§
Serera set up a [Realm of Silence]. But once I was about to speak, the King caught me by surprise with his first words, spoken with a gentle smile.
“If this has to do with your past life memories, Sasara told me enough, and insists that I not press you for any details. It’s enough for me to know that my foster daughter now has considerable knowledge well beyond her years.”
Caught off-guard, I sat there for some time with my mouth open before I realized and closed it.
After pursing his lips for a moment, he continued, “I’ll tell you what I know, so you have a starting point. You awoke to your past life memories recently, which allowed you to rescue Amelia from that underground world that was used in the extreme past.”
I nodded. “That’s correct, Your Majesty.”
“And this part amazes me, but, in that past, you were personally acquainted with the gods.”
Choosing my words carefully, I replied, “I worked for them, Your Majesty. I commanded one of the twenty four legions serving them in those years. Mortals called us the Elders. The Brosians still remember our kind as stregas.”
He nodded, his mouth working as he seemed to be chewing over his next words. Then he asked, “So, who is it that you consider yourself to be, now that you’ve remembered these past lives?”
With a frown, I said, “I’m still me, Your Majesty.”
His eyes narrowed just slightly, and he replied, “You don’t seem to entirely believe that, though. Your eyes looked very uncertain as you said it.”
“That’s not…” I began, then frowned again. Then I admitted, “Your Majesty, I am Tiana, but I cannot truthfully say that I am the same as I was.”
“Mm,” he nodded. “But no child can, once they grow up. Even if you never remembered anything about your past lives, you wouldn’t still be the little girl who sat on my lap. That’s what it means to become an adult. So I’ll put it a different way. In your heart, what relationship do you hold with me now?”
Tiana’s basic honesty was pushing me to tell him the truth about that little girl he remembered, the way I originally intended to do. But if Mother had taken pains to tell him a half-truth to spare him the pain of knowing that Tiana died, I didn’t want to spoil her efforts.
Then I noticed that his eyes didn’t show suspicion, doubt, or uncertainty. Just concern for me.
Confused, I turned to my other personalities, to explain what I didn’t understand. Fan Li wasn’t available in this thin realm, but I thought as Daq, then Sirth, then finally Kwelabi. It was the old shaman who understood the King’s words and eyes and gestures easily.
The King wants you to answer his question for yourself, Kwelabi counseled. He asks not out of distrust, but out of concern for your heart.
I smiled and bowed my head, with my fist over my heart. “I’m your royal knight, your Majesty. I’m your foster daughter and your loyal vassal. These are absolute.”
His lips curled upward slightly, then he nodded. “Very well. I accept your reply.”
Then, smiling more, he added, “Provided that you call me ‘Uncle Owen’ again.”
With a blink, I realized I had in fact not been calling him that. I thought of him as my uncle, but to his face, I was saying ‘Your Majesty’. Before she began knight training, Tiana addressed him as ‘Uncle Owen’ in private.
I blushed, then nodded obediently. “Yes, Uncle Owen.”
“Much better.”
It was an opportunity to pivot to the reason I brought up my past lives. I told Uncle Owen about my home in Mount Ciddan, in vague terms that avoided things difficult to explain, and about how secure it was, and asked permission to bring Amelia there.
To my frustration, he only promised to consider it.
I could understand his hesitation. As a father, and as a king, he wanted to protect his daughter with his own might. I had to accept that answer for the time being and hope Mother could persuade him, after her discussion with Aunt Tenre.
§
After spending the night in the Royal Knights liaison tent and taking breakfast the next morning, I bid goodbye to Uncle Owen and Lady Serera and set course for Thuriben. With my speed now much increased, the flight only took me three hours.
Somewhere in the last hour of the flight, I noticed something.
“I’m back…” I said to nobody.
Have you been here before, My Lady? Durandal replied anyhow.
“About three months ago,” I replied. “I walked across the territory below. It was the first few days after I transmigrated to this world.”
According to the calendar, anyhow. But even if I did count my subjective time inside Mount Ciddan, it was only six months ago that I was down there, struggling to bring down a prairie chicken or a rabbit for dinner, while wondering what completely unknowable future awaited me at my destination.
Now that it was approaching the end of spring, it was a lot greener, but it was still that same wide-open northern grassland.
Why weren’t you flying? he immediately asked the most obvious first question.
“Because my great-granddaughter was a fool in certain ways,” I replied, now that I could admit it to myself. “She wanted to live as a mortal knight, properly fighting on her feet and equipped in the orthodox fashion. Mother had insisted she be a fairy knight and wear the proper armor for it. Foolishly, she tried to compromise.”
For several wingbeats, as I organized my thoughts, Durandal said nothing in reply, but I could feel through our connection that he was waiting for me to clarify.
I did so. “The knights of the Heroic Age wore full plate armor and fought from horseback, but full plate is only for ceremonial use today. Modern knights wear the same body armor as normal soldiers and fairy knights wear armor that caricatures the old full plate. Tiana was too shy to display her body in fairy armor, so she compromised with an armor that showed less. She was too embarrassed to expose her back, so the armor didn’t allow for her to grow her wings. When I had to travel back to Atius, I didn’t have anything to carry the armor in while flying, so I either had to abandon it or walk.”
At that time, I had been tempted to just say ‘screw it’ and live as an adventurer instead of returning to Atius. But I was relying strongly on my Tiana memories in order to survive, and I think her sense of responsibility prevented me from abandoning her duties to the King and to her mother.
Although I’m not certain that was it. Sometimes I think the unknown of heading off to live on my own was scarier than heading back to Atius. At least in Atius, I had Tiana’s relationships. Without them, I had no connection to anyone in the entire world.
It’s hard to say which it was. I was a very different person at that time than I am now.
I felt a twinge of blood hunger and carved a bit of mortal blood from my core. That made a half-dozen feedings I had skipped since my last time. I hadn’t needed blood in the simulations, but in the real world, I had been doing a lot of flying, healing, and other magic drains on the vampiric side of my physique. If I kept it up, I would begin eroding my blood core, despite the huge gain I had made from feeding on that asura in Ilim Below. Even though that had been the equivalent of decades of normal feedings, if I depended upon it, my blood magic would slowly decrease in strength, and I wasn’t certain that I could maintain my spiritual vessel if I lost it.
I decided to start keeping track of the number of withdrawals I made from my internal blood bank and make sure to feed enough to replace them. I would draw some of my pay when I reached Thuriben and go find a brothel.
§
The once-great capital during the Northern Kingdoms period was now the closest Orestanian city to the Hamagaar front, so the Expeditionary Force had made its headquarters here. The air patrols would be even more nervous than those guarding the northern approach to Atius. I didn’t want to cause any panic in the air defenses, so I cast my Vampire Cloak as I drew near.
My initial plan was to find a sheltered spot, close to the city, land and uncloak. But as I drew nearer, I saw the long line waiting to enter the city gates, so I just went ahead and flew on in. A blind alley, meant to access entrances in the back half of the buildings it ran between, became my spot to uncloak.
Melione would be very upset with me, but I didn’t cover up with my cloak after landing. I strolled into the crowded, narrow street, and instantly drew stares from every direction. It turned into a replay of my stroll through Cara Ita, and I channeled the same archetypical fairy knight image I had done back then. This fairy knight strode into the middle of the street with her chin raised, uncaring of what eyes saw her, and undaunted by any petty mortal in her midst.
It helped that I felt more confident that I could back it up, now. The corners of my mouth strained to rise into a broad grin, but I managed to overcome it and remain aloof.
This was a typical Northern city, with everything crammed together to shorten the distance between points and the area required for snow removal as much as possible. The street I was on was entirely for foot traffic. The only vehicles in view were handcarts. The buildings, with second floors wider than the ground floors, loomed overhead and choked out the sky. It stank a bit, too, although not as badly as Cara Ita had stunk.
It took me quite a bit of time to find my way to the local government buildings that the Expeditionary Force had taken over for headquarters. It wasn’t that the locals wouldn’t answer my requests for directions; quite the opposite actually. It was the basic problem that the city was absolutely stuffed full with refugees.
That surprised me. We weren’t the ones being invaded, after all. Our troops were entering Hamagaar. But it seemed that Hamagaaran refugees weren’t fleeing their lands until after the Orestanians occupied them. Apparently, the word had spread that demons were taking over their kingdom, so fleeing west was not an option.
At last, I reached the Headquarters Compound, which was in a part of town with wider streets and better architecture. The buildings lining the street ahead of me, beyond a barricade fence blocking access, looked really old.
After I queued up in the line to pass through the gate, Durandal asked, Is it possible that this town is Athuria Aben, My Lady? The capital of the Aben kings?
I blinked, then realized that this could possibly be the origin of the name.
I sent back, I suppose that might be its old name, Old Man. It’s always been ‘Thuriben’ in all of the history I know, going back thousands of years.
It’s in roughly the right territory, and yon column has the appearance of the monuments the Aben kings would erect.
He was referring to the obelisk-like monument at the center of a plaza ahead of us, standing on a plinth that was about as tall as I was. The monument rose a good nine paces above the street.
I think it’s reasonable to assume this is the same place, then.
It was a glorious and grand city in the past, My Lady. It truly has fallen.
It’s been a very long time since then, I told him, gently. He sounded a bit lonely, so I was cautious with what I said. But I explained, Neither the city of Atius where I grew up, nor Oste, the capital it replaced, existed during the time you remember. Their founding was thousands of years in the future at that time.
At some point, I had determined that Durandal was born at the beginning of the Elven Age, and lived through that entire era and the Heroic Age that followed, becoming a cursed blade at the beginning of the Demonic Age. The era he was talking about was the Heroic Age, around the same time as the Old Kingdom dynasties of Egypt. Everything surrounding us was clearly architecture from a much more recent time, and it was a near miracle that anything from Durandal’s time survived at all.
The soldiers checking the group ahead of me finished and I came to the front of the line. Enjoying the shocked look on their faces, I handed my papers to the corporal in charge.
