The first sound was a rustling.
Low and steady, like wind through a wheat field, except there was no wind. I was on my feet before I understood why, spear in hand and my whole body covered in goose bumps. In the corner, Sun woke with a jolt.
“W-what is it? Leader?”
“Get up. Weapon in hand.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Now, Sun.”
He didn’t ask again. He groped in the dark until he found his palette and brush and got up on shaky legs. I was already at the window.
The field of white flowers behind the village was moving.
It was the petals: thousands of them coming loose at the same time, rising into the dark air and spinning, like snow falling upward. For one minute, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in Erebus, in this life or the other one.
Then the petals started to come together.
They stuck to one another in small whirlwinds, gained volume, gained shape: a beak, a pair of wings, a pointed tail. In seconds, the sky over the field was full of white birds the size of crows, made of nothing but petals, with two points of pale light where their eyes should be.
“That’s n-not good, right?” Sun was glued to my shoulder.
“Not really.”
KRAAAAA
The cry came from a thousand throats that didn’t exist. Dry, like paper tearing. The windows of the village shook.
I was already going down the stairs.
*
“RAFAEL!”
The big man was running up the street from the stream with Lili in his arms and his shield already on his left arm. The girl was awake, clinging to his neck, her eyes wide.
“I saw it!” he shouted. “What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know.”
It was true, and that made everything worse. The index didn’t have a single line about this floor. I hadn’t walked without a map since the sidewalk.
“But they’re coming this way. Bertil!”
The old man was standing in front of his table, the oil lamp in his hand. He was looking at the sky the way you look at an old leak in the roof.
“The petal crows. Almost every night, after the bell. They come for the ones who have already forgotten.”
“Come for them?”
Bertil pointed the lamp at the street.
I looked and, for a second, thought I was seeing things.
There were people walking along the stone street. They were coming out of the houses, through doors that opened on their own, and walking toward the field at a procession’s pace. Men and women of every age, in nightclothes and bare feet, arms hanging and heads tilted a little to one side, listening to music only they could hear.
Their skin was white from head to toe. There were no more leaf marks, because there was nothing left but the white.
“The fevered,” Bertil said. “The ones who forgot their own names. First they walk. Dying comes later.”
One of them, a middle-aged man, passed a few meters from us. His lips were moving, and I heard a faint murmur, repeated over and over:
“What. Was. What was. What.”
“They’re a-asking something,” Sun said.
“Their own name,” Bertil said. “It’s the only thing left. The question.”
KRAAAAAA
The crows dove all at once, and the air in the street went white.
*
The first wave came down on the street like a white avalanche. I swung the spear, and the Hsu Quandao cut three birds in half in one stroke. They burst into petals that fell like confetti, and for a second it seemed easy. Then the petals on the ground stirred, gathered and took flight again.
“They come back!” Sun shouted. “Leader, they come back!”
“I can see that!”
Monsters that come back without leaving a body. Rework with no overtime.
Rafael put Lili down behind him and raised his shield. The crows hit the metal with a sound like hail, CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK, and he planted his feet on the stones and leaned his body like a boxer on the ropes.
“Little one, blessing!”
“Mm!”
The gold bloomed in Lili’s hands, weaker than at Hanne’s house, because she still hadn’t recovered, but enough. I felt the warmth run down my arms, and the spear got lighter.
“Sun! They’re made of petals!”
It took him half a second. Then his eyes lit up, and I knew that face: it was the one he made when he found the right color for a canvas.
“Petals. P-petals burn!”
“Then burn them!”
Sun dipped his brush in the palette, and the bristles turned red. He drew a square in the air, fast, shaky, more crooked than he would have liked.
“IGNITE!”
FWOOOSH
An area five meters by five exploded into flames over the street. Dozens of crows were swallowed at once, and this time the petals didn’t come back: they turned into black ash that rained on the stones and stayed there.
[EXP +2 x23]
[EXP +46]
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
“It worked!” Sun’s voice came out shrill. “It worked! Oh my God, it worked!”
“Again. As soon as it recharges.”
“Three seconds of duration, a few minutes to recharge! I’m going to need cover!”
“Rafael!”
“I’m here!”
He took two steps to the side and covered the painter with his shield. The crows diving at Sun hit the metal and fell dazed, and I cut them down before they could rise again.
For a moment, we had a rhythm. Rafael held, Lili blessed, I cut, Sun burned. We hadn’t fought like that since the forest, like a real group, and something like pride rose in my chest.
It lasted until the first of the fevered got too close.
It was a woman. Young, about twenty, in a white nightgown with her hair down. She didn’t attack. She came toward Lili with her arms out, the way you go to meet someone you know at the market, and she kept repeating the same endless question.
“What. Was. What.”
“Little one, get back!” Rafael shouted.
Lili didn’t move. She stood rooted to the ground, her eyes on the woman.
The woman opened her mouth, wider than a human mouth should open. Out came a gust of white petals that wrapped around the girl like a sheet.
“LILI!”
I moved.
“Shadow Emergence!”
The world went dark and came back, and I was between the two of them. The spear was already coming down in an arc. Only in the last fraction of a second did I see the fevered woman’s face.
She was just a girl. A girl with freckles on her nose and her mouth still open in a question.
I hesitated.
It was enough for the petals to wrap around my arm too, cold as snow, and for a whisper to slip into my ear, in a voice that wasn’t the girl’s, or anyone’s:
You’ll forget too.
“DON’T KILL THEM!” someone shouted behind us.
I turned my head. It was Pia, at the door of her house, with Hanne behind her wrapped in a blanket.
“Don’t kill them! That’s Greta! She did our braids at the festival!”
“She isn’t Greta anymore!” Bertil’s voice cut across the street like a whip. The old man was by his table, lamp raised, and his tired face had hardened. “She doesn’t have a name anymore, Pia! She isn’t anyone anymore!” And, lower, almost only to me: “Please. If you’re going to do it, do it fast. It’s the only good thing anyone can still do for them.”
The petals were squeezing my arm. Lili moaned, muffled, inside the white cocoon.
I closed my eyes for half a second and swung the spear.
SHHK
The fevered woman fell without a sound. The petals around Lili came apart like sugar in the rain, and Rafael pulled the girl behind his shield.
Pia screamed, a scream with no words in it at all, until Hanne pulled her inside and shut the door.
I stood still in front of the freckled girl’s body.
The one who swung the spear was me, not the Black Radiance that sometimes smiled beneath my fear. With my eyes closed, but it was me, and I would have given anything for it to have been him.
*
We fought for another hour.
There was no more hesitation, because there was no room for it. The fevered kept coming, two at a time, three at a time, always with the question on their lips, and with each one that fell the petals in the sky grew thinner. Sun burned the sky three times, until his hands shook so badly the brush kept slipping. Rafael’s shield got dented in several places. Lili passed out on the fourth blessing, and the big man fought the rest of the night with her tied to his back with his belt.
I killed eleven of the fevered.
The last one was an old man.
He came out of the house next to Bertil’s leaning on a cane he still held out of habit, even without knowing what it was. He wore a wool vest over his nightshirt, buttoned wrong. He didn’t hold out his arms or open his mouth. He just walked to the middle of the street and stopped there, his eyes on the sky.
“What. What was it.”
I finished him with a single blow, clean, to the heart. He fell sideways, like a tired tree.
A sphere came out of his chest.
It was a dull, grayish white, like old ceramic, nothing like the light blue of ordinary souls or the purple of Baekyung’s soul. It floated low and slow, almost without will.
Out of habit, I reached out and touched it.
[Level 3 Soul collected]
[Random mental attribute increased: Intelligence +1]
[Echo detected]
Echo?
The world folded.
I’m sitting at a wooden table, in a small, warm kitchen. Morning light comes in through the window. There’s a cup of tea steaming in front of me, and the hands holding it are old, spotted, crooked at the knuckles.
On the wall, held up with a pin, is a sheet of paper with a child’s drawing: a house, a yellow sun, two stick figures holding hands, one big and one small. Underneath, in crooked letters, someone wrote a name.
I look at the name and can’t read it.
The letters are there. I know they are. But every time I try, they slip away, like a fish in a wet hand. I know it’s the girl’s name. I know the girl is mine. I know I’ve said this name thousands of times, in the morning, at night, shouting in the yard, in a whisper beside the bed.
What was my daughter’s name?
The question isn’t in my head. It’s in my chest, in my throat, in the crooked hands squeezing the cup until the tea spills and burns the skin.
What was. What was. What was my daughter’s name. I know. I know. I knew. Why can’t I…
“Sehun! SEHUN!”
I came back all at once, and it hurt.
I was on my knees in the middle of the street. I didn’t remember falling. Rafael was holding me by the shoulders, shaking me, his face a hand’s width from mine. Sun was behind him, the brush gone dark in both hands.
“Kid, talk to me. Can you hear me?”
I tried to answer and realized I couldn’t breathe properly. The air came in short, in jerks. My hands were shaking, and I had the taste of tea in my mouth. A tea I had never drunk.
“I’m…” My throat was closed. “I…”
“You screamed,” Sun said. “Leader, you screamed really loud.”
I looked at the hand that had touched the soul. Empty, as always. But the question was still in there, quieter now, like a radio playing in another room.
What was.
[Soul Count]
[The echo persists]
“What happened?” Rafael wouldn’t let go of me. “Did he hurt you? The old man?”
“No.” I shook my head. “It was the soul. When I absorbed it, there was something inside it.”
I didn’t know how to explain the rest. I didn’t know how to say that, for a second, I had been an old man in a kitchen, trying to remember his own daughter’s name and failing. That I could still feel the crooked hands under mine.
The worst part I didn’t know how to say either: that I knew that feeling. The book with no title on its spine. The girl’s voice that shouted boss and had no face. I had been living with a small version of that question since the Turn. The old man just had the whole thing.
Shuffling footsteps came closer. Bertil, with the lamp in one hand and the book of names under his arm. He knelt beside the fevered man’s body, his knees cracking, looked at the man’s face and only then opened the book.
“Tomas Bree.” His ink-stained finger stopped on the line. “Carpenter. Made the table in the chapel. Bad with numbers, good with his hands.” He turned the page. “He had a daughter.”
My head snapped up.
“What was her name?”
Bertil looked at me, surprised by the urgency. Then he went back to the book.
“Elsie. Died in the fall, before the fever. Pneumonia. She was seven.”
“Elsie,” I repeated.
Inside, the radio in the other room switched off.
The old man’s soul was still with me, heavier than the others, like a smooth, cold stone among pebbles.
I stayed on my knees in the street until they hurt.
Elsie. Elsie Bree. Tomas’s daughter. Seven years old.
If I forgot, no one would remember anymore. Bertil already couldn’t read the first pages.
*
When the sky began to lighten, the crows came apart on their own, and the petals went back to the field like dust settling. We went back to Bertil’s house and each of us dropped wherever we could: Sun on the living room floor, Rafael in a chair with Lili asleep on his lap, both of them filthy with ash and petals.
Bertil served bread and what was left of the previous night’s soup, reheated. Sun ate like a wolf. Rafael barely chewed and saved half of every piece for Lili, who woke up halfway through.
I didn’t eat.
I picked up the bowl, looked at the soup and felt my stomach turn. I still had the taste of tea in my mouth. I put the bowl on the floor and went to sit by the window, my back to everyone.
I thought no one had noticed.
Half an hour later, when I turned around, there was a piece of bread on the sill beside me. Half of Lili’s bread, the bigger half. She was on the other side of the room, on Rafael’s lap, pretending to sleep with one eye only half open.
I stared at the bread. For me, gifts had always come with a bill.
Then I picked it up and ate it, one little piece at a time, until there was nothing left, and I kept looking at the empty sill for longer than I needed to. Across the room, the half-open eye closed.
She learned that from Rafael. Leave it beside you and keep quiet.
It was the second time that week someone had taught me that. I was still a terrible student.