Chapter 9
Obliteration
Elloven bathed in the morning’s first light with a satisfying stretch, ending the first full night’s rest she’d had in the Infinitum without her draught.
As she yawned and sluggishly rolled to the side, her face bumped Jesstin’s knee. She opened her eyes and found him sitting on the bed with his legs crossed.
“Sleep well?” Jesstin’s halfhearted smile was pointed at his hands, wrung tight in his lap.
“Better than I have in a long while.” Something was wrong. “Did you sleep at all?”
Jesstin shook his head. He hadn’t looked at her.
She deflated against the headboard. “Ah.”
“No, no, it’s not that. I... I loved that. So much.” He unwound his hands long enough to give her leg a brief, almost brotherly squeeze. “We have to get out of here, but first we really need to talk.”
“That statement rarely leads anywhere good,” she said lightly, hoping to bring forward a smile that might ease her fear, but he was no less distant.
“I wanted to tell you sooner, but I needed to wait until we were together. Really together, not in the Night Soul. This is a thing you do face-to-face.”
Elloven pulled herself into a fully seated position. She knew he’d been keeping something from her. “You’re scaring me.”
“I met your Shioven the night I arrived in the Infinitum. Your mother.”
“What?” What remained of her peace evaporated. “How?”
“She was expecting me.” He recommitted to his lap-gazing. “I should have told you last night. I started to—” He sighed. “I just wanted you to be happy for a few hours.”
“So that’s why you...” She didn’t dare finish, not even in thought.
“I made you come, Elloven, because I wanted to. I enjoyed every—” He made a bracing sound and cleared his throat. “I would do it again and again, but this has been hanging over me since I met her, and it would feel... It is dishonest to go any further without just telling you what she told me.”
Elloven was relieved and scared in the same breath. “Why do you sound so... Was she a monster?”
Jesstin sanded his hands. “No, not at all. I wouldn’t be here now if she hadn’t saved my life.”
“Then what?” Elloven readied herself for the worst.
“I understand now why the curias have been so obsessed with you. Our time in Rivenholde finally makes sense. Taven’s role is clearer too, though I doubt he knows even half of what she told me.
Estelar and Acheron’s ambitions make Ryquin’s seem.
..” Jesstin’s mouth creased in disgust. “Insignificant. My memory of that first night...” He massaged his neck.
“Everything in the Infinitum has felt like dream after dream after dream, all right, so please let me finish before you ask me anything because some of it is already fading, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.
I don’t want to forget. I can’t forget, and you need to know.
All right?” He nodded to coax her answer.
“I guess I don’t have a choice,” Elloven said. She was relieved his grim mood wasn’t a consequence of the night before, but she wondered how he’d kept his concern so buried until the morning. She’d clocked his distractedness, but this was another man altogether.
“You always have a choice with me.” Jesstin’s gaze was solemn. “Know that.”
She nodded and mustered some patience. “I trust you. I’ll try.”
He raised an arm toward the other side of the room. “I had some of the other cider brought up while you were sleeping. Not the lingonberry. If you get thirsty.”
Elloven smiled at his thoughtfulness, especially with how scattered he was. “Thank you. I’ll try some in a bit.”
Jesstin adjusted his posture. “First, if I could have brought her to you, El, I would have. She didn’t tell me these things.
She showed me through some magic that exposed the past, but it was all over the place.
It was like watching a play while drunk on backyard brandywine.
I saw conversations... interactions. Most happened long before you or she were born.
I don’t remember falling asleep, and I’m not convinced I was even awake when it happened, but when I came to my senses, she was gone. ”
“Did she say why...” Elloven flattened her mouth with a contrite look and raised a hand. “Sorry.”
“Why she hadn’t sought out her daughter herself?” Jesstin asked. “It’s not that she didn’t want to. Someone or something cursed her from ever being near you again. She waited for me because of you. She’d been waiting a long time.”
“Who would do that?”
“I can only tell you what she showed me. Guessing would be careless.”
“Yes,” she said, quiet.
“I can’t remember what you do and don’t know. If you’ve heard it before, just let me talk, so I don’t lose my place, and I promise you can ask as many questions as you want when I’m done.”
Elloven nodded.
“First of all, ‘prominence’ is a little more complicated than Estelar let on. You already know each curia has a house of magic they specialize in, and that they can dip their toes in others, like Taven with his healing, but they can’t practice it the way someone with prominence can.
But it wasn’t always like that. At one time, the curias didn’t even exist. There was no such thing as prominence because everyone could tap into any house of magic.
The Seven Sisters were outposts, not separate communities.
Most of the people lived in Ilynglass and traveled between worlds regularly.
All very serene and democratic, right? But you can imagine what might happen when thousands of people with that much power.
.. There were wars fought, borders drawn, other predictable chaos.
They were on the brink of annihilation. An emergency council was formed, and they decided the best option was to give every citizen the choice of one magic to keep.
The choice was binding, and they sealed it with a mark of their new prominence, which was passed along through their descendants.
So the Sisters were split, the curias formed, and magic was broken up.
But something else happened, and everything that’s happened since started there.
There was someone on the council, an extremist who believed they weren’t doing enough, who’d been saying throughout all of this that none of what they’d implemented would work unless the portails between worlds were closed, and the people of the curias barred from ever going back to the source of their magic.
No one listened, and he decided he didn’t need the council’s approval.
It’s not clear to me how, but he’s the one who closed the doors between worlds, and it seems like what happened here, in the Infinitum, was caught up in it.
Maybe they didn’t know how to be selective and just closed them all to be safe? I don’t know.
“Most of those who’d agreed with the initial plan were, as you can imagine, pretty fucking unhappy about being barred from their homeland.
There were insurgents in every curia and some unsuccessful uprisings, never anything too serious, but over the next generation, those sentiments gathered momentum, and a new order was formed.
They made another council, Defenders of the Glass Tree, inviting individuals from every curia who shared their goal of reuniting the worlds, and there were thousands who joined, but none of them knew how to do it.
But at this first council, the silver tongues of Eversong brought ten of their best storytellers.
All ten were separated, and the council hammered them with question after question, hoping for an answer to the problem.
On most questions, the storytellers were divided.
But on one question, they all said the same thing—the exact same thing. ”
Jesstin cleared his throat. “The Silver Deca, as these ten prophets came to be known, claimed that the one who had cursed the portails had a very specific pedigree that made it possible. Think one in a trillion. There hadn’t been anyone like them born since, but through a selective and intentional breeding plan, it was possible to create another.
The child wouldn’t just have all the curias in their blood, which isn’t uncommon, they’d have the perfect mix of all seven.
Not all seven equally split either. There was a particular importance put on time and chaos.
.. The math seemed complicated. It could be anyone, many people even, it was all about the perfect combination of ancestry.
This person would not only be able to reopen the portails; they’d also be able to recombine the magic.
“The process was overseen by the silver tongues of Eversong, who could see the many paths available and guide the leaders of this breeding program down the right ones. But then the silver tongues produced a list of thirty children across the curias whose descendancy was most likely to produce this individual, and all of those children were kidnapped from their beds and placed in a hidden encampment in Skyfire. The silver tongues claimed that between their sight into possible futures and Skyfire’s blood magic, there’d be no doubt of their success.
As soon as each child came of age, they formally entered the program, and.
.. What happened next was exactly what you’re thinking.
When they aged out of childbearing, they were murdered.
Couldn’t have them going home and telling everyone else how Eversong and Skyfire were imprisoning and breeding children, could they? ”
Elloven knew where he was going, and she needed to hear it, but she almost wished he’d stop there.