Chapter Thirteen Elician
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elician
It is dark in this room.
Dark enough that Elician wonders if it is a real place at all or if he is in another dream.
Another hall. Another room waiting for the flood to come.
It is the uncertainty that leaves him relaxing deeper into his pillow, waiting languidly for the peaceful flow of promise and potential to lap against his skin.
Listening for that echo of waves and words whispering in a language he never learned to speak and yet still could understand: Who am I?
‘El?’
He turns his head. Barely gets a chance to see the person the voice belongs to before arms are jerking him upright in a fierce embrace that leaves his head spinning and consciousness teetering back towards the brink. ‘Fen,’ he mumbles against her hair.
‘Gods, El! Do you have any idea how long it’s been?’
No. No idea at all. He blinks, struggling to pull her into focus. She seems to be glowing, radiating with life and purpose and untapped potential. It ripples across her skin like a stone dropped in a too-still pond, rolling and rolling on and on.
She answers her own question when he fails to provide one of his own. ‘It’s been five days!’
‘Oh…that’s it?’ He had dreamed of lifetimes. He had held lifetimes in his hand. He had walked into a river of possibility and all the world had felt as though it was exactly where it needed to be. That every life is sacred, and everything happens because it is meant to pass.
‘That’s it? No one knew what to do with you. Cat’s been running himself ragged. Lio’s been unbearable – we didn’t know if you were ever going to wake up!’
‘What happened? While I was…’ Swimming, wading, bathing, drifting. ‘Away.’
Fen pulls back and slumps heavily against the bed, sitting at his thigh.
‘They just finished a census, counting everyone and seeing who’s here…
who’s left…who’s missing. There are thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and twelve people in Altas.
That’s including all the soldiers who died at least once during the melee.
You brought back thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and twelve people. ’
He slides down on the bed, weary muscles struggling to keep him up.
His pillow is comfortably warm beneath his head, his spine eager to settle back into place.
Even his eyes are prepared to close and let him slumber once more.
‘Five days isn’t long for all that work,’ he muses idly, thoughts turning soupy.
‘Suppose not,’ Fen grants him. ‘But we worried about you the whole time. You brought people back from ashes, Elician.’
‘What?’ He blinks, trying desperately to clear his head. The exhaustion is crushing through him, all-consuming. ‘I did what?’
‘Those…those…monsters had been disposing of the corpses. Burning them on funeral pyres. But you brought everyone back to life. Every single person in the city, even the ones whose bodies were no longer bodies anymore. All of them.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘How could you not know what you were doing? When I bring people back, I know I’m bringing them back.’
Elician is not entirely sure what to say to that.
He had never seen their bodies, never known the total number of all those he was reaching for.
He had simply felt the endless death and destruction of a city full of his people who wanted nothing more than to go about their lives without getting slaughtered by an army of the dead.
‘I could feel their souls,’ Elician says.
‘And all of them were…it felt like they knew that it was wrong.’ Elician closes his eyes.
He tries to remember what he felt, what it looked like before him.
‘Like they had been thrown to the wrong side of a dam, and all they desperately wanted was to continue flowing forward, but they were being stopped by a barrier.’
‘And…the dam here is death?’ Fen asks slowly.
‘Mm…I could see it. I waded into the river. It should have flowed all around me, but the boulders were too high, and so I moved the stones. I just…I pushed them aside, and when they fell, the river flowed just like it was supposed to in the first place. None of Altas’s citizens were meant to die then.
It wasn’t their time. It wasn’t right. So, I just…
ensured that they could keep on living, just like they were supposed to.
The hardest ones were the ones at the bottom of the river.
Sometimes…it felt like I needed to swim into the depths, and I couldn’t breathe as I tried to push them aside. But…they’re all here?’
‘Cat organized a few parties to go through and take a count, and so far, our counts are all coming up clear. No households are missing anyone. Even the homeless population has reported in. All the tourists too. The city didn’t have an accurate census before, but…
we can’t find any evidence of someone not returning with the rest. A lot of people wanted to just evacuate and leave.
They didn’t want to stay after…everything.
Lio and Cat kept them from doing it until we at least had a good sense of who was even here, but they opened the gates up yesterday, once it really did seem like they were all accounted for. ’
Over thirty-seven thousand…No wonder he had slept for days, wading and swimming and lapping at the shores of a river that never let him go.
I’m surprised I did wake up, he thinks, this time catching the thought before it falls from his traitorous lips.
I’m surprised Death let me. ‘I’m glad,’ he tells his sister. ‘And you…? You’re okay?’
‘I’m fine. I’ve been here, watching over you. Cat comes in at night to sleep, but otherwise…I’ve been here.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s…fine, I guess. There were these pendants that were stopping him from using his powers right, so the soldiers were still fighting even though he was trying to get them to stop, and then he overdid it and…It doesn’t really matter – I healed him and he’s all right now. Promise.’
‘He couldn’t stop the army?’ He doesn’t remember that. Doesn’t remember anything of the battle at all. He had reached out, reached with everything he had, and – there had been water. Water, and all the souls of the dead. ‘Where is he?’
‘I can get him?’ she offers. He nods, and she leans down to hug him once more. She kisses his cheek, then hurries from the room.
Perhaps they should have waited together for Cat to eventually find them, though. Because, left alone, his bones seem to weigh more than they did before. His eyelids sink shut. He breathes in too deep, then falls back to sleep.
Who am I? a voice asks. It’s familiar. So familiar. Like the skin around his body or the kiss of wind on a cool day.
It is neither feminine nor masculine. And yet he knows it.
Who am I? it asks once more, insistent and firm.
Where does he know it from?
The water swallows him whole.
Elician wakes and the room is even darker than before.
He cannot make out the ceiling. He cannot hear the gentle sounds of life from beyond the room’s window or beneath the room’s floor.
He shifts and tries to sit up, but there’s a weight at his side.
‘Cat,’ he murmurs. The head springs up from where it was resting on Elician’s hip.
‘Could have slept on the bed properly,’ Elician slurs.
There should be enough room. The bed is not too narrow for that.
‘Can’t see your face…’ Cat leaves his bedside; Elician whines at the sudden loss of contact, but then an orange light illuminates the room.
He has lit a lantern. The colour is wrong.
Elician slurs, ‘Oh…s’not blue,’ as Cat retakes his place at Elician’s side.
‘They’re only blue in Alelune,’ Cat tells him, taking his hand in his.
‘Why is it blue in Alelune?’ His tongue trips on the alliteration, but Cat seems particularly smart to his muddled brain. He understands Elician perfectly well. How nice, to be married to such an obliging individual.
‘Because we do not use phosphorous, and our wicks are coated in the ground powder of blue stones. When heat is applied, they spark on their own and create a self-sustaining cycle of oxygen consumption and oxygen regeneration. They burn hotter as a result, and the flames are always blue.’
‘Did Elena teach you that?’ Elician asks.
Cat shakes his head and says, ‘My father.’ Elician should have guessed.
Cat’s knowledge about blue stones has always come from one place.
He squeezes his hand around Cat’s fingers.
Not quite an apology, but perhaps he didn’t need to offer one in the first place. ‘We were worried about you,’ Cat says.
‘Were you?’
‘Yes. We didn’t know what news to send back to Himmelsheim.’ Elician does not envy Cat the position he has been in.
This time, he manages the apology. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It is not your fault.’
There are deep, dark circles under Cat’s eyes. Elician’s heart aches at the sight. He reaches for Cat’s face, cups it with his palm and rubs his thumb beneath one beautiful sea-green eye. ‘Fen said you were hurt.’
‘Only for a little while.’
‘How?’
‘Our powers are not meant to work against others of our kind,’ Cat explains simply. ‘Our bodies maintain a level of homeostasis with relative ease, so to force this to stop, to reject that…’
‘It’s like building a dam in the middle of a rushing river,’ Elician muses.
‘Yes. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold my fellow Reapers like that for long, but…I thought I would be able to manage with the army. Something stopped me. It took more from me than I anticipated.’ He laughs. ‘The river pushed back, shall we say.’