Infinite

13 BEFORE

WHAT MADE THEM think I could do anything?

-For a long time, sylph hoped you would come. They hoped you would see the truth about Janan. After thousands of years, many gave up that belief, but when they discovered you in Purple Rose Cottage, the news spread to all the sylph.-

“I don’t understand.”

-Phoenixes cursed the sylph. The only way to break the curse is to stop Janan from ascending. However, sylph are incapable of doing this on their own.-

“That doesn’t seem like a very fair curse.”

Cris trilled, like a laugh, and the others burned a little hotter. -No. But the phoenixes told them about the possibility of a newsoul, someone who could break the curse by stopping Janan. And all the sylph swore they would do anything to find this soul, keep it safe. They would do anything necessary to gain their redemption.-

Redemption. A theory tugged at me, but I’d think about it later.

-When you were an infant, all the sylph traps were removed from Purple Rose Cottage.-

Sam and I exchanged glances. “Li did it?” he asked. “Hoping Ana would ‘accidentally’ be killed by a sylph?”

Shadows rippled. Nods.

-But they knew you were different. They protected you. They kept your room warm in the winter, and siphoned out heat in the summer. They sang you to sleep when you cried.-

It seemed crazy, but Cris wouldn’t lie to me, and I had frequently dreamt of warm shadows. Maybe they hadn’t been dreams, after all.

“What about the attack on her birthday?” Sam asked. “And the day after, when a sylph burned her hands?”

-The sylph wanted to communicate. They saw Ana leave the cottage, saw that she was leaving for good. They thought she was ready to help stop Janan, so they followed and tried to sing with her. Instead she got scared and ran. If they’d wanted to hurt her, they would have done it while she was sleeping.-

“But they chased me.”

Cris shrank a little. -They got excited. After you threw yourself off a cliff to escape, they realized you’d been frightened. So the next day, they sent only one sylph. But then you wanted revenge and tried to trap their messenger, who was afraid of you by then. The intent was never to burn you. It was an accident.-

The song sounded pleading, but too easily I could remember running between trees and dodging brush. Nearly a year later, I could still feel my heart pounding with the terror, and still feel the inferno in my hands where they’d been burned.

It had been a long and awful recovery, and I’d spent months terrified of sylph. I’d worried they were after me, like dragons seemed to focus on Sam.

And all along they’d wanted to be my friend? They’d wanted me to save them?

“Is that why sylph allowed Menehem to experiment on them for so long?” I knotted my fingers together. “And why they chose not to burn him the day he discovered the poison? Because they wanted him to keep working?”

The shadows rippled again. Assent.

“Did it hurt?” The question was out before I realized.

A shudder ran through the ranks of sylph.

My voice thinned, barely a voice at all. “I’m sorry.”

One by one, sylph leaned close, brushed dry heat across my face. Nothing burned. It felt only like walking into a summer-baked room, sunlight all around.

Melancholy whispers made me think of leagues and leagues of golden sand, wind-rippled dunes like snowdrifts. They gave me images of turquoise water and heat-shimmering air, strange trees with wide fronds and peeling bark. Lizards scampered everywhere, giant turtles, flocks of white birds screeching. Sylph voices rushed and hissed like waves on the beach.

When they pulled back, I sighed and shivered. I wasn’t sure what that had been. A gift, maybe? But now that it was over, the cold air snaked in, even through the sylph.

“What else can you tell us?” I asked Cris.

He rippled in a way that might have been a shrug. -The books you’re trying to read are phoenix books. The others can help you with possible translations for symbols, but deciphering what the books actually say—that’s up to you.-

“And the phoenixes? You said they saw the possibility of me. How?”

-Phoenixes don’t experience time like we do. They see things all at once. They see possibilities.-

“They see the future?”

Cris gave a frustrated keen. -No. They see possibilities. Like you can see water in the creek. It’s always moving. You can see what it’s doing right now. Perhaps it will trickle into the ground later, or evaporate, or join a larger stream. Even if you knew the course of the stream, there’s still a possibility of something outside happening to the water, like being lapped up by an animal. There are a hundred possibilities. Phoenixes see those.-

It still only made half sense to me, but I nodded.

Sam frowned. “It sounds as if these phoenixes are very powerful. They see possibilities, they curse sylph, they can build prisons to hold Janan and his allies—”

All the sylph hissed and grew hot, but Cris didn’t explain their reaction. I had suspicions, though.

Sam said more carefully, “If the phoenixes have all this power and they want Janan to fail, why don’t they help? Why leave it up to sylph and one newsoul?”

Cris shivered, black roses blooming around him. -Redemption must be earned. If we want it, we will work for it, even though we can never obtain it on our own. To succeed, we need Ana’s willing help. And your help, Dossam.-

Chills swept through me. “And the phoenixes?”

-They don’t need Janan to be stopped, any more than the earth needs the moon to orbit it. The world would change without the moon, but the earth would still exist.-

I nodded, still filled with so many questions, trying to absorb so much information. I didn’t even know where to start.

Brush snapped nearby, and a wolf howled in the south.

“We should head back in.” Sam wrapped an arm around me. “The others will wonder where we are.” He placed the flute back inside its case, and sylph songs faded into the night as all but one sylph vanished back into the forest.

Cris stayed with us as we headed back to the cave, our path illuminated by the lantern Sam had brought along. Snow fell more quickly now, dimming the world beyond our little circle of light.

Back inside the cave, Whit and Stef were going over our notes on the temple books. A pile of dead rabbits lay in the corner, waiting to be dried.

I draped a cloth over the carnage. “You had a lot of luck with the snares?” We wouldn’t starve, at least.

Whit shook his head. “We took the sylph hunting. They’d find a rabbit, chase it, kill it quickly, and we’d fetch it.”

“They hunt and they cook. Who knew sylph were so useful?” I sat down beside Stef and Whit and looked over the notes they’d taken, but nothing new stood out. “Have any of you ever been to the ocean?” I asked.

“Lots of times,” Whit said. “It’s beautiful, but it can be dangerous.”

“How?” The paintings I’d seen had been gorgeous, and that glimpse the sylph gave me had made the ocean seem like another world.

“Once, a bunch of us built a ship to take us to different islands and continents. We wanted to explore. But we got lost in the middle of the sea. This was before we really understood how big the ocean is and how easy it would be to get lost, so we hadn’t done enough preparation. Fortunately, we had machines to strip the salt from the water and make it potable.”

“Salt in the water?” I gagged. “Sounds disgusting.”

Behind Whit, Stef gave a very serious nod.

Whit went on. “Even being lost with no idea where to go—that was okay. Then a kraken found us, ripped the ship into five pieces, and started eating it. I was lucky enough not to be eaten alive. I guess. It might have been faster than drowning, now that I think of it.”

I shuddered, trying not to think about all the times I’d nearly been in similar positions. If not for Menehem’s experiment, Janan would have consumed me before I was ever born. And then I’d nearly drowned in Rangedge Lake.

“This isn’t too much for you, is it?” Whit frowned at me.

“No. I was just remembering something else.”

Sam touched my hand. “The ocean can be beautiful, though. Most of the time it’s beautiful.”

Whit nodded. “And there are lots of oceans. Some cold, some warm. Some, the water is so blue it doesn’t look real. And I love the sound of waves on rocks or sand. . . .” His memory ran away with him.

How long did it take for someone to grow that somewhen-else look? One lifetime? Two? How easy was it for someone to fall back in time and lose all sense of the present?

I couldn’t imagine. The present pressed around me, harsh and sharp and real.

Over the next week, I translated more symbols with the sylph’s help.

Getting new meanings for different symbols was easy now. The sylph knew several words for every symbol and knew how different modifiers worked, but they couldn’t always tell me what meaning a symbol had in specific context. So a sentence could read “People approached the city,” or it could read “Humans attacked the prison.” Or something else entirely.

But after days of going through a promising section of text, I’d found a translation that confirmed my fears. After lunch one afternoon, I passed my notebook to Stef for her opinion.

Chatter quieted as she read, and a few sylph skittered from the cave. Cris stayed, identifiable by his shadow rose.

After a little while, everyone waiting and watching Stef, she handed back my notebook, her tone sober. “That looks right to me.”

“Thanks.” I accepted the notebook and flipped back to the beginning of the story. “Then I guess if everyone is ready to know . . .”

“We are.” Whit set our dirty dishes aside and cleaned his hands. “Then maybe we can move on from this cave.”

I nodded. We’d move on, but I doubted he’d like where I was thinking about going. “Get comfortable.” As I spoke, I adjusted my sleeping bag so I could lean against the wall, my notebook on my knees. Cris hovered nearby, while Sam sat cross-legged beside me. I offered him my free hand, and he held it in his lap, tracing the outline of my fingers.

The memory magic on Whit was cracked and fading, though he wasn’t completely free of it yet. It took time. But Sam and Stef would remember everything I was about to tell them, and the more we reminded Whit, the better chance he’d have of recalling it later.

“First, I need to tell you what these books are. They’re history, but as Meuric said, no one wrote them. They’re simply written. I don’t know when, or how, but this one”—I reached to open one of the books—“talks about my birth.”

Whit snatched up the book as though to read it right now.

“How is that possible?” Sam leaned over to look at the book with Whit, but frowned and sat back when he couldn’t read anything.

“No one wrote the books. They’re written as history happens. But they do belong to phoenixes. They were stolen, along with the temple key.” I shook my head. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start with what you’ve been forced to forget.

“Before your time, the old world passed away. A new age dawned with cataclysmic events and the rising of creatures that had once been legend. Dragons, trolls, rocs, centaurs—and phoenixes. Humans perished by the millions during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all over the world. Hurricanes washed the earth clean. Only a small number of people survived the destruction, and it wasn’t long before they would fall, too. That’s when all this starts.”

“There were humans before?” Whit asked.

“Lots of humans, it seems.”

“Then they’d have had their own society. Technological advancements. Ideas and dreams and culture. What happened to all of it? How could none of that have survived?”

“Surely a lot of that world did survive.” I couldn’t stop my pitying look. “But Janan wanted you to believe he created you. Why would he have allowed a previous society’s culture to stay? He erased it from your minds, just like he erased so many other things. But when you had flashes of inspiration or ideas for inventions, maybe some of what you’d learned in your very first lifetime leaked through the memory magic.”

“So our inventions.” Stef glanced at her SED, my flute, our lanterns. “None of what we thought was ours is ours.”

My throat tightened, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if she was right or—Or what. The books didn’t tell me.

Sam touched my leg. “What happened next?”

I eyed my notes. “The cataclysm was before phoenixes began recording history, so whatever incited it is a mystery. We may never know. It’s not important, anyway. Only how people reacted to it.” I found my place again. “Humanity dwindled as the other dominant species carved out territories across the world. After a hundred or more years of living with the constant threat of extinction, a new leader was born.”

“You should probably mention that people weren’t reincarnated.” Stef glanced around the group. “People just lived and died, like everything else.”

“That’s how the population grew smaller.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”

She ducked her head.

“Anyway, this new leader’s name was Janan. He was strong and had plans to lead his people not just beyond their current problem—always getting slaughtered by the various creatures living around their small territory—but into a greater way of living: never dying. He saw how phoenixes rose from their own ashes, and was jealous. So he took dozens of his best warriors, and they went hunting a phoenix to discover the method of its immortality.

“They caught one and demanded answers, but the phoenix couldn’t tell them.” My voice broke. “So they hurt it and demanded again, but still the phoenix told them nothing. As they tortured the phoenix, its blood began leaking onto them, changing them. They didn’t realize it, though.”

Stef and Whit stared at their hands, and Sam had his eyes closed, as though seeing everything in his head. Sylph songs quieted.

“Soon, other phoenixes arrived to save their comrade. They were furious, but they didn’t kill the attackers. If a phoenix takes a life, it would cost their cycle of birth and death. Instead, to punish the attackers, they conjured tower prisons in the most dangerous places in the world, like jungles or deserts or over immense volcanoes. Inside the towers, the attackers wouldn’t starve or die of thirst. They’d get what they wanted—immortality—and they’d be alone for the rest of their eternal lives. Because the phoenixes separated all the attackers so they couldn’t conspire again.

“The towers were empty. They had no doors. Only a special key could affect the stone.” I glanced at Sam, who pulled the temple key from his pocket. It glittered in the faint light of lanterns.

“That’s the key?” Whit asked.

I nodded.

“How did we get it?”

I turned back to my notebook. “Meuric stole it. He was there when Janan and the others attacked the phoenix, and when the phoenixes took everyone away. But he didn’t take part in the attack himself; he hung back in the forest, hidden. When he returned to everyone else, he told them only that Janan and the warriors had been captured and imprisoned by phoenixes—not what they’d done to deserve it. He sent a party to steal the key, and they brought back not only the key, but a pile of books, as well.”

“These?” Whit asked, touching the leather spine of the book nearest him, and I imagined he was wondering if he’d been the one to grab the books. Maybe he and Orrin had decided together to take the books. The beginnings of their library, later locked away for five thousand years.

“Those books,” I confirmed. “Many people were lost in the attempt to steal the key, but when the survivors brought it back to Meuric, they had what they needed to free Janan. They went after him, and found an enormous wall circling a seemingly infinitely high tower.

“But inside the tower, Janan had been learning about the magic leeched from the phoenix, and he realized there was a way to achieve immortality after all. Like Meuric, he didn’t tell everyone the truth about what he and his warriors had done. He said only that he’d learned the secret to immortality, and the phoenixes had grown jealous and locked him away for it.

“He wasn’t going to let the phoenixes stop him from becoming immortal. Now that he understood how it could be achieved, he’d do anything to get it. He would begin with himself, and when that worked, he swore he would do the same for everyone else. In the meantime, he would reincarnate everyone, exchanging their souls with new souls. Everyone would perpetually reincarnate; no one else would be born because he could only reincarnate you.”

Sam jerked his head up and stared at me. Stef shot me a warning look. But before anyone could ask, I pressed on.

“Janan said the key to the phoenixes’ immortality was a death of their own making. After everyone was secured in chains, tied to him forever, he took the knife he’d used to harm the phoenix, still with its golden blood on the blade, and plunged it into his own chest. He shed his mortal form and became part of the tower, which was already half-alive with phoenix magic. And everyone inside the tower was bound to Janan.

“They reappeared outside the prison wall as adults, with no memory of what had just happened. Only Meuric remembered. He was meant to encourage people to worship Janan and prepare for Janan’s return. When they went inside the prison wall again, there were houses everywhere. The prison had been transformed into a city.”

Whit frowned. “But I thought there was a big fight over who would live in the city. . . .”

I nodded. “There might have been. I imagine everything was chaotic and strange then. The book doesn’t go into detail about that.”

“What happened to the others?” Sam asked. “The people Janan took to find the phoenix.”

I glanced at Cris, at the other sylph hovering around the cave with us. Several of them moaned and curled in on themselves.

“No.” Whit shook his head. “That’s not possible. Because Cris—”

“It’s the truth.” I raised an eyebrow at the sylph, and several of them nodded, odd little twitches. “What happened with Cris was unprecedented, but the others were cursed by phoenixes. They repented. They wanted forgiveness. Phoenixes didn’t trust them exactly, but they’d seen what Janan was trying to do. They gave the prisoners a chance at redemption.

“They had every prisoner do as Janan had done. They drove their own weapons into their chests—the weapons still covered in phoenix blood. The prisoners shed their mortal forms, but they had no one bound to them, no physical ties to their towers. They soon emerged as sylph: bodiless souls of shadow and fire.”

“That doesn’t sound like a chance at redemption,” Whit muttered.

“Redemption comes when they stop Janan from ascending.”

“How were they expected to do that?” Stef sounded indignant. “They were just going along with what Janan ordered. It could have been any of us he’d dragged along. Any of us—” Her voice broke, and she balled in on herself. Sam leaned over to hug her, and everyone was quiet for a minute.

“What about Cris?” Whit’s voice was hoarse.

I couldn’t look at the sylph next to me. “He was trapped like this because he performed the same ritual the others had. None of us realized what would happen after.”

Cris murmured a song, as if reminding me his plight wasn’t my fault, but . . . I could have done something. I could have made him wait. I could have insisted.

I should have.

Sam’s tone was all caution. “Earlier, you said Janan talked about exchanging souls. Does that mean we knew?” He faced me, expression torn.

He wasn’t supposed to figure it out.

“Did we know, Ana?” Sam’s voice dipped low and dangerous. “How long have you known that we agreed to the exchange? How long have you known we agreed to let newsouls be eaten so we could live forever? How long have you been hiding it from me?” There, at the end, the words caught and grief showed through.

I whispered, “Since Stef, Cris, and I were in the temple.”

He turned to Stef, naked betrayal in his posture. “You knew, too?”

She gave a single nod.

Without another word, Sam got up and left.