I opened my eyes to the same sight that had greeted me a while back. The same faintly shimmering lights. The same carved wooden ceiling, glowing under the low crimson light that spilled in through the window across the room.
As I realised where I was, I felt a slight warmth against my right hand, clasped between a pair of smaller ones.
Aela.
To think I had actually survived the trial. Though I still did not know whether surviving it had cost more than it was worth.
It had been harrowing in a way I had not fully understood yet, and lying there, I could already feel that something in me had changed. That some part of me had not returned.
I just did not know yet how deep that went.
I felt it now, a strange density low in my abdomen, foreign and unmoving.
My first Reliquary had taken shape, now that I had passed the trial.
I was officially an Awakened. The first of the five stages of being Touched.
As I shifted, trying to push myself upright, I noticed the hands holding mine tremble slightly before drawing back.
Pushing myself up, I finally took in her figure properly. Silver hair falling loose over one shoulder instead of its usual braid, her rapier still at her side.
Whatever had felt like days on the inside, dying over and over, had apparently only been a few hours out here.
Her expression confirmed it before she said a word. She was searching my face for something specific, her lips pressed thin and unsteady, dread creeping into her eyes the longer she looked.
Wait, what?
Before I could say anything, her chair scraped back hard, and her hand was already at her hip, closing around the hilt of her rapier.
I did not get a single word out before I felt it. The pressure of a thin blade held steady, its tip hovering a few inches from my throat.
What the fuck is going on?
"Wait, wh..."
"Silence," she cut in, her voice cold, every trace of the gentleness I had known from her replaced with something I could not quite place.
I noticed the shake in her arm even as she held the blade level, the faint tremor running through the tip of the rapier where it bit slightly into my neck.
Her eyes looked cold on the surface, but underneath that, up close, they were scared. Frightened of whatever she thought she might have to do next.
She kept staring, searching for something in my face, and the longer she looked, the harder her arm shook.
Did she think I was a Fissure? Did she think I had failed the trial?
I could not really blame her for that. I had written it happening countless times throughout the novel myself.
People waking from a failed trial wearing every gesture and phrase their loved one had used. They would lure whoever was watching over them into lowering their guard, right before showing exactly what they had become.
That was the real horror of a Fissure. It could think and move and speak in ways that looked human enough to fool you. But there was nothing left underneath any of it.
My Mark.
That was it. She could check that. If a Touched failed and turned, their Mark turned with them, corrupted into some inverted version of what it used to be.
Slowly, keeping my other hand where she could see it, I turned my forearms over and held them out to her.
She looked at them for a long moment. I watched the relief come into her face, and I felt my chest loosen with it.
Then her eyes came back up to mine, and every part of that relief drained straight back out of her.
The blade came up again.
What was wrong?
Then it hit me. It was not her that was wrong.
It was me.
That strangeness I had noticed the second I woke, the distance sitting behind everything I felt, I had assumed was leftover shock from however many deaths I had just come through.
The weird thought behind my eyes, where when I saw her, I didn’t see a human there.
I understood what she was actually seeing when she looked at my face, at my eyes.
I knew what it probably was before I let myself finish the thought.
My Burden.
Being Touched did not only come with abilities. It came with a price for carrying them.
And mine had apparently already taken enough out of me.
"Say something," she said, her voice cracking despite how hard she was clearly trying to hold it steady.
"Say something that sounds like you."
And that was the moment I understood exactly what I was about to do.
Because I did have something, but using that meant I was going to use a dead boy’s grief to keep his sister from killing me.
"If you are not you," she said, her voice gone very quiet and very steady now, steadier than anything else about her, "I am not letting you leave this room. And I am not leaving after you."
Her words hit me somewhere I had not yet braced for.
I finally understood exactly why she had agreed to watch over me, when she could have refused his order and let someone else carry it.
She had already decided that if it came to this, she was not planning on surviving it either.
The realisation landed like something cracking open in my chest, relief pouring into the space it left behind.
And underneath it, the guilt, just as heavy. Guilt at how willing she was to take her own life for someone who was nothing but a parasite wearing the skin her brother used to carry.
She saw it too, I think. Something in my face must have shifted, because the fear behind her eyes wavered, just slightly, as though she was starting to see something familiar surface there again.
I forced my voice steady.
"Ever since we lost Mother," I said quietly, "I pushed you away."
The guilt was lashing at me now, my heart almost buckling under the weight of it.
"I told myself getting stronger mattered more than anything else, and I let that become an excuse to shut you out for years. I am sorry for that." You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Her eyes trembled, and the rapier slipped from her fingers, clattering hard against the wooden floorboards.
Her arms fell limp at her sides, her eyes welling up before the first tears finally broke loose and slid down her pale cheeks.
Before I could say anything else, she threw herself against me, arms wrapping tight around my side, her face pressed into my chest as she sobbed, her whole body shaking.
"Yu-Yun," she managed to choke out, the words muffled against my shirt, the wet heat of her tears soaking through the fabric.
"I thought, I thought you were..."
It had worked. Every word of it was true, and not one of them was mine.
Raising my arms, for a second I noticed the tremble in them.
Some part of me screamed that I had no right to touch her. No right to act like the person I was not.
And yet the other part pulled her in properly, holding her against me.
"Hey," I said quietly, my voice softer now. "I am here. I am fine. I am sorry I scared you."
She did not answer right away, just clung tighter, her sobbing slowly easing into smaller, quieter breaths against my chest.
Eventually her breathing evened out, and she pulled back just enough to look at me, her eyes red and swollen.
"I looked at your eyes," she said, her voice hoarse now. "I am sorry. I thought you were, I thought you had..."
She could not finish it, and she did not need to.
I looked down at my own arms instead, at the streaks running beneath the skin.
She stayed quiet, watching me, some understanding passing through her. It had probably occurred to her that this had something to do with my Burden.
"I am sorry," I said finally. "Coming back from that trial did something to me, I think. I feel strange. Off, somehow, in a way I cannot really explain yet. I did not mean to scare you."
She nodded slowly, accepting it without pushing, the tension finally draining out of her shoulders.
I kept my eyes on my own hands rather than hers.
No Touched ever told anyone their actual Burden.
Not a lover, not a sibling. It was not paranoia, but simply pure survival. The one person who knew exactly what your Burden cost you was also the one person who would know exactly how to break you, and there was always the chance that person turned into a Fissure one day and used every bit of it against you.
Aela shifted beside the bed, wiping at her face with the back of her sleeve, some of her usual composure returning even though her eyes were still red.
"Father will want to know you are through it," she said quietly. "He probably felt it happen from wherever he is. I should go and tell him myself regardless."
She lingered a moment longer, as though she was not quite ready to stand up, before finally pushing herself to her feet.
"Get some rest," she added, managing a small and tired smile. "I will see you tomorrow."
I gave her a small nod, watching her cross the room, the click of the door leaving the room quiet again.
Alone, I lifted my arm and studied the marks more closely, the lines deeper than they had been that morning, catching what little crimson light spilled through the window.
And behind my temple, the Ledger sat waiting, that same faint pull it had carried since the day I woke here, patient and entirely willing to tell me what all of this had bought me.
But yet I did not look, some part of me worried about all that it would carry.