The Conduit Towers

Just turning the corner, Arevalen's immediate tension was tangible. My honed senses notwithstanding, his entire countenance was that of new terror.

Old terror was murder, blood, rape, and poverty. Wars, criminals, lords, ladies, and the politics that ran it all; the young fighter had seen enough of that to be as docile as a sheep around it. He could look at it, appraise it a moment, and then decide if he would eat it or move on.

When I showed him the conduit pillars locked far below the city - the size of a grand ballroom, humid and entrenched with the feel of ancient, brooding power - he experienced something of what I felt when Paul showed it to me some three months ago. A pang of confusion at first, then the slow realization of what was emerging into eyesight. There would be disbelief laden with denial, the mind coercing itself into a false sense of security. Yet steadily pacing its way into the confines of Arevalen's conscious thoughts was the bitter visage of truth.

"What is this place?" He asked as we treaded closer to the eight pillars. "Where have you--"

"This is where the children went." I had to admit there was a certain satisfaction in showing him how foolish he had been up until now. The stark refusal of facts, real life accounts shouldered away by the inability to fathom such mass injustice, the venomous belief that the "unending love of the Eternal Flame" shined upon all; all broken in a single moment. "This is where the magus recruits went who didn't survive the preliminary exercises. This is where you would've gone, had it not been for your dedication to the Empire."

The soldier continued passed me when I stopped walking. I could see then that he wanted to be certain of the reality. His hand extended to the first pillar he came close to.

As a shadow, ever present in the faintest of light, I took his wrist in-hand, preventing whatever fatal end would come of touching the edifice. "I was instructed not to touch these things. I wager the same goes for you."

Arevalen eyed me, a wanton scowl reserved for fresh enemies. "What is this? And tell me straight, assassin!"

Just as I released his leather-clad wrist, he whipped it to his side, attempting to deny me whatever sense of triumph he thought I may have been harboring. I turned, the thick, umbral cloths of my uniform billowing about my person, creaking softly among the stagnant energies radiating from the pillars.

I had to look and remind myself that this revelation was no personal victory over a foolish mind. It was an atrocity, thousands of years old and millions of souls solid. It would've looked like any other archaic work of marble art at a distance, but a second appeal afforded the eyes purchase of fleshly bodies melded with a heated stone. Something slick and clotted in random areas moved upward, like a dark azure sheen of ethereally flowing sweat. It went as far as the ceiling was high, and wide as a chimney of the royal estate, dimly lighting the room and accentuating the room's sinister appeal.

Open mouths, contorted in fear or bafflement, protruded outward. I imagine most of the captives laid to suffer here were dragged, defiantly shrieking at the immortal prison that awaited them. Arms and legs did much the same as those faces, likely too late to find footing, their entire forms too far gone into the pulsing pillar.

Men, emasculated by their fear, women, robbed of dignity, and children, shorn of whatever future promised to them; it was a raw ache on every sympathetic nerve in my body.

A slitter of throats, a taker of life, a hunter of marks, and even I was too sick to stare for much longer than a few moments. "It's what powers the city. This pillar..." I explained, pointing to the one my observer had nearly touched. "... controls the water system. Latrines, sinks, baths, and the like, all powered by the souls of conduits. Mages. People just like us."

His face contorted, then shook. Hearing must've had an even more rupturing affect. I remembered that Arevalen was a soldier before he was an advisor to the Empire, and his altruistic appeal of his superiors was only just being broken.

"The electric currents are generated from the pillar there." I indicated with an expressionless glance to the right. "They power lamps, stoves, and--"

"Enough!" The outburst was followed by the warrior whirling on me. His metal greaves crushed the collar of my obsidian-colored uniform. "Why show this to me?"

I stifled a knowing laugh, remembering the tinge of gratification at the beginning of the encounter. "Where's all that talk of 'hard work' earning anyone their way out of the slums? The plight of mages being their own fault? I distinctly remember--"

"I know what I said!"

He nearly forced me back a step, and I would've let him if not for the volatile wall of unlife behind me. A small part of me regretted the levity with which I addressed him.

Biting back another outburst, he put his energy into questioning me. "Who did this? Who made this all right?"

If I maneuvered out of his grasp, he would've collided with the wall, perhaps becoming apart of the structure, perhaps disrupting its integrity, perhaps instantaneously going up in flame. Nonetheless, when he turned to anger as his outlet, it was hard for me to pay him any serious mind. "I did a good amount of reading on how these got here. Too much to explain the why or how. The when, however, should be easy enough for you," I told him. "It can be traced back to just over five hundred years ago, after the Culling." I had hoped that years as an advisor would have afforded him the wherewithal to piece the rest of the timeline together.

"Make it plain, Farlander. My patience fails me by the moment."

It was all I could do to shrug and scoff at him with a roll of my eyes. "I should've known better than to give you that much credit.

"Mage prisoners, impetuous one. They were the first to be tethered to constructs like these."

"I see..." He muttered, the workings of his mind visibly making an effort given the way his eyes worked from side to side. The grip upon my collar receded, and I was afforded an opportunity to move away from the monstrous pillar of souls. "A few thousand was a good start, but they found that the more mages they had, the more power they could consume."

"So as those solid few thousand dried up, the want of resources became necessity," I finished, only a tad bit annoyed with how slow he was to put it all together.

His head shook feverishly a moment, then he drew his vision to each and every pillar. Those were the eyes of calculation, gauging the weight and worth of the still-living bodies pulsing at nearly every turn. For every time he peered at the stalk still bodies of pulsing flesh, there were hundreds of pupils shorn of fruitful existence looking back at him with what I would imagine to be envy or supplication.

It occurred to me that those entrapped inside the conduit pillar could yet me aware of me and Arevalen's presence. What would they say if they could speak? What would a tortured soul say to its jailor?

My wandering thoughts afforded the soldier my ignorance, and therefore, a chance to slip from sight.

"What are you doing?!" I spun upon my heels and cursed the workings of my mind.

His fist was drawn back. He would strike before I could get to him.

Before I halted his effort, those burly knuckles struck true enough to disrupt the flowing blue of stolen souls. The pillar that controlled the electrical facets of the Empire moaned a chorus of livened anguish, instantly causing me to buckle under the pressure of the releasing tension. It was not unlike the muffled slaughter of livestock, beating against the seal of their stone tomb.

As if responding to the outcry, the adjacent two pillars joined the cacophony, their reactions lower than the first, but still just as realm-shaking in their cry. It was one instance of concentrated sorrow speaking to another, feeling the disruption and replying to it in kind.

Though my body still quaked with the effort of standing my ground, Arevalen had been driven back by his own assault. He, with a body keener than ebonsteel, was on his back and drawing the shallow breaths of instant unconsciousness.

Once the wailing died down to a low moan, and then to the eventual utter silence of before, I took stock of his countenance.

He would live, though the shock of what he had seen would not soon be forgotten. I could rest knowing he would cease his baseless opinions of anti-magism in our conversations. Where I had come away from the experience lightly jarred and confident of a less chatty bodyguard, Arevalen, head military advisor to Emperor Kayviel Cypher, would need more than a nursemaid to swallow his new reality.

"I wonder..."

If Arevalen can strike it, then...

My hand extended to the pillar which the soldier had attempted to plow his fist into.

I made sure to find a face among the many open-mouthed horrors that bled life force into the city. It was a girl, arms melded with the runic stone, naked and hopeless amongst the rest of those who shared her fade. She couldn't have been more than eight years old.

And just as my fingers closed in upon her face.

Her emotionless eyes that stared detached into the abyss.

Turned their pupils squarely upon me.