I couldn't help the dejected sigh that escaped me as I found myself once more in the library of blank books.
Perhaps it was my own defeatism or a sense of pure desperation that drove me there and had me perusing those long, desolate shelves in the early morning hours before the rest of the manor was awake. My fingers thumped over the empty spines as I selected volumes on a whim.
All were empty. Useless.
The Cassandra's voice filled my head as I walked and listened to the thump of my fingers and the silent shift of the floor beneath my shoed feet. You hold everything you need to save your contemptible little creature.
"That's hardly helpful," I grumbled to nothing, wiping my dusty hands off on my pants. The sleeves of my overlarge sweater sagged past my elbows again and I pushed them up with an agitated shove. "Honestly, I'm relieved I've seen so little of that confusing woman."
I returned to the table I'd claimed as my own and began dismantling the book pyramid I'd built in my boredom. Darius had been back in the manor for three days now, and I'd yet to make any progress in finding the solution to our problem.
Like a bike in the mud, I kept throwing my weight forward and spinning my wheels, but I was getting nowhere. I begged for traction from whatever King or cosmic force would listen—but I was granted nothing. All I saw were fractions of Peroth's haunting memories and the echo of so many voices trying to tell me so many things.
Once broken, you can never truly be whole again.
It's a beautiful thing, really. They make each other strong, they make each other...something else.
You cannot remake what was broken. You must begin anew.
Anew.
"Stupid," I muttered as I slammed a book down atop another, then splayed a hand over the cover as if apologizing. "I'm stupid, and this whole manor is stupid. What, by all that is, is the point of a library without any words?"
Heat spilled across my skin as Darius appeared at my back, his breath scalding against my neck as he spoke into my ear. "To remind you that you know nothing."
"What the hell!" I yelped as I spun and furiously rubbed my neck to dispel the chills. I glared at Darius as the Sin peered down at me, something close to a smirk tilting his lips. "That scared me!"
"I know." He tapped an indolent finger against his breastbone. "I felt it."
I almost mocked him simply because my heart was still racing, but I recalled to whom I was speaking and stifled the urge. Ignoring the heat in my face, I turned my back and resumed collecting the books.
Darius reached past me to snatch one from my grip. I tried to take it back, but he casually tossed it open upon the table.
The pages were filled with words.
Mute, I stared at the printed script of an ancient typewriter and the careful borders inscribed by the writer. "How?" was my solitary, frustrated question.
"You have to ask very nicely." Darius's wry amusement only served to further annoy me as he shut the book and shoved it into my hands. I opened it, and it was empty.
The Sin began walking toward the far end of the library. Abandoning the tomes on the table, I followed him.
"I've read every book stored on these shelves," Darius said with a bored gesture toward the rows we passed. Each aisle was crammed with volumes from floor to ceiling, but Darius spoke with indifference, not exultation, as if he regretted every hour he spent drudging through this trove of words during his long, long life. "Trust me when I say there is nothing here that would help me kill him."
I remained silent. There was nothing here for Darius, and nothing here for me. The manor would have given me what I needed had the answer been here, and yet I kept searching. Books had been my solace in the past, and a part of me refused to believe I couldn't just pull a resolution off a shelf and hold it in my hands—but our dilemma was more complicated than that. Possibly more complicated than I could handle.
"Where are we going?"
Darius shrugged. "I've something I wish to show you."
"What?"
The Sin glared but continued on. We wandered deeper into the library's depths—deeper than I typically liked to delve. The statuettes in the alcoves became more deranged and grotesque in appearance, and the light emanating from the gas lamps and the skylight overhead dimmed. A paltry haze of dust and shadow stirred with every step.
There was a slim door ahead of us, positioned between two set of shelves. I hadn't seen it before and it was quite possible it hadn't been there until Darius and me went looking for it. Given its slender proportion, I would have thought it was a closet or a storage room—then Darius opened it.
Blackness eddied about our ankles from the narrow passageway beyond.
Darius entered. Stymied, I waited until he had almost disappeared into the gloom before I jumped in after him. The door swung shut on its own.
The corridor was barely wide enough for the Sin to navigate without walking at an angle. The paneled walls were covered in an eon's worth of dust and cobwebs that quickly stained our arms and hands. Darius vanished ahead. Barely able to see more than a foot or so in front of myself, the oppressive heat squeezed my throat and stole my air.
I stopped moving with my hand held before myself, a shiver jarring my very bones. I couldn't breathe. It was like being wedged in the crevice between walls with the manor's heartbeat throbbing in my ears. There wasn't any space to breathe. There wasn't any space to go back.
Darius's hand parted the dark to take my arm. His quiet amusement had a heat all its own as his fingers tightened upon my wrist and the Sin pulled me forward. "I find it ironic you can stand against murderous madmen and unhinged creatures without a whisper of fear touching your heart—and yet you're afraid of small spaces."
"Shut up," I growled, though I didn't shake him off. I allowed him to lead us further into the passageway, and eventually the light disappeared entirely. We kept going—until the manor's overbearing presence eased and the heat broke. Cooler air brushed my face as the scrape of our shoes upon the floorboards was replaced by the steady drip-drip of water.
I stretched my hand out for the wall and found nothing.
The passageway widened, and Darius released my wrist to walk at my side. A somber glow of silvery blue built ahead of us, and I again wondered where we were going. The light fell upon jagged cave walls and highlighted the serrated edge of stalagmites formed like the fangs of a wolf's lower maw.
"Are we even in the manor anymore?" I muttered as I stepped over a puddle of dark water. Darius had to duck beneath a warped overhang of rock.
"Yes," he said, voice loud in the din. "We're below it."
Below it? "We didn't take any stairs."
"You say that as if it matters." The passageway—or tunnel, as I was beginning to see it—came to an end. A simple door was set in the craggy wall, the light creeping in from underneath. "Take it from someone who has a far keener sense of his surroundings than you; we are below the manor."
The Sin shoved the door open, and I stepped inside our destination.
It was a cavern. The stone walls were bowed outward and domed at the cavern's pinnacle—and every inch of their surface was marred by vivid, carved runes. A tree grew at the cavern's center, though it was like no tree I'd ever seen in my life. It was monstrous in proportion and its dark, twisted limbs pierced the cavern's walls, delving into the rock like veins in skin. The light that had beckoned us forward seeped between the crenulations in its bark like cyan honey.
I could hear music, a subdued, euphonious singing of quiet voices met in choir. The breath of their song gathered and stirred the canopy of silver leaves. Thousands upon thousands of those dangerous silver leaves.
"You mentioned visions to me before my...sojourn." Darius stowed his hands into his pockets, glaring at a curious branch that came near. It withered as if it could sense his ire. "I was preoccupied, and didn't give your words the credence they deserved, but then I remembered...silver leaves. You said silver leaves."
It was impossible to take it all in. The area was massive. The tree's twisted roots were easily as twice as large as I was and stood several feet above my head. There wasn't a set path, so the ground beneath my feet was a field of crumbling rocks and the old husks of dead leaves. What were those? Forgotten memories?
One of those curious branches came too near and I brushed my fingertips over a leaf. I saw a flash of color, saw white marble veined in gold, a veranda jutting into the abyss, and a mass of lean, towering figures silhouetted against a red sunset.
Peroth screamed, "Vixiel!" until the darkness overtook him.
Darius sighed and jerked me back by the collar of my shirt. "Don't touch the leaves, idiot."
Confused by the fervor of the bleak vision, I didn't argue with the Sin. I kept my hands to myself as I explored nearer the tree's trunk. The manor's pulse was stronger here, but between every throbbing beat came the crooning siren of those voices.
"W-why can I hear singing?" I asked Darius as he trailed behind. He shrugged and did his damnedest to appear bored, but I saw the sharpness in his gaze and how closely he monitored the cavern for threats. It was a peaceful area, but also ominous, as if we walking below a dozen knives all tethered by thin strings.
"This is the heart of Crow's End. The source of its energy, and its madness. What bits of himself Cuxiel's fed to the manor keep it...stable, for lack of a better word, but the magic that gives it life is of the Dreaming. Given that one of your ancestors was one on the Isle's Children, you have just enough of that essential spark to hear their Songs."
I lifted my gaze to the canopy. The light given off by the tree was reflected in the metallic quality of the leaves and seemed to set the cavern ablaze in colors of blue, sapphire, and violet. The words of the Song written into the tree's being careened in intermittent bursts. I could understand the words but not give voice to them. Separately, they made absolutely no sense, but together the words coalesced into perfect, cohesive lines.
"It's beautiful," I told him, carefully sidestepping a low-hanging bough. "Strange, but beautiful."
The Sin stood unmoving with his hands in his pockets as I explored. "I hear nothing."
I frowned as I imagined the cavern without its Song. The idea of such silence was...unnerving.
"Darius, can I ask you something?"
He scoffed as he disappeared and reappeared several feet above on one of the roots. He paced its length with the sinuous grace of a jungle cat peering down at its intended prey. "You're going to ask anyway, why bother getting my permission?"
He had a point. "In the...memories I've seen, you always had blue eyes." The Sin's pacing stopped. "I wanted to know why they're red now."
Darius's expression was hard, unreadable. He turned and spoke not to me, but to the tree and to the music he couldn't hear. "It's a phenomena that occurs in Sins when...when our minds break. It's a prequel to devolution, the first warning sign of our loss in control. When we become red-eyed beasts, it's...the beginning of the end, you could say."
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. "But you're not...not...."
"Mad?" The Sin began to pace again, slower this time, his nature less predatory and more thoughtful. "No, I'm not. But I was. For just a moment, I was."
Darius dropped from his perch and landed in front of me. I was startled but didn't back down when he loomed, staring directly into my face with those strange, strange eyes of his. "For thirty years he tortured me with fire and lash, and yet I refused to give in—until the very end. Until I could no longer stand it, and I gave in to that need, to that lulling serenity that is the dominion of madness. That should have been the end for me, but...."
He trailed off as his gaze flickered with distant, painful memories.
"But?" I prompted.
"But he brought me back. He showed me the way out of the madness and back into my sane mind before it became...permanent. The Baal restored me, then...let me go. I'll never understand why."
Given the Baal's capricious nature, neither would I. If he'd been so intent upon breaking Darius, why heal him when the Sin finally relented? What sick game was that?
Darius walked around me as his footsteps broke the dead memories below.
I remembered then the red-eyed stares of the fractus within the Dreaming Isle's memory. I remembered their twisted forms and those eyes must have reflected the broken state of their minds and souls.
The Baal had told Peroth, "You cannot remake what was broken. You must begin anew." That was true. He couldn't remake those vicious fractus into anything else—not unless he broke them. Not unless he shattered those imperfect things and formed them into something else.
The image of the broken angel figurine flashed before my eyes. Try as he might, Peroth hadn't been able to remake it. He had only been able to compile a lesser, broken angel. A lesser, broken Absolian. A Sin.
But...what if he hadn't tried to remake the Absolian? What if he had taken those pieces, and had tried to make something else? In theory, wouldn't his creation have been whole? If his goal hadn't been the perfection of the Absolian, but something lesser, wouldn't it have been whole and—technically—unbroken?
You must begin anew. There is no such thing as revival—only rebirth.
Darius hummed and the sound rumbled in his chest like a warning growl. "You have that look upon your face that spells trouble for all of creation."
I blinked and glowered at the Sin. "I was thinking."
"Dangerous territory, indeed."
I aimed a blow at his chest, but Darius used that predacious grace of his to dodge. "Ass."
A coy smile tipped the creature's lips as the Song's susurration riffled through his carmine hair. "I've been called worse—by you, in fact."
He hooked an arm about my middle, mindful of my injury, and suddenly I was airborne. I swallowed my squeak of surprise as I landed sprawled atop one of those gargantuan roots and scrambled to grab hold.
His weight thumped nearby. Darius was laughing. "Graceful as ever, girl."
Swearing, I sat up and shoved my disheveled hair from my face to find the Sin perched upon the root's edge, his elbows balanced upon his knees. He tipped his head to the ground on the opposing side of the root, and I peeked below.
Water gathered where the earth sloped and butted against the trunk's bulk, forming a thin, placid lake. The blue light reflecting off the silver leaves was mirrored within the water and distorted into a mirage of a million cold colors. Every thump-thump of the manor's heartbeat trembled through the liquid, and the colors danced.
I snapped at the Sin for throwing me about, but couldn't quite tear my gaze away from the water as I sat next to him. The light burned like silver-lined sunlight—so cold and bright and brilliant. Darius said nothing as he folded his hands together and I memorized the entrancing sight of the shimmering lake.
I would have never guessed something so beautiful lied at the heart of this wild, precarious manor.
"The world is filled with many strange things," I sighed as I bounced my heels on the root's side. "So many mysteries. I could spend years unraveling them if I only had the time." Quieter, I added. "To think I wasted many of my years deeming the world monochrome and dull."
The Sin of Pride said nothing. He only watched the ripples roll upon the water as the amusement he felt minutes before dissipated.
The leaves rustled overhead, and one fell from its branch to the earth below. I watched as it curled and slowly, slowly died. It became just another forgotten memory left to break and decay into dust. I wondered at the multitude of dead leaves scattered upon the cavern's floor—and at the veritable forest of leaves above.
I wondered if, in Darius's mind, this moment between us was just another leaf waiting to fall and be forgotten. I imagined that in the immortal existence of a man like him, my entire life was just one more late autumn leaf awaiting its end.
I only hoped he'd remember this time favorably. Despite the heartache and pain I had endured, I knew I'd always remember Darius and the world he showed me. Wherever I went after my end, I knew I'd always remember him and this place.
"What are we going to do now?" I asked, watching as Darius increased his grip and his knuckles shone white.
The Sin of Pride frowned, the light playing upon his face and in those scarlet eyes. "I don't know, Sara," he whispered. "I really don't know."
He and I sat in silence for a long time. I leaned my head upon his shoulder and thought of that broken angel figurine in Peroth's office and considered what it all meant.