Chapter 38: Reasons.
The chamber was quiet. Whatever pressure Ash's Essence had left in the air was settling. The crystal walls still held their light in shifting patterns, though the patterns moved slower now, as if the room itself was catching its breath. Ash sat against the near wall. Her breathing came slow and long, and some of the colour had left her face. Perhaps I should not have asked her to flare her Essence so soon after what she had done to get it.
"We should leave," Ash said. "I have my core. We can come back tomorrow, when you're-"
"No."
Ash looked at me. "Are you sure?"
"I have not formed mine. I will not leave until I have." I said.
Ash held my gaze for a moment. Then she nodded and leaned back against the crystal wall. "Okay. I guess then we’ll-"
"You may leave," I said. "This may take some time."
"I won't leave without you." She said it the way one states the color of the sky. I did not argue. I had learned by now that arguing with this particular brand of stupidity was a waste of breath.
I closed my eyes and drew mana inward. The chamber's supply was still reasonably thick despite what we had both taken from it. More than full enough to form the two Essences I would require. I reached for both of my marks. Requiem Essence formed in my right arm -cold and tasting of things long past. Cradle Essence formed in my left -warm, and gentler than I deserved. I fed them both into my core, and the two powers met. The Requiem's carving tore through the Cradle's, even as the Cradle's tore through the Requiem's. Pain bloomed behind my ribs and expanded outwards, until it was sharp and vast enough that my breath caught.
I hadn’t truly expected this first attempt to succeed. On my next attempt, I tried different ratios of the two powers. This time, I used far more of the Requiem, with barely a thread of Cradle. The carving process held for five seconds. It held for longer than it had before yet still it did not hold for long enough. The thread of Cradle found it, and everything came apart again, and I felt the same pain. Again. I coughed and something warm touched my lip. I wiped it away without looking. It could not have been blood, a Queen did not bleed. I was starting to run out of things to test.
"Stop doing that to yourself."
I opened my eyes. Ash was watching me. She had not moved from her place against the wall. "What?" I said.
"You're hurting yourself. It's painful, isn't it? Stop doing that, Lys."
Her objection made no sense to me. "Then how else am I supposed to experiment?"
Ash stared at me for a long moment. The look on her face was one I could not parse, but it was not a hard look. "Just do it outside," she said.
"Outside?"
“Don't test the powers inside your body. You should just fire them at each other out here, where they can't tear you apart. At least, that’s how I’d do it."
I stared at her. The suggestion was so obvious that I should have thought of it myself, and so simple that I almost dismissed it on principle. A Queen's methods should not be improved by her retainer's common sense. And yet. "That is perhaps not a terrible idea," I said.
I rose, created distance from the nearest wall, and raised both hands. In my right hand, I gathered Ruin. In my left hand, I gathered Bloom. I drew Essence through both marks and let it build. I fired black and white flames into each other.
Black and white flame met in the air between my palms. The world warped around the point of contact. Light bending, shadows twisted, the crystal walls threw back reflections that split my silhouette into black and white copies across the stone. The two flames roiled against each other, coiling, devouring, being devoured, until there was nothing left but a faint heat on my skin and the smell of something that was almost sweet.
How interesting. I did it again. I used more Ruin and Less Bloom. The black consumed the white in an instant, then guttered out. I reversed the ratio. The white swallowed the black, hung in the air for half a breath, and dissolved. Equal measures of both, naturally, lasted the longest. The two forces grinded against each other in a spiral of destruction. It was utterly pointless.
Ash had leaned in close. I had not heard her approach. She watched the point where the two flames met with an intensity that surprised me. The light played across her face in alternating waves of the two colors. "They look beautiful," she murmured.
"Of course they do. They are my power."
We watched in silence for a time. I fired them again from different angles, using different rhythms. I could make them meet. I could not make them stay. Eventually, Ash spoke again. "Have you given it any thought?" Ash asked. Her voice was low. "To what the man said. About using only one mark, I mean.."
"That is out of the question."
"Why?"
I looked at her. Slowly, I asked, "Are you really asking me that?"
Ash smiled. It was faint and brief. "Suppose not."
There was silence then, one filled only by my two powers burning away at each other. I did not know why I spoke, but I did. "I need power," I said. I fired Ruin and Bloom at each other again. I watched them die. "You have seen this new world with me. Seen all the strange things within it. Only a fool would not reach for power when it is so readily available to them." I paused. “And perhaps reaching for power is simply who I am.” I gathered more Essence."I will not halve myself, as that small man suggested. I will not tie one of my own arms behind my back."
I started to say something else. Something about the Cradle. About wanting- My mouth closed. The words would not leave. I fired Ruin harder, and Bloom rose to meet it. The collision warped the air and I watched it die. "Power," I said again. "I need all of it. I will have all of it." Ash nodded slowly. Her gaze had weight to it. My gaze drifted past the collision and found the far wall of the chamber, where I did not see it.
The experimentation continued, and nothing changed at all. An hour passed. Or perhaps it only seemed to, in this room. There was only destruction, the kind that left nothing behind at all. What else had I expected, from me?
Ash was fading. She had been fighting it for some time. She sat straighter when her posture slipped, widened her eyes when they drooped. I had been watching her do this instead of working, and I did not know for how long. She was distracting me."You may leave," I said.
"No." Even that singular word came out slow.
Why were Heroes like this? "Then you may rest here."
Ash looked at me and her jaw set. "I'm fine."
She was not fine. She was pretending otherwise because she was too stubborn to do the sensible thing. I returned to my work. More time passed. Perhaps half an hour. Perhaps it only seemed that way.
When I turned back, Ash was asleep. Her head had tilted against the crystal wall and her breathing had gone slow and even. I looked at her. The chamber was quiet save for the hum of residual mana and the sound of her breathing. She was truly a stupid Hero. The Inker had spoken at length about how painful this process was. There was no way she wasn't exhausted. She was a stupid, stubborn Hero.
I moved to her. I adjusted her position carefully, so she would not wake with a sore neck. I shifted her until she was lying more than sitting, one arm tucked beneath her. My hands were stiff, but they obeyed.
My hand lingered near her throat. The bruises were gone. I had healed them myself, making certain nothing remained. The skin beneath my fingers was smooth and warm. But I remembered the silver hand. I remembered Ash's feet leaving the ground. I remembered the sound she had made. My fingers almost touched her throat. Almost. "I did not want to see you like that again," I whispered. Ash did not hear. I pulled back.
I fired Ruin and Bloom at each other one more time. I was watching them carefully now. Peering at the point where the two met and destroyed each other.
There. I saw a flicker, one so brief I had missed it every time, because the destruction that followed was so striking that the eye went to it instead. But there, in the fraction of a heartbeat before the two flames consumed each other, there was something else. A third thing. One that was neither beginning nor ending.
I fired the two again even as I watched harder. It really was there. This was no trick of the light. Where the two powers met, and destroyed each other, they became something else first. Just for an instant. Just at the boundary where they first met. I fired a third time, and this time I did not watch the flames at all. I watched only the edge where black met white. The moment lasted no longer than a blink. but it was real. It belonged to neither mark, and I felt it with instinct as much as I saw it with my eyes.
I looked at the egg. It sat in the satchel beside Ash, who breathed slow and steady in her sleep. The egg was gold and black. It was not gold despite black. It was not black despite gold. It was both, held together inside a single shell.
I knew what I had to do. I also knew it was insane. I had to force the Requiem and Cradle to meet inside my core. I had to sustain the collision between the two and endure the annihilation, over and over, until the third thing emerged on its own and carved its own structure.
I hesitated. There were other paths. I had known since the first failure that there were. I could have cut my core in two -with the Requiem itself, or asked Ash to use Sever- and healed the halves into separate cores with the Cradle. That was certainly dangerous, but it was possible. Then, there was the safe path. I could have chosen one mark and built a conventional core, the way any sane person would. Either of these would have worked. Either of these would have been wise.
They meant admitting that the Cradle and the Requiem could not exist together. Something inside me refused this. Something inside of me had to refuse this. I did not examine what. I thought of the egg one more time. Gold and black, held together inside a single shell. Both. I would make both work.
It was greedy. It was a mad gambit nobody else would attempt. I had attempted those before.
I drew mana through the breathing technique until the walls of my core strained. I drew it past fullness and past the point of pain. I took a breath, held it, and began.
I fed Requiem and Cradle Essence into my core and let them meet. The annihilation came, as did the pain, the same pain as every failure. I did not stop. I fed more in. There was another collision, then another.
The chamber shifted. The crystal walls dimmed. The light that had been shifting in gentle patterns went jagged and sharp. Even the stone beneath my hands had gone cold. My jaw locked. The air around me distorted as black and white bled from my skin. The crystal walls flickered. This was manageable, I had felt worse. I pressed on and increased the rate. I used more Essence from both marks at once.
Something about the pain changed. It now became a grinding and pulling thing that reached into places that were not physical. It felt like something alive crawling through me. No. A thousand somethings, each one tearing down what the last one built.
The chamber went dark. It flashed white. It went dark. Somewhere past the roaring in my ears, I could still hear Ash breathing.
I almost stopped. My hands were shaking. My vision swam. Every instinct told me this was destroying me from the inside, that my core was eating itself, that if I continued there would be nothing left to carve. I did not stop.
Faces found me. A child with nubs for horns, pressing himself against a wall as I passed. A girl little older than Sara, buried in a shallow grave I had demanded be dug lest her body be burned or left on the road. The merchants in the lower tier who had pulled their wares to their chests, as if my gaze alone might take them. My kind. My blood. What was left of it. I had clawed across a thousand years to break my own chains. I had thought only of myself, and they had paid for it. They were still paying.
Then Ash. A silver hand around her throat. Her feet leaving the ground. The sound she made. Ten paces. I had been ten paces away. My core was fragmenting. The collisions had become less controlled. I was losing the rhythm. Then I felt it. Something as familiar as it was ancient.
A gaze settled over me. Settled over this entire space. It was broken and faded, no more than a mere fraction of a fraction of what it once was. But I knew it the way I knew my own name. It was the System, or what remained of it. It was watching.
"S-so you've come to see me…do the impossible again," I whispered. My lips were cracked. There was blood on my chin. "You bastard." The gaze did not respond. It never did.
I pushed. The Requiem and the Cradle collided inside my core, one more time, with everything I had left. The annihilation began as it always did. Ending tore through beginning. Beginning tore through ending. And in the space between them, in the instant before nothing-
The third thing caught, and finally started to settle. The way an ember finds dry kindling. The destruction continued around it, but the third thing held. And then it carved. I felt it working inside me, gentle and relentless all at once. It carved and shaped something that neither I, nor anyone else, would have a name for.
The grinding, tearing pain became a hum. It turned into a second heartbeat, deeper than the first. I did not remember when my face had met the stone. It was cool against my cheek. Somewhere, the egg was pulsing. Somewhere, Ash was breathing. Both sounded very far away.
Time passed. The thing inside me worked. I lay still and let it, because there was nothing left in me to do anything else. My eyes closed. I forced them open. They closed again.
Eventually, the crawling settled. There was only the hum, constant and low, from somewhere inside me. From somewhere inside the inside. I smirked at that ancient, broken gaze. Then there was nothing.