Chương 80: Chapter 13: Kindred Spirits

Little by little, like sleepwalkers waking from the same nightmare, they stood up. There were looks of deep sadness and a silent horror that communicated in the mute language of the eyes. But Selena, in the midst of the whirlwind of others' emotions, found herself in a strange calm. It was not courage that sustained her, but a greedy and almost scientific curiosity. Death as the price, the body as the currency… it was a perverse mechanism, yes, but it was also a truth.

And truths, however terrible they might be, were always preferable to the sweet ignorance in which she had floated until now. When they went out into the corridor, they found Valerian leaning against the wall, his arms crossed and an eyebrow arched in a gesture of mocking impatience. —I wanted a dramatic twist —he said with a hint of irony. His voice echoed in the narrow stone passage; everyone looked at him. —But you cannot leave the facilities if you do not follow me.

Unless, of course, you prefer to spend the night snuggled up with the whispering void. Without waiting for an answer, he turned around and began to walk. The six, a flock of shocked souls, formed a silent line behind him. They did not return by the same tortuous path.

Valerian led them through a series of turns that seemed to contradict all spatial logic, until a door disguised in what appeared to be a solid rock wall slid to one side, revealing not the Atrium of Knowledge, but a small private garden, hidden between two wings of the library, bathed in the already golden light of late afternoon. —Until tomorrow, damned ones —Valerian bid them farewell with a grimace.

Only then did he walk slowly until he disappeared into the stone of the corridor lost in the gloom; the door closed behind him without leaving a trace. The younger ones, Fern, Yarra, and Corin, dispersed immediately, shuffling their feet as if they were wearing invisible chains. But Maya, the healer, and Ren, the guard apprentice, remained in the place, their gazes lost in the foliage. Selena, driven by an instinct, sat on a mossy stone bench under a tree of deep greenery.

A short distance away, Maya and Ren did the same on another bench, the space between them like a tacit moat. It was Ren who, after a few minutes of heavy silence, stood up and crossed that space. He stopped in front of them, his posture still rigid—it was almost a habit—but he had a resigned smile that softened the severe line of his jaw. —A sentence we are forced to live —he said, and his voice was raspy, as if the words scraped his throat. Maya, beside him, nodded in silence.

Her hazel eyes reflected a deep concern; the same one she must have seen on the faces of the patients she tried to save. Selena observed them, and in her chest, she felt a twinge of empathy. They were victims, like her, of a sinister biological lottery. But fear was a luxury; resignation, a prison. She took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly serene, a thread of clarity in the twilight. —My opinion —she began, adopting a tone that tried to be light.

She shifted her gaze to Maya and then to Ren; both were looking at the ground. —Is that we must not look with sadness at what we cannot change. It is part of us now, like the blood in our veins or the air in our lungs. Better… She paused briefly, searching for the exact term. —Better we talk about everyday things. You don't know how much it helps. A moment of normalcy in the midst of the abyss. Ren and Maya looked at her; the surprise on their faces was so palpable it could almost be touched.

It was not the reaction they expected from her, the woman whose mere mention they whispered with fear and hatred. They expected arrogance, disdain, or perhaps a fear as great as their own. Not this lucid calm, this invitation to sanity. For an instant, the weight of the shared curse seemed to become lighter, not because it had vanished, but because, faced with Selena's unexpected humanity, they no longer had to carry it completely alone.

Selena's calm, that serenity that had so disconcerted her companions, was not an innate gift nor the mask of nobility. It was a lesson learned on the beaten earth floor of Sacred Rest, where pain was a broken bone, everyone shared and hope, a commodity so scarce it had to be rationed with care. She remembered with a clarity that warmed her chest in the afternoons when Anya, with her warm and welcoming voice, began community time.

A simple ritual where words, honest and unpolished, served to break reality into pieces, to make it more digestible among everyone. It was the same principle she now applied, instinctively, in this garden of stone and moss, in front of two others condemned to her same fate. It was then that Selena, breaking the delicate thread of silence that had formed, asked with a frankness that sounded like liberation: —How did they find you? I was notified by my uncle of His Majesty's orders.

—Her gaze was clear, open, inviting confidence. As she spoke, her perception, sharpened by constant vigilance, caught two motionless figures in the distance. Her slaves observed her from the gloom between the trees, like two statues of a different nature. Maya spoke first. Her voice, a deep and resonant contralto, far from the soft tone expected of a woman, cut the air with a strangely reassuring cadence. —Four people in dark clothes arrived —she began almost with parsimony.

Her hazel eyes lost focus, as if she were reliving the scene. —There were three men and a woman. There was one who was blind, his eyes were totally pale, and the woman wore a blindfold, made of silver silk that slightly reflected the light, creating a faint glow around her face. She paused, her fingers twisting unconsciously in her lap. —They said they came on behalf of the King, that I could be useful to them. A sigh, laden with the echo of that moment of perplexity and fear, escaped her.

—Later they brought a judge with the badge of the royal shield who witnessed everything. She looked at Selena, and in her eyes, there was no longer just the concern for the magical curse, but the shadow of a transaction that had marked her destiny. Maya continued with the same tone of deep resignation. —The conditions for me to come here, the King said they were… She enumerated, counting on her fingers. —First, my family would obtain two gold crowns for each month I spent at the university.

Second, my family would have the privilege of being free men from any lord or noble of the land. Third, I could choose a path at the university. Another sigh, this one deeper, as if she were trying to expel the metallic taste of the barter. —No person in the kingdom would refuse those conditions. They didn't tell me about magic. She added, and her voice broke slightly. —Until yesterday, when I came to enroll in the Atrium of Knowledge.

The rector already had an hour scheduled for me to meet with him, so I had to wait. She fell silent, and her hands, at last, became still, but anxiety pulsed in the air around her like a feverish pulse. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. The silence that followed Maya's confession was thick, laden with the weight of the transactions that had sealed their fates.

Ren was the one who broke it; his voice was raspy and weathered, but with a hint of bitter irony that seemed carved into the stone of the garden. —The same happened to me —he confessed. Then he crossed his arms over his chest as if protecting himself from a cold that was born from within. —But instead of making us free men… my family already was… the King granted my father the opportunity to be the personal guard of the local baron. He added no more. It wasn't necessary.

The eloquence of his silence painted the whole picture: a social ascent, a bone thrown to the faithful wolf, in exchange for the son delivered to the slaughterhouse. A cold barter where his life and his mortal potential were the bargaining chips. A bird with colorful plumage like a speck of living emerald and sapphire crossed the garden. Its song, sharp and clear, was a flash of absurdly beautiful normalcy in the midst of the gloom that enveloped them.

It was as if that trill, fleeting and foreign, returned a shred of practical sanity to Maya. Her anxiety, once palpable like a feverish pulse, seemed to transform into a tangible curiosity, an anchor thrown into the sea of the unknown. —What paths did you choose? —she asked. Her gaze, now more serene, moved from Ren to Selena, searching in their choices for a map of the souls that would share her sentence. Selena answered first, her voice a thread of serenity that contrasted with the inner whirlwind.

—Advanced Medicine and Healing. —Then, she made a slight, almost imperceptible gesture; she was searching through her memories. —In the complementary ones, I took two Linguistics courses and one in Strategy and Logistics. She deliberately withheld the one on Paleography and Deciphering. Some keys, she knew, were better kept in the most secret pocket of the soul. Ren nodded, a short and efficient movement. Finding common ground in the concrete, in the choices they could still control, was a small balm.

—I took Military Strategy and Logistics. From the complementary ones, one from the area of Economy and Trade, one from Linguistics… He paused briefly, and a flash of practical foresight crossed his eyes. —And one from Medicine. As if he already anticipated the need to suture the wounds that his primary path, forged in steel and tactics, would not fail to inflict. Maya completed the circle. Her fingers were now toying with the rough edge of her simple dress. —I chose Natural Sciences and Alchemy.

In complementary ones, one in Linguistics, one in Strategy and Logistics, finally… She made an almost imperceptible pause, laden with intention. —One in Law and Government. The choice revealed a mind not only eagerness to unravel the secrets of the material world, but also deeply aware of the power structures that, like river stones, governed their destinies. It was Ren who asked this time. —Where do you come from? His question floated in the air like a glowing ember.

After a brief silence, he added, like someone pinning a map into memory. —I am from the village of Windy Peak, in the land of Baron Stonecrest. It's near the Duchy of Aelthria, where the wind licks the summits and the shepherds raise the lanquirios. Maya, with her eyes lost in the sky that was beginning to turn purple, murmured. —I come from the village of the Whistling Forest, in the Duchy of Thyll. We live from the forest, from its wood, from its secrets.

There the trees whisper with the wind when whistles pass through their branches; it's quite a spectacle. Grandmother used to say, "It's because they talk to the spirits, little one." She smiled with nostalgia, one that became heavy in that environment, and then finally continued. —We collect the mushrooms that grow at their roots and in the summer, their fruits. Both then turned their gaze toward Selena, as if the thread of their own stories had woven a net of waiting around her.

She took a deep breath, and in her green eyes, those ancient lakes that now seemed to crack, a pain was reflected that was not entirely hers, nor entirely foreign. —From nowhere in particular. She spoke at last, and her voice was a whisper laden with echoes. —Those who know me say I come from Lumenburg. But I… I remember Terracanto more. A deep sigh, as if tearing roots from her chest, escaped her. —My home… —she managed to articulate but did not finish. It was not necessary.

In the trembling of that word hung an entire lost world: the smell of damp earth, Kaela's face, and the rawness of a life that was not this one, of a life on the earth, of her work as a philologist, of Rulito and Román. —It is in the Duchy of Solendra —she concluded, with a hint of bitter irony. She diverted her gaze toward a point in the sky, then finished weaving the thought aloud. —Hardly a few weeks from here, in a carriage pulled by titanopods.

Maya and Ren looked at each other then, and on their faces were drawn the same question, formulated in unison with a respect that is only due to a title engraved in blood and power: —My lady… are you the Hereditary Duchess? Selena swallowed. She felt the weight of the name like a stone on her chest. —I am. She acknowledged, and her voice was not that of the noble, but that of the intruder, that of the prisoner. —But here I am not noble. I am not a duchess and I have no power.

She paused, and her gaze hardened, not with arrogance, but with a newly forged firmness. —You are worth the same as I am. Lift your heads; I am ashamed. The silence that followed was not uncomfortable, but different. As if an invisible door had opened between them. Ren straightened his back for dignity. Maya raised her chin, and in her eyes, there was no longer fear, but a renewed curiosity.

The sun began to decline, tinting the towers of Kaelburg with gold and purple, but in the corner of the garden where Selena, Maya, and Ren had taken refuge, time seemed to have dissolved in the easy current of conversation. The nightmare of the Whispering Void, the threat of a shared curse receded before the simple and ancient ritual of sharing stories.

The dialogue flowed, weaving a tapestry of disparate worlds ranging from Maya's loving family to the pride of Ren's father; for the first time, they found a point of union. Maya, with her small hands that seemed to remember the texture of every bark, spoke of the medicines her grandmother prepared in the gloom of her cabin in the Whistling Forest. She spoke of the dusaut whose leaves had calming uses, of the rock mint infusion, the fire root for colds and as an ointment for pain; she named more with shining eyes.

Ren, for his part, dusted off anecdotes of his training with the blunt sword, the one that weighed so much in his teenage hands and with which once, in a moment of carelessness, he had accidentally broken the handle of his father's axe. The shame of that day still made him blush, but now he told it with a crooked smile, turning the failure into a comic relic.

Then it was Selena who, with a voice that at first faltered like the light of a candle in the breeze, shared a memory that burned in her chest with a mixture of pain and tenderness: the afternoon when, sitting on a blanket beside the stream on the outskirts of the fish market in Terracanto, she worked scaling fish with a friend. The smell of fish and scales, Kaela's surprise at seeing her so skilled, and for her, the sensation of doing something tangible, useful, in the midst of so much misery.

The talk drifted toward the animals that populated their memories. Maya confessed with a sigh her love for the anurhys, those small ones of greenish and playful colors, but she remembered them with sadness, as according to her, their human scent always drove them away. Ren, with a flash of childish longing in his serious eyes, admitted that he had always wanted to ride a titanopod, or even an imposing chelokran, but the beasts shrank in his presence, or his father denied him permission with a severe gesture.

—I petted an anurhy once —Selena said then. Her voice regained for an instant a hint of wonder. —It was at the edge of a stream, with Kaela. It approached curiously; its semi-damp skin shone under the sun... it had a slightly rough texture on the hands. She spoke of the nimoras she saw for the first time, spectral and agile, gliding over the thatched roofs of the houses like elegant shadows, and of the immense snails that grazed with parsimony by the road, scraping roots with their mouths in a constant, wet crunch.

It was then that Maya, with the serene authority of one who has grown up among the secrets of the earth, corrected her softly. —They are called mollucapra —she said, with an almost comical tone. She traced with her hands the shape of the spiral shell of those immense snails and continued. —Farmers sell their meat, but their shell, once ground, is an invaluable source of calcium for the huge orchards that feed the cities.

Selena laughed, a clear and liberating sound that erupted from her throat like water from a newly discovered spring. —I don't even know the name of half the animals I've seen! —she confessed. The laughter spread instantly. Ren let out a rough guffaw in unison while Maya's was softer, a deep melody that vibrated with warmth. For a moment, under the increasingly golden light of the sunset, the shadow of the Whispering Void and Valerian's warning blurred, chased away by the simple spell of company.

The afternoon faded quickly, and the weight of the revelations settled back upon them with the arrival of night. Selena's stomach was a knot of apprehension; the mere idea of food was repulsive to her. A look at Maya and Ren confirmed they felt the same. Pale faces and lost gazes were a silent testimony to the terror that had settled in their entrails. Without needing words, the three made their way toward the residences.

Ren said goodbye with a dry gesture upon reaching the fork leading to the Cloister of the Sky, his tall and martial figure absorbed into the gloom. Selena and Maya, however, continued together. Realizing they shared a path, a new flash of complicity was born between them. —It seems that fate insists on having us close —Maya commented with a shy smile. Selena looked into her eyes and noticed they were lit up with the lightness of the smile.

—Or that the architect of this place had a peculiar sense of humor —Selena responded. Another laugh, more contained but genuine, arose from both. They only separated when the silhouette of the buildings destined for women stood out against the starry sky, an architectural barrier that Selena did not find heavy to cross. That night, against all odds, Selena slept like a baby.

It was not the uneasy sleep of the previous night, haunted by nightmares of dungeons and whispered warnings, but an abyss of deep and restorative unconsciousness. Perhaps it was the cathartic relief of having found kindred souls in the middle of the desert of her new reality, or perhaps simply the accumulated exhaustion of a day that had split her existence into a before and after. Her mind, exhausted, turned off all switches and sank into nothingness itself.