by E. E. Holmes
The space was long, narrow, and very cold, as though the heat from the rest of the castle could not penetrate the walls—which were not really walls at all, but row upon row of shelves. Fiona walked the length of it, turning on lights as she went, illuminating the room bit by bit. Long wooden tables with benches were placed end to end along the middle of the room, dotted with magnifying glasses, pencils, stacks of paper, paint brushes, and bottles of cleaning solution.
“Where are we?” I asked, momentarily forgetting my fear and staring around in wonder.
“This is the Archive,” Fiona said with a last flick of a switch that bathed the far end of the room in soft, golden light. “I am the only person in the castle who is allowed in here, with the exception of the head Scribe. If you ever tell anyone I let you enter it, I will deny it, you understand me?”
“Yes,” I said. “But . . . what is it? It looks like a library research room.”
“It is where we store all records—written, verbal, and artistic—of all Durupinen prophecies.”
My heart leapt into my throat, constricting my voice and my ability to respond.
“I’ve something I want to show you,” Fiona said, pulling out the nearest bench with her foot and pointing to it. “Sit.”
I promptly sat. My legs were feeling shaky anyway.
Fiona walked along to a display rather like stores use to display posters for sale, except that each panel contained a piece of artwork carefully preserved between two pieces of Plexiglas. Carefully, she began to flip through the panels until she reached the one she was looking for. Unhooking the entire panel from its wooden arm, she carried it over to the table and laid it down in front of me.
I gasped and pushed the bench back from the table.
“Sorry to spring this on you, but you’ve got to see it. Scoot back over here, now,” Fiona said firmly, but not unkindly.
I tried to swallow, but my mouth and throat had gone instantly, horribly dry. I pulled the bench back under the table and leaned cautiously over the panel again, unable to quell the feeling that the image there would reach out and attack me.
Because, in a way, it already had.
Within the panel was a painting that had been done on an ancient and frayed canvas. Time had faded and worn the artwork, but it was undeniably the very same image I had once, in a spirit-induced fervor, scrawled all over the walls and ceiling of the entrance hall in the rather unique medium of ashes mixed with my own blood.
“This is the Prophecy,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“It’s the same image I drew. Exactly the same image.”
“Nearly.”
I tore my eyes from it to frown up at Fiona. “Nearly?”
“Here,” she said, and she tapped the finger against the center of the painting. The Geatgrima stood open, light and power and spirit hordes flooding out of it, but . . .
“No Hannah,” I said softly.
“No Hannah,” Fiona agreed.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought the Prophecy was made in words, not images.”
“The Prophecy was made in many forms over time,” Fiona said. She swung her leg over the bench and straddled it as she sat down to face me. “The words you heard were the most complete record of it. But this image—and several other incomplete images like it—came first. They were collected, interpreted, rejected, re-interpreted, and eventually, confirmed in the form of the written prophecy, which was made, as you know, by your ancestor, Agnes Isherwood.”
I scrambled to compose myself so that this new information wouldn’t just bounce off me. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Not all drawings produced by Muses are spirit-induced drawings. Some are of a different nature entirely,” Fiona said.
“What does that mean? What different nature?”
Fiona rubbed her fists into her eyes like a sleepy child. When she looked at me again, her eyes looked bloodshot and her expression weary. “Many Durupinen have extra gifts. Muses, Empaths, Callers, and so forth. There is another gift—a very rare one—that can appear in Durupinen. It is the gift that created this painting, as well as every recorded mention of the Prophecy up to and including when it was made in full by Agnes Isherwood. Every one was created by a Seer.”
“A Seer?” I asked breathlessly.
“Yes. A Durupinen who can make predictions in some form. We have not had a Seer at Fairhaven since my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother was a Seer?” I gasped. “Did she . . .” I gestured rather helplessly to the images scattered before me.
“No, no. She never foresaw anything to do with this Prophecy. But that didn’t stop the other Durupinen from fearing her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You know that rather clichéd phrase about shooting the messenger? They didn’t actually shoot her, mind!” Fiona added hastily, for something in my face must have betrayed my alarm. “But when you dislike the message, it is easy to project that dislike onto the bringer of that message. My grandmother was brilliant and troubled, not unlike myself,” Fiona said, glancing sideways to see if I would take the bait and laugh at the joke. I didn’t. “Her marriage to my grandfather fell apart under the combined strain of the Visitations and the barrage of Seer episodes.” And she pointed to a large, half-formed bust of a woman whose mouth was open in a fearful scream.
“Your grandmother made that?” I gasped.
“Indeed. Carving was her Seer medium, which is one of the reasons I work in sculpture so often. Seer sculpture is powerful, but incredibly draining and often difficult to interpret. It was nearly impossible for my grandmother to create a complete image before the vision dissipated. The Council demanded answers that she didn’t have. They were paranoid that every single carving was a dire warning in need of faultless understanding. My grandmother, she began to crack under the pressure. She became obsessed with interpreting her creations, but most of them were barely half-finished. She began trying to induce Seer episodes, but mostly she was left frustrated and confused. It drove her mad in the end. We had her committed, but she kept trying to carve any surface she could get her hands on—walls, tables, floors. It was like the second coming of the Marquis de Sade.”
“That’s terrible,” I whispered.
“Yeah, it bloody well was,” Fiona said grimly. “Luckily she’d already passed her Gateway on to my mother and aunt. We had to Bind her for her own safety, just to stop the Visitations. And then, of course, you met my mother. Apple and the tree, and all that. My mother was never a great Seer in the sense that my grandmother was. She was a Muse, though, and it seemed she had a touch of the Seer gift, because she made that sculpture of your mother. And well . . . you know how that turned out for her.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“The night you turned the entrance hall into a life-size portrait of the apocalypse, I knew something was off. The Silent Child showed you the Prophecy as it had been portrayed before, in this image, but you added to it. Never until that night was the image of your sister a part of this record, or the Council would have recognized her right away as the Caller from the Prophecy. Of course, this was just an insignificant detail amid the chaos, and no one—including myself—stopped to wonder why you had added your sister to the image. But the truth is that the Prophecy was speaking through you. You were supplying the final piece of the puzzle. You were Seeing.”
The room spun. I shook my head to clear the dizziness, but it gripped me like an attacker, shaking me to my core.
“I ought to have realized it then,” Fiona murmured, knocking her fists against her temples as though she could knock this piece of knowledge into her past self. “I ought to have noticed that you had produced something new, a detail no Seer had yet provided. And then of course, when it was all over, no one wanted to dwell on the Prophecy anymore, not in the way we once obsessed about it. We wanted to lock all evidence of it away—to finally be free of its clutches.”
My brain whirred
into a defensive mode. “No, it can’t have been Seeing,” I reasoned, and in my own ears my voice sounded so calm and rational, even as my fear whimpered and moaned inside me. “It was spirit-induced. The Silent Child was using me like a vessel. If anyone was Seeing, it had to be her.”
“I might have said the same thing until three days ago, when you brought me these,” Fiona said, and she spread my own drawings of Eleanora out before me. “You heard what Lucida said. There was no way that Eleanora could communicate outside of those príosún walls. It was impossible. And even if she had, how would she have found you? How could she have known that you, of all people, would need to know her identity? She had not yet Shattered. What reason was there to warn you?”
A shudder ran from the top of my head down through my body and out through my toes, leaving me clammy and cold, doused in my own fear.
“These images were prophetic. You produced them as foreknowledge of the Shattering. There is no other logical—or even illogical—explanation for it,” Fiona went on mercilessly. “And now we have this.” She unfolded my sketch of the two Annabelles—body and spirit—in the forest clearing. “Your friend is very much alive right now, and so you must ask yourself: what does this image show and why?”
I could barely bring myself to look at it again—the way her eyes stared out blankly from her prone body, cold and unseeing as marbles. The Annabelle that stood above was so pale, her edges so blurred. If I stared hard enough, I could make out the shape of the trees behind her, like she was a foggy window masking the woods beyond.
“It . . . it looks like she might be . . . she’s dead,” I whispered.
“And as you spoke to her just last night, you know that’s not happened yet,” Fiona said. “Which can only mean this drawing is a premonition of sorts, a warning of what is to come.”
I opened and closed my mouth like a fish, feeling as though I could not breathe the air around me.
“One time is a fluke. Two times is cause for interest. Three times is a bloody charm,” Fiona said. She clapped a hand on my back.
“The Durupinen have found another Seer at last, and it’s you, Jess.”
§
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No.”
Fiona frowned. “What are you on about? What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, no,” I said blankly. “No, I’m not a Seer.”
“You’re a Seer if I say you’re a Seer,” Fiona said, scowling confrontationally. “It’s not up for debate. The evidence all points that way.”
“No. I can’t. It’s too much.”
“What are you—”
“There is such a thing as too much!” I cried, and it was all I could do not to sweep my arm across the table top and send all the artwork cascading to the floor. “No one in this castle seems familiar with the concept, but normal people—people who grew up outside of this insanity—reach limits of what they can handle. There needs to be a point where the weird stuff stops rolling in or they can’t function. This is mine. I’ve hit it. No more.”
“Jess, you haven’t a choice whether—”
“Yes, I have! I have a choice! And I’m making it! I’m already a Durupinen—as if that weren’t enough to drive the average person right off the deep end. Then I’m also a Muse, with spirits using my body while I sleep, invading my space like I’m just a new pair of jeans they just want to try on for a bit to see how I feel. And I’ve absorbed it. I’ve found a way to make myself okay with it. But, oh wait, Jess, that wasn’t quite enough? We haven’t broken you yet? Fine, you’re a Walker, too. You can slip out of your body like that same pair of jeans and just leave it on the floor of your room, but be careful, or you could cause yourself to go insane. Like it would matter. Like insanity could actually be worse than my own personal version of reality. At this point, insanity would probably be a relief!”
Fiona sat patiently, watching me lose my shit with the calm demeanor of a yogi in meditation, which only made my anger peak. I wanted to slap that calm look right off her face, so that she would feel some of the pain and anger and confusion that was rising in me like a tide I couldn’t stop because I half-wanted to drown in it.
“And then, of course, I was also the subject of that Prophecy. So, just as a recap, Jess, not only are you a ghost-magnet, a ghost-artist, and a corporeal vanishing act, but you also have to dive headlong into a portal to the afterlife in order to save the spirit world from total annihilation.
“And I did it! I fucking did it! So, you would think, after all of that, that the universe would say, ‘Okay, Jess, I’m done with you. I’m not going to pile anything else on top of the teetering balancing act that is your life, because I can see that you are precariously close to toppling over and letting it all come crashing down on top of you.’ But no. NO. Now I have to be a Seer, too? Well, I refuse. Take it back. Give it to someone else. I reject it. I refuse it. I am done.”
All through this freak-out, Fiona waited patiently for me to rant and rave myself into silence. Finally, as I sat heaving with a combination of sobs and panicked gasps, she squinted at me, scratching her cheek.
“You about finished, then?”
“Yes, on multiple levels you could say that I am finished,” I spat back.
“Right, then. Well, I hope that little tantrum helped you feel better, because it sure as shit did nothing to change the reality of your situation.”
“Of course, it did. Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m rejecting this particular aspect of reality. I’m finished with it. I won’t have anything to do with it.”
“You sound like a bloody child,” Fiona spat, her usual fire breaking through the Zen exterior.
“Good. I want to sound like a child. I never really got to be one, so I’m starting now.” I stood up abruptly. “If you need me I’ll be in my room, picking the marshmallows out of breakfast cereal and coloring with some crayons in a blanket fort.”
“Jessica, you can’t run from this,” Fiona called after me.
“Watch me,” I replied, halfway to the door already.
“And what about your mate Annabelle, then? Not bothered to find out what this means? No interest in why you’ve gone and predicted her death?” Fiona shouted.
I stopped, my hand gripping the door handle, feeling as though a giant fist was squeezing my insides.
“Ah, that’s got your attention, has it? Enough of this foolishness, now. Sit your arse back down here.”
I turned and slouched back to the table, feeling my anger give way to tears of terror and helplessness. I sank onto the bench, but I kept my eyes averted from the image Fiona was now shoving under my nose.
“It is a hard, cold fact that Seers are rare and that their predictions are highly valued. It is also a fact that most of their predictions come to absolutely nothing.”
I looked up, frowning. “What do you mean? They predict things that don’t come true?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t get it. Isn’t the whole point of a prediction that it does come true?”
“Prophecies are tricky things. They are only true in the moment they are made. A hundred factors could change in the interim, and then the outcome will change with them. The real test is how this prediction changes over time, if at all.”
A hint of curiosity sparked in my overwrought brain. “Changes how?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. The idea that the universe has a master plan is a load of bollocks. My experience with the world has taught me that it is a random chaos of intersecting paths over which we have no control. Today’s prophecy might just be tomorrow’s scrap paper. It all depends how all of those paths cross with each other. You follow?”
I shook my head. “But the Isherwood Prophecy. That remained unchanged for hundreds of years.”
“But it didn’t! That’s what I’m telling you! Yes, it foretold your coming, but look at these images!” Fiona mashed a finger against the glass of the painting. “Look at this chaos! Look
at that destruction! None of this actually came to pass!”
“Of course, it did! Hannah reversed the Gateway! The spirits came out!”
“And yet here we all sit, with the Gateways back intact and order restored to our sisterhood! This image, and the image you created, showed the worst-case scenario, don’t you see? They showed us what could happen if you failed. It was only one possibility, not a foregone conclusion!”
I blinked. Never, in all my time of dwelling on the Prophecy, had this thought occurred to me.
“All this time you’ve been thinking that you were the subject of a Prophecy that came true, but rather, you were the subject of a Prophecy that was foiled. The Seers could account for many things, but in the end, they couldn’t account for you.”
“Me?”
“You! You were the variable! Even the written version of the Prophecy left us with a huge gaping question mark because it could not predict the choices that you would make. The same is true of every prophecy ever made! In the end, they are only glimpses of the ends of the paths we are currently on. It cannot account for the detours, the delays, or the possibility that we might just say ‘sod it!’ sprout wings, and soar off the fecking path and into the sky!” Fiona cried.
“Fiona, I enjoy a good extended metaphor as much as the next girl, but can you please just get to the point?” I sighed. “You just finished telling me that your mother and grandmother were driven mad by this so-called ‘gift,’ so you’ll pardon me if I’m not up for reading between the lines.”
“What I’m getting at is, you should treat this as you would treat any other spirit drawing. So, answer me this, eh? How often does the spirit who sends you an image actually establish meaningful contact?”
I shrugged. “As often as not,” I said. “Lots of times, the spirits just leave a passing image and I never hear from them again.”
“Exactly! The same will be true for what you See. As often as not, the images will come to nothing, rubbed out of existence by the many variables still in play, irrelevant before you even finish drawing them. To dwell on them too much will be unhealthy and a waste of your energy.”
