Chapter 11
ARIENNE
When Arienne was little, an old woman in her village had told her that when evil people died, they would go to Heliwite.
It was a freezing-cold cave so deep in the ground that not even the warmth of the volcano could reach it.
There, the hideous Crone King harassed the souls of the dead for all eternity.
Arlanders did not bury the dead. Instead, they cremated them using a flame brought down from the volcano.
It was said that this would allow the dragon to aid their dead in reaching the realm of Hefenfels, beyond the blue veil of the sky.
Hefenfels was a field in eternal early summer where the ground sprouted without being sown, and the rains fell all night, ripening the crops by morning.
When she turned ten and asked her mother about what she had been told, her mother only answered that Hefenfels and Heliwite were no more.
“Then what happens to us when we die?” little Arienne asked.
“I don’t know. But we can’t go to Hefenfels or Heliwite anymore. The Empire won’t let us.”
The Empire mocked the traditional beliefs of Arland, calling them superstitions. It was their belief that no gods or demons or even dragons were above humans—and hadn’t the dragon the Arlanders so fervently believed in lost to them in battle?
The Empire scorned all invisible gods and killed all visible ones.
But if there really were a Heliwite and a Hefenfels, would they disappear just because the Empire conquered Arland?
Was calling something a superstition enough to destroy it?
What if there really was, still, a Heliwite where the Crone King continued to punish the evil, regardless of what was happening in the surface world?
Arienne had not wondered about this since she was a small child.
But it was impossible to not think of Heliwite here, in this echoing cavern with its chill and darkness.
It smelled like the turned earth of the cemetery back at the Imperial Academy, and the air had a dampness to it.
As she had been immersed in water only a few moments ago, the cold was cutting into her bones.
Arienne wrapped her arms around her shoulders and shivered.
She had no idea how she got out of the water—when she came to, her upper body had been resting on a stone while her legs still dangled in what turned out to be an underground river.
She imagined her body grabbing on to whatever it could and crawling out of the water on its own, her will to live outlasting even her own consciousness.
She felt about her chest for her tinderbox but found it was soaked.
She gripped the glass orb around her neck and concentrated her Power into it until it lit up with a faint light.
The darkness receded slightly and revealed walls of stone.
It wasn’t a completely natural cave, but it wasn’t completely human-made either.
The walls, the top of which she could just about reach, were made of something like limestone.
It somehow relieved her to find that none of the ubiquitous red dust that was covering everything on the surface was here in these halls underneath the city.
The cave was so dark and so wide that she couldn’t see across it. Nor could she see the hole she had fallen from when she looked up. Maybe she had floated here when she lost consciousness.
She walked to a spot a bit farther from the river and sat down.
She took out her flintstones and kindling from the tinderbox and laid them out in front of her to dry.
Water dripped from these items, and the air was so humid she was almost drowning in it.
She doubted her tinderbox would dry enough for her to start a fire any time soon. Arienne sighed and stood up.
“I have to start walking.”
She thought about just escaping into the room in her mind, but no matter how soft and comfortable the bed was in there, it meant nothing if her body out here froze.
What she needed to do now was move her body and get warm.
She shook some of the water off her garments and walked deeper into the cavern, her back to the water.
Down here, she didn’t hear anything of the huge trash monster’s hum or its footsteps. Whether this was because she was so deep down under ground or because the monster had given up on her, she didn’t know.
The cavern led her away from the underground river and began to narrow until it led to an archway that was only big enough to allow one person to walk through.
There were letters written along the arch.
She couldn’t read them, but they looked like the same lettering on the faded, melted signs on the surface.
But unlike the signs on the surface, they did not also feature an Imperial translation along with those letters, so Arienne knew the archway must be very old.
Arienne raised her left foot to step through the arch.
The moment she did so, her heart fell with a thud, startling her.
Unhelpfully, her mind started recalling the night in the wasteland with the ghosts.
Pressing down on the urge to take that single step back and turn around, she forced her eyes wide open and placed her foot down, fully stepping through—and began to see things previously unseen.
She was in a catacomb. There were hollows dug into the walls, and inside those hollows were skeletons wrapped in desiccated leather, their arms crossed on their chests.
And there were ghosts. Many of them. Like in her previous encounter, the ghosts here were moving about soundlessly, not yet paying any attention to her.
Arienne took a deep breath and gripped her glass orb.
This might be where she found out whether the horse seller’s claims of the orb warding off ghosts were true.
These ghosts were all wearing the dress of Danras, as she had seen in her dream, and all keeping busy.
There was one sitting on an invisible chair, reading an invisible book.
Another was holding up an invisible fruit and knocking its side.
An adult ghost patted the head of a child ghost. The whole scene seemed like a bustling street re-created by the dead in this catacomb.
But when she soon realized the ghosts were endlessly repeating the same motions, every hair on her body stood on end.
Trying not to attract attention to herself, she carefully walked around them.
No wonder it smelled like a cemetery here—it was an actual cemetery.
Danras entombed their dead in catacombs, apparently.
She thought of the melted skeleton in the first house she had been in, and realized it was likely that no one buried here would’ve died during the Star of Mersia attack.
Were these ghosts all people who had died before then, now haunting their final resting place?
Or were these ghosts indeed victims of that final massacre, repeating these moments of their lives like a prayer down here in this temporary afterlife?
She passed the street of ghosts and reached the archway on the other end.
Beyond that, there were even more ghosts populating another section of the catacombs.
Arienne leaned back on a pillar and sighed.
The prospect of finding a way in this underground ghost city perplexed her.
Where was the exit to the outside? And did she even want to go back outside, where the Powered monster roamed?
She suddenly realized her head had been aching for a while now. At first, she assumed it was the stuffy air, but the ache came from deeper within.
Arienne opened the door to the room in her mind and was stunned by what she saw inside.
The room was filled with people. Some were sitting on the edge of the bed and staring into space, others taking books down from the bookshelf and flipping through them.
A group was gathered around Tychon’s crib, looking down with fascination.
A few were having conversations. A child patted Aron’s head as the donkey swished his tail, irritated.
It wasn’t a large room, but by some trick, it seemed like there were scores of people in here.
“What is all this!” shouted Arienne. A few turned to her and approached her, smiling. One of them took off his hat and bowed.
“Tanges, freu.”
“Tange sau.”
“Tanges.”
The people around her kept saying the same thing. She didn’t know what it meant but she could feel the sentiment of gratitude. It only made her angrier.
“Who do you think you are, coming into a stranger’s room without permission?” she seethed.
A few of them looked at each other. None of the dozens, apparently, spoke Imperial.
Arienne bit her lip and focused. This room was sacrosanct to her. There were only two people, other than her, who had ever been inside, and there had been no new people allowed in since she had reconstructed the room. Aside from the donkey Aron, of course.
These people had to be the ghosts. Formless beings that had violated her headspace when she hadn’t been watchful, regaining their old shapes by siphoning off Arienne’s imagination magic.
But no matter how grateful they professed to be, she couldn’t let just any spirit floating around to enter her mind.
“All of you, get out!”
Her voice was so loud it shook the room.
The air inside the room distorted, and Tychon began to cry. Aron’s ears perked up. The ghosts in the room turned to blue smoke and then vanished. Arienne, half enraged and half afraid, took deep breaths.
She turned to Tychon in his crib to comfort him, but there was already someone there doing the comforting.
One of the ghosts had not disappeared and had picked up Tychon from his crib.
This ghost, once a man, wore Imperial clothing.
Not just any Imperial clothing but the robe uniform of a sorcerer.
The insignia of the sorcerer-engineers on his shoulder caught her eye.
Arienne stormed toward him, intent on seizing him by the collar if that’s what it took to throw him out—but stopped when she heard what the ghost was mumbling, a lost look in his eyes.
“Tychon, good boy … Don’t cry, Tychon…”