“Are you, uh, sure you know what you’re doing?”
Nerinai paused in whatever she was doing to look up at him. “Yes, Ike. I’ve been here plenty of times before.”
“Sure, sure. It’s just- you know-” he stopped himself before he said anything too stupid and resigned to leaning against the wall. Someone had lined the walls of this bathroom with cerulean glass tiles. Cerulean. Ike was seriously starting to doubt that particular someone- whoever had designed the not-Black Palace- had any idea what they were doing. In fact, he was so certain he decided to name that particular someone the Red Idiot.
He had just enough time to do this while Nerinai rubbed her blackened hands on the wall until finally there was a click and part of the wall just popped open.
The two of them stood outside while the wall shifted. Nerinai kicked his shin, her expression stoic. “Told you,” she said.
Of course she did. She went in, and Ike followed after her. The next room was dark only for a minute while Nerinai lit candles across the room, and Ike pushed the door back into place.
With light, everything came into full view. Tables pushed up against the blocky stone walls. Hand painted wards on every surface, including six large ones in a circle on the ground. They surrounded a central pillar wrapped in thick, black, pulsing vines with a brass basin on top that smelled more metallic than it had any right to be. At the back of the room was a full wall covered in iron furnace gates that looked big enough to hold a full human body.
Ike took it all in with a single gasp of air before he looked back at Nerinai. She wasted no time after lighting the candle. On the wall hung a few different sized racks, populated by more tools than Ike had names for. One he did. The one Nerinai took down and fell out was a knife. Short, sharp, and steel.
She took it over to the basin and Ike joined her there, a slight worry bubbling up in his stomach.
“The key,” Nerinai explained, “is soiled. By time, blight, whatever it is. All of the keys in the building have been so far.”
“But it can’t be blight? Right? I mean, this place is clean.”
“Simply because the blight hasn’t affected the Palace and surrounding areas as it has everywhere else doesn’t mean it hasn’t had more specific effects within the building. Certain places already have. Then again there's another option.”
She paused then. Stared down into her palms with the knife, and Ike could just make out by biting the inside of her cheek.
“Which is…?”
“Which is that the first shamans did it.” Their eyes met, and Ike couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or worry he saw in her. “Adding more fuel to the current theory that they crafted the seals and did everything else in their power to turn this building into a fortress. So much good it did them. All of the efforts of the past serve only to prevent me now, in the future.”
She looked down at the knife again. With it clutched in her hand, she pulled back the other sleeve and held her arm over the basin. Ike blinked at her arm which just happened to be covered in a pattern of ritual scars not so different from the one she was about to open.
Nerinai had done this before, and often from the looks of it. Every key, she said. Plus anything else that carried the same corruption this key supposedly did. Out of the admittedly very few books Ike had read on magic and the variety of rituals made by shamans he’d seen only one spare mention to the use of blood. A warning, written like a joke on the back of the book, stating in no uncertain terms that anybody who spilt blood for magic was already dead.
Ike could only stand there, stunned, as she pulled open another mark in the row and the trickle turned into a steady flow of thick blotting red. All he did was stand there.
He stayed watching until he saw her stumble on the dais. Then it hit him. Was he really that stupid? Without wasting any more time on meaningless thoughts he reached out and grabbed her arm. She opened her mouth to protest but only managed a whisper of something he couldn’t make out.
She tripped, and Ike was just close enough to catch her with the other arm before she fell. He let her down on the stone.
Both of their arms were painted with blood then. “You’re wasting it…” she managed, but Ike couldn’t care less about the ritual.
He ripped off a shred from his robe and started wrapping it around her arm until he realized it wasn’t enough. Then he started rummaging around the desks, flipping madly from drawer to drawer until he found something close enough to gauze to finish wrapping the cut and keeping it closed.
The knot in his gut tightened, pulling on all the guilt his body could come up with to torture him. Letting her go on like that was probably the dumbest thing he’d ever done. He couldn’t even bring himself to stare at the cut once he finished the wrapping. He saw what she was doing, so why wasn’t he quicker?
Nerinai grabbed his shoulder with his good arm and Ike still couldn’t look up to meet her. He didn’t need to look to know she was righteously pissed off.
“You’re ruining… the ritual. Ike, what do you think you’re doing?”
“A bit late to ask. Already did. Can’t let you cut yourself like that, it’s not-”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“The ritual is more important than anything you think-”
“Then let me help!”
“No. Don’t you get it?” She pushed herself to sit up, leaning against the legs of the table behind her. That anger Ike had grown to expect was written all over her face, in the way her cheeks and brow scrunched into her eyes.
“Time, and time again I have given you every single opportunity to get away from this miserable process. Over and over! I was so close to coming here and accomplishing everything I’ve set out to do without interference before you forced yourself into this.”
“Nerinai-”
“Shut up!” She reached into her coat and threw that black bound book at him. She was shouting now. “Do you think I didn’t know about the sacrifice? Of course I did! Every Raveness does! Six hundred years of tradition rooted in the slaughter of guardians and the disappearance of the Raveness in order to sate that black gate. Everything I have done, you fucking idiot, has been to stop that from happening.
“You don’t have the slightest clue about anything, do you? This is my mission Ike. My blood to spill, my fights to win or lose. Can’t you take a hint?”
They were quiet for a moment. Ike tried to take it in, what she said, but he couldn’t really. None of it made sense. Now that he had a purpose for being alive, she wanted to take it away from him?
“So you knew about the sacrifice?” The words seemed to slip out while he was busy thinking about everything else.
She scoffed. “Yeah. Of course I did. It’s… right. I forgot.”
“What?”
“That I made you forget.” Before Ike could do anything she reached her hand up his robe, searched there for a brief second before laying her hand on his side. On the scar that marked him from birth.
Not quite.
Memories came flooding through his mind. He was a child running through the halls of the monastery. The sky was black and raining, and he watched the city from on top of the walls above the settlement. The tutors were talking him through sword lessons on the field. There was a girl in black, just above his age, always moving around the next corner avoiding his approach.
Then one day she found him. Nerinai was always the bigger kid when they were young, or was Ike just more timid? She pulled him out of the monastery- black tendrils wrapped around her arms for support. She took him to the monastery gates and then there was someone else. Bigger, covered in hair with a strong voice. The closest Ike ever had to a father.
The last memory was him being pushed out of the city gates. Every time he tried to crawl back, tears boiling in his eyes, she would shove him back again. Nerinai was crying too. And then she grabbed him, and…
Ike blinked. Nerinai was staring at him, waiting for something. He knew she wanted him to be angry. To call her a liar, to blame her for living in the deepest rut of poverty for his entire life spending every day wondering if it would be his last.
Honestly, he couldn’t. He tried to be angry, and couldn’t.
Remembering the beginning of his life still warranted a weight that he’d have to carry. He sat back, spreading his palms over the cold floor to keep himself upright. The next time he glanced up at Nerinai, he could see her eyes glistening.
“You hate me, don’t you? Say it.”
“No. Just- why?”
“I was trying to help you.”
“I believe you,” he said, and she looked away from him then held her head up. “But nothing about being a muckraker was exactly safe. Did you even know?”
“I… I couldn’t weigh myself down while keeping up with you. I-” She swallowed, taking whatever she was about to say with it. “Leading you somewhere safe would have been worse than what I did. I had to. I figured you were too weak, too kind, to be taken with the muckrakers. Apparently I will have to be the first to admit that I was wrong here, since for some reason you are still acting like my Guardian.”
“I am.”
“Why?” Her voice cracked.
‘Why’ was something he’d answered for himself already. He knew why he couldn’t hate her, why no matter what she said or did he would stay right here to help. But how to explain it to her? What did she really know about being mud?
He stood up and walked back towards the dais and basin. “Nerinai, you’ve lived your entire life knowing who you were and what you were born to do here. Stop the blight. Save people. That’s having a purpose, no matter how much of a burden it’s been for you, you have purpose.”
The knife was stuck between a crack in the stone so he wrestled it out. “I can’t imagine explaining what it’s like to you. Being meaningless. Looking around at the world and the people around you knowing that each of them either had somewhere they belonged or still do.”
“I had nothing before you saved me. Saving my life outside of the pylon, you really saved me twice over you know.” Standing over the basin, he rolled up his own sleeve and cut open the skin. He didn’t know how much blood he needed but he figured something would give once it was enough. Then he looked back at her, talking to avoid the pain in his arm. “You are my purpose Nerinai. Knowing that means everything to me. I can never, ever go back to living a life knowing that I could have done something to help you. This is my purpose.”
Wordlessly, she pulled herself off the ground and joined him at the dais. For a moment he thought she might stop him then. He didn’t know what else he could do to convince her. Nerinai was so much stronger than he ever was, and now she knew everything. Just like he did. Thinking about it, touching on those memories both fresh and old, made him tremble.
Thankfully all she did was touch the edge of the bowl and mouth the words of an incantation. Runic symbols carved into the side of the bowl- not all, just a few, Ike noticed- began to glow.
“You can put your arm down. It’s enough.” He did, and she helped him wrap the arm just like he had helped her.
Her hands lingered on his arm longer than they needed to.
“Thank you, Ike.”
“It’s what I was born to do, wasn’t it?” He forced a smile that he didn’t feel very comfortable. “Besides. We aren’t done yet. At least now you can stop trying to protect me all the time, hah.”
Nerinai wouldn’t meet his eyes. When she reached in and grabbed the key out of the bowl, from where there was no longer a sign of blood, Ike expected her to spin on her heels and glide out of the room like she would have done before. Like any rational person would have done, really.
Instead she turned back and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into an embrace. Ike never expected her to be so warm. He couldn’t remember the last time someone hugged him, even.
Slowly, he lifted his arms up to reciprocate the hug. Ike waited, patiently, happily, for her to finish squeezing the life out of him to make a move in any direction.
Once she was finished Nerinai took a brisk pace out of the room, with her Guardian in tow. “You’re right, for once,” she said. “Our work isn’t close to being finished and the gate to hell is still very open. Let’s go break one more seal.”
Ike was only happy they’d be doing it together.