Ophelia #2
Ophelia’s not sure how to respond. “His beauty is quite uncanny,” she finally says.
“Much like your own,” the Educator replies. When she looks back at him, he’s squinting like he’s trying to place her. “What’s your name, young one?” he asks, but before she can reply, Alexander’s voice comes loudly through the speakers.
“I am a loser,” he shouts, sounding overjoyed. “I’m a loser!”
Ping! Kallias stops in the air, and then, shockingly, he starts laughing. The girls at the Temple will find that in the recording and replay it for months. She can practically hear them going on about his dimples and his smile already.
“You are a loser,” Kallias responds.
“Oh, don’t sound so pleased.”
“At least they thought you’d solve it. It would be wasted on someone who didn’t.”
“Har, har,” Alexander deadpans. Then his eyes go wide when he visibly remembers that the box he’s trapped in is slowly filling with water.
It’s as if Kallias distracted him from the fact that it was there at all.
“Okay, the water is at my waist right now, which probably means we’re halfway. Let’s get to yours.”
“Right.”
Because I watch, you cast no shadow. I
rightly listen, you make no noise. I leave, out
of your line of sight, but the buzz of silence cloys.
Keeping is not to have, but I do both in every way.
Eternity will seal your lid, so you can’t die, but stay. Go
not roaming in your jar, but shine through cracks at fraying ends. A glow you’ll really try to hide, but everything must bend. Too hard, you doth protest at this literary stew? I do want you to find it out so, fine, I’ll leave a clu.
“Plato and his prophecies,” Ophelia swears under her breath.
The Priestesses were given very specific instructions on the structure of the riddles. This one does not follow the outline at all. It has a strange rhyme scheme and no patterns. They’re meant to be straightforward and conceptual. So then what is this?
“Crap,” Kallias says.
Alexander’s face is ashen when he asks, “What do we do with this?”
“I don’t know,” Kallias admits, like he’s surprised with himself.
“Well, let’s think, okay? What is it trying to say?”
The two of them go back and forth about the rhetoric and the word choice, and Ophelia glances next to her to see if the Educator is upset by the difficulty.
He watches stoically, almost analytically, but he doesn’t seem angry, per se.
Still, whichever Priestess wrote this is about to get into major trouble.
If it was a Priestess at all, a voice whispers in her mind.
As the water level rises, Alexander’s voice gets thinner and thinner with nerves. “We haven’t talked about the ‘I’ yet. Who could that be? Mine didn’t have an ‘I’.”
“Someone who’s monitoring. Or someone possessive, right?”
“Yeah, makes sense.”
“So who or what are they talking to? Is it, like, a concrete thing or an abstract idea?”
“I—I don’t know, Kallias, but I think I’m about to…” Alexander trails off.
“To what?” Kallias asks distractedly, like he’s trying to think of a million different things at once. Ophelia’s heart speeds up with anxiety.
“The water is about to get to my mouth and then I won’t be able to talk to you anymore, but just keep going, okay? I think you’re close,” Alexander blurts out as fast as he can as the water rises to his chin.
“But won’t you float?” Kallias says.
“I’m stuck to the floor.”
That snaps him back to reality. “Oh, Forms. ‘No safety net nor scuba mask.’ You’re going to drown if we don’t get this.”
“Yeah, gorgeous, I’m pretty aware of that,” Alexander shouts, the water quivering right at his bottom lip.
“I—I’m about to go under,” Alexander says, but right before he does, his eyes widen, and he starts to shout, almost incomprehensibly given the water flooding into his mouth.
“Cracks at fraying ends, Kallias! Look at the ends—the endings!” he yells before fully going under.
“Alexander?” Kallias asks, but receives no response. Alexander, from what Ophelia can see, is still breathing through his nose, but soon enough that will be covered too.
“Shit, Forms,” Kallias whispers, abandoning his always-calm veneer for helpless anxiety. “The ends. The endings. I—It’s not—” Kallias drifts off into panicked breathing, too fast to get words out. It looks like he’s trying to have too many thoughts at once and now he’s overloading.
He’s breaking down, Ophelia realizes.
Kallias grabs the front of his shirt like he just needs something to hold onto and slows his breathing with effort. “What comes at the end?” he asks himself. “The last word?”
He tries it out loud, but it’s nonsensical. Ophelia winces. Alexander’s whole lower face is now submerged, and almost his eyes too.
“Alexander, are you… I just—” one of his hands climbs into his hair, pulling so hard she’s scared he’s going to rip it out. “Forms, this is ridiculous,” Kallias chastises himself after maybe a whole ten seconds. “Endings. The last letters? I, t, s, y, o, u. Itsyou?” His eyes open wide. “It’s you.”
He takes a deep breath and asks, quietly, “I am… me?”
Red shines from the ring with a buzz.
“It’s you. It’s you. So what am I, then? I’m…” Then he goes silent, and now he’s not hyperventilating. He’s not breathing at all. Like he’s realized something more than just the answer to the riddle he’s solving.
“I am a firefly,” Kallias whispers before she can have a heart attack.
Ping!
“Alexander?” he asks.
“Both halves of the pair have completed the challenge. Stay still and await further instructions for the next zero minutes.”
“Alexander?” he says again, this time so quietly she can hardly hear it.
Ophelia sighs in relief when the water is suctioned out of Alexander’s compartment and he gasps for breath. “I’m here! I’m here.” The only person more relieved than her is Kallias, whose whole body sags from releasing the tension in his muscles.
Then a ringing sound blares through all of the televisions, and a voice announces, “The challenge is completed, five minutes is up.”
She whispers a thank-you to the Forms that her friends are okay, and that reminds her that not everyone is. The challenge is over and that means all of the many who didn’t finish are going to die, right?
She spins around in fear, but the Auxiliaries that didn’t finish are either dangling right over the water or have just enough room in the compartment to breathe through their noses, their screens outlined in red.
So the whole ‘no safety net’ thing was a bluff then? Seems cruel when the stakes are already high enough. But she supposes it does engage the audience more if it seems like a matter of life and death. And everyone knows half the point of the Trials is the spectacle.
The camera broadcasting to Alexander and Kallias’ screen pans to the sand, where Auxiliaries are finding each other or kissing the ground or thanking the Forms. Music plays loudly over the muted video.
She sees Eudoxia and Zeno run into each other’s arms like long-lost lovers. Zeno lifts her up and Eudoxia wraps her legs around his waist. She smiles wildly into his hair and his hand strokes sweetly up and down one of her legs.
When Alexander passes them they wave excitedly, but Zeno doesn’t put Eudoxia down. He swings her to his back and carries her around the beach threatening to throw her in the water. She’s laughing maniacally into his ear like Arete at her most wild, and it makes Ophelia’s heart melt.
This is why she thinks they’re meant for each other. There’s no one who can make Eudoxia laugh like that, uninhibited and free. And Zeno looks like he’d rather be nowhere else for the rest of his life, glancing over his shoulder every three seconds just to see her face.
Ophelia grins, then refocuses when she sees Alexander smiling at them warmly from a few paces up the sand.
His linen shirt is soaking and sticking to his body like a siren’s wet dream.
Eudoxia always laughs about the fact that he never wears his undershirt, but now Ophelia understands why he doesn’t.
She watches him wave one last time at Eudoxia and Zeno before turning around to search the beach.
Once he finds what he’s looking for, he is a man on a mission.
It’s not hard to see who he’s on his way to.
Kallias’ hair makes him stick out in any setting, especially now that he’s milling at the edge of the crowd near the waves.
When Alexander gently places a hand on his shoulder, Kallias doesn’t startle. He just slowly looks down to the hand, then the arm, then farther and farther until he gets to Alexander’s eyes. He turns so they’re facing each other and Alexander asks him something, frenzied and desperate.
Kallias tilts his head and nods, and Alexander pulls him into one of the most passionate hugs she’s ever seen in her life.
One hand on Kallias’ lower back, and the other in his hair, both rough and tender at the same time.
Kallias’ eyes meet the camera for a moment like he’s worried someone’s watching, but he looks away just as quickly and gives in, melting into the embrace.
His face is buried in Alexander’s neck, arms wrapped around his back.
Forms, they’re so sweet.
The broadcast does one more pan around the beach before shutting off. When she looks next to her, the Educator is walking away. There’s a meal and a replay of the highlights for everyone in the towers, but perhaps the Educator has more important things to do with his time.
She distributes more food and tries to remind herself of the wonderfully relaxing night she’s going to have tomorrow with her friends as the hoots and hollers of the viewers leave her scowling.
They agreed to meet in Zeno’s room and do nothing but sit around, which Ophelia has no problem with.
That was unbearably stressful for her and all she did was watch.