Page 49 of Bright Blinding Ruin

After I eat real food—AKA food I didn’t scrounge up myself in rivers and streams and cook to shit on a campfire—the three of us head to the library beneath the conclave’s chambers. Fred once again kicks everyone out, earning him more than a few dirty glances, but the man doesn’t take no for an answer, and he doesn’t stop until we are the only ones in the entire library. He even instructs Frederick to help him drag a bookcase in front of the entrance so no one can come in. Soon we’re standing before the stone etching of a door in the deepest part of the library.

I stare at the door in the stone. It’s funny. It looks exactly like the entrances to the undercrofts in the castles. Does this mean the city of Laconia is basically one big castle in and of itself?

Fred’s eyes rest on the necklace around my neck, at the three aethers resting comfortably in their tiny vials. “I do not know what you’ll see in there. My lady told me no person has walked inside the great chasm in eons, but once you are inside, you must combine the aethers.”

“Combine them?” I ask, “How?”

“I don’t know. All I know is they must be united once again, as they were before.”

Frederick’s brows come together as he asks his dad, “What do you mean, as they were before? It sounds like the empresses’ magic is linked to the aethers of each region. Combining them…”

He isn’t the only one who doesn’t understand. I don’t, either, but I know we can’t dilly-dally. Sometimes you need to push forward for the answers you want, and right now I’m standing in front of a stone door that should hold all of the answers inside its depths.

Great chasm, here I come.

I move away from Frederick and his dad, stepping closer to the etching on the wall that was hidden behind a bookcase. A foot away from it, I tentatively reach up to the vials on my neck, touching them as I close my eyes.

How did I open the doors to the other undercrofts? The guardians. This door is different. Standing there, focusing on it, I can feel its pull—which is bizarre to me, because before I couldn’t feel a damn thing. Magical threads surround me, connecting me to the same invisible force that hides Laconia’s undercroft from most people’s awareness.

I let out a slow breath, and then I open my eyes and reach out, laying my palm flat against the etching of the door.

The door comes to life from my touch. The etching in the stone glows white, and the stone itself loses its solidity. Under the carved archway, I watch as the stone shimmers out of existence, replaced by an actual door into the unknown. All black and dark, just as the other undercrofts were, but it doesn’t intimidate me anymore.

I glance behind me, half expecting something nonsensical to come out of Fred’s mouth, but when I look over my shoulder I see both Fred and Frederick are frozen. Neither one is moving. It’s like time itself stopped the moment the door came to life.

Guess it’s just me, then.

I step through the door, half expecting to walk onto a platform surrounded by magical torches. What I don’t expect is to walk out into the bright light of day, onto the courtyard situated just before the stone steps to the conclave’s chambers and the library’s door.

My eyes squint when I walk out, but I don’t stop. I keep walking forward, keep pushing, even when I realize there’s not a single soul around. I’m in Laconia, but it’s empty. It’s empty and it looks… a bit different.

The buildings aren’t exactly the same. The stone around me, beneath me, is brighter. Whiter. Like it’s all newer. I do a little spin, and when I do, I see the conclave’s building isn’t as impressive as it is now. Its spires are shorter, not as pronounced or spikey.

When I finish my spin, I spot someone standing thirty feet ahead of me, their arms held behind their back, their gaze focused on whatever’s in front of them. A woman, if I have to guess, based on the long, braided brown hair that falls halfway down their back. The person wears a mixture of armor and leather, a few furry patches beneath the shoulder plates and waistband.

I step closer to whoever it is. “Uh, hello?” The person doesn’t answer me or turn around, so I finish walking up to her and stand beside her before I ask, “Can you hear me? I’m—”

The woman turns toward me, and I see her tawny skin wears face paint. Around her dark eyes, over her bottom lip and chin, is some kind of metallic, gold paint. That’s when I notice there are designs similar on the visible skin on her arms.

“Rey,” the woman speaks. “I know who you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I’ve never seen this woman before in my life, and yet… I feel as if I know her. I just don’t know how. “How do you know who I am? Who are you?”

“You have come far,” the woman says, notes of wisdom in her voice. “You have learned much about who you are, but it is time for you to learn the truth. It is time you faced your destiny.”

I break eye contact and look away. “I have to defeat Invictis.”

“Child, you will do what every empress before you could not. Not your mother, not Gladus, not Morimento. You will do what even I could not.”

That makes me look at her again. “You’re…”

“My name does not matter, only my purpose. I was the first to come to this land, banished from my home for ideals that were too… progressive. The men in power did not appreciate a woman trying to be their equal, so I was exiled to a barren land. They thought I would die. Before Laconia became Laconia, it was a land that had been ravaged an eternity ago.” She holds her hands up, motioning to the city around us. “This city was all that stood in remembrance of that time.”

Holy shit. Laconia’s a lot older than I thought, and from what she’s saying… it sounds like the extinction of everything in Laconia is some twisted cycle.

“But I found something hidden in the depths of this great city,” the woman goes on, and she turns and walks back the way I came, toward the library’s doors. “Beyond the books filled with words I could not read and parchment so old it crumbled into dust, deep inside the chasm, I found the aether.”

We stop just outside the library’s outer door, and the woman turns to me once more, whispering, “It wanted someone to find it, to start the cycle anew. I bathed in it and was granted power. Years passed, and more people came upon the shores of Laconia. I helped them build. I protected them from the wilderness. I watched as they had children and grew old. Cycle after cycle, generation after generation. They named me their high empress.”

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