§
“My Lady, you must wait,” Mireia told me with a firm tone.
I couldn’t ignore the worry in her eyes and I understood why she was worried. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it!
It was bad enough that Kiki and Shindzha had been patrolling the demon-infested area around Mother’s resting place for days. The expedition had reached that area as well! And that was only the start of my worries!
The news, which arrived barely before bedtime, had begun this anxious hell.
“There’s no way I can just wait,” I finally told her, then met my husband’s eyes with resolution as well. “Not after hearing that!”
We were already dressed for bed, and somehow, my husband and Mireia were visiting my suite yet again. It had become painfully obvious they were keeping me under supervision, distrusting what I might do if they left me alone. I had been behaving myself, though?
“You heard Lady Ceria as clearly as I did,” my Servant persisted. “Most of them have accepted the idea, once they learned that you had made a blood bond with her.”
“But not all! And that group is full of people who don’t need anyone’s help to kill someone!”
“Ti, that doesn’t mean they will act on their own,” my husband answered in a calming tone. “They aren’t brigands.”
“You’re putting an awful lot of trust in fairies to behave themselves!” I retorted, my voice beginning to sound a bit hysterical. I recognized this and tried to make myself calm down.
The ones who reserved their judgment out loud had been Lady Elhàn and her fairy warriors. According to Lady Ceria though, both Graham and Brigitte had made no reply.
Miss Brigitte was probably an even match for Shindzha. Any one of the others could kill her themselves, without a doubt.
“My Lady,” Mireia said, taking my hand. “Please stay calm. She has a powerful ally watching her back, after all.”
By which I assumed she meant Kiki. Even though Mir really didn’t know that much about her…
My eyes narrowed as I asked, “Rhea?”
She dimpled. “No. But she suggested that I say that to you. I’m not sure who she means, unless it’s herself. But the goddess wants you to remember that Shindzha is not alone.”
“I know that! But…”
Mireia and I had been sitting together on the edge of the bed. She quite suddenly moved, straddling my legs facing me, and pressed her palms to my cheeks, taking my head in her hands and staring into my eyes.
I blinked back in confusion. Mireia was normally only this aggressive during… Well, that. This didn’t seem like quite the time for it.
“My Lady,” she repeated, her gaze drilling into me. “The goddess is asking you to take steps to relax.”
“How?!”
Relax with my insides churning like this? Really, how?!
She stated, “She recommends a bath.”
My eyes widened in disbelief, “It’s already bedtime?”
“Your Royal Highness?” she requested of my husband without taking her eyes or her hands off me.
He got up from the overstuffed chair, heading for the bedroom door. Completely without asking my permission at all, he instructed the chambermaids in the sitting room to draw my bath.
“Now, just one minute…” I started, then Mir’s lips closed on mine. My mind went blank. Was she actually angling that direction?
But she ended the kiss quickly and told me, “My Lady, please just trust us for a bit. You need to stop thinking and let go for just a while.”
I felt my brows bunching into a knot as they fought against my underlying understanding that she was right.
Mir dimpled again. “The goddess says this is probably your first ever experience with panic. Helplessness is not something you’re accustomed to, after all.”
Panic? Me?
I wanted to deny it. But the incredibly unfamiliar feeling within me needed a name. Was that what I should call it?
Mir firmly dismissed the maids once the bath was drawn, rather embarrassingly implying there was a certain reason we wanted to be alone in the bath. Which she underscored by inviting my husband along! She even suggested he get in with us, but he decided to draw the line there.
I had been undressed in front of my husband enough to be able to– just barely– not collapse in embarrassment. I remained suspicious of her motives though, but she didn’t do anything questionable after we undressed and washed each other. Neither of us actually needed a bath, so that was largely a quick, symbolic rinse.
But once we settled in for a soak, I worried, “You’ve already come in with me once, today. Isn’t this bad for your skin?”
She shook her head. “I can use my magic to protect it, My Lady. It feels like an abuse of my powers to do it normally, but this is a special case.”
She doesn’t usually call me ‘My Lady’ in private, but I could tell from her manner that it wasn’t the goddess. I realized she had done so very much on purpose. To remind me of my responsibilities? Or just to keep me centered on being myself?
She beckoned to my husband and had him come over and sit on the floor behind us. He massaged my back while Mir hugged my arm.
Since I had never been naked together with her in front of him without it proceeding to either feeding or… Well, the other things… It all felt very strange.
Well, okay. My heart was still in turmoil. Somehow this weird turn of events had stopped my panic, but instead, I was just feeling confused and off-balance. But my husband’s hands on my shoulders and neck, Mir’s fingers stroking my cheek, and the gentle flow of Water mana soaking into my body, worked to bring me around to a sort of unsteady peace instead.
Fragile as it was, that peace let me see how frantic I had been just now, so I accepted that they had been right to do this. I allowed myself to continue unwinding and, as my husband’s thumbs kneaded the muscle in the back of my neck, I even grew a slight smile of enjoyment.
Although I’m sure that a romantic exchange with them when we returned to the bedroom might have also helped, the mood was all wrong for that. Those two put me in the middle and bracketed me on either side, continuing to simply be next to me and encouraging me to sleep.
I never expected it to work, but somehow, it did. Perhaps Mireia sneakily cast a [Sleep] spell on me, but I actually don’t think she did.
§
Having grown accustomed to my existence as a ghost in Lady Tiana’s head, I was surprised to find myself waking from sleep. Lady Tiana’s sleeping face lay before me as I opened my eyes. I had become accustomed to seeing this face in the mirror rather than my own, when I saw Lady Tiana’s world through her eyes, so this was momentarily quite surprising.
It probably would have been far less surprising had the face been Sen rather than Tiana. But, even though their faces are quite familiar, they are just different enough that I can tell them apart. After all, I ‘sync’ with my Spirit Core copy regularly, to acquire the training that Sen and Fan Li have given her, and she sees Sen quite often.
I had just done so again, because I could now remember a new series of courses, and additional spells to teach her, while also, in another perspective, remembering Tiana’s life on Huade up to the current time.
The two copies of me coming together is always a moment of confusingly parallel impressions. Immediately after ‘syncing’, I cannot tell whether I am the Huade version or the Spirit Core version until I identify my location. In the tea shop, I must be the Spirit Core version. In Tiana’s head, the Huade version.
But this was neither the Spirit Core, nor Huade.
Laying in this patch of moss beside her instead of haunting her body was not a potential scenario in either case.
“The ‘Spirit Core’ version can only exist in the Spirit Core, Lydia,” came the goddess Rhea’s familiar voice.
Rather than looking around for her, I touched Tiana’s face gently, confirming that she and I were both corporeal. “But I can’t be in a physical body next to her, and this is not the [Blood Presence] spell if I am able to touch her. It has no sense of touch.”
“Well reasoned and well done,” the goddess agreed. “This is my personal [Illusory Reality], a privilege of Immortals above the Celestial Maiden level. And you are, in essence, currently the one and only Lydia, or you are both versions. The truth is however you care to see it. Sit up and look at me, Lydia.”
I wasn’t going to disobey a goddess, so I did as she commanded, getting up and turning in her direction in order to sit on my knees facing her.
The goddess Rhea, the same as she appeared in the Spirit Core, sat with her legs curled to one side and propping herself up with one hand, on a flat-topped boulder near to the patch of moss. In the spirit core, she normally wore what I now thought of as Dorian fashion, with her hair up in one of their complicated hairstyles, but at the moment she wore the same peplos as I wore, and her hair was done up in a fashion my fellow hetairae might have worn, except with a flowery crown added. She was thus the image of the goddess of my old world.
“One of my aims is already accomplished,” she stated, answering my questions without me asking them. “I wanted you and your Spirit Core image to unify again, to catch you up with the latest things she has learned. But as you know, bringing you into my [Illusory Reality] was unnecessary in order to accomplish that.”
“Then you have an additional aim that you may only accomplish here?”
“Well probably not only here, but I have an aim that will be far easier here.”
“I’m of course at your service, Goddess.”
“Mm,” she wrinkled her brow slightly while looking at me, then cast her eyes over to Tiana.
“Shall I wake her?” I wondered.
“No. I’m also having a special conversation with her right now. One for which I needed to isolate her from you.”
I blinked, thrown off for the moment. “You’re having a conversation with her… now?”
“Mm,” she agreed. “I can do that, you see. Being in two places at once is not that difficult. Frankly, she’s in the same setting as you, in another copy of this stage, and she sees you as the one who is asleep. I cannot actually separate you two, as you are dreaming in the same head, but I can do this much.”
“I see,” I answered meekly, unable to think of any better response.
“For now, she won’t remember the conversation, or if she remembers anything, it will only be as a fragment of a dream. If and when it becomes a necessity, she will remember it perfectly. You, as well, so you don’t trigger her memory of it.”
Gaping at her, I could only retort, “What?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Although I can’t speak to either of you while you’re awake, I can reveal your lost memories to you. Hence why I’m doing this now, while Tiana is conveniently asleep.”
I noticed a logical inconsistency, and the goddess laughed, having already seen it in my thoughts.
“If I have to tell both of you, why tell you separately? Because her version is abbreviated. I can tell you parts of this I cannot tell her, because even here in my Illusory Reality, I could trigger a breakdown in her mind that we are laboring to prevent.”
“A… breakdown?”
“That which requires your role as gatekeeper. You don’t understand it, by design, since your understanding could leak across to her.”
What I understood was that another me, the Spirit Core version, lived a separate existence in a world where I met with the goddess and others. They had explained that if Lady Tiana ascended to that world, it would kill her body and her babies, and thus my role was to block the connection between her and that world.
“And you understand neither its nature nor the reason for its existence,” she replied. “And I will ensure that you continue to not understand it for now. Later, when it becomes safe, you will certainly learn. Please be patient until then. In the long term, you will know all of it.”
Unwilling to commit the sin of hubris, I decided to accept the goddess’s wisdom without question. It’s still frustrating to be told such things, though.
The goddess smiled a mild, approving smile, then changed subjects. “You were trying desperately to speak to her earlier, while she was panicking, were you not?”
Mireia had intervened and calmed her, but my anxiety during that time came back to me.
“Trying?” I asked, with concern.
“She never responded to you, did she?’
I could only answer with silence.
“Indeed, just as you feared, she was unable to hear your voice.”
The distractions of the last few days had indeed prevented me from teaching her much, but I was quite appalled to learn now that she hadn’t heard my voice at all during her anguish. Her anxiety had been so strong.
“At most, you may remember this as a dream, up to this point,” she stated. “From this point onward, you will remember absolute none until either the danger to Tiana has long passed, or until I cause you to remember it. And that will be when the crisis is upon Lady Tiana. Now, Lydia, listen well.”
