9.

 

Zaifyr was dry by the time the haunt rose from the water. With her gaze upon him, she drew closer, the splotches of red throughout her shrinking, diminishing to tiny points. “What is your name?” he said to her.

“What happened to me?” the haunt asked, instead.

He did not reply.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

For a moment he was silent, uncomfortable. He could not reply. He could stand and leave. It would be what Jae’le would want. It would— “You cannot leave here. This is where you died—where the Quor’lo died. Before today, I might have said that you would be where your body lay, but I would have been wrong. Your soul died here. This is where you will remain until the world is no more. As to what happened to you when you hit that wall?” He shrugged. “You can’t pass through walls.”

“I’m cold,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“I’m hungry.”

She was not fully restored. It would take days, not hours, for every part of herself to thread back into her soul. It was as if parts of her immortal being was seeking a way to pass on to another existence, to find what the gods had promised at the creation of the world. “What is your name?” he asked.

The haunt hesitated, a troubled look stealing across her face. “Oyia,” she said finally.

Zaifyr had thought that her appearance would change as she pulled herself together, that the modest, dated dress she wore would disappear. His cynicism prompted an image of wealth, of a modernity that opposed the ideals of equality and humility that he knew priests spoke of with a rhetorical joy. He found instead that the dress remained reminiscent of an older culture, that its simple cut and modest angles were a truth.

“I feel as if I should not have said that,” the haunt said, her voice confused with regret. “My name is power to the likes of you.”

“It is.” His fingers touched the skin beneath his wrist, seeking out the absent charm as he reached out for her, not physically, but with a touch that, while unseen, was still tangible. Oyia would feel the weight in her mind, as if a solid object had pressed against her skull and was looking into her following the trail of memories back to her origins.

At first, he saw a room no larger than a cell: a bed stood along the left side with a table to the right. A basin of water sat on it, books next to it.

Applying pressure took him outside the room. A long hallway greeted him, rooms lining both sides. The doors made from white ash wood. Inside, the spartan living standards of the first room were repeated and men and women, each wearing simple robes of brown, were within. They knelt, stood, prayed, their faces turned away from the door and hidden from him. Zaifyr did not push against her resolve.

Yet, the stone hallway felt like it never ended and Zaifyr briefly considered turning around, returning to the rooms he had passed. But a sense of anticipation had begun to fill him, the emotion drawn from the haunt. He had loosened his pressure and she was lost in her memories, unaware that he was there, unaware that he felt not just her love but her respect for the person who stood in a long, high-roofed auditorium, surrounded by rows of benches.

A man. A single man, militarily attired.

He wore not leather, nor chain, but a uniform of white and red, the former color dominating while the latter ran in lines down the chest and connected to a long, flowing cloak. A peace knot was looped around the long sword at his side. He wore the weapon uneasily, as if he were unaccustomed to its weight. His bearing, the way his hands clasped behind his back and the tilt of his head, spoke neither of a military background nor a religious one. Yet he commanded the kind of respect that Zaifyr had connected with leaders, with kings and generals—but even as he thought that, he realized that while the man was respected he was not the object of love that Zaifyr had felt upon entering the room.

The true object of the haunt’s love lay behind him, in a small room made from brick and empty of anything else.

A child. A girl, no older than seven.

She was pale-haired and pale-skinned and wore a robe of purest white. Her eyes were green, like his, but they held nothing of importance, nothing to suggest that the child was anything more than that—until she lifted her gaze and met his.

Zaifyr blinked.

In front of him, the haunt whispered, “Cold.”

There was a chill in him as well, born from what he had seen, what he had done. From the recognition that both, he knew, would have to be confessed to his brother.

“Can you…” She hesitated. “Can you stop the cold?”

“No,” he lied.