47. FORTY-SEVEN #3
Calver huddled over her body and pulled her face into his hands as he’d imagined doing a hundred times. He imagined every ounce of life she’d poured into him flooding back to her. Imagination was such a wonderful thing. Beautiful, infinite… and appallingly useless.
There was a chain around her neck, tucked into her robes. He pulled on it. A familiar stained-glass dragonfly pendant sat on its end.
He’d done this.
The Survivor snaked forward. {A mercy.}
This was what it had wanted all along. Void.
{You don’t have to feel.}
And he shouldn’t. He should have long since turned to ash. He was a blight. A disease. Silence that begot silence. What was going to cure him?
{Your sacrifice at the coronation. I’ve seen all futures for you, Calverous. Your paths all merge in the end.}
He beat the Survivor away with all the mental ferocity he possessed. Void. Void. VOID.
And as though punching through paper, Calver tumbled into a deeper layer of the void than ever before. It spanned out in the eye of his mind—emptiness both imminently and infinitely—and engulfed him.
The pain disappeared.
FANKALO
As Fankalo sat beside Mitek on the pebble beach, the pool of warmth that had sat in her belly through the evening suddenly drained. Her Luck began to churn with darkness. She lifted her head from his shoulder.
Mitek cleared his throat. “Hey, Brat…there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I just wasn’t sure how to say it, considering everything that’s happened.”
Her spine stiffened.
“It’s about Calver.” Mitek ran his teeth over his lower lip.
“You know how we’ve been redacting any transcriptions of the Ratka from Nelfinden medical records?
” There were enough Ghosts now that those who fell ill or injured—or worse—might have their scarring recorded.
Enough that the mark couldn’t pass as coincidence.
She nodded, unsure how much news surrounding Calver she could take. She hoped this was just an issue over a medic refusing their offer to pay him off.
“Well. There’s this doctor, Azim, out in Casowhatan.
And he has this record of a fourteen-year-old boy with an infection on his arm.
And…” Mitek’s eyes found the waves like he was hoping an answer might pop out of the sea.
“He had a scar described exactly as being like the Ratka beneath his collarbone. Same side.”
Fankalo’s skin prickled. Her Ghosts didn’t indoctrinate members below the age of seventeen. And at the age of fourteen, Calver had been behind Tera’thian lines… Hadn’t he?
“You had it redacted, eah?”
There was something wrong with this data. Mitek could have a bad source. Or he could be lying—this could be a continuation of the manipulation to frame Calver as their betrayer, but…
“Yeah. I did. That isn’t the issue, though.
And neither are the age or the location.
Brat, I’ve run the possibilities through my head a hundred times and can’t come up with an answer that doesn’t lead to more questions.
It’s part of why I’ve been sitting on this for almost a week. I didn’t know how—”
“If there’s one thing that will make me bite your head off, chew it up, and spit it back down your neckhole, it’s withholding information.” He’d kept it from her for a week? Her ire flared like a torch. “Mitek, how could you—”
“Because I’m trying to protect you from yourself, Brat!
” He looked at her like she’d grown a pair of fangs.
“You’ve nearly lost your head over this sort of thing—when Calver’s involved—more than once since he left.
” Since she’d forced Calver to leave, at Mitek’s insistence.
“You can’t lead an army when your headspace is fraying at the—”
Her voice darkened. “I am the one who determines what I’m capable of and when I am to be given information uncovered by one of my operatives.”
There was fire in his expression as he stared at her. She met it with steel in her own. Then Mitek’s hands fisted and he looked away in concession.
“The medical report is dated seven twenty-seven post-cataclysm,” he finished.
Fankalo froze. That wasn’t possible.
“Smeared ink?” she asked.
“Clear as day. Dry as a slit fucking vein.”
Twenty-one years ago Calver had been five and still living like a young princeling on Kaidech’s Skywalk with their biological parents. And he certainly didn’t have the Ratka Cul’Mon had carved into him at twelve. “What does it mean?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Captain.”
Fankalo was too distracted to care about the cold formality in his voice.
Calver had never told her he’d committed those atrocities: villages scoured, ships burned, innocents massacred.
Some, yes. But she’d just assumed, based on his fractured account of his time enslaved by Cul’Mon, his scarring, and his skills, that he was the man behind the butcherings.
But now, and considering the inflated rumors of the Ratka—which stemmed back far before her Ghosts had started leaving it—she had to reassess the truth of things. As new possibilities clicked into place, something shifted in her psyche. It set frost into her bones.
“Mitek,” she started, “I think I messed up.”
Calver might have never been the Shadewalker. And if he wasn’t, the real one might still be out there.
And he might not be pleased with what they were doing.
CALVEROUS
Calver floated through the void. The nothingness pressed in on him from all sides, pulling him apart, pressing him together.
It pulsed through his veins, filled his mouth, swelled his lungs.
He could stay this way, pressed into nothing’s embrace forever.
Or he could die at this moment. Both were agreeable.
Calverous.
He wasn’t alone. An impression shared the void with him.
It’s been a very long time since a conduit has passed through here.
It was not the Survivor.
No, not he, it agreed. Though in a way, you could say we are two sides of the same coin.
Creation?
The impression bubbled.
Where are we?
Where we are does not exist.
How did I get here? he asked, though numbed by the void the answer didn’t matter.
Emotive paradox.
Something about the answer scratched at him, cracking his comfort. I don’t understand.
Of course you don’t. It is beyond comprehension.
The void had no sound. No smell. No gravity. It was perfect. It was everything Calver could ever hope for. He didn’t care for answers. And yet—
Will you explain it to me?
Just as you ask questions in a place where answers have no consequence, you wished for everything and nothing all at once, with equal velocity. That is its own contradiction. And so here you are, in the realm of the Fates, where meaning becomes madness.
The perfection of the void suddenly became lacking as Calver tried to piece together what he could have possibly wished for, if not this.
Where are the others? he asked.
As Creation spoke, the images of her words flitted through his mind. Chaos and Preservation stay to the Void’s rim. We are at the heart.
And Destruction?
A conduit goes two ways, Calverous. Each time you enter the space between stars, a reflection of your deepest emotions comes out the other side.
He was Destruction. The truth rang through him.
I don’t understand. How can I be? I feel nothing. Want nothing.
Exactly.
Clarity shattered his non-feeling, and the Void, which had felt so comfortable before, suddenly seemed to push him away. Something trembled inside him. A want. It was antithetical. Impossible.
The void began to slip sideways.
You are not long for this place, and most who come here don’t return. You won’t be able to wield much power. That is for the best.
Power?
Over time. Over space. Over energy. Unstitch the Tapestry. Sew it together. The void does not exist. It is paradox, and therefore ungovernable.
Why was it telling him this?
Because it makes no difference. You know the answer either way.
He saw it then, as it slipped past him: everything that ever had been.
Everything that could be. He became omnipotent to every thought, feeling, possibility: only he didn’t care enough to dwell on any of them.
There was a memory… something he had wanted…
and his mind scraped desperately to retrieve it.
This place. This is the dragonfly?
Creation ignored him, though the Void, sliding faster with each passing second, answered ‘Yes’.
Instead, she sifted through every moment of his life in the blink of an eye.
She pulled on a thread of time, more than fourteen years past. Heed my wisdom, Calverous.
Return here. Don’t follow Thyatira after the Red Wing recruitment in Kaidech.
Go home to your child sister. She will hide you when the Tera’thians invade.
Through this path, I see you live a full life. Together.
The itch grew stronger. The void brightened. As Calver considered its suggestion, the want yawned wide.
Can I… bring Raimee back?
The impression rippled with derision. Yalathia Seraphindo?
Yes.
Creation dismissed him. An unusual desire for a Destruction conduit. And a foolish one. I see all paths. There is no future for you with her in it. Only death.
Calver knew, then, the real reason it had told him anything: it too had an agenda. He suddenly wished for something to break. The Void roiled.
Creation’s impression retracted. Careful. This is how your kind invokes cataclysms.
You’re just like the other. The Survivor. Destruction. You’re using me. You’d have me be your conduit.
You are the Survivor, too, Calverous. I’m giving you a chance to change your nature. To veer your destiny from the path of Destruction.
Caver would not serve as a pawn to yet another Fate. You’re wrong. At least, for the next few moments, she was, as clarity struck him like never before. I am not the Survivor. Not anymore. I am the dragonfly.
The void grew brighter around him. A tear rent its perfect fabric; blinding silver light flooded through.
Tell me what I have to do, he commanded, though the answer came to him before he finished thinking.