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The tower, dominating the sky, was easily as tall as any of the spires back home– tall enough that from the ground, its height warped over my head. But it glowed, in bright light glittering through the crystalline windows, and its own warmth broke against the night chill and the energy of our own bodies.
I looked at Balancia, leading the way across the courtyard, and wondered how that felt to him. To all the other mortals, too. How Vermiles had felt. They didn’t resonate with nearly as great a flux of energy as I– they– we?– did, that was true; maybe they didn’t have the fine senses to detect those fields at all. I couldn’t imagine how they possibly functioned.
It must have been getting quite late into the evening, and I didn’t think the clean, airy lobby could have strictly been described as “crowded”, but as the three of us entered I saw at least enough people inside to ruffle me again. Several faces turned to watch us cross the ornate tiled floor, from desks and doorways on either side of the room and looking down from the mezzanine railings. Nobody else so much as broke stride.
Three elevators were built into the polished stone of the far wall, attended by arrays of pulleys and electric wires running all the way up towards the summit. Their entrances were barred by complicated brassy cages, but Valerie folded one aside with a squeal of oiled metal and not much trouble.
I was the last one to enter, passing below the unfamiliar words faintly etched into the wall in long, flowery letters just above the arched aperture. The floor swayed disconcertingly as I entered; Valerie again reached around my shoulder and folded the barrier shut again with a grating crash.
He pressed one of the silver buttons set next to the entrance, and instantly a chill shot down my spine, and without any more warning the lift lurched and began to rise into the higher reaches of the tower. It shook almost violently, and my heart fluttered as I gripped the wall– it was a startlingly terrible experience, but it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds before the ascent mellowed. They both gave me those looks I was growing used to. It passed. I breathed.
The lobby disappeared below us, leaving the three of us to stand strangely close together beneath unpleasantly cold lights in an uncomfortably enclosed box. But as I got used to the motion, honestly, it was almost enjoyable to feel all those people shift around us; it wasn’t unlike… like being on an airship, where everything flowed past like water. I focused on them, one anonymous pulse at a time.
For a meeting that was supposedly so urgent, though, it seemed to me like we were moving far too slowly.
A chime somewhere rang when we arrived at the top, the floor rising into view behind the cage, and beyond it was a silent hallway lined with dark tile and painted a soft off-white, lined with closed doors. Long enough that it stretched through the building until, at the far end, the hallway opened up into a three-way junction… and instead of a wall, there was a window.
The entire city was laid out below; bizarre and yet now dizzyingly familiar at the same time. The burning light sparkling on the river, the comings and goings at the wall, the trains running down silver rails back and forth above rolling streets, twisting through the towers and stretches of trees. The dark horizon beyond and the deep night sky seeping into it.
Even as Valerie and Balancia figuratively dragged me along down the hallway towards our destination, I couldn’t help but be transfixed by everything I could make out, like the view from the wall tenfold; tiny intricacies of architecture I was accustomed to at home, and other details, too– a huge, bright circular building that must have been an amphitheatre. Just like River said.
Then, finally, Valerie apparently found the room we were looking for. When I paid attention, it was obvious. I stopped staring out the window as I realized, and I started staring at the door– through it. I felt what was on the other side.
“It’s not just Marcel in there,” I said.
Valerie’s hand hovered over the door handle and he glanced over at me, reading my expression. Balancia stood by between us. “Of course,” he said back. Of course it was obvious, but actually being confronted with this again…
He gripped the doors with both hands and silently began to slide them apart.
“Wait–”
“Finally!”
Someone ran at us the moment the door opened, and instinctively I stumbled a step back and prepared to raise some kind of buffer to protect myself, but whatever I was anticipating never came. Another immortal I’d never met slid to a halt before Valerie and I, seemingly unable to decide what to react to first.
They barely stood up to my shoulder, but they reached and clapped Valerie on his with ease, casually. Wild hair swept side to side as they looked him over before turning to me, bright eyes flashing. It wasn’t difficult to guess who this was supposed to be.
“I was getting worried you were never gonna show!” Senna chirped to Valerie, his voice echoing across the mostly-empty hall.
“Marcel caved,” said Valerie, quite pointedly. “I didn’t have much of a choice.”
From the other side of the room, a different voice spoke up with barely-concealed annoyance: “How old are you, Senna, four hundred? Ish? You’d think you might’ve learned some patience by now.”
“Ah, and yet, no such luck for either of us.”
As we entered I actually took in the room for the first time, looking over Senna’s shoulder; at the long, semicircular tables spanning most of the room, tiered into several levels rising above the floor, I saw Marcel at the back, watching things play out without interfering; and a short distance away from him, sitting down with her chin on her hands, was the one who must have spoken.
Like Senna, she’d eschewed what I assumed was the uniform Marcel and Valerie wore, though she dressed in plain, tidy black and warm grey instead of the busy, breezy ensemble Senna wore, all bright blues and bronze. Long, pristine curtains of black hair framed her hard face, eyebrows knit together as she stared down at me. When I met her gaze it was icy. Intense.
“Hey, Erias, did you pass on that message like I said?” Senna asked. Balancia nodded shortly, gesturing inconspicuously to Valerie, who immediately captured Senna’s attention. “Aw, you know I didn’t mean any of that, Val. Sometimes one simply needs to dispense with the procedure and skip ahead to the part we actually care about.”
“I’m not entirely sure that I agree with you,” Valerie said, “but you have made your point.”
“Good, good, good!” All of a sudden he put all his focus back onto me, scanning my face intently. I crossed and folded my arms tight against my chest, digging a few fingers into the fabric of my sleeves.
A smile seemed to slowly slip onto his own face. “Sooo… is anyone going to introduce us? Or must I do this myself? Marcel, you know I’m terribly shy.”
Marcel cleared his throat and spoke up before I could; he descended a few steps from the edge of the room, placing himself approximately in the centre of where we were all scattered, commanding attention. “Yes, I believe some proper introductions are in order,” he said, and with a sweeping gesture introduced me. “Adeline– this is the Court.”
Three other immortals in the hall made various subdued attempts at identifying themselves; the one up top didn’t, her glower unwavering. After a moment he said, “You’ve already met Senna, here–”
“I don’t bite, I promise,” he interjected with a grin. He was different, but the rhythm of his energy… it was still unsettlingly familiar. Bubbling up, barely contained.
“I could have been fooled,” said Valerie. “You’re like a hyperactive puppy.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing, Valerie. People love puppies.”
“And up here is Cherie,” Marcel continued, “who I’m sure will warm up in time.” She still didn’t so much as flinch. “You’ve already met Valerie and I, of course. And Cherie, Senna– this is our guest, Adeline.”
I cleared my throat, utterly and completely unsure of what to say. “...Hi.”
“Hello, hello!” said Senna. “Those two told us about you over the wire– honestly, not much. As much as they were at liberty to say, I’m sure. You have no idea how much of a stir you’ve caused around here already! Isn’t that right, Cher?”
Cherie grunted noncommittally, but Senna just waved her off. He leaned in and whispered, just loud enough that I was sure everyone else could hear, “Don’t tell her I told you so, but I think she was pretty excited to meet you too.”
“Okay,” she interrupted. “Marcel, can we move on from the introductions, please? Can we maybe talk about what exactly she is doing here?”
“Adeline?” He looked to me expectantly, and following suit everyone else did too. After a few long, silent moments he finally said, “Your… situation? I can explain but if you’d like to go into the details yourself…”
“Um.” My mind went blank. The lights burned overhead. “No. Thanks.”
“...Okay, so. Val and I were tracking River Mercier through Casthele, as you know, and we crossed paths with her in Vermiles and thought we’d had her cornered, but as it happened, Adeline here incidentally turned up in the area at the same time. My understanding – and, correct me if I’m wrong – is that…”
He continued on like that, relaying the events of the past few days, Vermiles and River and the flight and River and my decision to go with them for everyone’s benefit. And River. I started to tune out his voice when he talked about what I’d done in Vermiles, the trouble I’d caused so many people by accident. Worse than trouble. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about. I knew most of the story already.
Once again I was confronted with the fact that for the first time these were other people involved in that story. My life. Senna (and less blatantly, I noticed, Balancia) listened intently, but Cherie still seemed unimpressed. For a long while her gaze remained fixed on me, and I studiously avoided it.
I was… a little overwhelmed. But I could keep an even head. I was keeping it.
“...the rest of the trip home was uneventful, though,” Marcel finished. “We came straight here, I assure you, Senna. And now...” he paused, looking around the room at each of us in turn. “Everyone is up to speed, yes?”
“Actually no! Not entirely,” Senna said. He prodded my shoulder with a finger, and in that moment of contact, I felt a shock of static discharge against his skin. “I can feel your aura, of course. But we haven’t actually seen what you can do.”
I sensed Valerie stiffen beside me, though I wasn’t sure what exactly he was suggesting. “Senna,” he said, “now isn’t–”
“No time like the present, right?” Senna cut him off again before focusing entirely on me. “What do you say? Just a little contest of will, give everyone an idea of how we match up. I promise I won’t be too hard on you.”
I couldn’t exactly tell much about all these other immortals’ grasps on the energy around us, not without direct contact; everything but the vaguest notions were impossible unless one willed it into action, the not quite physical. On the one hand, it was an enticing idea. On the other, the thought of willingly opening myself up to that contact was scary on a whole new level.
I had held my own against Marcel, though. Twice.
Before Valerie could protest any further, I nodded.
A wave seemed to pass through the room as Senna backed up into the centre of the hall against one of the inner tables, so light on his feet he could’ve been floating. A grin on his face.
I swallowed, hard. Soft heat rippled at the edges of my vision, building, and then it broke. And though neither of us moved, even Balancia, however dull his senses were, must have been able to tell when it started– the sizzle in the air was just that tangible.
At first, I thought he was doing what Marcel had tried, simply forcing the flow of energy around me to slow and stop, wrapping me in a deadening makeshift barrier, but no. Something was different about him. Instead of just wrenching heat and electricity into place he was guiding it, the wind pushed and pulled at a stray leaf. When I tried forcing my way through again, the extension of power wasn’t snuffed, but redirected around me. A bubble all the same, and a little weaker, too, but breaking it was a different matter entirely.
Still, in the end, it wasn’t complicated. Trivial, really. Bracing myself for balance I took all of his momentum and swept it back around in a fluid arc, and suddenly the energy around me was being pushed at him. It was much slower than it could have been, limited by conscious control, but speed wasn’t as important as finesse. It was almost enough.
He added another layer to the bubble, and with even more of our shared momentum I circumvented it. Another layer, another push. The air around me folded together until it was as thick as a blanket, weighing heavy on my breath; and then, straining at the effort, I stopped redirecting and started directing. Conducting. I took all the energy built in the air around me and pushed it back with as much force as I could without breaking things, and then he was the one sweating away the heat, blinking away the tingle of electricity.
“You’re a quick learner!” he said to me, though he didn’t stop trying to push back at me, and therefore I declined to ease up either. Everyone else stared from the sidelines, unmoving. But even then, through the ripples in the air, I saw him smile. “How about something else, then?”
I finally stopped, feeling the room’s atmosphere slowly return to something approaching equilibrium (or as close to that as possible, when our auric halos of energy still bristled against each other, ebbing and flowing ever so gently). But a moment later he was on the offensive again.
Flickering orange flames ignited one-by-one on his fingertips, before he raised his open hand to his mouth and blew–
Tiny flames burst into firestorms blazing across the room toward me; someone yelled, but it wasn’t either of us. Beyond my focus. This was a much finer approach than the nebulous push-and-pull we’d established before, I knew; the best I could do was freeze the air in front of me as fast as I could, dispelling the flames before they reached me. I felt only the faintest glow of warmth.
I twisted the air again– my hands were shaking, but so what? The somatics were merely for comfort. I didn’t need them anyway. The pale smoke mixing with the steam in front of me was drawn into a long, narrow path, and I pushed it away along the line between us just like he was doing. My target would be more specific, though.
In the split second between him realizing my move and the collision, he managed to shift the pressure and divert some of the smoke into a thin mist around him, but the rest hit him in a narrow stream before exploding into his face. Instantly the fire stopped, and he backed up a bit more, coughing it from his mouth.
Before it even dissipated I could tell he was about to try something else. The air shifted again. I waited to see what he was going to do, ready to adapt before he could put the pressure back on me; until I realized that it wasn’t in his direction. The currents in the air were being dragged apart, but they weren’t being controlled by either of us, not directly. It was much fainter than that; someone had begun to move. It was just a miniscule disturbance, the kind to be expected when–
Almost too late I blasted the air to my right with heat, the hastily-estimated counterforce just barely adequate in slowing down whatever had been thrown at me inches before it hit the side of my face.
I reached out a hand and, its forward motion all but arrested, a still-smoking wooden stick fell out of the air into my palm. It took me a long moment to register before I turned and looked up to where it had been launched from. The edge of the hall.
Cherie dropped into her seat and leaned forward against the table once more, glaring. “A quick learner, and faster than you seem,” she said.
Balancia, Marcel and Valerie just stared, an array of expressions across their faces. Senna only chuckled.
“You certainly are,” he said. He let the projection of his energy fade away, allowing it to retreat back into his veins and across his skin, a gentle warmth felt from across the room. Just as quickly as it had begun, the tension was broken. “Pretty exceptional control for someone who only woke up a couple of days ago.”
“Thank you,” I said, still reeling. Her gaze still bore down on me. I averted my own as Marcel seemed to whisper something to her. It was so quiet, suddenly; I was sure I was already acclimating to the buzz of energy that permeated everything within the city, but this hall especially– so large for so few.
“...Is it just you? The four of you, I mean?”
Marcel paused, then nodded, gesturing to the whole room with open arms. “Just us. We have several liaisons with mortal governments and systems worldwide, like Captain Balancia, here, and a handful of others, but as for immortals in our circle, this is… the whole family.”
He said that last part barely his breath. The numbers were fine, though, I reminded myself. There were thousands of mortals, but these four – and River, too – could probably help me more than any of them could.
Thinking about that put my thoughts back on track. I’m here for a reason.
“I didn’t wake up a couple of days ago,” I said to Senna, and cleared my throat again, glancing at the tiny assembly. “Well, I did, but not in the way you were talking about before. I was awake before, too. I just wasn’t… here. I don’t know where I was.”
“Right,” said Marcel, “and that is key. That’s what I want to focus on, here. Adeline will be staying with us until we can determine where she came from and why. She doesn’t know the grittier details, so we are going to help however we can.”
“All good, then,” Senna chimed in. “Cousin. These guys already told us a few things, but I think it’s best to hear the full picture from you. What exactly do you know? About before?”
I took a deep, shaky breath, struggling to remember everything I could through the lingering fog in my head (not that there was much to remember– but still, I was nervous). Eventually I knew where to start, though.
All of it. I told them about Home, the books, the scrolls, the birds, the sea, everything I used to be able to depend on. Waking up on the beach, the light, the pain– and then Vermiles. Even the person I hurt. And meeting River, for the first time (but Marcel already knew most of that). It was hard, at first, but it got easier. Just a little easier.
I did leave out some of what River and I had talked about, though. The plan we made. Necessary omissions, even if it made my skin feel hot.
I’d read a lot of stories, imagined a lot of absurd things while I was there, alone. But I couldn’t avoid the fact that this all sounded absurd when it came out of my mouth. When I was finished I was fully expecting – if not prepared – for them to say I was lying or that it was all a trick or a dream or that they didn’t really care what I said, because they weren’t going to forgive me after all anyway.
“...So,” Senna said instead. “Any ideas? Marcel? Val, you put anything together about this? You should have a better idea than I do, here, by all means don’t let me do all the mental heavy lifting.”
“Actually,” Marcel replied. “I’ve got a working theory. Sorry, if you don’t mind, Adeline.”
I hesitated, then shrugged. “Don’t keep us waiting, then!”
“My first instincts were that she was either newly-born or had just now arrived, somehow, from another world beyond the Partition, but neither of those exactly fit the facts. So consider that maybe she arrived here, like Val and I, before Partition?”
He turned back to me specifically, and posited, “Under whatever circumstances, whether or not you can remember, you arrived on some isolated island all that time ago and stayed there. From your description it could have been an old fortress from the war, I can’t say for sure. But maybe it really has been sheer chance that it was never found, and that you never reached any shores until now; it’s not as if any of us have seen every corner of this planet. You had a collection of ancient texts, in Lumil, survived from… well, a very long time ago, at least,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but I believe it’s a reasonable conclusion.”
That actually does make sense, I found myself thinking. More than anything else, at least. Valerie echoed the sentiment a moment later, his voice low and pensive.
“This is a lot to take in,” I admitted. But like River said… it was weird that I’d known the name Alesse in the first place. It seemed so astonishingly simple when he laid it all out, but maybe that was a good thing.
“I would be surprised if it wasn’t, with how unusual all of this is.”
“But that means,” I asked, so tentatively. “...It means I can go home?”
They were all very quiet, for a while.
And then Marcel said, with what was surely utter confidence, “Yes. Absolutely you can.”
I found myself sighing, numb. I really hadn’t realized how good that would be to hear. How much more hopeful I was than I could ever remember being before.
“If you were that isolated we may not even have a record of this island you came from. You did wash up on the shore of the Crater, near Vermiles, but unfortunately that whole sea has been thoroughly mapped, so I think you must have been carried into it by the currents from somewhere further abroad. We’ll be thorough too, though. We can find it,” he assured me; I was barely listening by then, but I appreciated it. “I promise.”
“To be certain,” Valerie added sharply, “that we are not overlooking a breach, I would like to at least wait until after the next convergence to discharge her. Ensure that the records from our neighbours don’t suggest any discrepancies. Captain, what’s the date?”
“Oh!” said Balancia, startled. “That would be, ah, Prevernal 21st, sir.”
“That gives us three weeks,” Marcel noted. “More or less. That’s some time; I’m sure we’ll have a lead by then. Adeline, you’ll have to wait here that long, before we release you. Or until we find where you’re from, at the very earliest. If that’s… fine by you?”
They were all talking very fast. “Wait, s– sorry, uh, release,” I said. “Don’t like that very much.” He grimaced, nodded in concession, but he didn’t interrupt. “But what’s a convergence, exactly?”
“It’s an… exchange of information,” he said carefully. “Alesse and certain other nearby worlds align every so often such that information can briefly be sent between them. If we really can’t find anything in our existing records we might be able to learn something from what we pick up then…”
“But surely,” Senna languished, “it won’t come to that.”
I certainly hoped not.
“I’ll get you set up with somewhere to stay for the next few nights,” Marcel continued when I didn’t reply. “Again, you’ll have to stick around for a while, but we will get you home. It’s only a matter of time.”
And if there’s anything I have enough of, it’s time. I took a deep breath. “Okay, then. I can stay. I’ll stay.”
“Sounds fantastic to me!” said Senna. Valerie agreed. Cherie didn’t seem to react at all.
“...That’s that settled, then. So let’s get down to business.”
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