29: the day after

SE ON VALMIS. *huokaus* IT IS READY. finally.
 ei siten että olisin nauttinut tarinasta eroon pääsemisestä - minähän en pääse tästä yli enkä ympäri ennen kahden muun osan kirjoittamista. silti on uskomattoman onnistunut, helpottunut olo. nyt minua ainoastaan jännittää teidän reaktionne luettuanne lopun. niille siis ketkä pääsevät loppuun asti, vuodattakaa sydämenne kyllyydestä ilojanne ja surujanne. kuka hahmo ihastutti / pahastutti? kenestä on päästävä eroon? mikä luku otti pannuun niin että se on ehdottomasti heitettävä romukoppaan? kertokaa! jännityksestähän tässä halkeaa. end of the dream soi ja huokailen helpotuksesta. kohta tulee itku. 90385 sanaa, 141 A4-sivua (364 A5), uusia kokemuksia ja hemmetin paljon saksankielisiä kirosanoja. pitihän tämä tarina vielä laittaa wordleenkin. tältä siis näyttää. vähän julkaisematonta flarttia ties mistäkin mahtui joukkoon:)









 

Chapter Twenty-nine

THE DAY AFTER

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rilla voiced, peeking between her fingers. “I feel like crap.”

There was a pause and Rilla sat up, pressing a pillow against her chest. “Why are you looking at me so funny?”

“You said it,” I began, as if it had been the strangest thing in the world. “You said ‘God’ instead of cursing on the Elementals.”

Rilla gave a laugh. “Yeah, I’m not eternally in full councelor-mode.” She sighed and stared at the empty mattress next to her. “Unlike the guys. Nolan was very disappointed yesterday: he kept on lecturing on how you didn’t listen to him. After you threw Alex and his friends out he’s softened a little. But he still won’t listen to you.”

I frowned as I thought of the previous evening. After Alex and his 50-head entourage had left the apartment had been a mess. Some corners were still full of trampled porcelain and glass. Nolan’s arsenals had been rearranged, but some of the blades were bent and he had lost a good spear. Even his beloved tiger pelt suffered damage. But compared to the rest of the evening cleaning up had been easy. Saying goodbye had been harder.

“Without Hilary they’d still be here,” Rilla stood up for me. “Please, Chyse. Don’t be a jerk-ass.”
Chyse had laughed. His expression was exceedingly clear. What does that even mean? “Very well,” he had finally said. The rest of the evening had been very awkward. It had been different. Instead of the usual relaxed atmosphere there was a constant tension in the air. Chyse didn’t say a word when I was around. Even Nolan treated me like I was air. And when I tried to talk to Rilla, she went all tense like talking to me was cheating on her boyfriend.

So I chose to be by myself. After cleaning up I had made myself some tea, taken a long shower and thought about the most absurd of things, all the way from my childhood memories to my last year in high school. It still hadn’t been quite clear to me what I would do after high school. I could have become an aviator, a musician, even a mathematician: or just a bohemian artist who spent the rest of her life sitting in Café Play and drinking tea. But these dreams had already become so distant they were like another life. They were no longer options. Yet, for some reason, thinking of a future in Kaiya seemed even more distant. Living there was like going back tens of thousands of years to the times when every day was waking up and survival, life or death – death that I did not fear. I feared only of losing myself.

I did not turn off the tap until my skin was as wrinkled as the surface of a dried plum, knowing Rilla and the guys could have plenty of fun by themselves. But when I opened the door and expected to hear laughter, there was none. All was only the same silence which had haunted me my last days on Earth. The recollection of silence made me lapse out of the memory. “But why do you?” I asked.

“Of course I listen to you,” Rilla said gently. “I honestly believe you have nothing to do with the scrolls. Directly. But that guy, Fera…”

“You don’t trust him either,” I guessed.

Rilla’s expression stretched and she turned away, digging her fingernails around her blanket. “Chyse’s going to kill me if this goes on. I think Nolan feels the same way. As long as you keep seeing him, I don’t know if we can meet again.”
A puff of air lifted the hair off my forehead. “Seeing him is nothing I do consciously. It just happens. I don’t trust him either, but I know there’s more between the two of us than hate and betrayal. I have to see him again. I just have to.”

Rilla stood up on her knees, leaning against the window. Chyse had left for a walk early in the morning and he still hadn’t returned. Perhaps Rilla was thinking I was keeping Chyse from coming. Like he didn’t dare enter the building before I left.

“It’s not something I can choose just like that,” I said dryly as I pulled on something decent to wear. “One of the very first things Severina taught me was that there are some things that are meant to be. I feel like if I stop seeing him it will change the course of this all.” I was afraid to say the word. Destiny. “He’s one of the people I visioned about the very first time. Just a while ago I thought foresight was something impossible. But now some of my visions have come true. And maybe seeing the future really is impossible. Maybe it’s just all about coincidence.”

Rilla turned around with an empathetic look in her eyes. In the morning light she looked really young, like a little sister I could have had. I wasn’t still quite sure of her absolute age.

“You’ve seen it all,” she said, reaching out towards the window handle. “You’re the first wind-child I have met with a gift of foresight like yours. Some have this controllable version, what’s it called? Internal foresight. There’s something very creepy in it. They can touch someone and tell this person is to trip over to a banana and possibly die. They never see the right outcome, only possible options. And unlike you, they never use it for anything useful. Perhaps that’s why Aurora doesn’t have any people as councelors. Whenever there’s a council summoning, she just calls some wind spirit to help her out.” Rilla glanced outside one last time, opening the window with a dead expression. “Speaking of wind… I know there’s none in the fire city, but perhaps breathing fresh air helps. Nolan thinks it helps him concentrate when he ignites a torch or candle. I guess it works with me too. Though I fear fire, I’m somehow drawn to it, like I could stick my hands through a bonfire only to be fascinated by my own skin burning.” A shiver ran through her. “What about you?”
I shook my head as I breathed the fresh air. “I and my element come along pretty well. I think I’m beginning to understand.”

Rilla looked at me through an explosion of auburn hair. “What?”
“What my element is trying to tell me. I still can’t fully interpret all of my visions, but at some level I understand what they are about. It’s almost like I’m being offered different ways. I’m standing at a platform with like… four tracks. One leads me to Severina, one to Tristen, one to my mamma and one to Aurora and my own element. On my way to the final station I have to stop on several different stations which are all equally important to reach the goal. Fera is one of these. To understand Tristen I have to understand him. Yet I feel like none of these tracks is wrong, like there’s some point somewhere where they merge into one track – balance.”
“Whoa,” Rilla said, leaning slackly in a pile of satin cushions. “You just blew my mind.”

I gave a laugh. “Imagining them as something concrete is easier, just like balance is being represented by a scale. Just thinking of decisions as separate things causes me brain damage. Analyzing things make them simpler.”
“Do you understand them, then?” Rilla asked. “Your visions. Can you tell are we all going to die? How many visions have you even had?”

My eyes glassed and images flashed by like celluloid. “I think every dream I have ever had has been a vision. And just like real life… well, I can’t go inside anyone’s head and tell what  they are thinking.” It has happened only once, I added in my thoughts. When I drank from the fountain of Truth. “Just like real life they’re complicated. If my element were to show me the end of the world it would come in separate visions in some sort of symbolic form. I’ve actually never had a particularly long vision. They’re all short flashes. Even the shortest and most random of them… I even think they might be the most important. I’ve been studying them for a while and I think I understand. At least partially.”

Rilla let out a deep sigh. She had slid down on her back and was now observing the oriental paintings on the ceiling. “Life sucks,” she began. “Then you die.”
I raised my brows with awe. “You sound like some of the guys at my old school. None of them was really average.  Every guy was either a drunken jackass pumped with steroids or an angsty teenage boy who unravels his hidden aggression by listening to death metal.”

Rilla snorted. “To me it’s true,” she said. “On Earth, I died.”

I remembered the dream of me in a coma-like state, wondering whether it had really been real. I shook my head of instinctive refusal. Rilla wrinkled her brows in bewilderment.

“What was that about?”
I stared at the rising sun, noticing a familiar figure on the walkway.

“I was just thinking about life,” I shrugged. My eyes went to the pacing figure on the yard. “Nothing special. Oh, and look who’s back.”

Rilla turned around as a whirlwind, stuffing her head out of the window. She and Chyse had some sort of signal conversation. “It’s him,” Rilla said between her teeth. “If he knows you’re still here I’ll be in trouble. I hope you listened to what I said.”

I nodded, but a silent disappointment seemed to weigh me down. “See you in council,” I rolled a scarf around my neck and pulled on my jacket. “In case my father doesn’t manage to destroy it by then.”

I had never been more relieved by a cool autumn breeze.

Somehow I felt like the earth and wind cities were the only places outside The Cities where the weather was as it had to be. Before it all went wrong Nolan had told me it had something to do with the currents – due the hot current passing the darkness and water city they never had snow, just like the cold current passing the light and fire cities had built a desert and a line of mountains. The morning after the air around Aurora’s bluff was cool and clear, just like it had to be, and I could almost taste snow on the tip of my tongue. The world was no longer all orange and yellow like last time. The trees were now skeletons of themselves, which I only knew to be a sign of the upcoming winter.

I saw her standing on the edge of her bluff, her feet only inches away from a deadly drop thousands feet below. As she stood still with her eyes closed there was godlike beauty in her - remoteness, agelessness. The human vessel through the element speaks. That moment she looked unbreakable, like even the fatal fall could not harm her.

But when Aurora opened her eyes it all was gone, leaving her plain and hollow. Her eyes had still not lost their blue, but something in them seemed to be missing. Suddenly she looked almost... fragile.

"Hilary," she spoke my name with fear. "You look... old."
I forced an incredulous stare. "I'm still eighteen."
Aurora shook her head, being herself again. "Not old," she rephrased. "Mature."

I sighed internally. If I only could have been. I had never felt so childish before. "I've had lot to deal with. Severina told me you knew about Tristen. That you had warned her. How did you know his means? Did Wind tell you?"
Aurora looked into the distance. "I have known him longer than she."
"How come?" I furrowed my brows. "He is her father."

Aurora turned her back and walked towards her palace. The crystal walls and windows shuddered in the breeze. "Tell me, Hilary," she changed the subject, "Have you felt... different lately?"
The wind blew hair on my face. "How do you mean?"
Aurora remained silent. Before entering her palace, she stopped to lean by a stone fence and study the scenery down below. Her land. But so much of it had been taken away, eaten by a colorless haze.

"I've had more visions," I told. "Not that I'd say they were clearer. But I have learned to interpret them."

Aurora looked away. "Your element serves you well," she recited. "How is your windbending?"
"Uncontrollable," I laughed. "Just like it should be, I suppose."
"You will learn to control it," Aurora continued. "Elemental bending is the ability which develops the slowest. But also lasts the longest."

A look of question passed my face. "But abilities like that... they can't fade away? Or can they?"
Aurora said nothing, and I was beginning to understand.

There is only energy, I had been told. It can never fully be taken. Only borrowed and returned.

In the beginning it was all divided evenly. But ever since then balance had been shifting, energy dividing unevenly. And when someone took too much, it would have eventually to be returned.

"Aurora," I asked very unconsciously. "How old are you? I mean... you're so... ageless. How many decades?"
Aurora smiled amusedly, but there was sadness in her eyes. "Not many. Three, four."
My eyes widened.

"No guardian lives for long," she said. "But the longer a guardian stays in touch with their element they stay alive. When a connection like that fades... it breaks the soul. I have already lived for longer than I thought I would." She paused, a smile of irony on her face. "When Severina arrived eighteen years ago, I thought she would be the end of me. But she turned out to be something else. And I lived."
I swirled around to stare at the reflections of us off the palace walls. The last time I had looked at us like this, I had looked so powerless beside her. Things had changed now. We were almost... equal.

"I am starting to lose connection with my element," she said. "Wind still bends under my will. But every time you dream I grow weaker. I will soon lose my ability to understand the windbeings."
A wave of shock passed over me together with understanding. "And I grow stronger," I realized. "I will become the human vessel through the Elemental speaks."
Aurora forced a nod, and I suddenly despised the mere look of myself. Rilla had been wrong with Aurora. She had chosen not to have a human council not because she hadn't found anyone suitable. She had chosen it because she had feared this to come. And when I would take her place in the high council, she would die.

"Is there nothing I can do? There has to be a way. I could deny Wind. I don't want to become a guardian. Not if this is what it causes."
"You cannot defy the Elementals," Aurora said with finality. "Denying Wind..." She shook her head. "Denial in Kaiya is something more than saying 'no.' It is not an option. If you are willing to live."

I can't deny him, Severina had told me. Now it all had a reason. He is my father. "I have experienced it once. I will not do it again."
The clouds passed over us, and a dim glow lit Aurora's skin. In the light the numerous thin scars covered her skin like a pattern, tiny marks to remind her of failing never again.

"Aurora?" I asked, fighting the urge not to run my fingers over the thin red lines only to find how they felt. "Where did you get those scars?"
"I said 'no'," she said, her blue eyes glowing. "The Elementals punished me."
Aurora fingered her palace glass with trembling fingers, a fear of breaking it once again. "I denied your father."
A recollection of the old piano tune rang in my mind like a forgotten childhood lullaby, a ghost of another life. "You don't have to explain," I said, remembering the rain of glass over the girl with azure eyes. "I already know. I have seen it."

I thought of the four tracks emerging into balance. This was what I had spoken of - that they all were connected somehow. Things had meant to be different, but numerous decisions had changed the course of it all. And Aurora had been punished.

Confusion burned bright in my eyes as Aurora took a hold of my shoulders and walked me inside, up the stairs, to an instrument hidden under a white fabric. "Your visions have already shown you it all," she began, skillfully restraining her fear. "But for you to understand the present and make decisions concerning the future, we have to return to the past." She pulled the fabric aside, revealing a grand piano shining like crystal. There was a twitch in her fingers, and I could tell she yearned to play again. "It all began here. Thirty years ago your father taught me to play. But he always wanted more of me than what I wanted of him. When I chose to deny him and defy the Elementals I was punished with these scars. It changed the course of fate."
My fingers drew a clean line in the dust coating the old instrument. A dead key rang in my ears. "That is not possible," I whispered. "Tristen lived on Earth. He lived and loved my mother until he left her. He couldn't have crossed the veil twice."
"But he did," Aurora claimed with bright eyes. "When I chose to change fate, he was separated from me forever. We were meant to be together. On Earth he found your mother and had two children. And when he found a way to cross the veil one more time, I knew I would eventually be doomed."
A silent question formed on my lips, but Aurora answered before I could say a word.

"It was not your mother who your father ran away from," she voiced. "It was you. It was you - because he was afraid of you."

Tristen smiled radiantly from the end of the table as he passed me a bowl of grapes.

“Please, enjoy,” he spoke. “You are my guest at the palace of Light.”

Reluctantly I picked a grape, staring at it as if it was poisoned. Severina met my eyes as she took my hand. “Don’t,” she whispered. “He is our father.”

“Severina,” Tristen taunted. “What do you think you are doing?”
Severina froze. “Father-“

Tristen snapped his fingers, and my sister’s body fell limp on the white marble floor. Her eyes were still open, but vacant. A scream made its way up my throat. “Severina,” I gasped. “What did you do to her?”
Tristen crossed his fingers nonchalantly.

“What did you do to her?” I repeated, reaching a hand towards my sister, but I found them tied behind my back. The room around us had changed: light flooded in the high arched windows, burning the gold velvet drapes and crackling the floor under our feet. The air had started to boil and scorch my skin. “This is my dream,” I said. “You don’t belong here.”

Tristen flicked his hand carelessly, knocking over a wine cup. “There is only one in here that does not belong,” he said. “And that one is you.”

Severina’s body in my feet started to shimmer, slowly fade away.

“What are you doing to her?”

Tristen’s laugh was like music. “Oh, but Hilary, you still cannot understand?”
A dark aura pulsed around my sister like a fragile heart, a flickering candle in a merciless wind. Just like hers, Tristen’s figure had started to shrivel, wither away, as spirits of gold, silver and black swirled around him. Their unrecognizable visages were twisted into screams of death, and I recognized only one of them: a woman with straight dark hair like Severina’s in reverse, ebony eyes now like glowing diamonds.

“Good,” Tristen smiled as he noticed my recognition. “Very good.”

Tristen twisted his palm upward, gathering the souls into one single singularity. I closed my eyes, and behind my eyelids the world turned into a screaming, swirling chaos.

I woke up in the cold ground under Aurora’s willow, resting peacefully under a layer of newly fallen snow. Beneath the haze I felt the light of the rising sun, and a figure formed behind my opened eyes. His name was now complete as I whispered a wish to the rising wind.

Come back, my thoughts echoed off the cliffs of the land of Wind. I think Tristen has my mamma.