A lullaby came from the room in her mind. It wasn’t Noam’s voice, and the melody was different as well. Yuma was humming. Arienne listened closely as she continued to lean against the wall and slowly climb the steps. Then, Yuma began to sing.
“Why are lullabies always about the same thing no matter the country they’re from?” Arienne murmured as she dragged herself up the steps.
“Do you speak Mersian?” asked Noam.
“No, I don’t. That song was in Mersehi?” Noam’s agape mouth made her realize she had just spoken in a language she hadn’t learned.
The singing voice stopped and began to speak instead, in a lower, different tone.
“I see that I am back here, in the Feast Hall.”
Not stopping her ascent, Arienne entered the room in hermind. She could barely see even in here now. But Yuma turned from her chair to look at her.
“Who are you?” Yuma asked.
Careful not to stumble, Arienne approached her, lost her balance, and grabbed on to the edge of the bed. She found a chair and lowered herself into it.
“My name,” she said, “is Arienne.”
Yuma’s gaze flickered to her neck. Arienne raised her head to give her a better view of hert’laran. Did Yuma know of Arland? Their eyes met once more.
“I’m Yuma. The Chief Herder of Danras. Or at least, I was. I remember being in and out of sleep, for what seemed liked days, maybe years. How am I back in Danras? What happened?”
Arienne, as calmly as possible, spoke of what had happened to Mersia after it had joined the Empire. When Yuma heard of the death of Dalan the Host and the Star of Mersia turning the country into a wasteland, tears came to her eyes. At the end of the story, Arienne was asked the question she’d been dreading the most.
“What happened to Lysandros?”
Arienne only hesitated a moment before saying, “He died.”
“How?”
“I killed him,” Arienne said simply.
Yuma let out a surprised whisper. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, without knowing what she was sorry about.
Yuma neither acknowledged her apology nor blamed her. Instead, she changed the subject.
“Do you know what happened to the Grim King?”
“He was turned into a Power generator, but then he came back, and then I killed him too.”
Did she have to apologize for this as well? Yuma didn’t respond. Tychon woke, and Yuma picked him up out of the cradle, as he looked ready to start crying.
“Am I back in my room?”
Arienne shook her head. “This is the room I made inside my mind.”
“It looks exactly like my room in the Feast Hall of Danras.”
Arienne herself didn’t know where exactly the memory of this room came from. Fractica’s dream? Tychon’s? Or somewhere—someone—else? As she hesitated in her answer, Yuma said, “What’s outside of this tower?”
“Nothing.”
“How sad. I wanted to ride with my child on horseback at least once.”
What would’ve been outside this room if it were the real Feast Hall was the city of Danras, and beyond it, the steppe of Mersia. But there was nothing. This was not a real place, only existing in Arienne’s mind. But what about the people here? Yuma, Noam, and Tychon were not people she had imagined, nor were they memories, as Eldred, Yuma, and Lysandros had been in Fractica’s dream.
