"When the two-headed eagle carried me off, I really thought that was it for me," Inata said to begin her story. "I felt myself lifted off the ground and I couldn't do a thing. I was already terrified up there on your stupid tower, but this was even worse. When I opened my eyes and realised what was happening, I first tried to struggle and use my powers to twist its necks."
"Why didn't you?" Hichy asked.
"Because I told myself it was a chance to gain altitude and observe the surroundings better. Even with our powers—and even with the tallest tower—we'll never get as high as birds of prey."
"And then?"
"And then? I let it carry me off, trying not to lose sight of our shelter. When the two-headed eagle realised I wasn't struggling anymore, it loosened its grip."
"You mean it realised," Hichy said. "You really need to review your conjugation."
"No, I said they realised. There's only one eagle, but two brains, and each one thinks independently."
"That can't be very practical when you need to agree on which way to fly."
"And yet… It seems one head is in charge of steering while the other scans the surroundings."
"Kind of like a fighter plane with a pilot and a crewman on the gun."
"If you say so," Inata sighed at her brother's warlike comparison. "But that's not what matters. We flew toward the circle. At first I thought we'd go over it. That was partly why I let it happen—I figured it was a good way to get back to the centre. But the closer we got, the stronger the wind became, so the eagle turned aside before reaching the rim."
"Why didn't you say they turned aside?"
"Because only one of the two brains handles direction. But whatever. Don't you realise what that means?"
"Well… no. What?"
"It means the disc's edge is just as impassable in the air as it is on the ground. It isn't only a disc, but a perfectly impenetrable cylinder. The circular motion forms a vortex through the entire height of the atmosphere."
"Damn. I hadn't thought of that. So that's what you saw up there? Nothing else?"
"Unfortunately, no. The disc—meaning the cylinder—is gigantic, and I couldn't see the centre. As for the other sides, it's nothing but forest, forest, and more forest as far as the eye can see."
"Great… And how did you get out of it?"
"By opening the animal's talons. That's all."
"You didn't smash its two heads together? You could've turned that horrible thing into pulp."
"For what? And why do you say it's horrible? You're the ugly one."
"Very funny."
"After that, I had an endless fall. I don't know why, but I wasn't scared at all anymore. I was gliding like a bird, and I thought I was going to drift gently down to the ground when the eagle came back to attack."
"See? You should've crushed it."
"No need. I made it do a few loops it will remember for a long time. And before you say anything, that's not a conjugation mistake, because each brain has its own memory. Then I came back here with little hops and found you sleeping like a pig. You didn't look too worried about me."
"That's not true!" Hichy protested. "I looked for you all night! And I didn't know where you were."
Faced with the impassable wall of air that stood before them—and that Inata had been able to observe up close—the twins decided to establish a base camp while they searched for a way back to the centre of the disc. Inata began crafting frantically, adding every kind of improvement to their new home, while Melio claimed an ever-larger territory to satisfy his hunting instincts.
Water was everywhere around them, but also underground, and the power to control matter allowed the girl, like a dowser, to find the nearest water table. Using reeds, she crafted a distribution network for drinkable water, and aside from electricity—which the clearing house they had left had lacked as well—they quickly had every modern comfort.
Hichy, for his part, salvaged the wood from the tower to build a high palisade, which he surrounded with a deep ditch. There was no drawbridge and not the slightest door, since they only had to leap over it, hoping Odilphins couldn't do the same. The danger of two-headed eagles remained, so they protected themselves by weaving a gigantic net from braided spider silk threads.
Their diet was that of hunter-gatherers, but to diversify their intake, Inata forced her brother to gather as many mushrooms as possible, along with wild berries and any fruits and vegetables their overpowered cat sense of smell could locate. They always took care not to harvest everything, leaving a few young shoots to limit their impact on the ecosystem as much as possible.
Even so, they realised they had to keep moving farther and farther out to feed their insatiable teenage appetites, and that their territory now covered several kilometres. Meanwhile, Melio was getting bigger by the day—food had become too easy to access and too abundant for him.
One day, as they lounged in the sun, Hichy suddenly sat up.
"What if we jumped straight to the Iron Age?" he said to his sister.
"What do you mean?"
"It's simple. We've started almost from scratch, like Cro-Magnon men. Apart from a lighter that doesn't work anymore, the clothes we're wearing—which are getting more and more worn—and a knife, we have nothing left of our old life."
"Yes—and?"
"And I don't want to have to go through every step back to modern civilisation. I don't want to go through flint, the Bronze Age, and all that. I'm going to try to find iron ore and forge it."
With that, the twin got up and went looking for the precious metal. To do so, he used the blade of his knife, sniffing it for a long time to absorb its smell and molecular structure. Since there was no accessible deposit around their camp, he went as far as the belt of debris the disc spat out endlessly. Among the rubble, he managed to find stones with low iron content.
Unlike water—which is easy to draw from plants and other organic elements—extracting ore from stone was a very different matter. Not only did he have to process huge quantities of rock to obtain the volume he wanted, each extraction also required a great deal of energy. First he had to break each pebble as much as possible by striking them against each other. The work was exhausting; some stones resisted his blows, and shards flew dangerously toward his face.
Once the interior was exposed, extracting iron molecules remained extremely arduous. Hichy had to focus with all his strength for a good fifteen minutes to obtain, with difficulty, a few grams of raw material. After an entire day of labour, he had barely gathered enough to make a pot. He still needed a fire hot enough to melt the iron so he could forge it.
"How are you going to do that?" Inata asked.
"Easy," her brother replied. "With an anvil."
"And the anvil?"
"Cast iron—by mixing iron and carbon."
"And your hammer?"
"With a big piece of steel."
"So basically, you need iron to work iron," she scoffed.
"Yeah. It's a bit like the chicken-and-egg story. The first chicken had to come out of an egg. But if there was an egg, that means there was a chicken before it, so it wasn't the first."
Undeterred by his sister, Hichy went back to hunting iron and, after a week, managed to gather several kilograms. He filled a hole in the ground with ore and lit an enormous blaze over it. In the end he obtained a kind of cast block that, from very far away and with a lot of imagination, vaguely resembled an anvil. He did the same with the hammer head, then fixed a wooden handle to it by plunging it into the metal while it was still hot.
Then he made a sort of puddle with the remaining ore mixed with a bit of carbon. He hammered that rough sheet for a long time with his makeshift tools, stopping only to eat while his sister handled everything else.
"All that for that?!" she laughed when he proudly showed her the result of his work. "So that's the dented little pot with the crooked handle you burned half the forest for?"
"Wait, you don't realise—we're going to be able to heat water," he defended himself.
"Yes, great. But how is that going to help us get back to the centre of the disc?"
Hichy might have spent a lot of time for not much, but he didn't feel it had been useless. Forging steel would allow them to craft objects far sturdier and more refined than anything they had made so far.
Besides, their beautiful house had become so comfortable that he no longer felt any urgency to leave. They each had a spacious bedroom with wooden beds and exquisitely soft mattresses. They had a large living room with couches covered in flower petals. If he kept going, Hichy was sure he could melt sand to make real glass panes. And who knew—maybe he could even find a way to produce electricity and build one of those computers he had read about in books and dreamed of.
In short, he was starting to feel at home and no longer saw the point of pursuing a goal as uncertain as it was vain. Nothing prevented them from settling into that reassuring cocoon and living happily there, far from the Celestial army that had killed their parents. Why did they have to go to the great city at the centre? He had forgotten the very reason for their quest.
"I'm going to plant a vegetable garden here," he said to Inata, pointing at the meadow that had grown where he had cut down the trees.
"My books… I miss them, and I—"
A shrill scream pierced their eardrums before she could finish her sentence.