[Can’t Opt Out]

Little Emilia sent a burst of recon skills forward. They pushed past Rayleen, fearlessly stepping forward—and once again, Emilia was reminded of how fearless the woman so often was. Funny, how the woman had just been thinking it would be amazing if Emilia didn’t kill herself before managing to end the war, yet, she was the one stepping into the unknown first.

Emilia was trying not to think too much about all that—not the so stupidly reckless she was liable to get herself killed thing, which was nothing new, nor the bit about Rayleen risking her life by going first, but the part where Rayleen had apparently known she would end the war. Rayleen, and others who were capable of seeing into the future the aether had seen, guessed at, foretold, as well.

What a thing to learn: that she had always been destined to end the war. For how long? For how long had this fate chased her? Some bit of herself that she had no idea of the origin or end of—because that was the thing: as someone who had ended the war and then had all her memories of the how of it vanished from her mind, Emilia had no idea if the war was truly over or not. Maybe it was done for now—for centuries, millennia. It would be someone else’s problem next time. Maybe it was done forever, whatever she had done tying the aether’s enemies up so firmly only wisps of its monsters could escape.

Emilia had rarely found herself thinking that it would be that simple. She was not a god, even if she sometimes felt a broken god, millennia of knowledge and pain trapped within her, making her and every other person who had allowed their mind to exist for so long a monstrous thing, broken and shattering and melting into a puddle of trauma and too much, too much, too much every waking moment—at least, that was how it used to be. Something to add to her List of Things to Ask People About Later she supposed, this question of how others had dealt with everything they’d done to themselves during the war. It was a long list, growing and curling in on itself, and in this body, without a Censor and no idea how much she would remember once she woke, Emilia had no confidence in the list’s fidelity.

Oh well. What would come would come. What she would remember she would remember. What she would not she would not.

That was how it had always been, and it was how it continued to be now.

✮ ✮ ✮ Clemence ✮ ✮ ✮

I had to give Emilia’s xphern over to her, the other girl waiting for me to reach her as our group made our way through the path the murder machine had created for us.

I had to give it over, yet, I was afraid.

Realistically, I knew that somewhere between too much time and a perfectly acceptable amount of time had passed between when Porsq had been found and now. It hadn’t been that long, and there was nothing Emilia would have been able to do—no bit of information she could have supplied any of her friends to increase their understanding of the situation. Rayleen and Jerrial had supplied a bit, taking Emilia’s xphern from my hands at times to add their own knowledge of the boy to the chat.

Mostly, we all knew that the boy was valuable and in no world would Fräthk be willing to let him escape without a fight. Emilia knowing about Porsq and the situation with her friends, the lawyer, and the little boy everyone thought likely to be a non-dev, wouldn’t have helped. She’d been stuck and stressed and banging her head against the murder machine. In no world would laying more complications at her feet have helped.

“You’ve been hiding things from me,” Emilia said, startling me out of my fretting. Her hand reached out, nails chipped from everything she’d been through today—or maybe she always had chipped nails? I’d have to watch her more closely later, assuming she didn’t toss me aside as a friend, once she learned everything I’d been hiding from her. As much as she’d taken my black knot in stride, that was only one flake of the secrets I was keeping.

“Yes,” I admitted, adding that there was a new message thread from someone—those were what the most recent bings had been about.

“Ah~” the other girl sighed, not seeming overly concerned that I—and by extension, Vern, Jerrial, and Rayleen—had been keeping things from her.

Our conversation from before, about Emilia likely being a low-dev, came back to me. Perhaps, the Baalphorian girl had come to the correct conclusion: we were only hiding things from her because it wouldn’t have been helpful to tell her?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I could ask—find out the truth. I was afraid to ask.

“Shit,” Vern breathed out as we followed after Rayleen, the woman having vanished into the abyss of the room that was tucked behind the murder machine.

Following his gaze—I had eyes only from Emilia, her own eyes trained on her xphern, a little frown pulling at her lips as she went through messages new and old—I found that we had come to a large room filled with people.

So. Many. People.

Even Rayleen, who had been able to confirm that some number of people were tucked away back here, seemed shocked to have found so many. I had expected a dozen, perhaps two. There had to be at least a hundred. I hadn’t even realized Fräthk had been sending this many people into the dungeons, let alone into a single dungeon.

How many more must be hidden in the other dungeons, dotted throughout the city?

A cough pulled itself up through my chest as the first wafts of the stench of the place reached me. Neither Jerrial nor Vern were particularly pleasant smelling, but they were fresh fruit compared to the people down here. If Jerrial and Vern had been unable to wash themselves regularly, their scent pulled through with sweat and the stench of men, these people were covered in the scent of shit and piss, of rot and decay.

It was horrific. Almost immediately, it dissipated a bit, Emilia’s aether swirling around us and pulling the scent into something a little softer—still there, but not so rancid I worried I’d be adding the stench of vomit to the mix… not that that wasn’t already there, the scent of bile mixed in with everything else.

“Rayleen?” someone called, the woman in question stepping forward to begin talking to the group who seemed to be in charge, everyone around them stepping back to let them speak with Rayleen.

Beyond them, this main room—all hard rock and bare surfaces—branched out into yet more paths, more faces poking out, seeing what all the fuss was about. Most everyone wore threadbare clothes, although some wore nothing at all or little more than underwear.

I examined the people, trying to pull up a thread of the empathy I so often failed to find. I could find a scrap, summoned up from my own inclination to never find myself living like this. I could imagine how terrible I would find living within this squalor; therefore, I could summon a bit of something for these people.

I could summon yet more when I imagined my friend down here, suffering as I had no way to reach her, and unbidden, my eyes began to search for my friend—for any feature, coated in grime and misery that reminded me of the smiling girl I’d once considered mine, would always consider mine.

Of course, I already knew my friend was dead. It wasn’t something I could explain, this knowledge that she had long ago been killed. I’d felt it, like a splinter through my entire being, the moment she died. Still, I’d let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong.

I knew I wasn’t, and when I spotted someone I recognized—someone who had also known my friend, who had so immediately felt like the missing part of my soul from the moment we met, years ago now—I wandered over. The words caught on my tongue as I reached him, my throat unwilling to voice my question—to ask what I already knew.

“Have you seen Zarthia?” I asked, the look of remorse in the man’s eyes enough to tell me I had long been correct: Zarthia was dead, and with her, a piece of my soul had died as well.

✮ ✮ ✮

This was, in fact, one of those times where Emilia was amazed she hadn’t been killed a million times over during her youth due simply to her ability to focus and lose the world in the abyss of her mind.

Around her, people moved—so many people, and most of them, Emilia had never formally met. They’d gotten out of the city, a handful of them allowing The Black Knot to help them relocate, a few heading towards Norvel. Many more had vanished into the wind. Some had attempted to find their way to family and friends who were still living in other Lüshanian cities. It was impossible to say if they’d succeeded, given the state Lüshan had been in between their exodus from the capital and the start of the war, eight years later.

One civil war for war that would spread over the continent over the course of two decades. There had been a few disasters in Lüshan, but for the most part, the Lowdouran’s caverns kept monsters out as well as they did anyone. Sparking didn’t work on the Lowdouran’s creations. Neither Zavriel nor any majenstra with which he would eventually share his ability to dig into the universal mind could make the aether forget they weren’t in a Lüshanian city touched by the Lowdouran—and what a strange thing for her to have forgotten, Zavriel having tied up her memory of the universal mind so thoroughly it had been nauseating to learn of it once more. The Shadow of Jinkai could shift themself through the caverns’ twists and turns, but they could not force their way through the molecules themselves like they could so many other substances.

Monsters could run their way through the caverns as well, of course, although they rarely had. Still, some had, and so many people had died, trapped within Lüshan’s subterranean cities where they should have been safe—where they generally were. Those attacks were nothing compared to the destruction of Falmíer—few attacks during the war had been as bloody and deadly as Falmíer.

Floating through the crowd, Emilia tried to count all the faces—tried to catalogue the ones she recognized, tried to remember if she’d ever even noticed the ones she didn’t. The answer was… no. The Emilia of her youth had eyes only for her Censor and the messages floating through it from Malcolm and Curtisal and Vtraní; for the messages Clemence hadn’t been telling her about because they’d all known how stressed she already was.

Olivier had been holding a little boy—a little boy who had been taken by women intent to use him for their own freedom, and that was all the Emilia of the past could think about. It didn’t matter that they’d gotten through Curtisal’s playground, nor that that boy had been trying to keep these people safe as best he could.

All Emilia could do was read and read and read, her eyes flying between messages and threads, trying to make sense of everything when her heart was a racing thing. It had pounded so hard that Emilia could still remember the weight of it, hammering against her rips, urging her to do something.

In the background, Jerrial was looking for his friend, while Clemence tugged at the cuffs of her shirt, an older man frowning down at her. Later, Emilia would learn that her friend was dead—had died soon after being dragged down there for reasons none of them would ever understand. Usually, Fräthk had been all too happy to leave their child’s playmate’s alone. Clemence could kill her playmates when she was done with them. What had made this friend—one of the only true friends the Lüshanian teen had ever had before Emilia dropped her at the Mhrinas with a good luck to Alaric and Cyan—so special that Fräthk had sent her to her death in this place?

None of them knew—not Rayleen nor Clemence, not Zavriel nor Vtraní or anyone else they’d ever asked, and with Fräthk dead, perhaps they never would know.

Of course, there was always the other possibility—the one somehow more horrible than any other: that there was no point other than in getting Clemence down there—in getting Emilia herself down there.

Perhaps, had Clemence not been there, also searching for a friend, Emilia wouldn’t have risked her life in the dungeons. If it had just been Jerrial’s friend…

No, Emilia still thought she would have come down to this place, stupid, reckless, loving person she so often was. What might have been different, however, was Clemence herself. The girl would have had a friend, and therefore, never ended up standing on the ground level of the 17th holding cells, Emilia wandering into her.

Clemence wouldn’t have—stupidly, obsessively—fallen for her at first sight.

Emilia wouldn’t have had her sent back to Baalphoria.

They wouldn’t have become friends.

Clemence wouldn’t have become a war hero, even if being one had cost her life, in the end.

Was this yet another puzzle piece in the war? Played by the aether’s enemies or the aether herself? If it were the former, it seemed as though they may have erred, its attempts to do something to Clemence’s story having instead led her to Emilia. If it were the latter…

If it were the latter—if it were the aether, sacrificing young girls for its war game—where did that leave them? Sometimes, sacrifices were needed, the universe and every life held within it more valuable than a single soul, but what did it say if the universe were tugging strings about and killing people?

What did that say of free will? Of the ability to control one’s destiny?

What did it say of her own life, and every life that had ever touched her own, cast down through generations and links of friendship and animosity?

A web tried to form within Emilia’s mind as she lingered around Clemence, trying to offer the teenager strength, her younger self too consumed with concerns for Olivier and children she had yet to meet but would immediately love with her whole being to offer the girl anything. It didn’t do much, but Emilia still pressed her phantom forehead to Clemence’s, in the moments before the aether pulled her away.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered because she was. Emilia was so impossibly sorry for the girl who would become her friend—for the one girl she had seriously considered testing out her ability to have sex with another girl with.

Then, Clemence had been dead, whatever possibility had existed within them snuffed out before it could become more than Clemence’s always appreciative gaze and Emilia’s slowly more curious one.

Sometimes, Emilia wondered if she would ever be capable of experimenting with another girl, knowing that for some twenty-five years, her first time with a girl had belonged to this girl. First, Clemence had been too young, and then, the war had so often kept them apart.

Then, Daniel had kept them apart.

Then, Emilia had been broken and secretive, even if Clemence had always known the truth.

“I’m not stupid, you know. With how closely I’ve always watched you, of course I’d know,” Emilia could remember Clemence saying, shortly before she died, their feet shifting in the cool waves of a Norvellian pool after the girl—the young woman—had shown up uninvited. In the distance, Xavier, his siblings, and all the children he called cousins—a giant group, not contained by anything but the little boy-who-by-then-was-a-young-man’s affection for them—had been laughing and playing. A rare moment of calm before blood and gore came once more.

Her and Clemence’s feet had tangled together in the water. It wasn’t the first time the girl had tangled their limbs together in the softest of flirting—of letting her know that even after so much time, she was still interested—but it was the first time Emilia hadn’t turned it into something playful, rather than something flirtatious, their fingers tangling together on the pool deck. Clemence had leaned in, whispering sweet nothings to her, whispering all the things she’d been thinking for decades but never thought it acceptable to say, given Emilia had never indicated she wanted anything other than friendship with the Lüshanian girl.

If she could go back, Emilia would have left the children to play—there were more than enough adults around, intent to make sure no one drowned—and dragged Clemence off to her rooms. It would have been new and strange, and Emilia still had no idea, even after thousands of years within her head, whether it would have worked or not, but she would have liked to have tried.

Now, of course, it was too late, and all Emilia had was regret and mourning for a sweet, terrifying little girl who had loved her since the moment they stumbled into one another, stupid as that love had so often been.