[Part 5: The Return] Chapter 44

  Part 5: The Return

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

  - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  Year 7

  They couldn’t tell, at first, whether it had worked. Derxis laughed and he laughed, until his orange tears dripped upon the melted-wax stumps of his wrists where his hands used to be. But the wish proved efficacious, and at last Derxis wiped his tears and drool and looked at them with rheumy orange eyes that, if not entirely sane, were at least lucid.

  Three sets of eyes gazed back: golden tigers’ eyes, brown dragon’s eyes, blue shark’s eyes. They glittered in the feeble light of a yellow shinestone.

  “Do you remember?” asked Rasmus.

  Derxis giggled at the sight of them: Rasmus draped in the chains of dead Acarnus; Rosma scarred nearly beyond recognition, her heart and mind nothing more than ice now; Emmius fierce and wild, his face a painted mask, his weapon of musical destruction on his back. Derxis gazed about into the void beyond. Where was he? A cold rock, a barren pebble, adrift in a starless void. There was the Bright World, dim, a guttering candle. There was Ardia, a blackened ruin, and adrift around it such moons as remained.

  Rasmus stepped forward, threatening. “Do you remember?” he repeated. Derxis quailed back against the gritty rock. It would not do to anger Rasmus. He might die for that. Wait. Hadn’t he died already? Yes. Oh, yes. And Fiora had used up her one chance. They had bought a wish.

  Derxis showed them his teeth in something that was almost a smile. “Show me,” he whispered. He burned orange; he selected a mind to invade. Not Rosma; no use bothering with her mind anymore. Not Rasmus; Derxis had just come back to life, or something; no need to undo that miracle, at least not right away.

  Emmius, then. Derxis dove into the maelstrom. The chaos and the violence of Emmius’s mind nearly tore him apart. Music screamed in the darkness, such music as could shatter a moon. Derxis pried his way into Emmius’s memories. He crawled through those dark, thrashing corridors. He saw, and he remembered:

  Anthea dead—a mercy. Zayana dead—a betrayal. Acarnus dead—abandoned, no choice. Jeronimy, the traitor, vanished away, saving himself to doom them all. The darkness, having won, finding something more terrible than itself. And himself, Derxis, gone mad, killed out of necessity. Understandable. A year had passed, roughly.

  But why bring him back? Why had…(he raided Emmius’s memories)…Fiora, of all people, gone and purchased a wish? Ah, of course. She had wanted to pay the price of memories. But why now?

  A little more searching. Emmius’s mind was such a mess. And there it was: something strange, something Derxis has not sensed in years. Hope. A shining thread. A whisper in the dark. A candle against the howling void. A dream against the nightmares.

  They had found something. A chance.

  Something shook him out of his trance. Rosma prodded him with the friendly end of her spear. She signed to him: little time. Right. Her voice.

  “A way back?” he asked. “Why? From where?”

  “Perhaps the Bright World has seen fit to grant us a second chance,” muttered Rasmus, who seemed dark and terrible in the dim light, wrapped in his sparking chains.

  Derxis shook his head. “The Bright World has no pity,” he said with a maniacal titter. “No compassion. I know. I looked inside.” This appeared to be news to them. “Where do you think I lost my mind?” He snickered at that. His mind—lost! Maybe it was still in there, wandering forever in those awful, scintillating mirrored halls. Was that where he lost his hands? He vaguely remembered chewing them off. Something about his stars. He didn’t have a constellation anymore.

  Rosma slapped Rasmus on the arm, a signal for him to hurry. His retaliatory backhand spun her away into the cold darkness beyond the dim, buttery light of the shinestone. She did not cry out. She could not. Emmius leaned away slightly from Rasmus, but that was all. His eyes were wide and wild, his gaze fixed on Rasmus almost as though daring him to try, to just try.

  “Where?” asked Derxis. Rasmus picked up something at his feet and tossed it onto the stone in front of Derxis. It was a plain canvas bag. But something inside glimmered with strange light. Derxis didn’t need to look inside. He’d already seen it in Emmius’s memory. An echo crystal, they were calling it. A single star in the empyrean, in a sky with no stars to hold back the nightmares, not for years. One star of mysterious origin, the echo crystal within. A way back, for one power, into the past. Soon.

  “Soon,” said Rasmus. “It must be soon.”

  Rosma returned. She stood just beyond the reach of the light. Only Derxis could see the hatred radiating from her. Hatred for everything, including herself. Hatred masked as judgment. Hatred too blind to know itself as such.

  “You will go,” said Rasmus.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Derxis paused. His eyes widened as the implications crept in upon him. “No,” he whispered, giggling. “No. No! I can’t!” He laughed hysterically.

  “It must be you,” said Rasmus. Derxis quivered, but he knew the truth. They could send something back, some arda energy shot through the crystal into the past like a lethal injection to kill off this iteration of events, to create a new path. A new future. What could the others send? Lightning? Fire? Even, in Fiora’s case, life? No. These would create No Significant Alteration (ha ha!). But send back a mind, a mind full of knowledge and memories…

  This was why they had spent so much to bring him back, to revive and restore the one they’d had to put down like a rabid chameleon.

  But he could not shake the fear. He could taste it, like a sour stench. It was all around him. None of them knew what would happen if Derxis sent back his own mind to alter the past. Would they…cease to exist? Was that, perhaps, the most idyllic outcome?

  Derxis had no choice. He could do what nobody else could. But he didn’t want to. He couldn’t bear to see everyone as they had been all those years ago. Terror clawed with icy fingers at his breast. He shook his head.

  Rasmus crackled. He took a step forward. His arda shimmered yellow; his dead eyes sparked to life. “You will go,” he said. “You must. You can prevent…this.” He swept a hand out at the caliginous empyrean. The invasive void. The nightmares, the Dark World, the ruins of Ardia and the rubble of their moons. A hopeless situation. A story with no happy ending. Despair, prolonged.

  And he could, too. Derxis knew it. Their young selves…it would be so easy. They had been children, nothing more. He could do it. He could correct them, guide them, stop the most terrible mistakes. He could change everything. It might even be fun .

  Rasmus took his stillness as assent. He stepped back, giving Derxis a cautionary space.

  Derxis nodded slowly. “How soon?”

  They looked at Rosma. She stepped into the light, just enough that they could see the swift motions of her hands. Any moment, she signed.

  Derxis laughed. They had cut it close. He had caught glimpses in Emmius’s mind of the trials they had gone through to make this happen, to bring him back in time. Fiora was out there somewhere, maybe dead, maybe eaten up by the Prothagonus or turned to glass by the Bright World. Akkama had done her part by thieving his corpse from the ever-smoking ruins of Skywater Citadel, and she was now fighting an inexhaustible horde of nightmares to the death, for this was how she preferred to spend what might be her last moments.

  He glimpsed Akkama’s mind. This happened from time to time ever since he became Champion. When he and another were thinking of each other, their minds linked for just a tiny spark of an instant. Akkama was in danger, but she was always in danger. When their minds touched, she understood in an instant, and she had sent him a message: kill her. Referring, of course, to the younger version of herself that Derxis would soon meet face to face.

  The crystallized echo cracked, a sound like an icy lake threatening to give way underfoot. And not, from Derxis’s perspective, very much different from that. The metaphorical icy lake of the distant past. (That metaphor sucks, D-man.) His skin crawled as it nervously shifted through bright hues.

  They all watched as Derxis flicked a stump wrist at the flap of the canvas bag with a shimmer of orange magic. The flap fell aside, and there it was: glossy, angular, cold. Silver veins twisted like trickles of mercurial liquid draining down into the ebony depths. Like hours, days, years, bleeding away into nothing. All things done, undone. Seven years unraveled in an instant.

  “Stop,” said Rasmus. His voice broke. Derxis realized that his thoughts had been leaking out, influencing the others. They were afraid. They should be. What would happen to them? Rasmus looked resolved, Rosma unconcerned. Emmius, though it was hard to tell through the paint, looked worried. Their looks didn’t matter, not to Derxis. They were terrified.

  The crystal cracked again. More silver veins ran against the dark, spiderwebbing the void.

  “Derxis,” said Emmius, speaking for the first time. His voice was gravelly and hoarse from all the screaming. Everyone looked at him, but his deadly umber eyes—dragon eyes—never left Derxis. Emmius opened his mouth, hesitated, then rasped out, “save us, man.”

  Derxis wanted to say something. Something moving. Profound, even. Something hopeful. Something to inspire. But he had nothing. None of that. He had only one thing, so he gave them that.

  He laughed.

  The crystal cracked again. Derxis sparkled with a tangerine light and then, still laughing, shattered the time crystal.

  Hope is a passion for the possible.

  - S?ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling