Chapter 3 #2
“What you could cross in a step,” Tala repeated softly.
“Yes. That is precisely the point.” She sat back.
“The home worlds are empty, Jupiter. Not dead. Empty. The bane are eaters, and an eaten world holds nothing for them. There is no more magic to sustain their hunger. The swarms that consumed our worlds moved on long ago, chasing richer feeding grounds toward the galactic core. What they left behind is thirteen worlds’ worth of ruins.
Cities with no one in them. Places where the doors were sealed from the inside and nobody ever came back to open them. ”
I realized my hands were gripping each other in my lap hard enough to hurt.
Jamie had shown me the Pisces world in the dream, and I’d thought of it as something beautiful and lost, like a black and white photograph of a dead relative.
Not as a door standing open. Not as somewhere you could go physically.
Somewhere that waited and waited while nobody returned.
“You want me to take you home,” I said, already knowing it was my sole reason for being here. Both in this room and on this planet.
“We want,” Arthur Bennett said carefully, “you to try. For ten thousand years there was no such person with the right magic to do so. Now there is you, and you did not ask for it, and we are painfully aware that this is unfair to you.” His jaw tightened, and for a second I could see exactly where Lucas got that, too.
I’d spent days thinking it over, and I’d already come to the conclusion that I was going to do this.
If not for myself and my own abilities, but for our people.
For the worlds we left behind. We were strangers orbiting a star we did not belong to, and we could never truly be a free people until we returned.
So I asked my questions. All of them. For the next hour I peppered the elders with them, and they answered every single one as if they’d been expecting exactly this.
I asked why the Assembly buried most of the knowledge, and got the answer I expected, which somehow didn’t make it less infuriating to hear confirmed.
Because a people with a homeland is a people with somewhere else to go, and the Assembly’s entire authority rested on there being nowhere else.
Because Ophiuchus was a dead designation right up until it wasn’t, and by then the leaders in Geneva, Antarctica, Russia and New York had spent so many generations teaching everyone the home worlds were unreachable.
They held power here on Earth, and my presence was throwing it all into question.
I asked how they knew the bane had really moved on.
Tala explained the incursion records going back centuries.
The way each wave of bane arriving on Earth came through starving, which meant long jumps from depleted territory, which meant the feeding grounds behind them were bare.
The way the waves themselves were spreading further apart, decades becoming half-centuries.
The bane hadn’t given up on Earth. But the great mass of them, the tide that had drowned thirteen worlds, had rolled on toward richer waters a long, long time ago.
“They left the lights off and the doors open,” I said, half to myself, raking my fingers through my hair. My eyes were getting heavy, and I knew I needed a long nap to recover from the information overload.
“And it will take them a very long time to come back,” Tala said.
“Distance protects the home worlds now. If our people returned, if the cities were rebuilt, the wards raised anew, the old defenses remembered, we would not be the cornered refugees our ancestors were. We would see them coming, across all those slow, hungry jumps. Generations of warning, instead of none. With our shield teams, we could spread out across the home worlds again and build new training academies on our own turf. We could create a society of warriors ready to defend our people and protect our way of life. No longer hiding away on Earth, afraid of what the humans would think or do if they knew about us.”
“You are the strongest raw talent any of us has ever seen,” Arthur said plainly, “and you are running on instinct. What you did across the Atlantic should not have been possible for someone with no formal Ophis instruction. We have texts no one else has. Techniques recorded by the last Ophis’s own hand.
Scholars who have spent their lives studying the mechanics of what you do naturally.
We are offering you all of it. The elders will mentor you directly, here, in this chamber, where the magic is strongest and the wards are oldest. No Assembly oversight. ”
It was a big offer and a bigger ask. But it was a good one.
When it came to dealing with the Assembly, there was always a layer of distrust and secrecy.
There was none of that here. I looked around at the faces of the elders surrounding me and saw people.
Just people, who spent their entire lives working to preserve the sacred knowledge of our people, selflessly and at great personal risk.
“And if I take everything you teach me and decide the portal never gets opened?” My gaze flickered around the circle, one by one.
“Then the knowledge continues with us. With our Order. We pass it to the next generation, and one day, if another Ophis is born, maybe we can have another chance.”
It was a good answer. It might even have been an honest one, but could I really trust that they would just let me turn around and walk away if I chose not to do this?
Ten thousand years of waiting was no small thing.
The guys had told me from the start that it would be my choice, and I believed them, and I mostly believed Arthur and Tala, but I’d learned the hard way that institutions were made of individually trustworthy people right up until they weren’t.
Still. Every time I tried to expand my powers on my own, I risked burning myself out. And Nightfall was arriving in a week, and the Assembly was watching me from across an ocean.
“Twice a week,” I said finally. “I have classes. And a massive shield to form. So my schedule’s a disaster, but I can give you two evenings.”
Arthur inclined his head, and around the circle, thirty robed elders let out a collective breath.
Tala just smiled, the lines of her face making her beautiful and wise and kind. “Two evenings,” she agreed. “We’ve waited this long.”
When the elders had begun to gather up their chairs and drift toward the stairs in twos and threes, the chamber slowly filled with the low murmur of people who were family first and conspirators second.
I stood at the edge of the scorch mark and looked at it for a long time. Phoenix came to stand beside me.
“He stood right there,” I said after a few minutes. “The last of my kind. He watched everybody he loved go through the portal, and then he closed the door and stayed on the wrong side of it.”
“One of the bravest men in all of Aelari history.”
I glanced up at Phoenix. “I keep thinking I should feel some kind of connection. Ancestral memory of something.” The blackened stone gave back nothing, not even torchlight. “Mostly I just think he must have been so tired.”
Phoenix’s hand settled warm on the back of my neck, thumb tracing once along my hairline. “You don’t have to be him, you know. However this ends. Nobody down here gets to ask that of you, and if they try, they’ll be having a conversation with me about it.”
‘And me,’ Noodle put in. ‘I bite.’
I reached up and scratched his chin, and let out a breath.
“Come on,” Phoenix said. “It’s late, and we’ve got in-laws to entertain in the morning.”
“They are not— “ I rubbed my face with a groan. “I cannot believe Theo’s got you all saying that now. I’m going to portal him into the North Sea.”