Chapter Five The Keeper
They had not gone far down the stone path when a figure stepped out from between two of the frozen echoes — a living figure, unlike the others, moving and breathing and very much awake.
She was tall, with skin the color of dark honey and eyes that shifted color like light through water. She wore a robe made of the same pale, moonlit material as the towers, and around her neck hung a small silver key on a long chain.
"Cassian Vale," she said, her voice carrying like a bell across still water. "It has been a long time."
"Maren," Cassian said, and Lyra heard real surprise in his voice. "You're still here."
"Someone must keep the Kingdom," the woman said simply. "Someone must remember, when everyone else has been allowed to forget." Her strange eyes turned to Lyra, studying her with a careful kind of interest. "And this must be her. The girl the whole realm has been waiting for."
"I'm Lyra," Lyra said, unsure how else to introduce herself to someone who apparently already knew exactly who she was.
"I know," Maren said, and there was something gentle in the way she said it.
"I am Maren. (The Keeper of this realm — the one who watches over every memory that lives here, and makes sure none are lost twice.) I have watched you arrive here in many forms, across many centuries, though this is the first time you have arrived not knowing why. "
"Then tell me why," Lyra said. "Please. I'm tired of not knowing things everyone else seems to understand."
Maren glanced at Cassian, something passing between them that Lyra could not read.
"The Kingdom does not simply open its doors for visitors," Maren said carefully. "It opens when something inside it needs to be found. A memory that has been buried too deep. A truth that the living world has tried very hard to erase."
"What kind of truth?"
"That," Maren said, "is what you are here to discover.
" She turned and began walking down the stone path, the silver key at her neck catching the golden light.
"Come. I will show you where to begin. But be warned, Lyra Solis — once you start waking echoes in this place, you cannot choose only the gentle ones.
Memory does not work that way. Truth does not work that way. "
Lyra glanced at Cassian, who was watching Maren's back with an expression she could not quite name. Worry, maybe. Or fear.
"Cassian," she said quietly, so only he could hear. "Is there something in here you don't want me to find?"
He looked at her for a long moment, and for the first time since she had known him, Lyra saw something close to guilt cross his face.
"There is a great deal in here I do not want you to find," he admitted quietly. "But I promised no more secrets. So whatever we find, Lyra — we find it together."
It was not quite an answer.
But it was, Lyra thought as she followed Maren down the endless golden path, the most honest thing he had said to her all day.