Chapter 18 #3
My eyes dart over the garden, observing it more closely. In the back left corner, partially obscured behind a stunted weeping tree, there’s a large area fenced on all sides by thickets of rosemary.
Numbness steals over my body as I stand and walk towards it. Part of me doesn’t want to look, knowing what I’m likely to see. But I can’t stop myself. I peer over the rosemary.
Neat rows of regularly spaced mounds, each one topped by a tiny diamond. Too many to count.
In Meissa, under the ever-spreading shadow of Flamefever, we now cremate our dead within a moonsrising of their passing, commending departed spirits to the Void beyond the Stars.
Beyond the Veil. Tombs are reserved for Regents only.
But in the Hill Country, they still practise the ancient custom of burying their untainted dead in remembrance gardens.
Izarius taught me that, explaining their antiquated tradition of burying bodies vertically to encourage the spirit’s ascent to the firmament, of marking graves with diamonds to help the dead find their way back to the stars.
The size of the remembrance diamond indicates the age of the departed spirit.
Judging by the minute gems in this plot, this is a garden of lost children. Lost neverborns.
Pressure builds behind my eyes; they start to sting. How many generations, how many families, have endured this pain because of what Arden unleashed? Because of the cursed magic that flows in my veins.
I think of my parents’ losses. The five before me; the one that came after. Never discussed, that procession of tiny lost souls destroyed my family. If they had lived – if any of them had lived – things might have been different.
I’ll never forget the night we farewelled the last one.
My brother. The char that lingered in the palace gardens for a moonsquarter, the size of the remains – piteous, even to my child eyes.
I tried not to look, not to see the mottled fingers and toes, no bigger than my smallest fingernail, peeping through the shroud.
I focused instead on the tears tracking my mother’s cheeks and the tortured expression in my father’s eyes as he vowed before the pyre this would be the last time.
He kept his word. He always keeps his word. There were no more pregnancies for my mother after that. They hid their pain, swallowed it whole, but I saw the dead-eyed glances that passed between them. I heard my mother’s desperate, hollow cries in the night.
If only my mother never left the safety of the Crystal City for the Asteum.
If only she hadn’t needed to find answers about her cursed child when my powers started to manifest. If only she’d never caught the fever on that fateful journey.
If only she’d rested during her convalescence, instead of tending to her fretful daughter.
Perhaps then, the fever wouldn’t have taken such a devastating hold.
Perhaps then, my brother wouldn’t have been birthed before his time.
Perhaps then, he might have been spared.
If only. The saddest words in the shared tongue.
I can’t stay here. My gorge is rising, my throat closing.
The stench of smoke seems to swirl the air dragging me back to that awful night.
For a moment, the thought of the hoarclaw, its eviscerating claws and slavering jaws stills my feet, but surely it will have moved on by now?
I flee the garden, stumbling as I re-enter the tunnel.
A cry slips my throat as my knees slam against the earth.
‘Orthriel!’ My cry is the pathetic mewl of a kitten.
I try again, but my Guardian doesn’t answer.
I beat in vain at the door connecting our minds.
‘Where are you?’ The tunnel’s sour reek is choking me.
Panic starts to surge. Breathe. Keep breathing.
I repeat this instruction like a charm as I crawl along the tunnel, repeat it until my breaths are even and slow. Until the world slowly rights itself.
Gripping the moon-arch to steady myself, I stand and peer around the vine-throttled masonry.
It’s growing dark, but the woods are still, silent as…
I don’t finish the thought. My legs are weak, wavering like a fading star, but they carry me.
The mutilated image of Arden from the Reliquary portrait swims before me as I walk back to camp, along with a procession of the faceless neverborns buried in that remembrance garden, the phantom siblings I never got to meet.
They swirl against a backdrop of wizened vines and mouldering starfruit.
Loss, so much senseless loss.
Horror turns to rage.
I lift my chin and search for the Astral Mountain through the trees. Something hardens when my eyes light on its wan glow piercing the darkening horizon; as if the star-laced blood running through my veins has turned to ice.
I may be the last Starborn Seer, but I’ve been blind.
Finding the Starlight Staff, finding it quickly, it’s the only thing that matters.
And not because it could save my mother’s life and earn me my father’s forgiveness.
I’ve been approaching this all wrong. Only thinking of myself, about how this quest could benefit me.
But it’s so much bigger than that. The realms are broken; this is a chance to do more than repair rotting threads.
We can weave our world anew, spin new patterns.
This is more than just a way out. This is the chance to fashion a better Arcelia.
To change our stars.
I care about my people. I care about the Outrealmers too – and I care what happens to their homelands.
I have to stop what Arden put in motion. Stop it, or die trying.
With new purpose crystallising my resolve, I’m about to hasten through the glade, to ensure I make it back to camp before darkness shrouds the woods, when a clacking sound splits their shaded hush. I turn, and immediately wish I hadn’t.
It’s the hoarclaw, and this time its tar-black eyes are fixed on me as it snaps its teeth together, spittle foaming and stringing on its tusks. The instructions Astrophel issued in the Armoury ring in my ears. I fall to the ground, pine needles sharp against my cheek.
Die trying?
Famous last words.