The Other Side

On Landsday, the twenty-seventh of Reapsmonth, Violet’s father was actually available to stay home with Teo all day, so Violet took advantage of this rare opportunity to visit the library after school. Cumula City contained several libraries, of various sizes and specializing in various types of documents, but her favorite was the one located right in the castle: the Atlas Isle Royal Library. As a library designed for the most important people in the world, it eschewed the shelves of childish novels, instead collecting within one room an impressive array of history, mythology, political treatises, and detailed records of the monarchy’s activities stretching back for nearly five hundred years.

Violet adored the ornately carved shelves, worn but still solid after so many years, the carpet so faded that its color no longer matched the upholstery on the armchairs, the gilt-bound books whose spines were pockmarked with a hidden language of age and wisdom; sometimes she felt more at home there than she did in her family’s quarters, or even in her own bedroom. Usually she had the place all to herself – King Cecil was not a sensible-enough person to make good use of the knowledge stored right under his nose, and while Lord Algernon loved coming here as much as she did, he was always very busy and his schedule rarely brought him here at the same time as her – so she was quite startled today when, upon letting herself inside, she immediately spotted Royal Enforcer Chuva sitting at one of the tables behind a modest stack of books.

Violet cut off her happy stride abruptly, stopping just beyond the doorway so that she wouldn’t make her presence known immediately. Outside of occasional glimpses and the official announcement that Chuva would be appointed the Enforcer of the Royal Guard, which may as well have been nothing compared to their first encounter in the city, Violet hadn’t seen the strange woman in days. Her curiosity was fired by the idea that a foreigner could appear in Cumula City, turn out to have connections to one of its most mysterious occupants, and then get appointed to the Royal Guard within twenty-four hours, but this was not the sort of question that she thought would be answerable in the library; she’d come here to do more general research on kings, queens, and gods. But now something even more enticing than books was right in front of her.

She hesitated barely a moment longer, then moved forward again, at a more measured pace this time.

Chuva’s head was bowed over a large but slender tome; its yellowed pages boasted numerous illustrations and diagrams which, so far as Violet could tell from a quick glimpse, had something to do with spellcraft. She flicked her eyes upwards at the sound of footsteps, and nodded acknowledgement at Violet, but didn’t seem on the verge of saying anything until the girl spoke:

“Aren’t you meant to be on duty, Enforcer Chuva, ma’am?”

For a moment Chuva’s expression flashed puzzlement, like she’d just been called by the wrong name, but she recovered herself quickly. “Even Royal Guards get meal breaks, you know.”

“Then…shouldn’t you be eating?”

She gestured to her stack of books. “As far as I’m concerned, this is eating. I was hungry for knowledge.” Just like the other day, she snickered at her own awful joke.

Violet smiled faintly but didn’t join in the humorous attitude. Chuva’s tattered vagabond clothes had been replaced with the familiar guard uniform, and her wild hair was now restrained in a tight bun, but she hadn’t lost her extruded air of foreignness. She was like an aristocrat dressed in commoner’s rags and sent to till a field, understanding her part and playing it passably, but revealing with every subtle movement that she was used to being in different company. For example, she apparently didn’t know or care that Royal Guards never spent time in the library during their precious break hours.

“I’m feeling a little peckish myself,” Violet finally answered, playing along with the joke. “On that note…maybe you wouldn’t mind answering some questions for me…?”

Chuva leaned back in her chair, crossing one boot over the other – a defensive pose or merely a casual one? “That kind of depends on what the questions are. When I asked Sir Silver about you, he said that you can be a little nosy, but also that you’re sharp as a dagger and that you care a lot about what happens to your kingdom. It’s hard for me to begrudge your little search for the truth if that’s the case.”

“You asked about me?!” exclaimed Violet. The parts about Sir Silver complementing her were so startling that she couldn’t even comment on them yet.

“Well, yeah. I mean, I was kind of interested to know what the void kind of kid would follow me all the way to a battlefield.” Chuva frowned thoughtfully. “Though, come to think of it, he never actually got around to mentioning who you are – I mean who your parents are, what you’re doing in the castle. Are you some nobleman’s kid or a guard’s kid? Do you have some title I don’t know about? Like duchess or princess or whatever.”

“I am not a princess,” contradicted Violet quickly…and a little more snappishly than she’d intended. “I’m the daughter of the Royal Treasurer, and that’s all.”

Her tiny burst of ferocity prompted a raised eyebrow from Chuva. “Uh, okay, I’ll take your word for it. You’re not a princess. Didn’t realize that would offend you so much – most little girls would be happy to be mistaken for a princess.”

Violet’s mouth puckered up, and she glowered at the ground as she muttered, “I’m not a little girl anymore. And I know that ‘princess’ is a real title, but it sounds too much like something out of a stupid fairy tale. Like some vapid smiling lady prancing around in a dress, worrying about when her prince is going to come for her, and never actually taking any political responsibility...! And the stupid happily ever after, to make babies satisfied. But I’m not a baby and real life doesn’t work like that.”

Both of Chuva’s eyebrows were up now, and for a moment, Violet thought that she’d been taken aback by the outburst…but then her lips curled knowingly. “Ohhh. I get it. You’re going through that phase.”

“Excuse me?” demanded Violet, affronted.

“The whole ’I’m too old for fairy tales, and all of the brainless masses have been force-fed stories about happy endings, but now I’m smart enough to see through the bullshit and I know the truth about life and how it’s full of pain and misery’ – you know, that phase.” Chuva smiled broadly enough to reveal a few inches of her still-not-pointed-but-really-should-have-been teeth.

That patronizing grin infuriated Violet almost more than the dismissive words. “It’s not a phase! It’s the truth!”

“Never said it wasn’t.” Chuva held up her hands like a peace offering. “Hey, I’m a grown-ass woman – excuse my language, though I think that ship has sailed already – anyway, I’m an adult and I don’t believe for a second that fairy tales are true. What I do believe is that they have their purpose beyond just entertaining babies, but to get to that point, I had to go through the same phase that you are right now. Cynical about everything, thinking that I was the only realistic person on the planet, that everyone else was a damn numbskull…” She snickered. “I may not have completely missed the mark on that last one. Really, if anything, you should be proud that you’re going already through it at your age. Mine wasn’t ’til I was like thirteen or fourteen.”

Violet almost protested again, every brain cell that she had shrieking that these smug assertions were hideously offensive…but she had to stop herself when she realized why she was feeling this way. It wasn’t necessarily because she disagreed with Chuva’s assessment, but because she loathed the idea that the revelations she’d had, about the disconnection of fairy tales from reality and the role such stories played in sedating ordinary people, were not unique to Violet Haraka. For so long she’d assumed that she was on to something shocking, mind-blowing, thought-provoking; she’d never considered that just because her ideas weren’t inscribed in any book she’d read didn’t mean that she was the first person to think them up.

“I…never really thought about it that way before,” she admitted haltingly.

“Didn’t think you had.” Chuva studied the girl’s face a moment longer, then threw back her head and laughed. “Do you still want to ask me questions, or have I pissed you off too much?”

Violet felt like her face was being roasted. She inhaled sharply through her nose, counted to five in her head, forced herself to inject some blessedly cool logic into the situation. The best way to demonstrate that she was much more intelligent and mature than other twelve-year-olds was to take this teasing on the chin – to be the bigger person instead of throwing a tantrum. The idea of sitting and spending time talking to Chuva had lost a certain amount of appeal, but she had no intention of showing it. “Yes, I still want to ask you questions.”

“Go ahead and sit down, then. I’ll clear a spot for you.” Chuva picked up the book she’d been reading and slammed it shut without bothering to mark her page, explaining, “This thing’s crap, anyway; half the spells don’t even work. I thought maybe it was just a magic-depletion thing, but then I saw that some of the spells I already know were written incorrectly, so I think the author just didn’t know what the void they were talking about.” As if to demonstrate – or show off – she lifted a finger skyward; the book sailed into the air and, after a bit of twiddling from her, neatly re-shelved itself nearby.

Books that put themselves away, purple smoke that addled demons…the first thing Violet needed to know was why Chuva had enough power to do such things. “I’m surprised you can tell that the spells are wrong,” she said as she took her seat, hands folding together on the slightly warped tabletop. “I’ve looked in some of those books, but they just seemed like gibberish to me, even when I tried to figure out what language they were supposed to be written in.”

“That’s because they’re dead languages,” explained Chuva. “Ones that nobody speaks anymore. The very first magic users in the world came up with spells, and the magic got entwined with their words, so now saying those words reactivates that magic…or that’s how it used to work, anyway. But don’t ask me to translate for you, I have no idea what the actual words mean.”

Violet asked bluntly, “Are you a magickai?”

“No,” answered Chuva, seemingly amused by the question. “I was trained by a magi – the same thing as what you people here call a ‘magickai’ – once she realized I had the knack, but I never could have become one myself.”

“Why not?”

“My town blocked me. My teacher was getting ready to retire, she wanted to appoint me her successor, but the council didn’t trust me as far as they could throw me. The official reasoning was that I didn’t have ‘the right kind’ of magic.”

Violet leaned forward, her indignation already half-buried by intrigue. “There’s more than one kind of magic?”

“Yes and no.” Chuva splayed out her fingers on the tabletop. “Mortal magic is supposed to be drawn from the energy of nature, and spells are just a way to direct that energy. I can do the same spells as any other magi – probably more than most of them, to be perfectly honest – but the aura always feels a little off, to the point where even ordinary people can feel it. I think you can feel it, judging by some of the faces you’ve made at me. My teacher always told me that I was getting my energy from another source entirely, but she couldn’t say exactly where, and that big unknown made the council people nervous. Basically they were afraid of me, in case I turned out to be wielding some kind of evil demon-magic.”

“Well, are you?” Violet couldn’t help asking.

“Not as far as I know,” Chuva replied, smiling wryly. “But I can’t really tell you any more than that.”

Violet thought: Can’t, or won’t? The phrasing seemed deliberately coy, not revealing if Chuva simply didn’t know any more than she’d already said, or if she was withholding something. But at least there was an explanation for why her very presence seemed to make everyone feel weird.

She waved her hand pointedly. “Next question.”

“Where are you from?” Her accent was ambiguous, but if she had a whole different word for magic users, she couldn’t have come from anywhere nearby.

“About halfway around the world and up north a ways. My hometown was a little speck-on-the-map village, you’d have never heard of it, but the nearest big city was Azuna.”

Violet was fairly certain she knew where that was, though she’d have to check a map later to be sure. At any rate, it was nowhere within traveling distance, requiring treks through stretches of numbed-out land and probably at least two boat journeys. Yet Chuva had come all this way regardless, and not even because she wanted a better life, but because she was looking for someone in particular…

“How do you know Sir Silver?”

Chuva smiled, and this time it wasn’t a teasing smile or a boastful smile. Even the mention of Sir Silver had dragged a genuine sort of emotion out of her. “We’ve been best friends since the two of us were nine years old.”

Nine years old? Violet blinked, realizing that she had never spared a thought for the simple fact that Sir Silver had once been a child. Sometimes she’d tried to imagine him as a young man fighting in the Thirty Years’ War, but admittedly without much success; he seemed too constant and ageless to have ever been younger than he was right now. It was like trying to picture a building as a child, or a weapon as a child.

And yet…why should it have been so strange? Sir Silver was not a building or a weapon, he was a person, and every person had some sort of beginning.

“That must have been a pretty long time ago,” she commented wonderingly. If it hadn’t been a social taboo, she would’ve asked how old the two of them were.

Chuva propped up her elbows on the table. “Sometimes it feels like ages ago, sometimes it feels like just a little while. Right now it seems like that was a whole other life.”

“So you two grew up together? He’s from the other side of the world, too?”

Instead of the simple confirmation that Violet had been expecting, Chuva swung her eyes from side to side, as if searching for spies hidden behind the bookshelves. Having confirmed that they were alone, she leaned forward conspiratorially and muttered, “No. Look, you can keep your mouth shut, right? Because if I tell you the truth, this isn’t the kind of thing you can splash around.”

“Who would I tell?” responded Violet in a low voice. “There’s no one I really talk to that much.”

“Except for Lord Algernon, from what I hear…but that’s all right, he already knows this stuff.” Chuva leaned in closer, lifting herself out of her chair. “Silver and I never met in person until a few days ago.”

“What?” whispered Violet. “Then how could you possibly have been friends since you were nine years old?”

In response, Chuva reached into her pocket and placed a small object on the table between them: a brooch in a tarnished golden-colored casing, with a gem that was probably glass made up to look more expensive, a hairline fracture running almost down the center. “You see this? Silver has one practically just like it. We’ve had them since we were kids, and they let us talk to each other from opposite ends of the planet.”

Violet stared at the piece of unassuming junk jewelry, unsure if this was another one of Chuva’s weird jokes or not. “Uh…how?”

“How? Shit, I don’t know how. I’m aware that two random kids each happening to find a magical artifact that lets them talk to each other sounds way too damn convenient to be true. But that’s what happened, swear to gods, and it changed our entire lives. Without these stones, we wouldn’t just not know each other – we never would have even figured out that we were magical.”

“Sir Silver is magical too?!” gasped Violet, barely remembering to keep her voice down.

“Of course he is. Tapped into a weird energy source, same as me. His reputation’s enough that he doesn’t have to show his magic to make people respect him, but since I just got here, I figure that a little flashiness can’t hurt. Not all of us can go around saying that we fought in the Thirty Years’ War, after all.”

Violet shook her head, bewildered. “I…I don’t understand. You two are the same age, and you obviously know how to fight, but you weren’t in the Thirty Years’ War? And you both have magic, but you never met until last week, even though you were using magic stones to talk to each other when you were children? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Royal Enforcer Chuva, ma’am.”

“First of all, there’s no need to call me ‘Royal Enforcer’ or ‘ma’am’,” started Chuva, folding her arms beneath her as if preparing for a long stay at the table. “Just ‘Chuva’ is fine, or ‘Miss Chuva’ if you’re one of those kids who doesn’t like calling grown-ups by their first name only. Second, life doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense. That’s one of the things you figure out as you get older. Right now you’ve got the first part down – no fairy tales, no happy endings, all that obvious shit – but the next thing you’ll have to learn is that life doesn’t follow any cold hard logic, either. And third, it’d actually make a void of a lot more sense in context. I haven’t exactly told you very much.”

“Then…would you be willing to tell me more?” ventured Violet hopefully.

Chuva’s fingers pattered across her sleeves, her expressive face showing a clear desire to talk about herself, but at the same time she was clearly trying to figure out where to draw the line and proclaim that enough was enough. “I can’t tell you everything,” she finally said. “But…I can start at the beginning, if you give me your word that your lips are sealed. And after that, I’ll tell you about when I went through my ‘fairy tales are bullshit’ phase.”

“I won’t repeat a word you say to anyone,” Violet promised.

“Okay. I can trust you…I think. So, remember when I told you that I flew to Atlas Isle, and you said that I had a weird sense of humor? Yeah, about that…”

Chuva was thirteen.

She’d just finished having a bath, and now she was standing in front of the washroom mirror, dressed only in her cape and a knee-length slip, examining herself carefully. Lately it seemed like her body vanished every few weeks and was replaced by another, similar but perceptibly changed one. She had been plump since she was born, and while her baby fat wasn’t exactly diminishing, it was shifting from a formless, vaguely round shape to something much more definite. Pressing her slip tight against her body for a moment, she could see thighs, a waist, wide swooping hips – elements of form that were common on women in paintings, women in book illustrations, women around town. Women, not girls. Adults.

But if she was an adult (or at least, something close to it) then why were she and Silas as distant as ever from their goal of meeting in person? They’d reaffirmed their promise half a dozen times, to “meet when we’re bigger”, but when, exactly, were they going to be big enough?

She frowned into the mirror, which drew her attention towards her face. That, too, had become more defined lately. She had her father’s eyes and cheeks, her mother’s nose and chin, but somehow her appearance was far more distinct than just an amalgam of her parents. She’d started looking like herself just in time for her to begin caring about things like that.

She wondered if Silas would think that she was beautiful.

He seemed to care a lot about beauty, often chattering to her about nature and art, but he never commented on her physical appearance…well, how could he? All they had were hazy mental pictures of each other; he didn’t actually know what she looked like. A couple of weeks ago, though, she had asked him:

’Silas, do you think I’m beautiful?’

I have no idea, Chuva, but I’m sure you are.

Unfortunately, this response left her unsatisfied, because there was no way of knowing if he’d actually find her attractive when he finally set eyes on her.

Every day, Chuva would tell herself that Silas would show up tomorrow, even though she knew that it wasn’t true. Whenever other teenagers avoided her on the street, or her mother ragged on her for her failure to do something useful – her parents were both carpenters, and they complained endlessly about how much they hated their jobs, but somehow their daughter’s refusal to pursue a traditional career utterly baffled them – any time the sensation that she was living a life meant for somebody else became too oppressive, she told herself, “Tomorrow’s the day. He’ll show up tomorrow.” It wasn’t completely impossible. In romance books, dashing men whisked their ladies away from unfulfilling, dreary lives within seconds; in fairy tales, the knights appeared like magic to rescue the princesses. And if it got written about so often, then surely it had to happen sometimes in real life…didn’t it?

A few years ago, it had been easy to tell herself that her life would change “someday”, but now that she was older, she was impatiently wondering when exactly “someday” would be.

Chuva was fifteen.

She was standing in the kitchen with a surly grimace curdling her mouth, being ranted at by her mother. Saría was angry because of the spliced-lightwood practice staff clutched in Chuva’s fist. The air felt taut and bristly like the very worst kind of magic, and Chuva knew that at any moment, Saría could explode from merely lecturing into screaming.

“…and after all the money we’ve spent on you, the private tutoring to get you an education, the private lessons with Magi Corona, you still have the nerve to waste your time on this? I mean, honestly, Chuva! What do you need self-defense lessons for?! What could you possibly have to defend yourself against?!”

“The wild people in the forest, for one,” Chuva pointed out, contempt pulsing around the edges of her words. “The demons that keep attacking, for another.”

“Every demon attack has been miles and miles away from here! You’re just wasting money!”

“It’s MY money, not yours, so what do you care?”

“The money isn’t the point!” declared Saría as if she hadn’t been emphasizing it just a second ago. “The point is that your examination scores are slipping, you’re going to be finished with your basic schooling soon, and nobody will hire you as an apprentice because you don’t have any useful skills! You’re going to be living here for the rest of your life, leeching off of your father and I, all because you wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to warn you – ”

“Oh, gods,” interrupted Chuva disgustedly, “I’d rather live on the street than stay here with you my whole life!”

She had never been struck by either of her parents – except for one time that she was too young to remember, according to an anecdote that her mother proudly told whenever they had relatives visiting, boasting that she “wasn’t afraid to discipline my children like the spineless parents nowadays” – but this time Chuva nearly pushed her luck too far. Saría’s hand came up, though it went no farther than that. She loomed over her daughter, the persistent height gap making Chuva feel like a little girl again, and the house seemed to rumble as she shrieked:

“CHUVA DE SARIA-MUSTAFA MALDONNA! HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME IN THAT TONE OF VOICE! HOW DARE YOU ACT SO HIGH AND MIGHTY WHEN ALL YOU ARE IS A SELFISH, SCATTERBRAINED, UNGRATEFUL LITTLE BITCH! YOU NEED TO SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH AND LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, NO IDEA WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU – ”

“NEITHER DO YOU!” Chuva bellowed at her, and Saría reared back, as if another person entirely had just materialized in the kitchen and subsumed her daughter. Because in fifteen years, Chuva had never, ever yelled back at her mother, not once – she’d sneer and snark during lectures, but as soon as that warning-siren-voice started up, she’d just stand there silently and take whatever was coming to her; she had no choice in the matter. Except that she did have a choice, and she was going to make it: she was going to show Saría that she was almost grown, that she was no longer small enough to be pushed around, and that she was not a lump of clay passively waiting to be beaten into whichever shape that her mother chose.

“Ever since I got my wings, all you’ve wanted is for me to be NORMAL!” she shouted. “You want me to have a ‘normal’ job, and a ‘normal’ life, with no flying or magic or any of the things that I actually like! Well, here’s a revelation for you, Mother: I’m NOT normal, and I don’t WANT to be normal! I’m meant for greater things, and maybe you know that, maybe you’re just jealous of me – but do you think that you can stop me from doing something special?! Because you can’t. And I’ll make you sorry if you try!”

She raised her hand, snapped it into a fist, and uttered a couple of staccato syllables – and a dish that happened to be on the kitchen table behind them exploded into sharp little slivers. Saría sucked in a squeaky gasp, whirling around to see what had happened, and by the time she turned back to her daughter, Chuva had escaped to her bedroom.

Tearing past the mirror on her way to fling herself onto her bed, she noticed tears dribbling out of her eyes, and she scraped her arm across them angrily. She did not want to keep feeling hurt by her parents’ refusal to accept her. And she did not want to feel frightened, either – but despite this show of rebellion, she was still living under Saría’s roof, and her mother could storm it at any time to try and get the last word in the situation. Though that shattered dish had probably sent a stronger message than she knew how to rebut.

Chuva landed facedown on the bed, and that flattened her starstone up against her, rekindling her connection with Silas – which she’d severed when she’d come home to find her mother haunting the doorway. Chuva?, he asked with concern, immediately worried by the uncharacteristic vibes she was putting out. Are you okay? She screamed at you again, didn’t she…?

’No. I screamed at her.’ She was glad not to have to speak aloud to make herself heard; her throat was so clotted that any attempt at speech would have been an embarrassment. ’Screamed at her and made a plate blow up in her face.’

He paused incredulously. And she just…let you get away with that?

’What the void is she gonna do about it? She can’t keep pushing me around the way she’s always done. I’m powerful now, I can do all sorts of things that she could never dream of.’ That was the truth, and Chuva wished that she could revel in her victory, but… ’That doesn’t mean that I want to do anything to her. Or that I’m happy that it came to this.’

Yeah, murmured Silas, reaching out with his intangible touch to comfort her. Fighting can be rough…

’I don’t even mind fighting, but she’s my mother! I’m not the one who told her to howl at me like a demon. I never asked her to treat me like a freak. She’s the one who started this fight – but now she knows that I can be the one who finishes it.’

She gulped back more tears, cursing the fact that she was still young enough that setting herself up as an enemy against the woman who’d raised her was disorienting, disheartening… She’d never known that winning a battle could feel so desolate.

But at least she had Silas, who still lingered in her mind, who – if he had really been there with her – might have conceivably reached out at this moment and touched her cheek.

Chuva?, he ventured after a long silence. I love you.

And her mouth opened, her brain spun, but neither outlet managed to produce an immediate response. They’d known each other for six years, but that was the first time he’d ever said it.

Chuva was seventeen.

After the village council had blocked her, a few months ago, from becoming the new magi of Saint Valdez, she had stopped her lessons with Magi Corona. There was nothing more that she could learn, anyway; she’d managed to pull off some of the spells that Magi Corona could no longer use, but after a certain point, the advanced magic stopped working no matter who was using it. Even Chuva’s mysterious energy source couldn’t overcome the absence of the gods. If the universe was a mill, then they’d been the water rolling through it, and its wheels couldn’t turn without them moving things along. Someday soon, magic might stop working altogether.

Well, it wouldn’t if she had anything to say about it.

With much more time on her hands, she’d taken to holing herself up in her room with a stack of books, cursing the pitiful little Saint Valdez Library for not having a better selection of mythological literature. She wanted to know about all the heroes of the olden times, when magic had been plentiful and nearly anyone could speak to the gods – but a few chosen mortals had been given more than a chance to have their prayers listened to. Some had been hand-picked by the gods to fulfill prophecies, to destroy oppressive regimes, to defeat evil people and fight the twisted creations they’d called up and save the victims they’d taken hostage. If you were divinely appointed to such tasks, then you would rise to a level beyond all other mortals in the world – the gods would name you a saint. In fact, Saint Valdez had been a real person, a woman who used “power beyond all magi that came before her or would come after her” (in the words of one history book) to heal a spot of land that had been cursed by a dark magic user, where her eponymous village would later be built.

Almost all of the saints were said to utilize some kind of rarer, stronger magic than normal people had access to, which supported Chuva’s theory – a theory that she discussed with Silas multiple times a day.

’We’re really chosen ones,’ she told him excitedly. ’We’re saints in the making. Everything makes so much sense now! Your sunstone and my starstone, our wings, the fact that we can talk to each other from across the world…it’s not just a bunch of coincidences. The gods set it up that way!’

His thoughts wriggled with dissent. I guess so, but I don’t understand. Why choose us?

’Why choose anyone?’ she countered. ’Why choose Saint Malloy, or Saint Oranda, or even Saint Valdez? None of them knew the reason why they’d been picked, but the gods did.’

Okay, but…the gods are gone. So how could they have picked us? We don’t even know what we’re meant to do…

’Silas, don’t you get it?!’ Excitement thrummed in her chest; the satisfaction of finally knowing her purpose fueled her heart. ’We’re the ones who are supposed to help bring back the gods! Before they disappeared, they must have foreseen that we would be the ones to restore them someday, so they left a trail for us to follow: the stones, then the wings, and then…!’

He apparently couldn’t stop himself from being dubious. I don’t think they knew that they were going to disappear. Everyone says that Destruction, Death, and Darkness –

’Yeah, yeah, I know all that,’ she interrupted dismissively. ’The three D’s got rid of the others, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was the good gods who set us up to find them, then. Or maybe something else god rid of the gods; it’s not like anyone knows for sure what happened. But, like, is it really that hard to believe that they knew what was coming?’

Knew it and weren’t able to stop it?

She huffed inwardly at him. ‘Look, I’m just stating the facts! You have wings, don’t you?’

Of course.

‘And you can do magic?’

Yes. He’d still never taken lessons, but they’d figured out how to channel knowledge and skills through their link, so he’d been leeching off of what she’d been taught.

‘Magic is rare, wings are unheard of. So how many people like us could there be in the world?’

Probably not very many, he conceded. You may be right, Chuva. Maybe it’s just that…I don’t know, I never thought of myself as a hero, not seriously at least. And you’re always saying that we need to defeat the demons and solve the mystery, and I know that those things are important, but I only ever thought I’d grow up to write poetry and maybe manage a library or something. This is a big change.

‘You’ll be great at it,’ she assured him. ’My knight in shining armor…’

She could feel him blush from the other side of the world. I wish you wouldn’t call me that…

Chuva giggled, but didn’t attempt to fluster him any further; besides, she’d only meant it as a joke. Reading all of this history and mythology had inadvertently led her to reencounter some of the fairy tales she’d grown up with, and sometimes she found her mind strolling nostalgically through all the old fantasies of princess and knights. Yet somehow they weren’t as attractive as they’d been a few years ago. Probably that was just a side effect of growing up, but she was oddly suspicious of the familiar stories, too, as if a part of her thought that they were concealing something beneath their banal surfaces.

She never dwelt on the odd, paranoid notion, though. She had bigger things to think about these days.

Chuva was nineteen.

One year away from the onset of legal adulthood, and she was still stuck living at home. There was a lot of tension in the house these days. She reflected with bitter irony that things had actually been better, in a way, back when her mother used to periodically throw tantrums at her; the stress had been less palpable so long as Saría had an outlet. Now the shrieking fits had been replaced by arguments that neither of them could win. Decisive victory would only come when the Global Safeguard Army finally made their way to this corner of the world and Chuva got herself recruited, allowing them to whisk her away to Silas and her destiny, never to return again.

That was Plan A. Plan B was to save up her money and flee to the other side of the world before things got even more unbearable than they already were. She no longer thought that Silas coming here would be the best course of action – even if he was considered a “cursed child” at home, at least he wouldn’t have to deal with Saría Maldonna as long as he was there.

At this particular moment, Chuva had just returned from work, and she hobbled into her bedroom on aching feet. She did six-hour shifts at the general store three days a week; they couldn’t afford to keep her on much longer than that, which was fine by her, as she thought she’d go insane if she had to endure that sort of menial drudgery every day of her life. Her mother wasn’t happy, of course, and made pointed comments about how Chuva should try and get a second job, which Chuva in turn pointedly ignored. She’d mostly accepted this job to appease her parents, but she shouldn’t have bothered, because look how much appreciation she got for it.

She kicked off her shoes, taking a minuscule amount of pleasure in the sound they made as she flung them halfway across the room, and tipped backwards onto her bed – only to yelp out a curse as she landed on a stiff, rectangular lump. Rolling over as far as her cape would allow, she reached around and dug out the book she’d been flipping through before work: not her usual history or mythology reading, but rather the anthology of fairy tales that she’d treasured as a little girl, the one that had provided endless stories for her to steal and tell to Silas.

Chuva frowned, remembering her mounting frustration from when she’d been rereading the book that morning, and her brain picked up the feeling again like an interrupted piece of knitting. She had to admit, it was a little ridiculous that she was getting angry at some stories meant for babies. Maybe she, like her mother, just needed an outlet to get her through her worst days…in which case she supposed that despising a book was better than screaming at your children. But she was convinced that there was more to it than that.

She propped up the book on her stomach and started riffling the pages, only to find one repeated word constantly jumping out at her: “princess.” There were princesses everywhere she looked: passive princesses locked up in dungeons or towers, princesses living under curses that had to be broken by the boys, warrior princess who she used to look up to, even princesses with no character traits at all who merely existed to be awarded to knights for their bravery. All of the girls were princesses – the revelation that she’d had when she was only nine now reoccurred to her in a whole new way. Boys and men could be knights or paupers or princes, women could be witches or soothsayers or queens (either evil or good), but girls only ever got to be just one thing. And that, Chuva realized, was exactly what had been bothering her so much, because…

“I am not a princess,” she said aloud.

There was nobody around to hear her – even Silas was asleep; it was the middle of the night on his side of the world – but she said it anyway, for herself. She couldn’t be the one thing that apparently every girl was meant to be, and even the thought of trying to conform, now, was enough to make her skin crawl. Why had she ever thought otherwise? In fact, maybe trying to force her story to fit a certain shape was a part of what was making her so miserable; it wasn’t the only reason why, but it certainly wasn’t helping. She’d still been trying to think of herself as a princess all this time, but she didn’t have to be a princess, and her story would still be worth telling.

Chuva stared up at the ceiling, her hair limply spread across the pillow, her body squeezed by the store uniform she was forced to wear and her feet still throbbing in time with her pulse. She was stressed out, exhausted, impatient, and defiantly triumphant. Most nineteen-year-olds couldn’t definitively say that they knew who they were, and she was no exception, but at least she knew who she wasn’t.

“I am not a princess,” she declared to herself again.

Of course, Chuva didn’t share all of that with Violet; she omitted the worst bits about Saría, didn’t mention any of the awkward semi-romance between herself and Silas, and ultimately even decided to leave out the old “chosen ones” theory – it’d been long since proven wrong, of course, but it still hit a little too close to home and might prompt Violet to ask a few uncomfortable questions. But unabridged memories played in a constant stream behind Chuva’s eyes as she outlined her life’s history, telling it in the same way that she used to tell stories to Silas every night. Violet, to her credit, listened attentively and without interrupting, although sometimes her fingers curled and uncurled like she was itching for something to take notes with.

“At the time,” Chuva finally concluded, “I thought it was a damn epiphany. I am not a princess! As if that’s anything more than common sense. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of women in the world aren’t princesses. I mean, shit, now I’m actually living in a monarchy and there still isn’t a princess, is there?”

Violet shook her head. “King Cecil isn’t even married.”

“Didn’t think he would be. But the point I’m trying to make is…the anti-fairy-tale phase isn’t exactly a mind-blowing new philosophy. As far as the grand scheme of the world goes, it probably isn’t that important. But I think that it is important for individuals – for girls like us when we’re trying to figure out the truth about life. It’s a stepping stone that we use to get to a more productive state of mind. You get it?”

“Kind of,” responded Violet cautiously. It was clear to see that she was reluctant to give up her current set of beliefs, which was all right; she’d grow out of them in due time. Chuva thought about saying “you’ll understand when you’re older”, but that was exactly the kind of thing that used to piss her off when she was twelve, so she didn’t.

“What time is it, anyway?” Chuva searched for a clock, found one mounted above the library doors, and internally flinched when she saw where its hands were pointing. “Dammit, I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late getting back on patrol.” She shoved out her chair and began piling the stack of borrowed books into her arms.

Violet stiffened, like a child whose bedtime story had just been cut short. “Miss Chuva, wait!” she protested. “You still didn’t answer my questions – why didn’t you fight in the Thirty Years’ War with Sir Silver? And if you were planning to find him since you were that young, then why didn’t you get here until a few days ago?”

“Sorry, kid, but it’ll have to wait for another time.” Chuva started towards the labyrinth of shelves, only to feel one of the books slip out of her grasp; before she could so much as bend down, Violet had rushed over to grab it, cradling it to her chest as if it were an injured animal.

As Chuva made one of the books hover in order to place it on a shelf that she couldn’t reach, Violet conceded glumly, “I guess it’s just as well. My dad will probably want me home to watch Teo soon.”

“What the void’s a Teo?”

“Teo is my little brother – my adoptive little brother. We found him on the street when he was practically a baby, but nobody claimed him, so my parents took him in. I love him a lot, but I wish I didn’t have to watch him all the time.” With the way Violet spoke, quickly and a little self-consciously, it was as if she was trying to repay the little question-and-answer session by sharing some details of her own life.

Chuva paused, and so did the book she was levitating, stopping just short of its destination. “Your brother was just some random kid walking around the city without parents?”

“Yes.”

“That’s…weird.” Orphans were fairly common in some of the more destitute cities, but on Atlas Isle, parents usually couldn’t die or abandon their child without someone semi-official finding out about it. “…But we’ll have to take that up later. Right now, I really have to go.”

“I can put away the rest of those books for you,” offered Violet.

Chuva accepted without hesitation and with only a quick nod to express her gratitude. She added her armload of books to the one that Violet had already saved for her, then crossed over to the doors, assuming that they were done talking. But then one last question struck her from the back just as she was about to leave.

“‘Divine Legacies: Unveiling the Mysteries of the Gods’?” Violet was reading the title of the uppermost book that Chuva had thrust upon her. “Miss Chuva…what do you know about the gods?”

Shit. This was ground too dangerous to be treading on; it might weaken and break, dumping them both into the deepest truths that Chuva couldn’t reveal. And she wasn’t the only one who thought so: a dark mist crept over the surface of her mind, a raincloud without the water, a foreboding presence ominously speaking of what would happen if anyone found out that the gods still walked the planet.

Gods damn it, Silas, I already know!

“Not as much as I’d like to,” she replied without turning around, and then she hurried out before nosy little Violet Haraka could turn those words into any kind of confession.