She became aware of an endless, silver fog slowly, like waking to a dream.
Once, she might have found it curious, comforting. Now, it only echoed back on itself, a numb abyss that she could lose herself in forever. She did not move. She did not call out. Her strength was spent, having leaked through the cracks she'd made after digging too deep. Her spirit was weak and left battered just to breathe.
Everything was silent. She was silent.
She didn't want to be aware. She wanted to rest, but this silver fog held her back from tumbling into sleep. She remained awake, exhausted but unable to lose consciousness. So many blackouts throughout her life, and the one time she actually wanted one, it was denied to her.
It wasn't that she lacked a purpose. She wasn't alone. That silver figure carved of light moved among the fog, beckoning her, calling her, but she just couldn't find the strength to move. No matter how urgent it became, she just couldn't bring herself to listen. She was flat out just breathing.
She dropped her head down into her lap, wrapping her arms around her legs.
She'd never felt like this. She'd never felt so broken. So empty. So utterly, completely spent. Moving felt like it'd kill her. She didn't know if she was dead, Dark, or somewhere inbetween. Maybe that was why she couldn't sleep. Maybe she was dead, stuck somewhere between the waking world and the sleeping, forever trapped, forever in this silence--
No.
That small, tiny part of her, the single spark left in her core, flared into a bright, defiant note among the overwhelming silence in her head.
Did the Serpent really beat you? the spark demanded to know. Are you really just going to lay down and die like this? After all that talk with the Serpent? The only reason you annoyed him was because he believed you.
I had Banshee's strength then, she replied. Banshee's strength held me together.
Wyvern didn't have his Luminary strength. The spark wasn't as loud as it'd been before, but it still refused to be ignored. Refused to be stifled. You still heard the sheer stubborn will that held him together. Are you gonna tell me that Wyvern is stronger than you?
Her fingers tightened on her arms. I don't know.
You care so damn much and you're so strong because of it, whispered the spark.
Olivia looked up, searching for eyes, for the colours, and found only silver.
"What did you say?" she said into the silvery void.
The spark did not reply, and left her to the silence.
Eternal, echoing, silence.
No.
She'd had enough of silence.
Olivia forced herself to take a breath. Olivia put one foot flat on the ground and pushed. Olivia was the one who stood up, and Olivia was the one who refused to collapse back down when her legs were shaking and her body wanted to crumble into a heap.
You've always been there for us, Shadowheart. For me.
He'd said those words, starlight be damned. He had said those words. To her. He'd said them to her. And she'd heard him, and she'd fallen asleep beside him, and she was enough.
This, this mess of a mind that she had was enough, Other be cursed. She still barely had the energy to move, could barely move or breath or think beyond this sheer, stubborn determination that flicked on like a default setting and absolutely refused to be shut up.
The silence crept back, ringing in her head. Olivia covered her ears against it.
Strong because of it.
There'd been a song. He'd hummed her a song, a song that had fought back the silence, a song that she'd first heard on his violin, a song that'd lured her and flared the spark at her core into flames and smoke so suffocating that her breath had caught coals in her throat.
It was that song she hummed now, that song of golden fire and acrid smoke. It wasn't loud, wasn't strong, but it was enough, and the spark slowly flared back into a glimmering ember.
Nothing was really here, but she was. She was here. His song, her song, it fed the spark until she didn't need to hum to ward off the silence. It was fragile, it was cautious, but if it was half as stubborn as she was then it wasn't going anywhere any time soon. Her legs still shook, but she was pretty sure they weren't real anyway. There were far too many missing bruises and cuts, which really, was a rather morbid way of thinking about it, but if she stuck her head too far into the reality of 'probably in another hallucination' right now, she wasn't sure how long she was going to last before the last tether of her sanity snapped, and that really wasn't something she was looking forward to, because, well--
Olivia took a deep breath and forced herself to swallow down the hysterics.
Starlight, she really was out of it.
The silver figure cut from light was closer now, swaying a few metres away. It reached towards the horizon, where thunder from a distant storm was rolling in. The fog around them shifted, restless, and the figure looked back towards Olivia, the urgency clear.
"What do you want me to do?" Olivia asked, only half focused on the storm as she tried to decipher this figure before her. Though its entire being seemed formed from light, there were points that seemed... brighter, like the light came from within to form the whole. Olivia tilted her head. Like there were crystals imbedded in its skin, or--
The figure drew its arms inwards, taking a hesitant step towards Olivia before pulling back. It glanced at the storm, then back at Olivia, and finally, when the storm of silver mist was close enough for Olivia to see the darker, roiling haze within it, the figure finally made a decision.
It ran the last few steps to Olivia and embraced her.
The figure's light swallowed her, and Olivia almost screamed. Memories came flooding back of the light she'd stepped into from the Serpent's darkness, the light that'd gone one and on and on and on until it'd led her to the City that was hers-yet-not, the first hallucination, the beginning of her existence of a million realities where she'd watched them die a hundred times over, realities of being trapped and hunted and starlight, starlight she'd barely scraped herself back together, she couldn't do it again, she couldn't--
The aurorasong slammed into her chest like a second heartbeat. The blinding light receded, sucked into Olivia's chest like Viri did for Banshee's transformation. It slipped into her breathing, her blood, her mind. It wore Olivia like she was a second skin, calming her and soothing every piece of her that she had left.
Or at least, it was trying to. In the absence of her own, pure, home-grown fear and panic clogging her mind, Olivia knew exactly what this light had done. As strong as those feelings had been, the light had swept them away like they were nothing, and they weren't nothing. They were hers, dammit, and at this point, her mind was about the only thing she had left and she was going to keep her own Other-cursed feelings no matter how useless the damn things made her thank you very much.
The light sensed this, and responded by digging deeper into Olivia's mind, searching for those doubts and raising anxiety, but Olivia wasn't having it. She dove into the shadows of her mind, shadows so deep that they swallowed the light.
"Give them back!" Olivia shouted, clutching the sides of her head. It probably didn't help, but it felt like it did, and that was the important thing right now. "You can sit in there if you want, but you do not take my feelings away, I know you're trying to help but those are mine and you do not have permission to take them."
The light prodded once more.
Olivia shoved it back.
An eternity passed in their standoff, both waiting for the other to make a move, to give in, to break, when, to Olivia's surprise, the light backed off.
It vanished from her mind with an indignant huff, taking the aurorasong with it.
The strange sense of being alone crept over Olivia once more, but she steeled herself with a breath and looked around, finding herself among buildings of rose-coloured starstone that were all too familiar. One look at the sky, however, and the comfort of familiarity died in the sight of the endless, silvery barrier that stretched out across the sky and hid the horizon from every angle.
It was the same City she'd seen in her first vision, the one that had first taken her from the darkness. Instead of above it, she was within it, in the middle of one of its sprawling streets.
Olivia's breath caught as her earlier panic rose once more. She spun around, finding people around her, figures garbed in long, ethereal robes of similar colours. They were all faceless, a blur of colour where their features should have been. Their voices were murmurs in her ears, a droning hum that made no sense as they swallowed her senses and drowned her.
"Hello?" she tried, approaching one of the groups, a group dressed in garments of yellow, beige and white. None of them acknowledged her, so she stepped closer, absolutely not in the mood to be ignored.
Olivia reached for their shoulder.
Her hand went straight through it.
She stumbled forward, right into the same space that the figure she'd reached for still occupied. The rest of her passed through their body just like her hand had, and with no shortage of horror, she scrambled backwards onto the starstone road behind her. Though she tried to force herself to breathe, tried to calm herself down, the rest of her wasn't having any of it.
"Can anyone see me?" she called out, desperately shoving herself back onto her unsteady feet and running towards the next group of people, this time garbed in sea blue and neon green. "Can anyone hear me?"
Not real.
Every group was the same. Their low, hummed murmurs weren't quite real. The City around her retained a dreamlike quality. The walls weren't quite solid. They shimmered with a strange, reflective light, and little by little, panic ripped her will to shreds.
You're not real.
Breathe, she kept telling herself, but she couldn't. The instincts that'd kept her alive in the Serpent's torture box was rising, the numbers, the empty, detached thoughts that had stopped her from thinking about it too much and kept her head above the water even as it quenched her fire and killed her. A delayed death, one that stretched her existence long but thin, one that--
No. No, she could fight it. She could... she could do something about this.
She found a quiet corner, covered in as many shadows as seemed to exist under the all-encompassing gleam of the barrier above. She sat down. She wrapped her head in her arms, and she clamped her eyes shut into darkness as the panic kept screeching inside her head. She took a breath only when her lungs forced her to.
She counted each one, forcing herself to focus on the numbers until the panic receded.
But it didn't.
It grew stronger and stronger, suffocating the music from her mind.
And the silence was creeping up once more.
*+*+*+*
Jason walked down the hallways of the hospital at a steady pace, not entirely sure where he was going, but retaining his confidence on the matter regardless.
He inclined his head to several of the staff he passed, exchanging polite words to decline the few who offered him assistance and quickly locating a small sitting room with a window. It held nothing more than a few chairs around a table and a water dispenser, but it was empty of people and surveillance, which made it perfect.
Jason stepped inside, quietly pulled the stopper out from under the door and closed it.
With one, last sweep of the room to ensure it was safe, Jason reached up to his ear and placed Sae's cuff in the centre of his palm. "Sae, I need to tell you something."
The icy ear cuff grew wings and exploded into a ball of snowy feathers, and Sae's eyes blinked open. "What's up, Jason? Did you find Olivia?"
"Yes," said Jason. "Adande wasn't lying about that at least."
"Sounds like you think he might've been lying about something else, though."
The words dried up in Jason's throat. He so badly needed to know the truth, to know whether Olivia was truly Banshee, but if Sae confirmed it, then it also confirmed that something was wrong with Jason's mind. His mind. The one place he'd always been safe with those precious thoughts that were no ones but his when nothing else was. If he'd lost that without realising, if he'd--
Jason swallowed, exhaling through his nose and forcing himself to focus on something simple--like the feeling of Sae's feathers on his skin. Cold, yet pleasantly so.
"Jase?" said Sae, hopping forward. "What happened?"
"I don't know if this will change how you think of me," said Jason before he could back out. "I don't know if this will deem me unfit to remain a Luminary, but I have to know why. I have to understand, because... I just don't think I can live with it otherwise."
"Live with what otherwise?" said Sae. "Jase, what'd you do?"
Jason shook his head. "It's nothing I did. Or at least, it's nothing I'm aware of." He managed a breath. "You've made statements in the past that seem as though you are aware of Banshee's civilian identity. Is that true?"
Sae hesitated, then fluffed himself into a rounder shape. "It is, but you know that I couldn't tell you--"
"Adande said that Olivia is Banshee."
Sae went still.
"According to him," Jason continued, hoping that if he just kept talking, he'd say something that would help. "He got Banshee away from Cryo and took her outside the Limit to keep her from the Serpent. Once she was out, she dimmed--I... I saw her Ascended, Sae. I saw her tattoo, and Adande's story lines up, and it explains an enormous amount of Olivia's past behaviours. Her random disappearances, her knowledge of Banshee, Ella. It explains so much."
He couldn't bring himself to just pin the next part to his rambled sentences, but he didn't have to.
Sae's feathers smoothed out, his eyes drifting low around Jason's palm. "But no matter how much evidence you have, you can't believe it, can you?"
"No," murmured Jason, squeezing his eyes shut with a frown. "No, I can't. And... and I'm, well, I'm concerned that the Serpent has somehow... altered my thoughts. If he has the power to delete and reshape memory this way, then nothing can be real, Sae. If he's inside my head, then perhaps it's not safe for me to remain Luminary."
Sae was all too quiet on Jason's palm. The Ascended tucked his beak under his wing, preening it through a few feathers as he often did when he was considering something, or thinking it through. But the seconds kept ticking by, and Sae just kept going from one feather to the next as if nothing had been said at all.
Jason couldn't take it. "Sae, please say something."
"It, uh, wasn't the Serpent," said Sae, beak still under his wing. He pulled it out and turned one eye to face Jason. "It was me."
Jason's palm moved a little further from his face. "You?"
"Yeah, me." Sae tucked his wings in close to his body, appearing unusually sleek, which told Jason enough. "You, uh, kinda worked out that Olivia was Banshee a while back, before the festival. You somehow managed to end up somewhere you shouldn't have been, and you pulled a piece of it back with you. You became consciously aware of a memory you shouldn't have been able to summon, and well, the choice was either wipe your memory or Banshee goes Dark."
"You... you stole my memory?"
"Only because I had to."
Jason swallowed. "Did you ask? Did I agree?"
"Not... exactly," said Sae. "You were about to say it out loud and it was a 'now or never' situation, but for what it's worth it wouldn't have worked at all if you'd been resistant to the idea. I kinda just figured you were okay giving up the memory because you knew you weren't supposed to have that knowledge, but you were unusually stubborn about the idea too so I--"
"You?" Jason's voice came out as barely more than a whisper. Everything else was crushed beneath the disbelief that Sae, that his own Ascended would... "You... you tampered with my head without asking? Without... without--Sae you of all people should know that I wouldn't be okay with you just assuming I'd be fine with you taking my memory like that!"
"It wouldn't have worked if you hadn't been okay with it!" squawked Sae.
"I would have been, had you asked me!" said Jason, standing up and flinging his hand up, forcing Sae into the air. "But you didn't. You didn't ask. You just took it!"
"I didn't have much of a choice!" said Sae, his wings flapping frantically to keep him in the air. "With the Ascended rules, I couldn't wait. I had to act, or Banshee would have gone Dark!"
Rules. It wasn't the first time Jason had heard that, but it was the first time it'd stung this fiercely.
"My mother had rules, too," muttered Jason. He wrapped his arms around his stomach to try and dispel the building nausea with little success. "You told me it wasn't right, the way she... she took things from me because of those rules. You told me so many times that it wasn't fair, that it wasn't okay, and now you're telling me you did the same thing?"
"It wasn't the same," said Sae.
"It feels like it."
Sae cautiously flapped closer, clearly hoping to be allowed a landing place on Jason, but Jason...
Jason just couldn't.
"Jase--"
"I understand why you did it," said Jason, digging his fingers into his skin through his clothes. "But I want to be alone. I need you to leave until I've had time to think."
"Are you breaking the bond?"
The answer should have come immediately, yet in its place, doubt rose. Doubts about his own ability, his utter incompetence, and the million ways he'd failed this City in the past week. Without Banshee, he'd so quickly fallen to his frost. He'd been willing to hurt, to do whatever necessary to accomplish his goals, and too many had suffered for it. Nereid, Wyvern, Olivia, Skinwalker--just four names on an ever-growing list of proof that he was not fit to be a Luminary without a partner to keep him in check.
"Not yet," said Jason, looking away. He drew in a breath and used it to straighten his shoulders, to lift his chin with the kind of confidence he'd learned to fake all too well. "I don't know, Sae. I need to think, and I don't wish to make any rash decisions in this state of mind."
For a moment, Jason wasn't sure if Sae would respect that decision, but the Ascended managed a glum nod.
"I understand, Jase," said Sae. "Tap your tattoo when you're ready for me to return. I'll be close by. And, well, for what it's worth, I'm sorry."
With that, Sae flew out the window and disappeared into the twilight.
Time passed.
Jason remained in the sitting room, though for how long, he wasn't sure.
He stared at the window until his eyes felt dry and his temples began to pound from the lack of sleep, at which point he sat down in the chair against the wall and planted his head in his hands. His mind felt blissfully empty. He didn't think, didn't worry, didn't doubt, didn't do anything but sit there, forcing himself to take deep, even breaths.
And then, something made him look up.
Jason found his gaze drawn to the window, where in the skies, the auroras were beginning to bloom. They seemed brighter than they'd been before, and before Jason knew what he was doing, he was on his feet and heading outside, into the gardens to stand under the light of the auroras.
One moment, he was standing in the gardens.
The next, there was a figure made of light standing in front of him.
He knew he should have felt alarm, that he should treat this figure with caution as he would any other magical occurrences, but strangely enough, he only felt a strange sense of kinship with it. This being before him, whatever it was... it felt strangely familiar, though he couldn't place the exact reason why.
As the figure reached out as if to grab him, light falling in shards from its hand, however, even that sense of kinship wasn't enough for Jason to let it. He pulled away, muscles tensing and feet bracing against the ground.
When the figure didn't chase him, merely remaining standing there, Jason risked a question.
"Who are you?"
The figure didn't reply, but in the skies above, the auroras flared silver for the briefest moment, before they sank back to their regular blues and violets.
Jason wasn't entirely convinced. "That doesn't answer my question."
The figure answered that with something else. At an arms length away, it slowly lifted a hand and stood there, waiting.
An offer.
"For what?" asked Jason.
The figure paused, then lifted its other hand up towards the hospital.
Jason resisted the urge to look back behind him. "Olivia?"
The figure nodded.
Jason still couldn't shake the feeling that he knew this figure. He couldn't figure out why his first instinct was to trust it, which only furthered his skepticism on the subject.
Can anyone see me?
Jason blinked as he heard Olivia's voice echo inside his head, the desperate note in her words, the fear behind them. He heard scrambled, uneven footsteps like they were somewhere down the street, but that was impossible. She couldn't remain conscious, let alone get out of bed.
Can anyone hear me?
Yet it was unmistakably her. He'd heard her voice from a memory before. The scattered pieces of it still came back to haunt him at night. She'd pulled him in before, and if she was there again, if this figure could take him to her...
Jason looked to the figure. The light around it had changed, though he wasn't quite sure how. It was faded, like part of it was elsewhere, watching over someone else.
He didn't have a choice.
With a muttered curse, Jason reached out, took the figure's hand, and released a long, deep, breath as he fell into the light.
*+*+*+*
A/N - I feel like it's important to note at this point that I've given up on trying to keep this a reasonable 'book length'. I have no idea if we're 5 chapters or 50 away from the end of the book but heck WE'LL GET THERE EVENTUALLY but its probably closer to 5 than 50 but its also definitely not 5 so I'm just gonna keep going til I write a way out of this mess and hopefully you stick around <3