I fed this story into an AI to test making it into an audiobook. Hit play below to see if that went well or…not so much.
Here’s the full text below so you can read it the regular eyeballs way too.
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It is evening at Usherat when I land. The sky gray and stony, the water untroubled at large but seething in tiny splashes with the snowfall. The pier a great stone sword concealed beneath that bitter surface.
I walk out onto that cold stone. My boots splash through the dull, slush-laden water. Snow falls heavy and thick as rain and sticks to my pauldrons where it melts back into water that runs over the gardbraces and finds my gloved hands.
I am alone on the pier. I try not to think as I walk. I try not to remember the last time I was here, try not to see the figures that waited at the end of the pier, infinitely tiny against the huge expanse of water and sky.
How like today that day was. How very alike.
The waves lap gently on the pier. Soft foam hisses on my metal boots.
I have changed since that day. Everything has changed. I see shapes in my mind as I walk, looking out at that infinite plain of sea, that endless bowl of sky.
Shapes of ships and men. Shapes of iron and concrete and white hands of pure fire.
The pier is more than a mile long. I turn to look back at the distant shore and I can only make out the pinprick that is my vessel. I am like a man stranded alone, standing miraculously, like Yeshua, atop the great plain of water.
The water expands and contracts, laps softly, and hisses and burbles in the thickening snowfall. This is the heart of the Usherat winter. It is no time for a visit.
The air seems to thicken as the snow falls harder. My richtnaut is invisible behind me, all of a sudden, and I am truly alone in the hand of the water.
Splash, splash, splash. The snow falls thick enough that it is forming an unmelted layer atop the seawater, obscuring the path of the pier. I walk on faith. Snow ripples out around my footprints and my feet leave pocked holes of water behind at each step.
A human figure forms out of the white curtain as I walk. A dark outline, barely visible against the sea.
Once, I stood just there. Nearly a decade ago, it was. The screaming cry of Cadencian engines echoes in my head like sirens. I want to collapse to the stone and weep, as I must have on that day.
Instead, I approach the figure, sure of my footing on the now-invisible pier, the snow-laden sea like an endless white tablecloth.
She spins at my approach, drawing a weapon like a sword tipped with light. I keep walking, gait steady, breathing sure.
Inora holds no fear for me anymore. My visor is shut, or she might read my gaze there. Like a deadly animal, like a tiger, she leaps into action, swings the sword in a flurry of strikes that are so fast and so well-timed they cannot be told one from the next.
The blows clatter like the hail of Koriograf on my mantine armor. I keep walking. I see her face, exposed in the snow. Her hair is damp, stuffed into the fur-rimmed hood of the parka enveloping her.
She drops her sword-hand to her side, letting the gleaming tip of the blade trace sighing shapes in the snow, leaving a dark trail.
“I—I knew you’d come—” her voice is not something I have ever heard from Inora. Not solidity, not strength, not evil, not cunning.
It is raw fear. The tiger, screaming as its hunters corner it. Lashing out madly in hope of life.
“Inora,” I say, the syllables falling like black ice from my lips. She shivers despite the parka. “I told you I would return.”
“I—“
“You didn’t believe me. I know. It doesn’t matter now.”
I reach a gauntleted hand out and touch her shoulder. She jerks back, spinning to face me.
“You’re going to kill me,” she whispers.
There will be death here, I think, but not yet. Not yet. First there must be pain.
“Kanatka,” I say. “The ice-bridges. The hallowed city.”
Inora swallows like a corpse might.
“Overland,” I say. The words are a rythym, like a litany of religion on my lips. “The Traders’ Capital. The White Barracks. Peleator. Constantina.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, but my prayer continues.
“Cold Heart, and Silvanara, and Rossoth,” I say. “Buildings and bodies and vehicles spread in ruins across the white sands, across the seas, across the green plains, across the slag and rubble of cities.”
She chokes on her own sobs. I reach up and undo the catch of my visor, the better to see her corpse’s face looking at me. Eyes of ice-blue glistening with cold and tears. A vision that kept me alive this past lonely decade.
I drink it in like fire, like water. Those tears are my sustenance.
“That is not all,” I say, voice clear and sharp, free of the visor. “There was Baltan, first, now. His bones adorn a refuse heap in Berensburg. That is, they did, before I turned the city into black glass.”
I tap a metal finger on one glassy-hard mantine greave. It clanks like a porcelain dish. “That was the sound it made, Inora, when I walked through the smoke of Berensburg the next day. The whole place smooth and flat. Beautiful, you know. Like ink in the sunlight. Nothing living. Nothing at all.”
She is sobbing openly now. It is sickening to watch, but I drink it in, because it is all I can do, now. The prayer, the litany, that I am reciting is not supposed to burn on my own ears.
But it does.
“And Karla. She was at the White Barracks on Overland. You know how they are at the White Barracks, don’t you? They hung Karla from the steeple.” I was in the crowd with all the other mad soldiers of that place. We stamped and cheered.
“Now, of course, now…there’s nothing there. No steeple. No body. No bones. No White Barracks. Inora, even the land where it lay is nothing. Blasted away to dark lava. A million souls…”
I trail off. Something like a dark cloud rises from within me. I fall forward, hard armored poleynes over my knees splashing aside the snow and thin seawater to hit the pier beneath. I taste salt. I feel dizzy.
The sky and the sea are so calm, so cold. It is that day all over again. That is why I feel this way, I tell myself. That’s all it is. Bad memories.
Not nightmares I have built.
Inora turns to me.
“What else?” she whispers. I can barely hear her over the storm.
“Everything,” I grate, forcing some anger back into my voice. “Everything you ever knew. Everyone you ever loved. Everyone who ever loved you. Torn apart. I ground their bones into dust and fed them back to the Void they loved so well. You think you hurt me, Inora. I tell you—I tell you you know nothing of pain. You have not yet heard the name of suffering.”
I am repeating myself. These are the words I spoke to her a decade ago. These are the promisises I made. The promises I have kept.
She squats, then sits in the water, and drapes her legs from the edge of the hidden stone pier. We are alone in the great sea of Usherat, and it is truly a lonely place.
A cursed sea, I think to myself.
“You were right,” she says. “Oh, how right you were.”
I try to smile to myself. I did what I said I would. I am vengeance, I told them all. Shouted it as a war cry. Painted it in blood on banners the size of a protean tank. It has been the mantra that propelled me and drove me.
She turns to look at me, face only inches from mine. The face of my nightmares, the ghastly mask of dreams. The face that drove me to do all I have done. A face to loathe.
It looks tired and sad. Tears run openly down her cheeks.
“If you only knew,” she says, sobbing. Her tears sting me. I have thirsted for them for a decade like some rabid madman, and here they are, and me kneeling like I’m hurt by them.
But I move to sit, too, feeding my own legs into the icy water, throwing a glance back toward my richtnaut. There is nothing to be seen but white snow against the hard sky.
Inora meets my eyes and holds my gaze for a long, slow minute.
“Your eyes…have died,” she says. “You’re older.”
“I hurt you!” I scream back at her. “Suffer, witch! You are alone and unloved. Look out at the sea! Watch the blank sky. Feel the loneliness of it. Let it eat your soul.”
“You have not yet heard the name of suffering,” she says, slowly, quoting me. I grin manically at her, a snarling rictus of rage and hate and spite.
“I am vengeance,” I say, “and you are nothing but the pain and suffering you deserve.”
“Can anyone deserve such a fate?” Inora looks back out over the water, away from me. “If you came to kill me,” she says, “then kill me. You’ve become quite good at it.”
“Killing deserves no adulation.”
“Don’t tell me you’re regretting all this,” she says. She meets my eyes again. Hers are softer than I could have imagined. Pure pain is reflected there like acid, like two dark flames. Her face is lined and creased with it, more lined, I think, than only a moment ago.
“I knew you’d come here,” she says again. “I knew you had to. You have to see that it was all for a reason.” She smiles softly. “We’re the same now, you and I.”
“We’re nothing like the same, curse you! Nothing at all! You know nothing of what is within me!”
“I know enough,” says Inora fiercely. “And you are right. You are nothing at all like me. You’ve seen the light snuffed from the eyes of millions, all in the name of vengeance. You have cut and butchered and burned your way through half of the known universe, Daniel, and left a trail of blood a mile wide. So don’t tell me you’re better than I am!”
We sit in silence, stony souls on the stone of the great pier. The water moves my legs like seaweed beneath the surface.
And I know why I came here. I cannot think of it, cannot let the thought even touch my mind. I have moments left. I can block out my deeds for a few short moments more.
Even so, they echo in my head, layer upon layer, burying the Cadencian screams so deap they no longer hold life. I see blood running, no, flowing, on the steps of the Altaresque on Constantina, more blood than any mortal could imagine. I think of horrors worse still on Silverana. I see the black shape of Karla against the sky of Overland before the White Barracks became nothing but mute crags of lava. I feel the unholy pulse of that crowd again. I never want to feel it again.
“I hate you,” I whisper to Inora.
“You can never hate me more,” she says, “than you hate yourself. I know it.”
She tilts her head, looking at me, and plays with the sword in one hand, its bright tip tracing circles in the snowy air, scattering snowflakes.
I don’t snap my visor back up. I don’t move. I only bow my head, still looking at her, seeing so much pain in her eyes, more than anyone could ever imagine.
This is my reward, I think, blotting out the blood and the white fire from my mind, replacing it with her drawn face and the silver tears that find their path through cold snow on her cheeks. This is the end.
“Just kill me, damn you,” I say at last, giving in to it all. “Kill me and have it done.” I think she knows, as well as I do, that I don’t plan on leaving Usherat again.
She blinks back the tears, sniffles and chokes.
“Goodbye, Daniel,” she says.
“I hate you, Inora.”
“You don’t believe that anymore, do you?”
“You took everything from me.”
“And what did you do to me?”
She raises the sword, a cold straight line against the sky. If someone were to see us, we could be two lovers, I think, meeting, as in stories, sitting at the end of a pier.
“You’ve not yet heard the name of suffering,” she says, voice quieter and softer than the grave. Than ten million graves.
She holds the blade delicately, ever the perfect morcador, and then, in a single smooth motion, she drives that line of spark-tipped steel cleanly through her own neck.
It protrudes from the back of her parka’s hood. Blood flows out around the gold-traced hilt, down her neck, and she turns to me, dying.
“Daniel,” she says, placing a single hand on my cheek. It is the first time she has ever touched me.
I try to think of something to tell her in her last seconds of life. But nothing rises to my lips.
She is all you did, I tell myself. She is the reason for it all. She deserves this death.
But I can’t believe it anymore. None of it seems real. And the final realization of it all is a pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt. It feels a betrayal, that this pain is so terrible. That this feeling hurts more than what Inora did those ten years ago. That it burns greater than the guilt of coutless murders.
Hot and angry and desperate, it is worse than dying. Such is the nature of a man, I think in desperation.
“You understand me,” I whisper to Inora, who has her eyes still focused on mine, two wells of pain meeting two more of now endless suffering. “You alone, in all the worlds.”
“Now….” she coughs red blood, and more flows from her neck, “Now…you…see...”
And in seeing, it all comes collapsing down, as I always knew it one day must. So much hurt and anger and pain and guilt and cowardice. The acts I have committed are freed like ten thousand tigers from cages of black stone.
Inora expires beside me, her last breath cold and choking, and falls backward so that water fills her hood and floats her hair around her in the water. Her eyes are still open, and I turn away from them.
I climb to my feet, trying not to think, trying to fight the cowardly thoughts of death in my head. I crave death. I craved death at her hand. That was how it was to go. This is wrong. She was to be left alive, to suffer. Cowardice makes me want to snatch the sword from her neck and use it on myself. Cowardice again, and guilt, stop me.
This is not what was meant to be! I collapse to my knees again, armor shaking and rattling, hammering my fists against the stone.
I am truly alone on Usherat now, a tiny figure at the end of a great white sword, alone in the middle of the sea and nothing at all like the mythical Yeshua.
I scream my anger at the snow. It is a pointless thing to do. It makes it all hurt worse. I am trapped in my own head. I must not think, but it is all I can do. I see shapes in the snow. I try to summon the image of the Cadencians. Try to focus in on it. That too is pointless. There is nothing but blood and pain in my head.
My age-old threat to Inora has been turned upon me by myself, and I know, at long last, the true name of suffering.
THE END.
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