The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 478

Chapter 478

Chapter 476: Ji-ae

TESSIA ERALITH

As the portal swallowed us, my last thought was of disappointment. For a moment, it had felt so good to see Arthur, but that feeling crumbled with the stone structure of his golem’s body.

Space and time inverted, stretched out and flipped upside down by the portal as it dragged us away, and then…

And then I was surrounded by nothing. Absolutely nothing. Emptiness in every direction.

And I was alone. _{ƒreewebηoveℓ.com}

I was alone.

I couldn’t sense Cecilia or hear her thoughts. Nor could I feel the body that I shared with her.

Tentatively, I tried to speak her name, but no sound came out. I had no fingers or toes to wiggle, no neck to turn my gaze left or right.

Then, like I was stepping out of a thick black fog, space materialized in front of me.

I was looking across a ground made of black glass at Cecilia. Not Cecilia in my body, but the way she pictured herself in her head, an athletic and feminine figure with cream-colored skin and dusty brown hair tied up in a tail. Beyond the strangeness of looking at her in a way I had only seen in thought before, something else was wrong. She was flat, like a reflection of herself in a dark mirror, and she was very still, making only occasional, unnaturally jerky movements.

“What’s happening?” I asked, and my voice came out distorted and strange to my own ears.

Across from me, Cecilia’s face pinched into a scowl. ‘I should’ve known you would attack me as soon as you had the chance.’ Her voice resounded hostilely inside my mind.

I shook my head. I wasn’t exactly hiding that fact. Whatever delusions or reasons you have to act the way you do, that applies to me too. But that's not important right now, is it? Look around us. Where are we?

‘Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. When I escape this, whatever it is, I’m going to leave you here.’ In her frame, Cecilia’s hands came up, and it looked as if she were pushing against the surface of a flat piece of glass.

Muted as my senses were, my nerves were still on fire throughout my body as I considered the full implications of what Cecilia and I were experiencing. We had fallen through a portal and been transported somewhere, but more than that, we had somehow been separated from one another and imprisoned. How is Arthur capable of this?

‘Oh, Vritra take me,’ Cecilia cursed, letting her hands drop. ‘I can’t believe I fell for his trap. I…Agrona is going to be furious. Not only did I disobey him, but I failed as well.’

I felt myself frown in a distant, numb sort of way. Surely you’re more angry at Arthur for trapping you than you are afraid of Agrona?

When Cecilia looked across the emptiness at me, I could see I was wrong. Her emotions were distant and clouded, but the expression on her face was easily readable. ‘You don’t understand. He’s losing patience with me. I’ve sensed it. And I’m afraid that…he’ll do something to Nico to punish me.’ She turned left and right, up and down as she searched her prison for any hint of a way out. ‘I need to escape this place.’

Cecilia’s thought brought me up short, and I had to be careful to not send any more thoughts to her. I was scared, and I wanted to escape too, but…Arthur had done this on purpose, knowing Cecilia and I would both be trapped here.

I had to ask myself what Arthur’s intention was. I didn’t know where we were, what the purpose of this place was beyond the obvious, or what would happen if we remained. Arthur knew I was still conscious inside of my body along with Cecilia—or at least I thought he did. He would have expected me to be here. That could have been why he devised this prison to separate us. Perhaps that meant he would be coming to free me…but was he really capable of such powerful magic?

Fear turned my stomach. It was also possible that the separation of our minds had nothing to do with Arthur’s actual plan, and he had finally decided that removing Cecilia was worth sacrificing me in the gambit. I couldn’t bring myself to disagree with the sentiment or be angry at Arthur if this were the case, but I still felt afraid.

‘I can feel your mind whirring over there,’ Cecilia interjected, interrupting my thoughts. ‘It’s annoying. If you’re not going to help me figure out how to get out of this prison, the least you can do is shut up.’

I sighed and wrapped my arms around myself. I don’t know what this place is, but to be honest, I don’t really care. Arthur finally beat you, Cecilia. There is nowhere for you to go, nothing for you to do now. Sit and seethe in your silence and fear.

I closed myself off to her before she could reply, lapsing into a sullen and fretful silence. But I still had to watch her; I couldn’t look anywhere else. Seeing her thrashing and gesticulating inside her two-dimensional prison brought me neither pleasure nor comfort. I expected her efforts to be short-lived but was surprised as the tenacity of her efforts only built. No magic or spells manifested in the open air between us, but a charge built within the strange prison that made the hair on my neck stand on end and roughened my skin with gooseflesh.

A tremor ran from my toes up to my scalp, and something tugged me forward. I flowed through a thin layer of glassy energy and found myself standing on the smooth surface I had seen before. I spun around to see an identical window like the one Cecilia was still trapped inside; I could feel her burning eyes stabbing into my back.

Beyond the window, around our smooth flat platform, which couldn’t have been more than twenty feet wide, was an endless ocean of emptiness. It was so black that my eyes played tricks with me, inserting color in a haze of purple and shapes like shadowy creatures crawling over each other inside the dark and the void.

I turned away and hurried to the very center of the platform between the two windows, each labored breath aching in my chest. “What have you done, Arthur?”

As if from a great distance, Cecilia’s muffled voice was shouting my name.

My hands trailed up my arms to my shoulders, then to my face, feeling the warmth of my skin, the shape of my nose, cheeks, and lips. My hair, I thought, running my fingers through it, lifting a lock of the silvery gray strands.

“Tessia!” Cecilia shouted again, her voice cutting through my revery like a bonesaw.

I wrapped my arms around myself in a sort of hug, hunching over and closing my eyes. “Just…give me some time, please. Let me have this moment.”

My legs were trembling, and I sank to the ground and pulled my knees to my chest. Pressing my face into my knees, I began to cry. My body shook with the relief of it. Slowly, I exercised the pent up emotion of my long imprisonment, and the tears eased. My breath came easily. Every muscle in my body relaxed.

Cecilia cleared her throat. “How did you escape?”

“Imagine, the two of us fused together for so long,” I said, my voice empty of all the emotion I had just released, “only to find ourselves imprisoned together when we are finally separated.”

“Tessia, please…”

My gaze slowly lifted to meet Cecilia’s. I had spent so long now inside her thoughts that I knew her probably better than she knew herself. I’d seen her switch from a megalomaniac to a vulnerable girl like I might switch on and off a lighting artifact, but I also had to remind myself that she was a child who had been manipulated into being little more than a weapon—not only once, but through two different lives.

“I don’t know. I felt you pushing mana across this platform, and a charge built up inside my window, then suddenly I was drifting out—”

“That’s it!” Cecilia said desperately. “These windows or whatever must have to be opened with mana or—” Her face fell suddenly, growing pale with fear. “Or aether.”

I thought back to the moment Cecilia had used Arthur’s own weapon to strike a blow against him and went silent.

“If I moved enough mana, it is possible that some aether interacted with the window as well…but I can’t pull mana to me in here,” she continued softly.

I didn’t answer.

“Which means you would have to be the one to release me,” she finished after a few long seconds.“We have to work together. You’re going to have to let me back in.”

She was referring to the mental block I had placed shortly after arriving inside the zone, cutting her off while I was imprisoned inside the window. I’d left the barrier up, but now it slipped away, joining our minds yet again.

Cecilia’s tangle of emotions burned hot and uncomfortable, like an ache behind my eyes.

“Except there is one other problem,” I started, digging my fingers into my temple with a grimace. “Even if I wanted to release you—I don’t know if I do—I can’t control mana.” I could sense the mana contained within the strange prison, but although I had my body back, I hadn’t regained my ability to cast spells. I tried not to think about the fact that I did not have a core at all.

Cecilia didn’t respond immediately, but I could feel her thoughts turning over and over. I stepped away from her window, moving to the edge of the platform and staring out into the nothing beyond. The writhing shadows, black on black, made my skin crawl even as I wondered if it was real or if I was simply seeing things.

‘Why can we still hear each other’s thoughts?’ Cecilia asked, her voice seeping into my head unexpectedly.

I returned to her window. “I don’t know, but then, I can’t even imagine what kind of magic could separate us to begin with.”

“What if we haven’t been separated?” she asked, her voice soft and echoing as if resounding up from the bottom of a well.

“What do you mean?”

She gestured at my torso from within the window. “You have your body, but I look like myself—like before, on Earth. And yet the runes that bound my reincarnated spirit to your body still mark your flesh. You are walking around inside an Integrated body and should be able to use magic, while I have a ki center and not a core, but I can manipulate mana.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise as I regarded her. “Of course. I should have seen that before. So you think…that we are still in the same body? Only our minds are divided?”

“I think we’re in the Relictombs,” she confirmed. “If there is anywhere that could trap our minds in a prison while our body sleeps somewhere else, that would be the answer.”

Cecilia had been taught about the Relictombs, although not extensively, and I shared her limited knowledge. Together, we considered what we knew. “That must have been an ascension portal that we fell through.”

Cecilia nodded at me from within her window. “Grey would only have chosen this zone if it was somewhere he thought we couldn’t escape.”

“Which means that it likely does require control over aether to navigate,” I said, circling back to our earlier line of thought. “So we really are stuck here.”

“No,” Cecilia said, now shaking her head. “I already released you. That means we can interact with this zone, even if not in the intended way. You can release me, and together we can clear this zone and find our way out.”

I bit my lip, unsure what to do. “Is this place any worse than out there, where I’ll be a prisoner in my own body again?”

“Please, Tessia,” Cecilia begged, sagging in her frame. “I can’t stay trapped in here. I have to get back to Agrona, to explain myself…” Her eyes burrowed into mine. “I can’t let him punish Nico for my mistakes.” When I didn’t immediately respond, she added, “I know you don’t understand why I do the things that I do, but…”

“I don’t, but I also can’t say I haven’t done something similar.” I swallowed down a lump in my throat, wondering at the simulation’s ability to create such a realistic sensation. I chose to go to my parents that day, and Arthur and Sylvie almost died—no, in a sense, they did die—because of my decision.

I knew that Arthur wanted to keep us—to keep Cecilia—in this place for as long as possible. Maybe he meant her to stay here forever, or maybe he knew she would break free eventually. I could only hope that my actions were a part of his plan, because the more I thought, the more my mind felt made up.

“What do you want, Cecilia?” I asked. “Really? In the end, I mean.”

Cecilia let out a deep breath, her eyes never leaving mine. “I want it all to have been worth it. In the end.”

Nodding my understanding, I made a decision that I could only hope I wouldn’t grow to regret. “You’re going to have to give me control and…to teach me how to use magic without a core.”

What followed was a difficult back and forth as Cecilia and I both worked against our instincts. If we were right, the zone was a kind of projection, little more than a dream, and for Cecilia to release her hold over my body and allow me to manipulate the mana within the dream, we both had to accept that the zone was simultaneously not populated by our real selves while also allowing our real shared body—and magical ability—to be utilized by both of us at the same time.

It would have been far easier to simply wake up, but whatever magic formed the zone and held us within it wasn’t so easily beaten. Still, I had been right beside Cecilia for all of her many advances in mana manipulation, and the pain that I had been subjected to was not without some benefit.

Many hours, maybe even days, passed as I sat in front of Cecilia’s mirror and sought the magic. Despite the passing time, Cecilia seemed to calm as she stepped into the role of guide and teacher, simultaneously handing me the reins of our detached physical body while guiding me toward the magic and teaching me how to manipulate it without the lens of a core to focus through.

I followed her impromptu exercises with a singular focus, and we both embraced the trial and error necessary to impart her insight and understanding.

“Okay, that’s not working, but I think we can change tactics slightly,” Cecilia said after one of many failed efforts. “I can sense the mana reacting to your focus, but you’re not taking hold of it, at least not yet.” She looked at me with her brows pinched in confusion. “What?”

I realized I was smiling and quickly smoothed my features. “Nothing, it’s just…you seem so motivated. Almost like you’re having fun.”

“I…” she started before trailing off. “I guess it’s just nice to be working together for a change.”

I nodded, understanding what she meant. “We’re almost there, I can feel it.”

It was difficult to describe, but it felt like there was a scale inside me, and that scale was tipping slowly, lifting me up and bringing me into balance with the opposing force—Cecilia. And as that scale balanced, my sense of the mana drifting around us heightened until I could feel something brushing across the tips of my reaching fingers.

And then, finally, my fingers closed around what I’d been reaching for.

I drew in a sudden, shivering breath, and my hands clenched into fists. The mana particles lit up in my vision the way Cecilia could see it. The particles were sparse, floating over the platform but not suffusing the void beyond.

“See how the mana moves?” Cecilia used our mental connection to draw my focus to a specific point. There was a sort of tension in the suspended mana particles. “This place is much thicker with aether, and that tension is the two forces pressing against each other. If you press all the mana toward my window, you can’t help but move some aether too. That has to be how I released you, I think.”