but he still found it difficult to think straight. He shook his head. “Or Anupriya. Think of what they could learn.”
Hu Shui had already staggered to the wall, where he ran his hands along the thin membrane of living tissue. “It is all engineered.”
“What?”
“The tissue. The buildings. Everything has been designed.”
Elijah drew closer to the other man, then laid his hand on the wall. The framework of the building was inorganic, though the material was more energetic than any Elijah had ever felt. What’s more, when he peered closer, using Eyes of the Eagle almost like a magnifying glass, he saw that the surface was covered in nearly microscopic runes.
When he did the same with the tissue, aided by Soul of the Wild, he found something incredibly troubling. He recoiled in disgust.
“What is it?” asked Hu Shui.
Elijah glanced back at Benedict, who was lying on the couch, his eyes glazed over.
“It’s them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The tissue. It’s…it’s djinn. Or whatever species these people were before they fully transitioned to becoming djinn. You can’t feel it, but the cells…they’re identical,” he muttered. Then, he hurried to the balcony, where he found a host of vegetation. Even before he reached them, he knew what he would find.
The trunks of the trees were blue, almost fleshy.
“Oh, God,” he breathed. “It’s all them.”
Hu Shui hadn’t followed him outside, and instead, remained engrossed with studying the runes. That left Elijah to wrestle with the implications of what he’d just discovered. Not only were the walls covered in tissue that had been grown from djinn, but so were the trees. The bushes. The city itself was just a collection of living building materials that had been grown from a common source. Even the stone seemed more like keratin than something truly inorganic.
What’s more, when Elijah looked closer, he found his horror deepening.
They were sentient. Elijah could feel their thoughts coursing through their cells. It was a distinction he’d never really bothered to catalogue, but it was one he’d always felt. After all, he could sense the difference between a beast and a tree, though it took feeling the wrongness of the vegetation before him for him to understand what he instinctively understood.
The trees could think. So could the walls. The very couch on which Benedict lay. It was all alive, and it was all capable of thought.
It made Elijah sick, and he wanted to lean over the rail and vomit. But that would require him to touch more of the living tissue, which somehow made it all worse. He’d never wished for shoes more than at that moment, if only to keep the soles of his feet from touching such a grotesque surface as the living floor.
Before he knew what he was doing, he’d launched himself into the air, bounded off of Cloud Step, and took on the Shape of the Sky. He flew upward until he found himself nestled in the clouds. Only then did he feel himself relax.
Only then did his thoughts clear.
And when that happened, he started to put things together. The incubators were the key, and it only took a slight leap to find himself at the inevitable conclusion. The djinn were genetic engineers, and they’d used that skill not for self-improvement. Rather, they’d molded their own people into materials. He hoped that they had done so as a last resort, that they only wanted to survive. But he couldn’t convince himself to believe it.
To advance to such a level that they could fundamentally change a person into nothing more than a membrane – or a tree – meant that they’d been at it for longer than Elijah could fathom. And if that was the case, they would’ve had plenty of time to find other ways to solve their problems.
It was only then that Elijah catalogued something he’d felt since arrival – everything was connected. The threads binding it all together were thin, and he had no idea as to the purpose, but they were there all the same. It left him feeling even more disgusted, though he couldn’t place why that bothered him so much.
One thing was certain – the djinn were monsters. Perhaps not in the strictest sense like the corrupted or out-of-place creatures he’d routinely killed since the world had changed, but rather, in the more colloquial sense. Like a serial killer. Or more appropriately, a mad scientist who cared nothing for morality, only results.
“Please return to your assigned quarters,” came a voice from nearby. Elijah didn’t need to turn and look upon the djinn to know he was surrounded. Ten of them, all mounted on ethereal rays. “It is not safe for you out here.”
Elijah wanted nothing more than to go on a rampage. He didn’t believe for a second they could withstand an attack from him. No matter how strong they were, he was a dragon. And dragons were at the top of every food chain.
But he pushed those instincts to the back of his mind, where they mingled with his disgust at the revelation he’d just discovered. He needed to be smart. He needed to bide his time and learn more about the situation. Once he did, he could kill them all.
With that in mind, he flapped his wings and silently returned to the balcony, only to find that the situation hadn’t changed. A fascinated Hu Shui remained beside the wall, his hand resting on the surface as he studied the runes. Meanwhile, Benedict had yet to recover from his almost drunken stupor, and he continued to stare unseeing at the ceiling.
For now, Elijah chose to remain silent. Instead, he forced himself to study his surroundings. As repulsive as the situation was, he needed to know as much as possible before he made his move.