Retribution, p.65
Retribution, page 65
I paused, thinking about what I wanted to say. This was a test, after all. I needed to express myself clearly, because I thought I was starting to see the purpose of all this.
“Their sense of superiority and infallibility prevents their civilization from advancing,” I continued, my baritone resounding through the chamber. “The dragons—all the asura—are entirely beholden to Kezess’s strict worldview. Chained to it. Regardless of the strength of their physiques or power of their magic, they do not grow. Not anymore.”
Kezess’s eyes darkened to a thunderous violet as he stared right through me. “The djinn custom of letting all voices be heard, even in a matter of state such as this, is a tiresome one, Lady Sae-Areum. If you are not wise enough to treat with me individually, perhaps I am speaking to the wrong djinn.”
“And yet, isn’t that the descendant’s point?” Sae-Areum asked, but the words sounded like a whisper in my ear, like they were meant only for me.
“But the truth is,” I continued, stepping down onto the bench in front of me and passing right through two djinn, “this decision is already made. You don’t want my input, because I can’t change what already happened. I doubt even Fate can rewrite the past like that, can it? But you’re judging my intentions, my ethics, and my understanding of your people. And, in a strange way, I think you’re trying to confirm whether you did the right thing or not.”
I stepped from bench to bench until I reached the floor, not twenty feet from where Sae-Areum and Kezess sat. “So have my answer. You did the only thing you could do—what you thought was right.”
Sae-Areum didn’t look at me, but she smiled and absently traced her finger along the grooves carved into the round table. Kezess stood, giving me a piercing look. I expected him to have some rebuke, but instead the scene dissolved, turning to ash and blowing away.
I thought perhaps it was over when everything became white, but, like when I was first drawn into the trial, light and color bled across the blank white canvas. This time, though, it was soot-gray and bright orange and ruddy crimson. My surroundings ran not like watercolors but like the flickering of a flame.
The same pagoda from before took shape. The cyan roof was blackened and half collapsed. The stream was gone, drained away through the floor where a crack the width of my fist had opened up in the stone slab.
A distant roar trembled in the air, followed by the forge-fire rush of flame and wind, drawing my attention to the city. Zhoroa, they had called it. Clouds of smoke billowed up from flames a hundred feet tall, thick enough that they blocked out the sun and darkened the sky for miles around. And the dragons were still attacking, breathing fire so hot the stones glowed orange and ran like blown glass.
I wasn’t alone. A woman was sitting at the pagoda’s edge, her feet where the stream once joined the narrow river before it plunged down the cliffs. Even the river was gone.
“Lady Sae-Areum…” I said, reaching out a hand before realizing it was my own hand, not that of a djinn.
She turned to look at me, and I realized I was wrong. She had the same blue tone in her skin, but her hair was darker and thicker, flowing like water instead of floating on the air.
“What should we do?” she asked, the despair so thick and sharp in her words that they clawed at my heart. “Tell us what to do…”
I started to reach for her to make some futile comforting gesture, then remembered where I was and let my hand fall. This scene was different than the others, somehow. After the meeting with Kezess, the trial seemed to be over. I’d realized its purpose and answered as best I could.
So why, then, is it continuing? I wondered. Out loud, I said, “Your choice is already made.”
She swallowed heavily and wiped away her tears. “And was it the right thing to do? If it happened all over again, would you follow our path, descendant?”
I watched the wheeling dragons breathe death on the city for a long time, half expecting the trial to end and return me to the ruin, but it kept going. It expected something else from me, clearly.
I’ve spent the entirety of both my lives struggling to become more powerful, I thought, sure the djinn mind that was conjuring all this could read my thoughts as plainly as if I’d spoken them. If Kezess led his dragons to burn Dicathen tomorrow, I would fight them no matter how hopeless the battle.
Did that mean it had been wrong for the djinn to refuse to fight, though? If their final days had been spent at war, perhaps the Relictombs would never have been completed. And then all their knowledge, the memory of their entire civilization, truly would be gone.
“You thought it was. But no, your way isn’t mine,” I said at length, in answer to the sobbing girl’s questions. “Perhaps, in the eyes of this trial, that makes me unworthy, but I hope you can see I only want to do what I think is right, too. If no one fights back, our world will be crushed between the Indrath and Vritra clans. Then, what good will guarded knowledge be?”
The flames died down, and the ash-filled smoke smothered the landscape. When it cleared, I was standing in the crumbling ruins once again. Ellie, Boo, Lyra, and Mica were all leaning against the wall or sprawled on the floor.
Some small movement must have given away the fact that I was back with them, because Ellie yelped and jumped to her feet. “Arthur! Are you…in there?”
I nodded and cleared my throat. “How long was it this time?”
Mica pushed away from the wall and crossed her arms, looking sour. “Almost an hour. A little warning would have been nice.”
‘Back from total brain death, huh? And here I thought I was going to inherit all your vast wealth if you didn’t come back,’ Regis thought, chuckling in my mind.
You couldn’t see any of that? I asked.
‘Nope, quiet as a grave in here the whole time.’
Disconcerted, I turned to the crystal hovering over the central pedestal. “I don’t understand what the purpose of this all was. Why show me these things?”
The crystal pulsed, and the djinn’s voice echoed out of it. “It was a test.”
“Did I pass?”
The extradimensional storage spellform grew warm on my arm as the crystal spoke. “It is not my place to judge. You must decide for yourself. I’m only a memory, after all.”
Activating the rune, I drew out the nondescript cube cut from dark stone that had just appeared in my dimension rune. “Can you tell me anything about what this keystone contains?”
A barely audible static hum vibrated from the crystal, and then it said, “No. But that does not mean I can’t help you. The process of your mind, the weave of your thoughts, is very different from the djinn. This could be fatal to your understanding, or it may allow you to become something beyond what we ever imagined. Either way, know that the path forward will be difficult.
“But I feel compelled to say that I, at least, believe you will accomplish what you’ve set out to do. The four spellforms locked within these keystones are themselves a map toward a deeper insight. Our greatest minds theorized that if one could understand these four edicts of aether, then perhaps they could also gain insight into Fate itself. It was a distant, desperate hope, but now that I have met you, Arthur Leywin, I believe it may actually happen.
“I…feel a sense of loss.” The crystal gave a melancholy hum. “It has been a very long time that this piece of my consciousness has watched over this keystone. Now, I am the last, and soon I will be gone.”
“Can you tell me anything about what happened to the third keystone? The missing one? If I can verify that Agrona somehow recovered it—”
“That information isn’t stored within this remnant.”
Knowing instinctively that time was running short, I voiced another thought that had lingered in the back of my mind since speaking to Kezess. “During that conference with Lord Indrath, he claimed that Epheotus was taken out of this world and housed somewhere else, and that the djinn were creating something similar. What is the place where the Relictombs are contained?”
“You should understand better than I, as you bear a godrune that connects you to the inner fabric of the universe,” the crystal said, almost sounding amused.
“God Step,” I said softly to myself.
Several layers of understanding settled into place, completing a picture that I hadn’t even realized wasn’t complete.
“The godrune doesn’t reveal hidden pathways,” I continued, feeling my expression slacken, “I’ve been using the connective tissue of this word, the in-between place where Epheotus and the Relictombs are, to move.”
The godrune burned against my back, casting a dim golden light through the room.
‘It changed,’ Regis noted, drifting down through my body to inspect it. ‘The design is more complicated.’
My understanding had changed too, but before I could activate the godrune, the crystal spoke again. “The damage to the external edifice has been very draining for me to maintain. You have already seen how I was forced to withdraw the energy from the secondary illusion that should have impeded progress to this room. I will need to manifest a portal for you to leave through, but it will drain what energy I have left. Apologies, Arthur Leywin, but you must leave now.”
“That doesn’t sound great,” Mica said. “We should probably listen to the talking-crystal-gyroscope-thing, right?”
“Yeah,” I said distractedly. Then I looked at Ellie, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach as I remembered every single time she’d died in front of me in the last zone. “We’re ready. And…thank you.”
The crystal hummed again, much louder this time, and we all floated upward through the immaterial, transparent floor of the nonexistent room above. Through the crystal’s power, the floor hardened, allowing us to stand on it, and then a rectangular portal swirled into existence, inset in one wall.
As this happened, the rest of the room began to collapse, the aether maintaining its shape being shifted to the portal.
Withdrawing the Compass, I hurried to connect the stuttering portal with its other half, and a distorted image of the small bedroom came into view. “Go!”
Mica jumped through before the word was even out of my mouth. Lyra urged Ellie through, followed by a nervously mewling Boo, and then went through herself without so much as a backward glance.
But my attention was stuck on the slowly dissolving space around the portal. Beyond it, the twilight purple sea of the aetheric void. I took a step away from the portal and touched the rune marking my forearm. The horror of the last zone, the djinn’s test and everything I’d learned, even the new insight I’d gained into the God Step godrune, it all went out of my mind in a moment.
Because there was one thing more important than all of that.
When I’d been in the aetheric realm fighting Taci, I’d realized that with the limitless ocean of aether, I finally had enough power to complete Sylvie’s egg. But it had remained out of my reach ever since.
Until now.
Less and less of the room remained by the moment as the djinn remnant spent its power to maintain the portal.
‘It doesn’t look like we have time, chief,’ Regis said.
Time…
Holding out my hand, I imbued Aroa’s Requiem. Bright aetheric motes flowed out of me, racing along the edges of the collapsing room.
But nothing happened. “Please, can you hold it a while longer? I just need—”
“I apologize,” the crystal voice said, echoing from all around me. “If you do not leave now, you will be trapped.”
I closed my eyes and sighed, letting Aroa’s Requiem go dim.
With a heavy heart, I turned away from the image of the endless aetheric void and stepped into the portal.
423
UNEXPECTED VISITOR
By the time I stepped out of the descension portal into my family’s room in Vildorial, the others had already spread out. Boo was in the kitchen slurping up something out of a cast iron pot, and Ellie was wrapped in our mother’s embrace. Mica had thrown herself down on the couch, heedless of how filthy and bloodstained she was. Lyra was standing near the small fireplace on the far side of the sitting room, her arms crossed and a faraway look in her eye.
Mom pulled back from Ellie just enough to take my sister’s face in her hands, inspecting her closely. “You’re back in one piece…”
“Mom, you’re embarrassing me in front of a retainer and a Lance,” Ellie complained, trying in vain to wriggle free of our mother’s grasp. “I’m fine, I promise. I mean, okay, I did die like ten times, but—”
“What?” Mom exclaimed, looking incredulously from Ellie to me and back again.
“She’s clearly in one piece like I promised,” I said, giving my sister a warning look. When this didn’t immediately quell Mom’s furious worrying, I gave her a smile and pulled her into a hug. “How long were we gone, anyway? It always feels much longer in the Relictombs.”
“A few days,” Mom answered, giving Ellie a side-eye that suggested she wasn’t done with the whole died-ten-times conversation. “It’s been busy here though. Lord Bairon has been here multiple times looking to see if you’d returned yet. Apparently some very important visitor is waiting for you at the palace. And Gideon has been driving me a little crazy, if I’m being honest. He’s absolutely desperate to study any advances Ellie has made.”
My sister collapsed into Mom’s favorite chair and started to kick her boots up on the footrest, but she froze when Mom’s brows shot up. With a chagrined smile, she eased the dirty boots off her feet and set them aside carefully, then leaned back and put her feet up. “He’s going to flip out when he sees everything I can do. I bet he’ll be so surprised his eyebrows will fall out again.”
I shook my head at my sister’s antics but was still focused on what Mom had said before that. “Who is this important visitor? Do you know anything?”
Mom sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “No, the general didn’t tell me much, just insisted that you be sent to the palace immediately upon your return.” Her mouth pressed into a thin line, revealing her irritation. “I told him I may be your mother, but I wasn’t going to order you about. I also reminded him that you’d likely be tired and in need of a good home-cooked meal after traipsing around for who knows how long in the—”
“Mom,” I said, laughing lightly. “It’s all right. Thank you. I’ll go see him immediately.” I turned to my companions. “Mica, you’re free to do as you wish. Ellie, you should clean yourself up and get some rest. Don’t let Gideon pressure you, but track him and Emily down when you’re ready to debrief them on the ascent.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said sarcastically, saluting me with two fingers at her temple.
“General,” Mica muttered sleepily.
“And me, Regent Leywin?” Lyra asked, letting her arms fall and standing straighter, an edge of defiance in her posture. “Will you be escorting me back to a prison cell?”
Tension hung in the air like an electric charge. It would have been the safe thing to do, of course. Disabling her core and putting her on trial for her crimes would have been completely justified. She would always be remembered as the Alacryan who paraded the corpses of Dicathen’s king and queens from city to city while praising the Vritra clan for their kindness and goodwill.
“So you can rest? No, I’m not letting you off that easily,” I stated. “I’m sending you beyond the Wall to check on your people, see what they need. Consider it both punishment and recompense for your crimes against this continent.” To Mica, I said, “Arrange transport back and forth. Lyra of Highblood Dreide is free to move between the Elenoir Wastes and Vildorial.” My gaze went back to Lyra. “Just there, understand? This isn’t freedom.”
Lyra lifted her chin as she regarded me. “I understand, Regent. I acknowledge this punishment and accept an opportunity to aid both your people and mine.”
“I want you to represent your people on this continent,” I said, softening somewhat. “Those soldiers in the Wastes should know they haven’t been forgotten. But all isn’t forgiven, either.”
Mica had sat up to watch this conversation play out with a growing frown.
“Problem?” I asked, addressing my fellow Lance.
“No, just thinking. Things might have been a little boring if we’d actually killed this skinny Alacryan back when we had her chained up in the Beast Glades.”
Lyra snorted and rolled her eyes. “This continent has many positives, but as torturers and jailors, you are woefully lacking.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I suppose this is not a bad thing, though.”
The two devolved into familiar bickering as they headed for the front door of my mother’s rooms. Just before it closed behind them again, Lyra met my eye. She gave a small bow, then let the door close.
Ellie smirked. “The great Lance Godspell showing his soft underside to the enemy, who’d have guessed.”
“It’s a punishment,” I said, glowering at my sister.
Mom rested her head on my shoulder. “With all your many responsibilities, you may have an image to uphold to the public, but it’s just us here. No need to put up a façade in front of your family.”
Ellie broke into a fit of giggling, but I ignored her as Mom pulled away from me and headed through the kitchen arch. She had to shimmy around Boo, who took up nearly the entire room.
“Do you want anything to eat? Or will you be rushing off right away?”
I considered ignoring Bairon’s request for at least an hour or two so I could spend some time with her, but the fact that he had come here, to our home, multiple times in my absence made me uncomfortable.
“I should go,” I said. “Hopefully I’ll be back shortly. I wouldn’t mind something hot to eat, if you can reclaim your kitchen.”
