IBTRFL Chapter 3

Four days had passed. Aer had adapted completely to this goddamn orphanage routine.

She rose before dawn to pray and helped prepare the children's meals. A soup boiled from half-rotted meat and vegetables. Bread so hard it could have been quarried—no telling when it had last been baked. Those two things were the whole of it.

Even those two things came in amounts too small to fill anyone, so hunger clung to them like a shadow that couldn't be shaken.

After the meager meal came the scripture-copying. A fixed daily portion, no less. Once the assigned pages were finished, each child was assigned their section of the orphanage to clean.

Not one moment of idleness was permitted. If a priest caught you resting, you didn't avoid a beating.

Aer worked through her tasks without complaint. The urge to drive her fist straight into those priests' smug jaws—violent, ungovernable, arriving as reliably as breath—was entirely natural, under the circumstances. Either way, once the day's work was done, it was straight to sleep.

But Aer stole hours from her sleep and cut the nights into pieces. She muttered over the scattered memories of future events, rehearsing what she could recall, or made her way through the forest to gather berries and build back some measure of physical strength.

The constraints on what she could accomplish were severe. But she could not simply fold her hands and wait.

"What was the name of that count connected to the sacred relic theft?"

No matter how hard she turned it over, she couldn't bring it to the surface. After a long time struggling with it, Aer let out a breath and went back to scrubbing the floor.

The large events had stayed with her. A few of them were not unpleasant to recall. Most were cruel and terrible.

Of those, the ones connected to the Cult were not so numerous. And of even those, the ones where she remembered the precise timing and context were fewer still.

"Damn it."

What would a mercenary drifting from one contract to the next possibly know about all of it?

And then there was the plain limit of human memory. For an ordinary person to remember twenty-eight years in fine detail was simply not possible.

Aer dropped the mop into the bucket.

"Well. This case is an exception."

The words were barely out before a clamorous bell split the air.

Aer wiped her wet hands on her clothes and stepped into the corridor. Children with faces drained of color were running somewhere. The way they moved in lockstep toward a single destination was like watching well-trained dogs that had learned not to be otherwise.

The children stopped at the open ground behind the orphanage. Before them waited an old man and several priests, all of them standing with their shoulders squared.

"Director, it appears all the children are assembled."

The old man gave a slow nod and came forward. Then, in a voice that had no business belonging to someone his age, he bellowed.

"This morning, two pieces from my collection went missing. Items of a value beyond what the likes of you little shits could imagine. Some rat, forgetting the debt they owe for the food and shelter given to them, has obviously helped itself to what isn't theirs!"

The old man's neck went red above his collar.

"Come forward right now and return what you took! If you don't, there will be no meals from this moment on. That goes for every single little shit standing in front of me!"

Aer's inner voice filed this under: confirmed.

The Director was a man whose greed had no bottom. He was known for saying openly that the only way to eliminate material desire was to acquire everything you wanted. Had he pursued moneylending instead of the priesthood, he might have achieved something.

Crazy old bastard. Hope you fall straight down the stairs.

Aer fixed her eyes on him, pouring out a torrent of curses in silence from a safe interior distance. The Director, unaware of what was happening behind her eyes, continued emptying himself out on the assembled children.

"Two items in total! If you find a shining stone, bring it to me immediately! If you see anything suspicious—the same applies!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Dismissed."

The Director stalked off, huffing and muttering under his breath. The priests followed.

Only then did the tension break, and the children gathered into small clusters to murmur among themselves. Who might have done it. What would happen to them if no one came forward. Those were the questions.

In the old life—the one she had already lived through—those worries had come true. The thief had not been found as quickly as anyone had hoped. Time kept passing. The theft went unsolved.

One week. The children—Aer among them—had gone a full week with nothing but water. The priests, already worn thin by the Director's temper, had found reasons to strike out. That had come with the hunger, as a kind of supplementary cruelty.

"What do I do. My little brother is sick."

"My older brother too..."

Aer glanced at the children who were fighting to hold themselves together. She had been in the same state then. All of them were nothing but bone and skin.

The reason she had never been able to forget that week was specific. Several of the children who could not hold on against the hunger died.

The bodies of friends gone cold. Children too exhausted to cry. And what had the priests said, standing in front of those small bodies?

'Why go and die and create more trouble for us.'

That blade of a sentence had lodged in her chest ever since. It was still there.

Aer stood very still for a moment. Then she quietly began to move.

She opened her eyes with care. A few blinks, and the shapes around her resolved.

The children were sleeping with the depth of people who could be carried off and never notice. More accurately: they had half-collapsed where they lay.

The Director had meant what he said, and the evening meal had not come. For most children the inadequate daily ration was the one thing standing between them and a body that simply stopped functioning. With even that taken away, they had not lasted.

By tomorrow, there would be children who could not move normally.

Aer rose carefully from her spot and moved toward the door. She had been as quiet as she knew how to be, but the old wooden floor complained anyway. A boy nearby, one whose sleep had always run light, shifted.

"Mm... hungry."

Aer went very still. The boy stirred for a moment, then let out a slow, even breath.

She held her own breath and slipped through the door. This deep in the night, the priests were nowhere to be found. By now they would be trading insults about the Director over their cups and then going under.

Fallen leaves crumbled under her feet. A sound that would have been nothing any other night seemed to echo out especially loud in the quiet.

The rough sound of her own breathing. Her heartbeat, loud in her ears. Her legs had started to protest, but Aer didn't stop.

Past the thicket of brambleberry bushes. Into the territory of the oaks. Around the base of the great old tree in the middle of it.

"Somewhere around here."

She wiped the sweat from her forehead and began searching.

More than ten years back in her memory—the exact location wouldn't come clear. She went back and forth, and her clothes collected dirt and fragments of dead leaves until she was a thorough mess.

Sweating and aching, Aer finally straightened up.

Her back, bent for a long stretch, sent a dull throb through her. The air was a little cool and pushed in through the gaps in her clothing, and the evaporating sweat carried a faint chill.

In her old life the thief had been found in an unexpected way.

A girl too hungry to sleep had slipped out before dawn to try to find something—anything—to eat, even grass. And entirely by chance, she had seen the thief retrieving the stolen goods.

That girl. Aer remembered that moment exactly.

She'd said it was somewhere in this area.

Aer steadied her breath and looked around.

One spot drew her eye. A small hollow in the side of the great old tree. Sealed with a deliberate panel of packed mud and woven dead leaves.

There.

Aer ran to the tree and tore the panel apart. A few blows with her palm, and the fragile mud wall crumbled.

Inside the hollow, resting carefully, was a small pouch. Inside the pouch were two soul stones, each the size of an eyeball, each burning with light. The mysterious stones formed from the long compression of a fierce chaos beast's spirit.

A short, humorless sound escaped her.

That crazy old bastard—no wonder he's furious.

At the time she had only reported the location. She'd never had the chance to look at soul stones properly. The Director would never have displayed his collection for someone like her.

The size alone. The light. Low end, mid-grade; high end, upper-grade. Put them up for auction and three hundred gold coins would be a modest opening bid.

Aer pocketed the soul stones and destroyed what evidence she could. She found two rocks of similar size, put them in the pouch, and replaced it in the hollow. She cleared the debris and packed fresh mud and dead leaves into a new panel over the opening.

This would hold. No one would realize the stones were gone—not until someone broke through the panel and opened the pouch.

She dusted her hands and checked her surroundings as she moved.

The cave should still be there.

The thief wasn't due to move yet. But she couldn't rule out the unexpected. Until she was ready to use the soul stones, they needed to be somewhere only she knew.

This is brutally hard work. Aer wiped the sweat from her face and pushed forward.

Through the dense trees and into the quiet clearing. The place where broken stumps stood like grave markers—the Tree Graveyard, she had named it as a child.

At the far end of the Tree Graveyard the ground dropped away in a steep slope. Aer sat at the edge and slid down. Tree roots and outcroppings of stone caught at her on the way, and her backside was thoroughly battered by the time she reached the bottom.

She rubbed the smarting pain and looked around.

A small cave, half-hidden behind heavy curtains of vine. The position, the size—both matched the memory exactly. Aer pushed the vines aside and went in.

Her eyes adjusted to the absence of light quickly. Before long she could make out the far wall.

She took her bearings and knelt at the edge of the space. She began to dig with her hands at the earth along the wall.

This will do.

The soul stones, laid into the small hollow, lit the space around them.

The brilliant light was covered over with damp black soil. It had been a place only she had known before. She could only hope it would be the same again.

Aer pressed the earth flat, and pressed it again.

Then she turned and made for the exit. Her legs, which had been unsteady for some time, gave out entirely just before the opening.

The muscles of her calves, worked past what they could hold, seized and trembled. Her empty stomach lurched as though it were about to give up everything it didn't contain.

Aer sat rubbing her legs and stared blankly at the space in front of her. The missing soul stones. The Director's rage. The location of the stones. This settled it. The future was playing out exactly as her past had.

In ten years, the world would be half destroyed.

A single star above trembled as if it might fall.

The catastrophe she carried in the deepest part of her mind—the one that hadn't happened yet—came back to life with absolute clarity.

Screams and shouting came alive in her ears. The acrid stench of bodies burning drifted past her. She could feel the hot blood raining down from above.

To throw herself back into that hell again.

Small hands, shaking, came up to cover a pale face. Something heavy had lodged itself just below her sternum and wouldn't let the air through.

I, of all things—what is any of it even for—

She felt like a fledgling bird facing the world for the first time, its down not even dry yet. Utterly powerless. Utterly afraid.

"Kardo......"

I miss you so deeply it cuts.