Chapter 6 The Voss Connection #2
"I am saying that you are not the first Voss to cross the Veil.
I am saying that your surname appears in the oldest memory-crystals in this Arbor, connected to a shadow woman who lived approximately three thousand years ago, during the aftermath of the Great Thinning, and who was described in the records as a Weaver of extraordinary power who bore a name that, in the old tongue, translates to Seraphine the Elder.
" Oren's voice was measured, but Sera could feel the tremor of excitement beneath the measurement, the scholarly thrill of a discovery that confirmed decades of theoretical work.
"Seraphine the Elder was a Shadow-Touched being, Sera.
Like you. She carried mortal essence in her blood, and she possessed abilities that were, according to the records, unprecedented in Umbral history.
She was also, according to the same records, the last of her line.
The records state explicitly that she disappeared during the Great Thinning and left no descendants.
" The implications crashed over Sera like a wave, and she gripped the edge of the table harder, her knuckles whitening, her nightbloom flaring against her hip in a rapid, agitated pulse.
Her mother's face rose in her mind, unbidden, the faded portrait that hung above the hearth in Aldric's shop, the auburn hair and the grey-green eyes that were so like her own, and she thought about her father, Marcus Voss, who had disappeared when she was eleven, who had left behind nothing but a name and a locked chest that Aldric had never been able to open and a silence about his past that had deepened with every year until it had become a permanent feature of their lives, as solid and immovable as the walls of the shop itself.
"If she left no descendants," Sera said slowly, "then how do I carry her name?
" Oren's expression shifted, the excitement giving way to something gentler, more cautious, and she realized that he had been leading her to this question, that the entire journey through the Arbor had been a carefully constructed prelude to a revelation he was not certain she was ready to receive.
"That is precisely what I do not know," he said.
"The records from that period are fragmentary.
The Great Thinning disrupted the memory-crystals' recording function for several centuries, and much of what was recorded before the disruption has degraded beyond recovery.
What I have found are fragments. References.
A name here, a description there. But the pattern is clear enough to be significant, and the pattern is this: the name Voss appears in Umbral records only in connection with Shadow-Touched beings.
Every. Single. Time." He reached for the black crystal on the table and turned it so that its silver veins faced Sera directly, and she saw, with a jolt that went through her entire body, that the patterns in the crystal were not random.
They formed shapes. Letters. Words in a script she did not recognize but that her eyes seemed to understand on a level deeper than reading, the way her body had understood the nightbloom's call before her mind had caught up.
"This crystal contains the most recent reference to the Voss name in Umbral records," Oren said.
"It dates from approximately three thousand years ago, the period of Seraphine the Elder's documented activity in the Garden.
I want you to touch it and tell me what you see. "
Sera hesitated. Her experience with the memory-vine had been overwhelming enough, a controlled immersion in ancient emotion that had left her shaken for hours.
The crystal before her radiated a depth and a density of emotional resonance that made the memory-vine feel like a shallow stream beside an ocean, and she was acutely aware that the last time she had touched an unknown Umbral artifact without adequate preparation, she had accidentally invaded the Warden's most private grief and fractured whatever fragile trust existed between them.
But Oren was watching her with those warm, faded gold eyes, and his emotional resonance was not pushing or demanding but open and inviting, the emotional equivalent of an outstretched hand, and she had come to trust Oren in the days since the Council's ruling in a way that surprised her with its completeness.
He had given her knowledge without manipulation, guidance without control, and the kind of patience that she recognized, from her years with Aldric, as the mark of a genuine teacher.
So she reached out and placed her palm against the black crystal's surface.
The crystal was cold. Not the coolness of stone or metal but a deep, penetrating cold that seeped through her skin and into her blood, spreading through her arm and into her chest with a deliberateness that was almost gentle.
The cold carried a taste, metallic and bright, like licking a silver coin, and beneath the taste was a sound, a low, resonant hum that vibrated through her bones and into the marrow of her spine.
For a moment nothing happened, and she was about to withdraw her hand when the cold transformed, becoming not cold but clarity, a sharp, crystalline lucidity that made the world around her seem dim and imprecise by comparison. The chamber fell away.
Oren's hands fell away. Even the sensation of the table beneath her other palm dissolved, and she was suspended in a space that was defined not by physical dimensions but by information, a vast, luminous void that extended in every direction and contained, nested within its depths like seeds within a pomegranate, the accumulated emotional memory of millennia.
She was inside the crystal. Not metaphorically.
She was standing in a space that was defined by the crystal's internal structure, a three-dimensional lattice of silver light and absolute darkness that extended in every direction, and embedded in the lattice, at irregular intervals, were nodes of intense emotional concentration that she recognized as records, individual moments of preserved experience that she could approach and, if she chose, enter.
The sheer volume of information was staggering, a library of living memory that dwarfed anything the Sunlit Realm had ever produced, and she understood, with a humility that was new to her, why Oren had devoted eight thousand years to the study of this place and its contents.
One node pulsed more brightly than the others, and she moved toward it, drawn by a pull she could not resist, and as she drew closer, the node resolved into an image, or rather into an emotional impression so vivid that it functioned as an image.
She saw a woman. Dark-skinned, like Malakor, but with hair that fell in a cascade of deep auburn, and eyes that were the precise pale grey-green of Sera's own.
The woman was standing in the Garden, but the Garden looked different, wilder, less cultivated, its luminescence brighter and more chaotic, and she was holding a flower that Sera recognized with a shock that nearly broke her concentration: a nightbloom, its silver veins pulsing in the woman's hands exactly the way her own nightbloom pulsed in hers.
The woman turned, and for one blazing, impossible moment, Sera looked at a face that was her face, not identical but so close that the differences were negligible, the same bone structure, the same grey-green eyes, the same auburn hair, and the woman's expression was one of desperate, terrified determination, and she was speaking, and the words echoed through the crystal lattice with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty cathedral.
"The nightbloom ritual must not be performed again.
The cost is too great. The Shadow-Touched One must come willingly, or not at all.
" The vision shattered. Sera gasped and pulled her hand from the crystal, stumbling backward, and the cold rushed out of her in a wave that left her shaking and light-headed, her vision swimming with afterimages of silver light and auburn hair and grey-green eyes that were and were not her own.
Oren was there, his hands on her arms, steadying her, his face creased with concern and wonder in equal measure, and she could feel his emotional resonance now without trying, a complex blend of vindication and guilt and the sharp, specific fear of a man who has just set something in motion that he may not be able to control.
"The nightbloom ritual," Sera breathed, and the words tasted of silver and something older than silver, something that lived in the space between heartbeats where the Veil was thinnest. "Oren.
The flower. The nightbloom that drew me through the Veil.
It wasn't growing there by accident. Someone planted it.
Someone performed a ritual to summon me. "