Chapter 51 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 51: Flame in the Swamp 07
This was Lucita's first time setting foot in the swamp, yet before today, she had glimpsed it countless times.
It seemed to lurk behind a veil, neither real nor illusion, occasionally projecting itself before her eyes like the mirages of legend.
From the very first day she had come to Grande, Lucita had caught sight of its shadow, and now, at last, she had seized hold of it.
The greatest truth about mirages, after all, is this — even when you cannot reach them, they are unmistakably real.
Her eyes took in the towering dead bones rising nearby.
Her ears caught the faint, mournful keening that ran through them as they trembled, or perhaps it was the spiders plucking their silk strings, sending vibrations through the air.
She smelled the fetid stench of the mud, released with every bursting bubble, carrying the reek of bones and blood that had rotted through a thousand years.
All her reunited senses perceived the reality of this phantom world — all except touch. She still felt no pain, no warmth or cold. She ran her hand along a nearby bone and felt nothing at all.
Lucita looked down at her feet, and only then noticed that they had already sunk into the mud.
The loss of touch had robbed her of any firm grasp on what was real and what was not.
Lucita's brow knitted tight. Her heart seemed to drop like a falling weight, sinking into the mire along with her feet, a stifled, helpless feeling with nowhere to push against.
In every direction, pitch darkness. Not a single point of light.
Even the Eye of True Sight could only reveal to her the blurred, indistinct outlines of what crouched in the dark.
The night almost always sheltered unknown dangers, and she knew nothing of what lay within.
Lucita scanned her surroundings, and her gaze fixed on one direction.
Somewhere in that direction, at an indeterminate distance, there was a faint and feeble source of light.
It was a soft white glow, unsteady, swaying and trembling as though it might gutter out at any moment.
Against the surrounding darkness, that small light flickered as if in invitation, illuminating just enough of the bones and swamp mud around it to make their shapes dimly visible.
There are times when you cannot blame the moth's instinct to fly toward flame.
Moving toward light is every living creature's most basic impulse. To a person lost in darkness, a single point of light is like water to a desert traveler, a hope too precious to ignore.
Lucita was no exception.
She wrenched her feet free of the mud, steadied herself against a nearby bone, and began to make her way toward it, one step sinking deep, the next finding firmer ground.
A spider nearby went on weaving its web, showing no sign of aggression.
As a precaution, Lucita was careful not to brush against any of the silk threads. Besides, without her sense of touch, she might make contact without even realizing it, and she had no desire to discover what the consequences might be.
In the face of the unknown, a baseline wariness is only sensible.
Lucita felt as though she had been walking for a very long time.
The solitary light ahead, the only landmark in all that darkness, always seemed close, yet whenever she tried to reach it, it felt as though she would never quite arrive.
Then again, she may have been lost for so long, with the environment around her so entirely featureless, that her sense of time had simply drifted out of alignment.
Her shoes had filled with mud, and it had splashed up over her shins.
She tried very hard not to think about what might be in that mud.
In this one matter, she was almost grateful to have lost her sense of touch.
What gave Lucita a mounting headache, what wore at her steadily, was the sound that surrounded her: the low, mournful keening of the bones, and the spiders' discordant plucking.
The noises were faint but unrelenting, hovering at the edges of hearing, a kind of psychic pollution in the decay-saturated air that dragged her spirits down into leaden fatigue.
Madness is contagious. So is grief and despair, especially in a silence this complete, this close to endless night.
But Lucita could not stop. She could only keep walking toward the light, that single visible hope.
Otherwise... was she going to rot here, lost and unable to leave?
To escape the emotional weight the noise was pressing down on her, Lucita began forcing her mind to wander deliberately.
She felt as though she had been walking for at least a full day and night.
Perhaps two days. Perhaps three… She didn't know.
Would finding the light actually reveal any way out?
It could simply be wishful thinking on her part…
Dalila was alone in that house where someone had died. She should be all right, shouldn't she?
She ought to have gone home by now.
And Stasia... what would she and Kelsey do when they discovered Lucita was missing? Would they come looking for her?
Lucita simultaneously hoped someone would come for her, and hoped they would not come to their deaths.
No. Be optimistic, Lucita. You're not going to die carelessly like this.
She encouraged herself. You haven't found your own past yet. You haven't made any effort to change this world's future. This will not be where your bones are buried.
She dragged her heavy feet forward, one uneven step after another.
And when her last reserves of will were almost spent, she noticed the light had grown closer.
It was a leaping pale flame, and from a distance it cast a reflection in the black depths of Lucita's eyes.
She felt a sudden surge of energy, set her jaw, and quickened her pace.
At last, Lucita drew near.
The firelight filled her eyes. She stopped where she was, and could not speak.
It was not a flame at all. It was a young person.
A barefoot youth, standing motionless in the swamp with closed eyes, floating above the surface, hair and clothing drifting on the air.
Is there wind?
Her garments billowed. Pale fire burned upward from her bare feet, engulfing nearly her entire body, like some great act of sacrifice.
In the boundless eternal night, she was the only light there was.
Lucita felt a shiver run through her.
She had no sense of touch, and had not even come close to the youth, yet looking at that fire, she felt intensely cold.
Strange, isn't it?
Fire should feel hot.
As Lucita stood transfixed, the girl opened her eyes.
In the instant their gazes met, Lucita suddenly felt she looked familiar.
Shoulder-length hair. A long, slender face. Eyes set slightly wider than average. Full lips. A face vivid with youth.
Her pupils contracted sharply.
Wasn't this... the woman's daughter who had died of illness? The girl in the portrait, Delphine?
Lucita parted her lips, and found no words would come.
Then the youth spoke first, in a voice that seemed to drift as if from a dream: "Who are you?"
Still caught in her shock, Lucita instinctively asked in return: "And who are you?"
"Me?" The youth echoed the question back at herself. Rather than taking offense, she fell into quiet bewilderment.
"Who am I?" she murmured. "I am... I am Delphine."
"I've been told Delphine is dead."
"Yes. She is dead." The youth answered without thinking, then caught herself. "Strange... why did I say ‘she’?"
Lucita's thoughts raced, and she pressed on, as though drawn by an irresistible pull: "Then who, exactly, are you?"
"I am — the Heart of Dragons." The youth suddenly closed her eyes again, a shadow of melancholy settling over her brow.
"I was born from the place where the dragon fell. I am the Heart of Dragons."
Their gazes met, and in an instant Lucita was pulled into a flood of memory.
This was the final battlefield. The last bloodline of the dragon race was extinguished here. Vast bodies fell from the sky with a dying cry, and their blood stained the earth red, soaking three feet into the ground.
The dominion of space was lost. Only myself condensed out from it.
Because our kin were annihilated, I lost my vessel. Carrying the origin of space, I drifted in oblivion, slowly fading.
I was trapped here. I watched the erupting volcanoes bury these dragon bones. I watched humanity build new cities over the ruins. I watched the history of the dragons be forgotten.
Look at me. I am burning.
After all these years, I am nearly burnt out. The day I die, the spatial fabric of this world will collapse entirely.
That future is not many years away.
Recently, a human woman woke me with a fragment of a dragon's bone from long ago. What was her relationship with that dragon? — Ah, I forget that humans have such short lives. Perhaps it was her ancestor who knew the dragon.
I wanted to see what she was doing.
Do you know? She was trying to wake her daughter. Someone already dead.
Lucita had been carried along by the youth's memories, and that final sentence struck her like a nail. She finished it silently in her own mind: Of course I know.
That woman had been playing the soul-summoning song in the streets for days.
The youth seemed faintly bewildered: Is being alive really so longed-for?
Her desire was so powerful. She let me see Delphine.
I began to feel a longing for life.
I want to live too. I want a pair of eyes. I want to smell things. I want to taste food. I want to leave this place and go out into the world.
I don't have to stay here. No one can demand that I remain and wait for death. Can they?
Right, death.
I have actually begun to fear death.
The youth drew a slow, careful breath: "The fire burning on me has started to hurt a little."
"I wanted to become a living being, but the only form I had ever seen was the image shaped by her descriptions. Delphine. So this is what I became."
"Looking at you now, you look rather similar. Eyes, nose, mouth, you have all of them. Do all the living beings outside look like this?"
Lucita found herself momentarily at a loss for words.
The form this entity had taken was identical to the Delphine in the portrait, except that her pupils were gold.
And she herself, and the living beings outside, certainly did not all look like Delphine.
But to this "Delphine," the differences between human faces were probably like the difference between the first crucian carp she pulled from a lake and the second — indistinguishable.
She paused, and in the end simply answered: "Yes."
"How wonderful." Delphine smiled. "In your human terms, she should be my 'mother,' shouldn't she?"
"What a pity, I never met my mother." She sighed. "She shaped me, gave me a name, gave me a face. But I still cannot leave. The dominion of space has been lost. I am sealed away from this world's spatial fabric, and I can never touch this world."
"Is she well?"
"Cannot touch it?" Lucita did not answer. Instead she asked, and, unbothered by her lack of touch, reached her hand out toward her. "May I try?"
The youth smiled and shook her head, but cooperatively extended her own hand.
Their hands met. A pale, violent fire immediately swept over Lucita's hand.
There was no time to register Delphine's startled expression. Lucita's face contorted, and a sharp hiss escaped her lips, her body nearly convulsing with pain.
Delphine flinched and made to pull away. "Once the origin of the world begins to burn, it cannot be extinguished!"
Lucita's mind had gone blank with pain, and the one inexplicable thought floating through it was: This fire really is as cold as it looks.
Bone-piercing cold.
She ignored Delphine's warning entirely, seized her hand, and ran: "Come and live. Living is a wonderful thing. This world needs you."
As they passed through it, the fire on their bodies caught the dense-woven silk, spreading at tremendous speed, and lit the entire swamp.
The mournful keening of those who had found no peace in death slowly subsided. The burning silk and the soul-devouring carrion spiders dissolved into a cloud of black smoke and were gone — these spiders had long since died themselves, still diligently singing their dirges. What remained had been nothing but an obsession that refused to disperse.
They had forgotten their own deaths, and gone on working dutifully, just as they had in life.
Now, at last, they rested.
An immense, mingled feeling of pain and exhilaration rose through Lucita's skull. She closed her eyes and drove her elbow through the unseen barrier before her.
Crash —
The barrier of this world shattered completely. A foreign human soul broke through the screen of the five senses, and at last arrived in the world of the living.
At the same moment, the origin of space returned to the mortal realm. The world trembled once, then quickly settled back into calm.
Busy people, for no reason they could name, paused for just a moment, then continued whatever they had been doing.
Only Lucita knew that something in this world had already changed.
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