Chapter 50

  In the end, Fiora was Champion. And Rosma had been right: it hurt. Fiora didn’t care that it was supposed hurt, that she was supposed to learn something from it, that she was supposed to be changed. As she sat on her ten-sided platform, swaying in the waves above the green city, ringed by bright clouds and glittering stars overhead, she cried for what she had done.

  She sang a song, and it was a kind of song she had not sung since the death of Catch, when she and Rasmus had mourned in the cold storm. There was neither cold nor storm now. There was a warm breeze, and a beautiful sky, and a green jungle rippling below her, making the flimsy tree-stalks wobble, making the animals laugh and dance. She sang a sad, sad song, because she knew the truth: that sometimes it was better not to help somebody, even when you could. Sometimes you helped by not helping. It was a painful mystery, something she could not understand. Her arda shone like a green sun at the height of the city, and its light poured down over the creatures of Quelk. They all stopped to listen to that sweet, sad voice, and to the ringing chime of her arda. Some of them looked up and noticed that the stars turned overhead in a slow dance.

  And every injured creature on the island who heard the song was healed.

  When she finished, Fiora observed the eight doors all around her on top of her platform. Her own door and seven others. She fondly remembered the creation of each door. But the missing doors, black and white, haunted her. Those gaps felt like personal failings. Two people that she loved, unable or unwilling to love her back.

  And now a new thing troubled her: the medallion. Emmius’s sign had gone dark. What did it mean? She had tried calling him to no avail. She peeked through his door onto the endless sands of the Delta Moon, but he was not in his cave or anywhere on his mountain.

  Fiora intended to get to the bottom of this! But there was one other thing she had to do first. Derxis had told her to go somewhere, and she could tell that it must be important. He had been very serious when he told her, only laughing a little bit.

  So she hopped through her door to Skywater. And it was not long after that, following Derxis’s instructions, that she knocked on the door of a marble mansion in the shade of the Citadel.

  Leocanto Lockbreaker opened the door, much to Fiora’s discomfort. She had never trusted him. But he bowed to her, and he wordlessly led her up a gilded spiral staircase to a back room with a fancy door. He left her there after murmuring some brief congratulations about becoming a Champion. She tried to look gracious, but could not manage it. Letting her beautiful and kind guardian die didn’t seem like anything she should be congratulated for.

  She pushed through the door. The room beyond smelled of singed leather and woodsmoke and blood. It was bizarrely hot, like an oven. It looked as though a wild beast had trampled through, upturning the furniture, and something orange was splashed all over the—

  Fiora shrieked as she saw what lay crumpled up at the foot of the hearth. It was Derxis, and something about him looked wrong, but she couldn’t spare any thought for that because he was dead.

  Horror and panic thrashed inside of her. Was this the work of the Lockbreaker?! Was he going to try to kill her next? She brought her comm band up with a trembling hand, about to contact Rasmus.

  Something white crawled up on top of Derxis’s twisted torso, where it calmly gazed up at Fiora with an eyeless face. It was Clicker, Derxis’s angel. It opened its mouth a few times, lizard-like, before turning away from her and crawling back off of Derxis, apparently unconcerned. Fiora watched, wide-eyed, as it stepped over to the wreckage of the smashed and upturned table.

  The sight of the angel allowed Fiora to regain control of herself. She took a slow breath, and then she remembered what Derxis had told her earlier that very day: that when she was Champion, she could bring someone back from the dead.

  She realized, with some unconscious instinct, that it was true. Just as she had always known that she possessed the ability to heal the wounds of others, now she understood that she could take the body of Derxis, eviscerated and exsanguinated at her feet, and she could undo what had been done to it.

  And so she did. It was exhausting, but at least it did not require her to bleed. This power came not from her blood, but from the Bright World. She had earned the right to undo a death by allowing one to happen. Was that it? She didn’t like that at all.

  After a minute, with a song and a green light so intense that it snuffed out the fire and lingered for minutes afterward in the nooks and crannies of the room, Derxis stirred beneath her trembling hands. She saw his spark reignite in the dark space of her mind, joining herself and the five other living people downstairs in the mansion. She felt his heartbeat, sensed him take a shuddering breath.

  He groaned. He coughed. He raised a hand to his head. Fiora looked at that hand and realized what she had noticed earlier, what was wrong with Derxis: his arda was gone! His hand, normally scattered with orange spines, was smooth and bare.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Ahh…” said Derxis. “Damn. Thought I might see the books this time.” He tried to lever himself up, but Fiora applied her weight, such as it was, to pin him to the carpet.

  “No,” she said. “You need to rest.”

  He tensed as though to resist, then relaxed back onto the carpet. “Yeah. My work is done.”

  “Derxis, what happened?” Fiora asked him. She whispered to her angel, which vanished and reappeared moments later with a flask of water snatched from somewhere downstairs. Fiora opened it, sniffed it to make sure it was actually water, and then gave it to Derxis.

  “Akkama,” he said. He accepted the water and took a long drink.

  Fiora’s eyes widened. “No,” she breathed. “Why? Derxis, what did you do to her? You should have known she would…”

  He grinned. “I did know. Why do you think I told you to come?”

  Fiora’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t decide whether to be shocked, angry, or concerned for his sanity.

  “I made a mind spike,” he continued, eyes closed, satisfied smile still in place. “Akkama killed me and took it. Don’t be so upset. I provoked her.”

  “Derxis! Akkama cannot have a mind stone! Remember what she did last time?”

  “It’s okay. I know what she’s going to do with it. Trust me.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. There was something in those orange eyes that made her look away quickly.

  “And more importantly,” he continued, “she forgot something. Hey, Click. Go fetch.” He gestured toward the wreckage with a limp hand. Click, who always seemed to prefer plodding along rather than teleporting, made his slow way over to the burned and splintered wood. After a moment, he returned with something clamped in his jaws. A medallion. He dropped it into Derxis’s outstretched hand.

  “That’s Akkama’s?”

  “Yeah.” Derxis inserted the medallion carefully into an inner pocket of his tattered robe. “It was really important that she doesn’t have this. So she can’t cheat and become Champion like Rosma did.” His skin shifted through a few pastel colors. “I think she’s going to need that wish. Later.”

  Fiora fell backwards into a sitting position beside Derxis. Her head hurt from trying to figure this all out.

  “I’m not the Derxis you know,” he said, answering her unspoken questions in the way he always did. “I’m from the future. Seven years.”

  She looked at him. His eyes were closed. His mouth seemed to be suppressing laughter, as usual, but his brow was furrowed in distress.

  “Things got really bad. In the future. Abraham Black, and Rosma…”

  “How…”

  Derxis laughed bitterly. “How is everyone? Trust me on this, Fiora, you don’t want to know. But that’s why I came back. To stop that.”

  “But…what about Emmius?”

  Now Derxis sat up, and he looked serious. “That didn’t happen in my timeline. Akkama killed him. Yeah, that you can be upset about. But no, you can’t bring him back. He died on the Paper Moon, and Akkama left him there. His body is almost certainly irrecoverable. I’m having Acarnus check, of course, but…” He shook his head. Then he looked at her. “In the future, almost all of us died at least once. You saved almost everybody, at least once. It wasn’t enough. But you were a hero. For a while.”

  “So…well…” Fiora struggled to wrap her brain around all of this. “But we can stop it! Right? The bad stuff.”

  “We? Yeah. Well, that was the plan. But Black is gone, and the key went with him. We’re bailing. Abandon ship!” He laughed.

  Fiora stared at him. “How?”

  “Like this.” Derxis reached a hand out to Clicker. “Now, Click.” The white chameleon trundled over, reached out one of its funny chameleon-feet, and grabbed one of Derxis’s fingers.

  Light flooded the room, a flash swift and bright. When the purple splotches faded from Fiora’s vision enough that she could see, the angel was no more. And Derxis had changed.

  He smiled at her, his face bizarrely altered. “You next. We don’t have much time.”