Chapter Nine Questions Cassian Wont Answer
Iris walked to one of the tall arched windows and looked out over the golden, unmoving sky of the Kingdom.
"I was born in a kingdom called Aveline," she began.
"A small, proud country, ruled by a king who feared the stars almost as much as he worshipped them.
I met Cassian the way you always meet him — suddenly, completely, like the world had simply decided we belonged together and skipped the part where we were supposed to be strangers first."
Lyra found herself leaning forward, hungry for every word.
"We were happy," Iris continued. "For three years, we were happy. And then the Hollow Court came."
"The same enemies who hunt us now," Lyra said.
"The very same. Though in my time, they were not hidden.
They ruled openly, a council of ancient men and women who believed that love like ours — love that survives death, love that remembers across lifetimes — was a danger to the order of the world.
They believed that if people like us were allowed to remember too much, too many times, we would eventually remember something they very much did not want remembered. "
"Remember what?" Lyra pressed.
Iris's eyes flicked, just briefly, to Cassian. "Ask him."
Cassian's jaw tightened. "Iris."
"I am not going to lie for you anymore, Cassian Vale," Iris said, not unkindly, but without softness either.
"I have watched you carry this alone through a dozen lives.
I watched it crush you in mine. I am not going to watch it crush hers too, not when she is standing right here, asking you honestly, and you keep choosing silence over her. "
Lyra turned to face him fully. "Cassian. Please."
For a long moment, the tall round room was utterly silent, the golden light from the windows painting long shadows across the floor.
"There is something at the very beginning of all of this," Cassian finally said, his voice low and rough.
"Before Iris. Before any life either of us remembers.
A first life. A first choice. And that choice is the reason all of this keeps happening — the reason we keep meeting, keep loving, keep losing each other, over and over. "
"What was the choice?" Lyra asked.
"I don't know if I can tell you yet," Cassian said, and there was real pain in his voice now, not evasion.
"Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't think you're ready to carry it.
I've watched what it does to you, Lyra, in life after life, when you learn it too soon. I've watched it break you."
"That's not your decision to make," Lyra said quietly, but firmly. "I have spent this entire journey being protected from truths other people decided I couldn't handle. I'm done with that, Cassian. I would rather be broken by the truth than protected by a lie."
Cassian looked at her for a long, long moment. Something in his eyes shifted — not quite surrender, but close to it.
"Then let me show you differently," he said finally. "Not tell you. Show you. There is a place deeper in this Kingdom, older than the Hall of Whole Lives, older than Iris's memory. If you truly want the beginning, Lyra, that is where we have to go."
Maren, who had been silent through all of this, spoke at last, her voice careful.
"The First Room," she said. "I wondered if it would come to this."
"What is the First Room?" Lyra asked.
Cassian took a slow breath, like a man preparing to step off a very high ledge.
"The place where all of this began," he said. "Come. It's time you saw it."