Chapter 2: Palace of the Wasteland

The bricks were smooth and interlocked tightly, but because the walls also sloped outward, I had to dig my fingertips into the gaps to find handholds. I grit my teeth as my fingers were scraped raw; warm blood made them slick.

While I clung for dear life, my gaze continued to drift toward the waterfall that plummeted from the palace’s lowest archway. Squinting, I distinguished others that descended from other archways farther up the palace’s flank: the clear streams almost invisible through the flowing snow. Raised layers of ice rippled outward from where the waterfalls crashed upon the icy plateau: framing pools of water that I bet would freeze by sundown. Perhaps the cycle of spreading and freezing water was how this plateau formed, but the why behind history mattered more than the how. Flowing water? In a land that's turning me cold-blooded? No, there’ll be plenty of time to figure out why it’s kept flowing later. First, let's focus on keeping my grip.

I frowned at the archway several rows above me where the birdman had disappeared. Not that I can’t, but climbing up there would take far too long. For the sake of punctuality, I’ll settle with this entryway—I reached for the ledge where the first archway stood just within arm’s reach—and see whether I can’t meet up with that birdman so we can have a proper introduction.

I hissed through my teeth as I lifted a leg. Pins and needles shot down the numbed limb at the slightest movement, but after planting my foot on a loose brick, I strained to raise myself over the ledge. However, even my outstretched hands became blurred by the mist that erupted from a plinth beyond the archway. All I could make of my surroundings was a hazy silhouette of what appeared to be a leg. Perhaps it belonged to some statue or other. Oh, the artistry. The cultural significance! Who could deny Birdman exist now?

A wave of vertigo coursed down my spine.

Whipping my head around in search of a handhold, I hurled myself through the archway. My scream was pushed to the back of my throat. I plunged headlong into the water that filled the plinth. My three jackets soaked through. I might as well have been encased in ice.

Spluttering, I flung my head from the water and clutched my quaking frame. I lay against the side of the plinth and panted, but I barely noticed my constricting lungs. I staggered to my feet and ran my hand along the mammoth oyster shells, carved from powdery ivory, which overlapped with each other to form a basin that contained the wretched bathwater. Oh, how unprofessional of me. A more accurate report would note that it was a wretched fountain. It covered this balcony with water that shone like crystal in the sunlight: let in by the towering archway filled with foggy stained glass. Filled… apart from a four-foot door set at the ledge. Not that I had the pleasure to appreciate the specifics of my method of entry while I was clinging for dear life; nor even now. My gaze passed over all this in a second before I stared at the shadow that stretched from behind me and then the statue.

The statue towered from its water-filled plinth with limbs as long as a human’s, and it was carved in the act of spearing a thrashing walrus, but not with a spear. No, I gaped at how the sculptor had made the obvious mistake of putting a heron’s head on the statue’s shoulders. The creature hoisted its prey overhead with a lance-like beak. Entering the plinth, the water must travel up the human-like body through some mechanism I didn't have enough time to work out the specifics of. The stream then arced from the walrus’s impalement wound that, as I had watched with wide eyes, formed the waterfall: one of many “manmade” waterfalls.

“Whoever put you here must've thought swimming to the front door was a fine idea." I unstrapped the folding camera that hung from the coarse rope I am sorry to call my belt. I extended the lens from the camera’s casing while presenting my back to the unknown palace: in the name of photographic evidence. Once I had a superb angle of the statue’s rigid features, lifelike despite constant weathering from the Floating Isles’ blizzards, I pulled the latch. The camera clicked, and the flash went off.

I grinned while imagining this photograph plastered in every new textbook and record about the Floating Isles only to frown. Gaping pits riddled the fountain’s base. Really, and after I took all that trouble that came with snagging that shot. Well, good thing I didn't just come here for photographs. Cutting a path through the water, I stepped over the tiles and bricks that had been dug up and strewn about the pits. “What would one birdman need so many holes for?” I froze at an arch framed by a pair of winged seahorses. These two won't be getting pictures. People have enough trouble believing birdmen exist. I leaned on the part of the arch well away from where the statues fused into one… thing at the top. I almost had to duck to peek into the hallway beyond. “Hopefully not their victims.” I laughed and glanced back at the birdman statue. Once I realized this was my last excuse to dawdle, I balled my hands into fists and strode onward.

Streams flowed through trenches along both sides of the hallway before passing into the fountain outside. While the water certainly wasn’t being heated, some mechanism was churning mist from these trenches. Despite the lack of lighting fixtures, the palace’s misty innards shone with a hazy light as if whatever shadows might have touched the bricks were burned upon contact. I bet I would’ve been able to peer down the hallway and out the other side of the palace if not for the mesh of roots that snaked along the walls and knotted into… something else… that obscured the hallway farther inward. Unlatching my camera and holding it at the ready, I bolted down the hallway and skidded to a halt when I nearly became tangled in what had been obscuring my view: a tree that grew from the wall.

The roots that weaved along the wall twisted into a gnarled trunk that reached until it grew alongside the opposite wall and curled in on itself like a nautilus shell. I could envision the tree contorting itself into a knot to fit snugly in the middle of the hallway. Yet, despite how the tree’s bark peeled in flakes with every turn it made, its limbs and roots sprawled toward the trenches within the tiled floor. The cluster of roots the tree shoved into the trenches nearly staunched the streams.

My gaze swept past the misshapen tree to the glistening… “stone.” It had been waiting to be bumped into the way it dangled from the tip of one of the tree’s limbs which coiled inward from the floor, ceiling, and walls more like a tentacle than a proper branch to clutch its prize.

“What do we have here?” I stroked my chin as I paced around the oblong stone to observe it from all angles. On one hand, it had a marble texture, but the fact that it was also egg-shaped could be no coincidence. I frowned with each theory I dismissed about how crushed trees and marble eggs could relate to the birdman who occupied this palace. There hadn’t been anything in the University record about these… unanticipated discoveries. Well, of course, there were bound to be some mysteries that the document left unexplored. That was why I was here: to find the answers. I had to. Otherwise, some random deckhand might as well have been the one to discover this palace.

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I clasped my hands over my skull as I racked my brain. My eyes shot open, and I swung an inquiring finger at the roots. “You! I came here to understand you and the palace to which you cling.” Perhaps it had to do with spending years aboard an airship filling my head with theories I’d never dare voice aloud until I had the proof, but I sensed a challenge within these roots. Something about how they clung beyond all reason really… rubbed me the wrong way. “What? You try to deny me simply because you’re an anomaly? A root within a frozen wasteland that is beyond my comprehension? Well, you'd best wipe that grin off because here comes the rebuttal. You're no mere root at all because rather than cling, you have entwined with the palace as if to a lattice.”

Yes, the roots didn’t so much as nudge the bricks at the points where they grew into the walls. Far from damaging the stonework, the roots might as well have been woven into the walls by design. They must’ve been. “I've got it! Nothing flourishes on the Floating Isles by accident. This palace might not be homey, but it’s far from ruin. Statues that haven’t weathered, fountain pipes that haven’t frozen over, and the fact that these roots even live. This is more upkeep than one birdman could handle. I daresay I've hit the jackpot and stumbled upon a nest of ‘nonexistent’ creatures.” I put my hands on my hips and glanced around as if birdmen would start crawling from the cracks between the bricks. "Perhaps they’re bashful about the state they've left their houseplant in. Well, if it's this desperate for water, I'm sure it’d love a bit of light.” And if the birdmen come to see what I’m up to, all the better. Maybe then they can show me some common courtesy. I raised the camera, flicked its switch, and the flash flooded the crumpled tree in white light.

I flinched when violet sparks spurt from the egg to reach the hand I had used to operate my camera.

The branch that suspended the egg shuddered as if something writhed inside.

I whipped my hand from the egg, and the violet light dimmed. A jolt ran up my fingerbones even though the sparks extinguished inches from my hand.

Ashy flakes peeled from the branch and showered the already darkened, ivory floor.

My eyes widened when a crackling echoed farther down the hallway. A violet glow like a bulb on a high wattage pulsed alongside the wall, and something tumbled onto the floor only to be swallowed by the mist that obscured everything farther than ten feet. My eyes snapped to the following lights that burned through the mist: depositing more hidden figures. One by one, the lights extinguished. Silence followed.

I stiffened and gripped my rapier’s hilt until my hand went numb. My heart stopped when a faint clicking echoed from the mist.

I staggered away from the tree and bolted toward the seahorse arch to give the inhabitants time to understand that my interest in their magic was the sincerest compliment I could give.

Clicking echoed from beyond the arch. More pairs of clacking footsteps joined the first until their pattering deafened the howling wind. The clicking ceased within a second, and I swore I had lost my hearing.

Despite myself, I screwed my eyes shut. All the fairytales I had been told about the Floating Isles drifted back from my childhood memories. As I imagined prehistoric apes emerging from their caves to kill me and take my place in civilization and snow leopards that had risen from their frozen graves, my heart now decided to start pounding in my chest. No! Even here, in the middle of no man’s land, I still had an image to uphold. Stop shivering this instant, Alice! Now, you’re going to turn around and give these fellows the proper greeting you would have expected to receive from them. I pivoted, balled my hands into fists to keep from trembling, and held my head high.

Hundreds of glowing, pinprick eyes stared back at me through the archway.

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