In the penumbra of the unknown,

I abandon,

To reach what I never could,

I escape what should.

Miracle of the Door.

  Nay started her psalm, slowly, just like the archbishop had taught her. He had nothing left to rectify in her singing since their second lesson, and merely stayed to encourage her. He often repeated that only time would let her transform notes in a miracle. Touched apprentices, always locked inside the Cathedral despite Trinne’s best efforts, would take many years to succeed in a controlled miracle, and even after succeeding, they would not be freed. That would only happen if they managed to stop their phantom miracle by themselves. The collar they wore was enchanted, some blocking the use of miracles and others punishing the wearer if someone tried to remove the choker. None of those enchantments had any effect on the Legio.

Nay started her song for the second time, under the patient gaze of the ex-Imperatrix and the almost mad one of Defin. He had admitted that, to him, being able to see the greatest of God-Touched come closer to accepting the immense love of the Gods was an honour that could be matched by nothing. Which Nay had promptly concluded as being more proof that the archbishop was a weird kind of pervert. The psalm was beautiful, but Nay was starting to hate it. She had sung it over and over for weeks, months now, hundreds of times.

What’s more, nothing was changing. Nay was able to sense magic, she was able to consciously feel it, which was why she knew that the psalm was exactly that, just a psalm. Her words were not carried by anything other than her voice, there was nothing happening like when Defin was chanting his own miracles, nor anything close to the sensations she felt coming from the Ja murals, nor even this imperceptible link between herself and the words, like there was between herself and the runes.

Nay stopped mid-singing, troubled. Now that she was actively concentrating on those links, she could actually feel the minuscule ones connecting her with all the enchantments in the room. They were a lot more subtle than the one she had felt when touching the runes on the piece of fabric, but now that she was conscious of them, it felt like a foreign thing hanging on to her. Her Rreico was hidden inside, closed off, so it should not have been possible to ‘touch’ it, but she knew better than to think in physical terms. There was nothing concrete about the Rreico. Talking about distance made no real sense, it wasn’t ‘big’, it was just…more there? The words she sometimes used to explain her sixth sense were just borrowed things to make it clearer, but in truth, the Rreico wasn’t following any rules of existence, there was no logic or science behind it.

“Nay?” Defin asked her.

“Just a second please.” The Legio grimaced. Could she even disconnect from all those runes around her? When she tried to do that, it naturally happened. It had been that easy, although she had no idea what she had just done.

She looked around for a moment. Hyn was observing her, her Rreico clearly showing interest and curiosity, nothing more. Defin still had his friendly and uncanny smile, and his Rreico was expressing the exact same thing, but worse. To them, what Nay had just done didn’t seem to register. Which wasn’t surprising, even with the Legio’s very strong perception of Rreico, the distant links between herself and the runes had been too weak for her to notice without being shown they were there.

The ex-Imperatrix and the archbishop were probably not even perceiving them.

The Legio was a bit less nervous now though. Getting rid of anything linking her with the infernal box in the corner of the room was bringing her great comfort.

She restarted her song from the beginning.

“In the penumbra of the unknown.” She began.

At least, she didn’t have the connexion between her and the box anymore. But now that she thought about it, shouldn’t there have been something similar between her and the psalm? She needed to push her power in the words, no?

“Ah.” The former Imperatrix said.

“I abandon.” Nay continued. But how to manually create such a link? Between power and words? At least the runes were something concrete, real. How would you even begin in linking something conceptual with invisible power?

“To reach what I never could.” It wasn’t like she could just simply focus and…something weird was happening right now, but she couldn’t say what. Nothing made sense. She could not create a link…wait, what was the problem between linking the conceptual with something that didn’t exist? Why was that an issue, actually?

In front of the pitch black door, at the bottom of the only step in the chapel, ground became frost. The stones became like ice.

No, not ice. Glass. Something was pushing out of them, emerging from oblivion.

A door.

“I escape what should.”

A terrifying wind began howling, Hyn was speechless, but even in the sudden maelstrom, the archbishop was laughing maniacally: “Magnificent! Magnificent!”

But a door leading to where? Nay hadn’t thought about that, and she was suddenly terrified. What was happening? Her hands were freezing, her eyesight clouding.

But the power was still escaping her lips, her fingers, her whole body. It was invisible to everyone except the three people present in the room. And in front of the Conqueror’s door, abyssal and sombre, something else rose. Thousands of pieces of glass and crystal popped out of nowhere, and melded together, climbed over each other. Little by little, a rectangular structure was being built, reaching two meters high and one meter wide. The thousand pieces were one moment perfectly transparent, another reflecting all the colours of a rainbow, and they were all fusing together. The chapel burst in colours, wall red, then green, then blue, and so on and so on…until all the pieces formed one, single geometrical shape. Then the light vanished.

The already dark Chapel felt even darker, almost as if night had fallen. But there, in front of her, Nay saw a crystal door. Purer and more transparent than the most beautiful piece of glass in the world, more extraordinary still than the bay windows in the Imperial balcony. There was a single glass door handle, impossible, that would never have worked as you could perfectly see it was lacking any internal mechanisms. It was barely visible even, as the light passed through it as if ignoring it completely.

Nay stumbled, sudden fatigue gripping her chest. She held on to the bench to her right, her eyesight muddy. She still tried to focus on the door, her door. She recognized the signature of her sinister power, but she was also seeing something else, something akin to stars in the sky. The light of the stars in a sea of the damned.

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Slowly, her eyesight came back, and that’s where she saw the door, really. Where the door led. Because while the door was completely transparent, it wasn’t the dark hole of the Conqueror’s door she was seeing behind it.

What she was seeing was a little stone house, with a dark roof, with to the left of it big walls. The big walls of the school of the Legios.

It was dirtier than in her memory, ivy plants had taken hold of places that shouldn’t have, not without surviving Ra’fa’s fury first. This though, was, without a doubt, her home. Her house, her childhood.

She held out her arm, almost touching this place she had run away from.

Then the door shattered into a million pieces. The Legio fell back, but nothing touched her, the pieces weren’t really there in the first place. They scattered all over the room with the sound of a broken crystal carafe, every fragment seemingly becoming liquid, and disappearing inside the smooth stone of the mountain Zenith.

“Darae! Congratulations! Congratulations! You succeeded!” Defin grabbed her hand, shook it repeatedly, his face overjoyed.

“I…” Nay wasn’t able to respond. Her feelings were too powerful, too crushing to say anything. She hadn’t realized how much she missed Gite. How much her house, her entire family, happy and complete, the school of the Legios, the Jasminn, her friends…how everything was so cruelly missing from her life.

“You succeeded.” Hyn too, seemed overtaken by feelings. But there was too much happening in her Rreico for Nay to understand what those meant. “You succeeded.” The ex-sovereign repeated.

“You saw Gite?” Trinne asked. Despite her surprise, she didn’t pull on Nay’s hair. She had become quite proficient in beating the uncompromising hair of the Legio. Who was currently enjoying a bath, trying to calm her heart after the events that had happened an hour before. There was no evening official meeting tonight for the two young women, as Hyn had asked for Nay to be dispensed so she could rest.

The use of magic had completely drained the young woman. According to the ex-Imperatrix and the archbishop’s observations, she had used more than half of what she had in one go. Which was an absurd amount, according to them, but despite that, they believed it would only take a few days for Nay to be back to full and able to retry the miracle once more.

“Mh, mh. Well, I just saw the school and my home.”

“And it wasn’t some sort of illusion? I’m asking because we have to be sure…”

“The door only held on for a couple of seconds, but it wasn’t just some random picture. It had changed, you could clearly see it had been abandoned for more than a year. I would never have imagined it like that, I’m not an artist.”

“You do sing very well, and your cooking can satisfy even my tastes. You could very well have imagined it.”

Nay angled her head backward to look at her friend. “That nice of you to say, but no, this was Gite.”

Trinne inhaled, one big breath. “Ok. Ok. I guess that changes things. If you manage to do it again, the Imperatrix, I mean Hyn, could let us go. We’ll have missions to realize as Jewels but…”

“You could get more informants, reach outside of Leïn.”

“Yes and yes. You will probably be allowed to see Ra’fa more than once a week too.”

Nay grimaced. “I doubt I’ll be able to see mum even once a week. It’s been a month and we didn’t manage to see each other for more than ten minutes, that’s how busy I am. All those meetings…”

“It won’t always be like that…” Trinne’s voice then became darker: “Well, now, you’ll have to be extra careful. Your power…well…it is way too powerful. Hyn is going to want to use you, even more than she already is. Jarl too, even though I believe him to be incorruptible, could be tempted. With the incoming war, I can already see the excuse of it being an important exception but…”

Nay closed her eyes, and responded with a peaceful voice. “Calm. Calm. I’m not getting anything you’re saying to me.” When she reopened her eyes, Trinne had begun massaging her hair with shampoo.

“Mhhh.”

“I apologize Nay. It’s simply…I’m imagining what I would do with your ability to go wherever I want instantly and…well if it wasn’t you, I would probably use you as well.”

“You’re constantly ordering me around.”

“Maybe, but that’s for your sake.”

“Really now?”

“Fine, I may do it for my sake as well, but I would never ask you to do something you don’t want to.” The red-haired woman rectified.

“That is true.” Nay admitted.

Trinne’s Rreico was worried. “Look how tired you are. Are they going to ask you to play teleporting Yae? Are you carrying everyone everywhere? How heavy will that be on your body?”

“Ah, I see, yes. But don’t worry about that, my door only lasts for a few moments, and, according to Hyn, I’m the only one able to use it.”

“Really? That is not what I read…”

“You have to trust Hyn on that, Trinne, she’s the one who knows everything there is to know about the miracle. She told me my door is too unstable, it is nothing like the infinite doors that the Conqueror’s could create. With more training though...”

“She could have lied to you. Even with the Rreico, you know she can.”

“True. But honestly, she was quite shaken. Seeing the miracle again…it made her nostalgic I think. I’ve never felt so many emotions…well, that's not exactly true but in anycase...if she had lied to me in that state, she wouldn’t have been able to hide it in her Rreico.”

Trinne nodded silently.

Then, after relaxing for a few minutes, she spoke again. “On the subject of the Imperatrix, well, ex-Imperatrix, I’ll never get used to that.”

“Tell me about it. She’s still so…Imperatrix-like.”

“…have you never asked yourself why she’s keeping you alive?”

Nay’s eyebrow rose. “Because she doesn’t want me to explode and kill everyone?”

“She told you she had an idea to stop that, right? That she knew of a place where that wouldn’t happen? Why not bring you there and kill you then? You are still a terrifying risk for the Empire, to train you and let you free…she even lets you climb the walls of the Zenith mountain.”

“She’s a Leïn, she knows perfectly well that if I was going to die climbing, I would have died when I was two years old in the unbroken Ones.” Nay countered.

“Fine, let’s skip that story where you supposedly learned to climb before you learned to walk. I don’t even want to remember the day where I was dumb enough to decide to come with you up there.”

“It was fun!”

“I almost died seven times!”

“I was there…” Nay said as she rolled her eyes to the sky, or in this case the ground.

“And I would have died seven times if you hadn’t been. In any case, you’ll admit that you are a liability, and that killing you cleanly makes more sense than keeping you alive.”

Nay grew silent for a short instant. Her expression was tense. “Yeah.”

“That’s it. That’s why I think Hyn has plans for you. She wants to use you, and it's important enough that it warrants that crazy risk.”

“Doesn’t that mean that she won’t hurt me?”

“Yes and no. You’ve seen her, I don’t think the Imperatrix is a bad person. Far from it, I believe. But she is a very pragmatic individual.”

Nay nodded. “Probably why you two don’t like each other.”

“Because we’re alike?”

“I’ve heard people talk about that, but no, I don’t agree. I think it is because you are both pragmatic, but not in the same way. I can’t explain it better than that.”

“I understand, don’t worry. Thank you for that. In any case, we can safely assume Hyn won’t try to kill you. To be honest, I’m much more at risk.”

This time, Nay turned around completely, splashing water all around. It brought a dirty smile to the duchess’ lips: “Are you boasting?”

“Stop it Trinne.” Nay’s answer was stone cold. “What did you mean by that.”

“Well, your breasts are bigger than…”

“Trinne.”

“Nay.”

The two women stared each other down, then finally, the duchess sighed. “Sorry. We both know that killing me in front of you would be an excellent way of making you lose control over your phantom miracle. Using that knowledge, in some specific circumstances, could be advantageous. Especially during a war.”

“I would be some sort of…timed bomb? With your assassination as trigger!?”

“It’s a thought I had. Well, a plan I could imagine and put in action. If only I believed that the end justifies all the means. Which I don’t. The Imperatrix though…”

“But…what should we do then, We can’t…”

“Don’t worry too much. It’s a hypothesis. It is growing in my brain for some time, and with what happened today with your powers…You’re getting more and more precious. Honestly, I’m glad no one realizes how good you’ve gotten with the dagger and sword, or I really don’t see how I’ll be able to keep you to myself in the future. You’re my sword, I don’t like to share.”

“Fine, Fine…” Nay returned inside her bath. “So, you think that Hyn is double-crossing us.”

“Triple crossing, quadruple crossing. It isn’t easy to be one step ahead of her. But I did promise you I would become the best strategist in the world, and seeing how fast you’re becoming the best swordswoman, I have some catching up to do.”

Nay laughed softly. “I’m not the best at anything. I have plenty of weaknesses, I’m slow, and my left hand is still not back to full. Anyway, you’re too nice to me, Hani, I won’t let myself get mellowed. If you are correct about Hyn, I’ll have to be twice as careful. I think losing a friend that way is well enough once in a lifetime.”

“I didn’t tell you that to stress you out, Nay. More to reassure you, really.”

“Reassure me.” Nay’s voice was flat, with a slight smudge of sarcasm piercing through.

“Well, if someone is trying to assassinate me, know that I’m aware already, and that I have fail-safes in place. So, be reassured.”

“Uh uh, sure.” Nay responded, not convinced at all.

But, their conversation ended there, and, little by little, the Legio felt serene again.