The streets of Spire were eerily empty and quiet as Dega led Tal along a winding path. He’d never been outside at night in Spire, he’d never had a reason to go out at night. Tonight though, after Dega had posed his question to Tal asking where all the children were, and Tal realizing he’d never seen any children, he hadn’t argued when Dega told him to follow him. Together they had slipped out through the window in Tal’s room and began making their way towards the lower reaches of Spire. Dega didn’t offer any further explanations while they crept through the city and Tal took that as a signal to keep quiet. No one had ever said that Tal couldn’t go out at night and a part of him knew that the way in which he and Dega were moving about would look suspicious. Maybe it would be better to walk normally. That way, if anyone saw them, or asked them what they were doing, they could more easily claim to be out for a walk since neither of them could sleep.

The buildings grew shorter and less refined the further down they went. Tal was familiar with that aspect of Spire, having spent many years studying the building patterns of Spire while designing buildings for Peak to ensure they never just copied something that Spire had already built. Eventually, Dega and Tal stepped out into the lower most reaches of Spire. Even on a clear day this region almost always had a thin mist over it, making it incredibly difficult for anyone at Peak to get a very good look at these buildings. There didn’t appear to be anyone living this far down and the buildings here were in varying stages of decay and collapse.

Even with there being no sign of anyone living here, and the cover of mist obscuring them from view by anyone further up, Dega did not relax his wary posture. Tal began to feel as though he were being watched, as though countless, unseen eyes were looking out at him from the darkened windows and doorways. At last, the final building was behind them and a series of wide terraces, cut into the mountainside, were laid out before them. At first, Tal thought he was looking at fields for growing crops, but then he began to see the mounds, regularly spaced apart from one another, forming orderly rows.

Everyone needed a way to dispose of their dead and it appeared that this was one area where Peak and Spire were very much the same. Tal could even make out what looked to be stones laid on top of the mounds. In Peak, those stones would be carved, or sometimes painted, with the name and sometimes age of the one who had been buried beneath the mound. Perhaps it was the same here. The problem though, as far as Tal could see, was that this would be a very convenient place for Dega to kill him. He could dig a new mound, or perhaps had already dug one out, and then place Tal inside and no one would ever know what had happened to him.

“Dega,” Tal finally broke the silence, “why’re we here?”

Dega huffed and then sat himself down hard onto the ground, just as he had done the time before as though to prove his intentions weren’t violent against Tal.

“I am not going to hurt you!” he hissed. “What do I need to do to prove that to you?”

Tal wavered but managed to relax a bit. “Why’re we here then?” he asked.

“I was given the task of evaluating their food stores and determining how much they could give to Peak,” Dega explained. “But while going over their stores, I also had access to their records showing how much food they produce and consume on a regular basis. While their harvests have varied with the different seasons, the amount that they consume has remained constant for the past thirty years.”

Dega looked as though this information was unbelievable but Tal failed to see the significance of it. Dega, who had puffed himself up, deflated slightly when it became apparent that Tal wouldn’t give him the desired reaction.

“Places like Spire should have variations in how much food they need,” Dega further explained. “If your population is growing, you need more food. If your population is shrinking, you’ll need less food. The differences from one year to the next are generally small, but over a time of so many years, there should have been some variation.”

“So they’ve stopped having children?” Tal asked. “And everyone has just grown up?”

Dega shook his head.

“If that was the case, their numbers would have gone down as the elderly died.”

“Maybe they have the same number of children as the number of people who have died?”

“You think anyone could manage to make sure that sort of rule was followed?”

Tal only gave that possibility a brief consideration before acknowledging how foolish it was.

“If they always need the same amount of food,” Tal asked as a new question arose, “why would they need you to figure out how much they could give to Peak? Wouldn’t they know how much of their reserves they could do without?”

“That’s their problem, they don’t have any reserves. They trade everything else they produce with the people down in the valley. My job has been to figure out a rationing system that will minimize the hunger of both people.”

“So they really do want to help Peak?”

“They want to prevent Peak from starving to death,” Dega admitted, “but I am not convinced that their motives are completely altruistic.”

Dega nodded towards the burial mounds as if to encourage Tal to go and see if he could discover what Dega had found out. The mounds nearest them turned out to also be the most recent ones, which surprised Tal. He had expected the oldest ones to be the nearest. As he moved about the mounds he saw signs of old foundations and surmised that they had torn down parts of the city to make room for these mounds. It seemed like a solution that wouldn’t last them for too many generations since they would eventually run out of abandoned buildings to tear down.

The first few mounds that Tal examined didn’t seem too extraordinary. Spire, rather than just marking the ages of the deceased, also marked the year they died. There were mostly elderly people, their stones marking them as being quite old, and then there was a smattering of younger people. It didn’t surprise Tal very much that they had all died the same year as one another since they would have been buried in order and so they would naturally be buried with those who had died around the same time. However, the more he looked, the fewer elderly people he found and the more youths he discovered. He also noticed that the year of their deaths were all thirty years ago. No one, it seemed, had been buried here since then. Of course, it could be that they had decided to begin burying their dead someplace else, but somehow he knew that Dega would have looked into that possibility.

Tal spent far longer than he had meant to, walking up and down the rows as he examined their stones. There were hundreds of them in this section and all of them were from thirty years ago. When at last he returned to where Dega still sat, he was at a loss for words. He hadn’t done a proper counting, but he was sure that the vast majority of the dead had been youths.

“There is no record of disease,” Dega said when Tal joined him, sitting on the ground. “Neither is there a record of famine or any other natural disaster that would explain it. The stones they use to mark the mounds are not from this mountain,” he continued, “they’re traded for down in the valley, but they stopped trading for them in thirty years ago.”

“No one’s died here in thirty years?”

“And no one has been born here either.”

Silence fell over them once again and Tal turned the mystery over and over in his mind. What could have happened to Spire to have caused this? As with a lot of things that he didn’t understand about Spire, he began to wonder if there was a connection to the bond these people had formed that allowed them to seemingly share their thoughts with one another and caused them to speak in unison whenever they were interacting with Tal or Dega.

“Have you asked them how long they have had their bond, or how they formed it?” Dega asked as though reading Tal’s thoughts. He didn’t wait for Tal to respond, however. “It makes me wonder why they would be so secretive about it, unless there was something about it that was worth keeping secret.”

“I still don’t see what they could want from Peak,” Tal finally said.

“Really?” Dega asked. “You see no reason why a people who have been unable to have children for the past thirty years would want to make contact with a neighboring land who is showing signs of collapse? No reason to choose this point in time, when that neighboring land is most vulnerable and in need, to appear suddenly and in grand fashion, offering aid and friendship?”

He let his words hang in the air, a look of utter incredulity on his face. Tal felt himself deflate slightly. He didn’t want Spire to be what Dega was suggesting they were, and yet he couldn’t see any alternative. Could it be that they had built the bridge of broken glass only so they could deceive the people of Peak? So much of what he had seen here had amazed him, and yet there were just too many unanswered questions. Too many unexplained events.

“They’re going to rebuild the bridge,” he told Dega.

“I know.”

“What do we do?”

“We help them,” Dega stated. “For now.”