Transformation
The grass beneath Isabel’s feet is metal wire, brittle and sharp. As she enters the silent village, the crowd of ghosts at her heels, she checks her hands and the hems of her sleeves for any sign that she’s undergoing the same transformation. Her fingers remain flesh; her coat is still wool. Whatever happened here is over now. All that remains is a village made of iron.
What had Emryn Marner said? Something about the red star, and a town half a day away—and the story a traveler had told about it, passed from alehouse to inn until it reached the University District. Isabel had dismissed it then. She’d had more pressing concerns.
A scraping, rattling sound that makes Isabel’s teeth hurt sweeps through the village as the wind rustles the grass underfoot and the thatching on the roofs. Flat surfaces—walls, fence posts, and the sides of the unfortunate cattle—shine dully in the midmorning light. She avoids looking in any more windows, but that doesn’t spare her the sight of a stablehand, no older than ten, cowering by the fence with iron arms covering his head. His hair is fine wire, coiled tightly, and the ends crumble as the wind passes through it. Iron dust falls to the iron earth.
Isabel swallows the ache in her throat, and it settles into her chest, hard and stubborn. She crosses the road, where muddy wheel ruts have turned to solid ridges that strike at the soles of her feet, and kneels down on the other side of the fence, facing the boy. His eyes are squeezed shut over rounded cheeks, as though he’s cowering from a sudden, bright light.
The red star.
Had it fallen here, as the rumor suggested? Isabel saw it in both the real world and the nether, disappearing over the eastern horizon. This village is far too close to the city to be the same place, but there also hadn’t been a perpendicular plane of forest and a wall of bone intersecting the walls then, so maybe distance isn’t something she can estimate anymore. The whole world has been cut apart and pasted back together, and if there’s a pattern to it, Isabel hasn’t found it.
So, assuming the star is what caused this, or at least preceded it—she isn’t quite convinced, but it’s the best she can do for now—why iron? And why the whole village? A magical effect of this scale would have taken a dozen unscrupulous practitioners a week or more to enact, and only then if they were uninterrupted by local authorities and lucky enough to avoid unexpected side effects. Or, perhaps, this terrible alchemy was a side effect, the consequence of some other intent.
She reaches out and touches the boy’s elbow. The metal is cold. She taps at his skin with a torn fingernail, and then tries to lift him by his arm with one hand. He’s impossibly heavy, and devoid of all warmth of life—iron, all the way through. He’s dead. It’s a small mercy.
If the ghosts of the people in this village join Isabel’s retinue, she can’t see them. There are too many ghosts.
There were already too many ghosts when she entered the nether world in the Belisia’s fallow garden, when she first saw the thing beyond the wall with its many eyes. She hadn’t seen either wall then, just an endless plain and the tide of human figures, wandering with nowhere to go. The red star flashed, and the thing screeched in pain.
Isabel gets to her feet. She’s halfway through a prayer for the safe passage of the dead before she catches herself. She still has a Sentinel’s habits, even after everything that’s happened.
She finishes the prayer, but decides against trying to consecrate the area with circles and sigils. It’s too large, and would take too much time—time she needs to get to Vernay and take all these ghosts with her. It’s the best she can do for them now.
But what happened here? What could turn an entire village to iron, from the muddy path through the center to the tips of the chimneys, and everything living and nonliving in between? It would take power beyond anything Isabel has ever seen, and she trained under a master Sentinel and once faced down a vampire mage. No one, alive or dead, could access that much magic—no matter how many years or even centuries they had spent learning. And it had happened so fast, turning people to statues where they stood, the cattle frozen as their ears flattened in surprise. Only a god could create something so great and so terrible. Isabel’s stomach turns, but she can’t look away from the face of the stable boy. She half expects him to lower his arms and look up at the sky, to breathe again, he’s so lifelike.
He remains where he is, in the midst of hiding his eyes from the light, never to complete the motion.
Did the thing beyond the wall do this, before it was confined to its boundaries? Isabel can’t see either wall now, and she has to admit she’s been taking for granted that she’s within the area they protect. Space has little meaning, now, so inside and outside might not be the right words. She can only hope that somewhere nearby is the chapel she’s been trying to reach.
She stumbles down the road out of the village, iron mud and grass tearing at her boots. Two more houses, dull and gray and heavy, stand on the other side of the cattle pen, and the blacksmith’s shop is the last building on the left. The anvil is unchanged, but the hammer lying atop it has an iron handle as well as a head, and the cheaply carved emblem of Mella the smith hanging on the iron wall is as gray as the nail above her head. Even the splinters at her feet have become slivers of metal.
Is Mella still alive? The gods aren’t, strictly, living or dead, but it’s the best word Isabel can come up with right now. She’d have to go to Mella’s temple, to see if any holy magic still lingers in the forge-goddess’s house. That her emblem wasn’t spared the calamity suggests she had no power in this village.
Even if Mella remains, she likely won’t last. Her faithfulness is like an anvil, her wrath as unrelenting as a hammer, as the old songs say. It won’t be long before she has sacrificed herself to bolster the walls, or to do something else to beat back the many-eyed thing.
Something else, for instance, like throwing herself into its many eyes, an opening salvo as red as the spark from a great forge. It burned, blinding the thing for an instance, and then perhaps what power and will was left of Mella the smith fell to the earth like rain, and turned this entire village into the iron she loved so well.
It’s a theory, as plausible as anything else at the moment, which isn’t much. Isabel has to get to Vernay.
Her boots find green grass again, and beneath it, soft earth. If only the star had fallen just a hundred yards east—then the village might have been spared, and the transformation visited instead on the unlucky insects and small mammals that lived in the overgrown field. It stretches on and on, like an ocean of gentle emerald waves, far too green for the time of year. By now, the grass should be golden and going to seed.
The ghosts have begun to sing, tuneless and droning. It’s a lament, or perhaps an outpouring of the pain of the unmoored dead, falling from the hollows of their open mouths. The iron bodies are too heavy for them to move, or so Isabel hopes. She quickens her step.
As the wind howls and the ghosts accompany it in eerie harmony, Isabel walks, keeping the shadow of the forest at her left. The sun is climbing over it, and she’ll be on the nightward side of it once more. For now, she can see a network of twisting roots gripping rocks the size of houses far overhead. She’s far enough away that if one of them falls, it won’t squash her flat. Probably.
By the time the sun reaches the top of the plane of forest, the iron village is a gray blot on the northern horizon, surrounded on all sides by endless, undulating green. Surely a place like this has always existed somewhere on the continent, but Isabel has never seen it before. In her experience, this much empty, untilled land would be put under the plow all the faster for its obvious fertility and lack of trees. There are too many hungry people around to leave it alone.
Isabel still hasn’t found the chapel, nor are any of the tiny wildflowers peeking up from the grass the correct shade of blue. She turns closer to the wall of roots and stones, the train of ghosts behind her forming a long curve as they sing. It’s starting to grate on her, this droning, sighing lament, but she’s not going to waste her time telling them to stop. There must be a hundred of them now, rippling as they move like a pale, mist-colored river. Where are they coming from? Who taught them this song? It would be a powerful and persuasive Sentinel, if a deeply unethical one, who could convince a hundred ghosts to form a choir.
She walks for another hour, or so she guesses by the angle of the sun as it disappears behind the vertical forest, light streaming in faint rays through the trees at the edge. A false night falls over the field, and the village disappears into the gloom.
The chapel isn’t here. In the grand reshuffling of the world, it’s ended up somewhere else, replaced by the iron village and this endless expanse of grass and wildflowers. The chances that it sits somewhere within a day’s walk of the city are slim, and she doesn’t have days to look for it.
If she turns around now, she could be back in the city before nightfall. Alternatively, she could keep walking, and hope that Vernay is where she left it, despite all evidence to the contrary. She has nothing for the road, not even a lantern, and her feet ache from hours of uneven terrain.
“I have to go back, don’t I?” she asks the darkening sky. If there’s help to be found, it will have to be within Mondirra. The city is cut off from everything outside, even the port.
Behind her, the ghosts intone a low, wavering note.
The village of iron, transformed by the death of a god, was one of the original ideas I had for this story. In the published version, it’s likely to appear earlier. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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