“Are these my marks? Are you trying to read them out loud?”
He didn’t answer; to answer would have been to break the flow of his speech.
Her skin warmed as he spoke. She’d intended to try to listen to the marks on her skin, but the sound she could hear with her eyes closed had been swamped and overwhelmed by the sonorous bass of the Arkon’s voice.
She rolled up her right sleeve, exposing the marks on that arm. The rest were on her back or legs, and unless their lives depended on it, she had no intention of removing her shirt or her pants. The Arkon’s voice didn’t change, possibly because reading—or speaking—words like this took effort and time.
But as she listened, she knew which of the words he was attempting to express in sound, in syllable. She could see it clearly; it was on the inside of her left arm, which was exposed because she’d turned it up simply by opening her palm and holding her hand out.
As she’d done once before, she listened to the sound of a Dragon’s voice, and she joined her voice to his, not repeating what he said, but attempting to be part of it, to overlap it, two voices speaking one word, a slow syllable at a time.
The colors of the marks on her arms began to shift, the white gaining gold, the harsher, flatter light becoming the warmer as she watched. All of the marks, not just the one that the Arkon was, slowly and laboriously, speaking.
Were they all connected? They had her skin in common, but—were they somehow connected in other ways that she couldn’t see because she couldn’t quite understand them?
A single word wasn’t a sentence. A paragraph wasn’t a page. A page wasn’t a book.
Why did the marks of the Chosen exist at all?
The Arkon’s voice lapsed, but hers continued for several syllables; it was softer than the Dragon’s voice, and it was no longer deliberate. She realized as she caught the sound of her voice that she wasn’t speaking out loud; it was a deliberation of syllables that never made it to anyone else’s ears. Like thought, but without intent.
And yes, the words were, or felt, connected somehow; she slid into syllables, and then away. All of Barrani, Leontine or Aerian were ways to describe things. There were no words in Barrani for certain mortal concepts; no words in Elantran for some of the Barrani concepts. But they could be circumscribed, they could be described—it took more effort. The communication wasn’t exact.
These words were like those individual words: the concepts didn’t exist in the same way in any language she’d laboriously learned. But...they could almost be described.
She realized, as she thought this, that she had continued to speak, or not-speak, and as she finished, one word rose. It didn’t rise from her arms; it rose from the back of her neck, almost electrifying strands of hair, because no matter how careful she was, hair always fell out of its bindings in bits and pieces.
It was glowing. She could see it, even though in theory it was behind her, behind where her eyes were. It was a deceptively simply rune, two slashes, two dots beneath them; it was not as complicated as the one that shed light for them in this space.
She opened her eyes.
The Arkon was seated in front of where she remained crouched, palm flat against the floor. His eyes were a shade of gold that had no orange in it. And he was looking past her, above her head. She lifted her hand and turned. The rune was there; it was bright gold—a gold that was the color of the Dragon’s eyes, as if it reflected him, or the parts of him that were not simple flesh or organ.
Kaylin looked away almost instantly when she realized that the Arkon’s inner eye membranes had fallen, and that he was crying. Not sobbing and not in any obvious pain—but there were tears glistening on his cheeks.
“Yes,” he said in Elantran. The word was quiet, almost absent force. He rose. The word that Kaylin had spoken floated until it hovered above the shoulder that didn’t contain Hope. He swatted it with his tail.
She didn’t feel it as a weight; she did feel the light. In theory, she’d chosen both words, but the weight of the first was physical. She could carry a torch or a lantern for a long time; it was similar—once lifted—to that. But the golden rune above her shoulder weighed nothing; it was very much like any other time the words lifted themselves from her skin—words that she could see rising, but that others, watching, couldn’t. It was frustrating, this sense that they both looked at the same thing while simultaneously not seeing it the same way.
But that was witness testimony everywhere. One witness—without the intervention of the Tha’alani—could be really dodgy. So many factors went into memory. There were lies, of course—those happened a lot as well, especially in murder cases—but for the most part witnesses who disagreed with each other, sometimes vehemently, believed they were telling the truth.
And they were, but it was a different truth.
If people could speak these words, the words on her skin, the words that marked the beginning of the Leontines, the words that empowered and caged the Hallionne and other sentient buildings, there would beonetruth.
Maybe.
But this word was a True Word, and it hovered above her shoulder and it appeared to be meant, not for Kaylin, but for the Arkon, and she had no idea what it offered him, what it meant to him or what she had meant it to say.
“Come,” he said when she was slow to follow.
Bellusdeo raised brows in her direction, a silent, wordless query. Kaylin shrugged. She had no idea where the Arkon was going, but he now walked with purpose, his back straight, one arm by his side. The other held the book; he hadn’t set it down once since he had picked it up. Kaylin suspected he wouldn’t.
We’re out of the endless hall, Severn said.
Is Killian there?
No, but the door opened to stairs, not more hall. Emmerian has picked up a few inconsistencies in the rooms in the endless hall; minor differences or distortions that weren’t immediately obvious.
