At the end of the crooked tunnel, Galanthus stood in wait, the faint glow beyond enwrapped her, so that there was no mistaken for a vision. And unlike last time she looked straight at us. Her unflinching gaze stared down the leveled staff of Valerian, clearly aimed with intent.
“What is your trick?” asked the blonde knight through gritted teeth.
I daresay she would have attacked, but right then Litzia’s hold on my hand loosened, and she moved to check Valerian’s.
“She is an enemy now,” Valerian said calmly.
“And yet I mislike threatening someone unarmed,” Litzia answered, “Where is Acis?”
Nowhere could we find Galanthus’ pledge-sister, attached as she has always been to the white wyvern, and it was as strange a sight as the few times I had seen each of the pair by themselves before. I noticed also a loneliness in the girl’s forlorn stature, so that she seemed to care not for our hostility.
But there was someone beside Galanthus, though at first I thought it something inanimated, crumbled into a corner and leaning on the uneven, protruding rocks of the tunnel.
Wisteria halted first, and recognized the face before any of us. But Valerian saw it too, and froze. The little wyverness fell into slow steps, disregarding the tension between us, towards who she thought her destined pair.
“Hyacinth?” she stammered. “Is that Hyacinth?”
Finding a foreboding silence upon her, the girl turned seeking an ally, an answer. Her pleading, askance gaze fell on me.
I did not have what she sought. Instead I averted to Galanthus, who took the girl’s question with no pleasure and returned no kindness. “Tell her to mock me not. I am in no mood for it,” she said. And yet, more than only out of hate, her voice quivered. It was rare enough for the stoic wyverness to be so affected, and I could still recall vividly the last time this had transpired. This time, all the more desperate, she looked on the verge of tears; her flushed cheeks marked a departure from the pristine white so wonted in her. And it shook her all the more so as she shifted from the one she hated to the one she loved, who now lay unmoving.
There was little of the Acis I knew, and a great deal of what I had seen in the paintings beneath the Loredan estate. Her hair a chestnut shade, her face altered, and I daresay she was a little taller. But all that soon changed. Presently, Galanthus collected her skirt’s hem, which the dirty floor had previously stained and worn, and knelt down beside the unconscious person as she had done who knows how many times before we came. With slow but sure movements, the wyverness cradled her pair’s head and slid an arm to the stiff figure’ back, as though holding onto a slippery mast to brace for a coming storm. Starting from where the contrasting locks touched, the whiteness spread even as fresh milk dissolved. The knight deformed, her hair shortened, her features shifted, until she looked a near splitting image of her pair, but no horns or tail. And that was the Acis I knew.
This person was the one her current pair knew and loved, if only part of it. And too, if only love was enough to cure all afflictions. Not in this. Not today, when misfortunes seemed only to pile up one after another. As soon as the change took place, her eyelashes twitched as if fluttering into consciousness, then abruptly they shut again in a tight grimace. Her lips parted, from which there loosed a blood-curdling scream. It was pain as pain could be put into sound. Pain that seemed to reach deeper than ever I had known, burning more than the bone marrow or the most tender flesh, one that tears into the soul, one that rends the mind within the flesh. ‘Twas an utter rejection. Her hair shook off the whiteness as though battered smoke in the wild wind, her body shuddered away the alteration. A revulsion seized the knight’s weakened frame, lurching it against the rough rocks on which she lay. Against the effort, Galanthus held on, desperately anchoring her writhing pledge-sister in place, and was hurt for it as the wildly flinging limbs struck her. In vain, she did, for however long she held on, her resemblance could not creep back further than a handspan from where their skin touched, always they were beat back; all the while the girl’s throat throbbed in delivering the ceaseless screams.
I couldn’t do aught that day in that abandoned cistern, nor could I now. How, when not even Litzia or Valerian, both of greater experience than I could not? I did not think aught alive could comprehend it in full, for it was stranger than the sorts of sorcery we were used to. This was deeper, reaching into realms forbidden from mortal touch.
But Wisteria, ah, that little girl of no power or knowledge save for a pride innate and untested love, she rushed there then, inserting fragile arms into Galanthus’ embrace, and with only that small frame strived to wrenched the grown alaris away.
“Let-her-go!” she gasped, “don’t you see she’s in pain! Get off Hyacinth!”
“That - she is not!” Galanthus snarled, in her eyes despair and verging madness. “Acis is her name! She’s bound to me. Else she is naught but scattered things fastened by vapor.” Then with a strength I did not expect in her, the white wyverness sent an elbow at Wisteria’s chest, neutralizing the young wyvern’s desperate effort and sending her stumbling backward to the floor.
“Galanthus!” Valerian cried, “She is but a child!”
“Think you so? How sure? I know not what she is, but a simple child she is not!”
From the ground, struck and undignified, the little girl stared back with hatred under the tangled locks. I knelt down beside her, and saw up close the verging tears as she pressed her lips.
“Let her go first,” Litzia said, concerned by the ferocity of her eruption, “She’s right, whatever you may think of her. Your pledge-sister is in pain.”
Galanthus bit her lips, then reason, or perhaps aching pity, got to her, and she withdrew her tight embrace. At once the changes dissipated from Acis, leaving her still and lifeless, even as she had been before we came.
“What happened?” Valerian asked.
For a moment I thought Galanthus resented to answer, but at long last, she rose, standing even as she had been before, save her stare out the tunnel. “I do not know,” slowly, she said, “There had been warnings when I first spied the fallen walls. It was too late. Then the pledge came undone. Then we fell. I brought her here.”
“But what was it that rendered her so?” I asked.
“I could guess,” Galanthus said. She turned, until her darkened eyes jabbed at the little wyverness.
“She does not know,” Litzia said, “nor could she recall aught that had transpired since her young age, or so she claimed. Even to say that she lies, she was with us the whole time.”
Having heard our brief summary of the situation, Galanthus did not seem aught convinced, but shook her head. “You claim to know these halls? That is queer. This place is Aurora’s own; no living creature had ever thus penetrated into her sanctuary without her knowledge. ‘Tis strange magic - not one to trust.”
“What course have we then?” Litzia said, “Something out there is hunting us, something beyond our knowledge and the ritual’s common course. And now as we stand, the majority of us are pledge-less.”
“Still no reason for blind trust.” Galanthus’ voice was even as ever, but all the darker was her tone, and her ill mood seeped through her glare. “Your logic is of no use in this place, sister-alae. These halls are ancient; not even Rosa Alba knows all the secrets here born and died for eons past, many of which but for one thread unraveled could guide you to the light you seek, but not for an army of alares should you survive down the wrong path.”
Valerian narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean to say? I fear I could trust you much less than I do her.”
“Your choice,” Galanthus replied, “only apt to choose one’s pledge over one’s ala.”
“Apt it is then to betray your ala for one’s selfish grudge?”
The smaller girl answered Valerian’s hostility squarely, “Selfish? Say what you will, Valerian. I have done no wrong. It is you who is far too eager to make amends for your perished sisters.”
Valerian hissed. For all that her composure ever belied the anguish beneath, it was seeping out now. “I have not it in me to suffer you at the moment, Galanthus. You cannot be trusted with Acis like so.”
“Ask her then,” Galanthus shifted her piercing gaze to Wisteria, “this is her dream, so she claimed. She must know the answer.”
Then befell a silence. I daresay we all see the point in Galanthus’ words. Though we all misliked confronting a child.
The white wyverness was no deceiver, that much I could say with surety, capable as she might be of terrible things if done for her pledge-sister’s sake, even as she had many times threatened.
But what could be the slithering sound that had terrified us before, we were none the wiser. Galanthus had not heard it, even as she was not the cause of it, and yet, it seemed more than a coincidence the noise had ceased the moment her eyes had laid upon us.
And too, the greater part of me wanted to trust her explicitly. Perhaps it was a weakness, owing to my lack of experience and short life, but for the many months of constant happenings, we had shared our duty day and night. So for someone who had lived a life of blandness until now, I felt a deep connection - weaker though it was than what Valerian and the others might hold for her, yet still one stronger than any I ever harbored for my fellow-creatures in the slave cabin.
I do not claim the dubious wyverness shared my sentiments, but to be sure, she had as little of it as could for Wisteria. First she beheld the changed wyvern of house Loredan with shadowed eyes, and I knew there was no more love in her for the girl than when we entered into the mountain.
It was unreasonable, I think. Though I could understand how she felt. It is a pain to see a loved one suffer, and she did not want for reason to suspect Wisteria chiefly of all. Still, was it right now of all times, when a danger loomed over us and unseen perils awaited at every corner? Perhaps it was right, for them at the least, if they saw in the other the greatest danger.
Litzia sighed. “There are merits to what you say. We know too little of this girl. She claims extraordinary truths.”
“What then?” Valerian turned rueful. “Do we force a child to confess what she may or may not know?”
As the conversation turned, their eyes shifted to Wisteria. The little wyverness’ attitude had changed, there was more the careless attitude toward us whom she thought unreal, the apathy she had for our affairs.
“Say this, say that,” her voice trembled, shaking not only with shock but also frustration. “You people speak of me as though I’m a formless spirit. I do exist, you see. I do know what I am. I know and recall all that I must. Yet you utter in your delirious tongue of dream-creatures as you haunt my slumber, fantasying another version of I. You whisper of dark truths beyond my knowledge. You jeer and you mock. Say it out loud then, and tell me of those secrets you delight in keeping. I do not care for wild raving and rambling, but there lies Hyacinth, who I love, and shall not suffer her harm, in dreams or otherwise.”
And all the while, she demanded of naught in particular, but referred to us all as haunting ghosts in league. And yet, she turned to me first, not Valerian who was her pair, nor Galanthus who she thought hurt her Hyacinth.
“You,” said she in a child’s insolent tone, “an azure orphan who claims a place in the Order of Anemones. Yet stranger things had occurred under the skies, but chief of all what I could sense: that you speak the truth. A voice nags in my head that in you only I may find that which I need.”
I staggered. Why me? Of a surety, between us all, I knew least of the truth, if a tiny bit more than Litzia.
“I do not know,” I said, retracing all that I had learned of the mysteries surrounding Acis. The paintings under the Loredan’s mansion, the story of the Veniers’ execution, Wisteria’s accusation of Galanthus’s torment, Acis’ unstable appearance. “Only what you once told me yourself, Loredan. That girl is not Hyacinth. The Hyacinth as you know exists no more.”
“What could you mean by that?” she asked. She had taken it with a jarring calmness, if the defiance in her eyes did somewhat wavered. She glanced once at the unconscious Acis. “Then who is she? What say you of Hyacinth.”
“A convenient truth to forget,” remarked Galanthus, “a convenient form to assume. You are a coward, Loredan.”
“Yet I am no fool,” the little girl retorted, “I know a coward when I see one. And if I be a coward then you are no less so. You fear your own secrets, do you not?”
“Think you so?” Galanthus drew to her full height. And I saw then, clearer than ever, an emotion most intense in her placid features - a desire to inflict pain, to cause suffering, and she delighted at every word as much as each harmed her in turn. “I shall remind you of it for how many times I must. You are least of all to be allowed the relief of memory, for her and your own sake.”
Elsewhere came a sigh. “Must it come to this?” Valerian said.
“Coddle her not even in this, alae-sister.” Galanthus glared, then shifted her intense gaze to the young Wisteria, once sister of her current pair. “Since you ask, I shall tell you the making of Acis, who was once called Hyacinth.”
At the end of the crooked tunnel, Galanthus stood in wait, the faint glow beyond enwrapped her, so that there was no mistaken for a vision. And unlike last time she looked straight at us. Her unflinching gaze stared down the leveled staff of Valerian, clearly aimed with intent.
“What is your trick?” asked the blonde knight through gritted teeth.
I daresay she would have attacked, but right then Litzia’s hold on my hand loosened, and she moved to check Valerian’s.
“She is an enemy now,” Valerian said calmly.
“And yet I mislike threatening someone unarmed,” Litzia answered, “Where is Acis?”
Nowhere could we find Galanthus’ pledge-sister, attached as she has always been to the white wyvern, and it was as strange a sight as the few times I had seen each of the pair by themselves before. I noticed also a loneliness in the girl’s forlorn stature, so that she seemed to care not for our hostility.
But there was someone beside Galanthus, though at first I thought it something inanimated, crumbled into a corner and leaning on the uneven, protruding rocks of the tunnel.
Wisteria halted first, and recognized the face before any of us. But Valerian saw it too, and froze. The little wyverness fell into slow steps, disregarding the tension between us, towards who she thought her destined pair.
“Hyacinth?” she stammered. “Is that Hyacinth?”
Finding a foreboding silence upon her, the girl turned seeking an ally, an answer. Her pleading, askance gaze fell on me.
I did not have what she sought. Instead I averted to Galanthus, who took the girl’s question with no pleasure and returned no kindness. “Tell her to mock me not. I am in no mood for it,” she said. And yet, more than only out of hate, her voice quivered. It was rare enough for the stoic wyverness to be so affected, and I could still recall vividly the last time this had transpired. This time, all the more desperate, she looked on the verge of tears; her flushed cheeks marked a departure from the pristine white so wonted in her. And it shook her all the more so as she shifted from the one she hated to the one she loved, who now lay unmoving.
There was little of the Acis I knew, and a great deal of what I had seen in the paintings beneath the Loredan estate. Her hair a chestnut shade, her face altered, and I daresay she was a little taller. But all that soon changed. Presently, Galanthus collected her skirt’s hem, which the dirty floor had previously stained and worn, and knelt down beside the unconscious person as she had done who knows how many times before we came. With slow but sure movements, the wyverness cradled her pair’s head and slid an arm to the stiff figure’ back, as though holding onto a slippery mast to brace for a coming storm. Starting from where the contrasting locks touched, the whiteness spread even as fresh milk dissolved. The knight deformed, her hair shortened, her features shifted, until she looked a near splitting image of her pair, but no horns or tail. And that was the Acis I knew.
This person was the one her current pair knew and loved, if only part of it. And too, if only love was enough to cure all afflictions. Not in this. Not today, when misfortunes seemed only to pile up one after another. As soon as the change took place, her eyelashes twitched as if fluttering into consciousness, then abruptly they shut again in a tight grimace. Her lips parted, from which there loosed a blood-curdling scream. It was pain as pain could be put into sound. Pain that seemed to reach deeper than ever I had known, burning more than the bone marrow or the most tender flesh, one that tears into the soul, one that rends the mind within the flesh. ‘Twas an utter rejection. Her hair shook off the whiteness as though battered smoke in the wild wind, her body shuddered away the alteration. A revulsion seized the knight’s weakened frame, lurching it against the rough rocks on which she lay. Against the effort, Galanthus held on, desperately anchoring her writhing pledge-sister in place, and was hurt for it as the wildly flinging limbs struck her. In vain, she did, for however long she held on, her resemblance could not creep back further than a handspan from where their skin touched, always they were beat back; all the while the girl’s throat throbbed in delivering the ceaseless screams.
I couldn’t do aught that day in that abandoned cistern, nor could I now. How, when not even Litzia or Valerian, both of greater experience than I could not? I did not think aught alive could comprehend it in full, for it was stranger than the sorts of sorcery we were used to. This was deeper, reaching into realms forbidden from mortal touch.
But Wisteria, ah, that little girl of no power or knowledge save for a pride innate and untested love, she rushed there then, inserting fragile arms into Galanthus’ embrace, and with only that small frame strived to wrenched the grown alaris away.
“Let-her-go!” she gasped, “don’t you see she’s in pain! Get off Hyacinth!”
“That - she is not!” Galanthus snarled, in her eyes despair and verging madness. “Acis is her name! She’s bound to me. Else she is naught but scattered things fastened by vapor.” Then with a strength I did not expect in her, the white wyverness sent an elbow at Wisteria’s chest, neutralizing the young wyvern’s desperate effort and sending her stumbling backward to the floor.
“Galanthus!” Valerian cried, “She is but a child!”
“Think you so? How sure? I know not what she is, but a simple child she is not!”
From the ground, struck and undignified, the little girl stared back with hatred under the tangled locks. I knelt down beside her, and saw up close the verging tears as she pressed her lips.
“Let her go first,” Litzia said, concerned by the ferocity of her eruption, “She’s right, whatever you may think of her. Your pledge-sister is in pain.”
Galanthus bit her lips, then reason, or perhaps aching pity, got to her, and she withdrew her tight embrace. At once the changes dissipated from Acis, leaving her still and lifeless, even as she had been before we came.
“What happened?” Valerian asked.
For a moment I thought Galanthus resented to answer, but at long last, she rose, standing even as she had been before, save her stare out the tunnel. “I do not know,” slowly, she said, “There had been warnings when I first spied the fallen walls. It was too late. Then the pledge came undone. Then we fell. I brought her here.”
“But what was it that rendered her so?” I asked.
“I could guess,” Galanthus said. She turned, until her darkened eyes jabbed at the little wyverness.
“She does not know,” Litzia said, “nor could she recall aught that had transpired since her young age, or so she claimed. Even to say that she lies, she was with us the whole time.”
Having heard our brief summary of the situation, Galanthus did not seem aught convinced, but shook her head. “You claim to know these halls? That is queer. This place is Aurora’s own; no living creature had ever thus penetrated into her sanctuary without her knowledge. ‘Tis strange magic - not one to trust.”
“What course have we then?” Litzia said, “Something out there is hunting us, something beyond our knowledge and the ritual’s common course. And now as we stand, the majority of us are pledge-less.”
“Still no reason for blind trust.” Galanthus’ voice was even as ever, but all the darker was her tone, and her ill mood seeped through her glare. “Your logic is of no use in this place, sister-alae. These halls are ancient; not even Rosa Alba knows all the secrets here born and died for eons past, many of which but for one thread unraveled could guide you to the light you seek, but not for an army of alares should you survive down the wrong path.”
Valerian narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean to say? I fear I could trust you much less than I do her.”
“Your choice,” Galanthus replied, “only apt to choose one’s pledge over one’s ala.”
“Apt it is then to betray your ala for one’s selfish grudge?”
The smaller girl answered Valerian’s hostility squarely, “Selfish? Say what you will, Valerian. I have done no wrong. It is you who is far too eager to make amends for your perished sisters.”
Valerian hissed. For all that her composure ever belied the anguish beneath, it was seeping out now. “I have not it in me to suffer you at the moment, Galanthus. You cannot be trusted with Acis like so.”
“Ask her then,” Galanthus shifted her piercing gaze to Wisteria, “this is her dream, so she claimed. She must know the answer.”
Then befell a silence. I daresay we all see the point in Galanthus’ words. Though we all misliked confronting a child.
The white wyverness was no deceiver, that much I could say with surety, capable as she might be of terrible things if done for her pledge-sister’s sake, even as she had many times threatened.
But what could be the slithering sound that had terrified us before, we were none the wiser. Galanthus had not heard it, even as she was not the cause of it, and yet, it seemed more than a coincidence the noise had ceased the moment her eyes had laid upon us.
And too, the greater part of me wanted to trust her explicitly. Perhaps it was a weakness, owing to my lack of experience and short life, but for the many months of constant happenings, we had shared our duty day and night. So for someone who had lived a life of blandness until now, I felt a deep connection - weaker though it was than what Valerian and the others might hold for her, yet still one stronger than any I ever harbored for my fellow-creatures in the slave cabin.
I do not claim the dubious wyverness shared my sentiments, but to be sure, she had as little of it as could for Wisteria. First she beheld the changed wyvern of house Loredan with shadowed eyes, and I knew there was no more love in her for the girl than when we entered into the mountain.
It was unreasonable, I think. Though I could understand how she felt. It is a pain to see a loved one suffer, and she did not want for reason to suspect Wisteria chiefly of all. Still, was it right now of all times, when a danger loomed over us and unseen perils awaited at every corner? Perhaps it was right, for them at the least, if they saw in the other the greatest danger.
Litzia sighed. “There are merits to what you say. We know too little of this girl. She claims extraordinary truths.”
“What then?” Valerian turned rueful. “Do we force a child to confess what she may or may not know?”
As the conversation turned, their eyes shifted to Wisteria. The little wyverness’ attitude had changed, there was more the careless attitude toward us whom she thought unreal, the apathy she had for our affairs.
“Say this, say that,” her voice trembled, shaking not only with shock but also frustration. “You people speak of me as though I’m a formless spirit. I do exist, you see. I do know what I am. I know and recall all that I must. Yet you utter in your delirious tongue of dream-creatures as you haunt my slumber, fantasying another version of I. You whisper of dark truths beyond my knowledge. You jeer and you mock. Say it out loud then, and tell me of those secrets you delight in keeping. I do not care for wild raving and rambling, but there lies Hyacinth, who I love, and shall not suffer her harm, in dreams or otherwise.”
And all the while, she demanded of naught in particular, but referred to us all as haunting ghosts in league. And yet, she turned to me first, not Valerian who was her pair, nor Galanthus who she thought hurt her Hyacinth.
“You,” said she in a child’s insolent tone, “an azure orphan who claims a place in the Order of Anemones. Yet stranger things had occurred under the skies, but chief of all what I could sense: that you speak the truth. A voice nags in my head that in you only I may find that which I need.”
I staggered. Why me? Of a surety, between us all, I knew least of the truth, if a tiny bit more than Litzia.
“I do not know,” I said, retracing all that I had learned of the mysteries surrounding Acis. The paintings under the Loredan’s mansion, the story of the Veniers’ execution, Wisteria’s accusation of Galanthus’s torment, Acis’ unstable appearance. “Only what you once told me yourself, Loredan. That girl is not Hyacinth. The Hyacinth as you know exists no more.”
“What could you mean by that?” she asked. She had taken it with a jarring calmness, if the defiance in her eyes did somewhat wavered. She glanced once at the unconscious Acis. “Then who is she? What say you of Hyacinth.”
“A convenient truth to forget,” remarked Galanthus, “a convenient form to assume. You are a coward, Loredan.”
“Yet I am no fool,” the little girl retorted, “I know a coward when I see one. And if I be a coward then you are no less so. You fear your own secrets, do you not?”
“Think you so?” Galanthus drew to her full height. And I saw then, clearer than ever, an emotion most intense in her placid features - a desire to inflict pain, to cause suffering, and she delighted at every word as much as each harmed her in turn. “I shall remind you of it for how many times I must. You are least of all to be allowed the relief of memory, for her and your own sake.”
Elsewhere came a sigh. “Must it come to this?” Valerian said.
“Coddle her not even in this, alae-sister.” Galanthus glared, then shifted her intense gaze to the young Wisteria, once sister of her current pair. “Since you ask, I shall tell you the making of Acis, who was once called Hyacinth.”
