ARIENNE
She almost couldn’t see in front of her anymore. But Tychon was awake and cheerful, babbling and laughing. A laugh she had never heard from him before. Yuma was sitting in a chair as she rocked Tychon’s cradle with one hand, lost in thought.
Noam hadn’t remembered anything when he came into her mind for the first time; it had taken awhile for him to even recall his own name. He had come a long way to be himself again, like Arienne had just a few years ago.
“Do you remember yet?” she whispered to Noam. “One hundred years ago, how the accident happened?”
Noam, gazing at Yuma and Tychon, slowly nodded.
“Fractica sounded the alarm.”
“An alarm?”
“Even after the Grim King had been defeated, Grand Inquisitor Lysandros had been worried about traps or schemes that might have been placed, and so he planned for contingencies, usingFractica. It had been Fractica that maintained the Host’s enchantment in the catacombs. And one of Fractica’s many other functions was to sound an alarm when it sensed the presence of the Grim King.”
Arienne detected Yuma slightly raising her head at the mention of Lysandros’s name.
“And then what?” Arienne urged.
“The alarm sounded, but nothing happened immediately after that. I think the Grand Inquisitor knew. He went right back to the Capital. Saying he needed to take care of something… But whatever he did, he was too late. When the Grand Inquisitor was gone, Fractica’s output became unstable, and its humming became thrums. A storm of black smoke… kind of like what you saw when you came down here on the steps, but much thicker, much faster. It flooded the generator chamber. I thought the control chain was malfunctioning, so I went to get the cutting tool. And then I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“Sorcerers…” Noam had a faraway look in his eyes now. “I saw them. Heard them, too. The Grim King was among them. I’d never seen him before, only knew him through legend, and in that moment he was only half formed and he spoke in gibberish, like he had just woken up from a nightmare—but I recognized him immediately, and the name he kept murmuring: Lysandros. That’s why I tried to escape to the catacombs, since Fractica was supposed to keep them safe from him.” Noam swallowed. “This was the Grim King’s revenge, seventy years after his death. Didn’t I tell you from the start? The Empire would never do this. It was the Grim King all along.”
Arienne shook her head. “Eldred didn’t do this all on his own. There were countless sorcerers—Power generators—in the Circuit of Destiny. The accumulated history in the Circuit was what led to the Star of Mersia.”
The Empire did not care where it got its Power—as long as it came into their hands, it was theirs. They thought they could control the sorcerers indefinitely by turning them into Power generators. Evidently, they couldn’t. And by adding generators to the Circuit, by using the Circuit to look into the past or predict the future, they had unknowingly built the Star of Mersia.
Arienne’s knowledge of generator magic had failed her at the Academy three years in a row, but she was sure in her speculation. If the Circuit had borne witness to pain and suffering on a worldwide scale, like what she just had seen in that black smoke, would it be so inconceivable that the Circuit was full of resentment and bitterness? And that the resentment and bitterness that had built up over a century in those three hundred Power generators was poisonous enough to destroy a whole nation?
All of that poison had been unleashed through Fractica into Danras before spreading throughout Mersia. That, Arienne decided, was the truth behind the Star of Mersia.
What Arienne saw when she opened herself to the whispering smoke was harrowing, but it was just only a lingering trace of the disaster. She still wasn’t sure what had triggered it, though. Arienne’s first choice was Eldred. She did not believe that even he would do this, but his hatred toward Lysandros must have played a role in Fractica being the conduit of the disaster. And perhaps Lysandros had wanted to find out as well—perhaps that was why he couldn’t simply destroy Power generator Eldred after the Starof Mersia and instead secreted him away in the basement of the Imperial Academy.
But to confirm this, she would have to go back to the Imperial Capital and examine the Circuit for herself. Maybe have a talk with it, to hear what it knew, what it felt, and finally understand why it had done what it had. Just as she had listened to the whispering smoke, the last trace of the Star of Mersia, here underneath Eldred’s old castle.
“Are you all right?” Noam asked worriedly.
Even in the room in her mind, her hands were covered with bursting pustules. She could barely make out light and dark. “Do I look that bad?”
“You look like you’re about to die. Is this what you look like outside too?”
“Worse.” Despite her growing blindness, she could sense the worried frown on Noam’s face and tried a smile. “It’ll go away. I just need to get out of here.”
She focused on her physical body—which was collapsed next to Yuma’s remains at the bottom of Eldred’s castle. Arienne groped around until something soft came into her grasp. A wide-brimmed hat. She remembered that Yuma had worn such a hat in her first dream in Mersia. Arienne put it on her own head, leaned against the wall, and stood up.
“With thatthingfilling the stairs,” Noam wailed, “how are you going to get out?”
“It’s fine. The Star of Mersia is… I’ll be fine. They can’t hurt me anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I understand them all.”
Arienne had heard the whispers. She felt for them. Doing so nearly destroyed her, even though they were just whispers rather than the screams that they would have been a century ago. But whatever horrors the Star of Mersia so desperately wanted to tell, now she knew. She had no fear, as what she knew couldn’t hurt her.
Touching the wall by her side, Arienne made her way up the staircase. It reminded her of the steps in the Imperial Academy that led down to the Power generator chamber there. Why hadn’t she thought of it on her way down? At the Academy, she had placed Eldred in the room in her mind and walked back up the steps. Hadn’t there been an old skeleton at the bottom of those stairs as well? Her memory must be fading. Many more things would fade if she didn’t hurry.
