Part 12 (1/2)
Cris s.h.i.+vered, black roses blooming around him. -Redemption must be earned. If we want it, we will work for it, even though we can never obtain it on our own. To succeed, we need Ana's willing help. And your help, Dossam.- Chills swept through me. ”And the phoenixes?”
-They don't need Janan to be stopped, any more than the earth needs the moon to orbit it. The world would change without the moon, but the earth would still exist.- I nodded, still filled with so many questions, trying to absorb so much information. I didn't even know where to start.
Brush snapped nearby, and a wolf howled in the south.
”We should head back in.” Sam wrapped an arm around me. ”The others will wonder where we are.” He placed the flute back inside its case, and sylph songs faded into the night as all but one sylph vanished back into the forest.
Cris stayed with us as we headed back to the cave, our path illuminated by the lantern Sam had brought along. Snow fell more quickly now, dimming the world beyond our little circle of light.
Back inside the cave, Whit and Stef were going over our notes on the temple books. A pile of dead rabbits lay in the corner, waiting to be dried.
I draped a cloth over the carnage. ”You had a lot of luck with the snares?” We wouldn't starve, at least.
Whit shook his head. ”We took the sylph hunting. They'd find a rabbit, chase it, kill it quickly, and we'd fetch it.”
”They hunt and they cook. Who knew sylph were so useful?” I sat down beside Stef and Whit and looked over the notes they'd taken, but nothing new stood out. ”Have any of you ever been to the ocean?” I asked.
”Lots of times,” Whit said. ”It's beautiful, but it can be dangerous.”
”How?” The paintings I'd seen had been gorgeous, and that glimpse the sylph gave me had made the ocean seem like another world.
”Once, a bunch of us built a s.h.i.+p to take us to different islands and continents. We wanted to explore. But we got lost in the middle of the sea. This was before we really understood how big the ocean is and how easy it would be to get lost, so we hadn't done enough preparation. Fortunately, we had machines to strip the salt from the water and make it potable.”
”Salt in the water?” I gagged. ”Sounds disgusting.”
Behind Whit, Stef gave a very serious nod.
Whit went on. ”Even being lost with no idea where to goa”that was okay. Then a kraken found us, ripped the s.h.i.+p into five pieces, and started eating it. I was lucky enough not to be eaten alive. I guess. It might have been faster than drowning, now that I think of it.”
I shuddered, trying not to think about all the times I'd nearly been in similar positions. If not for Menehem's experiment, Janan would have consumed me before I was ever born. And then I'd nearly drowned in Rangedge Lake.
”This isn't too much for you, is it?” Whit frowned at me.
”No. I was just remembering something else.”
Sam touched my hand. ”The ocean can be beautiful, though. Most of the time it's beautiful.”
Whit nodded. ”And there are lots of oceans. Some cold, some warm. Some, the water is so blue it doesn't look real. And I love the sound of waves on rocks or sand. . . .” His memory ran away with him.
How long did it take for someone to grow that somewhen-else look? One lifetime? Two? How easy was it for someone to fall back in time and lose all sense of the present?
I couldn't imagine. The present pressed around me, harsh and sharp and real.
Over the next week, I translated more symbols with the sylph's help.
Getting new meanings for different symbols was easy now. The sylph knew several words for every symbol and knew how different modifiers worked, but they couldn't always tell me what meaning a symbol had in specific context. So a sentence could read ”People approached the city,” or it could read ”Humans attacked the prison.” Or something else entirely.
But after days of going through a promising section of text, I'd found a translation that confirmed my fears. After lunch one afternoon, I pa.s.sed my notebook to Stef for her opinion.
Chatter quieted as she read, and a few sylph skittered from the cave. Cris stayed, identifiable by his shadow rose.
After a little while, everyone waiting and watching Stef, she handed back my notebook, her tone sober. ”That looks right to me.”
”Thanks.” I accepted the notebook and flipped back to the beginning of the story. ”Then I guess if everyone is ready to know . . .”
”We are.” Whit set our dirty dishes aside and cleaned his hands. ”Then maybe we can move on from this cave.”
I nodded. We'd move on, but I doubted he'd like where I was thinking about going. ”Get comfortable.” As I spoke, I adjusted my sleeping bag so I could lean against the wall, my notebook on my knees. Cris hovered nearby, while Sam sat cross-legged beside me. I offered him my free hand, and he held it in his lap, tracing the outline of my fingers.
The memory magic on Whit was cracked and fading, though he wasn't completely free of it yet. It took time. But Sam and Stef would remember everything I was about to tell them, and the more we reminded Whit, the better chance he'd have of recalling it later.
”First, I need to tell you what these books are. They're history, but as Meuric said, no one wrote them. They're simply written. I don't know when, or how, but this one”a”I reached to open one of the booksa””talks about my birth.”
Whit s.n.a.t.c.hed up the book as though to read it right now.
”How is that possible?” Sam leaned over to look at the book with Whit, but frowned and sat back when he couldn't read anything.
”No one wrote the books. They're written as history happens. But they do belong to phoenixes. They were stolen, along with the temple key.” I shook my head. ”I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll start with what you've been forced to forget.
”Before your time, the old world pa.s.sed away. A new age dawned with cataclysmic events and the rising of creatures that had once been legend. Dragons, trolls, rocs, centaursa”and phoenixes. Humans perished by the millions during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all over the world. Hurricanes washed the earth clean. Only a small number of people survived the destruction, and it wasn't long before they would fall, too. That's when all this starts.”
”There were humans before?” Whit asked.
”Lots of humans, it seems.”
”Then they'd have had their own society. Technological advancements. Ideas and dreams and culture. What happened to all of it? How could none of that have survived?”
”Surely a lot of that world did survive.” I couldn't stop my pitying look. ”But Janan wanted you to believe he created you. Why would he have allowed a previous society's culture to stay? He erased it from your minds, just like he erased so many other things. But when you had flashes of inspiration or ideas for inventions, maybe some of what you'd learned in your very first lifetime leaked through the memory magic.”
”So our inventions.” Stef glanced at her SED, my flute, our lanterns. ”None of what we thought was ours is ours.”
My throat tightened, but I didn't know what to say. I didn't know if she was right ora”Or what. The books didn't tell me.
Sam touched my leg. ”What happened next?”
I eyed my notes. ”The cataclysm was before phoenixes began recording history, so whatever incited it is a mystery. We may never know. It's not important, anyway. Only how people reacted to it.” I found my place again. ”Humanity dwindled as the other dominant species carved out territories across the world. After a hundred or more years of living with the constant threat of extinction, a new leader was born.”
”You should probably mention that people weren't reincarnated.” Stef glanced around the group. ”People just lived and died, like everything else.”
”That's how the population grew smaller.” I smiled at her. ”Thanks.”
She ducked her head.
”Anyway, this new leader's name was Janan. He was strong and had plans to lead his people not just beyond their current problema”always getting slaughtered by the various creatures living around their small territorya”but into a greater way of living: never dying. He saw how phoenixes rose from their own ashes, and was jealous. So he took dozens of his best warriors, and they went hunting a phoenix to discover the method of its immortality.
”They caught one and demanded answers, but the phoenix couldn't tell them.” My voice broke. ”So they hurt it and demanded again, but still the phoenix told them nothing. As they tortured the phoenix, its blood began leaking onto them, changing them. They didn't realize it, though.”