Chapter 27: Silence

Shiori covered her eyes against the light. She realized that she could hear Mores scream as the magical prison around his mind shattered.

The light from Mores didn’t feel hot, but Shiori wished to hide from it. It wasn’t warm or burning on her skin. Instead it seemed to reach into her mind and scour away her calm and focus.

She glimpsed thoughts pouring from Mores. Duke Praetor. Loyalty. Horror. Crimes. Devotion. Recrimination. Piety. Fear. Pain.

By the end, she was cowering on the pile of rocks at the cave’s entrance with The Last Word held over her face in a vain attempt to keep the light from her eyes and mind.

Shiori didn’t know how long she was in a daze after the light stopped. Mores lay on the ground, skin glistening with sweat. He was unconscious, like Tsubame after her spell had broken.

She stood slowly. The light had felt like a decade of painful drudgery. It had been a decade of slavery for Mores. Had his light shown for seconds? Minutes?

Shiori sighed, looking at Mores, then at The Last Word. “When Tsubame passed out, I got attacked by shadows and had to carry her. At least this time I won’t have to…”

The ground shook.

Shiori paused, holding her breath. What was that?

The ground shook again.

The panicked and only remembered to breathe when the pain in her lungs didn’t allow her to do otherwise.

When Symphon lit a light to combat the Umbrae shadows, something came to the temple, something even Speakers feared. Ribald had known that the light would bring something terrible.

The light from Mores had been bright. Perhaps not as bright as the temple lit by Symphon, but likely visible from some distance.

The ground shook again.

Shiori was startled from her frozen panic when the next rumbling felt much closer. She moved to Mores, pushing his shoulder gently, then with more force. “Come on. Get up.”

She wouldn’t survive in the realms of Kryptopeda without him.

The rumbling knocked her on her butt next to Mores.

She had to move him. She tried picking him up like Tsubame and realized he was far heavier than her tiny friend. There was no way she could stand with him on her back, much less climb from the cave entrance.

“Get up!” she yelled, patting his cheeks harder than intended.

The rumbling was closer. She could both hear and feel it.

Shiori tried to lift him since he wouldn’t wake. The next rumbling knocked her down.

Around the depression at the opening of the cave she saw forest animals running away from the rumbling. Shiori panicked, hugged The Last Word, and ran.

She reached the slope and climbed a few steps before the panic eased and she realized Mores was behind her. She looked back, heart pounding as the rumbling came again, stronger.

Mores lay on the stones. From afar, Shiori saw that the bright light had scoured something dark away from the area around the boy.

It was like a fine black dust had been burned away by Mores’ light. Or not quite dust. Everything around Mores looked more bright and real.

Shiori looked at the towering trees. From here she could see the tree’s surface was bright where the light had scoured them clean. Surface hidden from the light remained dim and dark. Something about the light had restored anything it touched.

The clean places looked more real. They appeared bright, vibrant, and alive. Everything else resembled an old faded photograph or a dimmed, wrinkled paper suffering from too much sun exposure.

The light had cleaned every surface it touched, removing something that coated and tainted everything in Kryptopeda with a dark, corroding unreality.

The realms of Kryptopeda had truly fallen into darkness.

The rumbling came again and in an insane moment Shiori decided she’d rather die trying to help someone than die running alone. Maybe it was too late to escape.

She ran to Mores and pulled on him. Once, then twice, then three times she failed.

“Get. UP!” she said in frustration.

The next time she pulled, he floated up like a balloon, nearly upsetting her balance with his weightlessness.

“Ah, up, I should have said ‘up’ earlier,” Shiori said, realizing the power she’d felt in the word ‘up’ when she yelled it. She’d have to be careful with her words now that she knew magic.

Shiori ran, carrying the weightless Mores, struggling not to slam him into a tree as the rumbling grew closer.

Mores woke two hours later. Shiori had wandered aimlessly through the forest, then ran uphill.

She found herself against a cliff wall with a cave. She hid herself and Mores after ensuring the cave was unoccupied.

Then it came to the forest. It was two or three times taller than the tallest trees.

She made the mistake of looking at it.

The effect was exactly the opposite of Mores’ painfully bright light.

Her eyes hurt to look at it, it was so dark. Her body reacted before she could think, covering her eyes from the painful darkness like it had from the painfully bright light.

She tried to remember the shape of the massive thing, and immediately regretted it. The memory hurt. It hurt worse than the memories of enslavement from the light shining from Mores.

The light emitted by Mores as he broke free summoned something that wasn’t dark or black. It frankly shone with a darkness, emanating blackness that coated everything it touched and consumed light.

Shiori’s skin felt cold. It looked dim and unreal.

The unearthly awful dark coating sealing every surface of Kryptopeda had tainted her exposed skin. She was over a kilometer away, but it hurt!

She pulled Mores deeper into the cave to protect them from exposure to that thing.

Shiori sat in the dark with Mores, scared to make any light. She wished to know what was going on in Kryptopeda. She wished she could use magic effectively, but she didn’t even know her true name.

She tried thinking of her true name but nothing worked: Princess Shio-chan, Princess Shiori Honjou, Shiori of Japan.

About an hour later, Mores woke.

The first thing he said was, “you saved me?”

Shiori looked toward the cave entrance. The rumbling had traveled away long ago. “We barely escaped before that dark thing came.”

“What?” Mores asked, confused. He was trying to put himself back together after discovering he had been a puppet without free will for most of his life. “Right, the Duke’s bindings failed. I must have cast light as I broke free.”

Shiori nodded in the dark, trying to keep her mind from recalling how she felt at the touch of the darkness.

“The Silence must have come,” Mores said. “You were wise to run. Even the most powerful Narrators fear the Silence.”

“The Silence,” Shiori said, trying out the word.

“I meant…” Mores started, then paused, “I meant that you saved me when Symphon was about to kill me. He was about to end my life and you intervened. Why?”

Shiori held The Last Word to her chest, thinking. “You weren’t in control.”

“I don’t think you knew that at the time. I was your enemy, trying to capture you,” he said quietly.

Shiori looked back at the cave entrance, where the Silence had been. She also thought about Duke Praetor. “It’s clear who the real enemies are now.”