EPILOGUE: The Ship
He told us to conquer the heavens. We are trying, Father. We are trying.
Four hundred and twelve years after the death of Aurelion Caelum, on a clear morning in early spring, a crowd of several hundred thousand gathered at the facility on the coast where the empire's Academy of the Sky — the direct descendant of the Ninth Academy — had been working for the better part of a century on something that their predecessors would have called impossible and that they had decided to call, instead, merely difficult.
The thing they had built stood on a great platform above the marshes, attended by vast structures of metal and cable, surrounded by the smell of fuel and heat. It was unlike anything that had existed before in the world. It was also, clearly and unmistakably, a beginning.
The ship was called — by unanimous decision of the Academy, confirmed by the current emperor, who had not been hard to persuade — the Aurelion.
The crowd was quiet as the countdown proceeded. The language had changed in four centuries, diversified, branched, though the common tongue established in the early empire remained its deep root. The people standing in the crowd that morning would not all have understood each other perfectly. They were not all from the same culture, or the same traditions, or the same part of the world.
But they were all looking at the same thing.
They were all, collectively, holding their breath.
When the engines ignited, the sound was not a sound but a pressure — something that moved through the chest, that bypassed language and thought and went straight to the ancient place in the human nervous system that responds to enormity.
The Aurelion rose.
Slowly at first, impossibly slowly, and then faster, and then very fast, trailing fire and thunder, climbing the sky with the unhurried authority of something that had decided where it was going and was going there.
In the Academy's museum, behind glass, was a copy of the speech he had given on the hill in Carthenmoor four centuries ago. The transcript had been made from the accounts of those who were there. The last line, in the common tongue, was one that every child in every empire school learned by heart:
"Conquer the heavens, my children. I have given you the earth. The sky is yours to take."
The ship cleared the clouds.
In the crowd below, people were cheering, and weeping, and holding each other, and pointing at the sky.
Somewhere, in the deep history of the world, an old man sat beneath an oak with a sword across his knees and looked up at the stars.
And smiled.
— ✦ —
— END —
CHILDREN OF THE SKY