Page 53 of A Rising Hope

“Stating the facts and blabbering are two separate things. But I’ll make sure to blabber extra around you just in case you can’t tell the difference.” Aurelia took a step away and let us in.

We climbed the wooden stairs to Aurelia’s room. Priya curiously looked around the strange dome, picking up a few scattered papers and random objects.

Aurelia shoved a few stacks of books, maps and papers off her bed, a vial of ink spilling on her sheets, but she ignored it, grabbing the leathery sack in which she kept an ancient book. The one I had stolen from the Pleasure Dome.

“Thank you for keeping it safe.” I couldn’t resist flipping through a few pages. A part of me hoped a sudden revelation would dawn on me. A piece of the puzzle would click into place, and everything would make sense. I turned a few more pages, the unknown symbols glaring back at me. Unhelpful. Useless.

I shoved the disappointment deep inside me.

“You are hoping the book will tell you how to defeat the Queen . . .” Aurelia probed. “In a way that we do not die,” she added, earning a sharp glance her way.

“Aurelia . . . ”

“I overheard my parents talking. I might have not been raised in court, but I can still decipher gossip from the truth. And that was the truth.” Her face was blank, no fear, nor excitement. A statement, nothing else. “I’ve read the book, Finn,” she stated, turning back to her book, searching for a few papers. “Not like read, read it. I mean, I don’t know the symbols. Nobody does.I’ve done my research.” She handed me a few large volumes of dictionaries and books from her father’s library. “Such language is not known; the letters don’t make sense. And I tried to read it backwards and upside down, which was not helpful. I tried sounding the letters out too, but that didn’t help. Well, it kind of did,” she rambled on, and Priya glared at me, but I masterfully ignored her. Aurelia reached for another book. But this time it was a much thinner one. Long pages bound with a thread. “This one.” She tapped with her pointer finger on top of it. “Look at the pattern.” Her silver eyes widened, implying something grand.

“I’ll need more explanation,” I finally told her, my jumbled thoughts became unreadable even to me.

“The notes. The lines, the rhythm,” she proclaimed with a certain excitement in her voice. I looked down at the book. She tapped again. Her mother’s book of songs and ballads. She yanked it back, opening to a random page inside. “See, here. One-two-three, one-two-three.” She sounded the notes and then sang a sentence. “Now look here.” This time, much more gently, she reached for the ancient book, pointing to a page. “One, two, three . . . One-two-three.” She used her pointer finger to trace the scribbled lines. I saw it then. “It’s a rhythm, like notes.” Aurelia twisted around, grabbing another paper off her floor. Drawn lines and dots for rhythm dabbled in ink, just as unreadable as the ancient book. Except for Aurelia, it was a melody she sounded in her mind.

“So, this is just a book of songs?” I tried to hide the disappointment in my tone. Tried and failed. Aurelia looked at me, this time a bit more defeated. That look felt like a lashing against my heart. “Aurelia, these are great findings,” I corrected myself. “Songs mean rhymes, and rhymes are connected to Seers and Seers can see the past and the future. We can do something with this.” This time it was me who was fumbling, flailing for words. So much for useless fucking visions . . . This book turnedout to be quite unusable. I choked the frustration in me, as I stared at the unknown characters on the ancient paper. “Do we have any clue what the song is about?” I asked hopeful, but not surprised, when Aurelia shook her head.

“The song is somewhat a slower one if I had to guess. It matches some of the tempo from the slow dances that I do, but that’s as much as I could decipher.”

“Thank you, Aurelia.” I gave the girl a kind smile before placing the ancient book back into its leathery sack.

“I hope when I die, I’ll turn into a beautiful phoenix,” she stated, leaning back on her cluttered nightstand. “It’s a bird that rises from ashes.” She shot Priya a snide look.

“I know what a phoenix is, odd girl,” Priya huffed.

“Nobody is going to die, Aurelia. Remember that bird that we saved on the beach a few months back? We thought it was going to die.”

“Of course, he had a broken beak and a curled claw. Whitewings can’t hunt and feed with broken claws and beaks.”

“And what did he do instead of dying slowly?”

“He found our farms and stole food.”

“Exactly. He fought the odds and found a solution and so, we will too. If a little bird could do it, so will we. Besides, I remember you were the one making a trail of scraps for him leading to the farms for days. Sometimes help comes in the most unexpected ways, Aurelia.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” she asked.

“Oh, but what if it does?” I chuckled, fighting the tight clump in my throat. I had no guarantees, and I had no answers. All I could do was hope. Hope that it’d work out. Hope that we’d live to see another day. “I’ll see you around.” I winked at her, heading for the door.

The steps creaked under my boots as I descended the steep stairs and stepped outside.

“You look like you just got gutted,” Priya grumped behind me.

I did feel gutted. Completely gutted.

“I don’t actually know how to kill the Queen,” I said to her, quietly enough for only her to hear as we strolled through the village.

“Well, I’d say a dagger to the heart will do the job. Boring, yes, but I’m past the age of lavish killings . . . actually, who am I kidding? Wyg root but just a drop; while she is hallucinating, we will chop off her fingers one by one, then cut off her eyelids so she can’t blink but she’ll still be alive so she’ll see it all. Then we’ll flay her skin or pull a major artery from her body inch by inch without severing it. Perhaps we’ll scalp her and wear her hair as a wig, so as she hallucinates, she’ll think she is the one killing herself. I don’t know honestly, but that’s a start . . . ” Priya stated it louder than I wished as a few villagers turned their heads, scattering from her vicious glare. I had forgotten just how much excitement it was for Priya. Her tone was upbeat and thrilled.

“Did you miss the part where I said the whole of humanity would die?” I whispered, faking a smile to a few of the villagers that greeted me along the way.

“Hell, always so dramatic. So what? A minor setback. I don’t plan on dying. Do you?”

“It’s not that simple, Priya. Her magic is unruly, mixed. It will wipe out the world.”

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