Chapter 18 #5
Aurora toured their stalls and allowed them to tell her all kinds of fanciful tales about their wares. Theron for his part met with a group of well-dressed nobles near a broken fountain. A leaping dolphin was cut in half, its crumbling head peeking out of a shallow basin of murky water.
“Has there been trouble in the town?” Aurora asked.
“Yes, Your Highness. The spirits here are angry. Just last week they broke the fountain and fouled the water. And the week before that, a farmstead up the road burned down. They don’t even wait until dusk and dawn anymore, Your Highness.”
The merchant’s eyes beseeched her. He was asking for reassurance, for hope. She was about to tell him not to worry, that they would make it right, when Theron’s words cut into her heart.
“You cannot…give someone that kind of hope. What if it had failed? His parents’ grief would be all the greater, and when grief turns to rage, it would have been you they blamed—your name they whispered to Vengeance and Death.”
What if this didn’t help? What if their efforts failed?
In her time so few knew of her role in the cycle of calamity that she hadn’t been confronted with someone begging her for help.
In this time, she’d had to fight so hard just to be believed and gain allies that she hadn’t even considered anyone asking her for aid in this way.
Mostly, she placed the pressure on herself, knowing what she would lose if she failed.
Though the responsibility of one chosen by Fate and one who wore a crown didn’t seem so different in theory, she’d never been asked to shoulder both desperate hope and the possibility of bitter condemnation.
She had grown accustomed to the idea of failure meaning her own death. There was a strange peace in that. There was no after in that case. What she couldn’t accustom herself to was the idea of her failure meaning someone despised her—or died and left her with the guilt. It frightened her.
“And that is why we’re travelling to the Dragon’s Spine Mountains,” she said, hating her carefully worded cowardice. Was she so pathetic that someone’s hope was too much for her?
The merchant beamed at her, and Aurora felt her innards turn to jelly. Yes, she was that pathetic. She thought she would make a better monarch than Theron? What a fool she was. How did anyone bear the weight of it?
“Blessings of the Triad on the star of Aureum.”
Just as she was mentally reminding herself to return the man’s smile, a deep, ominous crack rent the air.
Thunder? Her gaze shot upwards. Horror rooted her to the spot as fissures raced through the tall stone columns and then the thick wooden roof overhead.
People began screaming, but in their panic, they tripped over stalls, merchandise, each other.
Her own guards circled her, not yet realising the source of the threat.
She gasped.
Backwards.
Aurora fumbled with her artefact, twisting the band, her magic roused by her own terror.
Backwards. Backwards. Backwards.
Her magic was a great serpent, its body filling the space and holding the pillars and roof up, begging them to slow and then return.
It fought her, trying to buck her control, recoiling from her demands.
Another thunderous groan. Part of the roof collapsed and she screamed, her magic grabbing it in its teeth.
“Your Highness!”
Her guards tried to move her, but her magic rooted her to the spot.
“AURORA!”
Go. Backwards.
She snarled, dragging her magic kicking and screaming, refusing to allow it to pull her under.
No matter how it beat against her, how it resisted, she would not budge.
And she could see she was winning the battle.
The roof rose, the cracks in the pillars retreating.
As if raining in reverse, chips of stone and splinters of wood rose through the air to return to where they’d once been.
But deep in her bones she knew the moment she released her hold the structure would crack and crumble once more.
Something more than her magic was pressing against the structure, something old and angry and greater than she’d ever imagined.
Aurora pushed it from her mind. She twisted the ring on her artefact once more, not for days, but decades.
The wrongness flooded into her as ancient anger swiped at her, gouging out pieces, a lion batting a mouse between its paws.
She would not yield.
“Backwards!” she cried.
Slowly the strange sense of anger faded. From a roaring shout to a discontented whisper. It was only once the wooden ceiling looked newly laid and the paint on columns freshly painted that she let go, her magic spent.
Aurora fell to her knees, limbs trembling, her heart hammering in her chest, drowning out all other sound.
A headache bloomed behind her eyes. Blood gushed from her nose, the coppery tang rolling down the back of her throat.
She gripped her artefact in her hands, the bands biting so hard into her palms she knew she’d cut them.
But she couldn’t look away at what she’d done.
The structure wasn’t just repaired—it looked new. Not a single scuff or stain remained. That strange being of anger was quiet, vanishing from her senses. A laugh bubbled up inside her. She’d done it. She’d reversed time. Not just for a scrap of paper, but a whole structure.
The people under the stoa fled from the structure, but none of them had been crushed. No one had lost their lives that day because she had bent her magic to her will. She’d saved them all.
Great Goddesses, she’d never felt so proud—so jubilant.
Possibilities unfolded before her. When she returned, she could hold her head high before her goddess.
Knowledge that had been lost would be hers to recover.
The ancient past would no longer be an unknowable secret.
Aurora couldn’t hide her smile—her joy. She turned around.
Wonder.
Shock.
Horror.
Fear.
But joy was sorely lacking.
Even the guards gave her a wary sort of space.
She froze, their dread infecting her. This was how you looked at a wild beast, a threat.
They all held their breaths, Aurora included.
She feared one wrong move would send them careening into violence.
Her gaze sought someone—anyone—in the crowd who might defend her. Some kind of safety.
Theron. His own guards still had their arms locked around him, their bodies braced to hold him back. But his eyes held no joy either. No, there in those shimmering, golden irises there was only one thing.
Realisation.
She gasped.
Did he finally see the truth?
Would he welcome it, or turn on her?
Theron shrugged his guards off and marched to her side. The whole of the town held still, as if her magic had frozen them in time. He sank to his knees before her, reaching an unsteady hand out to touch her face. She held still, telling herself not to flinch from his touch.
“Oh Merciful Triad, my little fairy. I…was wrong. I was so wrong. Forgive me, I have been the greatest, cruellest fool in all of Trisia,” he said, his voice hollow and shaking.
He dragged her close. Sheltered in his arms, her heart numbed inside her chest. He believed her now, but she wasn’t happy. Not even a little. Her joy had turned to ash. Because he hadn’t believed her words, only her magic—and only when he’d seen it for himself.
He believed her. For now. Until the next hard truth proved too difficult to digest. It was too soon for relief. Any trust she might have in him lay in tatters.
She’d triumphed today, no doubt, but it tasted bitter in her mouth.