Chapter III | The Littles

Year 690 a.S., Fall | The Sea Train between City Pyraleia & City Vergalis

“I don’t know what your father is thinking,” Tristan muttered to me. His eyes held the fog of the sea soaring past through the train window. His hands fiddled in his lap. “First, Duke March entrusts me to his ministry out of nowhere, and now your lord father has gone and sent you off to Vergalis without rhyme or reason.” He turned from the window to study me. The color of my eyes. “Annamarie Kavesta. The only heir to an ancient house with humble beginnings. A house unremarkable in all history up until just recently. A forgotten mystery. And you in particular possess such an odd little voice. Perhaps wise beyond your years.”

The minister almost seemed like a child in his train seat, legs just too short to reach the carpet below. If not for his rugged face of stubble and deep lines, one might be inclined to treat him as such too, with his cargo shorts and smooth legs. He turned back to watch the ocean, still in awe of the beast he had designed. Across the sea in only half a day. The current riders below were almost too stable, and Tristan felt he had to look out the window or else he’d stress the whole thing had broken.

“I never got to hear more about those dreams of yours,” he said suddenly. “When you said August, I thought you were referring to the month, but it’s come and gone and nothing’s happened. Your words have caused me to agonize over this for so long until I finally realized that it must’ve been a name. It’s a name, right? A person?”

I nodded, though tentatively. The little man seemed so enthralled by this idea, but I had already begun to forget having that conversation with him in the first place.

“The problem is,” he continued, “August is such a popular name in Pyraleia. There are 11 of them in Layer 1 alone. I’ve brought with me 50 pictures for all the most likely candidates. If I show you their face, will you be able to recognize the one from your dream?”

Before I could answer him, the door to our private booth slid open, and Lana entered, arms full up on bags and bags of snacks of all sorts. “This again?” she said. The snacks poured out from her arms like a fountain over Tristan’s many photos, and she took a seat beside me to pull me close and snuggle. “You shouldn’t treat her like an adult like that. Kids her age prefer to be coddled.”

“Doesn’t that depend on the kid?” he said, but Lana only shook her head and held me tighter. I remember distinctly that she smelled like the rain. Like the outdoors and hand soap. Like pine and warm milk, as well as all sorts of scents that mixed up and tangled to create the color of her, the teenage girl eight years my senior.

Eventually, Lana asked Tristan about how long they would be staying in Vergalis. It was her very first time traveling outside of Pyraleia, but it felt oddly comfortable to her. Or oddly normal.

“Just a week,” he said. “We do need to make it back in time to attend the Old King’s funeral, after all.”

“Makes sense,” she mumbled, staring out the train window as he did. The world was suddenly much larger than she ever bothered to think about before, and it made her feel inexplicably calm.

The sun shone pale white at the funeral of the Old King. The Great Houses of Pyraleia lined up across Roadway Major in Layer 1 in great stands, all in formal garb and with solemn expression. Claude Morsylis, now branded the Kid-King-to-be at 15, stood at the end by the hole in the ground for his ancestor’s casket. He stood with perfect posture, dressed in Morsylis black and a fist to his chest in salute.

“Whistles!” he shouted. In the dead silence, and with his great voice, the command traveled the entire way down, a mile in length. House Morsylis numbered many, with several in marriage pacts that spread them far across the gathering of houses. No matter how distant the relation, a Morsylis wore black, and they wore their whistles. Carved from human bone into the shape of a curling corpse, one blow sounded Hell itself. They screeched the screams of the damned, like the curdling of blood and of death. Every whistle from every Morsylis was blown into, and out came the screams. It’s said that this tradition was began to terrify the angels back to heaven, so that their loved ones could remain in the mortal realm to look after them.

When the casket was lowered and covered, the crowd dispersed, and the streets of Layer 1 sat empty once again. Only Claude and his uncle Morris remained.

“Do you know why I chose you to be King?” his uncle asked. Unfortunately, the Crown Prince was not listening, his sight instead lingering on the lucky who lingered also, just in the distance, a lower eyelid peeled down and a tongue out to mock him. “Claude!”

He scratched his head. “Because half of our records were in paper and the other half were digital, so our archivists gave up and deferred to your choice, as the Old King’s Carnation. Am I right?”

“I’m asking you why I chose you, not why I was the one who could choose.”

“I haven’t the faintest, old man.”

Morris sighed as he let himself sit, finally after an entire day of standing. “Under Finryd’s direction, I was the one who formed the program you know all too well. You five were the ones we chose to be the HEIRs, and though it didn’t turn out as I wished, I do believe that it demonstrated that you, Claude, were the most worthy to be king.”

In a sudden blaze of fury, Claude gripped his uncle by the collar and lifted him into the air. “It was you?!”

“Hate me if you will,” Morris choked out. “Remove me from office as you’ve done, but know I will never betray you. Purily is not yet ready to be without a king, and any but you is bound to be killed before anything meaningful can be done.”

Claude stared his uncle in the eyes and found a blazing conviction in them. His rage faded in the presence of it, so he let his uncle loose. “Do what you want.”

“One more thing, child.” Morris stumbled to his feet and cleared his throat. “The Church is the enemy. House Caecilius. Know it and know it well. Over the years, as our blood has mingled and diluted, our power has diluted with it. There are as many Morsylis children as there are fish in Lake Atria, and the name scarcely means a thing anymore. They may be our cousins, nephew, but they are only distantly related, and now have more power than we did back when our house claimed the Old Kingdom of Luridia more than 300 years ago. Choose the ones you trust carefully. You may find them in odd places and in odd people, but until we are rid of this danger, we cannot move forward.”

My lord father had sent me off to Vergalis for a reason no one in the Nine Cities could really understand. No one save for the aide he sent with me. I was never told her name, and she would never give me an answer when I asked, so I simply referred to her as ‘the Woman’ in my head. She was quite tall to me, and wore her black hair in a bun. Any other detail about her appearance has escaped my memory.

After Tristan dropped the two of us off at the station and bid us farewell, the Woman walked me down another layer into the Undersea District of Vergalis. I’d only ever seen Pyraleia’s version once in a dream, and there it was completely different. In this city, the boundaries were carved in glass like an aquarium, and lit up in lights all around, warm and blue. Then she took me down another layer, where the pretty dissipated but still persisted in portions at least. How long did we walk? At the time, I’m sure it almost felt like forever. Forever spent in a maze of streets and alleys until we finally reached that familiar street where I would spend most of my childhood.

The locals called it Waterdrop Road because it always either drizzled from leaky pipes or sat in a fog so thick you could scarcely see the cars on the road. Every building on the block, whether a storefront or apartment, had hanging a massive neon sign that wrote its name in bright glowing letters.

“It’s across the street,” the Woman said. Her eyelashes splashed away the drizzle in sparkles of white and pink light, and her skin shone the same color. “I’d forgotten.”

I followed her line of sight and found there a three-story building with sideways neon letters that stacked up to spell, “LUCKY LILIES.” That name and that sign must’ve been the result of some unfortunate marketing mishap, because no one could tell at a glance that it was actually home to an orphanage. But of course still, in smaller, non-glowing letters beside the main attraction was written: “Institute for Abandoned Children.”

“You forgot,” I said. I didn’t really mean anything by repeating after her, but the Woman took my hand for the first time since I’d met her then and gripped it tight. We walked across the street together, looking both ways for cars—I would never make the mistake of neglecting that again—only pausing when the front doors crashed open and a young girl tumbled out and dashed off at us.

“Grab her!”

The command traveled through my body and before I knew it, my hands had wrapped over hers as she tried to pass us. She was much bigger than me though, and it took just a little yank from her to pull me from my feet and knock me flat onto the pavement. The pain was blinding. The wind knocked out of my little body. The scratches on my arms. But it almost all seemed to disappear when someone lifted me up from the ground.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt. See?”

The little girl who had tried to run stopped just for me. A girl not much older than I was. A girl just a stranger to me at that point, but who I knew in the present as the autumn girl of my distant memories. A girl who bore a mask of porcelain white, and eyes and lips barely visible through the cutouts in that mask. The mask my mind made up to fill in the gaps of what it’d forgotten.

The adult who had first shouted for us to grab her caught up to us now. “How many times are you going to do this?” they said.

Autumn glanced around all the taller people who surrounded us now, then back to me. Her mask shimmered with hope. “Are you and your mom here to take me away from this place?”

“She’s not my mom,” I said. The shimmer of her porcelain disappeared, and her expression became one that was sad, but not for herself. Sad for me. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to tell her that I was the one who could take her home, but instead, I walked back into Lucky Lilies with her, and we waited together while the Woman signed all the paperwork necessary to leave me there.

That night, I fell asleep to dreams again of the capital, where a violent conflict brewed beneath the surface, from deep undersea into the sky where the crown prince prepared to sit on his marble throne. And somehow, without any significant violence, an empty three years passed in peace to finally greet the world with Purily’s second king ever.