Chapter 57: Walking with Ghosts

Having climbed through door out of the temple, Miro was on the fringes of a moonlit beach, clearly not on the shores of the Shattered Sea, since the enormous expanse of calm dark water reached unbroken to the horizon. Where he stood, knee-high grasses grew among the sand, their rustle in the breeze the only sounds in the night, save for the rolling waves and two hushed voices murmuring from the direction of the water. In the distance to his other side, distinguishable from the darkness only by a handful of windows illuminated by lamplight, lay a village of a few dozen houses. Seeing nothing for him to do there, Miro decided to follow the voices, reminding himself that wherever he was, it was likely that he was still inside Akaseeya’s temple.

Further confirming that what he was seeing wasn’t entirely real, his footsteps made no sound as he waded through the grass, though he maintained a sneaking pace simply out of habit. As he approached the shoreline, the voices grew louder, until he could finally see where they were coming from – a couple standing at the edge of the water, their silhouettes black against a sea that shimmered with reflected moonlight. They both had their backs to him, the man standing behind the woman, his arms wrapped around her while she rested her head against one of them.

Miro was near enough to make out their words.

“I’m going to miss this,” the woman sighed.

“I know, I’m sorry,” the man replied, sounding genuinely apologetic. They couldn’t hear Miro’s approach so he continued to draw closer as they talked. “You know …” the man started, and then cleared his throat, “You don’t have to follow me. I’ll understand.”

“What’re you even saying?” she asked in both bewilderment and amusement and then slipped out of his embrace in order to face him. Miro could see them more clearly now in the moonlight and found that they couldn’t have been but a few years older than him. The man, his creamy complexion looking almost ghostly in the moonlight, had features that were familiar to Miro – uncanny in their similarity to the ones that would stare back at him from a looking glass. Peteri had been right; Miro did have the same jaw and nose of Jalvyn Kaldoun. And this meant that the woman – a tingling sensation spreading over Miro’s eyes and cheeks as the realization came upon him – the woman whose wavy brown hair reached well past her shoulders, and whose face made his father’s look even paler by comparison, was his mother. His first instinct was a desire to reach and touch her, but he remembered that he wasn’t really there, and didn’t want to do anything to chase away this illusion.

“What I’m saying, Neli, is that I’ll understand,” Miro’s father continued, his voice sounding dry, “Arkensk is half a Kingdom away, and your family is here, and I don’t even know what I’m doing. Maybe you’d be better just leading a normal life here.”

Miro’s mother blinked a few times, then sighed and put her hand against his father’s cheek. “Oh, Jalvyn. One thing my mother was right about, and that is that you are a foolish boy.”

“What?”

“At least a fool for thinking that I might be one as well.”

Jalvyn stared blankly, and looking at his father Miro now understood Hima’s urge to punch him anytime he himself must have given her a similar look.

“You think I don’t know this won’t be easy?” Miro’s mother asked. “We may not have chosen how our life was going to go, but I did choose you. And I’m continuing to choose you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. We’ll figure it out, whatever the capital throws at us.” She took Jalvyn’s hands into hers and paused while she studied their intertwined fingers. “And I’m sure we’ll be able to build something beautiful there together.”

As she said this, Jalvyn pulled her in closer and they kissed. With a cloud passing over the moon, Miro’s parents began to fade into the darkness, and a new sound of something brushing against the sand drew Miro’s attention. It was a boat with a pair of oars and it signaled to him that it was time to go. He looked up at the dimming moon, now almost completely obscured and whispered a “Thank you”. A warm breeze blew at him in response, nudging him in the direction of the boat.

Miro got in, got a grip on the oars, and set out into the open water, where a thick fog was gathering. And so he rowed without rest, deeper into the fog until there was nothing left to see, and until it gradually started to lighten and eventually turned the same anxiety-inducing shade of grey as the sky above the Shattered Sea.

His arms starting to burn from the effort, Miro glanced over his shoulder to see where he was headed and found that out of the fog materialized a rocky shoreline, and a figure by the water rose at his approach. The tall lean shape of the archer Peteri was unmistakable.

Quickly steering the boat and tying it up to the rocks where he found its predecessor, or previous incarnation, Miro clambered through the water back to Peteri, unable to contain the stupid grin plastered over his face despite the remaining dangers.

Even Peteri had trouble hiding his emotions, smiling as he put two hands on Miro’s shoulders and said, “I’m happy to see you still alive.”

“Not as happy as I am to be alive.”

“Did you get what you came for?”

Miro looked down and gave his hands a once over. “I think so.”

“Good. Let’s get you to Hima then.”

The maze that had befuddled them on the way there had unfolded. They found Winterbug in no time, surrounded by the most luscious patch of grass that they had ever seen this side of the Lowlands. They rode the horse fairly hard for the rest of the day and it wasn’t until just before nightfall that she showed any signs of fatigue, so they stopped and made camp about ten miles shy of where they had done so the day before. Peteri did not intrude with questions the whole time they were on horseback, not that Miro would have expected him to, allowing Miro more space to process what had happened. But when their food was ready and Winterbug was fast asleep, Peteri said, “So you made it inside the temple?”

With a mouth full of baked potato, Miro nodded.

“What was it like?”

“Like nothing I could have ever imagined,” Miro said, thinking back on the temple and wondering if the whole thing could have been a dream, “It was as if the entire thing was alive – a living breathing structure with its own thoughts and feelings.” Seeing Peteri’s normally placid face take on an air of barely concealed wonder, Miro had to stop and ask, “Have you heard about them before?”

“I have,” Peteri said, stilling his face, “And many others have as well, though we are told they are nothing but legends.”

“Let me guess, that’s what the mages say.”

Peteri nodded. “And those that don’t outright deny them, claim they are dangerous. Holdovers from a time of great chaos from which the mages saved us.”

Everything he had seen and heard at the temple told Miro that this last bit was all a cartload of nonsense. There was one thing though that Akaseeya had mentioned more than once that now somehow seemed more important than it had been at the time, as if she had dropped some crumbs for him in the hopes that he would follow them.

“Hey Peteri,” he asked. “Do you know anything about something called ‘the Great Soldering’?”

Peteri chewed his lip for a moment, as if digging in his memory. “No, can’t say that I do. Why do you ask?”

“Oh nothing,” Miro said, “Just something I heard.”