Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Fall and Rise - (Nov 29, Friday)

Give the world what it wants.

"I will give your world what it wants."

"What is the Fever that rattles around inside all of their heads up there if not an undeniable drive to be free of it all: to tear their way out of their high cages as savagely as possible."

"We named it at Heaven's Stair (formerly Skygate). We'd called it Cabin Fever then, for that's all we thought it was. And maybe Cabin Fever is some distant relation of it. It is something that has lain in wait in our geneology since the time of the neanderthals: a savagery that plagued us when we were confined to caves, which left us once we came out into the light. Fever is not the evolution of cabin fever; it is completely the opposite. Cabin fever is the docile, younger brother of Fever proper; the first inklings of crisis that gives us the itch to get back out into the light. It is only when this itch is not scratched; only when we are shut up inside without escape, that the itch breaks out into hives—creeps across the entire surface of our body in a savage, red, fiery outbreak that can only be satiated when you are tearing at your skin with the JAGGED SPLINTERED BONES OF ONE YOU ONCE CONSIDERED TO BE YOUR NEIGHBOUR."

The man stopped suddenly, breathing hard, his screaming still ringing in Benedict's ears. His eyes were utterly wild and unrestrained as he turned them to earth, panting like someone who had just finished a dead sprint. There was no question where he'd been just then. The Blacktower. Heaven's Stair.

"You fear Fever. You fear Fire. You fear the Wild. You have no windows, and you have no doors other than those that open into your insular warrens. You subsist on a kind of genetically engineered pond scum that is only so many generations removed from something that could be scraped from under a rock. You think that you have all climbed so high, but when you get right down to it, you are cavemen living in the sky."

"You really consider yourselves to be that different from us?" Benedict asked.

The man laughed. "A good point, Architect. If you are now caveman, I suppose I must have been the first caveman--King Caveman, for a time even."

Benedict's mind crossed more names off the ever-shorter list of who this man could have once been. Even with his shaven head and gaunt features, there was something undeniable in his bone structure.

"The difference between all of you and me is that I have been through the Fire and the Fever, truly so. I have been baptized in the deepest, darkest hole of this calamity that I had once proclaimed to be the future. I have survived where all others died, and it falls to me to educate the rest of you."

(It would be tacky to have an epic reveal of who the Head Monk of the Grave actually is. It is the mystery that persists and not the secret. The idea is that he could be any senior official or executive for he is metonymy for them all)

"When i speak of all of this, I speak from experience."

And Benedict felt a shiver up his spine to think of what that word "experience" entailed. His position within the 'Do had afforded him access to the research that had been done on Fever in attempts to curb it or erradicate it entirely. He has seen men come tto savagery, locked inside padded cells and observed via closed-circuit vidlink. He had understood why at first they had believed the condition to be some strain of rabbies because those effected became more monster than man with eyes wide, mouth drawn up into a snarl, and hands used as claws in rage-filled attempts to claw their way out through the nearest wall or door.

In the presence of one so affected, with feet of concreet and steel and glass between them, he had been terrified. To be shut up in a tower that had gone black, with an entire population that was rapidly descending into this condition...