* * * * *
At that moment another loud rumble shook the sky.
Alessia stopped abruptly. Several hours had passed since she began her story. The light outside had faded, and the lights inside waned in synchrony with the outside world.
“Come with me,” she finally said, and Eiron stood, shaking his head. Her lyrical voice had mesmerized him. She took his arm and led him over to the space on the wall where the doorway had appeared each day, the one through which he had so far been unable to pass.
The wall melted away into a dark aperture, but this time he was able to follow her through it. They walked for only a few minutes when they reached a metallic wall; the halls of dark sandstone were lit faintly by the barely-there, cold, pale, and flickering light that surrounded her and made her seem like a ghost.
The metallic wall snapped in half and retreated into the sandstone, and out of the blackness a small chamber appeared. After Eiron entered, the metallic door behind him snapped together like a shutter.
A strange, sharp, creaking sound soon broke off into silence. He could swear that they were descending rapidly, but he felt no movement to indicate that they were in an elevation device.
Alessia invited him to sit on the floor beside her. A soft light came on, and Alessia’s face appeared.
He decided that he liked her, despite his earlier suspicions of her. He found it was an easier thing to do, now that she was trusting him with so much information about her life.
“That all really happened?” He said. “It’s a true story?”
“Yes. If subsequent events had been under my control, I would have arranged for a happy ending to this story, but—”
“Then why do you hide away here?” He asked, a crease forming between his brows. “I wouldn’t think the outside world could harm you. If you decided to cut yourself off from us—then why did you save my life? You said you needed a favor. But what could I do for you? Wouldn’t this friend of yours, this Sargon, be better able to help? Or—I guess he’s dead now.” He amended, doing the sum of years in his head from his own knowledge of the Baidarka mission.
Eiron waited for an answer, but Alessia only shook her head.
“I told you before that you remind me of someone I once knew and trusted. But he’s gone now, so I can only rely upon what visitors as God sends me. That’s why, well, at first I never intended to bring you down here, so you would know nothing of me, so that you might return to the world and to your previous life unchanged. What I know, even knowing about me, could endanger your life, Eiron. But I thought I would just dull the memories in your mind, for your protection.” She paused.
“What changed your mind then?” he asked.
“You did. You reminded me so much of the man I knew and trusted that I wondered if perhaps you could help me since he no longer can. I have so few chances to rectify the damage I caused here, and I can’t leave before I restore the peace between your worlds. I owe it to both planets, and for the sake of the man who raised me, to fulfill a promise to him, for these worlds were his lost colony, his life’s mission to preserve our race. It’s true that being here has delayed the journey I should have made before coming to Rigell. But I feel responsible for bringing an evil upon you, perhaps even more dangerous to your world than the Seynorynaelian Empire ever was.”
The Seynorynaelian Empire? Eiron thought, uncertain what she meant by that. “What kind of evil?” he asked tentatively.
“Eiron, in all my years, I never found a better man than this boy Terin, this man Sargon, and I made a monster out of him, a dangerous monster.”
“You what?”
“I destroyed his soul. I knew what I was doing, but I wanted to change his fate, all because I didn’t want to be alone anymore, maybe even because I wanted to defy Fate and all it has done to me. Because I was tired and tired of living alone, I did something I never should have done. I made an evil God out of this man, and nothing, not even my power, can undo it now. It is too late to save him.”
Eiron was silent, and after a moment, she took him back with her, back to the memories of another life.
Adieu, brave Crillon, je vous aime a tort et a travers. Good-bye, my brave Crillon, I love you to distraction.
—Henry IV of France
Chapter Twelve
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 29