Chapter 139: Temples
Marco woke in the middle of the night, the quiet of the borrowed room pressing in. A sliver of moonlight stretched across the floorboards, and in that glow he saw Aethe sitting upright at the window. Her back was straight, her gaze fixed outside at nothing in particular that he could identify. It was raining.
He shifted, reached out across the small space between them, and set his hand gently over hers. She started, shoulders jerking, but then glanced down and realized what was happening. The tension drained from her posture.
“Sorry. I'm just thinking,” she said. "I didn't know you were awake."
“I wasn't. I am now,” Marco said softly. He left his hand where it was and together they looked out at the night beyond the glass. "You seem worried."
"I think I am. You know how I was an elf?"
"I do."
"And that I didn't like it much. You know that too. It's mostly because I couldn't build a life there." She pointed to the window, where water was running down the pane in little drips and rivers. "Most of my people join together. It's like the water there. Drops become bigger drops, bigger drops become streams. Eventually, they all meet in a big pool. It's how our society worked. You couldn't be just a person there. I spent most of my life thinking I wanted to be just a person by myself, alone. In the woods or something. Allowed to do what I wanted."
Marco understood that, he thought. He understood it enough to know that it wasn't at all what her life was like with him and the rest of the crew, either. She had gone from one kind of group to another, even if they were drastically different versions of what it meant to be together.
"When I joined up with you all, I found out I was wrong about everything. I was a person, it was okay that I was a person, but I was also in a group. Now I'm a person in a group, and I'm with another person in another way, forever. That's not bad. I like that."
"I'm glad," Marco said. "It would have been bad if I messed things up that quickly."
"You never will. But now I'm thinking about Riv and his parents. And Riv and that girl."
"Ah," Marco said. "That he might want to leave."
"Yes. I'm like the people who used to make my life bad now. I don't want him to go. I want him to have to be part of the group so the group can be better. And I'm bothered that he might not do that."
"It's not the same thing," Marco said. "I think I understand why it seems the same, but it's not."
Aethe turned back to him, her eyes serious in the dim light. She slid down from her seat at the window, lying back beside him on the bed. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled a little closer until their faces almost touched, not moving her eyes from his face.
"It seems like it is."
"Nope. Think about it. The person that the elves wanted you to be was never the person you were. Right? You were never someone who was going to just go along with what everyone was doing, full stop. You were what you were, and you wanted them to not try to pretend you weren't."
"I don't get how this is different."
Marco reached out and pulled Aethe closer. It was rare, but this seemed like a situation where he needed to comfort her, and not the other way around.
"Because you know who Riv is, and you like him. You don't want him to be someone else he could never be." Marco felt his throat tighten a little as he realized what he was about to say about Aethe was true of him too. "You like who he is. You accept it. You just don't want to lose him. That's a different thing. I'm sure he'd tell you the same."
They lay in silence after that, the rain soft against the windows, the rhythm steady enough that Marco almost thought it might lull him back to sleep. But Aethe stayed close, her breathing measured, and neither of them closed their eyes. Time stretched. It must have been later than he thought, because eventually the darkness began to thin and shift. The light outside changed slowly, the black softening to blue, then gray, then the faintest orange as the sun thought about making its appearance.
Dawn crept across the floorboards, touching their boots, their packs, and the edges of the bed where they lay side by side. Neither of them spoke; the silence filled with thoughts they weren’t yet willing to give voice to. Marco’s mind kept circling back to Riv. He thought about his heavy steps, the way he had smiled when his parents embraced him, the almost childlike way he had pointed to the house as though it were proof he belonged.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Riv had found something real here, something Marco wasn’t sure he could compete with. He knew Aethe was thinking it too. Her hand tightened slightly on his, and he didn’t need words to know she was imagining the same questions. Would Riv stay? Would he choose this life over the one they’d built together at sea? The morning came in golden streaks, and still they lay in silence, each turning the weight of those thoughts over and over while the world slowly woke around them.
"We made it through the night," Marco said. "I was surprised. I thought for sure there would be an attack."
"Sometimes you get lucky. Although Riv didn't sleep anyway. He was out talking to that girl."
"That's what started all of this?" Marco sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. "I wondered."
"Yeah. I think he does know, after all. That there's more to that than he lets on." She cocked her head slightly to the side, considering something. "How much should I talk to him about this?"
Marco was dealing with the same question, in a way.
"In the end, it's his decisions. None of us wants to force him. I'd say, pretend you don't see it, for the most part. Or make fun of him when you do, like we normally would. But give him room where you can. Let's make sure he has the space to decide what's right for him."
When they found Riv, he was already sitting with Elisa, drinking tea and looking distinctly under-rested. Marco gave Aethe a look but otherwise left the topic of Riv's swollen eyes alone. They sat, and the innkeeper brought them plates of food almost immediately. Elisa had the good manners to let them eat for a bit before bringing up the next thing, which turned out to be a surprise none of them was looking for.
"So Riv," Elisa said. "Did it never occur to you to tell us this island had a temple?"
"It doesn't," Riv said, cradling his head in his hand. "Or at least if it does, I didn't know about it."
"That's actually reasonable." Elisa looked proud of herself. "It's not that important of a site to the people here, it turns out. I had to visit two or three different people this morning to get a bead on it."
"How long have you been up?" Marco asked. "It's just after dawn. Were you banging on people's doors?"
"Sure. Banging on people's doors before dawn to ask arcane questions is a time-honored tradition among scholars. Don't worry about that." Elisa unrolled a small piece of parchment that looked recently inked in an unsteady, tired hand. "Worry about this. This is more or less the town we are in. And way, way over here, on the other side of the island, there's a cliff with a hole in it. That goes to the temple. It's hard to get in, and it tends to crash most small boats when they try to go in. That and it being a big, useless rock building to anyone but us makes it uninteresting compared to what it takes to get there."
"And you want us to go there?" Marco asked. "Why?"
"Because it might be nothing, but I suspect there are a lot of these. As many as in the outer seas. Remember what Frisk said? He's seen temples himself. He just didn't care, because to him, they were just buildings. To us, every single one might be a clue."
"You think so?"
"The people invading this land do," Elisa said. "That should be enough."
They talked it over around the table, plates pushed aside to make room for Elisa’s map. In the end, deciding to go wasn’t much of a debate, since hardly anyone ever felt Elisa was likely to be wrong about these things. Still, the choice mattered more than most. Going meant leaving the town unguarded for a time, and that sat uneasily with Marco. He tapped the map with one finger.
“If we’re patrolling the waters around the island, that’s fine. It’s useful. But what if the town gets attacked while we’re away? We’d have no way to know until it’s too late.”
Riv considered that. “We’d know when we saw smoke.”
Elisa gave him a sharp look. “It would be better if we knew before things were on fire, don’t you think?”
Marco would prefer that version as well, even if he didn't see how to accomplish it. “And how exactly would we manage that?”
Elisa leaned back, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I’ve been working on something for that, too. I've been up for longer than you think.”
Elisa led them through the town not long after, her steps absurdly brisk and cheerful for someone who had been up for so many early morning hours. The part of town she led them to wasn’t the same part of the city they had walked before, instead curving off on new roads to places nobody besides her had yet seen after their arrival.
She cut down side streets, then onto lanes that bent away from the markets and homes Riv knew. Everyone followed, though Marco noticed Riv lagging now and again. As they got farther and farther from the city center, Marco gave him a questioning look, but Riv just shrugged, breath puffing in the cool air.
“Don’t ask me. I don’t know where she’s headed either.”
The further they went, the more the city thinned out. The cobbled streets grew quieter, and the noise of merchants and families gave way to the faint clang of tools. Eventually they stepped into a wide space open to the morning sun. An open-air workshop sat in the center, its walls little more than shoulder-high stone boundaries stacked to keep the wind out. Tools lay neatly arranged on tables within it, and the smell of some kind of unknown burnt material seemed to stick to the walls, filtering out weakly into the air.
At its heart sat a single old woman, her back bent with age. She was etching careful lines into a broad piece of stone, her tool nothing more than a long silver needle that gleamed as it caught the light. Each stroke was deliberate, almost ritualistic, and the pattern began to spread across the surface like veins in an arm. The crew stood silently at the edge for a while, watching her work, the sound of the needle scratching against stone sharp in the quiet. Nobody was eager to interrupt what was clearly delicate work.