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'The House Of Insight'

By Sugarvenom

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Idris travels through the Churn in search of his people’s salvation …

Idris appeared inside the Glass City coughing, a painful sting in his nose when he tried to inhale, his eyes pouring water, the sharp chakram dropping from his fist. He wrapped his turban around his mouth and nose but it was no respite from the swirling green-gray smog. His skin burned even beneath his sandstorm-proof clothing. He dropped to his knees, choking, blind but aware on all sides of things waking, sniffing and growling. He tried to escape in the same way that he had come, but he was gripped by fear and could not move. So he would die like this, smothered, sniveling, helpless.

In that realization, however, there was peace. He allowed death inside, and death flowed through him. His mind settled. He breathed deep, pulling the noxious gas into his lungs, and forced his eyes open to watch death come. The strength of the old destructive force filled him – or was he being drawn into it? – and he remembered the cryptic words of the djinn.

What the Churn does not kill, it swallows.

It felt like a dream of breathing underwater. His vision cleared, and he saw that he was near to a broken fountain that still poured water forth. The water streamed out in several directions onto the ground, over books strewn everywhere. Books in stacks, books torn apart, books held by the skeletons of the dead. The fountain water ran black with ink.

Idris dropped his turban and gripped his chakram again. He drew his spear, raised himself up and walked toward a door worked with colorful, geometric glass tiles, now broken and jagged. The sign above it remained:


He had arrived at the House of Insight, inside which the engineer sisters Rana and Ayah had written their book.

The air tasted like strong spices now, and blood, and green things growing wild. Inside the destroyed house of learning, vines grew over ornate tiles and murals. The leaves had sharp teeth and tongues; they hissed at him but he threatened with the tip of his spear and the vines shrank back from him. Other creatures scuttled away: overgrown insects with snapping claws and horn-backed reptiles the like of which he’d never seen. He moved nevertheless through room after room, determined but lost. He found shattered telescopes attached to windows and maps crowding walls and desks. Some floors were covered in the slivers of glass that had been the tools of chemists. All the rooms were filled floor-to-ceiling with books tumbled off of shelves. How would he find one book among these thousands?

Then he came upon a tidy room. On display inside were strange machines and models of inventions: watermills and chain pumps; a robotic peacock that pecked at him as he passed; clocks of all kinds ticking in unison; and a helmet. There were weapons, too, in varied states of repair, and blast marks on the walls where some had discharged. Curious, Idris placed the helmet on his head and startled when a holographic visor appeared before his eyes that gave him a view of the room behind him and to his periphery. And then he heard whispering.

“He was not choked by the smog.”

“He passed the first test.”

Idris whirled around and the display whirled too, so that what was behind him showed in the visor. He saw no one. He moved through the room until his back was against a wall and waited, spear and chakram at the ready.

In the year of nightly battles he had seen many kinds of Churnbeasts, horrific evolutions of animals and plants, but what slithered through the door was another thing altogether, a thing fashioned after a giant serpent but made of steel and the conjoined bodies of two women, their fingers mutated to resemble viper fangs, tubes and wires grafted into their flesh as if grown there, a single glowing eye separating their torsos. It was a sickening amalgam of wildlife, humanity and technology. The serpent slithered in a spiral so that one and then the other of the sisters faced up, and Idris could see that they had been beautiful once.