“You’re going to have to be smarter about this if you think you’re going to take back our place here. Or have you forgotten how many years have passed?”
Years. They had stopped meaning anything to him. It had been mere weeks since he had found some sense of self again, bolstered by the rift that had reopened the door to the memories carried within the phoenix. Centuries, since he had last blinked out to a world where the weight of a crown bowed his head. Millennia, since he had first gazed upon the bird of fire and desired the power for his own hand. Since pauper had become prince. It may have been the twins to realise the potential of that power, in their earliest incarnations so many years ago, but it had been that poor boy who had been the first to seize it, even before the Siklos had found their name.
“You may have your parties. Did you forget that we cannot step into the city? It’s swarming with bluecoats. We’d be executed on the spot.”
“You did know subtlety once, brother.” A beat. “I think. Even so, you really mean to tell me you would be cowed by simple men?”
Vallnor frowned. “I said nothing of the sort. I hardly thought you wanted me to be announcing my presence everywhere I go.”
Fyera shook her head, rising in one smooth motion. “That is exactly what I want you to do.” At his frown, she said, “We have to make ourselves known once more. The world thinks us long dead. Buried and gone. How are they to know any different if we do not let them know?”
“And a party will change this, will it? Why do you want to invite that man anyway? He’s our enemy.”
She beckoned him with a finger and he quashed the flicker of irritation, making a show of hauling himself off the sofa to take her arm. “Lord Sandson is a well-connected man. There is little going on on this island – nay, across the Myrliks – that he does not know of. I wish to become acquainted with him but, alas, I have not yet had the opportunity. You, however, boast a –”
“A nothing. I do not know the man. I spoke to him once. That woman…” Kilai. The woman’s name had been Kilai. “She had to fight for him not to kill me. He would have done it if he thought it the way to protect his city, make no mistake.”
“It would have been wise of him.”
Vallnor choked, looking at her, and she stared back at him coolly with her green eyes. “You remind me of him right now. The kid.”
“Don’t say his name,” he snapped when she looked like she was going to continue. A spike of panic flared through him and he clenched his fist, using the pain as an anchor. It was always the quickest way back to the phoenix, for it was instinct to heal any hurt no matter how small. Each vessel had to be protected for as long as possible.
Fyera had stopped walking and was now staring at him with considerable concern. “He’s a part of you now. You remember him.”
“Do you remember – who you were?”
“I have recollections of the girl I was born as in this body. But they’re faint, as if every memory that comes back to me replaces those of hers.”
“She is still you, though.” It was almost a question.
“No.” She glided along the corridor, tugging him with her. The marble echoed beneath their boots, veined with orange as if the shell of the floor was cracking, lava about to spill out. Her kobi swished with her pace. “I am Fyera Siklo, as you are Vallnor Siklo. Perhaps it may take longer for you to – to fully remember.”
“And if I don’t?”
Her grip tightened on his arm. “You will. Anyway, we have a party to plan for. I have invited many important noble families from across the Myrliks and beyond. What do you think? Should we have a band in the centre?”
She led him into the courtyard where lanterns had been strung across each pillar of stone, glowing in red and green like the lights from The Night of the Phoenix. Vallnor was struck by the similarities, a hand slamming out to steady himself against a pillar as he remembered. The rain. The anger and cruelty in his veins like the raging flame. Riftspawn poised above men like the executioner’s guillotine. Screams and cries as bodies fell. The look on the beserker’s face after she had done the deed, blood shining on the wicked grin of her blade. Rook, his brain supplied. The beserker was called Rook, and she had fought for him as if she were one of his knights of old.
“Vallnor?”
For a moment he did not recognise the name, blinking wildly around a palace the likes of which he could only dream, clouds reflecting on the glassy surface of a huge fountain, water gurgling from the statue atop it as if something was stuck in its throat. The sound vibrated so much louder than it really was, drumming inside his skull. There was greenery spilling down from small balconies above, vines curling down around the pillars with saccharine sweet smelling blooms in white and pink. Plush chairs had been scattered around the area, gilded arms beckoning him forth.
Vallnor staggered back a step.
“Vallnor?”
Suddenly he was there, in the warm high season heat, surrounded by the nobles and diplomats of the centuries. Chalices of fine wine from the far east, inset with jade and ruby. Pretty girls giggling behind their hands, hoping to catch the prince’s eye, and flushing pink if he threw them a smile. Talk of revolution. Of the Sonlin threat on the horizon. Vallnor had thought it nonsense, back then.
A gentle hand on his arm snapped him from his reverie. Green, green eyes, a shade both familiar and foreign all at once; like jade in the palace walls, like green lilypads in the water, like the water on the horizon as he sat on a rooftop with Red. Like moss on the forest floor the first time he had gone on that excursion with Rook to the rift.
“Are you sure you feel well, brother?”
“I’m fine,” he gasped, breathless. “I just need some air.”
Except he dashed inside, into the cool embrace of the palace walls. He hadn’t meant to take the corridor he always avoided, but in his haste to get away he hadn’t even considered it, and suddenly he found himself trapped with the ghosts of his past, all bearing down on him with the severity of the Siklo gaze. Vallnor’s own face – his face, once upon a time – was also there. Part of him wondered if it made him as much a relic as they, nothing more than a placard beneath a gilded frame.
But he was paying the price for being the boy to cheat the ravages of time. Because everywhere he looked it kept skipping before his eyes, seeing bright shining floors and smelling fresh paint one minute, then blinking into hanging cobwebs and chipped marble in the next. He was too many people all at once, so many thoughts and memories swimming in the vast, incomprehensible ocean of his consciousness, and he was but one lone voyager in a tiny rowing boat trying to paddle to the edge of the horizon.
Vallnor wasn’t used to feeling so insignificant. He was effectively immortal; a veritable god. And yet. And yet here he was, unsettled, dislodged from reality, desperately trying to gather up the scattering fragments of his identity into something he could call his own. The instinct to reach down and pull up flame into his palm hadn’t faded and he sighed a breath of relief to see it burning in the cup of his hands, tingling against his skin. The world opened up, currents of energy so strong and vibrant all around him.
“You would hate to see us now, wouldn’t you, father?” he murmured, holding the flame up to the painting of Varren Siklo so that the green shimmered over his high cheekbones and thin, pressed lips. The likeness showed signs of age, lines around his eyes and brows, jawline sagging just a little. Oh, how he would have hated such a sign of weakness.
You and your sister are our legacy, his father had sneered once. Locker knows why the phoenix picked you but it is a done deal. Don’t sully the Siklo name.
“For the flame bows to none,” he echoed, the precise tone of his father’s clipped vowels resonating inside him. Strange, to have had a family, so long ago. The man before him had never been a parent to him, not truly, but some distant part of him shivered with longing, to have at least known where he came from.
Vallnor squashed it. “I am the prince of the flame. I will show
you that we can’t die. Because we are your legacy and we will be better than you ever were.”
Because the fire still burned. Because his father hadn’t been chosen by the phoenix. But he and his sister, they were the children of the flame, and like the great firebird, they would rebuild their kingdom piece by piece. Vallnor nurtured the resentment, fanning the smoke until it flared up inside him, reminding him of who he was. Of all that was his. He locked eyes with green paint, unflinching.
“I will show you what being a Siklo means.”
*
At first there was no thought. For what could have been seconds, or days, or years, or millennia, there was nothing but sensation. Unfiltered through the lens of human language, stripped of context, it was nothing but pure, raw, untapped feeling. There was no he, no she, no them. It was free falling through the messy tangle of other consciousnesses, strange and alien. It was never hitting the bottom, just the endless fall until adjustments were made. Until slowly slivers of himself were uncovered, but like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, they didn’t quite fit together. The broken edges couldn’t be mashed back together, the picture incomplete.
Seeker. Boy. Rift-breaker. Niks Kataema. Pjurrei. Storm Lord. Ziko.
He knew they meant something to him, in the distant way one registered a gun firing before the bullet pierces flesh, but in the moment he couldn’t access the memories that came with them. They just were. No attachment, no feeling.
Gradually he was able to rake in the scattering of his memories but most slipped through his fingers, unable to grasp onto anything substantial to shed light on where he was. The colours coalesced into a rainbow of so many vibrant shades it was difficult to look at. Everything was so much more vivid than he remembered; smells sharp and overwhelming, sounds crashing around him and making him panic and stumble, the tickle of sensations vibrating through his very core. He wanted to reach out, to swipe away at the offending feelings, but he had no real form to speak of. Here, in this realm, he was as unreal as the spirits, barely strung together by hazy thoughts and the sensation that something was missing from him.
He was seeking.
On and on he drifted, surprised when shapes became clearer to him. Pink, frilly fronds floated through a substance thicker than air, as if he were actually swimming in water, and he tried to paddle out of their path only to go colliding into their prying fingers. Cringing at the buzz and crackle, he was suddenly thrown into another dimension, everything much darker and sombre. The sky – if it could be called a sky – was stained with ink, running down the parameters of his vision. Fear, clogging up his throat. The creature was trying to devour him, to take his energy and make itself stronger.
He tried to scream but couldn’t, for he had no throat. No lungs. Struck by the instinctive need to breathe, he gasped, unable to find air, and flailed. There was no rise and fall of his chest, as natural as the steady rhythm of his heart. He could feel none of it. The panic in him rose, bubbled over, and it took tangible form before him as his surroundings turned a deep cerise, crimson pooling at the bottom. Pockets of bulbous eyes opened all at once, staring at him from every angle he turned. A high-pitched whine started from the distance, growing sharper and more painful by the second.
He wanted to run but there was nowhere for him to go. Help me, he cried out. Please, help. Snaking creatures slithered from spindly tree-like beings spouting from the crimson pool. One wound its way around him, striped with a white so bright that it almost seemed to flash as it moved. It tasted like sawdust in the back of his throat; like the dry, hissing sands in the desert, witnessed from the tiny window in the attic. He could hear something like its thoughts, and it was a burning bright curiosity at the intruder shaking up its boring, mundane little world.
You taste wrong, it said.
I don’t know where I am.
You are not. This is not a place of being.
I don’t understand.
I am you and you are me, yes?
If he could have frowned he would have. No.
Suddenly the creature plunged into him and he reeled, pelted with the knowledge of all the different things this creature had once been. For it had been the drifting pink fronds, and the blinking eyes, and myriad other streams of consciousness caught upon the currents of this world. To be was not quite the same as it was on the other side. For survival required change. Here, where things changed as fast as he could think of them, there was only adapt or die.
Everything has a name, he said, even though he was uncertain of this fact. Even you.
I am called the Shiki.
Shiki.
The Shiki. The one who lingers.
I had a name once.
Everything has a name, it repeated. It sounded like it might have been mocking him.
I do not know what it was.
Pick one, then. You can choose. The creature kept coiling around him, spooling out longer and longer. It should have been impossible, and yet, and yet nothing was impossible in the realm of dreams. Here, he was connected to everything around him so strongly he could make reality quiver with just a thought. Here, he could change the landscape with the force of his feeling, the ground rumbling every time he remembered his fear. The possibility of it ached inside him. Anything seemed such a yawning chasm for him to topple into.
There was a snag to the Shiki’s words, a familiar catch that had him picking at it until it finally unravelled. You’re free to decide who you want to be, had said the man that had reminded him of the Reaper, pale as death and adorned in black. Perhaps this was him now, in the Netherworld. Perhaps his father was wrong and he had finally completed the trials that allowed him to earn his name. Perhaps, he, worn so thin his sense of self had stretched into something translucent and flimsy, had reached the stage of inevitable rebirth.
But one thing remained. The storm, crackling at his fingertips. The crash of lightning and the caustic stench of it cleansing the rains thundering from the sky above. As he thought it the space above him cleaved in two, hot, gloopy liquid spilling down upon them and making the Shiki hiss, spinning through him with flickers of its faint, shifting memories. The rumble above reverberated through him and he could not tell if it was real or if it was little more than his own memory, bolstered by this strange place. If it was haunting him like he had become his own ghost.
Ziko. Respite after the storm. Rift-breaker. The one to unite the worlds. These were names he had earned. Not given away like thoughtless, half-hearted gifts. They were signatures forged by his own hands, with the help of another who had become a part of him. He focused on her form, picturing her in his mind eye, but the image kept shifting, until once more his desperate sketches of the fox spirit became the Shiki.
That is a dangerous one to have, Ziko Rift-breaker.
A dangerous what?
Thought. Ally. Friend.
And if she is me?
The creature tittered, tail swirling so fast it stirred up little wriggling worms of worry, scattering out into the stormy sky beyond. You will draw others here.
Others?
Powerful ones.
I was powerful.
The Shiki snickered, the atmosphere brightening to a dusky yellow, a field of sunflowers rippling up around them and blinking with one large eye in the centre. As soon as he thought of flowers they erupted in a wave of blooming buds, only they looked different from the ones in the physical world, petals sharp and jagged, stalks swaying as if alive, their faces spinning around and around and around until he felt dizzy.
What is powerful here? If you and I can change anything at will, who has the real power?
You are naive, little big thinker.
That does not make sense.
No? The Shiki weaved itself into knots, so tangled it seemed it would take years to unpick itself. Then suddenly it danced out of each loop in a matter of moments, looking quite pleased with itself for a riftspawn with no eyes. What is sense? What is power? It cackled at him, the sound of claws raking aga
inst a tree, only he felt the sound inside him, rattling around like a loose tooth.
Now who is being naive?
He tried to picture the fox spirit again, the name coming to him with a flash of light shining down upon him. Niks Kataema. That is her name. Niks!
The Shiki darted away, its form shifting the same shade as the sunflower fields so that it could no longer be seen. Ziko could feel its presence, knew exactly where it was, so he wasn’t exactly sure what the purpose of its camouflage was other than to demonstrate its protest. Do not. You will bring them here.
Bring what?
The ones who devour.
Ziko did not understand. All he knew was that he was still alive when he shouldn’t be and that he was closer to finding his missing half than ever, so close the shifting currents of energy almost seemed to whisper his name, an echo of the breeze that had teased his hair before he had known all Niks truly was. Their connection could not wholly be severed – he believed it with all of himself – and so it must have been truth. And in this realm, where any man could be king, his truth reigned supreme.
Niks will protect us. She must be here, somewhere. How do I find someone in this realm?
The Shiki appeared once more, its motions tentative as it drifted closer, tail flicking behind it in a gesture he read as anxious. There is no end to this realm. To find something you must will it enough that it comes to be.
But I do. I wish to see her more than I have ever wished for anything in my life.
It was true; the boy named Seeker had never dared want anything for himself, for to want things for himself was to live the covetous life of the damned. According to his father they would suffer for eternity in the Netherworld. Only through the sacrifice of personal artifices could a person ever earn the right to such things, but first one had to prove themselves to the Pillars. Only then could Seeker take his own name, his own affects; his own identity.
The Rising Tide Page 4
