by Scott Hale
“The last night. Oh, the last night.” Adelyn crossed her arms and held herself tightly. “I’m only telling you this because I don’t want the one thing I leave out to be the one thing you need to bring my baby back.”
Aeson nodded, prepared himself for what was to come.
“Quentin and I were exhausted. There was nothing left in us. Three days is a long time to… Anyways, that night. That night I woke up again because, again, I felt something wet between my legs. And there was a pressure, too. I thought maybe it was Quentin, thought maybe he had one last go in him before Mara let us out. Might as well make it count, right?
“It wasn’t Quentin. It wasn’t him at all. There were tentacles inside me. Blue, slimy, fucking disgusting tentacles. They had come out of the pool in the floor, and they were feeding something inside me. I screamed, Aeson. I fucking screamed. You don’t understand, but as a woman, seeing that, knowing… But as soon as Quentin woke up, they ripped out of me and slipped back into the pool. He didn’t see them, but he believed me. And that’s when we broke down that fucking door.
“Bjørn was waiting for us in the village. When he saw us come stumbling into Lacuna, I thought he was going to kill someone.”
“God, how I wanted to,” Bjørn said. “Might be one of my biggest regrets, letting Faolan and Nuctea live.”
“Faolan and Nuctea pulled us into Mara’s house, which wasn’t much better than the shacks, and told us what was going to happen next,” Adelyn said. “The creature told them I would be with child, so they had to keep us there until I gave birth. The child would be ours to raise, they said, but theirs to use. The child would be different, gifted, maybe. They told us it would be an honor to have a Child of Lacuna. We were one of the few of our people who had one. Most, you see, of the Children came from Night Terrors mating with Corrupted, and most ended up Corrupted in some way, so we were special.” Adelyn laughed, cursed under her breath. “We were special, which meant we should have been grateful.”
Adelyn scooted her chair back from the table. She came to her feet and walked over to a jug of water sitting on the floor. Meant for the plants around her, she drank from it instead, spilling the excess down her front.
“I stayed with them the whole time,” Bjørn said, watching Adelyn. “Wanted to kill Mara, too. Whatever good reason had brought them to that cursed place didn’t seem worth it anymore.”
“It didn’t,” Adelyn said, “until four months later, when Vrana was born.” She dropped the empty jug and leaned against the Chrism-covered wall. “She’s beautiful now, Aeson, you know that, but oh my god, after everything, I didn’t expect her to look the way she did. She was perfect, Aeson. Fat cheeks, fat feet. Had that baby smell. Almost immediately, I forgot about the shack and the tentacles and… she was ours, our baby. She looked like us. Had that little deviant smile of mine, that quietness of Quentin’s. She was ours, and she looked okay. She looked normal. Regardless of the methods, Mara had come through for Quentin and me.
“We stayed there another month while I recovered. Watched a lot of flesh fiends get born there. Faolan and Nuctea said we could go back to Caldera together, the three of us. They reminded me Vrana would be different, and it took me years to piece it all together. You have to admit that Vrana is remarkable, Aeson.”
“She is,” he agreed, tears welling in his eyes.
Bjørn chimed in: “Fights like hell. Takes a beating like no other. Smart as a whip, and doesn’t know when to quit. She went from Geharra straight to Lacuna, one Worm after the other, while a Witch messed with her mind. I’ve never met someone so unshakeable.”
“And the dreams,” Adelyn added. “Not the Witch’s, I mean. Vrana had so many strange dreams and terrible nightmares growing up. Eventually, she stopped telling me about them, and I think that’s because she just figured it was normal for her to have them. When she told me about the Witch, I didn’t think much of it at first, because I figured it was just like the visions she used to have as a kid.”
“That’s what they were, weren’t they?” Aeson asked. “Visions. Her connection to the other Children, and the Blue Worm.”
Adelyn said, “Yes,” and came away from the wall. She took a seat at the table again. “The elders made sure she grew up a ruthless fighter. They made sure Bjørn trained her constantly; it was part of the price he had to pay for knowing about Lacuna.”
Bjørn rolled his eyes.
“But they never unlocked her telepathy. It still worked, obviously, but it wasn’t used. Not until that fucking Witch got ahold of her.” Adelyn made a fist; her nails dug into the heel of her palm and drew blood. “You know what pisses me off more than anything else?”
Aeson didn’t.
“Myself. How I handled it.”
Bjørn moved to interrupt, but didn’t.
“I should have told her everything. I almost did. When she left for her second trial, I damn near went after her. I saw what the elders were setting her up for. But the elders stopped me, reminded me what they could do if I told Vrana anything. I thought they would take her away from me, turn her into some puppet, like the spellweavers in Kistvaen. So I kept my mouth shut. I let them run her all over the place. She would figure it all out eventually, I thought. Like Bjørn said, Vrana’s smart. But everything escalated so quickly. When she told me she was going to Lacuna, I almost threw up. But then I thought that maybe she would learn everything there. That Mara would tell her. I don’t know if she did. But she shouldn’t have heard it from Mara or anyone else. It should have been me. Or Quentin if he were… still here.”
“I’m sorry to ask,” Aeson said, “but did Quentin really get lost in the Black Hour?”
“No, he didn’t. He died on Lacuna.” She said this without any emotion in her voice.
“But Vrana remembers him. She’s told me about him.”
“Vrana remembered only what we told her about him,” Bjørn said. “Might be the Worm put the memories there, too.”
“She could never remember Quentin’s mask,” Adelyn said, a sad smile on her face. “Every time she talked about it, the mask would be the skull of a different animal. She was making things up, I think, to make sense of him being gone.”
Aeson pressed on. “H-How did he die?”
Bjørn faced Aeson and said, “I killed him.”
“What?”
“I killed him.” Bjørn stood up and headed out of the room. “You tell him, Adi,” he said, on his way out of the house. “I can’t.”
Aeson’s gaze met Adelyn’s. “What is he talking about?”
“After Vrana was born, something happened to Quentin.” She picked at her nails. “He changed. It happened so fast. One minute, he would be kissing me; the next, he’d be pacing the room, sniffing the air, like a dog. He stopped talking, and when he did, his words didn’t make any sense. He never stayed with me and Vrana in the house. He kept going outside. The villagers on Lacuna said he was following people, stalking them. I thought it was some side-effect from being in the cave, what with all the pressure and what the Worm had put into the pool. I asked Mara, but she didn’t know what was going on. And the elders just kept telling me to keep my distance from him.
“In that last week before we left, Quentin became violent. Wearing only his iguana mask, he rushed out of the house and chased down a bunch of kids who were playing outside. He kept picking them up and putting them down. Eventually, Bjørn stepped in. When he did, Quentin pushed Bjørn and came back inside the house. After that, he sat in the chair beside my bed and watched Vrana and me for hours. He didn’t say a word.
“The morning before we left, Quentin sat down beside me and watched me breastfeed Vrana. Then, when I was finished, he ripped her away from me and ran out of the house. Bjørn was just outside. He heard me screaming, so he took off after Quentin.
“I caught up with them in the field outside Lacuna. Quentin had slaughtered a cow. He had torn open its stomach and shoved our baby, our Vrana, inside it. And he was trying to feed her with an
udder he had ripped off the animal.
“Bjørn was screaming at Quentin, swinging his ax this way and that, telling him to stop, to get away from Vrana. Quentin kept hissing, spitting. He kept grabbing hunks of the cow’s innards and rubbing them all over himself.
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t… I didn’t say anything. That wasn’t my Quentin. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t know him. I didn’t… I didn’t want him. Maybe I could have talked him down, but I was so… I just stood there. I just stood there.
“Bjørn stopped trying to talk Quentin down and ran after him. Vrana started crying. God, she was covered in blood. And then Quentin lunged at me, like a wild animal. Bjørn didn’t hesitate. He didn’t know Quentin like I did. Bjørn, he was just trying to protect me.
“One swing, and the love of my life was cut down and left dead at my feet. I don’t blame Bjørn for killing him. For a while, I thought maybe he did it because he hated Quentin, but he didn’t. Bjørn has always liked me, but he wouldn’t do that. I had made a stupid choice, going there, having a child with the help of that Worm. I was so stupid, and like always, Bjørn was there to save my ass at the last minute.”
Adelyn was shaking. “I don’t know what happened to Quentin. I don’t know if the Blue Worm turned him into something else, or if, somehow, something was passed onto him. I don’t know. But I hope it wasn’t something like that. Not something genetic. Because I’ve seen a violence in Vrana that scares me. Bjørn said she’s unshakeable, but sometimes I think it’s more than that. She’s ruthless. So far it has been for good, but goddamn it, if she finds all this out, will it stay that way? Now that she’s with that Witch, I don’t know what she’ll become to survive. I love her so much, but I don’t know her, not like I should, not like a mother should. She has part of me, but also Quentin and—”
“The Blue Worm.”
“Yeah. It’s not her fault. Not at all. But if the Witch is feeding into that part of her… Aeson.” Adelyn stared into his eyes, pleadingly. “If anyone can save my daughter, it’s you. Whatever she is, she needs you to make her more. You have to keep loving her, even if you see her do something that makes you not want to. Do you understand?”
“I do, Adelyn.”
She nodded and wiped her nose. “Good, that’s good. She wasn’t always supposed to have the aspect of a raven, you know?”
“I didn’t,” Aeson said.
“No, the elders wanted her to be something else, but I fought them tooth and nail on it.”
“What did they want her to be?”
Adelyn laughed and looked away. “A vulture. Subtlety has never been the elders’ strong suit.”
After Adelyn’s confession, Aeson spent the rest of the night alone in the Archive, surrounded by the thousands of books and documents kept there. Hundreds of shelves containing information on any topic or genre ran across the building in a web-like layout. For bookworms, it was a buffet, and for him, it was one of the few places other than at Vrana’s side that he truly felt comfortable and at peace. The smell of the books brought him back to a better time, when his mother and father were still alive, and words were worlds of mystery to be solved, not to be catalogued and quantified.
He had laid out the registry of Lacuna’s Children on one of the long tables in the Archive and was now standing over and reading it by candlelight. There were thirty names on the registry. The list seemed several hundred short, but if he had to guess, Anguis and Enaar had only added those Children who would be the easiest to track down, or the most likely to be of any help. Beside each name was the person’s birth date, a brief description, and their last known place of residence. The names were ordered not by proximity but importance; that is, where the most Witch-related activity appeared to be happening. The top of the list consisted of four people in the belt of backwoods farm country inside the Dires.
“The Dires, huh,” Aeson said, running his fingers over the four names. He hadn’t been there before, but then again, he hadn’t been anywhere.
Charlotte Breckin, Aeson thought as he read the first few names on the registry. Erin… and then his thoughts were elsewhere. He imagined himself on Lacuna, and tried to put together the scene of Bjørn killing Quentin while Vrana watched from inside the carcass of a cow. But something Adelyn had said kept dispelling the scene. “You have to keep loving her,” she had told him, “even if you see her do something that makes you not want to.” He knew Vrana better than most, but why the hell was her mother making her out to be some sort of monster?
“Aeson.”
His head snapped up. A frightened yelp escaped his lips. Aeson gripped his chest like an old man having a heart attack and shouted, “Who the hell is there?”
Out of the shadows, Anguis emerged. He was wearing a white toga that was covered in small, scale-like embroidery. The snake skull was on his head, like usual, but tonight he had a black cloth draped over it, as if he had just returned from a funeral. Aeson had never seen the elder dressed in such a way before. But what interested him more than anything else was the large book Anguis was holding against his chest.
“Whew, sorry,” Aeson said, laughing out the last of his shock. “What… what time is it?”
“Three in the morning. You spoke with Bjørn and Adelyn?”
How the hell does he already know that?
“We are not upset with them. You were right to speak with them about the circumstances of Vrana’s birth.”
“Okay,” Aeson said, suddenly very aware of how alone they were in the Archive. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
Anguis took the book he held and laid it on the table. “Everything is fine. I wanted to give you this before you leave in the next few hours.”
“The next few hours?” Aeson eyed the book.
“We can waste no more time, and Bjørn is already preparing. I passed his workshop on my way here. As for the book, it is yours. You were initiated at fourteen, and have done great work in your position. At twenty, you were to receive this book, but as I said, we can waste no more time. We will need you at your sharpest when you return with Vrana.”
What was the book? Aeson leaned forward, out of his seat. The cover was blank, and so was the spine. It was thick; the page edges were rough, frayed, as if they had been recently cut and bound to the book. He had seen a million unmarked texts like this before, and yet there was something about it that told Aeson this one was different. Like R’lyeh’s letter, it emanated a force all its own. He couldn’t touch, taste, or smell it, but it was there, warping the air around it, activating senses he didn’t know he possessed.
Anguis continued on. “What you will learn in here may help you in your journey. And when you return, it will guide your duties as our Archivist.
“This book is a record of our people. It is an Archivist’s duty to chronicle our history. This history is history, and nothing more. No revisions or embellishments. Every Archivist has added to it, and now it is time for you to do the same. Adelyn and I have been keeping it up to date until you were of age. If you have not already guessed, we place great faith in Adelyn. If one of us elders were to be killed, she would be an immediate, but temporary, replacement. With everything she has experienced, I am sure you understand why.
“But before you make your first entry, you must read the chronicle in its entirety and understand its contents. The last Archivists to write in the book were your mother and father. Now that you are old enough, and wise enough, it is your time to record our accomplishments, as well as our failures.”
Mom and Dad? Aeson reached for the book. Half-expecting Anguis to stop him, he paused, his fingers just barely touching the bare cover. But the elder didn’t stop him; instead, he nodded at him, practically urged him to take the book into his care.
“As you can see—”
Aeson opened the book to the first page. There were two blocks of text written in gibberish and what looked like safety symbols from the Old World.
“—it is encoded. Each
entry is encoded, and you must read each entry, beginning with the most recent, to uncover the cipher for the previous entry. In essence, reading it will take you back in time to our beginnings.”
“Backwards?” Aeson flipped to the end of the book. There, the text, written in a muddy, chunky ink, was so strange and garbled it made him go cross-eyed looking at it. “Why?”
“To protect the secrets of our past. Very few know them, and it should be kept that way.”
Going back to the first page in the book, Aeson said, “But I don’t know the cipher for the most recent entry.”
“It’s there in the text. When you and Bjørn are on the road, you will figure it out. You have much on your mind at the moment. Now is not the time for code-breaking.”
What the hell am I looking at? Aeson turned through the book once more. If he had to guess, there were about fifty pages. Some of the pages were covered in encrypted messages, while others only contained a single entry or sentence. The last thirty or so pages appeared to have been written by an Archivist who might have been insane. Because as he had seen before, the text was garbled and frantically laid out across the page. But this time, now that he was looking at it more closely, he realized that the ink used on these oldest entries wasn’t ink at all. It was blood.
“The Trauma was a trying time for our forefathers,” Anguis said.
Aeson closed the book and planted his hands on the table. “Why did they write it in blood?”
“It must have seemed like a good idea,” Anguis said, smugly. He bowed to Aeson. “Follow the registry as it is laid out. Stay away from the East Coast. You will be tempted to go to Gallows because of the Red Worm having died there, but between Eldrus, Penance, and this… Marrow Cabal in the area, the danger will not be worth the risk.”