Lost to Time

Two centuries of mistakes.

The darkness of murals lit by faint blue light fades to the soft streaks of stars, and I idly test the side of my neck for any dark threads. It’s never a good sign when Angrila comes back to haunt me. Nothing but the scars on the side of my face, though, rough and warm as always. Hm, scars...?

My mask. Someone removed it?

I ease myself up, feeling half as though I’ve been beaten and left for dead to fight off an infection. Sels— Ah, there. Curled at my side. Snoring faintly.

“How exactly did Ilempo take Nachisi?”

Sister’s voice banishes the smile from my face.

She kneels there in the light of the holy-blue moon, watching it hover above the treetops of wherever we are, and I watch her. “Where are we?”

“Between Treeline and Nachisi. We decided not to risk further injury going back there,” she says, oddly cooperative, and looks expectantly at me. In this light, her hair is dark, black pits for eyes in her slender, pale face.

I find it funny, how in the past I never faulted her for what happened. Deceived by hope and not power, hm? “We’ve been over this, haven’t we? You tell me.”

Her expression subtly hardens. “He drained the life of Takireyo and created a fissure, invading the city.”

“All under our blissfully-unaware noses.” I hold her eyes. “A clever deception.”

“And this time he was planning to do it through Treeline instead.” Her gaze drifts back to the sky. “It’s a fortunate thing Akir and Jeanu went there.”

“Hm.” It was, actually. I should have looked further into those rumours of a chill in the northeast, instead of letting myself get distracted by ghosts of immissures. Madam Kasanma is rarely ever wrong.

And speaking of immissures, I must be a fool. If it was going to go anywhere, then....

“So a mortal can become the general of evil itself,” sister murmurs.

Seems she’s figured out everything, hm? She thinks her expression shows nothing, a blank mask looking at the moon. I see the dark glint in her eyes—the thoughtfulness.

“How does that happen, brother dear?”

A cloud drifts across the moon, hiding its youthful brilliance. “One becomes consumed by that evil, dear sister.”

She looks at me, the darkness doing a better job of hiding the subtleties of her expression than she herself could. Even so, I catch the faintest impression of a frown.

When she says nothing, I ease my aching body back down, closing heavy eyes. “Now, if you’re done, let me sleep another two days.”

Ξ-Ξϟ†ϟΞ-Ξ

Light flutters between my eyelids far sooner than that.

It takes me a while to wake up enough to figure out how I know that, and register the jostling swaying me. That’s around when I find out why I’m awake.

“Wait whoa halt there! Aki!”

The movement abruptly stops in time to let me splutter wretchedly off the side of a—stretcher?—and into a faceful of grassy dirt. “Ngh.”

“Lonn!”

The sound of wood clattering onto the trail meets a squawk somewhere around my stomach, a wing smacking me in the face. I’m a bit busy trying not to either cough up a lung or lose any hard-earned ichor, but it’s probably Seelis.

Voices argue somewhere over my head, a hand helpfully rolling me properly onto my side, cold fingers brushing my forehead. By the time I’ve managed to battle my way out of danger, somehow, I can barely move at all.

“—e, Lonn? Can—”

I briefly spot goose feathers ruffling before my eyes flutter shut against my will. Awake, then....

I don’t particularly know where I am, though. By a bar raising a wooden mug to Akir and Jeanu sounds like a bit of a stretch. No, Jeanu was dead by then.... Arvintt...? Sels. No, Jeanu is alive, I remember he was, and Meil....

Meil lifts eyebrows down at me—a hard wooden floor, flat on my back, riotous laughter at my expense—and I remember a youthful flush from a bygone age. Mine, not hers. She only blushed once, that I remember.

Once, a long time ago, I thought....

It’s hard to breathe. I’m dying again. No, not quite. There’s black in my veins trying to escape, but it burns inside me, fuelling my flickering candle.

A flickering candle, and a thin wrinkled face, grey hair spilled on the pillow like riverweed, her chapped lips pulled in a smile that still reaches rheumy eyes. I hold her long after she’s died, as all people do, and the bitter sting of tears burn scars that loathe them.

Where am I? “Where... where am I?”

Hot blood spills across the floor, trickling past my hands, and I taste it between my teeth, lacquered nails dripping red as she kneels beside a small feather-furred body still breathing, still warm.

“How does that happen, brother dear?”

I can still see the smirk in those eyes.

Yet in an instant, they swim from black to grey.

“Dolt.” Painfully fond, that word, eyes too hard and lips pressed too thin to hold it. “You pushed yourself too hard, didn’t you?”

“Meil, please....” a voice that isn’t mine, from a time long, long ago, begs. A different man, a different life. “Please....”

Worn fingers trace her dimpled chin.

I jerk free with a wheezing gasp for air. Something rough, soft, scrapes under my nails, zipping harshly in my ear.

A... blanket. A pillow. A quiet room, filled only with the sound of my breathing and a faint, familiar scent. Meil. Her house?

No wonder....

I ease my way up, gazing down from a raised bed a faintly dizzying distance from the floor. Strange, how easily one gets used to a futon again. Using the distance to plant my feet, I place my heavy head in weak, trembling hands.

For once, I truly feel my age.

I’m only an old man filled with too many memories; too many lifetimes. When I was younger, I dreamed going back could change things for the better. If I went back far enough, I could prevent it all....

This world I’m in isn’t real. Why am I back here?

The sliding of a door announces I have company before her voice does. “You’re awake.”

She sounds wary. I don’t know what I said or did in the grips of fever. It’s nothing I can take back, in any case.

“Feeling maudlin, are we?” There’s a faint sourness in her voice, her quiet footsteps approaching briskly.

I take in a breath that feels as frail as my trembling fingers. “I’m not him.”

Her footsteps slow.

“You wanted to know why I changed my name. Why I’ve changed.” Bare scars burn too warm against my left hand. “I have no doubt you suspected it. I’m not the man you knew. I’ve watched you grow old and die, and your shrinestone crumble. I’ve seen the end of everything and in the end I’ve come back here. I’ve killed him. I’m sorry.”