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“You’ve done as I requested and learned something of the world in which you find yourself,” said the Crystal Exarch. “Now it’s time I fulfilled my half of the bargain and explained what has befallen your comrades.”
She stood before him with the quiet, unselfconscious poise of a temple effigy. He had forgotten how grand her presence could be. Eurielle Beauchene—Waysinger, Warrior of Light —seemed somehow more than the blood and bone that made her, as if the weight of her titles lent her a gravity beyond the sum of her parts. Once, the boy he was had wanted to pry past the lofty tales that preceded her to meet the woman beneath; now, the Exarch found her austerity reassuring. She had suffered no harm in the crossing. She had faced the test he set before her with solemn wonder, returning to him after with an air as if the Crystarium was as home to her as the shard she left. The wheels of fate could at last begin to turn. This world could yet be saved. He kept his excitement locked deep inside, a small, glowing ember in a dark room, and went on,
“That is a conversation I would rather have in the privacy of my quarters, however. I must go on ahead to the tower and organize a few things—” his spellbooks, namely, presently sprawled across the Ocular in disordered heaps, “—but I shall see that the guard knows to admit you.”
“Exarch,” said Eurielle. She didn’t speak very loudly. There was no need. Her voice rang clear and sharp, as well-seasoned as a warrior’s sword. It arrested him as surely as if she had given him an order.
“Yes?”
“In my time, the tower had another keeper. G’raha Tia. When you opened the gate, was he still inside?”
He had anticipated the question. He had prepared his answer whilst staring at his time-ravaged reflection in the vast mirrorglass in the Ocular, watching his mouth for tightness in the corners, watching for a tremor in cold, dead hands. And yet there was no preparing for the way G’raha Tia rolled from her tongue. It was an ordinary name. Lacking gravitas, the boy he was used to think, all open vowels and aspirated sighs, without even the distinction of nunh to set it apart from the G’holhas and G’nheas he once knew. But in her voice, it carried with it all the cadence of a song. She might have written it into a ballad without it ringing out of tune, given it the brassiness of a stalwart hero’s name while she sang his deeds to life—washed it with the poignant longing of a threnody when she reprised how the gates slammed closed behind him.
How beautiful she made it sound.
“...I am not familiar with that name.” He owed it to practice that the words didn’t catch against the stone in his throat. “There was no such individual residing in the tower when it passed into my care, I’m afraid.”
Eurielle’s figure bent like a flower bowed by heavy rain. He couldn’t see her eyes beneath the hood he’d lent her to shield her from the Light’s garish glow. Only a smooth white chin, a chaff of lavender hair. “It has been nigh a hundred years since you became its caretaker, no?” she said. “Even if he was alive when you pulled the tower from the Source, I suppose that he is dead now.”
If he did not know her, he would have found her tone unmoved. But the boy who knew her saw the slope of her shoulders, the bony white of her fingers around her staff, and read the sorrow in her as clearly as if it was writ in plain ink. The Exarch had steeled himself for the question. What he had not prepared for was her grief. It struck him hard between the ribs, so that for one long moment it was as if his lungs, too, were crystal—as if all of him was overtaken in ice but for his heart, burning wild and fierce in the frozen cage of his chest. He fought a terrible urge to tear back his hood. Wicked white, he could not. He could not , because…
Because that was how the story ended. The boy in the tower grew old. He lived to see himself become the villain. To betray the Warrior. To drag the Light into the hollow space between worlds. To die.
“Was this person,” said the Exarch, hardly knowing what he was saying, “G’raha Tia, very important to you?”
She did not answer him for a measure. Instead, she looked up at the glimmering, remote splendor of the tower. Where it once stood upon the shores of Silvertear Lake, it was the bastion of a dead civilization growing out from a crystalline wasteland, a bright spot through the smog; here, it fractaled the preternatural sunlight into rainbows. No matter where it went, a symbol of hope. Even if his connection to the tower turned his insides to glass, the Exarch believed that still.
“He changed the course of my life,” Eurielle said. The words all but stripped away the hardness inside him; he might have been twenty-three again, full of blood and wonder and passion, his feelings swept aloft in flights of grandeur. Then, he felt the unyielding scrape of his crystal hand against the shaft of his stave, and he remembered. Eurielle, lost somewhere beyond his courtyard, failed to notice. She smiled distantly. “I’m sorry. If you go on, I’ll be along in a little while.”
You changed mine, too, thought the shadow of G’raha Tia in his breast. I did this for you. Every bloody spire.
But what he said was, in the Exarch’s miraculously even voice, “Please, my friend, take all the time you need.”