Chapter 59 - End of a Legacy.
The road outside the university gates lay under a low afternoon sun, clipped hedges with small dark leaves running along the verge, and long shadows stretching from the white fence posts across the pavement.
Aren was brushing the dust and dirt off his clothes, while Eveline's surfboard hovered just off the ground by his ankle.
"I never would have thought I'd see anything like this," said Aren, brushing off his knees.
Eveline let out a small laugh and carefully picked a couple of leaves out of his hair.
"They're pretty popular here, and there are flashier models by now, but mine works beautifully. My father gave it to me for my last birthday."
Aren straightened up, running a hand over the front of his uniform one last time.
"Maybe one day I'll have one of my own."
Eveline smiled and dropped her eyes to her surfboard.
"By the way, Aren, how old are you?"
Aren went still and turned to Eveline, who looked back at him.
"Well... um... that's a pretty complicated question..."
"What do you mean?... You just need to know when you were born," she answered, raising one eyebrow.
"That's exactly the problem..." Aren answered, rubbing the back of his neck.
Eveline knitted her brows and tilted her head slightly, trying to catch Aren's eyes as he looked away.
"Wait, are you—" she began, when a voice cut in from the side.
"Aren!" Olen called.
"Oh, there he is," said Aren, turning and catching sight of the cadet.
"Aren't those graduates supposed to be on duty at Solum?" Eveline asked, watching Olen walk toward them.
"Well... right now we're all living in the same Hall."
"Huh?" said Eveline, surprised, glancing at Aren.
"I don't fully understand it myself yet... but it seems they're keeping an eye on me"
Olen stopped two paces in front of them, looked each of them over from head to foot, and let his eyes settle on Aren.
"Are you two finished?" the cadet asked.
"Well... we were still discussi—" Aren began.
"Not that. Classes. Are they over already? Or are you on a break?"
Aren faltered for a moment, and Eveline decided to answer for him.
"Yes. No more classes today."
"Good. Aren, let's go," said Olen, turning and heading off in the direction of home.
Aren sighed and exchanged a look with Eveline, who waved him off with a knowing smile, and he set off after Olen.
Eveline stood without moving, following him with her eyes, the hand she had waved with still raised at chest height, and then, taking a short breath, she called out to him.
"Aren!"
Aren and Olen stopped and turned back to her.
"Come to the library tomorrow before classes!" she shouted across the road.
Aren turned his head toward Olen, who paused briefly, his eyes moving from the girl to him, then gave an approving nod and walked on, while Aren smiled and looked back at Eveline.
"All right! See you tomorrow!"
Eveline smiled with a light breath out and waved to him again, as Rexy landed neatly on her shoulder.
The same low light that had stretched the shadows at the university gates now lay across the western quarter of Midar, where the Lumière house rose in a heavy mass of white stone, older and more silent than anything around it, and came through its tall turquoise windows to fall across the marble floor in long green patches.
The dining hall took up the middle of the ground level beneath a vault of gilded ribs, and along both its walls ran the gallery of ancestors, where the men of the House stood carved one after another in white stone, each holding a faceted photocyte in a raised palm.
A long table of dark wood stood beneath the vault, set for three, so that both its ends were left bare.
Between the gallery and the table the maids moved in grey dresses and white aprons, laying out plates, setting the cutlery, and filling the jugs with water. Every one of them had beige skin, and they kept their hands low and their steps short and quiet, and not one raised her face as she passed beneath the statues.
One of them bent over the tabletop, squaring a knife against the edge of a plate, and stepped back, running her eyes down the row.
Aurora came to the table, tall and very straight, in a floor-length gown of ivory with a high standing collar, fine gold embroidery spreading across the bodice. She looked over the setting and nodded to the maids without lifting her face to them, and they bowed slightly and left the hall, while two of them stayed behind the table with the jugs.
Then Aurora raised her eyes to the entrance arch, from which Varian came slowly into the hall, tall and heavy through the shoulders, in a pearl-white robe that reached the floor, a fine thread of gold branching across it. His white beard was cut as precisely as his swept-back hair was combed, and he adjusted his sleeves as he walked, making for the head of the table.
Stopping at his chair, he glanced back at his wife, and then at that same arch, where a moment later Gray appeared, lifted his eyes from the floor to his parents, and walked slowly to his own place beside his father and across from his mother.
Varian did not sit at once, watching his son in silence as the boy stopped beside him and lowered himself into his seat at the same time as his mother, and only then did Varian let a moment pass and sit down himself.
The sound of the photocytes did little to break the silence in which every member of the family took up their cutlery in both hands and began the meal.
Varian put a piece of baked Radiant Forest fruit into his mouth and chewed it carefully, glancing over at his son, who was silently doing the same without raising his eyes from his plate.
Varian went on holding the slice with the fork in his left hand, cutting it with the knife in his right.
"How are your studies going?" he asked.
Gray went on eating, his eyes on his plate, and answered only once he had swallowed.
"Everything's fine. Same as always."
Aurora silently raised her eyes to her son, keeping her face slightly lowered, while her hands cut the fruit into even pieces.
"Has anything new been happening?" his father went on.
Gray smirked, put a piece in his mouth, and began speaking around it.
"New? Oh yes... A new student's come to our un—"
"Don't talk with your mouth full, Gray," his mother cut in sharply, and her son stopped mid-word, looking her in the eye, then swallowed the half-chewed piece.
"A new student has come to our university... and into my own group, no less," he went on, turning back to his plate.
"And what is remarkable about that?" Varian asked.
"The fact... that he's a foreigner," Gray answered, his hand speeding up as he cut the slice with his knife.
Varian's fork stopped halfway to his mouth, and he raised his eyes up the table.
"Hm... Aurelius ordered it?"
"Hah... who else?"
"Mhm..." Varian said, still staring at nothing, and then went back to his meal.
"I see."
"You see?... And that's all?" Gray asked.
Aurora went on chewing longer than the mouthful called for, not taking her eyes off her son.
"Are you unhappy about something?" his father asked.
Gray set his knife and fork down on the edge of his plate with a loud clatter, planted his forearms on his thighs, and looked at Varian.
"Yes. Of course I'm unhappy!"
"Mind your language, Gray," his mother ordered, and Gray swallowed his answer, looked at her, and then turned back to the conversation with his father.
"Our university is meant for the best students, the ones gifted with magic! For our own people! And not for outsiders!... And the Archon... simply spits on our standards! On the rules and the laws!"
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"And which laws exactly forbid foreigners from studying here?" Varian put to him.
Gray said nothing, while his father went on cutting and eating at the same pace, still without raising his eyes to his son.
"So...so what difference does it make?!... The point is that—"
"A great deal of difference," Varian cut him off.
Gray broke off again as his father set his elbows on the edge of the table and slowly raised his eyes up its length, speaking as he did.
"When you state something with confidence, you are obliged to have proof. You stated that our Archon has spat on our rules and our laws. And so I put a question to you that you ought to have an answer for, given how confidently you said it. Am I right?" he said, then turning his gaze to his son.
Gray kept his fists under the table and did not look away from his father.
"Do you... do you even hear me?... What we are talking about is the Archon of Light letting an outsider into a place where he has no business being!"
"And yet he did it, because he has the power and the right to. Exactly as he did more than twenty years ago. That was when a foreigner first studied at your university."
"Oh really?... I know!... I've seen the archives and I've read the history!... And note that ALL OF THIS is happening during the rule of Aurelius!... The man who became Archon of Light purely by luck, when it should have been YOU!"
The hall sank into a silence in which Varian set down his cutlery, and Aurora slowly moved her eyes from her son to her husband.
"And yet I did not become one. And Aurelius is our supreme Archon. What is the point of all these words?" Varian asked.
"The point is that this whole outrage has to end!... We are the direct descendants of the First Archon!... We are House Lumière!... And from time immemorial, only the direct descendants of Urian Lumière himself became Archons of Light, and so we must take back our inheritance, make Helios what it ought to be!... Instead of what we see now... when in the great Midar University for Conductors, a foreigner sits in my lecture hall, and a dirt-skin along with him."
Varian set his knife down on the edge of his plate too carefully, while the two maids at the wall behind him traded a glance.
"A dirt-skin?" Varian asked.
Gray froze for a moment and shifted his eyes to the beige-skinned maids, who at once turned away from him.
"I...I meant... a Null... or rather not exactly a Null, but her Pandorum is so weak that she's no different from a Null and... she has beige skin," he answered, turning away from the maids.
"So that's how it is... we now insult and humiliate people who did not choose to be born Nulls? And Aurelius? Is he a dirt-skin to you as well?" Varian asked, without taking his eyes off his son.
"N-no... I only mean—"
"Enough, Gray. Don't you dare make excuses, and answer me honestly... IS THAT the reason you attacked a girl in your own year?"
Gray forgot to breathe out, and his hand, which had never reached the cutlery, stayed where it was on the tablecloth, while Aurora went on watching intently.
"How do you—"
"The magister reported all of it to me. In detail," Varian answered, looking straight into Gray's soul.
"Father... she—"
"Not she, YOU...You went up to her, you picked at her, and you all but set Alvazar on her companion. Do you really think that your blood... your place in this house... gives you the right to look down on other people?... Do you really believe you have any right at all to judge others, to insult them and make sport of them, and imagine you won't meet the consequences?"
Gray clenched his fists tighter and tighter as the pressure built in his head, until it drove him up out of his chair, into a quick bow, and off toward his room.
"Gray," Aurora called after him.
"Leave him. Let him think about his words, his conduct, and his attitude," said Varian.
Aurora moved her eyes to her husband, watching him go on eating.
"Don't you think there's something to what he says?" she asked.
"Oh? And what would that be?"
Aurora's eyes narrowed as she let a moment pass, watching Varian, and then went back to her plate.
"Aurelius permits far too much. An outsider in our republic, and in the university on top of it. That is a great deal of trust to extend, and it carries enormous risks."
"That is so. But Aurelius is neither a fool nor blind. If he personally arranged this foreigner's schooling, then he learned enough to trust him. It would be a mistake to underestimate his seriousness and his judgment."
"And yet, if it turns out otherwise, that mistake will cost him very dearly. Perhaps that is precisely the opening Gray is hoping for."
"Aurora. You are on this again. Enough. We closed this subject, and that is that."
Aurora looked her husband in the eye without a word, then took up her cup and drank a mouthful of pale gold wine, and Varian did the same.
The same silence that hung over the table below lay in Gray's room as well. He had come in and shut the door behind him without turning, and stood in one place with his eyes on the floor, the only movement in the room the curtains at the open window.
He felt a pulling sensation growing in his chest, and his body stayed where it was.
Gray slowly raised his eyes and looked at the painting that hung in his room, in which he himself was shown as a child, standing beside his father and his mother.
His thoughts drifted back into the past, where that child stood at a private ball to which all the highest ranks and families of Helios had been invited.
The reception hall was drowned in an even golden light that poured from the photocyte crowns hung beneath the vault and lay across the white marble, across the glasses, across the embroidery of the gowns, while between the columns the families stood in groups in heavy silk and light brocade, their voices blending into one low hum.
Varian stood by one of the columns, his head inclined toward Aphira Ray, Archon of Trade and Intelligence, and they were speaking under their breath, exchanging short nods.
Young Gray looked up at them, his face tipped back, then turned and walked toward the long table of refreshments.
He went through the groups of people in expensive clothes, skirting hems and coat-tails, reached the table, took one pastry, and heard whispering off to the side.
"That's Varian's son, isn't it?"
"Yes, the only child and heir to the family."
"I heard he's only a third level."
"What a shame... it seems the great House of the First Archon really has lost its greatness."
"Yes... that child can safely be taken as proof that the great Lumière legacy is at its end"
Gray turned his face toward them, and the speakers at once turned back to one another, while the boy himself put the pastry down again and walked quickly away through the crowd, until he stopped in front of his mother, who stood in silence and looked at him.
Gray moved his eyes from his own childhood face to his mother's.
The child's room was steeped in evening light coming through a narrow pane of turquoise glass, where shelves of books with tooled spines stood along the wall, and on a low table wooden animal figures stood in a row by height. Gray sat on Aurora's lap.
"Everyone says I'm the full stop at the end of our family's history."
"People only want something to talk about," his mother answered.
"But my teacher said that our family always had Archons of Light, and that my father was supposed to be the next one... and then me..."
"That is true. But before you were born, circumstances turned out otherwise."
"Is that why everyone looks at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like I've done something wrong... but I haven't done anything"
Aurora laid her hand against his cheek and lifted his face to her own.
"They look at you that way because they placed their own hopes on us and those hopes were not met. None of that is your fault, but it is your responsibility. And that responsibility is to prove to all those people that you are not the end of our House's greatness. You are Gray Lumière, heir to the great House of Urian Lumière."
Gray did not take his eyes off his mother while she gently straightened her son's hair.
"You, like your father, were destined by right of blood to become our ruler and to lead the people of Helios toward the light and toward greatness across all of Prime. And so, nothing that is happening now must ever be allowed to make you forget who you are. Times always give way to other times, and so do rulers. And so you must believe, and you must strive to take back what was once taken from us. Taken from you. And make every one of those who doubted you take their words back."
Then other images surfaced in his thoughts.
The university's main square on the first day of the semester hummed with new voices, where yesterday's schoolchildren gathered into knots beneath the turquoise domes, tugging at the stiff unfamiliar collars of fresh uniforms, and Gray stood among three others like himself.
"Whoa! So you're a direct descendant of the First Archon!" said one of the students.
"Yep."
"That's amazing..."
"What sort of companion do you have?" the second student asked.
Gray smirked, pushed back the sleeve on his left arm, and touched two fingers to the photocyte on his bracelet, and it lit with a smooth glow as Alvazar came down out of the sky.
"Holy crap!" the students cried out, while many others across the square also kept their eyes on it, smiling.
"What armour! I wish I could get something like that for my hawk... "
"Well, maybe someday I'll be able to get you one just like it," Gray answered with a smile, and the student's mouth spread into an even wider smile, his eyes shining.
But then a general hum of surprise made the students and Gray himself turn toward the university gates.
Eveline came out onto the main square, stopped after a few paces, and looked everyone over.
"Hey... what's a Null doing here?" said one of the students.
"Why is she wearing our uniform?"
"Is she going to be studying with us?"
Questions and whispering voices began to pile on top of one another, while Gray knitted his brows and let his hands fall.
Then a recent scene flared up in front of his eyes.
Eveline stood in front of him, looking at him coldly and with disgust.
"A strong Pandorum doesn't cancel out a weak mind," she said.
Then the scene at the training grounds surfaced.
"How badly must things be going for you, that out of every opponent matched to your companion's level, you picked Rexy?" said the beige-skinned student to the heir of House Lumière, whose inheritance was under threat because of a new, beige-skinned Archon of Light with nothing in common with that great House.
Gray clenched both fists, set his teeth, and dropped his eyes to the floor, while the silence in the room was still broken only by the faint movement of the curtains.
At that same time, out in the desert, the ninth patrol detachment stood with horror frozen on their faces, all of them staring the same way, while their flyers hung back with their ears flattened, giving ground a step at a time.
In the sand ahead of the detachment rose a huge mass of pulsing biomass in the form of a cocoon. It beat with a steady heart rhythm, each contraction giving off a dull thud with a wet, slithering undertone beneath it, and in several places a taut membrane of flesh stretched across it, an inner light spreading behind the membrane in time with the pulse.
"What the fuck... is that..." one of the patrol muttered.
"Has to be the damned Erz... looks like those bastards had to sink all the way to the bottom before they'd start using filthy magic..." said a second.
"Hell, that stink..." said a third, pressing a palm to her face.
The leader of the detachment stepped to one side and began circling the cocoon, examining it, and the others followed him. He stopped mid-stride, a shudder going through his whole body as his eyes went wide, and the rest reacted the same way when they saw the stretched, disfigured silver face of an Erz spread across the back of the cocoon, amid all that mass of flesh.
"Send a signal to Solum. Red. Lucia needs to see this herself," the detachment leader said.
One of the patrol immediately took out a device with an integrated photocyte, laid two fingers against it and drew them all the way up, and the photocyte switched over to red. Then he raised his arm overhead, and the device released a powerful beam of red light straight up into the sky. The Lumisensors, the instruments that register such signals, caught it at once and raised the alarm.
"Can we go back to the flyers? It doesn't sit right with me, being this close to that thing," said the sergeant.
"Agreed, this smell is about to make me throw up," another answered.
"Go. I want to look at this a while longer," the lieutenant answered, and four of the six set off for their flyers, circling around the cocoon.
"Do you think the Erz really have taken up dark magic?" asked the soldier who had stayed with the lieutenant.
"I don't know... but unless I'm mistaken, not even the Valkarans dealt in anything like this..."
The cocoon churned and jerked, and both soldiers flinched. From the other side came the roaring of the flyers and the screaming of the men.
The two of them ran clear and froze as they watched their comrades, and saw two long tendrils of flesh burst out of the cocoon and punch clean through each flyer in a chain, and then through the soldiers seated on them, driving through every limb and every part of the body, fusing them into a single biomass and dragging them in.
"WHAT THE HELL?!" the soldier shouted, and snatched up a photocyte hilt, formed a magic sword, and charged in, hacking the tendrils apart.
The lieutenant took a hilt in each hand as well, formed two swords, and rushed to help.
He leapt to the flyers and set about cutting away the foreign tendrils breaking out of one part of a body after another, trying to sever the soldiers from their beasts, and saw that on one of the soldiers a tendril of flesh had driven through her leg and was taking in more and more of her thigh, knitting into her flesh as it went.
Once he had cut through every tendril that held her, he took her up in his arms and leapt down onto the sand with her, looking at her face choking on blood, at eyes red with burst capillaries, and at the veins standing out abnormally on her cheek and pulsing to a hideous rhythm.
Meanwhile the second soldier cut through the last of the tendrils and turned to see the flyers and the rest of the victims collapse onto the sand, fused together by bloody flesh and pulsing as one organism.
"LIEUTENANT!" the soldier shouted, and the lieutenant turned to see the cocoon in front of the man begin to swell and pulse faster, the flashes behind the taut membranes coming brighter and brighter, until the outline of a figure showed through from inside.
The next moment the cocoon burst, spraying blood and pieces of bodies in every direction, and both soldiers shielded their eyes with their forearms as hot blood covered them.
Lowering his arm, the lieutenant saw a creature straightening up in front of them, the like of which this land had never seen.