The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 411

CECILIA

My insides seethed with nausea as the tempus warp returned us to Taegrin Caelum.

I had failed. Now, I somehow had to face Agrona and explain that failure. The Legacy had been defeated by a common Scythe.

Draneeve was waiting for us with a number of attendants. The crimson-haired, half-mad mage bowed deeply as I stepped down, arm-in-arm with Nico, off the reception platform. “Welcome home, Scythe Nico and Lady Cecilia. The High Sovereign is waiting for you.”

Despite the bone-deep exhaustion that had settled over me, requiring a full day of rest before I could even face the tempus warp, I knew there was no escaping this summons.

Nico knew as well. “Maybe he can help you understand what happened at Aedelgard?” he asked consolingly.

In my previous life, my handlers and the train of scientists and ki-optimization specialists they paraded through my life hadn’t understood what I was—not really. Even the name they gave me, “the Legacy,” seemed born from myth or legend, a term not of their own invention.

But Agrona, he understood me. He saw beyond the constraints of his own perception, and by doing so he gained knowledge that was inaccessible to others. But he shared little of what he saw, and he needed to work around my still-human mind, and so we progressed slowly and only when he decided I was ready for more.

“I am ready,” I said, more in answer to my own thoughts than Nico’s question.

Draneeve spun away, his unkempt crimson mop of hair splashing along in his wake. The other attendants—Imbuers, healers, Sentries, anyone who might have been needed on my return—fell into line behind us wordlessly, like a flock of ducks mindlessly following their leader.

My eyes were blind to the passing halls of the fortress. Unconsciously, I stared at Draneeve’s crimson and black uniform, the sight of him tethering me like a leash so that my feet could follow where he led, but my thoughts were in Sehz-Clar, stuck there as if a part of me hadn’t really left. I wished to understand why the barrier resisted me. No other mana that I had encountered was outside of my control, not even the purified particles within the bodies of other living beings.

And yet, somehow, Seris had found some way to bind the mana so completely that it resisted even my influence. Not only that, but even an omnidirectional bombardment on multiple fronts from thousands of powerful mages hadn’t shaken anything loose, either. And then there was the Scythe herself…I had already known she was dangerous. All the other Scythes regarded her with a wary combination of respect and fear. Now, I understood why.

At my full strength, I knew that I could have overpowered the mana void technique she used. But I hadn’t been at my full power, and so, had allowed her to overwhelm me and push me back.

At least I eliminated her retainer, I thought, but it was a small victory, and there was no pride or pleasure in it.

Draneeve stepped aside at the top of a stair that led down into the lower research levels. Nico was eyeing the stairs apprehensively, like a child afraid of the dark. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but then glanced again at Draneeve and all the attendants. No, I could ask when we were alone. I didn’t want to draw attention to Nico’s discomfort, and remembering the mana core he had been hiding, I put two and two together.

“The High Sovereign will look for you where the phoenix roosts,” Draneeve said, his voice gravelly, his eyes darting and uncomfortable.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, confused by the unnecessary dramatization.

“I know the way,” Nico replied quickly. “You are dismissed, Draneeve.”

Nico took my arm again and led me toward the stairs. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, frowning at Draneeve and the other attendants, but got no more answers from them.

“It was a message,” Nico said after a moment, his voice very low, almost a whisper. “Agrona knows I met her. He…might even know about the core I took.”

“Oh,” I said, then, “Met who?”

“One of his prisoners, an asuran woman. A phoenix. After I was…after you healed me.”

The stairs were cramped enough that it was uncomfortable to walk side by side, and so I slowed, falling into step behind Nico, looking down on him from above. The lower we went, the darker the stairs became, until the black stone steps were almost indistinguishable from the shadows. “Why would it matter that you’ve met this phoenix? Did something happen?” I said after a minute.

Nico’s steps stuttered, and he started to turn around to look up at me. Whatever he was thinking, though, he quickly smothered it and resumed the slow descent. “No.”

I let out a little laugh, but stopped when the darkness swallowed the sound. “I don’t see the problem, Nico.”

“Just…don’t say anything about the core? Even if he knows I took it, don’t admit you know?”

“But I could—”

He stopped his descent fully this time, and I nearly ran into the back of him. “Please?”

“All right,” I said, reaching out to lay a hand on the top of his head but stopping myself. Such little acts of intimacy still gave me horrible, wrenching nausea that I couldn’t escape. Damned body, I thought, suddenly angry. “But you shouldn’t fear him so much,” I snapped, venting that anger on the only target I had. “He isn’t a threat to you. Agrona is the key to our future.”

Nico’s shoulders went stiff and he curled in on himself ever so slightly, and I bit my tongue. Guilt and regret immediately overshadowed my anger. Seris’s words had shaken him, I knew. I could tell the moment she uttered the foul lie—telling us that Agrona didn’t have the power to send us back to our lives—that it had taken root in Nico’s mind, and I had watched it grow in him as he watered it with his thoughts and attention.

But what I saw when he turned to glance at me was a smile, and in his eyes I saw only his trust and love for me. Regardless of what trials we faced, at least I always knew that would be there.

We started moving again, continuing the slow climb down the winding stairs in silence.

It wasn’t long before voices began drifting up to us from somewhere below. Nico stopped again, this time holding a hand up to warn me against making any noise. Two voices, those of the Scythes, Viessa and Melzri.

“—treating us like common rabble, it’s absurd,” Melzri was saying, her voice echoing slightly in the narrow stairwell, low and angry.

“We are lucky to be alive, sister,” Viessa replied. The words seemed to creep along the black stone and tickle my ears like some haunting specter. “Take care with your words.”

“Tch, what is Agrona doing, anyway?” Melzri hissed. “Sequestering himself away for days at a time, holding back the Wraiths—Vritra’s horns, why not send the other basilisks to Sehz-Clar or Dicathen? His treaty with Epheotus is long since dust, along with the elven forests, and yet he has done nothing.”

“The lives of asura are long,” Viessa said, her tone lightly critical. “What, to us, may feel like ages, for the High Sovereign is a blink. Perhaps what looks like inaction is in truth only patience.”

“Then our failure should hardly matter, should it?” Melzri shot back.

Viessa started to respond, but Nico chose that moment to step down loudly as he descended. Both Viessa and Melzri went dead silent, their footsteps faltering.

When Nico completed another slow revolution of the stairwell and caught sight of them, he stopped, feigning surprise. “What are you two doing down here?”

“None of your business, little brother,” Melzri snapped, glaring suspiciously up at us both. “I don’t have to ask why you’re crawling down these steps, of course.” Her eyes burrowed like maggots into mine. “Perhaps the Legacy’s failure will sap some of the sting from our own, or at least make us look better by comparison. I should thank you for that, Lady Cecilia.”

“Enough,” Nico said firmly, then he began walking again.

I didn’t have the energy to care about her childish sniping, and I followed Nico wordlessly, eager to get the inevitable confrontation with Agrona where he expresses his disappointment over with. Then we could figure out how to take down Seris’s barrier, together.

Viessa shrank against the inner wall to allow Nico to pass, but Melzri stood firmly in the center of the stairs.

“Agrona himself has asked for our presence,” Nico said stiffly. “Would you like to be the reason we are detained? It may not be a particularly dark black mark on your record, but with everything else that’s happened, perhaps it will be the board that broke the wogart’s back.”

Melzri sneered and stepped aside. “I guess I shouldn’t blame you for your urgency. Since Agrona was happy to leave you for dead after your pathetic display at the Victoriad, I’m sure you feel compelled to prove you’re not entirely worthless.”

My fists clenched, and a fury of mana sprang unbidden into action around us, slamming Melzri and Viessa against the curved inner wall of the stairwell.

Tendrils of black mana writhed around Viessa, grappling with my own power, trying to extricate her and force me away. I grabbed those tendrils—her power—and wrapped them around Melzri’s throat, squeezing.

“Stop this,” Viessa hissed, her wide eyes staring helplessly at her out-of-control spell.

Soulfire rippled and jumped across Melzri’s skin as she attempted to burn away my influence, but I suppressed her power, holding it down against her, no more dangerous to me than smoke on the wind.

“For far too long, you’ve treated him—a Scythe of Central Dominion!—like a dog you can kick to make yourself feel more powerful,” I said, grinding the words out between clenched teeth. “Speak to me or Nico in this way again, and I will pull the core from your chest and drink its mana while the light fades from your eyes.”

I released my hold over the mana, and both their spells faded away. Melzri’s hand went to her throat where the void wind had choked her.

Not a single word was spoken as we moved down the stairs past them, and Nico was quiet until he must have been certain they were far above us.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said eventually, not stopping or turning to look at me.

“Why?” I asked incredulously, letting out a wry laugh. “The other Scythes become more irrelevant with each passing day. If anything, you should be more angry. Why aren’t you?”

Nico cleared his throat, then threw a dark scowl back up the stairwell behind us. “Like you said, they are becoming irrelevant. Why waste any feelings on them at all?”

After another minute or two, Nico led us through a door of black stone into a large, rectangular room with a high ceiling. A sudden and unwelcome series of memories flooded into my thoughts as the sight of the sterile space reminded me of the many similar rooms I had seen in my last life: places where I was cut open, drugged, and put through inhumane tests.

Vertigo made my knees tremble, and beyond the sickness of the sensation itself, there was also the deeper underlying shame I felt at being so weak. Only moments ago, I had felt so powerful putting the two Scythes in their place, and yet here I was, ready to curl into a ball and vomit at the sight of a few tables, tools, and bright lights.

“Cecil, are you—”

“Fine,” I muttered, blinking rapidly.

Nico must have understood, because he again put his arm through mine and quickly guided me across the room and into a long hallway. Cells lined both sides, but I had no mind for inspecting them, and Nico seemed to know where we were headed.

When that hallway ended, he led me left into a second, nearly-identical series of cells, then stopped in front of the first to contain a living occupant that I had noticed.

The woman on the other side of the cell’s shielding barrier was truly beautiful—or had been before her captivity. She looked young but felt very old, with tired eyes the color of fire and a smokey gray tint to her skin. It was the way her rich red hair clumped together in the shape of feathers that I found most interesting and beautiful, though.

Her power was suppressed, what little she still had shielded behind the barrier, but I could still sense her mana. It burned beneath the surface, like hot coals under a blanket of ash.

“The reincarnate returns,” she said, her voice a dim and dying rasp. Those glowing eyes settled on Nico, who shifted uncomfortably. Then, slowly, as if dragged by force of will, they shifted to me. Several heavy heartbeats passed, then they widened in recognition. “Legacy…”

My lips parted, a question forming on my tongue, but Nico spoke first. “She’s an asura, a phoenix. According to her, they have some understanding of rebirth and reincarnation.” He seemed distinctly uncomfortable, his eyes never alighting on the asura for more than an instant before he looked away.

Her dry, cracked lips turned up at the corners. “The dragons have their aether arts, the pantheons the art of war. Titans will claim to understand life best of all asura, but they only understand creation, just as the basilisks know corruption and decay. Life, and all the many facets that make it up, is the domain of the phoenixes.”

“You’re being uncharitable, Lady Dawn,” a deep voice boomed from just behind me, causing me to twirl around in surprise.

The sight of Agrona never failed to impress upon me a sense of awe. His lithe yet statuesque features maintained an evenness that settled my nerves, as the series of chains and jewels adorning his expansive antler-like horns caught the light and held my attention.

Beside me, Nico shifted back, away from Agrona, and bowed, his gaze remaining on the floor except for a single glance thrown down the hallway, right of where we’d come from. I knew instinctively the cell must be in that direction, the one he’d taken the dragon’s core from. He was wondering if Agrona had been down there, afraid he had been found out.

“High Sovereign Agrona Vritra,” I said, not smiling as I used his full title, something I rarely did. “I’ve come to report my failure to retake Sehz-Clar. The shield proved more robust than I anticipated, and in my weakened state, Seris’s void mana technique—”

He raised a hand, one finger extended, and I went silent immediately. His eyes, like two fathomless pools of rich red wine, drew me in. “It is my fault, Cecil dear, for not seeing the truth of things sooner.” Agrona ran his fingers through my hair, smiling fondly down at me. “I sensed Orlaeth’s signature in the barrier Seris has erected but assumed it was of his design. That may be the case still, but his presence within the magic is much more literal, I now realize.”

I reached for my understanding of this world’s technology, but it was still too limited, and I found only confusion.