Chapter 38
ARIENNE
She almost couldn’t see in front of her anymore. But Tychon was awake and cheerful, babbling and laughing. A laugh she had never heard from him before. Yuma was sitting in a chair as she rocked Tychon’s cradle with one hand, lost in thought.
Noam hadn’t remembered anything when he came into her mind for the first time; it had taken awhile for him to even recall his own name. He had come a long way to be himself again, like Arienne had just a few years ago.
“Do you remember yet?” she whispered to Noam. “One hundred years ago, how the accident happened?”
Noam, gazing at Yuma and Tychon, slowly nodded.
“Fractica sounded the alarm.”
“An alarm?”
“Even after the Grim King had been defeated, Grand Inquisitor Lysandros had been worried about traps or schemes that might have been placed, and so he planned for contingencies, using Fractica. It had been Fractica that maintained the Host’s enchantment in the catacombs.
And one of Fractica’s many other functions was to sound an alarm when it sensed the presence of the Grim King. ”
Arienne detected Yuma slightly raising her head at the mention of Lysandros’s name.
“And then what?” Arienne urged.
“The alarm sounded, but nothing happened immediately after that. I think the Grand Inquisitor knew. He went right back to the Capital. Saying he needed to take care of something … But whatever he did, he was too late. When the Grand Inquisitor was gone, Fractica’s output became unstable, and its humming became thrums. A storm of black smoke …
kind of like what you saw when you came down here on the steps, but much thicker, much faster.
It flooded the generator chamber. I thought the control chain was malfunctioning, so I went to get the cutting tool. And then I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“Sorcerers…” Noam had a faraway look in his eyes now.
“I saw them. Heard them, too. The Grim King was among them. I’d never seen him before, only knew him through legend, and in that moment he was only half formed and he spoke in gibberish, like he had just woken up from a nightmare—but I recognized him immediately, and the name he kept murmuring: Lysandros.
That’s why I tried to escape to the catacombs, since Fractica was supposed to keep them safe from him.
” Noam swallowed. “This was the Grim King’s revenge, seventy years after his death.
Didn’t I tell you from the start? The Empire would never do this. It was the Grim King all along.”
Arienne shook her head. “Eldred didn’t do this all on his own. There were countless sorcerers—Power generators—in the Circuit of Destiny. The accumulated history in the Circuit was what led to the Star of Mersia.”
The Empire did not care where it got its Power—as long as it came into their hands, it was theirs.
They thought they could control the sorcerers indefinitely by turning them into Power generators.
Evidently, they couldn’t. And by adding generators to the Circuit, by using the Circuit to look into the past or predict the future, they had unknowingly built the Star of Mersia.
Arienne’s knowledge of generator magic had failed her at the Academy three years in a row, but she was sure in her speculation.
If the Circuit had borne witness to pain and suffering on a worldwide scale, like what she just had seen in that black smoke, would it be so inconceivable that the Circuit was full of resentment and bitterness?
And that the resentment and bitterness that had built up over a century in those three hundred Power generators was poisonous enough to destroy a whole nation?
All of that poison had been unleashed through Fractica into Danras before spreading throughout Mersia. That, Arienne decided, was the truth behind the Star of Mersia.
What Arienne saw when she opened herself to the whispering smoke was harrowing, but it was just only a lingering trace of the disaster.
She still wasn’t sure what had triggered it, though.
Arienne’s first choice was Eldred. She did not believe that even he would do this, but his hatred toward Lysandros must have played a role in Fractica being the conduit of the disaster.
And perhaps Lysandros had wanted to find out as well—perhaps that was why he couldn’t simply destroy Power generator Eldred after the Star of Mersia and instead secreted him away in the basement of the Imperial Academy.
But to confirm this, she would have to go back to the Imperial Capital and examine the Circuit for herself.
Maybe have a talk with it, to hear what it knew, what it felt, and finally understand why it had done what it had.
Just as she had listened to the whispering smoke, the last trace of the Star of Mersia, here underneath Eldred’s old castle.
“Are you all right?” Noam asked worriedly.
Even in the room in her mind, her hands were covered with bursting pustules. She could barely make out light and dark. “Do I look that bad?”
“You look like you’re about to die. Is this what you look like outside too?”
“Worse.” Despite her growing blindness, she could sense the worried frown on Noam’s face and tried a smile. “It’ll go away. I just need to get out of here.”
She focused on her physical body—which was collapsed next to Yuma’s remains at the bottom of Eldred’s castle.
Arienne groped around until something soft came into her grasp.
A wide-brimmed hat. She remembered that Yuma had worn such a hat in her first dream in Mersia.
Arienne put it on her own head, leaned against the wall, and stood up.
“With that thing filling the stairs,” Noam wailed, “how are you going to get out?”
“It’s fine. The Star of Mersia is … I’ll be fine. They can’t hurt me anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I understand them all.”
Arienne had heard the whispers. She felt for them.
Doing so nearly destroyed her, even though they were just whispers rather than the screams that they would have been a century ago.
But whatever horrors the Star of Mersia so desperately wanted to tell, now she knew.
She had no fear, as what she knew couldn’t hurt her.
Touching the wall by her side, Arienne made her way up the staircase.
It reminded her of the steps in the Imperial Academy that led down to the Power generator chamber there.
Why hadn’t she thought of it on her way down?
At the Academy, she had placed Eldred in the room in her mind and walked back up the steps.
Hadn’t there been an old skeleton at the bottom of those stairs as well?
Her memory must be fading. Many more things would fade if she didn’t hurry.
A lullaby came from the room in her mind. It wasn’t Noam’s voice, and the melody was different as well. Yuma was humming. Arienne listened closely as she continued to lean against the wall and slowly climb the steps. Then, Yuma began to sing.
“Why are lullabies always about the same thing no matter the country they’re from?” Arienne murmured as she dragged herself up the steps.
“Do you speak Mersian?” asked Noam.
“No, I don’t. That song was in Mersehi?” Noam’s agape mouth made her realize she had just spoken in a language she hadn’t learned.
The singing voice stopped and began to speak instead, in a lower, different tone.
“I see that I am back here, in the Feast Hall.”
Not stopping her ascent, Arienne entered the room in her mind. She could barely see even in here now. But Yuma turned from her chair to look at her.
“Who are you?” Yuma asked.
Careful not to stumble, Arienne approached her, lost her balance, and grabbed on to the edge of the bed. She found a chair and lowered herself into it.
“My name,” she said, “is Arienne.”
Yuma’s gaze flickered to her neck. Arienne raised her head to give her a better view of her t’laran. Did Yuma know of Arland? Their eyes met once more.
“I’m Yuma. The Chief Herder of Danras. Or at least, I was. I remember being in and out of sleep, for what seemed liked days, maybe years. How am I back in Danras? What happened?”
Arienne, as calmly as possible, spoke of what had happened to Mersia after it had joined the Empire.
When Yuma heard of the death of Dalan the Host and the Star of Mersia turning the country into a wasteland, tears came to her eyes.
At the end of the story, Arienne was asked the question she’d been dreading the most.
“What happened to Lysandros?”
Arienne only hesitated a moment before saying, “He died.”
“How?”
“I killed him,” Arienne said simply.
Yuma let out a surprised whisper. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, without knowing what she was sorry about.
Yuma neither acknowledged her apology nor blamed her. Instead, she changed the subject.
“Do you know what happened to the Grim King?”
“He was turned into a Power generator, but then he came back, and then I killed him too.”
Did she have to apologize for this as well? Yuma didn’t respond. Tychon woke, and Yuma picked him up out of the cradle, as he looked ready to start crying.
“Am I back in my room?”
Arienne shook her head. “This is the room I made inside my mind.”
“It looks exactly like my room in the Feast Hall of Danras.”
Arienne herself didn’t know where exactly the memory of this room came from. Fractica’s dream? Tychon’s? Or somewhere—someone—else? As she hesitated in her answer, Yuma said, “What’s outside of this tower?”
“Nothing.”
“How sad. I wanted to ride with my child on horseback at least once.”
What would’ve been outside this room if it were the real Feast Hall was the city of Danras, and beyond it, the steppe of Mersia.
But there was nothing. This was not a real place, only existing in Arienne’s mind.
But what about the people here? Yuma, Noam, and Tychon were not people she had imagined, nor were they memories, as Eldred, Yuma, and Lysandros had been in Fractica’s dream.
Arienne bowed and left the room. She noted that Yuma had nothing to say about the state of Arienne’s appearance. Maybe that was Mersian manners.
She finally felt like she understood why the whispering smoke, the Star of Mersia, had lingered under Eldred’s castle. It was because Yuma’s ghost was there, alongside her remains. Like attracts like, and her pain was the same as that of the Star. It was commiserating with her.
There were more questions to be asked, and there was more to be learned, but Yuma would be here waiting in Arienne’s mind, as Noam had been.
She had time, as did they, and she decided that they were real, at least while they were here.
Perhaps everything was, as long as she kept it real in her mind.
Back in Eldred’s castle, she looked up the stairs. Was that a hint of light? She was nearing the end of it. Her legs shook and her throat was parched. She quickened her pace.
She finally reached the top of the steps.
Stumbling into the hall, she looked back one last time.
This empty castle had not melted away or fallen down, and as it had been the past one hundred years, it was unlikely someone would visit in the future.
Patting the Grim King’s crown secured to her belt, Arienne stepped outside.
Aron was by the melted gates. She ran to the donkey and hugged his neck, the donkey braying in surprise.
She stood like that for a long time before untying Aron’s reins from the iron ring.
She pressed Yuma’s hat down on her head and dusted herself off.
The road back home to Arland was long—and there was one more thing she needed to do before getting there.