Eagles and Swans
Chapter 38: The Helika Waltz
Ruthenia?
The world trembled gently, like a child shivering with cold.
Ruthenia thought she must be dead, because she was hearing voices. Something was glowing behind her eyelids.
Everything faded to darkness at the edges of her thoughts.
Ruthenia, it hurts.
Was it her mother, calling her under Ihir's wings at last?
No. She recognized that voice, and this pungent wetness beneath her… The air was briny…
Air. Her head throbbed, steady and warm. She coughed and water sputtered from her lungs. Ruthenia found her fingers trawling through ocean scum. She removed her hand from knuckle-deep.
It hurts. It hurts.
She twisted over. With a few dizzy sways, she pulled herself up on both knees. Her fingers ran over her throbbing calf, and found a sticky gash. It hurts. The Glaive glowed from her left, its blade the only fresh gleaming thing in her vicinity. Digging it from the muck, she picked it up. The blade was shaped in curlicues, and its shaft was threaded through with leafy patterns.
As Ruthenia rose on trembling knees, a shiver wracked her. She swung forward in a coughing fit, each making water spurt out between her lips onto the sea-scum below. She began to gasp midway, throat rasping, before her lungs convulsed again and she coughed up more water.
Blinking her tears out, she surveyed the space. Mist washed over her, so thick she could not see beyond a few feet. But she saw the roof of the chamber, silvery and glowing, about as high as the palace ballroom's ceiling, but gently arched. Whatever ground she saw was carpeted with decaying algae.
Wandering with a slight limp some way through the mist, she found herself passing by rotting tables with seaweed for tablecloth, tarnished telescopes, even shards of dinner plates, all foundering in algal mats.
Ruthenia shivered and stumbled on, through a maze of scattered furniture and discarded cloth. Ahead of her, an odd shadow loomed, jagged and dented, towering many times taller than herself.
Another smell assaulted her nose then, surging above the pungent algae: the thick, nauseating scent of rust.
It was a small steam boat. The remains of one—its hull, crusted with a bumpy corruption of rust, was old enough not to have arrived in the past year. She trudged a little further down the length of the hull, coming to a rust-ringed porthole that she peered through.
She felt a chill creep over her when she came face to face with a shadowy gambling room, the skeletons of players slumped across their decaying table.
“Lilin.” Ruthenia glared, raising her head to the ceiling, which must be the roof of her mouth. “Lilin! I'm here to save you!”
Ruthenia.
She hadn't thought an answer would come. She staggered back, and drew in a breath. In the river, the voice had only seemed distant and ethereal—now it shook the ground, the metal, her bones.
“I don't understand,” she said, drawing away from the window and the boat. “Why have you been swallowing boats? You've made enemies of the entire nation.”
No answer.
As she stepped over shattered compasses lost in the mist and dirt, she began to shiver. She'd reached the edge of Lilin's mouth. Close to the wall, the mist thinned to nothing, and all was visible along its length. Lilin's skin seemed more like porcelain than anything resembling flesh, a single great tooth larger than herself towering beside her. Trickles of seawater poured from between her lips, swamping the sea-scum and the broken furniture.
I'm lonely, she finally replied.
“I have a plan to get you free,” Ruthenia said. “I have the Glaive here, and I can use it to cut your chain. That might work, won't it?”
Will it?
“It's the best chance we have now. And it's worth a try.”
There was a period of silence from Lilin, just a soft, steady tremble beneath Ruthenia's feet.
“Let me into the sea again, Lilin. I'll do my best!”
At the centre of my tail.
An enormous gurgling began—Ruthenia gasped again—a frothing wall of water had formed at her lips. Behind her, she felt a gust build behind her as the ceiling descending, the air forcing her towards the ocean. She gulped another lungful, like a stranded fish. With the pressure building against her, she tried to imagine the collision, the creak of her bones, the pummel of the tide—and plunged into the watery wall.
Seawater smashed against her, soaking her hair again. Ruthenia was adrift again in the immensity of the sea again, but a great glowing floor rose from the depths beneath her feet, white wings unfolding on either side. Her feet met the monumental curve of her flank, and then that loomed over her: the chain.
It was much larger than she’d expected—shaped like the chains that suspended anchors from ships, except each link was as thick as she was tall. The structure ran straight into Lilin’s tail like an insidious burrowing worm, a shadow beside the glow of her skin. Her scarred flesh had grown around the chain, but there were tears through the skin, where she'd struggled too hard and it had begun to wrench through. The links were not metal: there were no welding seams, no irregularities, no rust even in these briny waters.
Glancing at the Glaive in her right hand, so tiny beside it, Ruthenia felt a despair crawl over her—then she beat it down with a surge of anger.
She looped one arm around the great pillar-like curve of the closest link. She felt the metal grinding at the goddess' flesh, flecks of scales crushed between steel and muscle. Gritting her teeth, she pressed the Glaive’s blade against its spotless surface.
One deity's work met another, both of the Upper Empire. Sparks dissipated in the water.
With the force of her hand, she sawed at the link—back and forth, back and forth against the resistance of water, shoulder straining as the blade screeched. The Glaive had made a nick in the surface.
The gurgle of water was poor encouragement, but it was all she had. Time kept stretching and buckling. She sawed away at the metal, deepening the crack stroke by stroke.
It was difficult, accepting her failure slowly.
Here under so much dark roaring water, Ruthenia already knew she was trying to do the impossible. One minute of sawing had left only a gash deep enough for her fingertip.
She could not finish in time. Not before she drowned.
Yet she carried on anyway, like a machine built to a single purpose, paying no heed to convulsions starting to seize her body and the fanged ache in her lungs.
Her vision began to sparkle and sway. Things were darkening at the corners again, slipping out of her mind’s grasp, as if ink were being spilled over patches of her consciousness. She only barely felt the shaft of the Glaive, but even now her grasp was loosening.
Lavender sparks swallowed her vision whole, and her limbs began to lock up. Even then, she pushed on, now with the force of her torso, deepening the cut. She would let nothing stop her, now that she’d gotten this far—
When next she woke, Ruthenia was staring up at the roof of Lilin's mouth.
She kicked convulsively twice, as if she were still in the sea, choking and gulping air. But then she became aware that her right hand was empty, and that the Glaive of Laveda was not beside her.
A scream burst out of her. The scream became choking, as ocean water spurted out from between her lips. She coughed and screamed but her lungs did not stop hurting.
Her screams turned to weeping. She sprung to her knees, ripping seaweed from the ground, ploughing through fronds and dirt. But the fog was as forbidding as ever, and nothing was there. Nothing but she.
Exhaustion barrelled her to the ground, and she curled up among the devoured things. Sobs seared her lungs. Her head burnt hot and cold; colours swam through her vision. She reached about for something to hold, trembling while the cold and nausea wracked her body, wave after wave.
“Lilin,” she croaked. “Kill me. Kill me, please.” Her voice broke on the last word, fading to convulsive sobs.
No, Ruthenia. I won’t kill you. She felt the wrenching sorrow in every syllable.
“I should’ve known. I should have known I couldn't do it. I really thought I could save you. I really did. Ha! Do me a damn favour and kill me, so I don't have to do it myself.”
I won’t kill you, she repeated, the chamber trembling about her. You came here to save me, so I can’t kill you.
“And what good did that do you?” Ruthenia laughed, then screamed.
Everything was cloudy in the fog, now—every sensation, every thought.
Ruthenia gasped, and screamed, and gasped, and felt her breathing grow level as the fit slowly drained out of her. Now nothing but an immense exhaustion sat upon her, pinning her to the ground.
Why have you fought so hard for me?
“I hate—” she fought her own trembling down— “I hate Ihir. He took my parents, and my home. His law turned the nation against us. I haven’t forgiven them, and I haven’t forgiven him. And I thought saving you was the right thing to do. Because I felt for you. Lilin. I felt like you.”
Pausing to let the last of her quivering subside, Ruthenia began to scoop the muddy grime beneath her aside, till a glow of blue peeked through the mat of decaying leaves, barely three inches down. She swept the debris aside and laid her head in the depression, closing her eyes.
I hate him too. The curtness of her voice belay a thick and writhing hatred. The mist thickened to a storm, the glow of the chamber dimming, the air flaring warm. I should have known what he had meant, when he said forever. I thought surely he would not be so cruel, for I adored him. I thought it was a brief penance for my insolence and I smiled when he left. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, when he chained me, I didn’t know, I didn’t know—
All around Ruthenia, vaster than the sea, an anguished keening resounded that felt so familiar it was as if there were a space in her soul meant to house it. She felt tears of her own grow hot in her eyes and spill out to meet the dampness beneath her.
“They say your parents are meant to love you,” she replied. “But it's a bloody lie.”
Lying in the depths of the murk and silence, Ruthenia heard a low booming rise into audibility. It came from Lilin's flesh, where her ear met the glowing smoothness. Soft and rousing.
It vibrated through her fingers, too. It seeped through her bones and fibres like warmth.
It was the beat of the Helika Waltz.
“Your heartbeat sounds like...the beat of a dance I know,” she said. “I danced to it once, at a private palace function. A wedding.”
She paused to let it wash over her. It was there, this ancient dance, echoing across this ballroom of ships and seaweed. She lay there for several minutes, closing her eyes.
“I went there to tell the king I would not take Ihir’s word as law. But something else happened on that day. I began to realise they were people, like me. I began to see that they it was all just one big mess, that some of them were puppeted by power, that they made mistakes too. That there's so much they don't know because they've been living in white towers all their lives.”
It is odd to me that your people have ceded their freedom to the kings.
“I know.” She rolled over so she lay on her back and saw just the dimly-glowing ceiling. “But…sometimes, I think I understand why others prefer to be led, to live by the laws The laws keep them safe…from people like me.”
Ruthenia fell silent, and so did Lilin. She lay with the booming of the Helika Waltz, older than fire, older than joy.
Were you happy, asked Lilin, when you learned that they were people like you?
“No. I wanted to believe they weren't. It made things...easier.” She paused. “They think you’re evil. But who gets to be the judge of that? Who gets to decide?”
*
For an hour or so, Ruthenia talked to Lilin, about ordinary things. Because now, with the last vestige of her life burning out, talking helped her feel like she wasn’t simply waiting for her death. And Lilin begged to hear it all, every detail she had to offer. If she couldn't save the goddess, then at least she could be good company.
As she did, she stood up, and explored. Stumbling towards the ship in the murk, she put a crate by the porthole, and clambered into the cabin. Inside, traces of its old lavishness still hung upon the walls. She found, gleaming in a shallow puddle on the carpet, the shards of an old beer bottle. She picked one up and picked her way past piles of bones into the darkness, shivering as she splashed into the cargo hold.
Inside that room of crates, she squinted about at the dim shapes scattered about her. With the glass, she slit the rope bindings of several boxes, finding by touch a few bottles of rum, a meat skewer, some spoiled meat, and a gold-leafed tinderbox.
She cut threads off the frayed end of a rope, and twisted them into a single strand, tying a knot in it. Then she pierced the cork of a rum bottle with the meat skewer and pricked the knotted thread through. Once it was damp, she lit her makeshift lamp.
Things around her glittered gently in the firelight. By its light, she found some old preserved fruit and meat, none too difficult to ingest—particularly not when she had been running on nothing but crackers and canned beef for...who knew how long?
As she sat and ate, and listened to the beat of the waltz, she remembered all those things she had left behind. The palace, the lab, the school and the streets, all drowned in rain.
Her eyes widened slowly as something dawned upon her, a memory that was had slowly faded, but still here, somehow.
“Hey, Lilin,” she said. “Do you think your father is like the people I know? That he might be flawed, that he makes mistakes?”
It doesn’t matter, Lilin roared. I am trapped here forever.
“I don't know an awful lot about deities, or what they can't do. But if he were to plead for forgiveness, would you forgive him?”
A long silence followed. Without waiting for an answer, Ruthenia popped a gleaming jar open and picked a piece of peach from inside it, nibbling it in the dim light of her makeshift lamp.
He will always hate me, and I shall always return his hatred.
“Lilin, I…don't think that's true.” The sound of Lilin’s heartbeat boomed louder, a dance without fixed measure. “I think he wants you home.”
He chained me here. He cursed me to rot.
“It’s been raining so much. Almost every day. There are bluebells everywhere...a sign of mourning, they said. But it isn't you who's mourning, is it? You didn’t send the rain. Or the flowers.”
A tremor rocked the ground, making crates slide about. Fog was pouring in through the doorway.
“It was your father.”
Lilin was silent for a minute. Ruthenia continued to eat pensively.
His sorrow is wasted on me. He made these chains to never break. And now he cannot break them, he has only himself to blame.
“It has been a month now. You are better off knowing this.” Her vision blurred as she passed through the doorway. “Streets are flooded. Buildings are falling. It's him, Lilin. He’s destroying his nest in grief.”
What use is weeping? She could hear it everywhere, now—the waltz, thundering in the air, and in her blood, becoming part of her. What use is apologising for a wrong you cannot right?
In the silence, the fog was thick with eddies and swirls, and as Ruthenia stood in the abandoned corridor, she stared out through the dim windows and pretended the sky was beyond.
What is there left to do?
I’m trapped.
He trapped me here. And now no one can free me.
As Ruthenia watched the mist tide over the ship and break into tiny swirls on the sills, an idea dawned upon her.
“Lilin. Deities are held together by their wills, aren’t they? So surely they are able to will themselves apart as well. Maybe, you could dematerialise and coalesce beyond the chain. Could you do that? Just for a minute?”
It could kill me.
“It's a risk. But would you risk that to be free?”
The fog began to pour through the windows like froth. She could no longer see the windows, but the white billows of cloud glowed with the light from her lamp. She stumbled through the doorway towards the room from which she’d entered.
I’m afraid.
I want to die. But I’m afraid to imagine dying.
“I know,” answered Ruthenia. “I feel the same.”
I’m not as brave as you are.
“There must be things you would live for, or fight for. Like the sky—do it for the sky.”
She felt the floor rock, and she thrust out her arms to keep her balance.
“For your freedom. For happiness.”
No. I shall do it for you.
Ruthenia smiled, and with her smile came a cascade of tears. Once Lilin vanished, she’d be under a hundred feet of ocean, and who knew how she’d survive that? But better to die like this than to die for nothing.
I’ll do it.
Lilin was dissolving into the finest, most brilliant dust. It tumbled through the potholes into the dim chamber and curled around Ruthenia's fingers as she lifted herself onto a desk and slid one foot through the pothole, rising upwards as if drawn to the sky. When she clambered out into the open, her feet sank through it as if it were quicksand.
As she did, she felt as if her life were unravelling from her memory. All the words she’d hurled in hate. All the chains, the basements, the cages, the graves—the memory of guns. Her work shed. Her umbrella.
Down she sank, through a universe of whirling glitter, the roar of the sea growing louder in her ears. Everything was bright and stormy. Flecks of Lilin got caught in her hair. The entire ocean was crying out around her.
Then the bubble of dust and light…began to flicker.
“Lilin?” Ruthenia called. It was something about the air. Bursts of water punctured the bubble from above, showering her. Lilin was beginning to thin and scatter.
Ru— — the goddess screeched beyond the hurricane of froth and mist, but her voice sputtered, as if heard through a faulty radio.
—I— I— I can’t—
Ruthenia screamed as the light flickered in the whirl of glitter around her and Lilin’s will began to decay. “Lilin!” her voice tore from her. “Think about freedom! Or the sky, or me, or whatever, Lilin, don’t you dare!”
But the glowing dust could not hear her voice, and the sea continued to crash inwards, breaking the eddies of particles as they tried to coalesce.
“Lilin, no, you’re going to live!” she began to sob, like a child as snow melted through her fingers— “You were always meant to live—please, Lilin—”
Then, there were wings.
Gauzy, misty wings. Burning white wings.
Light unfolding from the swell of the ocean beyond. An infinite wrath trying to tear the ocean in two.
Lilin! cried a voice of twenty different tones, twenty different versions of the same anguish. It roared down upon them like storm rain through windows, a swan song.
The whiteness circled and whirled and bloomed and slashed at the jaws of the Deeps. It swallowed all the silver dust in that hollow, turning seawater to steam, to clouds, to rain.
Ruthenia knew that the being that enveloped her, many-winged and endless, was Ihir, the patron god of Astra, returning to the world after three hundred years.
But when he opened his mouth, it was her mother's voice that spoke.
“You were wrong, my dearest,” cried Lita. “I love you, I always did, and always have!”
“Then why? Why did you leave me behind?” screamed Ruthenia, with Lilin's voice. “Why did you leave without a word? Do you know how much it hurt? How many years I spent alone, terrified, in a world that hated me?”
“I'm sorry,” Lita answered. “I knew you would be angry. I knew you would never forgive me. And I was a coward. I was afraid—to watch my own daughter stop loving me.”
She wanted to scream all the vileness in her at her mother. Her hatred swirled around her like a supercell, the only thing she’d known how to feel for years. Hatred that had defined her, made Ruthenia Cendina who she was.
But she could not do it. She could not be cruel. And she realized then that it was not hatred that blazed in her throat, but longing, for a life that would never be.
“No,” answered Ruthenia, curling up. “I was afraid that you had stopped loving me.”
Then her mother was gone, and all that was left were Ihir and Lilin, dancing around each other.
And Ihir said, “Will you ever forgive me?”
And Lilin replied, “I will try.”
And it was Ruthenia’s voice that spoke, thin and ragged and terrified.
*
She crashed out of the dream, the matter that formed her rippling and trembling. The light deserted her eyes.
Ruthenia felt her death begin—the pressure of the sea or some similar darkness, like claws in her chest.
She let herself enter it.
A universe expanded, right before her eyes, embryonic and developed and complex, pulsing with self-awareness—then it was shattered by the crush of the tides. A palace of blue light stirred into a hurricane blur.
In Astra, a storm began—a storm to destroy as none ever had before, a poem without rhyme. Lightning struck the pinnacles of towers, and every Thread creaked, making buildings sway through the air like birds.
It was like a stormy ballroom, all the world dancing across its floor to the beat of Ihir’s heart. Two flourishes, two leaps. Lightning slit the sky like a scalpel. But it was the thunder that shattered the shell of the city and snapped its pillars in two.