Chapter 31 #2
“You remember how I thought a look beyond the mist sounded familiar?” I couldn’t forget that day. I simply nod, fearful of where this is going.
“That’s because it was,” she says as she walks over to a table where she has what looks like a children’s fable sitting on her desk.
“I found this yesterday when I was shelving some books that Coral had issued out for the kids, and when I saw the title on the spine I…” her voice fades out as she hands me the book.
The words A Look Beyond the Mist are inscribed on the leather spine.
My heart sinks, like a rock plummeting to the bottom of a lake.
“Holy gods,” Hazel mutters as she looks over my shoulder.
“I started reading,” Cedar rushes out as I flick through the book, landing where a slip of fabric sits in between two pages.
“The book is full of lore and whimsical stories of faraway lands. They are written like fairytales, but I—uh…that one is different,” she nods to where I pull the bookmark away, the words The Fall of The Gods written in cursive at the top of the page.
My legs feel weak as I recognise the handwriting that litters these pages. It’s a bit neater than the notes scrawled in the journals, but it’s unmistakably my mother’s penmanship.
“My mother,” I mutter as I find my knees bending, laying the book on the floor in front of me as Elara and Hazel sit beside me on the hardwood floor. “My mother wrote this?” I look up at Cedar, who is leaning back against the desk, her dark brows dipped in a sorry frown as she nods.
“Only this story. The rest of the book is written by someone else, with completely different strokes.”
I look down at the words, my heart aching as I begin to read. “Can you...” I meet Hazel’s gaze.
She nods furiously, picking up the book and settling it in her lap. She clears her throat, brushing a strand of her short hair off of her face.
“The fall of the gods is not a straightforward story,” Hazel reads, her voice wavering. “In fact, it was less of a fall, and more of an escape.”
Elara reaches over, grasping my hand in hers as Cedar stands in the corner, biting on her fragile nails as she listens to the words she’s already read.
“Arizaya was once a land of beauty.” I have to hold in my gasp as I hear that word, and when I look up, Cedar nods, as if reassuring me I heard it correctly.
“It was prosperous, it was flourishing, and the people worshipped the very gods that walked alongside them. The gods who feasted on their bread and drank their wine. The gods who gifted them the land they dared to walk upon. The land that shared its power with all of them.”
“The earth’s power?” Elara mutters.
“Keep reading,” Cedar says. Those two words send alarm spearing through my body.
Hazel swallows thickly before continuing on.
“For years they lived together—the people, the gods and the earth—their relationship a give and take. Give and take. Give and take. This fragile balance was maintained for longer than one could’ve hoped.
But if one thing is certain, it is that balance never lasts. Someone shall always cross the line.”
I try to imagine my mother writing this, and it isn’t hard to do. My mother told me stories of the gods when I was a child. She told me that they used to walk among us, and I believed it. But she didn’t tell it quite like this.
“The people took, and took, and took. Draining the land of all that it held. It happened slowly, like a drip from a leaking faucet. The gods tried to seal it, to replenish what was lost, but before long they began to feel it too.
Not everyone took what wasn’t theirs to take. Many could do nothing but watch as the leaves dulled, and the animals disappeared. But the gods, they couldn’t stay. They couldn’t watch as their sanctuary was taken from them. They could only do one thing—flee.”
A tear slips down my cheek as I try to piece these words together, try to reconcile everything that we know, or everything we thought we knew with this story. To decipher whether that is all that it is—a story, a children’s fable—or if it is another of my mother’s riddles.
“But they still clung to one thing—hope. They had hope that one day, we could flourish again, that they could find a home here once more, not in Arizaya, not once it was nothing more than ashes and rubble, but somewhere else. They gave that hope to us in the form of four vials…” Hazel stops, her voice wavering before she looks up at the rest of us, Elara and I watching her with a nagging need for her to continue.
“The vials,” she mutters.
“Keep reading,” Cedar says once more. I don’t think I have ever disliked two words more in my life.
Hazel looks down at her lap, a trembling hand turning the page. “Water, air, fire, and earth. Four vials. Each holding the dark blood of their kind—”
“Gods’ blood?” Elara’s mouth falls wide open, like a net to catch fish down at the river. “That stuff is gods’ blood?”
“Cedar,” I shake my head. “It can’t be true. That”—I gesture towards the book—“is just a fable.”
But as the words come from my mouth, I suddenly remember the passage written in her journal, the one Rylan and I found on that rainy night.
I didn’t want to flee. I wanted to fight, to get back what was taken from our land, but it was too late. I was too late. Even the gods knew.
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes screaming with the knowledge of something yet to be told. “Everleigh.”
“One day you will understand, my girl,” Hazel continues, and my lungs constrict in my chest, my heart screaming in pain.
“Why I had to do it this way. Why I couldn’t tell you where you come from, or who you are.
But if you look deep inside, you might find the answers.
I have hope, just as the gods did, that one day everything can be restored. But only if you flourish.”
The room falls silent, but my heartbeat drowns it out.
Hazel flips a few pages before closing the book. “That’s it.”
“That’s it?” I screw my eyes shut before standing on wobbly legs. “How—” I let out a sharp breath as I furiously wipe at my eyes, searching for any explanation I can think of.
“My mother was delusional,” I say. “That’s the only word for it.” I throw my hands up in exasperation. Except…perhaps she wasn’t.
“The apothecary I went to meet,” I say, even as I shake my head. “Imogen. I asked her about the vials.”
“You did what?” Hazel asks.
I tip my head. “I didn’t ask her about them as such,” I correct myself. “I more or less asked her if she knew of any medicines of a similar colour.”
Elara leans closer. “And what did she say?”
“She froze.” I look up at Cedar, her eyes barely open, but I can see the concentration shining through them. “She was shaken, as if she knew exactly what I was talking about, exactly what they were,” I say. “She told me to destroy them, that so long as I have those vials, I’ll never be safe.”
“Okay,” Hazel breathes. “Either she is delusional too or…”
“You found three vials of gods’ blood hidden in your mother’s study,” Cedar says.
Silence falls over the four of us, every glance heavy with unspoken words. If this fable reads true, if this isn’t another of my mother’s riddles, then the people of Arizaya had some kind of power.
People like Rylan’s mother.
And mine.
I cannot bring myself to believe it, even after the things I’ve seen.
Elara pulls the book from Hazel’s lap. “It doesn’t make sense,” she mumbles. “Why did the god’s blood shine when I held it?” Her words come out shaky, barely more than a whisper. “Why could I feel it?”
Thoughts of my mother cease. Elara looks up at me almost as if for an answer, fear shining in her blue eyes. “I don’t know,” I whisper.
“The land that shared its power with all of them,” she recites. “What does that mean?”
Cedar and I share a look. “Perhaps there are more people from Arizaya than we thought,” she says, and I remember one of the first things I read in my mother’s journal. I try not to wonder where the others went, where they landed. ”People whose power—”
“No,” I shake my head, refusing to even hear what she is implying.
“The witch hunts,” Hazel breathes.
Elara looks up from the tattered pages. “But innocent people have died,” she says. “Don’t you wonder if they had some kind of power they would have used it to get free, or help at least?”
“My mother wasn’t a witch,” I argue with a laugh, even though all of this is far from funny. I don’t mean to.
Hazel’s eyes are laced with sympathy as she tips her head towards the book in Elara’s lap. “She speaks of a power, Everleigh.”
“That doesn’t mean she had it.” Defensiveness bites at the edge of every word from my mouth.
“There’s only so many explanations for the fact that there was a glowing fissure in your wall—one that you stepped through and then disappeared into thin air.”
I let out a sharp breath. “What does that make me, Hazel? I’m the only one who could see it, who walked through it!”
“I don’t know, Everleigh!” Her shoulders lift before she’s shaking her head. “I don’t know.”
I take the book now, thumbing through the pages of my mother’s handwriting.
She wrote this for me, to me. Somehow, she knew I would find this, or at least she hoped I would.
But the only way for me to do that, to recognise this as anything more than a fable, would be because I’d been into her study.
I couldn’t have gotten into that study without the blade, the one my mother gave to Rylan’s.
“The dagger,” I say, running my hand over the page. “Rylan’s mother left him journals too. She spoke of Arizaya and of my mother. How she gifted her the blade before they parted ways.”
I can see the cogs turning in Hazel’s mind. “So he knows about Arizaya? Does he know any of this?” She nods towards the book in my hands.
“No,” I say. But I don't know, not really. I want to believe that Rylan has been telling the truth, that he has told me everything he knows, yet I haven’t told him everything myself. Who’s to know what he knows? “At least I don’t think so.”
“He was as desperate as I was to find out anything about Arizaya. He hoped Imogen would know something, but after I asked her about the vials, she disappeared.”
Hazel tips her head. “So, both of your mothers came from this place? Arizaya? And both of them left journals for you?”
“It feels eerie,” I say. “I know.”
“More than eerie,” Elara agrees, her brows raised.
“There’s one more thing, Everleigh,” Cedar says, and the tone of her voice tugs at my heart. Hazel and Elara go silent, and we all look at where Cedar stands, her eyes brimming with unease.
“Finnick was the last person to loan it out.”