by Rowan Rook
Rickard frowned. "Thirty-one. We also lost soldiers—I can't say I know how many—and a few unfortunate students. Truly a shame."
Amaranth swallowed. He didn't ask for names, though. He'd lived at the Academy for years, but the other scientists were simply his colleagues. Nothing more. He knew very few of them personally.
"You look exhausted," Rickard smiled warmly. "You were out for several hours, but perhaps you need a more peaceful sort of rest."
Amaranth exhaled a moan, "It's just...the Not, I think..."
"It's fine," his boss assured. "Go back to sleep."
The thought of sleeping under both Rickard's and Shakaya's stares made him somehow uneasy, but the two of them were already blurring in his vision. He didn't have much choice in the matter. He closed his eyes. Slumber came almost instantly, as if it had been waiting for a chance to slip away with him.
Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ
Shakaya watched as Amaranth drifted off. There was something pleasant, almost hypnotic, about the rhythmic rise and fall of his ribs. Her eyes lingered on his sleeping shape for a few moments longer. "Did you know?"
"Did I know what, dear?" Rickard echoed.
Shakaya finally looked up at her. "About the attack."
"How could you ask such a question? I would never let such a thing befall my precious students." The Head Scientist paled with what could have been shock. "You wound me with those pretty blue eyes of yours."
Her pretty blue eyes narrowed. "I don't believe you. The Lyrum who attacked Ama was a Butterfly—the Vice Overseer."
"Was it? What makes you think I'm aware of what the Lyrum division gets up to?" Rickard sighed, "They're so hard to understand, after all."
Shakaya didn't dignify that with an answer. How naive did Rickard think she was? She let her winter stare speak for her.
"Come, dear, don't forget that our friend here was supposed to be waiting for me in my office. Don't let Lucillo's wild fantasies infect you." Rickard poked Amaranth's cheek. This time her sleeping subordinate didn't so much as stir, submerged in slumber. "It's as I told Lucillo himself—the troop came for the specimen room. Perhaps the Butterflies simply meant to aid them."
"It's not as if I doubt that, but..." Recognition slammed into Shakaya and flashed across her face. "You did know! You tried to isolate Ama before the attack. You knew it was coming." Her flat voice curdled, "How could you? They were your subordinates! Your students! You –"
"Calm down and behave like the lady I raised you to be." Rickard only frowned. "There's no need to be so cynical."
Shakaya bristled. Rickard hadn't raised her. Rickard wasn't her mother. She swallowed down a snarl. "Why would you allow this?"
Rickard was quiet for a few beats. "You're just going to have to trust me, dear." She offered a soft smile. "When have I ever acted in a way that wasn't in your favor? You two are more precious to me than anything else."
Shakaya's cheeks heated without her permission—pathetic. Her shame only further blanched her face. "Thirty-one of your scientists are dead, Rickard. Tell me what's going on."
"There's nothing to tell." Rickard's eyes found hers. "You're letting your paranoia get the better of you."
Shakaya held that blue-green stare. "Why can't you trust me, too?"
"You've answered your own question by behaving like this." Rickard leaned in closer, her breath still smelling of lavender tea and lemon. "You may not be a scientist, but I was the one who got you into this school. Don't forget that. I'll have you expelled if I need to, for your sake as much as anyone else's."
Shakaya said nothing. She had no choice but to heed the warning. Her fingers curled around the hem of her coat.
"Of course, I wouldn't want to do that to my own lovely daughter," Rickard grinned, "so please, do try to get a hold of yourself."
She hissed through clenched teeth, "Rickard—"
Amaranth groaned beneath them, shuffling under his blankets.
Shakaya stiffened—she'd nearly forgotten he was there. Thankfully, he didn't wake. His eyes stayed closed and his breath calmed back into a sleepy hum.
"Enough," Rickard decided, her anxious gaze mirroring Shakaya's. "There's nothing more to discuss. I should be overseeing our recovery efforts." She drifted toward the doorway and stopped just once, glancing over her shoulder. "I didn't know what would happen to the labs, Shakaya. I truly didn't."
Her voice almost sounded genuine.
Shakaya swallowed, staring at the floor as Rickard walked away.
Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ
Rickard pursed her lips and dunked her brush into the glass of blue-black water set beside her easel, then dabbed it into the suitably amaranthine pink on her pallette. It was hard to get the color and consistency just right—to capture the pale blush of Amaranth's lips while still letting the sky behind him seep through his face.
The minutes ticked by in that calm, stoic silence that always came over her as she painted in the privacy of her lab, adjunct to the Academy's main campus and thankfully untouched. Soon, she was finished with her portrait of the scientist. His figure stood beside her own, his translucent fingers held in her opaque grip. He wore a proper suit, adorned with a black tie and shorter hair. None of his favored floral gloves or lace or long red ribbons that looked so off on a male body, however delicate it might be.
Her own portrait wore an elegant red dress, with lace aplenty at her hem. Her hair—no longer such a sad gray-white—was as black as it had ever been, rippling over each shoulder like twin waterfalls. A crown rested on her brow as she sat on the throne, an enraptured audience gawking up at her and her companions. What a pleasant fantasy.
Yes. She tapped the brush—dark with the color of Amaranth's suit—against the glass, letting its inky drops spill into the water. What a fantasy, indeed.
She started on Shakaya next, painting her daughter's hand—as transparent as Amaranth's—in hers. She hesitated when it came time to carve out Shakaya's face from the canvas. She'd been putting off the soldier's portrait. Shakaya's image conjured a rather distasteful flavor in Rickard's mouth after their earlier discussion, but perhaps that was all the more reason to paint a smile on her face.
Rickard did so, giving Shakaya's transparent pink lips an upturn that seemed foreign on her face. Those pretty blue eyes were always enjoyable, though, putting the sky to shame.
With a smile of her own and a spark of energy, Rickard dressed her Shakaya in a white dress, not unlike the one she'd bought for her daughter as a girl. It emerged easily from her mind, all of its details both remembered and embellished, as if that was what Shakaya had always been meant to wear. She really would be beautiful, if only she chose to be.
"You became a soldier instead," Rickard chastised the image. Shakaya's occupation had been both useful and inevitable, but that didn't mean it wasn't a shame. Whatever regrets Rickard had held for her daughter had only grown alongside her, as she'd become a young woman who could've—should've—been so much more. "That choice, at least, was yours."
Perhaps one day, Shakaya would see the images in Rickard's head and realize that in so many ways, her choice had been the wrong one. Oh, how it had been the wrong one. A pang of guilt pulsed in Rickard's stomach—a foreign feeling—but her hands held steady to the paintbrush.
"You wanted this," she reminded Shakaya's portrait. "Forgive me for showing you your folly when the time comes. That's only the way of things when the world has order."
And order would indeed return to the chaos that was Auratessa, just the way her colors crafted structure and meaning from the chaos of a blank canvas.
Rickard let out a sigh that wasn't quite satisfied, wasn't quite sad.
She stepped back, admiring the finished painting. Her eyes stopped first on her own image—her own beauty, exaggerated and graceful. Her crown reflected the sun while her subjects stared in awe. She studied her two favorite students. Their bodies were transparent, faded, but her touch held them to Auratessa, k
ept them real. The sky's blue showed through them, losing only to Shakaya's eyes.
Rickard smiled and managed to meet those twin sapphires, so lifelike she could scarcely believe they'd been born from her brush. Perhaps that was what came after seeing them glowering at her so many times. "At the very least," she told her daughter's portrait, "I can promise you a worthwhile ending."
Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ
Elavadin's city center overflowed with nervous bodies and voices. On better days, the podium presented music and dramas, along with occasional open lectures from the Academy to the civilians who could otherwise only wonder what went on inside its walls. Today, the Head General would attempt to quell the panicked city that had nearly watched its precious pinnacle of money and fame burn. Many of its soldiers stood by the stage, eager to hear their boss's words, but Shakaya waited as far away as she could. She'd always hated crowds.
Elavadin was a bustling hub of metal and electricity. It may not have been the Human capital—although if its status kept growing, one day it would be—but in many ways, it was more advanced. It was the focal point of science and technology, and it possessed an army that could rival that of Velvire's castle, itself.
The Elavadin Academy of Science and Arms made the city everything it was. What had started as a small-town school had blossomed into an elite institute that trained highly sought students and often employed its own graduates. Without the Academy, Elavadin would be nothing but another unremarkable spot on Auratessa's map.
As its name suggested, Elavadin Academy housed two main components: a science department and a combat department. Three silhouettes—Head General Edgard Verox, Head Scientist Ransmae Rickard, and the mayor who doubled as the school's headmaster, Hayl Blaker—stared out at a crowd of tense soldiers and frightened civilians from atop the podium.
The theater hardly felt like the same place beneath the shadow of the afternoon's attack. Mayor Blaker rarely involved civilians with the more grim aspects of the Academy's business, but the assault on the labs had affected far more than the school itself. The sight of billowing flames coming from the Academy's windows and the screams and shots blaring through them had shaken up the whole of the city. Shakaya closed her eyes to escape the chaos. She already had a pretty good idea of what the outcome of this emergency meeting would be.
Finally, the Academy would focus its resources on finding the colony. Necessity had turned Lyrum into secretive creatures. The Humans of Lusanthine knew that the Lyrum had to have a base of operations tucked away within the continent, but somehow, it had managed to stay hidden.
Over two-hundred and twenty years had passed since Humans had broken free from their chains. Their wretched captors had lived in cities before then—cities the stronger Humans had built for them under their orders—while Humans had lived without proper education. Even after the Inversion, several years had come and gone before the species had developed the organization to write and keep proper records, and in that time, the Lyrum had restructured smaller colonies and gathered their survivors together. Human hands had already claimed many of their old dwellings—rumors suggested that even Elavadin stood where a Lyrum city once had—but the lack of recorded history left the Lyrum's current whereabouts a mystery.
However, folktales focused on the southwestern depths of Lusanthine. Swampy, dense, and crawling with beasts, the area was largely unexplored, and the Academy had tracked several Lyrum troops from that direction over the years. Human armies had searched there many times over and reported only the routine casualties of the wilds, but according to what Rickard had whispered in her ear just before the meeting, the school would once again toss out as many scouts as it could spare into the great, southwestern unknown. She would be one of them.
She would find the colony. She was sure of it. Front-line soldiers like her weren't generally selected for scouting. Now, though...now the Academy was desperate, and she'd finally get to see this place she'd heard so much about. None of the Lyrum she'd interrogated on the battlefield had been willing to confirm her suspicions, but she had plenty of reason to believe the rumors. After all, her mother had passed down tales of her own ancestors playing a role in the Inversion...and her stories had featured swamplands and forests. She straightened with a swell of pride. She'd continue her family's legacy and erase Lyrum from Lusanthine.
Her mother and father had birthed the Sentinel—an only somewhat legal organization determined to destroy as many Lyrum as possible. To eliminate the threat that stood against all of Humanity's progress. To do the dirty work the Academy and the capital, tied down by money and politics, often weren't willing to do.
Shakaya had graduated as a soldier only last year, but the twenty-two-year-old had lived at the Academy for a full fourteen. Rickard—once a proud member of her parent's organization—had brought her to the school after the Sentinel had burned down. After those beasts—after the Lyrum—had stolen away her family and her childhood dreams.
Why Amaranth and Rickard were so interested in poking about the innards of such vile creatures, she'd never understood. Why would they yearn for Translation when Humans had their own gifts? Translation was as primitive and unpredictable as the species itself. Humans had nothing to gain from Lyrum.
Her family had never been like that. The Sentinel had never been like that.
Human culture was changing. Tamer times denounced the Sentinel as fanatical and dangerous, and its cataclysmic end had ruined its reputation. Nowadays, Lyrum could be caged as lab mice, discreetly sell their bodies in whore houses, or hide quietly in the unexplored corners of the continents. And, well, many modern Humans would say, that was all right. But she knew better, just as her parents had taught her. The Lyrum would always be waiting—a predator ready to pounce and swallow them whole. If given the slimmest opportunity, the past would repeat itself.
That was why it made her sick. That was why it made her stomach heavy and her fists clench when people shied away from her family's name. From the proud legacy of the Sentinel.
They were right. Her parents had been right. And many more people knew it than were willing to admit it, too. They needed to spill blood until it washed the past away. They needed to eliminate the threat, once and for all. They'd all see it her way, one day. And so would Amaranth. She believed in him more than anyone else.
Her lips managed a faint smile.
After all, he was right about one thing—the current Auratessa was an ugly place.
Chapter Four: The Scarlet Butterfly
Amaranth took each step slowly, trying to keep the world from spinning. The doctors had just cleared him to leave the infirmary after one too-long night. His muscles still ached with exhaustion and his smoggy lungs still stung with each breath, but the anxiety tying his veins in knots wouldn't let him sleep any longer. He could have fared far worse. Perhaps it was shock ailing him more now than anything else. He had to see what was going on—what had become of the Academy. Only then might he truly be able to rest.
Dread swelled in his stomach when he approached the main campus's looming shape. Its second floor was nearly hollowed out in the back, as if a giant hand had reached down from the sky and torn it away. Its wounds were black with soot. The first floor looked out of place beneath it, its gated doorway and silver nameplate standing as proudly as ever. Nonetheless, security officers and red tape cut off the main entrance. A sign let him know that the dorms, on the east side of the building and away from the heart of the carnage, were still open.
His heart thrummed as the dormitory's door creaked open. He felt...off, uncomfortable, like he'd just been stripped in front of his colleagues. In a way, he had—there were certain things he wanted to keep to himself, but that had suddenly become much harder. Too many secrets had already been exposed. His body seemed strange, too—almost like he was trapped in a costume of flesh and bone that wasn't quite his. His feet were nearly as heavy as his head. He paused, sucking in a breath and trying to swallow the dysphoria
down with it.
Unease flickered through the corridor, filling it with electric air and loud voices. The debris were largely cleared, but the recovery efforts hadn't scrubbed away the fear left behind by the Lyrum. A group of researchers loitered in an anxious circle.
Amaranth took a few curious steps closer, trying to decipher what they were so fervently discussing. A piece of paper slipped from hand to hand.
"That insignia can only mean one thing—it was definitely left by a Butterfly!"
"But the Scarlet Butterfly had nothing to do with the attack, right? What interest would it have in the Academy?"
"There are Lyrum in the Butterfly, too. Maybe it joined the others against us because we keep specimens."
"But why now, after all these years? They've never bothered us before."
"I'm telling you—one of the Lyrum that attacked our lab was a Butterfly!"
"I...thought I saw one in weird clothes, too."
"Nah, that can't be. I mean, the Butterfly is a religious group. It doesn't get involved in violence like this!"
"We can't say that for sure. They're snakes—who knows what they're after?"
"Either way...none of us know an 'Anny,' do we?"
The gossip silenced.
"What is that?" Amaranth craned his neck for a look at the piece of paper that had so enraptured his colleagues.
The group turned their heads, their scowls doing nothing to hide that they weren't particularly happy to see him. Perhaps word of his spat with Lucillo had already gotten around, much less the odder details of his encounter in Lab 2.
Ryn was the one who finally answered, "It's a note with the Scarlet Butterfly emblem etched on the back." He looked at the floor. "I found it in the specimen room upstairs."
The Scarlet Butterfly...there was that name again. He rewound his film of memories, searching. He swore that he'd heard the term somewhere before but... It was no use. He couldn't remember. Why did it suddenly feel like he was the only one left in the dark? He never had gotten an explanation, he realized now.
