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The choice to throw myself into the crowd was one I regretted just about as immediately as physically possible.
Some people parted the way as I pushed past them, maybe discerning my panic – the first few giving me odd looks to match – but most didn’t even notice me. I did my best to weave deeper and deeper towards the centre, where they couldn’t find me, but I could hardly tell if it mattered; in the din I couldn’t even come close to sensing them. It only became denser the further I went. There was too much. It was all too much.
The headache was back, worse than before. Much worse. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I couldn’t think straight. I could barely fix my mind on a path or an escape for any length of time before the chaos all around would overwhelm me, scattering my thoughts.
On every side, they were talking and shouting over each other, a wall of indecipherable speech that seemed to close in on me with every step.
I could see through their many raised arms the stage I was vaguely heading towards – not because I wanted to, but because there was nowhere else to go. It was like a beacon rising from the crowd. The orator and their dancers continued to gesticulate, indifferent.
Looking over my shoulder, I realized I couldn’t even tell where I’d arrived from anymore.
My head pounded. It was too much.
There was nowhere for me to go, no way to find my way through the crowd, not when I couldn’t see and I couldn’t feel and I couldn’t move. Looking towards the lights seemed as bad as staring at the sun. Or the star; the star. Like sharpened sunlight. I tried to calm down, not to think, but my thoughts got away from me and the memories came knocking and they flooded me with pain everywhere and all at once and I was drowning, and I knew I wouldn’t die, I knew that, but I was. I was.
The light shattered everything. The world fell away, and I couldn’t see it or feel it and I couldn’t think because my head was broken too–
It was tearing at me and I had to make it stop but I had… I couldn’t–
And I…
I…
…
I opened my eyes.
Below me was nothing but rough grey stone, dimmed by my shadow. My knees and fingernails scraped against the tiled stone– they were shaking. Bad.
So was everything else. The tiny pebbles and the thin layer of dirt on the ground rattled; my vision blurred, the noise still rumbled– but it was quieter now. Something was different. Dust seemed to hang suspended in the air.
I looked up through the hair fallen across my face, and the lights were still so bright that I nearly fell apart again, but at least I could make out the scene around me. The crowd was still rolling and murmuring together, like they were able to boil over, but they were still.
All their faces were on me. Hard and thin and soft and dark. Above me was the open night sky, not like before; they’d all backed away, formed a wide ring around me. None of them dared approach, but they didn’t run, either. They didn’t move. I didn’t move.
I dug my nails harder into the tile, and it cracked a little. Even when they were silent I could hear their hearts and feel their uncertain shuffling across the ground. I stared downward and tried to ignore it, but the whispers I could barely make out were somehow even worse than when they were a faceless, noisy mass. I couldn’t hear their thoughts.
They surrounded me. No way out. Either they made the first move, or I did.
“Enì se e’ílûmorà gie’ia çhandè!”
Oh no.
“Enì séie!” shouted the person I’d burned, their voice hoarse and laboured, pointing and glaring. They were standing at the podium near the centre of the crowd, looking over them to me, standing by the orator’s side. “Úva n’en mía! Úva n’en mía!”
I couldn’t raise my eyes too far, but I felt the wave of reactions rushing across the crowd. A collective gasp. A few of the feet closest to me took quick steps back.
The orator did something with their hands, raising their sleeves and letting their long, crackling ribbons sweep in their wake, and the eyes turned to them. “Úe lío, úe lío. N’en mí’il,” they said, and collectively the crowd seemed to settle a little more. Their presence was commanding. And then, in other tongues: “Sie! Köe béjaha. Retu reën. Attent. You all have heard mister Beringer! Stay back, stay calm.”
And then, finally, they seemed to direct their attention to me. It seemed they had inexplicable restraint among the others.
“Ílûmorà. Unesse. Qe’vie úe il?” they said, but I stayed silent. My arms were shaking under my weight. The dust all around seemed to quiver before my eyes.
“Who are you?” they asked, but I couldn’t find the words.
After all, what words could possibly encompass the answer? I was… me. That’s all I was.
I’d never been posed the question before.
With a shaky breath I pushed myself up onto one knee, taking care not to look into the lights, and I started, “I’m not–”
“What is this?” came another voice, ringing across the stillness, and everything else went silent. It was unfamiliar. Too tired to be any more afraid, I carefully looked up to see that a gap had formed in the wall of people; in unison, they all turned to look at the person striding into the open square towards me.
“What’s going on here?”
The orator gave a shallow bow and broken the silence. “Mister Marcel. Ílûmorà enì has been running rampant,” they replied. I couldn’t even think to defend myself. “Jean Beringer tells me he was burned at her hand.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off of me, but he said to them, almost deferentially, “Forgive the intrusion, but might I step in? With your blessing?”
The orator paused before once again dipping their head. They gestured said something I couldn’t hear to the others nearby, who began to disperse into the crowd. They swept a hand in my direction. “Of course.”
Marcel – they called him Marcel – took another step forward, further into the light. It gleamed off his braid of silver hair and the ringed lenses on his calm face, and the crisp, scarlet jacket he wore, trimmed with bronze. And the armband below one shoulder, patterned with an intricate sigil in black and white.
He was different. All the people of the crowd I’d seen, they flowed with life like anything else, sure; but to their candle-flames, he was a star. Heat and electricity bent around him like nobody else, and though I still couldn’t see it with my eyes, I could feel the crackle around him as the very air seemed to prostrate to his presence. He ensconced himself in a cloud of radiant heat, the same way I could, a shield almost visible rippling in the empty air between us.
With the distinction now clear, I realized what I hadn’t before. All the others… they weren’t like me. They didn’t have the pull on the energy of the world, like me; but he did. The two of us were the same, somehow.
All at once, it clicked– everything clicked. The thread I’d been grasping for. Ílûmorà.
He met my stare through his glasses, streaked with light. “Please don’t make any sudden movements, now,” he called to me, holding both empty hands outward. “I can see how strong you are. Nobody else needs to get hurt.”
I coughed, and my voice cracked. “I– I didn’t mean to. I didn’t.”
“I understand. Don’t do anything rash. Stay where you are.” Then he turned to the orator and said something in one of their languages I didn’t know, and when they echoed it the assembled crowd around us began to slowly trickle away. I felt their collective heat as it began to disperse from the square; but Marcel’s remained persistent. He was so much stronger.
“I need you to tell me where you’re from,” he said.
“I… I was…” I started, and then said, honestly, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I was at home, and then I wound up here – on the beach, somewhere out there, when it was still daylight – and I don’t know how. I’ve been searching. I’m not here to fight.”
He didn’t say anything to that, which meant he was still waiting, to do whatever he was about to do. That was good. Hopefully. “I don’t know how, but you and me– we’re the same, aren’t we? You’re like me. Not like everyone else. I really don’t know how I’m here or what happened or what I’m supposed to do, but maybe… you can help me.” Something changed in his face, but I couldn’t make out anything more than that. He might as well have been a blank wall.
“Right?” I asked. Achingly, I stood up on both feet to meet him; but still, he didn’t move. “You have to know something. Nobody and nothing else here makes sense, except for you, somehow, and you have to help me. Please.”
Finally, Marcel took another step forward. There was a shadow in his aura, an edge to his voice, that I couldn’t place. “You and I are the same, to some extent,” he said. “I know. But I need to know where you came from before I can do anything else.”
“What? I told you, I don’t know. Why–”
“Are you from Austere? Are you from Ludeande? Or have you been living out in the wilderness all this time, outside our purview, and you’ve just walked into civilization? What is it?”
He took another step towards me, and I took a step back in return. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted. “How could I possibly tell you?”
“You either came here from somewhere else on the planet – in which case, I can help you – or you didn’t. In which case this is all going to go quite differently.”
...I hadn’t considered that.
Nothing was quite the same, after all. There were people here, but I hadn’t known people before. There were forests and hills where there had once been nothing. There was energy I didn’t recognize and life I couldn’t name. I knew about the planets in the sky, and I’d read tales of their fantastical visitors, but I just couldn’t have imagined…
Maybe I really was so far away from home that–
The possibility was daunting. Looming over me like a deep, icy shadow, sending my heart plummeting. The ground seemed to quiver just faintly once again. The headache was still throbbing.
Panic won’t help me. We just need to talk. I just need to make him understand. For once, we spoke the same language. It shouldn’t have been so difficult.
“Marcel, I…” I started, through deep breaths. I tried to channel the words I couldn’t quite grasp into action, putting whatever I was feeling behind some feeble, frustrated, ineffectual gestures, but the point didn’t seem to come across.
“I can’t tell you.”
As soon as the words left my lips, I could tell I’d done something wrong.
He didn’t respond right away, but in the air, I could feel the tension. Quite literally. The invisible floes of energy warped all around us– I could only assume it was his doing. He certainly didn’t seem perturbed about it like I was.
Even as he did so, Marcel and I traded steps forward and back, me still trying to maintain my distance. But he kept advancing, expression unreadable.
The pressure in the atmosphere was oppressive, in a way, even more so than the shortening quarter between us. The air rippled and warmed, and just slightly, I could feel it on my skin starting to push into me. Everything felt… heavy.
That was what he was doing, then; it wasn’t simple to tell whether he was exerting himself just by the sensation of his aura, his heartbeat, but looking closely, I saw the fingers digging into the palms of his hands. He was closing an envelope around me, suppressing any outward power I could’ve expressed.
Just to test, I tried pulling on the electric currents from the wires I could feel running through the ground, but Marcel’s makeshift barrier quashed my reach. Feeling the air tightening around me wasn’t quite unlike the instinctive rush that came from standing too close to flame. The warmth was certainly there. Not comforting.
“Stop that,” I said, still slowly retreating. “I can feel that. Stop doing it.”
“I'm afraid I can't,” he said.
He took another step, increased the pressure just a bit more, and then I pushed back.
I let my heat radiant outward from my body, shifted the electricity through my veins until I pried control over the currents in the atmosphere from his grasp, pushing outward in every direction all at once. The envelope cracked, and then it shattered entirely. The wind was whipped into a frenzy, and the burning lights all around us flickered. And suddenly I was in control again. It wasn’t even difficult, when I really let the energy flow.
The dust was definitely suspended in the air, I realized. It wasn’t just a trick of my fatigued imagination. As soon as I pushed outward it rose up from around my feet, swirling in long, ethereal coils around my body, not carried by any wind. A handful of small pebbles even got caught up in the storm.
I didn’t think I was doing that consciously– twisting gravity, that is. But I supposed he managed to drag that out of me, under duress. He didn’t try to close me off like that again, but he didn’t back down, either.
The square was empty. Just the two of us.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Just… can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Finally conceding to some degree, he said, “I don’t want to fight you; not here, and not now. But you must understand that I will do whatever I have to if it means keeping–” His words caught in his throat, then. He paused. “You see why I can’t trust you, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about? Of course not!”
“It’s my job to protect these people from what they can’t fight themselves. My duty, I might say. And I’ve been around to face the unexpected – things like you, whoever you really are – long enough to know that I can’t just take your word.”
Things like me. How comforting. He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked out at our empty surroundings, deathly silent, as if trying to figure out what to say. I could tell that he didn’t let the tension in his body go, though; he wasn’t letting his guard down for a moment. “You’ve put me in quite the difficult situation, here,” he continued.
“I’m acquainted with the feeling. I haven’t… enjoyed it.”
He sighed. “You really don’t know where you are? Who I am?”
I hesitated, my eyes downcast, then shook my head.
“...Then I can help,” he said. My heart leapt. “But only if you come with me, away from here.”
“What? Where?”
I didn’t know what I expected to hear, since I didn’t know that anywhere else to go to even existed. “The capital. Solace.” Marcel moved to approach me again, and I backed up further, but there really wasn’t anywhere to go. Nothing like the home. “You’re not going to get a better option, here.”
The atmosphere between us began to thrum again as my energy trickled out, my body acting on pure instinct. He sounded nice and he acted cold; maybe he hadn’t been listening to me at all, all this time. He wasn’t going to stop until I went with him. He kept coming, and that crystallized in my head: he wasn’t going to stop. The dust suspended in the air, though I didn’t have any conscious control over it, started to swirl faster, whipped into a frenzy by a stray gust of wind.
But then it wasn’t just the two of us anymore.
There was something high, at the edge of the square; a nearby rooftop. A single source of heat, approaching fast and intensifying every second.
Obviously, Marcel didn’t notice it as quickly as I did, because before he took another step its source arced over my head from one side and crashed into him headlong, throwing him to the ground several yards away with a heavy crack and tossing up a cloud of dust where it landed.
He pushed himself to his feet before he even stopped sliding, about as unscathed as I might’ve expected, his boots scraping against the stonework as he threw his arms up before him, mirroring me in self-defense. His glasses flew from his face, snapping and shattering into familiar twinkling shards some distance away.
Out of sheer shock I felt the energy in my body swell even further, singeing the edges of my clothes without thinking, but as suddenly as it had happened, it was over. Marcel stood facing me, teeth clenched and feet planted, but all was silent. More quiet than I’d experienced since I’d first entered the city. The cloud of dust all around me gently settled to the ground once more.
And stepping back from the place they’d collided into Marcel with graceful ease, a mane of gold hair sparkling around their head, the newcomer stood between us. She held a long, thin blade outstretched toward him, breathing heavily and bobbing on her heels, a long, multicoloured scarf hanging from her shoulders, wavering in a sudden breeze. She radiated energy in every sense of the phrase. Not unlike Marcel, not entirely, but… different.
She glanced over her shoulder and met my eyes with hers, bright green, and unfathomably, she actually flashed a smile at me.
“Hi there!” she said. “Ya don’t know me yet, and I don’t know you, but the name’s River Mercier. And I’m one of the good guys.”
Previous: Chapter 2 | Next: Interlude I
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