Chapter 12 #4
“She was never here. Only her consciousness. Did no one explain things?” The old man stood slowly, wincing through creaking joints. He shooed his hands without looking up. “I have a line tonight. Please leave a gratuity in the bowl on your way out and have an agreeable Cirque Calliope.”
An attendant appeared, to guide the stupefied Jesstin back through the curtain. He was still staring at the thick velvet when Ryquin came up beside him.
“Now you see.” Ryquin draped an arm around his back. “Question is will you help?”
Velanthe led Elloven through a field filled with spectators sitting on blankets. They were all focused on the sky, but there was nothing except stars.
“This is far enough,” Velanthe said.
“What?”
“Your Vinculo. With the necromancer.”
Elloven didn’t ask what a necromancer was. She’d already ceded too much ground to someone she didn’t trust at all.
Velanthe gestured for Elloven to take a seat on a nearby blanket. A young man with an absurdly large metal platter knelt before them. “Your imbibements.”
Her aunt drew a small glass from the tray. She nodded for Elloven to do the same.
“I’m not drinking that,” Elloven said with a contemptuous laugh.
“You will if you want to see your father.”
“What does this have to do with my father?”
The attendant’s knees buckled in his awkward kneel. “Will you imbibe or not?”
“She will,” Velanthe answered for her, taking a second glass.
The man rolled his eyes before continuing on to the next blanket.
“You must enter an altered state to view the show in the sky. I can’t make you do anything, but if you want to see Laxius, this is the only way.”
“What’s in it?” Elloven held the cup away from her body.
“Nothing that can harm you. All things you’ve had before, just not in this arrangement.”
Elloven’s eyes narrowed, flicking between Velanthe and the orange-tinged drink. “That’s not an answer.”
“Do you want to see Laxius or not, Aelloven? Everyone else here does. If you don’t drink soon, you’ll miss the whole thing.”
“What will it do to me?” Elloven prepared for more annoyance, but Velanthe smiled.
“You’ve been drunk on spirits before?”
“Of course.”
“This is more pleasant, and with fewer regrets later.”
Her choice wasn’t complicated, but that didn’t make it simple either. Trust and drink and possibly learn about her father, or walk away and live in the same ignorance she’d been in her entire life.
I already took the biggest leap of faith in coming here. It’s all for nothing if I can’t even try to assimilate into a culture I’ve always wanted to understand.
Elloven swished the cup and drained it down her throat.
The effect was immediate. Her head swam with a pleasant lightness. Warmth traveled across her shoulders and hips, into her limbs.
Velanthe chuckled. “Now look up.”
What appeared to be a man, slumped in a chair four times his size, atop a cloud. He seemed as real as the marionettes but larger than life.
“This exibere is called the Cry of the Ancestors,” Velanthe whispered. “The stories of old are replayed here, through a mix of arcane and silver-tongue magic.”
“I don’t have the patience for another show like the last,” Elloven snapped, but she’d wanted to return to her initial feelings of purpose and light, that sense of rightness, and she was. Slowly, she was. “Just tell me where he is.”
“I am.” Velanthe tipped her head toward the man in the sky. “In each season of the Cirque, a different piece of our history is told, stories that shaped our world. This one serves as a cautionary tale to all who defy the laws of our land. This season is the story of Laxius’s Fall.”
Elloven’s next question disintegrated as the ethereal figures in the sky moved. The man—Laxius, she presumed—lifted his head and accepted an infant into his arms. His posture relaxed with joy. His mouth moved without sound.
“The show is silent,” Velanthe explained.
“Because you all know it already, but what about me?”
Her aunt stared at the sky and said nothing.
Laxius was kissing and tickling the infant’s cheeks, marveling over its tiny fingers. He lifted him. A boy.
Esguards swarmed in. Laxius clutched the baby to his chest. His mouth moved in frantic pleas as the child was ripped away. She read his lips, between other protestations, No, not him. Not again.
Laxius sobbed and fought the esguards as he was brutally restrained, but all he could do was scream his sorrow as his son was taken.
Murmurs of sadness passed along those watching. Elloven’s hands drifted to her face.
The scene shifted. Laxius was again alone, but the chair was gone.
Two new people appeared, both of whom Elloven recognized, though they were much younger, Estelar and Velanthe.
Words flew between them in rapid fire, too fast and overlapping for her to read, and it made her anxious to watch.
Laxius screamed, and thunder rippled the scene, knocking away the others.
He raised his hands to the sky and howled.
A flicker of orange light blinked as Velanthe relit her pipe.
Sky Velanthe stepped forward. Something appeared in her hand, a large ball that swirled with color, like it was made of magic itself. You knew the rules, her lips said.
The real Velanthe whispered, in time with her doppelg?nger, “You of time could have loved anyone. Anyone but chaos. This is a fate of your making. There can be no absolution, only what must come next.”
Sky Estelar spun away. His posture was reluctant, but Velanthe laid a hand upon his shoulder, and he turned back with a curt, decisive nod.
The scene shifted. Laxius stood upon the edge of a great chasm, a soul lumen in one shaking hand. Velanthe and Estelar chanted in unison, and Laxius went soaring into the abyss. Velanthe surged forward to catch his lumen before it could go with him.
Estelar handed Velanthe the glowing ball, which she accepted, though unhappily.
“I don’t understand,” Elloven whispered. “You killed him?”
“It was out of our hands. When he defied destiny, he decided his own end.”
“What, though? What choice?” Elloven’s fevered pitch rose with her pulse.
“You asked where your father was. He’s in the Infinita Mori, with so many other souls.”
“Estelar said he was...”
“Resting. A wistful notion. We all pray he has found his peace in death.”
“Why...” Elloven needed a moment to collect herself. “Why would Estelar not just tell me that? Why would no one tell me?”
“I was asked to show you, Aelloven,” Velanthe said reluctantly. “Estelar and the others can’t bring themselves to witness this.”
“But you can?”
Velanthe tilted both palms out.
“And you were the pretor when this happened?”
“Curatrix is the title we give women,” Velanthe said. “I had no aspiration for it, so I passed the riven sphere to Estelar. He was always the most suited for power... a shame he could not have been the one to start with it.”
Even as intoxicated as she was, Elloven understood Velanthe was telling her more than she should. “You don’t like either of your brothers, do you?”
Her aunt laughed again. “I never have. Though, Laxius was born a fool, and he cannot be blamed for that, if nothing else.”
Elloven was more wary of Velanthe than any of the others, but even those who would mislead could provide color to a monochromatic problem. “You sentenced your brother to years of purgatory. He can’t even move on.”
“A fate we will all face eventually.”
“Why have you all not done more to fix what’s happened to Infinita Mori? Rivenholde is supposed to look after the dead, not abandon them.” Elloven then held her tongue, knowing the answer would come regardless. From her aunt, from the sky, from her heart. It would come.
Velanthe exhaled her smoke, her eyes closed.
“Because we don’t know how, Aelloven.” She turned a glazed look on Elloven.
“We’ve been waiting a very long time for someone who can reopen the way to the Halls of Ilyn for the dead.
It would reopen all portails, including the ones between the Coventicular of the Seven and the Coventicular dos Sete.
We could finally return to Ilynglass. I believe that was the intention all along, not to curse the dead but to close the pathways between worlds. The dead suffer either way.”
Another mention of Ilynglass. Either it was one big, long con or they really believed in it. “Why would someone want to close these portails?” She couldn’t keep the disbelief from her tone.
Velanthe cocked her head. “With access comes power,” she said, as though that explained everything.
Elloven didn’t mean to laugh, but it all sounded so absurd.
It was the wrong move though, because her aunt’s openness slammed shut. “There’s a lot you missed by being raised beyond our borders.” Velanthe licked her lips. “We’ll soon see which you regret more. Your ignorance or your enlightenment.”
“I want to go back,” Elloven said. She clutched her chest. The pain wasn’t physical, but the ache was undeniable.
The... yearning, unlike anything she’d felt before.
It was the cursed bond. The absence. This time, it wasn’t a consequence of distance but time.
Hours and hours had passed since they’d left the croft.
“To the ghastly marionette show?”
“To Jesstin.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Tell me where he is. Please.”
“I’ll escort you myself,” Velanthe said pleasantly and pushed up off the blanket. “It’s time anyway. You’re expected.”
“Time for what?” Elloven asked, but her cagey aunt was done talking. She watched her walk away.
“Coming?” Velanthe called over her shoulder as she continued down the hill.
Frustrated as ever, but with no better option, Elloven ran after her.