Chapter 6
There was only one course of action left to pursue. She’d decided that the minute she’d left the headmaster’s office and was racing down the hallways covered in sweat, her body convulsing out of fear and confusion. She’d dry-retched twice in unlit brassieres.
There hadn’t been any students about in the hallways thankfully.
None of the janitorial staff either. It had been just her and the many portraits and paintings that hung on the walls.
There was this long recurring joke about these portraits that they moved on their own—an old enchantment placed upon them that animated the pictures within.
But that’s all it was, a joke. No one had ever seen any of the portraits come to life magically.
But that wasn’t to say that Lesya couldn’t feel their gazes upon her as she made her way through the tall hallways. There was an unnatural energy, as if their spirits lingered, haunting.
She descended into the dungeons, making her way through familiar dark hallways till she was through the door of House Balthazar. An empty main hall. The giant window underneath the lake completely dark. Dark the little lights and lamps, dark the cramped hallways leading to the girl’s dormitory.
It soothed her, the coolness and the quiet, and she made her way past the sleeping girls toward her own bed at the end of the dorm. It would take her some time to pack all her belongings and leave for good, leave for somewhere far away where no one would know her, no one would reach her.
No one to remind her of her dreams.
* * *
The first dream came to her a few months ago. The only way she was able to tell if it was a dream was because she was still alive afterward. Given what had happened in the dream—and it was the same dream every time—she should have been dead.
She walked barefoot in a cemetery with moss-covered tombstones and bones littered on the ground. Human bones—fractured femurs, tall tibias, and the odd caved-in skull. It wasn’t a cemetery anywhere she recognized, and she had been to plenty of them.
They were suspended in limbo, amidst cascading galaxies and bright stars in an otherwise black as sin sky.
At the head of the cemetery, behind wrought-iron fences and red roses, there was a throne of bones, and atop it sat a pale maiden robed in black. Her hair was jet-black and the smile on her face was benevolent.
She signaled Lesya to come closer, and Lesya did with fearful steps, stepping over bones, their crunching sounds setting off panic alarms inside her mind.
“Fear not, little one,” the woman said, larger than life, her hand the size of Lesya’s whole body. There was fear there, but there was also some comfort standing in the woman’s presence. “Know you who I am?”
Lesya shook her head.
“I am whom you call in the quiet of the night, when the world has gone to sleep and your eyes are still wet with tears of yesterday,” the woman said, benevolently smiling upon Lesya.
“I don’t know where I am,” Lesya said.
“That is immaterial.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“That is immaterial.”
“I don’t know who I am.”
“That is…material.”
The woman on her throne sat poised with her fingers interlocked and her eyes closed, as if in great deliberation.
“Will you be my champion?”
When Lesya was not able to reply with anything meaningful other than petrified gasps, the woman reached forward, her hand outstretched. Lesya closed her eyes as the fingers closed around her, and woke up gasping.
It was the same dream every time. Sometimes it came to her every week. Lately, she’d been having the dream every other night.
She had devised a draught—a creation of her own—that would not only numb her but also help her forget the dream. It also dulled her emotions and made it really hard to concentrate, but she considered that a very acceptable tradeoff for what she was getting.
Peace. Even if it was manufactured peace.
Today had been a rough day, and the headmaster’s threat had been the cherry on top. He’d coerced her at the end, asking her to sign her name on a contract that bound her to the Solignis Covenant.
Only then had he let her go.
She rummaged around in the bottommost drawer and took out the nearly empty vial. She looked around and confirmed that everyone was sleeping, then drank three drops from the vial.
It would help her forget. It would help her calm down. And perhaps, in the morning, once she woke up with a calmer head prevailing, she’d decide on something else to do other than pack her stuff and run away.
* * *
Lesya knew who the woman was. She didn’t know it at first, and that had been frightening enough on its own, but Headmaster Eldric’s class had a long list of reference books that one could peruse on the subject of dreamwork.
One of them, Prophetic Visions, contained an image of the same lady that she had seen in her dreams.
Next to it, it said, Aeterna, Our Lady of Eternal Silence, Goddess of Aeternum, presiding over all matters of life, death, and resurrection.
Within the same book, after the long catalog of different prophetic figures that could come to a person in a dream, there was a section on what each figure’s appearance could mean.
Here, it felt as if someone had rushed over Aeterna’s section, because there was very little written on the subject matter. In fact, there was just this paragraph and nothing else.
Should you be visited in your dream by Aeterna, exercise caution at once.
It could be that some demon might be masquerading as the Lady of Eternal Silence, because Aeterna never reveals herself to anyone.
There exist no records of her doing so. Seek counsel from a more experienced dreamworker, and put the matter to rest. She is an ill omen to come into one’s dreams.
She wasn’t stupid. The same book had nearly two hundred pages explaining what it could mean if Sol came into your dreams, and what each dream could mean. It was no surprise that the book was written by Eldric Solwyn himself.
That’s why she hadn’t gone to him, even though he had been teaching her for a year. Instead, she had tried to settle the matter on her own by way of the draught she’d made.
There were only a handful of books on Aeternumancy in the library.
Lesya had read them all around the same time as when she’d started having her dreams. She did not find them useful primarily because they were all written by men who followed Solignity and spoke very discouragingly on the matter of resurrection and Aeternumancy.
Followers of Solignity believed that the Lady of Eternal Silence was not a goddess, but a mere angel of death that served Sol.
While there were not a lot of books on Aeternumancy, there were a lot of books on the Necromancy War, and they contained enough about Mortandagh and his cult to give Lesya a better overview of Aeterna and Aeternumancy.
There were no followers of Aeterna in the modern day, but once there were, and Mortandagh was one of them.
He believed, like the rest of those who followed Aeternum, that Aeterna was a goddess in her own right, not subservient to Sol but as strong as him, and while the god of Solignity, Sol, ordained that the nature cycle of life and death be respected and not disturbed, Aeterna taught that dying was a person’s own choice, and if they were not ready to die, they had the right to live.
Aeterna’s followers held that someone should only die when they wished to depart from this mortal realm.
Long ago, in a time that was known as the Belief Age, there were Aeternum priests who would ask after the departed, wanting to know if they had really wanted to die or still wanted to live.
Those who truly wanted death often had a decree written upon their body in the form of a tattoo.
However, those who still wished to live were brought back from the dead, their body and soul intact, and allowed a second chance, a third chance, as many chances as they wished.
When Mortandagh came to power in the previous century, he did so while claiming himself to be an Aeternum priest, wanting to revive belief in Aeternum and preach its message.
It was only until too late—according to the books—that people realized that what he was depicting as Aeternumancy was not Aeternumancy but necromancy.
Profane-craft.
A way to bring the dead back to life without their soul.
With that power, Mortandagh raised for himself an army, and in doing so desecrated not one, but two religions—Aeternum and Solignity.
After the war was won by the Solignis Covenant, all the manuscripts, books, and notes that Mortandagh and his Deathless had gathered at their various temples and hideouts were found and destroyed.
The only belief system that came out prevalent after such a dark time was the religion of Sol, a religion of orthodoxy.
All of which created a problem. There was little known about Aeterna today.
The books of her religion had been burned.
She was cast off in the minds of the people as some kind of heathen goddess, and the priests who took her name during religious processions only ever did so because they believed she was subservient to Sol, not an equal.
Knowing only this, it was extremely problematic for Lesya, who had never pursued Aeterna or her beliefs in her entire life, when the Goddess of Death herself started to visit her regularly in her dreams.
* * *
Despite the calming effects of the draught, she wasn’t swayed from her decision.
There was no other way around it. Or out of it, for that matter.
It was daybreak, and the other students were still asleep when Lesya was finished packing everything she owned.
The sun was no longer an abstract of light behind the hills.
It had climbed up from behind the crests and hung there between the rain clouds.
In another hour or two, there’d be a storm in the valley.
It was probably for the best if she left before then.