An hour or two went by, as did forty or more questions Kanrel found himself answering as directly and honestly as he could. Always giving just a little more; always having to dig into his mind, in search of the most adequate answer to a thing that happened when he was perhaps eight. And in return, he got the tiredness of having had to speak without a pause for an extended period of time. He did conjure some water and drank it, which Captain Vareth noted down on a piece of paper as well. None of that which reached the paper was ever voiced, or so it seemed.
It had been enticing to look at the old man. How his expressions would shift ever so slightly after each answer. Either because of further doubt that had instilled itself within him, or because of the creeping realization that the haggard man before him, with his unkempt hair and sunken eyes, might actually be the person he so adamantly claims to be. And then came the final question. Captain Vareth let out a long sigh. The edge had dissipated from his eyes, and there was something else in there entirely.
"What was your mission in Jersten, given to you by the Priesthood, and especially by your mother?"
Kanrel cleared his throat. "The same as any priest, though with the intent of looking for things that might be unusual. Stories told by the locals about mysterious things. It was my job to investigate them and then report directly to her," he replied.
Captain Vareth wrote something on his paper again, then placed the quill aside, after which he stretched his hands. He still stared at the paper and the book. Soon, he closed the book and hid it away, back to its place somewhere deep in the storage space of his large desk. He seemed thoughtful for a moment, then another long sigh escaped his lips. His gaze lifted from the paper, and he met eyes with Kanrel again.
"I can't pretend to trust you fully, not quite yet. But I can at least acknowledge that if you are just another pretender in search of some strange gain from all of this, then I must confess that you are perhaps the only one to have answered anything in such great detail."
"If it were only up to me, then I'd be willing to accept that you are Kanrel Iduldian, of course, given enough witnesses. And since we are in Atarkan, by the Academy, then I am sure that you'd be able to find those witnesses and convince them of your identity," he said, then shook his head slightly. "But it isn't up to me. I am not the Herald; I am not your mother. And only she can decide that you are him, that you are her son, her only child." His gaze regained that earlier edge, and he glanced at Roslyn and said, "You may leave now. There are other things that I must discuss with him."
Roslyn went ahead to get up, but Kanrel pulled her back down. Roslyn looked at Kanrel, but he did not look at her. His gaze was solely set on Captain Vareth. "Whatever we may discuss here today... Let her hear it," he said. His gaze matched the steel in the captain's eyes, but then the gaze softened, and he added, "I beg of you." It came out almost like a whimper, and Kanrel had to fight against himself to not look away.
Captain Vareth yet stared at him, then again glanced at Roslyn, who stared at Kanrel. He lifted his brow and said, "Very well... But know that none of the things that you might hear today are to be repeated outside of this room." His voice was stern with command, enough to make Roslyn meet his gaze, enough to make her nod in agreement. Captain Vareth nodded back at her. "Good."
He then moved his gaze back to Kanrel. "I have many questions about many things," he began. "You've not been around for nearly two decades, and there isn't a soul in this world who knows where you were. All those years, I wanted to know everything about them."
"You know, back then, there were many theories regarding your disappearance. One of the more popular ones was cultist activity. That you had been either compromised by them, imprisoned by them, or killed by them. After all, one day, you just walked into the woods. Into the same woods where such activity had been reported before, by you no less."
"So let us begin there. Why did you choose to depart into the forest?"
Kanrel swallowed. "It was... A week after having witnessed Roslyn depart toward Atarkan. I... I felt an urge to just leave. I wanted to be done with it all; I wanted to feel something other than the despair that I had felt back then. So I went into the woods and didn't turn back. I went deeper, and deeper, and deeper. In search of something that I had found during my investigation. Supposedly, there were ruins somewhere deep within the forest, and it was possible that there might be cultists around there."
"After a while, I found said ruins. And I came across three huntsmen. They seemed awfully nice, and after not having had much to eat in a few days, I accepted a meal they offered me, as well as a place by the fire. I foolishly trusted them."
"They had me eat something that knocked me out, and the next time I woke up, I was bound and blinded. I had no clue what had happened, only that I had been betrayed."
"One of the hunters then came to me, tortured me, wanting to know everything that I could know. He wanted to know about some people in the village, specifically, who had told me about the ruins," Kanrel said, and stopped for a while. For a while, he had not seen anyone, only everything that he remembered, but now, he looked directly into the captain's eyes. "I managed to burn away the cloth that had blinded me... I overpowered him. I questioned him in turn. Then I killed him. I burned him alive." His voice sounded hollow to himself. "I killed the other two as well. I pierced them with spears of ice and left them where they had fallen."
"Then I entered the ruins. A journal, first. It explained the place. A holy location for the cultists, for a long time now... And below it, there was more, so much more. The ruins extended far below the earth."
"I should've turned around in that moment. I should have marked the way back to the village, reported what I had done and found, then returned with a party... But I didn't, for some reason. I just wanted to know what was below. For I found out that the previous priest who had served in Jersten had somehow found his way there as well. So I descended to the lowest level. I got lost in strange, labyrinthine corridors that only led me further from the safety of the world above, until they brought me to a pit in the middle of a spherical room."
"From its ceiling, a noose hung. And in the pit, lay corpses. Bones and items scattered about. I went down. Of course I did. There, another journal. Authored by the priest who had gone missing. It told of something about the place. Something that had urged him to find it as well, to descend, too. To... enter..." His brows furrowed.
"What I had found was a confession that a priest had a desire. He had a clear desire for whatever that entrance meant." As Kanrel spoke, a shadow claimed his expression.
"Near the pit, there was a slim stairway that led further into the dark. On either side of it, just more darkness. I dared take the first step, and the next, and ended up going along with the staircase, and where it might lead me."
"And it led me to a thing so strange. A black surface. Like a mirror built from the darkness itself. And in that mirror was someone like me. Or rather, someone that I had once been. A child. In my arms, a cat, Deft. And I smiled. I smiled a smile I have not since smiled. I ended up breaking that mirror, for whatever reason. Something within urged me to do it, and so I did."
"The mirror lay shattered before me. But I could still see my reflection. Now it was at least the right one. The face of someone who had no such smile..."
"Then I heard it. Like a voice within me. Something of me, but something certainly beyond me. It called for me. It called me to enter. To enter... So I pushed myself against the darkness, against what was left of the mirror, and I pushed, and I pushed, until... There was just the darkness. I was as though submerged in the deepest part of the ocean. There was no light for me to see, and there was no air for me to breathe. There was just the pressure that squeezed me from all directions. I could not breathe, so I could only suffocate... And I thought that I would," he said.
"But then, a voice spoke to me. And it told me of things I had never known before. It told me of a people that he was tasked with keeping locked beneath the earth itself. He told me of the Atheians... or rather, the Otherkind, who had been locked away in a prison of sorts, deep below the earth itself, solely based on their transgressions against the will of the Angels..." Kanrel met Roslyn's eyes, who looked at him with horror in her eyes. "We discussed many things. Like his purpose, and what I was, and who I was, and why I could enter, and others could not..."
"I told him about the Angels, which he called the Sharan. I told him about the gift a priest might receive from one of their kind... And the voice recoiled at the thought of it, the unfairness of exchanging something so divine as joy for something so ludicrous as power."
"Then he told me that I could at least reverse this... gift of theirs, but to do that, I would first have to somehow escape what I had just entered. He offered to keep me alive for as long as he could, so that I might enter the complicated lock that bound the Atheians beneath the world." Kanrel scoffed. "And, of course, I accepted. The fool that I was," he almost spat out, then went silent, returning his gaze to Captain Vareth, who had brought out another piece of paper and furiously wrote on it the things that he had heard. His brows were deeply furrowed, and he seemed genuinely disturbed.
"Does that explain at least some of it? There is so much I could say; enough to fill libraries with books if I were to recite everything that happened, and everything that I had seen, as well as everything that I now know of." His voice was drenched with bitterness. Afterwards, it was silent for a while. Only Captain Vareth broke it with another question: "Did you... See one of these Atheians?"
Kanrel scoffed. "One? I must've seen thousands of them. I lived among them for at least a decade. I learned their language, how to read it, and how to write it. I even became friends with a few of them."
Captain Vareth stopped writing, suddenly. He lifted his gaze from the paper and stared at Kanrel. He measured him, then frowned. "You're not lying?"
"Why would I lie about something like this?" Then he snorted without humor. "Though, of course, I could just be insane, and that'd be enough to explain everything... But look around... What do you see? Do you think my reemergence is just a coincidence?"
The captain's brows furrowed further. "What do you mean?"
Kanrel swallowed; he steeled his wits. He forced himself to stop trembling so much. He had waited for this moment. Now was the time, was it not? He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He wanted to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth... But the words got stuck in his throat. They were like gravel; dry and too harsh to ever be fully swallowed or fully vomited out. He only found a sigh, and a lie instead: "The shadows, or the Veil, as the Atheians call it. You know, the clouds that are now above us, and seem to remove people from existence... They were the walls of the prison, so to speak. And what had kept it all intact was... a creature... an Angel... And that Angel happened to at last break free. The only reason I've returned is because of those shadows departing from the world below and into the world above."
"I am free only because whoever kept them there is free as well."
Captain Vareth's eyes twitched. "None of this makes sense; tell me–" he said, but Roslyn suddenly spoke. She had been quiet the whole time. She had just listened and nothing else: "Locked, imprisoned, those you know as the other. Waiting for the lock to open; waiting for the ascension; to breach the surface; to usurp those above..." She went silent for a moment. Kanrel felt his whole body tense as he listened to her recite what he already knew to be true. "Punished for betrayal; conquered and then enslaved by the shadows; by those within, around, and above," she said and went silent for a moment; she seemed to hesitate.
"Bloodshed, famine, death, an ending from and for below," Kanrel whispered in her stead.
The words hung in the silence afterward. The two priests stared ahead with glossed eyes. One with deep guilt, the other now knowing what she would've much preferred to not know at all.
Captain Vareth tapped the desk and returned the two back to this world. "What the hell are you two talking about?"
Roslyn smiled a sad smile. "It is a prophecy. One that was written in the Book of the Heralds nearly three decades ago... And now it is happening; it is coming to fruition," she said, then giggled. "And the latest, if not the final verse in the Book of the Heralds goes as follows: "He who proclaimed Himself god through patricide, He who proclaimed Himself savior through deicide, He who proclaimed Himself bound by duty through genocide, He who has now freed Himself through a flower in bloom, He who enacts vengeance onto innocence, He who claims through His war that peace may arise. He has arrived; so take witness and know that this is the end." Her smile faded, and the echo of her giggle long dissipated as she then added, "And this is as far as I've seen; it is all that I have seen; all that comes after is shrouded in shadow."
Kanrel's expression shifted. He buried his face into his hands; he ran his fingers through his beard and then his hair. He felt the urge to rip each strand of hair out, one by one, until he'd be as naked as he could become. His expression had turned into a mask of torment; the cloud in his mind grew and covered all. In his mind, repeating only this: 'He has arrived; so take witness and know that this is the end.' There was just despair, for the end was here.
"Is it true?" Kanrel heard himself ask, and soon he felt a hand grab him; his hands were pulled away from his face, from his hair, and he was forced to meet Roslyn's eyes again. He was forced to see as she nodded, as tears went down her cheeks.
"What does it mean?" Captain Vareth asked; there was urgency in his voice, and understanding in his eyes. He knew the answer already, yet he still asked.
"The end of the world; the end of all life," Kanrel answered, or heard himself answer. He wasn't sure. After all, the darkness had already covered his mind.
Captain Vareth stared at him for a long time. The look in his eyes had become unreadable despite the earlier urgency. He gazed down at his notes, gently lifted one of the papers, and read through it. Then, all of a sudden, he burst into laughter. He cackled like a maniac, like a man who had just slipped carrying a precious piece of porcelain that now lay shattered beside him. He laughed until tears wet his eyes, and he had to reach for a napkin to dry them away. He laughed until even Kanrel woke from his darkness and was forced to witness the absurdity of man.
"Is this funny to you?" Roslyn asked. Her tone had shifted from earlier despair into one mixed with clear disdain for the man.
Between cackles, the captain muttered, "Excuse me," only to burst into laughter anew. For a whole minute or more, he laughed, and he laughed, his face becoming as red as a drunkard's. He laughed so much that it clearly hurt; even the tears felt like they burned. But in the end, he calmed down. And carefully, he dried away the rest of the tears; the earlier humor dissipating from his face; and when he spoke, his tone was more serious than even during the interrogation, "Forgive me... I just realized that I had been wasting good paper."
Kanrel stared at him and said nothing, but Roslyn did: "You don't believe a word we've told you?"
The captain smiled slightly. "Of course I do... It is just that writing a report about it is incredibly inefficient," he said, lifting an empty mug that sat on his table. "I really need a drink," he muttered, and from the confines of another tablespace brought out an unopened wine bottle. He opened it and went to pour it into the mug, then he scoffed, and instead brought the bottle to his lips, and began gulping it down as if it were water. The two priests stared at him without a word.
And when the old man was done, he breathed in air as greedily as he had just drunk wine. He placed the bottle onto the table, half of it now gone.
"Could you be so kind as to explain what you mean?" Kanrel asked and reached for the bottle; he grabbed it and brought it to his lips. Soon, he swallowed liquid that had no other taste than ash. It only burned when it went down. He managed to drink only a quarter of what was left. When he was done, he offered it to Roslyn, who accepted it despite the confused look in her eyes. She drank in turn.
Captain Vareth grinned as he stared at them, drinking his wine, then sighed. "It was a gift from my wife, meant for an important celebration... but this is as good a moment as any to drink it, is it not?"
"Explain yourself," Roslyn demanded after placing the now-empty bottle onto the table.
The captain leaned on his chair. "Well, I suppose that at least you two will be heading to Lo'Gran, perhaps some others as well, who knows... Much better than sending a letter," he said, and got up. He stumbled slightly when he did, but quickly regained his footing. "You can go... Go see your family, or friends, or whatever or whoever you might have here in Atarkaan. I'll give you a day or two, then you've got to leave and see your mother." He stepped around the table and offered his hand to Kanrel.
Kanrel looked at it for a moment, then accepted it; soon, he was pulled up from the chair and was forced into a bear hug with a man much larger than he. As Kanrel was about to lift his arms up and hug him back, he heard the man whisper to his ear: "If I ever find out that you weren't who you claimed to be, I'll come down to Lo'Gran, and kill you myself... Understood?" Kanrel nodded against his chest. "Good," he then heard the man whisper.
The hug ended, and all Kanrel could see on the old man's face now was a wide smile, as if he hadn't said a thing just now. Then, he promptly drove the two priests off, citing a need for privacy; he practically pushed the two out of the door, into the corridor.
Kanrel and Roslyn stood side by side, staring at the door. "Is he allowed to drink?" Kanrel asked.
The woman beside him nodded and said, "Of course he is. He is a grown man."
Kanrel furrowed his brows. "Even during work?"
Roslyn's nod turned into her shaking her head. "No... I don't think so." Then she turned her gaze toward Kanrel and said, "There are some people who, I am sure, would want to see you."
Kanrel glanced at her. "Who?"
"You'll know soon enough."