~~~~~
The Silverline Sharp took up about two-fifths of Davranis’ western coast, near the southern end, a section of sheer drops that curved deeply, as if someone took a bite out of the landmass.
Dastou had chased Paige for hours, the woman pushing herself as if her energy was infinite. When she finally slowed down, she was at a section of the cliff that the two had used for picnics and time alone. The view was, as always, incredible, and the winds ranged from middling strength to powerful gusts. On that day, in this hyper-thought memory, the view of the Baritr Ocean near noontime and the fragrant light breeze coming from the nearby forested hills were much more noticeable. The Saint, much like when he was here in real-time several years ago, could not keep his focus from her.
The whites of her eyes were red from crying, her face streamed with new tears and the residue of old ones, and her clothes dirty from the frenzied run out of the nearby city-state of Ubruduk and all the way here. Paige Ki’s burgundy hair and pale skin, her lips, her jawline, her cheeks, her silvery-deep-blue Saint’s eyes, everything about this perfect woman made current-day Dastou want to stay here forever, going further and further into years gone by to replay every second of her existence with him. He wanted to drink memories like hard liquor until he poisoned himself with the past and died. His ache for her was devastating because he kept it hidden for so long, with drink or with purpose, either one had been a working substitute. Seeing her now, seven years after she died, her back to the waters, her feet at the edge of the cliff and hands out as if she was turning them into wings, he knew he still wasn’t brave enough to accept this loss.
Yet he had to, because he came back to this moment for a reason. Dastou took himself out of his own body, made his current self a phantom, a watcher, and witnessed this horrific scene with a mind to learn, not mourn.
Nineteen-year-old Dastou was ten meters from Nineteen-year-old Paige Ki and did not dare move closer. She was regularly teetering against wind gusts, keeping her balance.
“I don’t know!” she practically screamed, her voice almost failing at the end of the short sentence.
“Then why come here at all?” Younger Dastou said. “Anything, say anything at all that makes this make sense.”
“I can’t,” she said through a sob. “I don’t want to do this; my body won’t stop.”
Older Dastou retraced many of the thoughts he was having when this happened. He thought about pulling out a Stitch from his pocket, but those were for problems with regular people and wouldn’t affect her. The ghost of Older Dastou walked around the scene, watching it while picking up details. The ground, the grass, the air, the sea. Something was wrong here, completely wrong. He stepped near his younger self, watching the poor kid’s eyes alight with panic and his hands shaking uncontrollably with frustration and confusion.
“Okay, okay,” said Younger Dastou, trying to calm things down, figure things out. He would fail. “Tell me what your body is trying to do. Can you do that?”
Paige saw what he was attempting and went with it, her own desperation as real as his. “It wants to,” she said, breathing heavily after a hard sob halted her response. “It wants to die.”
“Translate that into more words. If I’m going to help you, I need more words.”
Paige closed her eyes, and Young Dastou forced himself not to run as fast as his body could go; he was too far, and she would hear him coming. If she truly didn’t want to do this, not consciously anyway, he had to break things down like he was taught to do.
Paige spoke without opening her eyes. “It’s saying I need to die. But first I needed to come here, to this place, to our little secret.”
“Why here? If you needed to die, you could have cut your wrist, hung yourself, poisoned yourself. And you could have done that without rushing here all morning with me behind you.”
Paige shook her head. “I wish I could tell you better,” she said, and began to cry again, which choked her words into something that would haunt Young Dastou to this day unless he pretended it didn’t. “But I can’t. I tried to tell my body to stop. I tried to use Open Iris. I tried. Nothing worked. I had to come here.”
Young Dastou’s mind raced to try and find a sharp enough thought to cut this loop he was in. Older Dastou knew he would fail.
“How long have you been wanting to come here?” Young Dastou wondered.
She hesitated, waited a few seconds before answering. “I think two days. We planned on coming back when the weather warmed up some more, right? Then suddenly I had to get here.”
“I remember. You insisted, but it wasn’t a rush. We packed light, came to Ubruduk, then as soon as we got there you ran.”
Older Dastou felt like he was being watched, and thought that it was some kind of ironic tinge because he was already watching himself. He came around his younger self and decided to watch the scene from a very different angle. Older Dastou walked to where Paige was, only a few paces from the girl, and turned to look at himself from a distance. It took every droplet of willpower not to try and hug this memory of a woman he loved one more time, even if nothing would really happen. Instead, he stared at nineteen-year-old Dastou with pity for what this event would make him.
He thought he had been calmer back then, but that younger one was full of explosively nervous energy and a desperate need to end this the right way.
“I couldn’t keep myself from using every muscle to keep going,” Paige said, “because I knew you’d chase me. That was important, I think.”
“It was important that I chase you?” Younger Dastou asked, his voice high from being utterly bewildered.
Then, no words came from Paige’s mouth, but Older Dastou knew to look at her, right now, to witness something he missed. He saw her lips move, and what he read on them was like an icicle stabbed into his spine.
It was important that you watch. Then she stepped backward off the cliff, and Young Dastou knew running was useless. The young now-broken Saint fell to his knees and wept. Older Dastou didn’t remember for how long. A couple of hours at least, somewhere in the time exhausting himself into sleep. He awoke with the sun not too far from where it was she fell, and walked back to Ubruduk.
That was a long, slow walk. He let himself be scratched by branches, and why would he care? He let his feet ache and every part of his legs burn, because why would he care? As he walked through the city-state, no longer able to cry because he was getting dehydrated, Younger Dastou ignored questions posed to him. Are you alright? What’s wrong? May we help, Your Eminence? Go ahead and die, monster, you look close enough to it already. That last statement was the only one he gave a portion of his attention to, because if Paige Ki was gone, why should he live?
But instead he kept moving, passed through the city-state, crossed the long Greatland Rail Bridge in the center and was lucky he didn’t get run over by a blue-eye operated train. After that three or four hour long trek, he reached Davranis Central’s outskirts and hiked up another couple of hours to the huge home in the wilderness the Saints deemed their fortress. There, he found the only other remaining member of their kind, Lonoj Ornadais, eating some fruit on the porch in the middle of the night, enjoying the sounds of the quiet wildlands the way he liked to do. Young Dastou had shambled up to the huge log cabin, the darkness hiding his condition, and collapsed on the ground before reaching his mentor, weak, starving, on the very border of death itself. For a while, he wished he’d taken a longer route, and actually died.
Older Dastou, who was now the only one in this memory, did not follow that trek again, only remembered it in an offhand sort of way. The sky shifted at high speed from noon to midafternoon to mirror when Young Dastou had really gone from this place, and real Dastou stayed at Silverline Sharp, on that cliff that had been one of his favorite places in the world. He knew he was here in the past of his mind for a reason, but couldn’t focus with the thoughts of how Paige’s death had affected him.
“I could never put you back together,” sa
id someone else in this memory.
The only remaining Dastou looked around for the source of that voice, and saw a shadow, a shape of oil-black smoke walking out of the tree line. The Saint walked in that direction, curious, because without his younger self here this memory was over, or should have been.
“It is over,” said the black smoke shape as it shifted and writhed forward, as tall as a man but amorphous. “But we are a strange bunch, aren’t we, son?”
The way those words were said, the way the shape addressed Dastou, belonged to only one man: Lonoj Ornadais. As that thought ended, the black shape condensed and coalesced into a tight form and shifted in color, becoming a man. It was really him, somehow here in Dastou’s mind.
Lonoj, as he insisted on being called – some Saints went by first names, most went by last – wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t exceedingly short either. His dark-brown beard was always full and incredibly well-maintained, a source of pride. At this point the man was sixty-one years old, but looked at least fifteen years younger except for the belly. The man carried his weight well, however, and you couldn’t call him fat, just stocky. He was balding, with some gray on the sides of his head, and his wrinkles were practically put there on purpose they fit him so well, the same with his typical tanned light brown skin tone. As expected, this representation of him was perfect, matching reality with no detail missing, and being an arm’s length away from it was strange.
“I hate being stalked by memories,” Dastou said. “Go away, I’m trying to think.”
“Think about what?” Lonoj asked.
Dastou froze in place, surprised. Having a memory or personality take shape in your mind was not exceedingly rare for a Saint. The fact that they could remember everything perfectly at will meant sometimes distractions turned into forms, and sometimes those forms were people. But they didn’t insist on staying when told to leave.
“’They,” Lonoj quoted from Dastou’s thoughts, “and ‘those forms?’ I have a name, boy.”
Dastou was flabbergasted. “What?” he whispered, wondering what was happening.
“I. Have. A. Name.” Lonoj stated, wagging a finger in his usual way with every word. “And yes, I do know that this is a memory and that I should be gone. Then why don’t I poof! Vanish.”
Dastou thought about it. “Because I want you here?”
“Close,” Lonoj said as he stepped up to his student and put a solid hand on his shoulder, “but it’s more because I want me here.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dastou said, squinting at the amazingly tangible phantom, “you’re not in control here.”
“Ah, but what if I was? What if I, let’s say, hid a bit of message for you in a place I knew you’d have to come back to, in a memory of such pain that you couldn’t get to it unless you had no choice.”
Lonoj’s voice was, as always, charming and gruff. He realized now that he missed this man as much as he missed Paige Ki. He was as important to Dastou, in different ways and for a pair of years longer, and he loved this old man with all his heart, too. He loved Nes, loved Saan, they were his wonderful friends, but he had cut away his deepest emotional connective tissue when his mentor died soon after his partner, leaving him as the last of his kind. This version of the man the Academy was named after spoke with an oddly unexpected perspective.
“Now,” Lonoj said, “we are here at this time, this place. Why?”
Dastou sighed. “I came here because someone mentioned this time, this... event.”
“Citizen Vaiss,” Lonoj stated in matter-of-fact sureness, rocking back on his heels once as he said the name.
Again, Dastou was taken aback. Memory people weren’t supposed to have information that the person whose mind it was didn’t know they knew. It was normally like talking to the actual person, but they would relay nothing they hadn’t already, and Dastou only met Vaiss about five days ago.
“Well,” Lonoj began, “I guess that means I already knew about him, doesn’t it?”
“H... how?” Dastou asked, somehow summoning the confusion he felt as a pre-teen in his early training.
“Hmmm,” Lonoj said as he walked toward where Younger Dastou stopped to beg Paige to come back to him, putting his back to his student. “I don’t know that part. I guess I didn’t add that to this piece of me I saved in you. I do know him, though, and I’m specifically here to show you something.”
Dastou followed Lonoj, the light grass under his boots making no noise, the wind halted, and the ocean frozen in place. “You know about him, you knew about him! Why didn’t you warn me, prepare me!?”
Lonoj stopped where Younger Dastou had, and waved a circle around his head with one hand, then stroked his beard as he spoke. “That’s not up here. I wanted to, that’s for sure. I think I was planning to prepare you, but all I had time for was this, as if I was in some kind of hurry. The loss of Paige seems to be connected to that urgency.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“Ugh, my apologies,” Lonoj said as he walked around, looking at the grassy ground, then back at Dastou. “To make it a bit clearer, do you remember how we meditated together often, as teacher and student, with myself as guide? Specifically, when you were recovering from your time as a horrific drunk.”
“Just before you passed away. Yeah, I remember.”
“During that time, I did not only lead you along a path of clarity. I said things in a different language, one I discovered was an incredibly direct form of suggestion.”
“Something Vaiss can do.”
“Yes!” Lonoj exclaimed with a smile. “Exactly. I used that to hide information in your mind, or more specifically, a small tidbit directly connected to this day in your life. There is a single, solitary thing I am absolutely dead-set that I must reveal. First, I know you read Paige’s lips at that last moment, a memory you had forced deep and away.” He stepped up to Dastou, less than an arm’s length away. “Repeat that for me, please.”
“Uh, uhm....” Dastou muttered, then made himself remember a phrase he almost made vanish again due to how terrible it was. When he spoke, it was low and melancholic. “She said: ‘it was important that you watch.’”
“Correct,” Lonoj said in his instructor’s delivery. “We both know how much she cared for you, and that she would never say that. But who would?”
Lonoj pointed back, at a spot a few meters behind Younger Dastou’s worst moment, and there he was, standing with a wide grin on his goddamn face: Citizen Vaiss.
“He was here?” asked Dastou, his voice almost non-existent from the shock of seeing that man, looking the absolute exact same as he did when met in earnest years later.
“He was here,” confirmed Lonoj. “I made you take me back to this memory once, and realized that he had hidden himself with a vocalized Stitch. You didn’t notice it, neither did our lovely Paige. He was in Ubruduk, as well. He spoke to you, told you to ignore him, then commanded her to commit her final act.”
All those words and revelations washed over Dastou in a blur of bitterness, anger, and befuddlement. He couldn’t remember what Lonoj said happened, what Vaiss did to him and Paige, but he knew how right it was in his marrow. The Citizen had ruined his life seven years before the bombing in Blackbrick. Maybe Vaiss thought that would do it, that it would finish him emotionally, enough that he wouldn’t be trouble again, enjoying how tormented Dastou would be. But Lonoj was there to help, to put things in a better place.
“Wait,” Dastou said as he realized something, “I didn’t know him back then, even if he hypnotized me. So how do you know him by name?”
“Because I met him before.”
“When?” Dastou said, the word escaping him in a tone that was nothing less than accusatory.
“Decades ago,” Lonoj admitted. “Several of us met him, fought him in the Tribeslands, and failed miserably. We ran, hoping to research and bide our time. We seeded a few weapons and surprises for future use. Unfortunately, that’s all I know as this phantom o
f myself. From your thoughts, I know that I am dead, which was expected.”
“You expected to be dead? You weren’t exactly elderly.”
“In truth, Vaiss had been slowly killing Saints or entourage members for years, making the deaths appear natural or accidental. You saw as much with Paige; that was a special bit of torture on his part. I expected him to come after me, then you. I suspect he is why I am no longer alive, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you now know.”
“Know what? What the fuck do I know other than he killed Paige, and that I’m pissed, and that I’m...”
Lonoj smiled, and Dastou calmed down.
“That I’m going to kill him,” Dastou whispered.
“Yes.”
“Whether I live or die, in the end I’m either the gun, the bullet, or the man that designed the weaponry. All meant to end him.”
Lonoj smiled wider, and began to dissipate into oil-black smoke again. “Do not take vengeance as a solitary goal, that is the folly of children and the unthinking. He is a piece, a barrier.” His voice was ethereal, echoing against nothing, spreading far and wide while the sky, land, and sea crumbled and burst and floated like burning paper. “And you know how he is, what he can do. He killed Paige, he killed Havraz, he killed Palintis, he likely killed the Pieced Mother, and he likely killed me. There was a hope my original self was utterly comfortably with: that if he killed you, the soon to be last, you would have already been the sharpening whetstone to a blade meant to pierce that barrier. That blade is all those whom you teach and gather. You only ever meant to end the Social Cypher, fearing that the Sainthood was near its end, but you or your grand legacy must first kill the Citizen, the apparent guardian. This will not be easy for you, but I have believed in you wholeheartedly from the beginning. I was always deeply proud of you, and I’m sure I would be now.”
The world flickered again and again, dissipating all around Dastou into white nothingness. He knew he wouldn’t be able to let go of his anger, his sadness, his loneliness. That was alright, though – it was who he was, though mostly in secret. At the very least there was no more apprehension about his goal, because that goal was no longer as vague as it once was. It wasn’t some childhood fantasy anymore, some feel-good way to recruit people to his side. If the Cypher had what Lonoj called a guardian, then it needed a guardian. It needed protection. Protection from him.
He broke his self-induced trance and came back to the world no better than he was before, though with a little more faith.
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 44
