The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 483

Chapter 483: What Was Lost

ARTHUR LEYWIN

“Hello, Arthur.”

The voice drifted to me through a haze—distant and ethereal, but familiar. I was drowsing, nestled deep within a cozy blanket of thoughtless fatigue. There was something exciting about the familiar voice, but that alone wasn’t enough to draw me out of my metaphorical nest. As this thought pierced the fog of my sleep, it set a spark to something else, and a burning idea radiated through the fugue.

This fatigue felt wrong. Unnatural, even. Like the sleep had sunk its claws into me and wouldn’t let me go.

Aether bloomed from my core in response to my jolt of discomfort, and the fog boiled away. I sat up suddenly and looked around, half in a panic with no memory of how I’d reached my current location. I was surrounded by bright white stone, molded smoothly into curves and arches.

“Peace, Arthur, peace.”

Turning away from the unusual architecture of the building around me, I instead focused on the elderly woman sitting by my bed. Her wrinkles deepened as she gave me a warm smile, and for a moment, I was fifteen years old again. The panic eased almost as quickly as it had come. I was in bed. Regis, in his puppy form, was lying on top of the blanket at my feet, sleeping deeply. I was safe.

“Lady Myre. It’s been a long time…”

“To me, it seems as if only a short time has passed,” she answered simply.

I considered the difference in our perspectives and wondered at the validity of my own reckoning of time. After all, how much time had passed in the keystone? How many lives had I lived between my last meeting with Myre? By one interpretation, it had been an eternity. From another, though, it was only a few short years. For the first time, I truly glimpsed the alien perspective of asura like Kezess and Agrona, and thought I understood just a little of how they see the passage of time.

“Where am I?”

“Epheotus,” she said. Her eyes flicked to one of the arched windows, and my own gaze followed hers. “More specifically, you’re in the town of Everburn.”

Through the arched window, I could see the buildings across the street. The walls were clean, smooth, white or cream stone that arched up to roofs tiled in turquoise and cyan. Arched windows, mirrors of the one I was looking out of, dotted the fronts, but I could make out little of what was behind them. As I examined the buildings, a mossy green-haired asura strode by, his brows knit in concentration, his mouth moving as he talked under his breath, apparently to himself.

Behind the buildings, the shadow of a massive, distant mountain, little more than a blue silhouette against a blue sky, towered over the city. The mountain had a distinctive split shape.

“One of several dragon towns in the shadow of Mount Geolus, yes,” Myre continued. “I thought this would be more…comfortable, for your family. Than the castle, I mean.”

“Where are Ellie and my mother?”

Although the grandmotherly smile never left her face, Myre’s gaze was intense and watchful. I couldn’t help the feeling that she was reading me like a book. “I felt you waking and sent them on a short errand. Forgive me, Arthur, but I wanted a moment to speak to you alone.”

Frowning, I eased myself up into a sitting position and swung my legs off the bed. I was dressed in silken nightclothes that I didn’t recognize, their glossy white contrasting against the deep-forest green of the bedsheets. “Speak to me? As a guest, or as a prisoner?”

“Do not forget that you yourself requested Windsom bring your family to Epheotus,” she answered, but her tone remained gentle. “You are, as before, my very welcome guest, Arthur.”

I mulled this over as the shattered fragments of my memory continued to slot themselves back into place. “Agrona?”

Myre nodded, her silver-gray hair bobbing around her face. “Imprisoned within Castle Indrath. He and his kinsman, Oludari Vritra, both. But…”

Her hesitance and her nervous expression made my stomach twist. “What is it, Myre?”

Glancing out the window toward Mount Geolus, she leaned forward slightly. “Agrona is mute. Even Kezess has been unsuccessful in driving Agrona to speak. Even his thoughts are shrouded, if there are any. But he feels…wrong. Empty. Arthur, I need to know what happened in that cave.”

I quickly considered what Kezess might already know. Have they been able to take anything from my mind without my knowledge? I wondered darkly. As much as I wanted to trust Myre, I couldn’t trust Kezess, and she was his wife. They had appeared together in the cave, right before I fell unconscious, and she could be operating on his behalf at that very moment.

Carefully activating King’s Gambit, I split my mind into multiple branches, each one focusing on a different layer of truth, potential truth, and outright lie. Aloud, I said, “Using a power the ancient djinn called Fate, an aspect of aether, I was able to destroy the Legacy’s potential by separating it from both the reincarnated version of Cecilia, my old friend from Earth, and from Agrona himself, making it impossible for him to ever utilize its power for himself. There was some kind of…shockwave from the act. Perhaps it did something to his mind.”

Again, that piercing look. “You have learned to control this…Fate, then?”

“No,” I said, letting my eyes fall and my voice fill with regret. The disparate branches of my thoughts were layered over one another, all thinking the same thing. “It was not something I could use, only…influence. And even then, only in the moments after I’d solved the keystone. The power is not something that can be controlled.”

I didn’t know if I spoke the truth or not, really, but I kept the thread of that thought buried beneath several others. With the aspect of Fate’s presence and assistance, I had been able to directly alter those threads in a way I didn’t fully understand, but there had been no time to examine my agreement with Fate or the keystone’s aftermath. I didn’t yet know what those events may have unlocked within me. My only concern right now was that Kezess not learn everything I knew—neither about Fate nor about the dragons’ repeated genocides.

“Ah, well, perhaps that is for the best,” Myre said, giving no outward indication that she doubted what I said or even that she could read the several interwoven branches of my thoughts. “Such things are better not tampered with.” With a little shake of her head, she refocused on me, and her smile returned. “You’ll be wanting to know more about what’s happened, of course. All the dragons have been recalled to Epheotus, and the rift has been closed again. Whatever Agrona hoped to accomplish by taking it over, he has failed.”

I frowned, focusing on one small detail. “My understanding was that Epheotus would die if the rift was closed.”

“The connection remains,” Myre explained patiently, “but the portal is shut. It would take aetheric knowledge beyond any yet alive—even you, Arthur—to cut the tether that binds Epheotus to your world.”

Which is what the rebel djinn hoped to use Fate to accomplish. I’d seen the possibility in my own searching, with Fate at my side, through potential futures. But to do so would be an act of genocide just as horrible as what the dragons themselves had done. Perhaps I would if there was no other way to prevent Kezess from repeating history, but even then I didn’t know if I could condemn all of asuran-kind to slowly waste away as Epheotus dissolved around them.

“I see,” I said after a moment, releasing King’s Gambit. “I shouldn’t stay long, then. I don’t mean to be rude, Lady Myre, but I’d like to speak to my family.”

She waved away my words playfully. “No rudeness in that, Arthur.” Her tone quickly hardened, becoming more serious. “You’ve been through an incredibly trying experience. I can still feel the shattered echoes of so many false memories crashing around inside your mind. Take some time to rest and speak with your loved ones. You are welcome here as long as you need. You have done both our worlds an indescribably incredible service by ending Agrona’s long rebellion.”

She stood just as I heard Ellie’s and Mom’s voices from outside. “I will leave you to your family. I’m sure you have much to tell each other.”

“Wait,” I said, another memory finally slotting into place. “What about Tessia?”

Myre gave me a knowing smile. “Not to worry, she is here. She will wake soon, I imagine. You both had to recover.”

As she turned away, it was as if a veil was lifted from behind my eyes. My mind touched both Regis’s and Sylvie’s, my thoughts entwining with their own.

‘Arthur, you’re awake!’ Sylvie thought, surprise rippling outward through the threads of our mental connection. ‘I didn’t sense you beginning to stir.’

Regis’s head lifted off the blanket and he turned to look blearily up at me. ‘About time, Sleeping Beauty,’ he said, his thoughts thick with fatigue. He had exhausted all his aether giving it to me, after I burned it up searching the future with Fate, King’s Gambit, and the power of the last keystone…

Outside of my room, Myre directed my sister and mother to me. The curtain that had just parted to allow Myre through was thrown wide open again as Ellie ran into the room, her eyes wide and mouth agape. Seeing me already sitting up, she started forward as if she might throw herself at me, then hesitated. Her smile flickered, strained by worry. Finally, she stepped forward and bent down to give me a gentle hug.

I accepted the embrace gratefully, glad to see her uninjured by the trials she must have endured in my absence. Uninjured, but not unaffected. Behind her, Mom lingered in the doorway, one hand holding back the curtain. “Windsom upheld his end of the bargain, then? And you’ve been treated well?”

Ellie pulled back, crossing her arms and looking stern. “Actually, we—”

“We have been very well treated here,” Mother said quickly, cutting across Ellie. My sister shot her a look, which Mom answered. I couldn’t read exactly what nonverbal cue passed between them, but it was clear they were holding something back. “It’s astounding, Arthur. Like a whole new world.”

I sat up straighter, feeling suddenly awkward in my silk night clothes in this strange bedroom. “I saw some of the Alacryan attacks from within the keystone. I—” An influx of tangled memories stole the words from my lips as they washed over me in waves. I remembered Varay, lying unmoving at the center of a blasted battlefield. I remembered the Alacryans collapsing in their jail cells. But there were other memories too, muddled with time, distance, and a kind of unreality. In them, I saw the aftermath of things that hadn’t happened yet, or might not happen at all.

Sylvie’s presence gripped me like two strong hands on either side of my face, forcing my attention forward. ‘Breathe, Arthur. We’re here to support you. You don’t have to carry the entire load by yourself.’

Leaning into her presence within my mind, I shifted some of the weight to her. Regis stood up on shaky legs, a frown on his puppy-ish face. Together, my two companions leaned into it, but the sudden smothering presence of the waves only intensified. Like a drowning man, I was dragging them down with me.

“Arthur?” Mother had taken a step forward, but her face was a blur, her expression nothing but a smudged shadow across her face.

Without conscious intention, aether released from my core and filled my limbs, attempting to buttress me against the mental weight of so many lifetimes of memory unfolding through my consciousness all at once. Regis stumbled forward, dematerialized, and drifted into my body, anchoring himself within me. More distantly, I felt Sylvie gasp against the force of so much raw memory.