26. Chapter 26
Chapter 26
Viola
" E xplain it to me again," I say, rubbing my temples.
Zeph has all four journals spread out in front of me; each opened to a page right at the end of the book. We're only a few hours away from docking at the Cliffs of Barez, and we're trying to develop a plan to bring these Gods back to Krillium.
"It looks like each ritual is coded by the high priest," he says, indicating a passage at the end of the journal with the snowflake symbol.
"We didn't realize this when we were planning to bring back Himureal," Mace says, leaning over me to grab the journal. "Stone must have just been guessing."
"'To return to darkness it must be greeted by its counter and embracing the shadows that exist within a person,'" I quote, reading over Mace's shoulder. His hair is curling over his ear and I lean close to brush it away and nip the end of his earlobe as I do it. His shocked expression at my outward show of affection has me coughing to cover a laugh before I speak again. "I did embrace my shadows, but Himureal called me his equal. That is not the same as a counter."
Tulip kicks her feet from her position sitting on the edge of the table. She has her back to us, but she 's still listening. "A counter is someone who can challenge the person. I would think an equal is the most likely to challenge."
"'Only one who comes from the curse of loving the dark,'" Mace continues, scrunching his nose. "The curse of loving the dark?"
"I think she loved Himureal," Zeph says, crossing his arms over his head. His ivory shirt rides up a little, and his soft stomach, coated with curls of red hair, is on display. "There are plenty of entries that seem to suggest he was heavily involved in the lives of Lucinda and her children."
"Damn, Lucinda, too?" Tulip says, eyes still trained on the door, staunch refusal to turn around radiating off of her.
I know she's waiting for Morrow.
Since losing his arm, he's obviously been going through a grieving period. I can tell Tulip wants to be there for him, but for some reason, she's holding herself away from him.
"Himureal said it was meant for it to be a descendent of Lucinda," Mace interjects, his spine straightening. "'Comes from the curse of loving the dark.' What if that is not just a descendent of Lucinda, but of the child she had with Himureal?"
"You think she was pregnant?" I ask, turning my body towards him. "That a child she had with him was the curse of loving the dark?" Chills wrack my body. Did this woman, my ancestor, really refer to a child as a curse? I don't want children but even I wouldn't call one a curse.
And if this is true…
"You're actually descended from Himureal," Zeph says, reading the wide-eyed expression I must've had and interrupting my thoughts.
"Most fucked up family tree ever," Tulip says, laughing.
"This can't be right," I say, refusing to accept this leap in logic. "We have no proof that Lucinda was pregnant and that I am actually related to Himureal."
Mace's purple shirt is a new one he must have picked up in Feria, the color rich and enhancing his green eyes. He smoothes it as he stands up from the table in the empty dining room and begins to pace. "It would make a lot of sense, Viola. How you were able to curse Max before you touched the Witch's Ladder. How the magic responded to you so readily." He stops pacing and pierces me with his bright green gaze. "With Godly ancestry, I bet you've always been able to pull devotion to some degree, and that's how you were able to unlock the Witch's Ladder."
I always assumed "daughter" was a reference to being a child of his magic. But it appears there may have been more to it than I thought.
"Okay, let's pretend, for just a moment, that I am the result of a child the two of them had centuries ago. Does it change anything about how we approach this?" I ask, resting on my elbows with my hands wrapped around my neck. I close my eyes and breathe through the grief I feel towards the life I should have had. "This is just further proof that I didn't have any choice in my fate. This shit was always going to find me, wasn't it?"
Tulip looks over her shoulder, resting her chin on her blue linen shirt. Her hair is wild today, creating a halo around her face with its wild waves. "Probably."
The blunt, bored way Tulip answers me is the last straw, and I burst out laughing. I laugh harder than I've laughed in a long time.
Because it's true.
Even if I had not brought Himureal back, he would have come for me because I am his blood, his family.
Zeph, Mace, and Tulip eventually join me in the laughter. After all of it is out of my system, I shake my head and wipe the tears that squeaked out in my moment of mirth.
"Alright, well, I'm glad we dissected this riddle—we didn't even have to since I've already brought this particular God back," I say, closing the journal.
"To be fair," Zeph interjects, "examining this one allows us to make sure our logic is sound before we go after the others."
"Gods, Zeph, since when do you care about logic?" Tulip says. "It wasn't very logical to kidnap Viola's best friend if you wanted her to love you."
"I deserved that," Zeph says, wincing. Tulip's expression is not one of anger or fear, though. She's teasing him, and something in me lightens knowing that they are growing more comfortable around each other.
"Well, which one is next?" I shuffle the journals, looking at each one. Eventually, I land on the one with a lightning bolt on the cover and open it up, trying to get through this as best we can before we arrive at the Cliffs.
"There, in the distance," Morrow says, pointing towards the top of the mountain we're hiking up. "It looks like there's a structure there overlooking the cliff."
I squint, trying to see what he claims to. It all looks like a smudge to me.
"I see it too, let's head there," Mace says from behind me.
It's been at least two hours since we've been climbing. Jaz got us as close as they could and, surprising all of us, decided to join us on our trek up the cliffs. Their people are staying on the boat for now. After another hour, we finally arrived at the top of the hill.
"Are we really supposed to do three hours each way every day?" Tulip pants, bending over and resting her hands on her knees. "Because if so, I'm staying on the fucking ship."
Laughing, Jaz pats her on the back. "Ah, come on, Tulip, where's your sense of adventure?"
"Adventure? Do you not know what I've been doing for weeks now?" Tulip nearly screeches. "The only beds we've slept in have been on your boat and in Feria. The rest of it was just us on the ground!"
I scan the area, eyes continuously fixating on the massive stone structure in front of us. A tall, crumbling tower, easily four homes in height, stretches up to the sky. The stone is twisted with vines and growth, the top of it broken as if hit by a massive impact. It' s surrounded by a wall that stretches wide and deep, enclosing a massive space within it. Along the wall are platforms strategically placed to face the hill we just trekked up.
The tower has a half-busted wooden door on the bottom, and the only way into the inner bailey is through the decrepit keep.
I've been tuning out the conversations around me, focused on that door. There is a pull there, something begging me to explore. It would be impossible to explain other than my magic knows I am supposed to be here.
So, without a look back, I trust my magic and walk to the keep, wrenching open the door, waving off my group's shouts, and walking into the darkness.
I easily conjure a ball of pure Light magic to float beside me so that I can investigate the structure. Inside, it is bare bones, clearly intended for the residents of this place to investigate all newcomers. The walls are bare except for the overgrowth of plant life.
The room buzzes with magic, but there is none floating in the air. It's as if the very ground here is infused with it. The magic in my veins responds in kind, a pull to join together. It's not painful, but it's an odd sensation.
I take a step behind some sort of counter and trip over two skeletons.
No clothes remain on them, the organic matter long since withered away, but each has a sword next to it. Guardsmen, then .
Before I can finish my exploration of their corpses, a wide hand pulls me back against a flat, lithe chest.
"You just decide to run into the unknown and then not come out and think I won't follow you, numen?"
I turn and look at Mace, rolling my eyes. "I knew you would follow me. What did you think would happen to me here? That a rat would scamper over my feet?"
"Who knows, Viola? And still, you run off without talking through things with your companions. I thought we discussed this." His arms are crossed as he looks at me like I am an unruly schoolchild.
"The plan was always to come here. Why would I need to discuss walking into a keep when that was clearly the choice that needed to be made?"
Mace scrubs a hand down his face in frustration. "We don't live in your mind, Viola. What would have been the harm in waiting?"
I throw my arms up in frustration. "What was the harm in me coming in on my own?"
"The potential for harm is unknown, Viola! That's the whole fucking point of developing a plan with your partner."
"I can take care of myself. I'm a God, Mace, in case you forgot," I hiss, crowding him.
"As if you'd ever let me," he mutters, rolling his eyes.
Huffing, I poke my finger into his chest. "I can handle going into a decrepit keep on my own. It's safer for me than you all, and besides. I doubt I'm easy to kill."
"We don' t know that!"
I hold up my hand. "Regardless, I am not now and will never be running all of my decisions by everyone. I understand you are still raw from my time in Ytopie, but my instincts have served us well thus far, and you need to allow me the freedom to follow them."
Mace shakes his head in frustration, taking a step back from me. "You're fucking impossible, Viola! You're not meant to do this alone."
"I'm not alone, I have my high priest."
He tries to hide his flinch, but I see it, and a flicker of guilt lights up low in my belly. He recovers quickly. "The high priest that you left out there. Viola," he grabs me by both shoulders. " Numen, Miss Mistflow, Shadowweaver. Whatever name I need to call you so you listen to me. This time, it was just entering a building on your own. What will it be next?"
The rest of the group enters the doorway, postures and facial expressions telling me all that I need to know about how unwilling they were to wait for us, and I wrench myself from Mace's grasp. "We've got some skeletons over here with weapons. It seems like this place was protected well."
I slip around Mace and down the hall, knowing this probably isn't the last I've heard of this argument, and find the door that I think will take us to the bailey. I throw it open, and my mouth drops. It's a bigger space than I thought it would be, carved down into the rock of the cliff. On one side is an amphitheater overlooking the ocean. Cracked roads lead to and from it, with broken buildings overgrown with vegetation filling the space.
While the amphitheater is the most striking part of the town, it's the thoughtful design of the town that really impresses me. Not only are there homes, but courtyards in between groupings of them, large halls that most likely were event spaces or schools, and empty rows lined with what at some point must've been permanent booths for a market. Everything is in various states of decay, the stone crumbling and the roofs, which mostly likely had been made of organic matter, completely gone.
If I squint, I can almost see the way this town used to be. The life, the excitement, that came with living in the city of the Gods. I wonder what their daily lives were like. This place is relatively remote, so how did humans end up living here?
"It's a whole town," Plume says quietly.
It's second nature to Decay all the overgrowth, removing the flora that obscures everything and giving a clear picture of the potential this place holds.
"Well, looks like we won't have to hike each way," I say to Tulip with a grin. "We've got houses."
"So what, we're just going to set up camp here?" Morrow asks incredulously. "Colonize this ancient city?"
"Why not?" Zeph says, running his hand on the rock wall of a nearby building. There is no roof, and the front is only a half wall. A blacksmith's shop, maybe. "This is where the Gods resided. This is where we plan to bring them back. Why not try to get it cleaned up?"
We walk slowly through the streets, examining the buildings to see how much work needs to be done in this space. "Do you plan on going back to Ytopie?" Plume asks me, placing a hand on my arm. "I mean, after all of this, will you settle there?"
"I hadn't considered it," I answer honestly. My eyes drift to Mace. He quirks one eyebrow and shrugs as if to say the decision is mine.
"I'm not," she says quietly. "I don't think that I could go back now. Now that I've seen all that the world has to offer," her voice drops, and I catch a quick dart of her eyes at an oblivious Jaz.
"For what it's worth," Mace says, moving closer to my side. "I've spent seventy years in Ytopie. It may be nice to live somewhere else for a change."
"Seventy?" Jaz sputters, eyes wide.
I laugh and pat them on the back. "You'll get used to it. Plume and Zeph are sixty-five, Morrow is forty."
"Fae are something else," they mutter, rubbing their hand through their vibrant red hair. "But for what it's worth, this wouldn't be a bad place for a new city. It's not super easy to get supplies to, as we just learned, but it's easily defensible. But magic should help make the supply thing a little bit less of a problem. It makes sense for a God to be somewhere protected."
"I hadn't considered that," I say honestly.
"Let's do it," Mace says, taking the decision from my hands. While I tend not to like someone making decisions for me, with this one, I am grateful for it. I spent too much of my time fighting to get out of Dalery and to Ytopie, but now they both hold so much baggage. Mace looks at our companions as he takes my hand in his. "We'll do our best to restore the city while we're here. And Viola and I will make this our home."
"And me," Zeph interjects.
"You can't get rid of me that easily, Lola," Tulip says with a wide grin. "I'm stuck to you."
Morrow groans, but there is no real depth behind it. "I guess we're doing this, then."
"Did this place have a name?" Plume asks, slowly walking down some of the stone paths.
Zeph sucks on his teeth but shakes his head. "Never mentioned in the journals. They just made references to being at the Cliffs."
"Then it needs a name!" Tulip says, following Plume, her eyes wide as she takes in all of the buildings. "What should we call it?"
There is silence as we all mull over options in our minds, but one sticks out to me almost immediately. "Rainworth," I say quietly. "We should call it Rainworth."
Jaz grabs my arm, stopping me short. When I turn, I see their eyes shining and the hitch of their breath. "Truly?"
"Truly," I say, placing my hand on top of theirs.
"What's the significance?" Plume asks, turning to look at the both of us. Mace places a hand in the middle of my back, tapping a familiar pattern on my spine, steeling me as I answer.
"Rainworth was Max's surname."