“Wait, wait! So after all that, your aunt just… gave up?” Emilia asked, pushing up to stare down at him, although Olivier doubted she could see him as well as he could her.
It had been a whim—this instinct to wrap the skill Emilia had given him earlier around his eyes so he could watch her reactions as he told his story. Every smile the girl made, every frown and grimace. There had even been a moment, earlier in the journal portion of the story, where the silverstrain had looked as though she might be sick, hearing descriptions of what had befallen the author’s servants. It was… brutal, and part of the reason Olivier considered this to be one of the most horrific stories he had ever encountered was the simplicity of what was said. There were details of the torture those servants had experienced, but it was vague enough that his mind couldn’t help but fill in the details, couldn’t help but make up more grotesque details of how their final moments had been.
So many questions lingered within the text, and perhaps if someone ever found either the missing day three or the hyren za curren’s hidden journal entries, they could find more answers. As it was, there were just so many questions, and the one that had wormed itself into his heart back when he had been barely more than a child, reading his aunt’s translations for the first time when Louis’ father—Judith de la Rue’s distant cousin—had taken them into the archives while searching for something—something Olivier wasn’t sure the man had ever actually found—was the question of what had happened to all the missing people.
Olivier hadn’t shared his aunt’s haphazard translations of the rest of the transcripts with Emilia, but there was more than what she had officially included in her commentary of the transcripts. The way things were laid out in the words of the high eminence… Olivier could understand why his aunt had focused near entirely on the question of how the aether, as well as this alleged thing that existed beyond it, were interacting with the lives of humans. By translating the document, she had become a part of the story of this piece of their war—were one to assume any of this was true, anyways. He was also a piece, he supposed, having passed the story along. Emilia as well, even if she wouldn’t be able to speak of what she had learned with anyone—although that was more to keep his family history and the archives secret, rather than the story itself.
What Olivier found most interesting and horrific was the high eminence’s assertion that, without someone purposefully burning the victims of their experiments who had reached a state of undeath into the aether, they would never die. Combined with her vagueness on the fate of those she had experiment on, never revealing if they had been successfully converted into undying creatures or succumbed to what was done to them, didn’t that mean they could very well still be alive out there? His aunt’s translations and commentary had certainly implied they might very well be, and the suggestions that existed as only notes further confirmed that, if these people had never been found, they had been trapped between life and death for a millennium.
The place where the tidal cities had once lain was still mostly empty, although several Grey Sands cities had popped up on the western edge of the Jibur Bay in the past two centuries. They had been visible to them, earlier that day, when they had all looked out across the edge of the Huss’tra, over the river and towards Baalphoria—directly over the land where the tidal cities had once existed. Olivier was no expert on the aether, but to him, the area felt no different than in any other
normal
location, but the idea that there may be an army of undead—if also potentially useless, given the state the two servants had been found in—soldiers buried somewhere under all that sand…
“Well… that’s nightmare fuel,” Emilia commented when he explained this to her, muttering that she’d been trying to not think too much about the few lines in the transcript-commentary that implied the victims were still stuck in such a state when the questioning had taken place.
He was also forced to tell her that, unfortunately, while he had read the story and transcript-commentary portions so often that, when he had his Censor installed, he’d been able to manually input what he knew, his aunt’s personal notes had been so chaotic that memorizing them had been impossible, and all he could tell her was what he vaguely remembered of them and the nightmares that had followed.
“Would it be totally inappropriate for me to, you know, go track your aunt down? Did I already ask that? Whatever. Point still stands: I have questions, and I need to beat them out of her! Or just ask nicely, but I’m not ruling out violence to get my answers!”
“I’m sure if you tell her you know me and speak some Grey Sander, she will speak with you.”
“And let me look at the original documents?”
“Assuming she still has them. My aunt was… impulsive, some would call it,” Olivier told her, adding that he had personally considered her
beholden to the will of the aether
, when she asked for his opinion of the woman he hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. Considering their time apart, not to mention her general lack of presence in his life even before that, he mostly knew her through the translated documents and journals she had left behind.
“How much did she take?” Emilia asked, finally lowering herself back onto him, her weight the perfect blanket over him, even if her leg had lifted so high over the course of their chatting and story telling that it was now precariously close to his cock. It was still soft—and had mostly remained soft or semi-hard for their snuggle session—but the knowledge that the girl could shift, just the tiniest bit more, and give him the pressure his mind ached for, even if is body was currently behaving, was not helpful.
“I am not entirely sure, but I do not think it was a lot. There are two documents I had read, which I know are no longer there. I believe at least three more went missing, as I had seen their titles in the section dedicated to her translations. They had never seemed interesting, and there was so much to read in the archives that I hadn’t gotten to them. Although…” Olivier trailed off, wondering whether he should tell Emilia that he suspected at least one of the documents hadn’t been taken by his aunt, but by someone else taking advantage of her demand to remove several documents before she left for the north. It was just a hunch—one that Olivier had no clue as to the origin of, unfortunately, other than to perhaps think it was yet another message from the aether—and he had never told anyone, not even his cousins, about it.
He told Emilia. Unable to share anything she learned tonight, it wouldn’t matter if he told her, nor did he expect her to make fun of him for putting even the smallest stock into this odd feeling that had existed within him all these years—this thing telling him that
something
wasn’t right with a family member, but that it wasn’t time for him to learn who.
Of course, Emilia was just as fascinated by that as anything else, demanding to know if he had ever looked into who it could have been, if he had any suspects, how often he seemed to get information or
vibes
from the aether. All of this was asked in such quick succession that Olivier couldn’t answer to any of it, even had he wanted to. Currently, he didn’t really want to—and there was that pull on his mouth and mind, yet again. This thing saying
now isn’t the time to tell her anything,
some implication that he would break a piece of a puzzle if he told her what he knew of his family’s loyalties now, and wasn’t that just great. Just what someone wanted, after having told a story about the machinations of the aether and her enemies: to feel like they were a piece in one of the aether’s stories. Hopefully, it wasn’t the story of this coming conflict. Hopefully, the entire document was just the makings of mad minds, grasping at strings of coincidence and reasons for their insanity and cruelty.
Not wanting to either answer Emilia’s questions nor bury her in his own growing concerns that the will of the aether was more serious than he had previously believed it to be, Olivier instead turned the conversation back where they had started: whether Emilia wanted to talk about her nightmare or not.
Running his fingers through her hair, left loose around her and leading to her constantly shifting to tug it out from under one or both of them, he assured her that she didn’t have to share. “Only if you want.”
The silverstrain was quiet for a long time, her breathing evening out until Olivier would have thought her asleep if not for her open eyes. They stared off into the darkness, over the expanse of his chest and the arm she had flung over him. It was nice, this press of their bodies against one another. Even without the benefit—or perhaps risk—of sex, there was something intimate about this. The catch of their breaths amongst each other, each of them pulling in the expelled air of the other in their closeness. The rise and falls of their chests against each other, shifting themselves and one another with every breath. The feel of Emilia’s heartbeat through the wrist pressed into his chest; the occasional slide of her leg or foot against his body as she fidgeted.
“I have a friend—BJ. He was always a little more of an outlier in our friend group, which was mostly… I guess I’d call most of us brilliant troublemakers? A few were just brilliant. Janie is like that. All smarts that got her stuck with us, and none of the troublemaker energy so many of the rest of us have. A few are friends we made along our path of chaos that are neither. Leerie is mostly like that. She’s not stupid, or anything, more… content to not push herself? At least, when compared to the rest of us—I actually think our undying motivation broke her own motivation a bit, since she could never hope to keep up? I think if her cousin, Darrie, hadn’t been so much a part of our group, Leerie would have found other people to hang out with… or just hung with Darrie. I think Leerie would be fine with just Darrie.”
“That is… very close.”
Emilia gave a humourless laugh. “You can say unhealthy; everyone knows it. A few of us have tried gently pushing Darrie to get some space from her—like, Leerie is great, and we love her, but…” Emilia trailed off, finding her words once more, before finally admitting that, in her opinion, her friend was ruining her cousin Darrie’s life. “Even the party I was dreaming about, Leerie wasn’t having a good time, so she made Darrie leave with her, and she definitely could have gone home alone. She’s just like that? Can’t be alone, always trying to make Darrie cut his time with friends short so it can just be the two of them, and this is totally beside the point!”
“It’s fine,” Olivier assured her, ripping a small piece of himself out to give her: “I enjoy listening to you talk.”
“About my friends?”
“Yes.”
Emilia’s head tilted towards him. Probably, in the scattered light of whatever existed outside the room’s windows, the girl could see the vague details of him. Hopefully, she couldn’t make out the burn of red spreading over his nose and cheeks.
“About my life?”
“Yes.”
“About my random thoughts?”
“Yes.”
“About—”
“About anything.” It was a dangerous thing to say, if also true. Here in the darkness, it was easy to admit the truth that he enjoyed everything Emilia had to say, even was it was insane or inappropriate or so personal he was left wondering how she could be so open with someone she barely knew.
Silence stretched between them once more, loose and easy and swelling with something Olivier couldn’t name but wanted to pull into himself and make a home for—somewhere this feeling would be safe and cared for until the day it was allowed to blossom, heartbreaking and beautiful, into the world.
“Alright,” Emilia finally said, shifting back into her explanation of why her friend BJ had been an outlier in their group. “It wasn’t that he was stupid!” she insisted, while effectively saying he was exactly that. “He’s gonna be a medic, at the very least. Maybe even a doctor! But… it’s more of a
when compared to the rest of us
thing? And I know the rest of us weren’t normal! So we really shouldn’t be compared to, I’m just trying to explain the situation!”
“I understand,” Olivier assured her. “I really do. My cousins aren’t stupid, but I also admit that sometimes, compared to myself, they are slower to learn and retain things. On the other hand, I will never match any of them when it comes to social interactions.”
After a moment of thought, he added that Axelle might be worse in social interactions. That girl was just… awkward in an entirely different way than him. Where he often couldn’t speak with people he didn’t know well, Axelle often missed cues that the person she was speaking with didn’t want to talk about her chosen topic—usually something tech related. Seriously, the girl was lucky to have been allowed to work for Hail. Surrounded with people like Halen, she was living her best life.
“Hey, Olivier?”
Well, if that wasn’t inauspicious, Olivier didn’t know what was. “Yes?”
“Does your instance of {A Private Moment} also keep you from sharing what I say with other people?”
Definitely a bad sign. “Yes. I will not be capable of sharing anything you tell me while it is active, although I will be able to think on it. Didn’t I send you the specifications?”
“You did. I didn’t read them.”
Why did it not exactly surprise him that the girl had agreed to the terms of his instance of {A Private Moment} without bothering to find out what she was agreeing to?
“So… here’s the thing…” Emilia began, and even before the words were out, humour cracking through the silverstrain’s voice, Olivier already had a feeling he knew what she was going to see—what very recent concern she was going to confirm had already happened.
Arc 9 | Chapter 358: She Just… Gave Up!?
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