Chapter 34 #2
“It seems to me that you are also facing a choice that could save your life. No one is forcing you into the White Trial, Amber. And as I’ve said repeatedly since the first day of this term, if you do not feel ready for a trial, you should not undergo it.
And you know that. Yet somehow you feel justified in blaming me for keeping my oath to the institute to which I’ve devoted my entire life.
You would evidently rather see me throw away my career and any benefit it could bring mankind than face a choice you don’t want to make. ”
“I…” I could see the fire in my own cheeks like the sun on the horizon of my vision. “No. I apologize. You’re entirely correct. Just because you helped me last time doesn’t mean that you owe me that same help this time. In fact, you owe me nothing.”
Desmond blinked, and with that one small motion, he suddenly looked as startled as if I had slapped him.
“I did not tell you what you would face at the Black Trial, and I would not have, even if I’d known.
I only highlighted research you’d already done for yourself.
I get no credit for how you performed, or for any of your work.
And that must be the case with the White Trial, else you will not have truly passed, and the Amber I know and respect would never be able to live with herself under that circumstance.
And you are not so changed that you are not still that Amber Fallbrook. No matter what you may have forgotten.”
There was something in his words. Something stalwart in the bulk of them, and something heartbroken in the last sentence, the combination of which brought stinging tears to my eyes.
A maelstrom of emotion swirled within me, stemming not just from what he’d said but from the unshakable certainty that he was referring, at least in part, to some event or circumstance I could no longer remember.
There was something he was not telling me.
And suddenly, it was all—every bit of it—too overwhelming to bear. Not just that I was unprepared for the trial, but that I should not be unprepared. That I’d been robbed of my preparedness.
Not just that I could not remember any important event from the past two years of my own life, but that he remembered much of what I’d forgotten.
It wasn’t just that he knew what I would face at the White Trial when I did not, it was that I’d asked him to compromise the very ethics that made him a stellar alchemist in the first place rather than working to earn my own place alongside him.
And more than all of that, it was the fact that I was compromising myself by asking. And that he knew it.
The laboratory blurred behind my tears, and I swiped them away, which gave me a clear view of the sudden helplessness in his expression.
He had no idea what to do with tears.
I grabbed my satchel and rushed toward the door. Desmond’s steps shuffled behind me, but I waved him off without a glance back. “Don’t!” I snapped. “I’m fine.”
The shuffling ceased and I slammed the laboratory door behind me, but I only made it halfway down the grand spiral staircase before I realized that it would be unbefitting and dramatic of me to run across the quadrangle crying like a small child.
Especially considering that nothing had actually happened.
I was neither ill nor injured, and not a thing had changed in my life or circumstance since five minutes before, when I’d been respectably dry-eyed.
So I sank onto the stairs for a moment of solitude in which to gather my wits. And as I concentrated on breathing slowly and calming the irrational impulse deep inside me—which seemed directly and frustratingly tethered to my tear ducts—a soft wash of color caught my attention.
I blinked to clear my vision, and I realized that the refraction of light through the stained glass above was not from the sun but from the moon. The weaker light source left the colors washed out, yet…
There was one strong flash among them, like the glint of bright sunlight through a magnification lens. The scene itself was stretched and blurred, though still recognizable as Queen Avalona on her deathbed, and when I looked up at the stained glass, I understood what that flash was.
It was moonlight streaming through the multifaceted surface of her legendary ring. The light was bright and starkly colorless, painting a single sharp beam of light on the wall to stand out against the other softly blurred colors.
That beam was centered directly over the tread my feet rested on. In another hour, as the moon shifted, it would likely fall on the metal plate serving as trim just above the stairs. Or maybe on the trim of the step below.
How had I never noticed before that the stair treads were trimmed with metal?
A dull sort of epiphany stole over me, like the day’s first ray of light spilling over the ocean. It was indistinct, but I could feel it wanting to come into focus, like the tiny words on the scroll in need of a magnification lens.
Queen Avalona had died, despite Lord Calyx’s best efforts to the contrary, and every day and every night, the sun and moon shone through the memorial glass, painting her death on the wall of the building he’d designed every single line of…
Now the moon shines. When the ouroboros bit off its tail.
The moon shines…through the scene of her death. Through the very moment the ouroboros bit off its tail.