24: aftermath

ääk! kuusi päivää aikaa ja minulla on enää yksi valmis luku tämän jälkeen teille postattavaksi. sain kuitenkin tänään pakerrettua kuvistyöni valmiiksi joten nyt kun lähden tästä bilsankirjan pariin voin toivottavasti sanoa että saan huomenna kirjoitettua 26:nnen luvun. tässä kuitenkin teille luku 24 ja tuo kuvistyöni (ihmisen piirtämisen kurssin hahmosuunnitelma, jossa työnäni on yllätysyllätys Severina::D.)

Chapter Twenty-four

The sky over the woods was dark and starless, looming in the distance like a bottomless pit or an endless chasm of emptiness. Walking through the forest had been like diving through oil, feeling like there was ink dripping off my hair, leaving a trace of black behind me. Even though the four girls I acquainted with had been friendly towards me, I still felt uncomfortable walking amongst strangers: it had been impossible to shrug off the feeling there was somebody watching me.

When we finally got far enough from the palace grounds to warp our ways away, a dread so tremendous had taken over me there was no particular place I thought when the scenery around me whipped and drew me in like tentacles. When I finally fell on my knees on the hard stone steps of Severina’s palace I let a sigh of relief. Warping had its consequences, and in case I ended up somewhere far away, it could have taken me hours to recover my strength to warp again. I remembered staying there for a while, just steadying my breath and listening to the calming rush of the ocean. As long as I was there, I was safe.

But something had changed. For some reason I had always been very aware of presences and known whether someone was watching me. The very second I laid my eyes on the onyx tower I knew I was alone. The lights had gone out and the doors sealed shut, unlike ever before. With disbelief I dragged myself to them, pain jolting through me as I throbbed the steely gates. My hands were slippery and cold of sweat. My legs felt like lead as I dragged myself away, repeating a name unconsciously. I had to find the strength to get away, anywhere, and the shadows had already started to build around me. The world spun, tilting from side to side like I was standing n a boat. I instinctively reached for a railing to prevent me from falling down the stairs into the ocean. But all my hand could feel was emptiness…

The whole world tilted, and the earth fell away like a rug being pulled under my feet. There was a snap as my bones hit the ground hard and I lost my sight. The rush of the ocean became louder and louder and pictures flashed behind my eyelids like lightning. I lay halfway dead on the brink of the steps, halfway dragged away by the wind. The starlight reflected off Aurora’s palace as heat against my lids but I was pulled away before I could call her name. Something cold and flat clutched beneath my fingers, and there was a sound like rippling air or cracking flames, as my fell ended as abruptly as a dream.

I woke up to a shout, and it took me a second to realize it was me. Pain radiated up my arm and my whole body was wet of sweat, clinging my dress close to my skin. There were words all around me, not sentences. “Fuck! Hilary, stop! Stop screaming!”
I pulled a deep breath and the world became complete. I had fallen directly in the middle of Nolan’s bed, but I wasn’t on top of him – matter of fact, I saw him nowhere. But Rilla stood helplessly over me, her face as white as she had been drained of blood.

Words escaped from my lips as an indefinite slur. “My elbow – it hurts…”
Rillas fingers reached out to touch me, and I howled of pain. “It’s broken,” she said. “In the name of the Elements, how are you here?”
“My elbow? My elbow’s broken?”
Rilla’s eyes widened. “You’ve never had broken limbs before? Well, you will have. Lots of them.”
A shadow blocked the moonlight and a figure appeared in the doorway. His voice was recognizable, but a muddle. “How are you here?” Nolan repeated, and my eyes registered he looked wasted – his eyeballs were visibly pink in the dark light. “You can’t warp inside private buildings.”
I was very aware of that fact myself, but there was nothing going on through my mind then but the pain. “I don’t really think I warped,” I said. The fist of my working hand opened, revealing a used darkness token. The surface pattern had burnt itself on my palm as a circle of indefinable letters. “I used this.”
Nolan’s red eyes were wide. “I can see it,” he voiced, approaching the bed. “Show me your hand.”
“Can you heal it? I can’t really move it.”
Nolan’s tone was dry. “I am not an earth child. And I meant your other hand. The patterned one.”
There was a tug as Nolan lifted my hand, and I winced. “Why are you being such a bitch? What’s up with the ‘let’s leave Hilary alone and get wasted!’-attitude? I thought you weren’t drinking anything. And especially not running away now that there’s a forsaken maniac running free.”
Nolan gave me a chilling gaze, the kind of Circus gave before releasing a giant tidal wave. Rilla answered instead of him. “We thought you had left. We didn’t find you anywhere. And I had to take this fucking idiot off the grounds before he-“
“Apparently we didn’t search well enough,” Nolan interrupted, ignoring Rilla’s last sentence. “The party grounds were very full.”
“Stop the bullshit,” I uttered. My elbow had become number – perhaps of the touch of two fire children, but was still broken. “Severina’s gone.”
Rilla’s tone was unbelieving. “She too?”
“Something’s wrong,” I said, trying to get up. It wasn’t such a good idea: every gesture felt painful. “The guardians are gone. Half of the council have… disappeared.”
“Chyse,” Rilla whispered. “Who else?”
“Talia,” I said. “And Aes.”
“And Circus,” Nolan added. “Who of the guardians?”
“Severina,” I continued, “And Eua. Their palace is empty. And in the worst case, Aurora too.”
Rilla flinched restlessly. “We have to go to Hestia,” she said. “And call the other councelors.”
“Now?” Nolan asked. “It’s midnight.”
Rilla frowned with displease. “You’re just using your hangover as an excuse to ignore something as serious.”
To my surprise, Nolan fell silent. “All right”, he said after a short pause. “We will do it.”

“Are you sure we should do this?”
“Don’t you worry,” Nolan reassured. “I assure you it will be safe.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Oh please,” Rilla snorted, sounding more like me than I did at the moment. “Just get it over with and stop sounding like you’re going to have sex.”
I couldn’t help it but I smiled, even as Nolan grabbed my arm and started bandaging it tightly. A little wince escaped from my throat, but the bandage helped. “I’m sorry we can’t do anything else right now,” Nolan said. “I could give you strength but not heal you. But it would drain my own strength.”
“Own fault,” Rilla shouted from the kitchen, and her voice drowned to the running tap. “No drinking means no drinking, you knew that?”
Nolan looked away. “We are done,” he said to me, walking us to the door. “Can you warp?”
The whole word sent a spasm through me, and I shook my head helplessly. Nolan pulled on a jacket and opened the heavy doors effortlessly. “Then stay very close to us,” he advised, rushing down the stairs. “It might burn a little.”

‘A little’ was a puny way to express how warping felt with fire children. For being used to wind warping I had expected for being somehow pulled away, but fire warping was like my whole existence were wiped away as heat hit my body and I dissolved into ashes. The pain, however, was over as fast as it had arrived, replaced by an odd bewilderment of what I was seeing. The ground below our feet was jagged, and the cobalt blue night was pierced with sharp edges I recognized to be mountains. The wind was warm, accompanied by the smell of burning. Suddenly I wondered why we had taken jackets with us after all.

But where was the palace?
“It’s inside the mountain,” Nolan answered as if he had read my thoughts. “Right close. Warping doesn’t take us as far away in here, because the palace isn’t as visible. It can be only found if known where to look from.”
And then Nolan looked down, sliding into the haze down the edge of the mountain, then disappearing.

“It’s down here,” he yelled from somewhere below. “Jump!”
Ignoring my pained elbow I leaped downward to unveil a curious sight. My feet hit the ground safely, and I could suddenly see the mountain walls carved around us like we were in some sort of valley. Rilla appeared from the haze, pointing towards a dark shape in the mist. “It’s there.”
“But this place…” I asked as the ground under us slid downward. “Where are we?”
“This is a dead crater,” Nolan answered. “But not all the craters around here are dead. Some are active and erupt every now and then.”
My eyes widened. “That explains this smell,” I sniffed the air. “Ashes.”
“And sulfur,” Nolan accompanied. “It’s not all safe here either. Now where’s the door… here.”
I wiped my eyes and could see the haze had faded, now revealing a gateway carved in stone, something ancient and savage. It lead into a dark pathway with fire symbols carved on the walls, and a single lantern burned by the doors. They were open, but it was oddly silent, and in the firelight of the hallway torches everything looked abandoned and cold.

“Hestia?” Rilla called, closing the doors behind us, as we entered a dark, circular hall which branched into several walkways. “Chyse?”
“They’re not here,” Nolan answered in a dead tone. “The whole palace… it’s empty.”
“How can you know that?”
“It’s too quiet,” said Nolan. “I am afraid Hilary is right. Something has happened.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Nolan’s tone was calming as he spoke. “There is nothing we can do in this situation but wait.”
In the torchlight Rilla’s face turned red, flames dancing in her eyes. “We have to find Chyse,” she said, her voice echoing off the palace walls. Looking at her and listening to the haunted silence made me wonder could I ever live in a place like that. “Now.”
“There is nothing we can do,” Nolan repeated as if the truth had been carved into stone. It was a tone he could have used in the council. “And as an answer to your question,” he said to me, “Now, we rest.”

And with the finality of his words he lead us to the leftmost pathway and past open bedroom doors. Without saying a word, he strolled into a single bedroom and closed the door before him, leaving me and Rilla together in awkward silence.

“I know what Chyse would say now,” Rilla sighed as she slumped next to the wall. “’Nolan might be a jerk, but he knows what the council wants.’ But this time I’m not as sure.”

“He’s been in Kaiya for a long time,” I stated as my back hit the stone wall. “He knows the principles.”
“But sometimes he follows them too much,” Rilla argued. “Times when the council books become the Bible and the guardians godlike creatures. It’s like… you can’t sacrifice an animal or a child in the name of the Bible just because the Bible does that. This is the same thing. You can’t just leave your friends in trouble because the council forbids you.”
Rilla’s words had a point, but somehow I understood Nolan too. Just being brought up in another world made his views so different they couldn’t be compared. “If all the guardians are gone, the council shouldn’t have much to say to this,” Rilla continued. “We have to find Chyse.”
“But what about Hestia?” I questioned. “Or Aurora, Severina and the other councelors? What about them?”
Rilla’s expression stretched, but she said nothing.

“If it wasn’t Chyse who was missing? If Nolan had disappeared, would you look for him too?”
Rilla’s tone was flat as she spoke. “Of course I would. Why are you asking something like that?”
“Because we do mindless things for the people who are important to us.”
Rilla huffed, leaning into the knees. “That sounds like something a guardian would say.”
An idle smile played on my lips. “If you had two options – to save Hestia, Aurora, Severina, Circus and Aes, but to save them you would have to give up Chyse, and to save Chyse but to save him you would have to give up everyone else, what would you choose?”
Rilla was silent.

“Chyse, of course,” I proceeded. “If this world for some reason would end, he would be the one you would take with you. Even if choosing him over the whole world would cause you guilt for the rest of your life, you would believe he could take it away.”

There was a long silence; so long I thought Rilla had fallen asleep. When she finally spoke, her tone was drowsy, half-conscious.

“Sometimes I wonder why we have feelings at all,” she said. “They are our biggest flaw. Without them, we would be… perfect.”

Her head drooped and a musical snore escaped from between her lips. I sat next to her until I felt my own eyelids falling closed, until consciousness became a dream.

I had a dream where I watched myself and Fera lay side by side inside a hexagonal chamber of light.

The floor we lay on was decorated by a hexagon pattern with peaks for each element: wind in our feet, earth in our heads. We were only a touch away from each other, but neither of us flinched, there was movement only in our lips. My own eyes were vacant, but Fera smiled at me as if he could see I was looking at him.

“Sometimes when I was little I and mamma stayed awake at night to watch the ceiling,” I said. “We would just lay there for hours, hand in hand, count the overlapping lines and stare at them until they started to waver. And I would breathe her scent and lay on my place until I lost consciousness and drifted into dream, and I would dream of her.”

“Why?” Fera asked, his eyes on mine. “Why would you do that?”
I answered as if there had been nothing unusual about the question. “Because I loved her.”
“Loved?” Fera repeated incredulously, and I saw the smile fade off my own lips. My head started to shake slowly from one side to another, as if I had just realized the truth. “I can’t love her anymore. My mamma is dead,” I cried, but Fera looked at me through the curtain which departed my dream-me from the real me, and there was still a smile on his lips. “Shh, Hilary,” he cooed, his eyes like glass. “You lie,” he said, and suddenly I stood on the brink of an endless chasm, departing the world into two. And in the middle of all there stood a giant scale, my friends and Severina and Tristen weighing in the other cup, Fera in another.

“Choose,” Tristen spoke, and his voice was as familiar as I had heard it every day. There was a deadly smile on his lips – lips which were just like mine. “Choose.”
The scales were trembling, and every second I waited the earth ripped more apart, opening a gigantic emptiness, an emptiness void of all worlds. “Which will you choose?”
I could see right then, that if I would choose my friends and sister I would also choose my father, my father who would end it all, and lose Fera. But if I chose Fera, I could prevent the world from falling, by denying my father… But if I chose him, I would also lose everyone else, everyone…

“Mamma,” I said, my voice subsided by the howl of the growing emptiness. “If you were here, which would you choose?”

But there was no answer, and the world was any longer but an inky blackness.

I woke up with a spasm on a soft surface in a candlelight room. It took me a moment to register I wasn’t in the hallway anymore: that I had either sleepwalked or someone had carried me to the bedroom in my sleep. When I saw her my blood circulation froze and my expression turned as awestruck as hers. Hestia.

“Who is Fera?”
A jolt went through me and I sprang to a sitting position, my eyes flying wildly around to spot either Nolan or Rilla. Neither of them was there. “What?”
“You talk in your sleep,” Hestia said. She looked just like she had done when I had first caught a glimpse of her – she wore her long, scarlet guardian dress and the fire pendant, looking like a flaming eye. “You called your guardian by name. And in the end you cried for Tristen and Aurora. But no mention of me.”
I shook my head with bewilderment, wiping the last remnants of the dream off my eyes. “You’re not gone,” I acknowledged. “You’re here.”
“Of course I am,” Hestia said with amusement. “This is my home.”
“Where were you last night?” I asked, although I didn’t really know the time of day or how long I had slept. “And Severina and-“

I broke off  before blurting Aurora’s name. “Did I only dream it all? Is Chyse really okay? And Aes?”

Hestia forced a turned-down smile. “The guardians were in emergency council last night,” she began. “Patrols have been sent after the lost teenagers. We believe there are more than few missing. Some disappear always after the Elemental feast but are eventually found. This is a mere precaution.”
“It’s not the feast.”
Hestia’s oblong face twisted. “What did you say?”
“Chyse and Circus were gone even before the feast,” I said. “It’s something else.”
“Do you know something of these disappearances that the high council does not?”
Blankness hit my mind and I leaned onto my palm. There was a throbbing pain in my head, but my elbow had gone numb. When I tried thinking I only could focus on the ring in my ears and nothing came to my mind. The only thing I could finally say was: “You have patrols?”

“The regime doesn’t run on guardian power only,” Hestia laughed. “The police forces of Kaiya are very pleased to help us against a little fee. I am sure all will turn out well.”
“Whoa,” I breathed as I laid back and focused on the ceiling. All the rooms were quarried into stone. “You sound so much more official when Ariel’s not around.”
I sensed Hestia smile. “She makes me feel young.”
A thought came suddenly into my mind. “Does… does the high council accept that you and she are… together?”

In the corner of my eye I saw Hestia’s expression hadn’t changed – it was still very indifferent. “Most of the council members are very young. We are accepted well.”
But there was something behind her tone. “I don’t think it really is like that.”
“Are you afraid you will be treated the same way?”

Amusement flushed on my face. Hestia had ignored my question when it came to the negative sides of the council such as the older, more conservative members. But it wasn’t the topmost thing going on through my mind. How had she known?

“I don’t think I will become a guardian that soon,” I said quite clearly. “It’s not something I should worry about.”
“It wasn’t what I intended,” Hestia continued. “The boy at the tunnels… he knows that you are different, doesn’t he? That is why he left you so unpleasantly.”

Air escaped from my lungs as a long puff and I sat up pole-straight. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” I huffed. “And I’m bi, by the way. It’s an all different story.”
“That changes things,” Hestia said in a slightly indefinable tone – I wasn’t sure whether it was apologetic or demented, like she had guessed things being as they were. “But does he-“
I lifted my both hands up in a repelling gesture, closing my eyes. “I don’t want to go through this conversation. I’m sorry. I know I owe you… my life?” I paused, “But this is not how I want to repay it. I’m very stressed out right now. All I would want to do is rest… but I just can’t.”

Hestia’s tone was motherly once again. “Why couldn’t you?”
“I can’t sleep,” I answered. “Some people say the stressing things they go through their days follow them in their dreams and they either run away from their problems or solve them. But all I get is more problems.”
Hestia’s expression was questioning, but there was nothing I could tell her. Helpless and devoid of solutions I jumped off the bed into my pink combat boots Hestia had apparently taken off in my sleep and strolled out the door into the torchlit corridor. The room I had been sleeping in was right next to a huge common room with sofas and a fireplace styled like Nolan’s home. The rooms represented each other so much I could have easily imagined the tiger pelt in front of the fireplace. But unlike Nolan’s home, there were no weapons there. It had to only mean one thing – Nolan had taken them all with him – or alternatively, there was an arsenal so large somewhere in the depths of the palace I didn’t dare to bring it in my mind.

Not knowing in which room Rilla and Nolan were staying, I started to explore the common room. Hazy daylight shone through holes in the roof like skylights, revealing me a glinting object in the almost exact middle of the round chamber. Close-up I could see it was some sort of hourglass filled with a strange kind of sand, almost like burning ashes with fiery specks. The glass had been engraved which the same type of rune-like letters which shone in different colors depending on the light like holograms. I recognized some of the letters -  each were engraved in their own elemental language. The darkness writings were just like the ones on my palm, the ones in the almost very top of the hourglass. But the only ones I could read were the ones in the bottom.

Wind letters were airy and curved like cumulus clouds, lightly and idly written. They shone an obscure shade of silver in a certain angle, forming very simply one word. MONDAY.

Suddenly I understood all the other letters too. TUESDAY. WEDNESDAY. The sand was almost halfway through, almost reaching Thursday, the day of water. The word SUNDAY had been written to the very top, and every letter shone in their own elemental color. Looking at the instrument made my head spin. Just like looking at the scales, I wanted to look away, but simultaneously couldn’t. Only Nolan’s voice snapped me out of the trance.

“Why are you worried?”
I whirled around so fast I was thankful the hourglass had been melted into the stone. “Nolan,” I said, studying his presence. He looked like himself again with the exception of how he was dressed – he had pulled on a tight, black tee which highlighted his burly shape. “All my clothes are at home,” he noted, noticing how my eyes were on his biceps. “I borrowed this from Chyse.”
So it looked. The two guys were very different when it came to looks – while Chyse would have walked naked on the streets only to show how good he looked Nolan hid his muscles under baggy shirts and pants – with reason. In Chyse’s tee he looked three times bigger than he usually did. “I knew I shouldn’t have dressed in this. It’s too distractive. Do you even remember anymore what you were worried about?”
I gave a laugh. “Gott sei Dank you aren’t Chyse. He would have finished that sentence with something like ‘I can see you are staring at my awesome abs. They can be distractive, you knew? Feast.’”

Nolan roared with laugh. “You’re like his female replica. You even have some of the same looks – the length, the hair… but not the eyes.”
I went silent, and Nolan changed the subject. “I called the councils this morning. Apparently there still aren’t signs of Circus, Aes or Talia. If I would have known there was something behind this I wouldn’t have left you alone last night.”

I waved my hand through the air nonchalantly. “It’s not all your fault. I wasn’t that careful either.”
Nolan’s eyebrows furrowed as if he had comprehended my sentence the wrong way. “I shouldn’t really ask this,” he began ominously, “But where were you?”
My response was blunt. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
Nolan let a suggestive cough, moving closer to me. “Or should I ask with whom?”
A sigh escaped from my throat. “You’re starting to sound like Chyse.”
Nolan shook his head vaguely. “It’s nothing like that, I assure you. I know you weren’t with Alex because he was with me all that time. And Aes had disappeared before that.”
But I could tell him, said my conscience. Nolan was my friend. A friend I had learned to trust a lot the last few days. Shouldn’t I tell him?

“With no-one,” I answered, not knowing why. “I just needed some alone time. Alex was starting to get on my nerves.”
“You were alone for long,” Nolan said suspiciously. “But you were on the party area, that’s the main thing. At least you weren’t alone in the woods.”
Actually, I was, my conscience spoke again. Or at least together with a stranger. A stranger who already was in my dreams…

“I’m glad you’re taking care of me,” I confessed. “It’s easier to talk to you than to Hestia. She’s acting too motherly.”
“Guardians are prone to that,” Nolan shrugged. “Now that she’s back, I could go home. I’m too big of a baby for her.”
“Then why are we still here?”
“Rilla,” Nolan answered silently, almost like she didn’t want anyone else to hear us. “She’s not in the mood to talk right now. She’s locked up in her room and hasn’t opened all day. I hope she will come out until Sunday.”
A trace of worry crept into my voice. “Are you sure she’s in there? That she hasn’t just… warped away?”
“You can’t warp inside buildings,” Nolan reminded me, then taking a quick look at my fire-branded palm. “Well, at least not inside guardian palaces. And she’s in there, I know it. When I try to come in she starts screaming and throwing things. Then she calms down and silences. Sometimes when I press my ear against the door I can hear her sob.”

A cold shudder went through me as an old image of mamma came back to me – how I had sometimes came home from school and looked for her but she had locked herself up in a room and I couldn’t get her out. The worst in it was she made no sound at all, almost like she was already dead.

“Are you going to stay, then?”
“Rather not,” Nolan’s shoulders slumped. “Times like this Rilla wants to be home. I think home is the best place for us all right now.”
I thought of Severina and her onyx palace with its somber bedrooms and murky corridors, of Aurora’s crystal gazebo and the unbelievable safeness the place brought me. They both felt equally like home. And then I thought of the house of my past – or my family’s past, where I had always felt cold. But it, too, was a home.

“Do you think I should do that too? Go home?”
“Home is where you feel safest,” Nolan acknowledged. “It doesn’t even have to be a place. It can be a person, a state of mind. Where is it that you feel safest?”
“I don’t know,” I answered instantly, thinking of Severina’s. There I would be the safest, Aurora had said. Yet she was my link to my father, the person I feared most. And at Aurora’s… her palace was like a time trap, so completely isolated off the world I could stay there forever and the world would revolve around me. “Not yet. I have to call Severina, ask her if she knows anything about this. But I could follow you. If it doesn’t matter.”
Nolan’s eyes glinted with friendliness. “It won’t. As long as you wipe that expression off your face.”
“What expression?”
“It’s in your eyes,” Nolan said, verbalizing all the thoughts which I had been unable to explain to myself. “It’s like you knew you were next.”