The chariot took off after them. Marici's hand tightened on the rail at the sudden motion, but Ilios was already laughing.
And soon, the terrace fell away beneath them.
They rose — and as they rose, the sky changed.
Visible from this height in a way they hadn't been before were rivers of warm radiance running through the open sky in long sweeping arcs, each one a distinct stream of brighter, moving light against the blue. Some ran wide and slow. Others were narrower, faster, bending and gathering speed before easing again. They crossed and diverged and pooled briefly where two met, then parted — a whole living system of them, running in every direction through the air.
Marici stared.
Then the creatures banked into the nearest one — and the chariot went with them.
Ilios felt it through the reins the moment they entered — the light of the court running through the reins, through the creatures, through all of it — and him moving with it.
He couldn't help but laugh as the sensation coursed through him. Then he drove them faster.
The current carried them upward in a long blazing arc — higher than the terrace, higher than the throne room, higher than anything they had yet stood upon within their realm — until the entirety of it spread itself out in full beneath them and there was nothing above but open blue.
Ilios pulled back on the reins.
The creatures slowed.
The chariot held.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Below them, far below in every direction, their realm hung suspended in the air.
Not as a continuous sheet, but in many individual pieces. A scattered world of islands floating at different heights against the blue, each one its own distinct shape and size. Some were vast, their surfaces wide and layered with rising buildings and terraces. Others were small and singular. Narrow, deliberate. They hung in the sky without support, without tether.
The Voice had placed them there.
"Can you feel Him," Marici asked in quiet wonder and Ilios didn't need her to say the name of whom she referred for he too had noticed what she had.
"I do."
"He's holding them up," Ilios added without taking his eyes off their realm beneath them.
"Incredible," Marici breathed. "There are so many."
"There are," he agreed.
A pause.
"I'm sure He won't forget."
Marici turned an appalled look on him.
"What?" Ilios asked defensively. "I said I'm sure He WON'T!"
Marici just kept staring at him with a slack-jawed expression, but just as she was about to say something chiding Ilios turned his focus back to the chariot.
"Well," he said. "We had better take a look."
He snapped the reins.
The creatures dove.
And Marici clutched the rail of the chariot again.
They fell in a long spiraling arc toward the island they had come from, their own island, the throne room island, the highest of all of them, circling it as they descended in slow revolutions that brought them closer with each pass. From this angle, the throne room was revealed in a way it hadn't been from inside. Its windows caught the court's full light from every direction and returned it outward in a brightness that was visible from anywhere in the realm below.
But below the throne room, further down the island's body, at a lower altitude entirely, there was more.
Buildings. Not one or two but many, clustered together in a purposeful way.
Marici leaned over the chariot's edge as they spiraled lower.
Residences, she thought as they passed them, they're for our court.
And between the residences were streets and open spaces that would one day be filled.
Marici straightened.
"It's not just a throne room," she said.
"No," Ilios agreed, pulling them out of the spiral and leveling the chariot. "It's our home."
Our home.
A home for our people.
Marici smiled at the thought.
Then a bridge came into view, stretching outward from the island at the heart of their court. It was an arcing span of radiant stone that connected it to its neighbors.
Ilios turned the chariot so they could follow it, and when they reached the far end he turned them sharply — down down down — past the edge of the island and beneath it.
And then they flew beneath it. Beneath the bridge. Beneath the island on the far side. Beneath the buildings and towns that were upon it.
But it was not dark beneath the island. Rather, when Marici looked up, the underside of the island simply appeared to be the sky. A slightly darker sky, but still sky.
And it turned out that what they had guessed at the peak of their realm was true. Their realm was not built on pillars. Nor had any roots. Nor was supported by any structure extending downward to explain why it stayed where it was.
The islands were truly islands.
From the peak of their realm, Marici had known the Voice was keeping the islands airborne, but down here she could feel the weight of what that meant. The sheer size of what He was choosing not to let fall.
She lifted her hands from the chariot rail and reached upward toward the underside of the island.
She couldn't touch it. It was too far above her. But as her hands rose into the space between them, something moved through the air around her fingers. Not wind, not the warm press of the current. Something quieter than both. A presence, barely there, the way the last note of a song is barely there before the silence takes it.
She held her hands still.
The understanding arrived without announcement.
She had been thinking of it as weight held back. As falling prevented. But that wasn't it — or wasn't all of it. The islands weren't simply not falling.
They were being held.
And what a difference between those two. The first was absence of catastrophe. The second was an act — ongoing, deliberate, chosen — the Voice's hands open beneath every island in their realm at every moment, not because they would otherwise drop, but because He wanted to hold them up.
She lowered her hands slowly back to the rail.
Beside her, Ilios said nothing. He simply held the chariot steady and waited.
Then he moved them on.
And before long, something appeared before them as they neared the end of the island.
A moving curtain at the island's far edge, catching the light as it fell, wide and silver and continuous.
They were already upon it before either of them understood what it was.
And by the time Marici said "Ilios—" they were already through it.
Cold. Brilliant. A rushing sound that was everywhere at once.
Then they were out the other side.
Ilios turned the creatures in a wide arc and brought the chariot around so they could see the thing they had just driven through.
It was then that they saw that the island's far edge gave way to a waterfall. A wide silver blue curtain of it, falling from the island's rim downward and downward and further downward still, dissolving long before it reached the bottom of the sky into a luminous haze of mist.
From here, looking back at it, the full shape of it was visible. The island above with its buildings and bridges and terraces, the waterfall falling cleanly away from its edge, the mist below spreading outward in a slow patient drift.
Marici stared at it.
"We went through it," she said.
"We did," Ilios agreed.
"By accident."
"...Yes."
"Yes?"
"Well…mostly," Ilios said with a quirked grin.
Marici couldn't help but laugh at him.
"So very intentionally next time?"
"Probably," he agreed, already turning the chariot so they could continue.
They flew onward, lower now, more comfortable in the open air, the creatures finding their rhythm and the chariot moving with them rather than after them.
Another island came alongside them, larger than the last, its surface busy with structures and open plazas. Ilios brought them close enough to see clearly.
Marici was watching the surface when something moved.
A section of the island itself, a wide plaza with its surrounding buildings rotating slowly in a clockwise arc, its position on the island's surface changing as she watched, the structures carrying with it everything built upon it. Then another section, rotating in the opposite direction. And another beyond that.
"The island is moving," she said.
"We are the realm of Day," Ilios said, watching. "Movement's in our calling."
"I suppose you're right."
They hung in the air beside the new island long enough to see the scale of it — the great mechanisms beneath the surface driving the rotation, the sections reshaping the island's layout with each slow turn — and then Ilios eased the chariot away and they continued on.
Marici looked back once as the island fell behind them.
Everything here moved.
Everything here was built to.
"We should turn back," she said. "Our people will be arriving."
Ilios looked at her.
"You're right," he said.
He began to turn the chariot toward home.
They were making their way back, the throne room island visible ahead, its windows bright, when Marici felt it.
A pull. As though something below had placed a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward it.
She looked down.
"Ilios!"
He looked at her immediately.
"There."
She pointed down.
He followed her gesture. Then he looked at her expression and turned the chariot without asking why.
Below them, one island waited.