30.

Vivian stood in an unfamiliar town, people bustling all around her. Her memory was hazy but she took everything in stride as she stepped on the cobblestone streets. The scent of the sea and silt in the air reminded her of her last meeting with Lord Ivory on the docks, but the physical surroundings couldn’t be more different. Women and children moved along with the men, everyone engaged in their own duties. Children drew squares in the dirt with sticks and played a jumping game. As she weaved through the people, she caught a whiff of baked goods. She followed the smell, tracking it like a silly dog, until she found a small bakery a block away.

“Pardon me,” she said, putting on her most noble airs as she spoke. “Might I have a slice of pie?”

The woman at the counter completely ignored her.

“Excuse me?” She tried again. “You sell pie, right?”

Still no response.

Vivian clapped her hands, hoping the noise might jolt the woman out of the stupor.

“You’re not really here,” someone said behind her.

Vivian whirled around to see a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, standing in the doorway, watching her. His hair was a mess of brown locks tumbling down his head. Other than that though, he looked cleaner than the other children in the streets.

“What did you say?”

“It’s a memory. The whole town is a figment of my past reconstructed. We don’t actually exist here. It’s a moment stolen from my childhood.”

“You’re still a child.”

He grimaced. “Yes, well, earlier in my childhood.”

“Are you like Rin? Older than you actually appear?” The memory of Rin sparked something in the back of her mind.

“No, I’ve only ever lived twelve years.”

“But you’re friends with Rin?”

“Yes, he was everything. My best friend.”

“Was?”

He turned around. “It’s a nice town, right?”

“Right….”

“I like to remember it this way. But let’s go somewhere else.”

The bakery shifted, walls melded into the ground. Then she stood in a bedroom, a little boy sprawled across patched blankets. Again, he remained completely unresponsive to Vivian. He awoke with a start, looking visibly distressed, then crawled out of his bed. Vivian followed him as he felt along the walls of the building.

“I’m looking for my parents’ room,” someone said beside her. Vivian turned and saw the boy from earlier again. Only then did she realize they were the same, just the one they followed was half the age, maybe six.

“Why?”

“My father just got back home after years away. I thought it might be a dream so I wanted to see him again for myself.”

They continued watching the little boy as he fumbled in a drawer before withdrawing a candle in one hand, flint and steel in the other. He lit the candle, casting shadows over the hallways.

“No,” Vivian whispered, knowing what came next.

The boy beside her gave no answer, just followed his younger self to a different room. There, two adults slept. The little boy peered over at them, shining the light over them. Vivian recognized one as the woman who stood in the bakery earlier. The other man was the boy’s focus though.

The man turned over in his sleep, likely unconsciously annoyed by the light. But his movement caused the boy to stumble back in surprise. The candle fell from his fingers.

Vivian shouted and lunged forward to catch the falling flame but it slipped through her hands. The candle bounced on the quilt. Then, after a horrific moment where Vivian dared to hope that the fall extinguished it, the flame spread.

It took a minute before the adults to wake up and realize what had happened. By that time, the boy was hiding in the closet, weeping. The father stayed in the room, frantically attempting to put out the monstrous fire while the mother ran from the room screaming, the hem of her dress aflame.

Vivian sank to her knees as the flames consumed everything around them until only a vortex of fire remained. The air stank of death and burning flesh. The screams of the family were hardly heard over the crackling of flames.

Then the flames solidified, reconstructed themselves into stone. They stretched out and morphed into cathedral walls and a congregation sitting in pews with heads bowed. A preacher stood at the head of the rows of benches, preaching over a pulpit next to three coffins. Vivian recognized the people sitting in the crowd, weeping, as the townsfolk she’d passed in the streets only minutes earlier hurrying about daily chores.

Despite how Vivian strained her ears, the preacher's words remained muffled just to the point where they evaded comprehension.

Then the smallest coffin rattled.

The entire congregation froze in place. The coffin continued rattling though, shaking madly. Finally, the priest stepped toward it and lifted the lid.

A familiar child peered out. The boy looked so small and disheveled next to the towering priest. He looked frantically around, begging for his mother.

“DEVIL!” The priest cried after a moment of shocked silence. He continued shouting, most of the words garbled in the same audible distortion but a few peeked out, ‘possess’ and ‘corrupt’ standing out amongst them.

The boy curled up into a ball in the coffin, crying, until the priest picked him up by his collar and hurled him to the ground. The boy scampered away.

“You’ve witnessed my death and rebirth,” the older version of the boy said, standing beside her.

“You’re a Natural Mystic,” Vivian said.

“Yes.”

“Silvis,” she whispered. “You’re Silvis.”

He said nothing, just walked through the congregation. Vivian again followed after him.

“But you’re so young,” she said. “All of the images of Silvis I’ve seen are men, you look nothing like them.”

He smiled, still not looking at her, and appeared a blending contradiction of ancient and youthful. “People write what they want history to be. I was powerful. That’s the end of it.”

Then everything shifted again. They stood in the street of a familiar stone city. People passed through it, some of them looked like citizens of Neo Regnum, but most looked completely different. Different hair colors and skin colors and even eye colors. A rainbow of people and culture.

“I know this place,” Vivian said, as she recognized stone archways. “So you really did come here.”

“Yes,” Silvis said. “We skipped a few of my stories, but here is what’s most important to you. This was meant to be the watchpost of Mortium. And a place of knowledge shared between nations.”

“So, what happened?”

Silvis said nothing, just led her through the throng to the vision’s version of himself. This version of himself looked like an exact doppelganger of him, down to the clothes on his back. He stood next to Rin, chatting with him.

Perhaps not chatting, Vivian realized, taking a closer look at them. They both wore serious expressions and were scanning the crowd, looking for something.

“There,” Rin said, pointing at a hunched over woman in a robe with a hood. “I sense it in her. She’s of my blood.”

The woman rounded a corner.

“Rin,” the past Sivis said. “I don’t know about this.”

“This might be our last chance to give chase. Unless you want to cross the sea looking for the leak in security, she’s the answer.”

As hesitant as Silvis looked, he followed his friend. The specter of Silvis and Vivian followed after the boys.

Just as they followed around the corner, a man lunged forward from the shadows and clamped a collar around Silvis’ neck.

Rin waved a hand and the man collapsed to the ground, a black husk.

But it was too late, the collar was locked around Silvis’ neck. The two boys yanked and pulled on it but there seemed to be no latch. Just a straight piece of metal.

“Melt it,” Rin said.

Silvis nodded. He placed his fingers over it and closed his eyes in concentration. But then they almost bulged out of his head.

An instant later, the entire alleyway engulfed into flames.

“Silvis,” Rin said with a wheeze as he covered his face. “Stop.”

“I-I can’t. Rin, get back. I can’t stop. No. No! Stop me! Rin, now!’

The blames burned blue, hotter and hotter. The shear force of the fire shifted the very stones around them, collapsing sections of rock and toppling statues.

Rin collapsed to the ground alongside the man he had killed a minute earlier. His skin burned off his black from the flames, all clothes and hair quickly burned away. Still he moved slightly, reaching for Silvis. Then the withered hand, burned black from the flames, brushed against his friend’s foot.

Everything stood still. The flames ended as suddenly as they began. Silvis collapsed to the cobblestone alley, the collar popping off his neck.

Rin’s body began to knit itself back together, in a moment he sat there, cradling his friend.

“No, Silvis, no, no, no.” He held him. “Go back in!” He demanded, slamming his palm into Silvis’ face. “I took it out, now go back in! Damn it!”

Then Rin took off, his hands cupping something unseen. “I won’t let you go. Not like this. Life, I need to find life.”

But Vivian saw nothing living. As he ran through the streets, they looked far more familiar now than before. All signs of life, purged now from existence without a trace. Not even corpses remained. Rin maintained his determination though. All through the city he ran, looking for something, anything, living. Vivian realized he was running toward the edge of the city, trying to reach the jungle, or maybe the ocean.

The ground slipped under Rin’s bare foot, causing him to lose his balance and tumble down, bursting through the ceiling of a cellar in shambles. Vivian watched from above in horror as rubble bludgeoned into his skull, painting his face and the stones in his blood. But still he crawled across the cellar floor, his hands clasped together.

Vivian blinked and she stood beside him a moment later, as he dragged himself to something in the corner of the room. A small speck of green. Somehow, a tiny sapling survived the city’s demolition. He shoved his hands into it and breathed out some sort of prayer. Then everything froze in place.

“And now,” the specter of Silvis said to her. “You’ve seen the end of my second life.”

“You’re dead,” Vivian whispered.

“I’m caught in between life and death. Rin extinguished my life to stop me but couldn’t reignite it so he carried the flame to latch onto another life. I’m a parasite linked to a tree.”

“Is that where we are?” Vivian asked. “In a tree?”

“We’re in a place between life and death. On the very edge of it. Rin hopes that I might be able to teeter over into your body sense you’re so similar to me.”

“A Fire Mystic.”

“And a Natural. My life couldn’t return to my body, not really because it was dead, but more so because that collar sapped out all the Savirlet from my blood. He’s tried a dozen times now to bring me back, but each time the person dies instead.”

“Rin...he’s been killing people?”

“Yes.”

“So...you’ve had this conversation before?” Vivian asked.

“No, most don’t survive this long. My soul is more compatible with your body so we’re caught in this swirl of cognitive awareness.”

“So...what will happen to me?”

“I don’t know, likely you’ll be trapped in the back of my mind as I take control. You won’t die, not exactly, but you’ll be unable to control your body.”

“You’re stealing it from me,” Vivian whispered. “My life, you’re stealing it.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. His voice cracked slightly with the word ‘want.’ For the first time, he sounded like the twelve year old he appeared as.

“But, you are.”

A rift occurred. Gone was the frozen scene before them of Rin saving Silvis. Instead they stood in a home Vivian recalled with a shudder.

Vivian stood before herself, a few months younger and clutching a crocheted scarf. Vaguely, Vivian recalled how she knit that for some boy she was crushing on in town. A few months, but a lifetime younger. Unaware how careless her life was.

“Where are we?” Silvis asked, bewildered. “I’ve...lost control. This has never happened before.” He looked from the past Vivian to the modern one.

“We’re in my past,” Vivian said quietly. “To the night where I died.”

Silvis peeked his head out the open door. “We’re in a brothel.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a prostitute?” he asked. But with a curious tone, sounding like a confused child.

“No. My mother was. She kept my brother in the attic. He wasn’t allowed out at night but I snuck out with him. I wanted to show him the town.”

As if on cue, her brother entered the room and closed the door behind him. He grinned, looking as if he thought this a great adventure. Now that she knew what to look for, it was so obvious. His cheekbones, his eyes. Her brother was a small replicant of Lord Ivory.

They crawled out the window, using sheets tied together like a rope to drop down to the shrubs below.

The scene shifted.

“I won’t let you!” her mother cried. The town’s constable stood in the lobby with them, having caught them sneaking about after curfew.

“We warned you, if you couldn’t control him, he’d be removed from the picture.” The constable shook his head sadly, his mustache quivered slightly as he did.

“I’ll out you! I’ll tell everyone! Every ear I see will be told. You won’t get away with this.”

He stared at her. “You’re threatening not only me, you realize that? This is treason you're talking about.”

“I. Don’t. Care.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes. You won’t get away with taking him.”

The constable looked her straight in the eye. Vivian looked over to her younger self who cried quietly out of guilt. Vivian wanted to unsheathe a sword and stab the man. Never before had she felt such bloodlust for someone’s life. She reached out to grab his throat in a chokehold like Owen taught her but her hand went straight through the man. A dream. Only a dream, she reminded herself.

The constable stood and left the room without another word.

Vivian’s mother went to her younger self’s side, pulling her and her brother into a hug and comforting them.

Time slipped forward again. A mob surrounded the brothel, headed by a preacher.

“Funny how clergy are an overlap,” Silvis muttered but Vivian barely heard him as they were marched out of the brothel.

Vivian noticed the boy she’d crocheted the scarf for. He stood in the crowd, next to his father who held a torch. He wouldn’t look up from the dirt.

Vivian didn’t understand the words the priest spoke back then, too taken in by the overwhelming collapse of her world. That lack of comprehension carried over into the memory, creating the same inaudible noises that she’d heard in Silvis’ past. Then the priest threw the torch onto the pyre.

Everything shifted again. Vivian let out a breath, she’d been worried she’d have to see her brother die again. The screams echoed in her ears even as they left the scene.

Vivian expected them to be transported to when she dug herself out of a shallow, unmarked grave, buried in the mud. But instead she found herself at the ball, standing next to Lynn as he lounged at the bar.

“You’re gaining more control,” Silvis said. “Now you aren’t just reliving memories similar to the ones I showed you. You’re going down your own path. I’ve tried to shift us back but it won’t work.”

She watched as her other self trotted away from Lynn with smug confidence, so certain she’d win the silly bet made with him. Both complete strangers to one another.

Then a ripple of ice tore through the ball, distorting the scene. It hung there, undulating in the center of the ballroom, nobody else noticed the tear in reality, everyone in the room hurrying to find a dance partner for the next song. It emitted an icy chill.

“I think,” Silvis said, his voice caught in surprise. “I think you can leave, Vivian. Take this way out! Get out of here!”

Vivian stared at him then to the cold tear in her memory. For a moment she considered letting it pass her by.

“You’re better than I am,” she said. “You can do things I can’t. Help people. Rin wants you back, not me.”

Silvis paused. “Vivian, the choice is yours but you need to choose. Do you want to go back? Or do you want to fade into oblivion?”

“I don’t know….”

“Choose. Be divisive, make a choice. What do you want?”

“I….”

“CHOOSE.”

“I want to live,” she whispered, looking at Lynn. Her friend, as he watched her dance. Lynn didn’t care what others thought of him. He lived his life for his brother and didn’t need validation from anyone else. She realized, suddenly, that he represented an opposite to her. He made decisions, and she floated with a tide. But no longer. “I want to live!”

“Good.” Silvis smiled, he reached out and touched her forehead. A burning sensation ripped through her skull. She stumbled and fell into the cold rip in the ballroom. “And...tell Rin. Please, tell him to live too.”

Then, in a flash of darkness, everything melted around her one last time.