“I had hoped to meet you in real life,” Ral said, standing. He inspected the closest tree and noted how the details in the bark blurred when he got close. He looked down and noticed he was wearing a gold silk tunic and fine trousers, one he barely remembered wearing as a child, except these clothes fitted his adult body. “Not in this dream world.”
“We already met in this dream world once before, I think,” Aris’s voice echoed as if speaking in a large cave. Ral didn’t notice that effect on his own voice. “You didn’t complain back then.”
“In the dream where you killed a baby?” Ral lowered himself beside Aris. The snow was cold to the initial touch, but then it didn’t feel like anything at all. It didn’t even melt when he buried his hand into the snow. “Because I saw that. Did you actually do that?”
“I did.”
Ral looked up at his sister, shocked, but then was even more startled to see her face. She had no eyes and not even that green rocky growth in her eye sockets, just two bleeding holes of where her eyes should be. She ‘looked’ at him with the corners of her mouth tugged down.
“Are you disgusted with me, brother?”
He wasn’t sure if she was asking about her past actions or her physical appearance, so he didn’t answer. Ral wasn’t certain if this dream version of Aris was being truthful. In fact he wasn’t certain if this was Aris in the first place. She turned her non-eyes away from him and towards the forest. Ral recognized it as the little patch of trees they played in as children, except he couldn’t see Caelis castle and the edges of it beyond ten paces from where they sat was blurred so much it was like fog. Movement fluttered there at the edges of what he could see. Aris watched it without eyes.
Camaz, Verne and Laell appeared; at least, Ral assumed it was those three. Camaz looked well kept, with laundered robes and a clean cut face with no beard in sight. Verne was recognizable from the Sekrelli armor he wore, except his face was slightly blurred out. Even with the blurring, Ral could see Verne was clean shaven in this imagined version of him. Laell was the least well formed of the three, her entire being blurry and fractured. She also had dark brown hair instead of blond and carried chalk instead of the charcoal he witnessed her using.
He realized these were figures built on how well Aris knows their physical features - meaning Aris has a detailed memory of Camaz, only superficially knows Verne’s appearance, and has no clue what Laell looks like. The projections of Camaz, Verne and Laell ran through the forest. They occasionally disappeared as they ran into a tree, just to reappear again from behind another tree. A cart rolled out, pulled by Verne.
“They did a lot to save you,” Ral said. He had no idea if what he was saying would be the right thing. “They care about you.”
Aris made no reply and just kept watching the projections run. At one point, the image of Verne stalled and looked at them - no, he seemed to be looking at Aris. Ral glanced over at his sister and saw that her hand clutched a white handkerchief. She squeezed it in her hand as Verne slowly approached, fingers outstretched to her. Ral wanted to look away. It felt like something private. But before Verne could get too close, Aris shook her head and the projection vanished.
“They all want something from me,” she said bitterly. “All of them. Did you know we were only born because the Parts willed it?”
“You mean the Gaian gods?”
“They are not gods,” Aris said. “They are meddlers of the Great Solvent. They are just dams in the rivers, just fucking know-it-alls who splash around with people’s lives and call it fate.” The horrible wounds on her face bled like tears as she scrunched her face in anger. “There are no gods.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Even so, what do you hope to accomplish staying here?” Ral asked. He looked around. The trees wavered in and out of focus, along with shadows of figures beyond what is visible to him. Like ghosts, they loomed, threatening to solidify into the shape of a person but then dissolved into nothingness again. It felt like memories of people trying to return and leave her consciousness at the same time.
“We were happy here, once,” Aris said. Her voice was hollow. “This forest we played in with Nilda and Rask. Nilda would always find us no matter how hard we tried to hide. We would fight over who’s fault it is that she keeps finding us.”
“This isn’t the forest we grew up in,” Ral pointed out gently.
“No, Caelis castle is no more,” Aris agreed.”Or at least, it’s just an empty husk of what it once was. Everything was taken from us, Ral. How am I supposed to move on from that?”
The pain in her voice kept him silent. Once they were nobility from a kingdom with the honor to be unnamed. Now they had to accept a lesser existence among people that struggle to accept them. At least, that’s how Ral felt; he thought living in the Academy would be kinder to Aris. He looked at her bleeding face with missing eyes and wondered if that was true anymore.
“I swore I would take it back,” Aris whispered. “That day in the caves. Whatever it was that took our parents from us, I still remember telling Nilda I’ll punish them, whoever it was.”
“Rask told me you or Nilda eliminated those people after us, all those years ago,” Ral said.
“But there’s more, isn’t there? Those people who made the orders, those people are still out there. And what of the emperor himself? Why has he not sought for Caelis’s return?”
“Are you blaming the emperor now?” Ral asked.
“You don’t understand, Ral. You haven’t lived right next to the Heart, you haven’t watched rich people flit in and out of the Academy and act like absolutely nothing happened after Caelis disappeared off the map. It’s like our kingdom, our home never existed.” Aris stood up, agitated. The handkerchief that was in her hands had disappeared. “It’s been a decade and you think they’re going to do anything? All this stagnation. All this apathy. They’re all fucking complicit and I’m tired of pretending they aren’t.”
The scene around them swirled in tune with her soured mood. The tree streaked from left to right, making a dizzying confusion of gray, brown and green. The snow rapidly melted and everything turned to dirt under him.
“Everything I’ve done was to ensure I could return to Caelis and do something. I wanted to learn about mama, I wanted to be able to fight. Time and time again I’ve been told it’s useless. Nothing works. Nothing I do matters. It’s because it goes all the way up to the so-called gods, the Parts. They’re the ones making us run in circles. Why is it that we must suffer for this, Ral?”
The ground broke with a loud ‘crack!’ Underneath the fragmented earth lay a layer of glowing green gemstone. It crusted out, swelling into a mountain as Ral tumbled down, unable to find his footing. Aris remained stock steady at the top, her horrible, ripped open face bleeding and bleeding as if she was weeping. Except all Ral could feel was pure, unbridled anger.
Ral grappled for words. He understood - he really did - but all her ranting tore at him. Was this all she thought about in the years at the Academy? Did this fester in her like a decaying animal? He himself had thought they had the responsibility to return to Caelis, to make it exist again. But after Alkkes, after the Somas… all he wanted was to find his family, and his family was Aris and Rask.
“We don’t need to suffer anymore!” he called out to her. The vision, the dream, had shifted so much that it seemed like she was at the top of a giant mountain not unlike the tallest peaks of Nossan mountain. “You don’t, sister. We can just live as Ral and Aris. We don’t need to take back a kingdom!”
She stared down at him, the perspective shifting so that she seemed huge, like a giant face hanging in the sky to scrutinize him. Her eye sockets had filled out with the green stone and now they were emerald orbs glowing at him like burning green embers. It was then he knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Why?”