A Myth to the Night

by Cora Choi

  Chapter 28: Confession

  Several minutes passed in frozen silence. Outside, the thud of running feet and the cries of anxious voices filled the courtyard.

  “I know you’re still here.” Anne-Marie’s sobs had subsided, and her voice was now a breathy whisper. She had moved to a corner of the cell and stared at the door. I was standing beside it. She was looking in my direction, but the focus of her eyes barely missed me. I knew she couldn’t see me. However, I could see her somber face clearly. I didn’t bother to make noise to show I was still there. I just stood staring—just staring at her. Anne-Marie had a son. I had a son. Drev was our son!

  I conjured up Drev’s face in my mind and looked for clues of how he resembled me. Images of him when I first saw him come into the cellar, when we encountered the other phantoms on the island, when he had met Pamina as a phantom—in any of those instances, had I recognized a part of me in him?

  I immediately wanted to hear details from Anne-Marie. Why had she never told me we had a child? Why had she kept it hidden all this time? I no longer felt any anger toward her, nor sadness or resentment. Complete hollowness was all I could feel.

  “I know . . . I know you’re still here.”

  Her tone was less confident this time. She continued to stare past me, seeming to search uselessly for something she couldn’t find. The sharpness of her features softened.

  Now that Drev was gone, did it dawn on her that it was all over? There was no need to hide anything anymore. All her plotting and planning had come to an end. The moment Drev had jumped off the tower, I had realized my mission for the past four hundred years had come to an end. Was it the same for her as it was for me?

  Although I thought I didn’t have enough energy even to keep up my existence as a phantom, I moved toward her. I came so close to her that my lips were only centimeters from hers. I could see every line in her face. Some of them deepened as she cringed while inhaling, and then smoothed out as she exhaled. Tears kept sliding down, one after another. I raised my hand and wiped them away with the tips of my fingers. I knew she couldn’t feel my touch, but I could see that she could feel her tears being brushed aside, for she breathed in sharply and her eyes opened wide as her lips parted. She blinked rapidly, looking around the room.

  “Hugh?”

  “I’m here,” I replied, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

  “Hugh,” she sniffled loudly, as she looked dejectedly at the floor. “This may be the last time I’ll be able to talk to you, so please, please don’t leave until I’ve finished.”

  “I won’t.” Since she couldn’t hear me, to reassure her I closed the iron-barred door of the dungeon and kicked a small pebble on the ground. It rolled to her feet, and Anne-Marie half-smiled.

  “You were always so good to me, Hugh. And when I was younger and I told you that I loved you, I meant it.” Anne-Marie’s voice was solemn. Her taut lips and focused stare told me what she was revealing was sincere. “I loved everything about you. . . .”

  “As did I about you.”

  “I loved that you, one person, were fighting an endless battle on behalf of humanity.” She smiled sadly, looking past me as though I were at the other end of the room, when in fact I stood by her shoulder, staring at her soft cheek, the perky tilt of her nose. “The fact that you would come back from death to see your mission through—my God, can you imagine how heroic that sounded to me when I was twenty years old? And you knew so many stories! Incredible stories.” Anne-Marie stared at the ceiling, her mouth turned up in a lazy, blissful curve. Her eyes brightened in a way I hadn’t seen all night. “I loved those stories. I couldn’t wait for every evening to hear them.”

  I remembered waiting for Anne-Marie every night outside Mizu House when she was still a student. She would sneak out through a window after her roommate had fallen asleep. Still in her white nightgown, she would run over to where I hid in the shadow of the oak trees by the Forgotten Cemetery. We would walk the winding, wayward paths, offshoots of the Five Ring Road. I would tell her stories about mythical creatures that lived in the sea, or tell her tales about the characters formed by the constellations. Sometimes we would stumble upon a strange statue that belonged to a legend or a folktale, and I would explain to her what story it came from. She would always listen closely, her eyes glowing. Every so often, I would invite a phantom from a myth or a fairy tale to join us and animate the tale so that Anne-Marie could experience the power of that narrative.

  “You opened up a world for me that I could never have imagined,” she continued, her mouth now opened to a broad smile. “Those tales made me laugh and cry. They made me want to jump to my feet and battle evil anywhere in the world. They inspired me to abandon myself to romance and then eventually to love—and that is how I came to love you.”

  I leaned toward her as she said this. I wanted to hold her hand as we had years ago. I wanted to kiss those lips again. I had not known love until I had met Anne-Marie. I had always believed she had taught me what it was to love, brought me out of the cold, austere shell I had resigned myself to when I entered the monastery. Knowing that I had helped her to love as well was a gift, the kindest words I could possibly hear.

  “But love, unlike your stories, doesn’t conquer all, Hugh. The night you revealed your book to me and explained the massacre and the destruction that the Order of the Shrike had caused, I went into shock. It turned my idea of the world upside down. When you told me that the Order of the Shrike was evil, I couldn’t believe it. I am the Order of the Shrike; that’s my family, my blood. I grew up proud of being a member—generations of my family were members—and I couldn’t see how that was evil. Yet the evidence you showed me . . .” She paused. “It was undeniable. And I knew that you would never lie to me. . . .”

  She tilted her head from side to side slowly, and tears filled her eyes again. “And I loved you too much to think of you as anything but honest and forthright. So that night, the night we ran away from the Saboteurs in the library, I decided to leave the island. I didn’t want to be a part of the Order of the Shrike, and I knew that if I stayed, when I graduated I would be forced to become one of them.

  “At the time, I was naive and ignorant about how hard it is to live on your own, without skill or money. I immediately fell on hard times, and when I thought about reaching out to my family for help, I discovered I was pregnant.” She stopped and breathed out loudly and slowly. “I was terrified that if my family found out, they would ask me who the father was. If they found out it was you—a phantom—they would be beside themselves. I was the only heir to the family, and reputation was everything to my parents. I knew that either they would force me to have an abortion or, after I gave birth, they’d have the baby killed, and so I hid. When I discovered that I was pregnant, I thought about coming back to Stauros—I thought about you day and night—but it was too risky. My family would’ve found out.”

  Now I understood. She hadn’t deceived me. If she had come back to let me know she was alive, it would have meant exposing herself and sacrificing Drev. She’d never had a choice, and I had judged her without knowing the struggle she had gone through.

  It came as no surprise that Anne-Marie would have continued to defy her family, even though she must’ve been horribly lonesome and frightened. Anne-Marie had many blessings—she was intelligent and brave. Yet she was also proud and brash. This mix was one of the reasons I loved her. I brushed away the tears that flowed down her cheeks to her jawline. She closed her eyes slowly. I knew she knew I was still there.

  “I thought about you a lot—so much—while I was carrying Andrev.” Her voice was quiet and legato, one word barely distinguishable from another. “I even thought that there might be some way that we could be together . . . all of us, somehow.”

  A few seconds passed, and she didn’t move. I was afraid she wouldn’t continue. However, she drew a deep breath, and, in a louder voice, she said, “But if my family had ever found out, they would surely have kil
led him—killed so there’d have been no trace of him. I was so scared. . . .” Anne-Marie’s voice cracked, and she paused to swallow, closing her eyes slowly. I looked down at her hands, which she’d balled into fists, like Drev had done when his emotions were more than he could handle.

  Clearly, she could feel my energy, so, as I stood behind her, I enclosed her fists in my hands and pushed her arms upward. She, feeling me around her, slowly raised her arms and wrapped them around her. I placed my arms over hers, holding her. I could feel the ring of the insignia of the Order of the Shrike pressing into my palm, yet I held her as tightly as I could. I let my face sink into her hair and let the loose strands graze my nose. She burst into sobs, heavier sobs than when she had discovered what had happened to Drev. We stood like that for several minutes.

  “I-I-I made . . . I made the decision to put him up for adoption when I realized I couldn’t raise him on my own. I had no real steady job or resources. I couldn’t continue hiding, always being afraid for Andrev.” She shook her head slowly, as though she were once again feeling the agony of the decision she had made so many years ago.

  “But I wanted to make sure he would be okay. I knew he would be different, special—after all, he was your son. I didn’t know how the difference would manifest, and I was frightened—frightened that whoever adopted him might reject him, because of any odd qualities he might have, and that he might grow up thinking he was some sort of freak of nature.

  “When I gave him over to his adoptive parents, I did so on the condition that they let me see him.” She paused. “Andrev’s adoptive parents were good people and even allowed me to stay with Andrev as his nanny, until I could finish school and get my degree.

  “I changed my name to Marie Dee, and, as you know, Andrev came to know me as his nanny. I stayed quiet about my family and my background. I never made any contact with people from my past, for I knew that if I was found out and my family realized I was alive and living as a nanny, they would research what had happened. All of that would have been putting Andrev at risk.

  “When Andrev was a baby, I could see that he saw things that others didn’t. He’d look toward a direction where there was nothing. To us normal people, there was nothing, but he would continue to stare and sometimes even crawl over to an empty space, as though there were something there. When he was a toddler, I would see him wave or try to speak to what looked to me like air. That’s when I knew that he could see and hear phantoms, like you.

  “When he was just a toddler, I taught him to keep what he saw to himself, because others weren’t like him, and they wouldn’t understand. I taught him that he was special, that there was nothing he needed to be afraid of. He was smart—very sharp—and, although I didn’t realize it immediately, by the time he was five years old, I was almost certain he was the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. For I remembered what you had told me about the Slayer—how he could see and hear things that other living souls could not. I wanted to start telling Andrev the story of the Slayer and the Shadow of Fear, but I couldn’t. He was too young, and I didn’t want to scare him.

  “When he turned five, his mother adopted another baby, a little girl, and became a stay-at-home mother. I knew my time as his nanny had come to an end. I took my leave, knowing that he was in a good family. But I promised myself that once he went to college and was old enough to understand, I would make sure he took his place as the Slayer in the world.

  “Afterward, I tried to make my way in the world by my own efforts,” she sighed. “I was young and idealistic. I wanted to dissociate myself from my heritage and remove myself as far from the Order of the Shrike as possible. I had dreams of making the world a better place—if not for me, then at least for Andrev.

  “However, it’s true what they say: this world is every person for herself. I spent years traveling, trying to find truth, courage, beauty—the essence that makes us feel like we are living—the virtues found in those legends and myths that you had told me. But that’s all they are—myths. I couldn’t find what I was looking for out there.”

  I continued to hold Anne-Marie in my arms, wishing that I had been with her through all her hardships to protect her and help her keep her faith that life could be as miraculous and enchanting as those tales.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “All I found was greed, treachery, and fear—fear everywhere,” she said, shaking her head. “And I realized that’s all there was. Perhaps you can say that I became jaded, or disillusioned. But I’d like to say that I just grew up.

  “Then one day, about seven years ago, I read in the newspaper that my parents had suddenly died in a tragic car accident. I also read that no heirs remained. At the end of the news article, there was a short blurb about how I, the only child and daughter, had been a victim of the Demon of Stauros while attending Stauros University. My disappearance had driven my mother into depression, and my father—who had never had a strong constitution—spent his life in and out of the hospital for stress-related ailments.

  “Sadness doesn’t even describe how I felt when I suddenly lost both my parents. I felt horribly guilty—and angry.” Her voice became tight, and she clenched her jaw.

  As I held her, I felt her muscles grow tense throughout her shoulders and back. So this had been the turning point. She was telling me not just about her parents’ death but also about how her heart had become cold—how and when her compassion for the rest of the world had evaporated.

  “That’s when I realized where my place was in this life and what my duty was to my family and to the society I lived in. I attended my parents’ funeral, to the great surprise of my family’s close friends and associates. Even though my return caused much of a stir, no questions were asked about my past. I was proclaimed the only living heir of the de Galard family and took my position as the head of a dynasty that had survived more than four centuries. I inherited my family’s vast estate and became the head trustee of Stauros University.

  “When Andrev’s application came in, I saw that his adoptive family had been financially ruined, so I offered him a full scholarship from my own resources. I had planned for him to come to the island and meet you. And to meet me.

  “I had wanted you, as a scholar and teacher, to explain to him about the Order of the Crane, and to tell him how to destroy the Shadow of Fear. You would teach him during his academic year. During the summers, I, as his former nanny, would invite him to my home, where I could initiate him into the traditions of the Order of the Shrike and provide him with unlimited resources.” She muffled a sob, and I felt her frame slump in my arms. “That was my plan. I wanted him to have the perfect education—become knowledgeable about the secrets of both orders—so that when the time came for him to battle the Shadow of Fear, to take his place as the Slayer, he could have the resources of both orders at his disposal.” She breathed in and out slowly, taking a few breaths before speaking again.

  As she picked up where she had left off, she seemed to be so lost in her vision of Drev that she spoke as though she were in a trance. “He would be more than just a warrior, more than just the head of the Order of the Shrike. He would be a king, an emperor. Great conquests, power, wealth, whatever he desired—he would be a living legend, a hero to outlast all other heroes.” She fell silent, and then I heard her swallow as thought she was trying to keep down the pain that refused to be contained. A minute passed before she cleared her throat and spoke. “While I no longer had you or my parents, I always had him. He was—will always be—in my heart. Now I have him only in my heart.”

  I felt her body go limp. I held her up as best I could. Her head tilted to the side. She began to cry again, quietly and softly, seeming to mourn her crushed dreams. I continued to hold her. I felt her pain reverberate through me. Both of our dreams had been destroyed. Both of our hearts had been utterly shattered.

  “Though you can’t hear me, Anne-Marie, I must tell you this now, because after tonight I will most likely be scattered to the wind wit
h this island.” I pulled her tighter to me and heard her stifle a sob. “I love you. I love you more than I loved anyone. You—yes, everything you are. Order of the Shrike. Power seeker. Manipulator. And I will always love you, because you gave me a son—a son who could slay the Shadow of Fear and rule the world. He was neither like you nor like me. He was better. He was clever and bold and had a higher sense of purpose. Whatever your plans were, whatever my mission was, it’s all over. All we can console ourselves with is the knowledge that our love created a great young man.” I stopped to take a breath before adding, “And we have only each other to give our deepest gratitude.”

  Anne-Marie had stopped crying but was silent. I knew she couldn’t have heard my words, but I was certain she could feel the essence of what I was trying to tell her. I pulled my head back to look at her face. I moved to face her squarely and kissed her lips.

  I released her from my arms. I walked over to where I had dropped my book, picked it up, and made my way to the dungeon door. Although Anne-Marie couldn’t see me, I felt her eyes on me, as though she were watching me move. As much as I love and long for you, Anne-Marie, I must walk away from you.

  I walked through the door and turned around to look at her. She looked dazed, arms loose at her sides, her eyes glued to the ground, seeming to know but not wanting to acknowledge that I was leaving. For a moment, instead of seeing Anne-Marie as she was now, I saw the girl I had loved nearly twenty years before—timid yet mischievous, looking at me longingly with eyes full of life.

  “Good-bye, my beautiful, sweet girl,” I said, as I walked through the narrow hallway, leaving her behind forever.