The novelist's fingers twitched over the pen. He pulled himself back together quickly, but the old man had already seen it.
"You did not possess yaicraft because you never awakened," the old man continued, his voice unchanged. "You could not become a yai user on your own. So for decades you searched for another way. A path to power that did not require what you were not born with."
"Even the rarest yaicraft would not have been enough for what you needed. So you spent those decades looking for someone who had it."
Lennard held the old man's gaze. Neither of them looked away.
"That was when you met him. Nongban Ezhaloch. A man who carried more hatred than anyone you had ever encountered, and a standing and influence to match it. He entrusted you with a powerful sigil and whatever else you needed to begin."
Lennard's grip on the pen tightened until the knuckles went white.
Aninke went still. Zelaine went still.
Zelaine more than still.
'Why.' The thought came fast and kept coming. 'Why is everything happening around me connected to Nongban. Every thread leads back to him. It cannot just be coincidence. It cannot.'
"The yaicraft he gave you was not simply a tool for revenge," the old man said, leaning into Lennard's space, his voice dropping. "It was a contract. You agreed to be the ink for his world. Didn't you."
Lennard let out a laugh, dry and raspy, the sound of something that had forgotten what real laughter felt like.
"He understood my pain," he said. "Unlike those others, he did not offer me pity."
He looked past the old man at nothing in particular, his remaining eye distant.
"He offered me the ability to rewrite my life. If the queen's law would not give me justice, I would write a world where her law did not exist."
After a few more questions were exchanged inside, Zelaine and Cale stepped out together.
They stood side by side on the balcony, the city quiet below them, the aftermath of the battle still visible in the dark, debris across the road, the smell of burnt paper still faint in the air.
"Tell me everything. We are alone now."
The reason Zelaine had been selective with her questions and careful with her behavior inside was simple. Too many people in the room, too many unknown quantities, and exposure was a risk neither of them could afford to take carelessly.
"I understand the caution," Cale said. "As soon as they found me they knew I was not from Ellejort. They captured me and questioned me, though they did not hurt me."
*You called them nice people,* Zelaine thought.
"They seemed frightened and I could not work out why at first. Eventually I concluded they were scared of what my presence implied. If the belt barrier had been breached then something had gone wrong at a level that would put the higher ups into uproar. They did not want to be the ones responsible for that becoming known."
Zelaine understood that. Breaking the pact between belts was not a small thing. The political fallout alone would reach further than either of them could currently calculate.
"I told them I was the future branch leader of a prominent family and that I had no information beyond an explosion that occurred while I was searching for my residence. That I woke up here with no explanation."
Zelaine frowned slightly. "You did not know what happened at the lab."
Cale looked at her. The look was not casual.
"Do not tell me you and Atiya are responsible for this."
Zelaine took a small step back. Something in her expression shifted, bracing itself.
"Yes and no."
Zelaine went through all of it.
The lab first. The silver alien, the fight, Sajibu being used against it. Nongban's ambush coming out of nowhere while they were still recovering.
And finally Atiya throwing himself into Nongban's plan at the last moment, the spatial explosion that followed, and then nothing, waking up in Ellejort with no way back and no idea where anyone else had landed.
Cale listened without interrupting. He took a few minutes after she finished the lab portion, processing it, and then nodded for her to continue.
She told him about arriving in Ellejort. About finding the family and what she had done to their memories to secure herself a place to stay and a source of information.
The crystal she had pulled from inside the well. The white light that kept returning to the farm at night.
Then Mavine, the full truth of it, what the crystal had been doing to the girl, what the stranger had planted in her long before Zelaine arrived. And lastly what Mavine had done to her parents while Zelaine was outside searching the farm.
"I burned the bodies afterward," Zelaine said. "So that nothing would lead back to her. Then I had her call the emergency line and register them as missing."
Cale said nothing for a moment.
He looked at her and she let him look. What she had done to the family's memories was immoral and she knew it, had known it when she did it, and there was no framing of it that made it something else.
But what had followed was not her doing. The white light, the stranger, the crystal finding Mavine in the well, all of it had been in motion long before Zelaine touched anything in that house.
What needed to be addressed now was not the question of Zelaine's choices.
It was Mavine. A seven year old girl with no parents, no home, and a weight inside her that most adults would not have survived carrying.
That was the problem in front of them.
****
They followed the deer.
Atiya's breathing had gone wrong somewhere in the last few minutes, shallow and uneven, and underneath the cold he could feel heat building in his body, the his body was running a temperature suggesting he was getting a fever which was in line given how cold the cave was.
His legs moved because he told them to and for no other reason.
The deer led them through the cavern without looking back and stopped in front of a lava river that stretched wide across the cave floor, the molten surface throwing orange light up against the walls and ceiling.
The heat coming off it reached them from several meters away.
Atiya stared at it.
'How is this atmospherically possible down here.'
The deer turned its head toward the left wall. Then it moved closer to the wall and held there, the blue crystal spikes catching the orange light of the lava, and Atiya followed its gaze.
Writings and pictures.
Cut into the stone the same way the carvings had been cut further back in the cave, but these were different in their arrangement, denser, more deliberate and possibly even contain some more answers.
He looked at them and could not immediately read what they meant.
"The answer to your search lies here."
Atiya's head snapped toward the sound.
The voice had come from the deer.
'How does it know what we are searching for. How can it speak.'
He stood there turning it over, staring at the Hingcha Sangai, and the deer gave him exactly enough time to form neither question into words before it leapt.
One motion, no warning, crossing the distance to the far edge of the cavern so fast that the eye processed it as a straight cut from one point to another.
And then it was gone.
Atiya turned in a slow circle, scanning the cavern.
everything about the deer had vanished. Not a sound, not a shape, not a trace of blue crystal light anywhere in the dark.
"It just left," he said. "What was that about."
"Let's check the wall," Leishna said.
He turned back to the writing and moved closer.
Atiya studied the wall.
There was so much written across it that he could not find where it began, and truthfully his attention was not fully on it.
The villagers were somewhere behind them in these passages, closing in, and the margin between now and that meeting was shrinking with every minute they stood still.
Going back was an option in the technical sense only. Defying the yai beast's clear intention felt like the worse gamble of the two available.
Then something on the wall caught his eye.
*Is that a crystal.*
Set into the stone, a single crystal, impaled into the wall among all the writing. He moved toward it. His mother had told him about these.
Ascension 3 yai users occasionally left their wills and memories encoded into chips, a way of preserving something of themselves beyond their physical presence. The chips could take many forms but crystals had become the most common by far.
*If this cave is his shelter then something like a will being here makes sense. It might even explain the deer.*
He pulled the crystal free.
The ground shifted beneath them, a low shudder moving through the cave floor, brief and contained.
*Something is happening. Maybe a genie comes out and grants our wishes.*
That did not happen. Something along those lines did.
At the bank of the lava river, an oval shaped hole formed in the stone, clean edged and deliberate.
Atiya would not have noticed it through the orange light and the heat haze except for the yai signature bleeding out of it, distinct and impossible to miss once his attention found it.
He turned toward it.
Atiya had a hunch about the shape before he confirmed it.
The hypothetical survivor had requested the sculpture be stolen and brought along. The oval hole in the stone was the same shape as the egg sitting in his hands. That was not a coincidence.
*Hm.*
Something else was forming at the back of his mind but he set it aside for later.
"Give me the sculpture."
Leishna startled slightly, then unwrapped the cloth and held it out. Atiya took the egg shaped sculpture and turned it over once in his hands.
*Maybe this is why the yai beasts were drawn to us the whole time.*
He gave it no further thought and placed the sculpture gently into the hole.
The world stopped.
Not gradually. Between one breath and the next he was somewhere else entirely, his body gone from under him, the cave gone, everything gone. He could not move. Could not speak. Could not feel his own hands.
*What is this. A memory realm.*
He was seeing through someone else's eyes. Borrowing them, inhabiting them, with no control over where they looked or what they felt.
In front of him was a man bleeding heavily, injuries severe enough that one hand was pressed against his own gut holding himself together. His face was not broken by pain.
It was set in contempt, hard and absolute, the expression of someone who had already decided something and was simply waiting for the moment to act on it.
Through gritted teeth the man spoke.
"Kallar Nelljan. I promise you I will return one day and kill everyone in this village."
The owner of the memory, the eyes Atiya was borrowing, answered.
"Hoh. A human dared to seduce our village's women and now stands here making threats."
Atiya could only observe. He could not feel what the memory's owner felt but the tone of the voice told him enough. Contempt meeting contempt.
"I am generous. Let me reeducate you, punk."
He took the injured man by the collar and dragged him toward the cells. Then the memory shifted.
Atiya had enough now to assemble the picture.
The name Nelljan. The current village head and priest was Fredo Nelljan. The man standing in the memory, Kallar Nelljan, had to be an ancestor, the village chief of that era. And the bleeding man being dragged to the cells was the traveler.
The one who had come to the village with goodwill and been humiliated for it.
The origin of the curse. The moment everything began.
He was about to see the truth of it from the inside.