by S. M. Beiko
Then they went through a door into another fully formed memory. It was in a place underground — the vaults under South Bridge — in a summoning chamber not unlike the one Eli had seen when he’d brought Roan back from Seela’s fortress. A dark and dismal place where the air prickled. Yet the two figures occupying the space were Cecelia and Ruo.
“I may not be a Denizen any longer, but this place . . . this feels wrong,” Ruo shivered.
Cecelia stood in the centre of the room. The Opal shone bright and proud from beneath her long neck, and her cascade of dark hair, though marked with streaks of white, was as proud a mane as any. “I have to do this, Ruo. Ravenna is my blood. Which means she’s bound to do something rash. And as the Paramount, I can’t intervene or stop our granddaughter from being marked. But in another form, maybe I can skirt the tenet . . . and I can’t do that with the Opal attached to me.”
“This is exactly the ritual that got Killian put away. It’s too dangerous. And you could die,” Ruo hissed, as if saying it might make it real.
Cecelia closed her eyes. “Ravenna could die. Roan could die. I’ve lived my life. And Deon herself told me my purpose was to keep Roan safe.” When she opened her eyes, they were flashing discs of sunlight. “And to keep that promise, I have to do this.”
The rings in the floor shone scarlet. Cecelia’s body changed into the fox warrior. Her garnet blade flashed, and she cut her mighty hand, spilling a wash of otherwordly blood onto the flecked granite beneath her feet.
“If this is the ritual Killian was attempting . . .” Roan started, then she turned to Eli. “What exactly are they going to summon?”
Eli was watching intently. “Surely —”
The black that seeped up from the rings was impenetrable. Ruo shrank against the wall, and Cecelia stood firm and proud as the creature emerged, a mask of bone over its eyes.
“I sleep in the dark of the Bloodlands,” spoke the creature, its mouth an unforgiving hollow. “Call my name so I may hear your petition.”
The creature was beautiful — its near-humanoid proportions perfectly formed, four hands bent in supplicant poses, arms extending from a long, mantis torso. Two hands clasped flat together in front, one with the thumb and middle finger touching, and the last with the thumb and index finger in an o. These mudras shifted, indicating the elements that bound them all and that identified this darkling. Zabor’s brother. One of the mighty three bent on removing the world.
“Kirkald,” Cecelia said, “most beautiful and wretched. I am a daughter of Deon. Your prison walls beneath the world are thick. You are bound by a targe of Ancient, and so you can only speak the truth to me.”
Kirkald was quiet for a moment, then his smile was cruel. “Oh yes. I will speak to you only truth. But it will serve me well, it seems.” Kirkald reared up. “I have seen you before. In my vision of the far past, a vision of my sister.”
Cecelia growled, “You break your oath so soon? I have never seen you before, world-shaker. I have come to ask you — can you truly separate a Paramount from their Calamity Stone, without a cost?”
Kirkald laughed. “There is always a cost, daughter of Deon. And I cannot speak an untruth to you. You said so yourself.” One of the four hands reached up and opened its palm to her, revealing a jade green targe incised with three gold circles. “I am bound by the same tenets you are. I can separate your stone for you. But you must complete a task for me in return.”
Cecelia tightened her bloody hand on the bone hilt of the garnet blade. “What sort of task?”
The four hands wheeled, dancing in the air and cutting crimson sigils into it. “A task you have already done. A task completed hundreds of years ago. For I can send you into the past to do it, as even your Matriarchs cannot.”
“Hundreds of years ago?”
“For it was you, daughter of Deon, who broke the targe of Zabor. It was you who allowed her to return to the Uplands, to wreck her havoc. It is because of you she has chosen your blood for her feast.”
Eli felt Roan stiffen, as if she were going to try to leap into the memory and try to change it herself. He held her back; this was, after all, what they’d been searching for.
“Time,” Cecelia said. “You’re going to send me back in time? To release my enemy? If I refuse you, then she’ll never be here in the first place, and I won’t have to bother with you at all.”
“Sound reasoning,” Kirkald agreed, nodding. “But Zabor is already here. And your granddaughter is already in peril. It has already happened. And you will do this so that you can stop Zabor regardless, to send her back to her noble brothers who have so greatly missed her.” When Kirkald smiled again, his teeth seemed to lengthen. “The choice has already been made.”
Cecelia turned to Ruo, who was still plastered against the wall in the dark. “Will you take the stone and hide it for me?” Cecelia asked her wife, her own voice overlapped by Deon’s great flaming roar. “Until I return?”
“What?” Ruo hissed. “What have you done?”
Cecelia turned back to Kirkald. “How long will this task take? Will I be back in time to save my granddaughter?”
Kirkald’s grin was too ecstatic. “Oh yes. Plenty of time. And once you have achieved this and your soul returns from its journey, you will take on a form that will keep you safe. But remember — once I’ve removed the stone, you cannot return to your body, except before its death. Do you understand?”
Cecelia nodded. There hadn’t been any time to consider what any of this meant. And she had always been a creature of action.
“Enough time,” Roan thundered. “Fourteen years.”
But suddenly the four hands of Kirkald held Cecelia in their death-grip, and a fifth emerged from beneath its mask of bone, clasping the stone. It wrenched, and Cecelia cried out.
“Remember your promise,” Kirkald said. “Break Zabor’s targe. Set it all in motion. This is your place in the Narrative, after all.”
As Cecelia’s nine tails fell, the fox head dipped, and what could have been hot tears sizzled away between flaming locks of fur. “I promise.”
“Then I will see you again. And again,” Kirkald said. The stone came free, and Cecelia’s body collapsed in an empty heap, the beautiful and terrible Dragon Opal caught in Ruo’s open hands. Cecelia’s spirit had fled through time.
Roan reached, but the dark took the moment away in a fist, and they were inside a memory of Roan’s. There she was, so small, rubbing her eye. Aaron Harken bent down, scooped her up. He was tall, hair and glasses askew, hands covered to the wrist in dirt, as if he’d been in the garden. The memory smelled of well-turned earth. Of some semblance of happiness, despite the dread hanging over the house.
“Don’t do that, love,” Aaron said, taking Roan’s small fist in his and kissing it. “It’ll only make it worse.”
He carried her away, but they passed Ravenna, standing in the hall, a phone receiver pressed to her ear, the other hand grasping a table that burned as she held onto it.
“I don’t want them!” she shouted. “Send them back! I know she’s trying to tell me to accept it. That’s why she won’t talk to me, isn’t it?”
The room split, and the line of the phone was held by Ruo, thousands of miles away. “No, love. She just . . . she just wouldn’t be able to talk now if she wanted to. They’re a gift from me. So you remember. That you are a part of a family, of something greater, and we love you.” Ruo did not tell her that the Opal had been set inside the fox’s head, that it could be freed again once Cecelia returned. “She’s going to make it right. You just have to trust her. Just wait a little while longer.”
“Make it right?” Ravenna laughed coldly. “You know how she could make it right? She could fall off the face of the planet.” And she smashed the phone down.
The Veil began to rumble.
“What’s happening?” Eli whirled on Roan, and she was
staring at her hands. The heat coming off her was harsh, a torrential wave.
“I can’t . . .” she started, then she held herself as tightly as Ravenna had, as if she were trying to stop herself from disappearing. Or exploding. “It’s getting stronger. And I . . .”
The world shattered, and Eli and Roan were ripped apart in the flaming black gale.
~
“Time is different there,” Eli was saying from the other side of the bathroom door. “You could go in and an hour can pass but it’s really years and years.”
I had pulled the door shut but he didn’t seem to care. Trouncing around with our souls tied together had made him completely oblivious to personal space, I guess. Ever since we walked in the door, he couldn’t stop his mouth.
“Right.” I stared deeper into the mirror, wondering, hoping I could will away what I was seeing. “She also went back in time, didn’t she? Hundreds of years back . . . then she got spat out again fourteen years too late. Though nothing surprises me now.” I saw something terrible deep down where I’d gone, Sil the fox had said. Had she just seen the same vision Eli and I had, of the world burning? A vision that would come about because of her own actions? Or was she just haunted by too many regrets that couldn’t be mended, even after her physical death? I didn’t think I had the will to go back into the Opal to go hunting for that answer.
Eli grunted. “I’ve never heard of a darkling having the ability to remove a Calamity Stone. In everything I’ve studied . . . I suppose that knowledge was hidden, to keep people from doing terrible things to rid themselves of the stone. Too late for that, though.” I could hear the gears of his brain grinding even from in here. He seemed a bit too giddy after everything we’d seen. “Still. It’s a method. Though Cecelia wasn’t able to return to her body. Maybe we can get around that . . .”
“I doubt it.” I blinked. Blinked harder. The eye that had been truly mine, was half-black, and the pupil had turned red. I opened my shirt, and the dark stain climbed up to my jawline.
This was happening too fast. And when I pressed my face closer to the glass, I saw the black bleed over, into the amber eye that Death had left behind. Déjà vu. Again and again.
The thing inside me was eager to get out.
An impatient knock at the door. “What are you doing? You’ve been in there for twenty minutes.”
“Am I to have zero privacy before the apocalypse?” I snapped. My reflection hadn’t changed, and it wasn’t going to. Not tonight, anyway. I needed to lie down and shut my eyes, shut all this away for a while.
“We’ll need to tread carefully. The game has changed,” Eli was saying as I pulled the sweater I’d found in a bedroom drawer over my head. “The Stonebreakers just wanted the stones to destroy them, and that was that. Seela wants the stones to unmake the world before he gets rid of them — if he intends to. We can’t ask the Celestial Darklings for aid because they’ll use us to their own ends, as they are doing with Seela. So we need a different darkling to do it . . .”
My hand was hovering over the doorknob. I couldn’t hide my face any longer. And I could definitely hide less from Eli, who sensed I was there, suddenly ripping the door open before I got the chance to.
His face was bleak, looking down at me, but he didn’t turn away. I tensed. “A different darkling?”
“Yes,” he said, grim. “You.”
~
There were two beds in the croft — in rooms that seemed virtually unchanged from Eli’s memory that I’d accidentally stumbled into. He’d been what — ten? A decade and a half ago, and this place a time capsule as much as a mortuary. I lay across one of these beds, staring at the ceiling. Saskia was curled beside me. She was like me and wouldn’t sleep, but she said she wanted to pretend. To try to remember what it was like to dream. I couldn’t blame her.
The other bedroom was empty. It had been Eli’s mother’s. I’d recognized the doorway, almost as if that little boy were still frozen outside it. I was trapped on the carousel of my thoughts, thinking of families; that you could have none and feel like no one, or have one and still be separated by a phone line or by regret. I thought of Phae and Barton and Natti and, yes, even Eli, and maybe Saskia, and how family could be what you made of it. Blood or not. Powers or not. You could have all the power in the world, in fact, and you could still feel as vulnerable as a child.
Eli had elected to sleep on the sofa, if he could sleep. He was as tightly wound as me, but he needed rest. This whole thing had taken a considerable chunk out of what little he had left. When I had the time to sit back and think about the distance he’d travelled, the sheer breadth of what he’d done, I was surprised he was still in one cranky-ass piece.
But he was here. That had seemed a stretch. And we were on an even keel, careful territory. We’d both lost much. We were both running headlong towards an uncertain ending. Mutt and Jeff at the brink of certain doom, trapped by our shared griefs.
Being together in the stones had been . . . a trial. And a dangerous one. But without him we would have faltered far sooner, wouldn’t have come out the other side with what we now knew, even if the truth was painful. I was grateful for that. For him. Even though he’d seen into parts of me I didn’t even want to face myself. I’d seen into him, and for a guy who could read minds, could completely wall up his own, that must have been hard.
Painful truths. Here was one: Cecelia wasn’t perfect. I already knew that. Everything she did, everything she gave up. It was out of love. I knew that, too. But so many lies piled on top of one another can suffocate even the brightest love. Lying here, still alive despite everything, I didn’t know if it had been worth it.
Saskia suddenly sat up beside me, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
I sat up on my elbows. “What is it?”
But she slid off without answering me, going across the room to the door and ducking out of sight. I was about to go after her, but Eli suddenly appeared in the doorway, and I froze.
“Hm,” he said, looking in the direction she’d fled.
I didn’t bother asking. Saskia had known he was there, maybe, in the strange way she seemed to know too many things, and now I was alone with him.
“May I?” Eli asked, lingering there. The bed was small, and now suddenly the whole room seemed way too small if he was going to come in. Too many things railroaded in my head, and I just stared at him.
He put up a hand, obviously reading this. “Or not —”
“No, no.” I shifted over, patting the bed awkwardly. “I mean, also, it’s your house . . .”
He took his damn time thinking about it, which made it more unbearable. Then he dipped his head down, crossed the room, and sat on the edge of the bed, looking around the space as if it were an alien planet. “Yes. I suppose it is. Though I’ve never felt at home anywhere. Not really.”
My body was changing right under me, but I could still feel surprise. An unfamiliar breed of anxiety. I pulled my legs up, knees under my chin. “You scared Saskia away. How long were you lurking out there?”
“Not long,” he said. “But she asked me to come in. With her mind. I’m not going to ask how she could do that. I’ve decided to just let things play out since she isn’t interested in killing us. It’s a nice change of pace.”
“Right.” My jaw was working, teeth grinding. What was that kid up to?
“Saw a lot today,” he said. He was perched so precariously, shoulders hunched, probably in case he had to flee from his own discomfort. Though he was just his normal jaded self, it was almost like his wings were there, a heavy shadow holding him down.
I turned my face away. I didn’t know if I had it in me for whatever this was — an oncoming argument, a pep talk turned berating. I didn’t want to bicker with him anymore. But I never expected Eli to be anything less than coarse with me. “Yeah? And?”
Eli looked at me strangely, and I became
very still.
“The thing about grief,” he started, and his voice was very quiet, “is that it doesn’t go away. You don’t ‘get over’ anything. It gets packed away, and you learn to live with it. You heal around it. If you can call it healing.” He crossed a leg, leaned over it. “Really you rebuild but you aren’t the same as you were. And that’s fine. You can’t stay the same forever. You can’t be a child forever.” He hadn’t moved closer, but I turned my face aside, a stinging coming up under my nose. “Whatever it is that’s inside you, that dark thing trying to take control. It feeds on grief. It makes you vulnerable if you ignore it, too. You have to remember you’re not just holding on to your own grief. The loss of your parents, your grandparents. You are holding the grief of too many people who had their chance at life and have passed from it. Their choices weren’t your responsibility. You have to know that.”
The room got even smaller, and so did whatever room was left inside of me. Why was he saying all this now? “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “They’re all gone, and we’re the only ones left to clean up the mess.”
I could tell his hackles were going up. “Your grief is what kicked us out of the Veil today. If you don’t master it —”
“You just said I can’t ‘get over it’ just like that. So why are you asking me to?”
“That’s not . . .” He let out an exhalation so big I thought it’d conjure a windstorm. “I’m just trying to do as you asked and . . . not be such a dick.”
Spoken in his cultured accent and with deadpan exhaustion, I couldn’t help but laugh. He did, too — I could see him smile in the dark.
After a beat, after remembering what was at stake, the mounting dread came back. “Eli. If I try to remove our stones, using this dark power, there’s nothing that can stop it from taking over once I let it in. It’s been hard enough keeping it down, keeping it buried. And you heard what that thing Kirkald said. There’s always a cost. What if —”