Chapter 48: Remembering
(I painted this in Procreate using the oil paint brushes - Chaiga T. Cheska)
Nix watched as Oren and Bran reacted to what Tavik had just revealed. Oren looked momentarily shocked, then pained, and sat up straighter, drawing in a deep breath as if gathering himself, whereas Bran seemed to sink into himself, his eyes filling as tears trailed down his cheeks. He cast a pained glance past Oren to the glow of the fire where Olis and Liv sat talking, then folded forward onto his crossed legs and wept quietly, smothering his mouth with both hands. Tavik and Oren, unable to see in the dark but very familiar with their sensitive younger brother, reached out at the same time, put their hands on his back, and leaned down close, murmuring to him.
Nix half heard the words but chose to ignore them. Let them have their moment of realisation, he thought, as he glanced towards the dimming fire and the tall figures of Olis and Liv, who still sat, heads bent together in conversation. Nix concentrated on Olis and wondered why the scribe hadn’t been as observant as he had been before, when Nix had first realised who Liv was. That made him wonder if Olis needed his cousins to have this moment.
Nix turned his attention back to his cousins. Bran had straightened up but sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in his hands, looking miserable yet slightly calmer. Oren and Tavik still had a hand each on Bran’s back and were talking softly as Bran stared blankly ahead.
“I was afraid that if I told you both, you’d vanish, or I’d vanish, or something would happen. I learned it through the tether. Nix here knew first, of course. Relief to tell you both… sorry, Bran,” Tavik said, rubbing his younger brother’s back as he finished. Bran took a shuddering breath, sat up, and looked again at Liv and Olis talking by the fire.
“I can’t ask her anything, can I?” Bran said sadly as he tried to memorise everything about the tall elf, searching for whether anything in the way she held herself was like him or his brothers.
“It’s best not to say anything that would give away who we are to her. If she even suspects who we are, she may do something to ensure we never come into being,” murmured Tavik to Bran, which made his younger brother moan and drop his head into his hands. Tavik rubbed Bran’s back and, in some ways, wished he’d not said anything.
“Why do you think she’d not want to have children, Tav? She taught us to anchor our magic, didn’t she?” Oren whispered, not sure why Tavik seemed negative towards Liv, who just seemed wary of new beings, something he felt made a lot of sense and perhaps was even a family trait.
Tavik sighed and flicked his eyes towards Liv in the darkness. “She looks at us as if we’ve broken a rule of her people. Didn’t you see the way she first looked at us? Like we were less than she is in some way? How did you not feel that, Oren?”
Oren shuffled to Bran’s other side so he had his back to the stone wall and could see the fire further towards the entrance, as he wanted to observe the elf properly now that he knew who she was. He draped an arm around Bran’s shoulders and leaned across him to whisper to Tavik, “I didn’t get that from her, Tav. She was wary of us, for sure, as she should be. We are intruders in her forest. Think about it, Tav. How would you react if someone truly different turned up in the Sentinel Forest where we grew up?”
Nix peered sideways at his arguing cousins and wondered how they could be blind in the dark and in memory too. Bran slumped forward again, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, recognising the signs that his brothers were about to argue.
Tavik gave out a frustrated sigh, feeling rattled by his older brother, his voice rising slightly, “It’s not the same, Oren! Why do you always do this and miss the point completely!” He gestured even though he couldn’t see his own gesturing in the dark, and continued, aggrieved, “She visibly doesn’t trust us, and she was rude about Nix as if he’s just a creature and not one of us! Open your eyes, Oren!”
Oren bristled and sat straighter, frowning towards Tavik in the dark. “Be careful what you say, little brother. I’m warning you!”
“Or what, Oren?!” snarled Tavik, really getting angry now. “If you can’t see what’s right in front of your own eyes, how are we going to navigate what’s ahead if you only see one way of thinking?”
Oren lifted his arm from around Bran and pushed Tavik hard enough to send him sprawling into Nix. Tavik scrambled off Nix and launched blindly at Oren as Bran tried to curl into a ball, and then they all froze as Nix growled low and threatening in his throat. Oren and Tavik turned to see their cousin’s slitted eyes glowing in the darkness, two glistening fangs shining back at them, and a terrible sense of fear emanating from Nix that had them both shrinking back, eyes wide.
Nix watched his cousins sink back against the stone wall and only briefly felt slightly bad for doing this to them, but he couldn’t risk them fighting when they had more important things to do. He released his predator instincts and relaxed and sat back down, watching and waiting. Oren and Tavik sat quietly, taking a moment to calm their racing hearts and remember their younger brother who was still curled into a ball between them, each reaching out to squeeze his shoulders and pull him into a sitting position between them as they turned slowly to look at Nix.
“Sorry,” said Tavik, through the tether, feeling ashamed and receiving no reassurance from Nix. Instead, Nix spoke in a low whisper to his cousins, “Liv is your mother, yes. Now you know, now you move on, not fight. I don’t understand you all sometimes. Pain is not for wallowing; pain is fuel for action. Why do you not know this?”
Nix waved his hands together, and Bran saw his cousin glaring at the shadows as Nix pinched and then pulled at the filaments of shadow. Bran saw that Nix was weaving these shadowy threads into a latticework, widening it with one hand a few times before he tossed the lattice of woven shadow into the space between them and the firelight, so they could all see through the shadowed latticework, but it was as if there were a woven barrier of shadows between the fire and them. Nix looked up, then held his palm open, and a faint glowing ball of light filled the space, so that Oren and Tavik found themselves blinking in their sudden ability to see each other and part of the natural stone formations around them. Nix held the light in his palm, then looked up at his cousins. “My magic will give us privacy for a short while as we talk, but they can see our light, so please don’t do anything idiotic.”
Oren touched Tavik’s shoulder. “Sorry, Tav.” Oren studied Tavik’s face and saw the anguish he’d missed, still lingering behind his brother’s eyes. Tavik mumbled something and made a playful swipe at Oren’s hair, all forgiven. Bran, still silent, leaned back against the wall, resting his head against the cool stone, and studied Liv as she talked with Olis, letting himself just see her without trying to pick up on anything about her that was like him or his brothers. Half to himself, he murmured, “How old is she…? If we’re four hundred years in our past, how long do elves live before they have children?”
Tavik and Oren looked sideways at their brother. Bran looked tired, his eyes heavy-lidded and shadowed, betraying his exhaustion as he watched the elf. He and his brothers and Nix spent a long moment quietly watching Liv, no one saying anything. Then suddenly Bran gasped and straightened, his hand flying to his mouth. He leapt up without thinking, hit his head and shoulder with a sickening thud against the low stone of the overhang, yelped, clutched at his head and shoulder, and looked wildly at his brothers and cousin, who had reflexively caught at him. He said, “Oh… that hurt so much… but I just remembered, I saw in the portal that I opened earlier, I saw her, Liv, I saw her… she was surrounded by blood… in a cave… a tree cave… and… and… ow… there was a battle or something and… owww… this hurts… and we need to stop it from happening!”
Oren crouched, reached for Bran, and pulled his younger brother back down as Tavik reached forward and squinted at Bran’s head, where a trickle of blood was coming from the cut on his forehead. Nix leaned forward, whispering, “Your Portalsight, Bran, use it to heal your cut.”
Bran didn’t feel he could focus enough to use Portalsight right then, and he just pushed his brothers’ hands away, saying, “Didn’t you hear me? She’s in danger!”
Oren, his hand on Bran’s forehead, looked towards Liv, then back at Bran. “She’s fine right now, and I don’t know what a tree cave is. What else did you see?”
Bran drew in a breath, closed his eyes, and tried to recall what he had seen in the portal earlier, when he was learning to anchor his magic. Slowly, the vision returned of a strange battle in a forest of very old trees, like the ones they’d already seen in the Crystalsong Forest but far older, much wider and taller, almost as tall as the Eldertrees perhaps. But in his vision, these trees were burnt up, as if some fire had eaten through the great trees, which lay strewn all over the land, so that these great trees took on the role of caves for injured elves.
As Bran concentrated, wincing as his head and shoulder throbbed, he saw even more details of a fierce battle being fought just beyond the area of fallen trees, with deadly spears of coloured magic lancing back and forth between giant elves bigger than Liv as they strove to fight off what Bran could only describe as walking storm clouds that lashed out with bolts of white arcing lightning that burned through everything it touched. Bran realised this was how the trees were burnt out inside, not from fire, but from the heat of the same blue-white lightning that made the trees smoulder and crackle, lit from within with an undying flame.
Bran opened his eyes and looked wide-eyed at Nix, the vision still flickering behind them. “It’s the Caelvarae, Nix. I don’t know why, but I see them fighting the Crystalsong elves. It’s a huge battle!”
Nix returned his cousin’s look, sighed, as he’d suspected, and said, “I think what you’re seeing as Liv’s future is actually why Olis brought us here in the first place, because he wants Liv to see me as a friendly, trustworthy Lightweaver.”
Oren, Tavik and Bran stared open-mouthed at their cousin, and Oren whispered, “Aurelian… she’s yet to meet our father… perhaps… perhaps by meeting you, she will learn to trust another Lightweaver?”
Nix watched as Oren finished, his cousin’s face frowning, worried, pained by memory. Nix’s eyes slid to Tavik and Bran, who wore the same raw look, but he shook his head and smiled without warmth. “No, I think Olis wants me to be the reason Liv spares the lives of my father and my mother. I think it’s about my heritage as both Lightweaver and Caelvarae.”
