But this story isn’t really about Reiav, or even—though you may disagree by the end—about the floating city she calls home. It isn’t about a person, place nor any one emotion.

  It’s about pain. Pain is more diverse and varied than anything else in the Colieneum. There are often a handful of ways to feel true joy, but there are more ways to feel pain than any one person could ever count. I’ve come across many of them, but even given a thousand years I could never list each one that exists. More are being discovered even today, because each pain is different.

  A certain young man who knew a unique type of pain felt tears at the corners of his eyes. Again. Keshel looked downward, feeling them roll past his cheeks. Talking to the grave of a relative did those types of things to people. His only consolation there was that no one else could see him, but no one else was ever there.

  I believe that it wasn’t necessarily the loss itself that was hitting him, he’d lost her years ago, but lately… well he was useless. Which means a lot more to the suiki—which is what Keshel was—than it does to your people.

  “Are you happy where you are, mom?” He asked softly to the air, “Is the next life any better…” He trailed off at that particular idea, no, no he wasn’t that useless, he could still protect them from afar. He sighed and kept going, “I’m shunned every time I go back to the burrow, it’s… well it hurts. I wish things had been different.”

  There was no reply—there was never a reply, she was very much dead in this context—but somehow it made him feel a bit better to talk to the air as if she was really there. It's certainly an odd coping mechanism, but there are plenty of weirder ones out there. I know a guy who used to travel his world looking for sad plants he could save, just to serve as some kind of weird metaphor. At least Keshel isn’t that weird.

  Keshel pulled the blanket closer and let his voice grow quieter. “It’s me, mom, it’s Keshel. I still haven’t given up, I promise.” That part was a lie, it was always a lie even though this young man tried to include it every time. He was very certain that he'd given up that first day five years ago when Sephel died and the elders offered him a position at the watchtower.

  Oh, they called Keshel a contributing member of the Karbion Burrow, but as far as Keshel was concerned it was just a convenient way to get rid of someone who made every other suiki uncomfortable. Next he supposed they just had to find a way to make his sister leave too, then Karbion would finally be safe from internal threats. The way he saw it, the two of them were a danger to the sanctity of the burrow.

  Because that’s what the rest of Karbion had convinced him. Defect. Unnatural. Useless. Those were his constant companions. Keshel cringed at the thoughts whenever they appeared, but he didn’t deny them. He didn’t think he deserved to deny them.

  Keshel has a very odd perspective of the world, but again there are weirder ones. He left the burrow in the first place to protect them from himself, and yet he still seemed to think he wasn’t doing anything for them… even though he still sat there in that lonely watchtower every night, looking for monsters and staying ready to alert the burrow to danger.

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  He stood up a moment later, glancing away from the simple mound of dirt that was marked with a pile of stones. Keshel found his eyes drawn back up to the watchtower. There was a certain type of irony to Keshel that the graveyard was right beside the ruins. But really it wasn’t odd at all, given that the original founders of the burrow had done it on purpose.

  The three buildings that made up the ruins were crumbled, broken, and unwanted. They'd been looted a million times over, and if anyone found anything useful there besides firewood then I would be terribly impressed with them and send them somewhere desolate to make use of their skills.

  The watchtower itself was a structure that felt to Keshel as if it was old as time. To you it would likely seem this way as well. The metal supports, rotting wood, broken walls, and shattered glass certainly gave off that feeling. It stretched up into the sky for reasons that the modern suiki had never figured out. If it weren’t for the hundreds of rooms that lay inside, one might have assumed that the dead folk had used it for a watchtower as well.

  I might have explained the origins of Keshel’s watchtower, but I don’t know anything more than what I just told you. Keshel seemed to have a similar view of it, because after a moment of standing there, he finally moved, slowly and tiredly even though he’d woken up less than an hour ago. He found his way to the bottom of the tower and firmly gripped the crumbling ladder; as if his troubled thoughts could be stilled by holding on to something tangible.

  Keshel was very good at using this ladder, in fact. He took pride in it. He took so much pride in it that I’m going to describe in excruciating detail now how good he is at climbing ladders. You’re a captive audience, you can’t blame me for using this wonderful opportunity to— did you just throw a fish at me?

  … anyway.

  He grabbed the rungs and swung his feet up, using his superior upper body strength to his advantage. Keshel grabbed the next rung and began truly climbing. It was so easy that he wondered once again if there was a good reason that the suiki didn’t live in trees, but of course, all intelligent life had long since given up on trees as they have a very annoying tendency to be terrible homes. Now there are exceptions to this, but Keshel is decidedly not one of them.

  He wasn’t quite sure how folks with less than four arms operated, because we’re the weird ones for only having two, clearly. Some of the suiki though had a regular amount of arms—it was a common enough mutation—the niortak technically had none on account of being feathered bipeds, and the larborak always had two unless they lost one for some reason, which they were prone to doing. Regardless, Keshel used all four of his to climb the rickety ladder.

  It takes a certain level of skill to judge how close a rung is to snapping, in his early days at the tower he’d broken four rungs in one climb. I would have broken them all out of sheer idiocy and then died at the bottom a horrible and painful death—which has to at least be something I could brag about afterwards, if I could find someone like you lot who’s worth bragging to.

  Sorry, but I’m not sorry.

  However, Keshel had five years of practice under his belt, so he could say for certain that the ladder was as safe under his feet as it could ever be. I still give him a fifty-fifty chance of breaking a rung every time he uses the ladder, because even experts at laddership can be foiled by a lost cause such as this one.

  Once the young suiki was at the top, the wind chose that moment to pick up—really I think that couldn’t possibly have been a coincidence—and he tightened his blanket around his shoulders. Keshel should have been using his cloak, but it was still drying after he’d finally finished scrubbing out the sap stains from his adventure a few weeks ago.

  Because he’d been stupid enough to try out the whole ‘living in a tree’ thing. I never said he wasn’t an idiot, but at least he understood how unsuited to it he was now.

  Keshel knelt beside his firepit off to the side, setting down an almost forgotten stack of wood. At that point, routine grabbed hold of him, he forgot his worries and how much the Elders hated him.

  It was nice to not remember, because not remembering is sometimes the only way to cope with what life gives you.