–I saw the sky, shattered like glass, reflecting the faint glimmer of the unseen stars slipping through the cracks and falling–
I reached out wildly, hoping to grab onto anything to stop myself, but I was already clear of the Seremina’s deck. I was in freefall, I realized– not so much with my head as with the entirety of my body. My heart lurched into my throat, my stomach to my feet.
–like grains of sand, crystalline–
Stars crisscrossed my vision; cacophonous ringing filled my ears. For the second time since the shore it felt like I was being torn apart from the inside, and around me the whirlwind that muddied the air tore at my clothes and my hair, ripping the goggles from my face, cascading around me in streams as I fell.
–stars falling through and spinning themselves into long, long threads, woven into concentric circles, halos, swirling into each other–
The jagged spires of trees rose up all around me, and I crashed through layers upon layers of long, brittle branches, scattering a cloud of splinters and leaves in my wake, just like the ships.
The ships. Above me, silhouetted against the soft morning sky, they appeared only as dark shadows; momentarily they’d raced beyond the edges of my vision, skirting the top of the treeline even as I fell deeper into it, but their energy was still there. The heat, the noise… the living forces of the other immortals sailing them.
–living forces blurring together, pulled into the rings where they would spin and melt into the vaguest shapes of eyes, mouths, hands, faces–
I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. Shutting my eyes made the vertigo worse, but I had no other choice. Anything to blot out the noise. Lines of energy warped around me, bending and breaking as easily as the branches, and each time I felt myself flickering at the edge of consciousness, vision streaked in black and white. It was so, so searing hot, and the light…
–and up there against the dark, where the lights were brightest among woven threads coiling and coiling upon themselves, a presence resolved, pushing against the furthest, deepest, sharpest edges of my mind. Watching me. Searching for a way inside. I was–
I hit the ground. Hard.
Somehow, enough instinct must’ve remained in me to cushion my landing with a short, explosive burst of hot air before the inevitable collision came; but it still hurt. A cloud of earth and debris mixed into the rain of splinters that continued around me, blanketing the soft, grassy underbrush with scree.
I couldn’t say how long I laid there, in the thick of the forest, shaded by the dark canopy. I didn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Not because I was panicking – although that sensation hadn’t yet departed entirely – but because something inside me was seriously, seriously wrong. Every slight motion caused something broken deep in my chest to twist, painfully, like a jagged point was piercing straight through me.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d broken myself; I’d always been so, so careful, and I’d forgotten how awful it was. One way or another, I was done running.
Not to mention that the headache was back. The same feeling like I’d tried to remember too quickly, like staring into the sun for too long.
I focused my attention away from myself, to the sky, where River and Marcel danced around each other in wide circles. Had she noticed that I’d fallen? Had he? How much longer could she even hope to stay aloft, as damaged as Seremina was?
There was no way of knowing. She knew, surely, but now, suddenly, she was gone. I rolled that thought around in my head for a while, feeling out where the concept stung most. River was gone, and I was alone. For the first time, I’d been surrounded by others – people, real people – and now there was no one. If I didn’t strain to detect the ships, fading into the distance at the edges of my senses, all that was left were the plants and the insects, a few noisy birds watching intently. And me.
Another thought crossed my mind, unbidden. Something that had been whispering at me from the beginning.
I never remembered my dreams; I’d stopped a long, long time ago. But still, the insistent question… what were they like? Were they terrifying like this? Painful? The creeping sensation of emptiness that was gripping me, below the heat and everything else… I didn’t know whether I’d ever felt something quite like that.
Maybe it was the kind of feeling that only existed in dreams. After all, until I arrived here, in this strange place I didn’t know, there had never been any context from which I could understand it. There had never been any reason to be lonely before.
Maybe I was dreaming, and in just a moment, when I closed my eyes and let go of the warmth, I’d wake up and forget that feeling. I’d be home. But I couldn’t count on that.
My eyes blinked open to see the beams of gentle sunlight still pouring over me. Somewhere in the distance of my periphery, above the hum of the forest, I felt the torch of one of the airships suddenly wink out. Whoever had touched down out there, I supposed I had to wait for them to come to me.
But River was good, and eventually, in spite of all my fears, she did.
When I first heard her voice calling my name, echoing through the curtain of the trees, I tried to call back and couldn’t; simply taking in the breath required to shout shook me with a sharp, stunning pain through my torso. But not long after, I could just faintly sense her warmth approaching. I knew she could find me too.
“Where– Adeline!” River caught sight of me as she broke through the underbrush, instantly running over to where I lay. Her heart was beating as hard as mine. I decided against trying to sit up, instead just turning my head cautiously to see her approach. She didn’t manage a smile.
“Hi there,” I groaned. She didn’t say anything as she crouched down next to me, placing her left hand against my face. “Did… did they bring you down? I don’t– I tried to do what you said, River, but I wasn’t fast enough, and–”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Don’t think about that right now, I’ll figure something out, just… Lords.” She paused, quickly looked me up and down. “Um. How are you feeling? Exactly?”
“I’m not sure. I broke something. Your hand is really cold, River.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause I’m trying to soak up some of your heat,” she said. “I need you to relax, okay? You are… wow, are you ever burning up, literally, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve gotta chill out. It’s gonna be fine.”
“What?” I was about to say something about how she seemed even more freaked out than I was, but I realized what she was talking about. The sheer heat. With some effort I turned my head enough to look down at my hand, splayed out on the grass– or what had been the grass. Streaks of black were scorched into the ground all around me, radiating out from my fingertips. The sweat beading on my skin sizzled into steam as I watched.
I lost control. Again. Through the haze, I hadn’t even noticed. “Oh. Yeah.”
With even more effort I managed to cut off the flow of energy, River helping me to keep from warming up again for a few moments before I tried letting my body regulate itself again. The pain started to fade with the heat, just slightly.
She leaned back, breathing a sigh of relief; her hand leaving my face was almost a shock. Her fingers snapped a few times in quick succession. “Okay. How bad is it otherwise? Can you get up? Can you move?”
“It’s going to be a while, I think,” I said– trying to push myself back up again only proved me right. I caught the look that flashed across her face. “What’s wrong?”
“...Marcie will have had to find a better place to land than I did, since their stupid ship is so much bigger, but… they were right behind me. They won’t wanna lose us again; they’re gonna find us out here sooner than later. We need to go.”
River pulled the sailing goggles from her face and glanced up at the horizon, obscured by the foliage surrounding us. I winced. “...How?”
“I’ll think of something,” she said. “If we can skirt around and avoid them, get a head start back in the air, we might be able to keep ahead long enough to get somewhere safer. Or I’m sure I could find a way to sabotage–”
Her voice withered in her throat as she met my gaze. She must’ve been thinking the same things I was: back home, when I managed to injure myself, it took time to heal. Time, oddly enough, that we did not have. I wasn’t certain how to tell her that I knew I wouldn’t be able to run like this, and not for a while. I probably didn’t have to; she was the same as me, after all. She had to know.
So I settled on saying, simply, “Seremina is damaged.” I already knew that was true, too. We had barely been able to stay ahead of them before, and now…
She nodded once. A short, brisk motion, one that didn’t linger, one that she moved on from as soon as possible. No use lingering on what she can’t do.
“She won’t be flying much longer unless we can get resupplied.” River spoke very rapidly, her voiced thoughts long, drawn-out strings. “If we can’t fly, we could run, but that won’t be feasible for a while.”
No, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to say aloud.
“I might be able to carry you, but that would probably slow down the healing process. And I don’t think we could run for long either.”
Also no.
Something else prodded at my periphery. A ripple through the collective life-force of the vegetation surrounding us, set off by a single drop into the pond. Their presence wasn’t clear, not immediately, but I could infer it. They were some distance away, nearly in the same direction River had come from. Closing fast.
“They’re going to be here soon,” I said quietly. It was an inevitable confrontation, of course. It was going to happen from the moment we escaped Vermiles. She didn’t seem surprised, but she still didn’t seem okay, either. She had to know; she had to have a plan. But for long, long moments, she didn’t say anything.
“Where? Can you sense him?“
“Almost. From the way you came.” She looked in the direction I pointed, turning on her heels and digging in to the soft earth, and her aura flared up in response; I didn’t trust myself to let mine go again, not yet. Not here.
She’s really here, I thought to myself. She’s here and she wants to help you and she must know what to do, I tried to convince myself. Because she’s good.
Even still, those feelings were welling back up within me again. Fear that I didn’t quite understand, its source one I couldn’t find. It wasn’t just Marcel, or Valerie, or anyone else. Fear of the emptiness that had been creeping up on me before she’d come back and banished it? Being alone again?
That was there. But that wasn’t all, not anymore.
I knew what I had to do, and it was obvious. If I had figured it out earlier, maybe I could have avoided it, but I knew I couldn’t anymore. I swallowed.
“River?”
“...Uh, yeah?”
“We’re in this together, right?”
“I…” She stopped and hesitated even longer this time, before she said, with utter confidence, “We’re in this together. It’s like I said, yeah? You deserve your own chance to get out of this, and I’m not leaving you. We’ll figure it out.”
“Right,” I said.
I could trust her. And she could trust me.
A stray branch cracked underneath Marcel’s foot as he strode between the trees, sliding into view at the fringes of the small grove I laid in. He didn’t try to hide his presence– a field of energy washed over us even before I noticed his arrival.
River widened her stance and shifted her footing when he showed his face, a wall between him and I. One hand hovered over the sheathed silver rapier at her hip, but she didn’t draw yet. The electricity in his veins pulsed rhythmically, smoothly; making itself known, certainly, but not aggressive like he’d been before. I squeezed one arm tightly around my abdomen and pushed myself up with the other, facing him as well as I could from the ground. Far from enjoyable, for so many reasons.
He was the same as he was last night, in the city; scarlet jacket pressed and pristine, a silver braid of hair falling between his shoulders. The expression on his narrow face as he looked between us was calm, inscrutable, and his hands were clasped gently in front of him. The absent glasses were the only sign he’d faced us before at all.
“Hiya, Marcie.” She put on a casual tone, but I didn’t have to feel it to know that River was as tense as I was. Not like before. “Long time no see.”
Marcel stopped just out of her reach, lifting his hands placatingly. “I’m sorry for how we met. I’d like to start over,” he said to me, before turning his attention to her. “But I’m not going to play any games, here, River.”
“Oh, trust me, nobody’s playing,” she said. “You can’t take us both on.”
“I really hope I don’t have to.” He was studying me, I noticed, too slow. “You were injured in the fall, I take it?”
“That is a bold observation,” I said. As if to prove it to all of us, something inside shifted from my mental grip and sent a crackling new wave of pain radiating across my body. I hissed through my teeth, involuntarily. But he didn’t feel that.
“Again, I’m sorry. Please believe me when I say that it wasn’t my intention. In fact…” He trailed off, watching me intently and making no move whatsoever to help. “You’re extraordinarily powerful, aren’t you? For someone supposedly so young. I expect you’ll be back in form in no time at all.”
“I– I’m not sure. About how powerful I am, that is. I don’t exactly have a frame of reference to judge by.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t,” he sighed. “If you’re telling the truth, that is.”
“What? Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged, casually. Like this was a casual conversation. “Any number of reasons.”
“...Where do you think I’m from, Marcel?” I asked, slowly.
“Where do you think you’re from?”
Again, he caught me off guard with that. I remembered what River told me– his words weren’t just deflection. He really didn’t know, and he thought I did. So instead of trying to convince him again, I said, “You think I’m from out there. That I don’t belong.”
“I’m not sure how much you know about that,” he said, unfazed, “but all signs point to that being the case, yes. If even you really don’t know, if you really have no reason to lie… like I said, I want to start over.” He cast a very pointed glance at River, still ready to fight at any moment. “There are peaceful solutions, here. We can talk it out.”
She wasn’t going to have any of that. “No tricks, Marcie. You’re not taking either of us. You can stand here and monologue all you want, but in a few minutes both of us are gonna be walking outta here.”
His hands lowered to his side as something changed in him, almost imperceptibly. “I want this to be as amiable as possible,” he said, “but you know there are so many reasons why that can’t happen right now, River.”
The pressure in the air changed with him; not just the atmosphere, but the faint breeze, the heat, everything. He was trying to close us off, like he’d tried before. The world seemed to constrict in ripples, numbing my connection to everything else around me, him included. I didn’t want outright conflict either, but I wasn’t going to lay there uselessly while he tried to push us around.
River, though… was plainly not as confident as I was. She hadn’t been there in Vermiles; I realized that maybe she wasn’t as familiar with this as I was. A little late to warn her. Unconsciously, she backed up a step from Marcel, then two, almost walking into me without realizing. She clutched the hilt of the sword with tight knuckles.
I clenched my teeth and swallowed down the white-hot pain as I twisted on the ground, putting my weight on my other arm and reaching up to grip her right hand, hanging at her side.
She stopped; her breath stopped coming heavy, her heart stopped pounding quite as hard. She looked down at me with some startled expression written into her face as I braced myself and, once more, let my power flow and break Marcel’s field, cutting through it like paper. At least you could touch paper. This was even flimsier.
“Last time,” I managed through clenched teeth, “I told you not to do that. So please don’t.”
“Whatever River has told you–”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I cut him off, with what I hoped was some semblance of authority. After a moment of shakily working to stand, River leapt into action, her other hand leaping from the rapier to my arm as she helped me to my feet. Marcel obliged.
But still, he said, “I can’t let this continue. You have a lot of power and, from what I’ve seen, not much control. You don’t understand what’s happened to you; I see that. Even if you have no ill intent it’s dangerous for the people living here, for the forest… it’s probably quite dangerous for you as well.” He met River’s icy stare again. “Believe it or not, my first priority is always going to be the wellbeing of my charges. Even you.”
She scoffed, her grip tightening nervously around my arm. I didn’t know what I could say to reassure her; so instead I focused on him. “It’s been… difficult, for me, here. You have seen that, haven’t you?” I asked. “But I’m… recovering from the shock.”
“And what does River think about this?”
“My voice is my own,” I said. “And so is… so is this choice.”
His eyebrows raised, momentarily; River shot me a peculiar look, too, but she didn’t say anything. That was okay. I took one more deep breath and continued.
“I’ll come with you, Marcel. To the capital. To wherever.”
Each eyebrow crept a little higher. “Oh. Oh, uh– well, then,” he said, “if you’re willing to come peacefully, of your own accord, we can move on–”
“What are you talking about?” River sharply cut him off. “We don’t need to–”
“It’s okay,” I told her, “just– please trust me.” And I turned back to him and said, “I will come with you. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to let River go. I know you’re more interested in me right now. So I’ll help you if she gets to leave.”
“...Fine,” he conceded, exasperated. “I’m sure I’ll find a way to justify it.”
“Hey, hey, hold up!” she loudly interjected, looking back and forth between us. “I’m not going anywhere! Neither of us need to make any concessions to you, Marcie, we– we won’t–”
“River–”
“You don’t have to do this!” she shouted. The clearing fell silent for a moment– even the insects seemed to hush. It felt wrong, like something had broken again. She felt hurt. Angry. Like she was angry at me. I tried to think of anything to say, to make her stop looking at me like that. But instead I reached around, placed a hand on the arm gripping my own. The tension fell from her face.
“We are in this together,” she said.
“We’re in this together,” I echoed. “River, you’ve helped me. I was lost – maybe I still am – and you… I can’t even put into words what you’ve done for me. But this is what I can do to help you.”
Marcel politely turned away, I could see in my periphery, looking out at the trees. I was sure he could still hear us, but that was fine. River was the one who mattered. It was all I could do; so it wasn’t even a choice.
“You can leave, and you should leave. Find… a nice lake to rest by, like you said, right? You don’t have to go to the Court with me. But I can learn from them, too, and he’s right, I’ve hurt people, and if it all means giving you a chance like you gave me, that’s fine. Do you have a better way out?”
“Adeline,” she said, rather than answer, almost under her breath, “I… shit, Adeline.” Her face contorted. Her sharp eyes glittered. “Listen. You’ve gotta promise me something. That’s my condition.”
“...What do you mean?”
“Tell me you’re gonna go, you’re gonna talk to these guys and get what you need, and then that at some point, we’re gonna meet up again. Sometime soon. And you’re gonna be safe and sound, and we can figure something out together. Friends, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will, River. It’ll be okay.”
She nodded to herself, gaze downcast. When she finally spoke, all she said was, “Don’t think I won’t hold you to that.” Then, gingerly, she let go of my arm, and I let my other hand go back to holding my abdomen.
Sorry.
With one last hollow glare thrown in Marcel’s direction, she backed away and left. And as she took off into the shelter of the forest, warmth fading, even as Marcel stood just a few steps away, even as I tried my hardest to ignore it… for some reason, I felt the emptiness creeping back.
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