Chapter 92: Glowing Gravestones
The Council Spire always felt taller when you walked in alone.
Raizen followed the Warden through a lobby that made men into ants: iron ribs, a ceiling lost in shadows, light that fell in polite sheets. People with lanyards moved like punctuation in a sentence he wasn’t part of. The elevator doors opened without being asked.
"The Ruler is expecting you" the Warden said, and somehow made it sound like both good news and a warning.
At the top floor, another pair of doors - these wrapped in quiet - parted onto a room that refused to pick a scale. A single long table. One wall of glass staring down on Neoshima’s petals. A boy in white stood at the far end like he’d been poured into the space and told to set.
Solomon didn’t send for anyone else. He only flicked two fingers.
"Leave us."
The Wardens left like trained weather.
For a heartbeat, nobody said anything. Raizen was good at silence - it had raised him - but this one had edges. Solomon’s gaze - a half-grown thing with young bones - took him in head to foot, paused at the bandage on his hand, found the scuffs on his boots, filed away the tired under his eyes like evidence.
"I’m impressed" Solomon said, not smiling. "In both directions."
Raizen could have asked which directions. He didn’t.
"You know, I’ve watched you since the day you got here. Ever since you came... From the Underworks, I suppose." the boy went on, voice a low, steady instrument tuned by necessity. "At the Lighthouse. At the Academy. On roofs you weren’t supposed to reach. I don’t know who taught you to move and fight like that." A small tilt of his head, the closest he would come to a question he didn’t need answered. "I don’t know what makes you work at two in the morning and then again at five. I thought: revenge. It isn’t. That almost makes you scarier."
Raizen looked past Solomon at the window, where the city wore its lotus walls like armor pretending to be art. "It’s... simpler than that."
"I prefer simple" Solomon said. He stepped closer, white sash catching the light like a cut through water.
"So. Raizen." He didn’t say family names. He didn’t need to.
"What do you want?"
No quiz. No trick. A key pushed across a table to see if you knew the lock.
"I want to kill all the Nyxes." Raizen declared. The words landed without ceremony, solid as boots on a floor. A beat. "And -" the word dragged something with it "- keep everyone safe..."
Solomon didn’t reward the answer. He nodded as if he’d just confirmed the shape of a map he’d already drawn.
"Come" he said.
They crossed to the elevator. Solomon placed his palm on the panel - the glass box dropped, smooth and arrogant. Floor numbers counted backward, then gave up counting at all. When they stopped, the doors never opened.
Solomon reached into the inside of his jacket and produced a small coin on a slender chain. Not gold. Not steel. A simple disk the color of obsidian.
He placed it on a specific spot near the elevator control panel. The panel sighed.
The elevator lowered them even more. You couldn’t see the outside anymore. It was pitch black. The air cooled. Raizen felt pressure find the hinge of his jaw and rest there, thoughtful.
"You asked me what I want" he said, because the silence was not a friend. "What do you want, Ruler?"
Solomon’s mouth took a small angle that might one day grow up into a smile and might just as easily become law. "The same thing as you" he said.
The box stopped. The doors opened on a breath.
There are rooms that perform. There are rooms that kneel. There are rooms that listen. This one... It remembered.
A hall stretched out, wider than streets, longer than stories. Above, the ceiling was not a ceiling at all but a forest of stone teeth: stalactites, some as thin as needles, some as thick as a man, pointing down in a slow riot. They carried their own ghost of light - nothing that touched the iris, only a suggestion, a glow caught inside like old lightning.
On the floor, the opposite had been made by hands.
Columns rose in human height - shoulder, chest, crown - cylinders and hexes, some smooth, some faceted. Hundreds at first glance. Then more. Then the mind gave up counting and accepted being small. Each column was inset with tiny inscriptions. Each, when Solomon’s fingers brushed it, woke.
Not bright. Not proud. A low bloom under the skin of the stone. Color the way memory does color: enough.
Raizen forgot that there was a correct way to stand in front of a Ruler. He stepped out because his body needed the space and because the first pulse of light under Solomon’s hand knocked something out of him cleanly.
"What... Is this?"
Solomon walked between the columns the way you walk a garden you have planted by hand and water by name. "Impure Luminite" he said, thinking Raizen meant the mineral. The glow followed his gentle touch like an obedient shy thing. "Too flawed for engines. Too stubborn to die. Useless for weapons. Terrible in a reactor. Lovely in a ring. Expensive as a confession."
The stalactites above reflected their weak light back down, passing it along like a rumor. There were no sounds. Raizen’s breath found itself and then tried to silence itself.
He took in the columns as his feet carried him. Blue-gray with veins like frost. Warm amber with an old bruise at the center. Colorless stones that pretended to be clear and failed beautifully. Some brightened eager. Some barely admitted to light at all.
He leaned toward an inscription: a name. Another line. A date that had been forced to stop. The small engraving of a weapon - a staff, a blade, a shape like wings - rough little symbols. The chisel marks were not perfect. The imperfection made them kind.
"They’re... Graves..." he said, and the word stuck the way the right diagnosis always sticks: cruel and useful.
"Not all bodies come home. Not all names arrive intact. The dark is good at keeping what it takes. So we keep what the dark can’t eat. Memories"
He brushed another column. The glow was a soft green with a stubborn heart.
Raizen’s hand lifted without permission, hovered over a blue one, then stopped. The stone brightened anyway - just the smallest degree. As if it had eyes and had recognized the human debate above it. He pulled his hand back, absurdly polite.
Solomon watched him not-touch things the way a craftsman watches you handle his tools.
"Every Vanguard gets a column when they fall" he said. "If there is no body, we carve anyway. If there is no name, we stop pretending and write Unknown. That costs more." The corner of his mouth turned. "The stonecutters hate unknowns. They pull at the chisel. It’s as if the word doesn’t want to be held."
He stopped at one whose inscription had been worn by too many hands. The glow inside was the color of candles through milk. He didn’t touch this one. He only stood near it, and the stalactites above seemed to lean.
"Velarion took a lot of space down here" he said, eyes on the far columns and also on a point only he could see. "You know some of those names by now. You’ve fought with consequences they bought." He inhaled. "I put this room under the Council. So no one forgets what decisions cost when the room upstairs is warm and very convinced of its own importance. The Council tried to stop me. Sayong that it’s a waste of money. Yet here we are"
Raizen followed his gaze.
He found a column with a sword carved into it, the little lines around the head suggesting the idea of light. He didn’t read the name. He didn’t need to. The same ache that had knocked him sideways in the storm rose and pressed the hinge of his jaw. Memories - last memories - of his brother flooded his mind, but he stopped them quickly.
"Why show me this?" he asked. He heard his own voice and didn’t entirely recognize it.
"Because people who plan to run faster than fate" Solomon said, "need to know where the running ends."
He moved along the aisle. His fingertips traveled, leaving small paths of glow like breadcrumbs. "Because you answered my question with kill and protect in the same breath and I believed you. Belief is a dangerous thing to give someone. This" he gestured slightly, a boy showing you the only inheritance that mattered "is what I believe in. And what I buy with other people’s belief in me."
He paused again. Another column, darker. The cut letters shallow, like whoever carved them had run out of strength and refused to stop. Raizen read this one because he couldn’t not. A name. A place. The simple word: FOUND.
Raizen walked until he came to a tight cluster of columns set a fraction farther apart, as if a crowd had been there and the room remembered. One had an inscription below it had no dates, only a line that felt like the front edge of weather.
He looked at Solomon. The boy’s face did not move.
"Yours?" Raizen asked, and the word came out a little like prayer.
"My brother has one" Solomon said. Not answering the question and answering it anyway. He did not touch the column. "We never found anything that had the decency to be called remains. But you don’t need a body to say a name out loud. You only need breath."
They let that sit. The room carried silence like water carries leaves.
Raizen heard a drop somewhere make the patient sound of stone solving time, one molecule at a time.
He looked again at the stalactites. Natural, Solomon had said with his shoulders, not his mouth. Above them, ages. Below them, choices. Between - people.
"Why here?" Raizen asked, finally. "Not some... hero’s plaza. Not the Academy’s square."
Solomon’s answer was the smallest shrug the human spine could make without lying.
"Because upstairs I am the Ruler" he said. "Down here I am a person that can only remember. Because the underworks hum and the mineral sings and it’s very hard to give pretty speeches when rock is behaving like an old book."
He turned to Raizen. "I don’t need apologies for shattering a pane if you’re building something that arrives where it’s supposed to." He let the faintest smile touch the corner of his mouth. "I do need you alive. I need you not to confuse brave with messy. I need you to bring other people home so I don’t buy more stones at stupid prices. It’s because... I believe in you."
Raizen swallowed. The room made the act sound like it mattered. He set his palm near a pale column - close enough to feel cool, not touching. The stone woke a little anyway, a halo underneath, weak and insistent.
"Does it... hurt?" he asked, and hated the question even as he gave it permission to exist. "When you come here."
"Yes" Solomon said, effortless. "And it helps. Which is the same thing, most days."
They walked in a slow line that didn’t bother to pretend to be ceremonial. No guards breathed in the corners. No cameras blinked. The city existed a long way up and a long way away. Here, everything had learned to be a smaller sound. A smaller string, still uncut, in the loom of fate.
At a column carved with three small circles - moon, maybe, or just a hint at it - Solomon stopped.
"A while back, we found another story. Maybe just a story. Maybe dark truth disguised in a child’s tale. The first piece in the puzzle we call past."
Then, he added, eyes a shade darker:
"Or at least something that I hope it’s the past"