thirty-eight
“Your mother…” Ramaron placed his cup on the table before leaning back into his sofa.
Before them, the sun continued to set behind the mountains.
“Your father. I don’t know how they’re working off each other. Maybe he gets visions from her. All I know is that he has more nefarious plans for vashta. I’m afraid that he might target an inhabited planet next.”
Mira knew this too, which was why she kept quiet, her hands folded in her lap and her gaze dancing between Ramaron’s visage and the glorious sunshine streaming through the curtains.
The heat it radiated was nothing when compared to what she endured on Cerilyn.
Was that why she was cold? She should have brought a jacket. Did she even own one now?
She wished she were dressed like Ramaron, who looked comfortable in his plaid overshirt and another, thinner shirt layered beneath. Chiki had moved from the desk area to a large splotch of sunlight on the floor, his golden fur as bright as the sun itself.
They had already discussed what they knew of what had happened—while Ramaron was not convinced that he had Crossed from another world, he didn’t outright deny the possibility.
Especially when Mira announced that Kema and Hannu had arrived with directives from the High Priestess herself.
Two women he should have never had reason to know.
Two women he seemed to recognize by name, as if they had seen each other only a couple of weeks ago.
Now, they sat together, Mira attempting not to think about how she was expected back on Cerilyn at any moment. If someone reported her as missing from her post, she could be in trouble. Not that she cared right now.
“Your father feels like a burden at times,” Ramaron confessed, while continuing to stare in the empty air before him.
“All the time. He is a man of the highest-highs, and the lowest-lows. Even when he tells you that he loves you, you can’t celebrate it. Something has to counterbalance it, and you know it will be disastrous.”
I never heard him talk like this in the other world…
Yet Mira knew exactly what he meant. To love—and be loved—by Nerilis Dunsman was a curse.
Potentially, he had loved her as a father, but what good had it done her?
Mira had to live under an assumed name outside of Yahzen.
She would on Yahzen, too, if she could get away with it.
It had been bad enough when he abdicated from the golden diadem and retired from the priesthood entirely.
It was another when he destroyed his first planet via vashta and immediately put a giant black mark on his soul.
There were talks among the other ranking members of House Dunsman to potentially change their name, which hadn’t been done in generations.
We have always been House Dunsman. Ever since the Founding. Right?
“There’s a woman. A Dreamwalker.” Mira already felt like she was in another dream when she brought up the entity that came from another time, let alone another universe. “Rahara. Does that name mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“She is… was… the Founder of House Marlow. Your House.”
He sat with that for a moment, staring at Mira’s profile before sighing and gazing out the window again.
“A week ago, I would have called you foolish. Perhaps touched in the head, just like your father. Dreamwalkers haven’t been seen in hundreds of thousands of years. Every few generations, someone tries it at the Academy and goes insane. They don’t understand it’s supposedly a natural talent…
not something you simply ask the Void to give you.”
Mira leaned her head against the back of the couch. “She has been coming to me for a while. Including in that other world. Actually, she’s from that world. The one my mother dissipated when she finally Ascended.”
“Your mother… she was quite guilty in that world, wasn’t she?”
This was his first admission that he believed her. “You saw it in her eyes in the end.”
“Eyes always full of life. Full of joy for life. Smote because she selfishly denied the call. Ah… the same thing happened here. Except she bargained with the Void that if it gave her a little more time to get married and have you, she would Ascend. That’s what happened. I was there.”
Mira swallowed a lump that had formed in her throat. She tried not to cry.
“Your father was holding you when it happened. You weren’t even a day old. Your mother spent that day holding you, talking to you, telling you the whole history that you needed to know. All of her hopes and dreams for you. All of her regrets. She didn’t care who was in the room,
because she knew she was now out of time. It was her turn to uphold her end of the bargain. She barely had the energy to teleport back to the High Temple. We had to help her.”
Mira wiped a single tear from her cheek.
“Nerilis didn’t even realize he was still holding you until we got there!”
That made Ramaron laugh, although the cough that followed made him reach for a tissue on the table.
“But Joiya wasn’t angry. She merely asked him to shield your newborn eyes so you wouldn’t be blinded by the light of the Void.
She used the opportunity to kiss you once more.
Then, she was gone. Right at your father’s feet.
“You mean the Void took her?”
“She Ascended, Mira. That means her soul left her body without death as a prerequisite. She left her body behind. Soulless.”
“I… see.”
“She had told us what to do. So, we did it. Well, your father did it. I held you.”
Mira didn’t ask. He killed her. Ensured that there was no living body for Her Holiness to retreat to, should she decide that Ascension was a fate worse than death.
“I understand why you have deteriorated so much over the centuries, then.”
“Deteriorated? My God, you sound like your father. That’s exactly what he would say to neuter my poor balls.”
“Well, I am my father’s daughter. I’m told that all the time.”
They both sat in silence, facing their own strange memories.
“I didn’t realize…” Mira didn’t know if she spoke of this world or the other, since as the hours—the days—went by, things muddied and jumbled together until both happened simultaneously in her memories.
I don’t want to forget that other life… Her mother had saved her soul for a reason.
The Joiya of the other world put in a lot of work to make up for her great, shameful sin, and Mira would not let the chance to right some familial wrongs slip through her fingers.
“That you were there. For all of it.” He had even held her, as a newborn, when her mother’s mortal shell was shed from the world.
No wonder my father’s lost it. He had killed his wife—on her orders.
“You weren’t supposed to know those things, especially when you were younger. Your father and I agreed. He even admitted that I would have to partially help raise you to ensure that you were kept safe from the worst of your mother’s veneration. People can be… insane.”
I know. She had seen some of it for herself upon entering the Academy. “Thank you,” she said. “For helping him with me.”
“And your grandmother. She took up the mantle of your female parental figure. I think it helped her grieve. Your mother may have been divine, but we all felt very real, mortal feelings for her. Your father and your grandmother… I can never conceive what they went through.”
The Mira from the other world understood everything he said, but remembered her own life, where Joiya had been as close to her as any mother could be.
She dressed me. Played with me. Taught me my first talents.
Protected me from the vipers of House Dunsman.
Showed me other human planets where nobody recognized us.
Cared for me from afar while I was in the Academy. Did anything for me… anything I needed…
It was difficult to reconcile that that Joiya was the one who sinned and doomed a reality. My mother… how could she be bad?
“I need you to believe me,” Mira said at last. “Anyone close to the situation and alive when my mother Ascended in that world… they’re here. You’re the last person I must account for. I think I need you on Cerilyn. Something is going to happen there. Why else would I be there?” With Sulim, no less.
“Cerilyn is very far away.” Ramaron covered his eyes when he leaned against his armrest. “Mira, there’s something I need to tell you. I wasn’t going to say anything, but this conversation has convinced me. I must listen to my instincts.”
Mira waited.
“Your father is going to attack Cerilyn next.”
She slowly turned her head toward him, not convinced that she heard what he said. Cerilyn? But that was where she was. But her father had not killed anyone yet. But…
“Your father is practicing to ensure he knows the process of vashta well enough. His goal is human sacrifice. He will commit genocide to stall the implosion of the Void.”
“What?”
The word hushed from her mouth. Yet no matter how much strength she put behind her tongue, her voice, everything was just…
there. Of course he is, thought the Mira of this world.
No, he would never, thought the one of the other.
Nerilis Dunsman was neither a man of inspirational good, nor a villain who hurt for the sake of it.
Ramaron knew as well as Mira that Nerilis would do whatever was necessary—for his family, the Temple, even the world as any of them knew it.
If the man in this world saw his wife Ascend and asked him to silence her body for all eternity?
To carry on as a father with a connection to the Void, the very one he asked his daughter to inherit?
Mira could only guess what he was capable of doing.
Because the Mira of this world knew that the Void was as unstable here as it was in the other.
I wish you could have survived in that other world, Sulim. To avoid capture by the mercenaries? To live a life of luxury as an adult? To fall in love with Mira? The Sulim of Cerilyn was confident and capable, but Mira now knew that softer, more na?ve side of her.
What I would give to get that back for you, Sulim.
“How do you know?” Mira asked Ramaron when she had her strength back.
“I’ve long known his ultimate plans, as much as I detest them.”
Ramaron sat up again, this time with her gaze directed toward the sunlight.