Chapter 150 - 151: The Long Way Home

Chapter 150: Chapter 151: The Long Way Home

Volume 1: The First Civilization

Chapter 151: The Long Way Home

Nara had heard the news three days before anyone arrived, from a Red Moss runner who had outpaced the seven watchers by two days and a considerable amount of dignity. She did not announce it. She simply began cooking.

By the time the first travelers crested the last hill above Bukanlibag, every cart in the village was loaded with bread, every dried-fruit barrel had been opened, and there was a pot of something in the middle of the training yard large enough to bathe a child in.

"She’s been at it since dawn," Mira said, meeting them at the gate with the particular weary pride of a woman who had been drafted as assistant cook against her will. "I counted eleven pots. I stopped counting the pies."

"How many people is she expecting?" Rokan asked.

"The whole valley. Possibly the mountains. She did not discuss it with me."

---

The village was waiting.

Aren had braced for it and still wasn’t ready. They lined both sides of the road, the drying-rack women and the gatherers, Oren and Cass standing shoulder to shoulder and clearly pretending they hadn’t planned it, the boy Lira had once saved from the fever, almost grown now, perched on a fence post with his arms crossed trying very hard to look unimpressed. Bram had hung a banner between two huts that read, in his careful hand, *THE VIGIL WAS RELIEVED*, and then, underneath, in smaller letters because he apparently couldn’t help himself: *(Please Do Not Touch the Banner.)*

Nobody cheered at first. They just looked, and then Oren took off his hat and held it against his chest, and one by one the others did the same.

Aren found he had to look at the sky for a moment.

---

The Aswang came last.

Ilvane and Veshka walked at the back of the party with Rook between them, and the closer they got, the slower they went, until at the edge of the village they stopped altogether. Aren saw the whole crowd register it. Children had been told about them, he knew, and there had been a great deal of whispering about teeth and horns and the kind of monsters children invent. What the village saw was an old woman in a worn cloak, a girl with her mouth slightly open, and a tall, gaunt figure that had spent a thousand years standing in the dark and looked, in the afternoon light, merely tired.

For a long moment it could have gone either way.

Then Nara marched out of the crowd, wiping her hands on her apron, and stopped in front of Ilvane with her arms folded.

"You’re thin," she said. "All of you. Come eat."

Ilvane blinked. "I do not require—"

"Did I ask what you require?"

"...No."

"Then come eat."

---

By evening, the yard looked like a festival that had decided to happen on its own. Someone had dragged out drums. Someone else had produced a flute of questionable quality and played it with the bravery of a man who had never been told. Veshka sat on an overturned bucket with a plate on her knees, tasting each dish with the solemn attention of a scholar translating a rare text, while three village children sat in a half circle around her asking questions faster than she could answer them.

"Do you have a tail?"

"No."

"Can you fly?"

"No."

"Can you do magic?"

Veshka considered this. "I can carry a very large stone for a very long time without complaining," she said at last.

The children conferred in whispers, and the verdict came back unanimous: this was better than magic.

Ilvane, meanwhile, had been cornered by Nara and a bowl of stew.

"This is food," Ilvane said, in the tone of a person making a discovery.

"It’s an apology," said Nara. "For all the years nobody brought you any."

Ilvane put down the spoon and was silent for so long that Rook, passing with a stack of plates, stopped and put a hand briefly on the elder’s shoulder without saying anything at all.

---

Sela spent the night at the record hall with Bram, a lamp between them and two blank boards on the table. She had insisted on being the one to write the first line, so he held the lamp.

She wrote it slowly. When she finished, she read it aloud. *The vigil was relieved. Not ended. Not failed.*

"Is that all?" Bram asked.

"It is all it needs to be." She set down the stylus. Then, because she was Sela, she added, "Write the rest in your own hand. The long account. Every name, every point. You were there for more of it than I was."

"I don’t know if I’m good enough to—"

"Bram." She gave him a look he had been receiving since he was nine years old. "Who do you think I trained?"

He didn’t argue after that.

---

Aren slipped away from the fire when the drums slowed and the singing turned sentimental.

He found himself at the Spirit Stone at the edge of the old village, the first place the System had ever shown him anything. It looked smaller than he remembered. A boy’s glowing rock beside a field.

"You have been avoiding me," said Bulawan.

The gold eyes opened in the shadow of the stone, and Aren noticed at once that they were different. Brighter, steadier. They had stopped flickering. The long strain he had carried in every one of their conversations since the first was gone from its voice, and what remained sounded, he realized, simply relieved.

"I haven’t been avoiding you," Aren said. "I’ve been busy being hugged by seventy people."

*That is a fair excuse.* A pause. *The boundary is closed. The vigil is relieved. I felt it, even from here.*

"You sound better."

*I am. You do not know what it is to carry a thing for ten thousand years and put it down.* The gold eyes studied him. *You are eighty-six percent, heir. I wished to speak of the rest.*

---

Aren sat down on the ground with his back against the stone. It was a long time before he said anything.

"What’s in the rest?"

*Everything you chose not to leave behind.* Bulawan’s voice was very gentle. *The fragments you have seen came to you through cracks in the seal, small and sudden, the way water finds a hole in a roof. The last of it will not come that way. It was locked by your own consent, and it will open only by your consent. You will remember the sealing. The city. The death of Marlon, in full. You will remember being the man who gave the order.*

"And Selene."

*And Selene. The whole of her.*

Aren closed his eyes.

"I’m afraid," he said. "Not of the memories, exactly. Of what I’ll be afterward. Whether I’ll still be—" He stopped. "Whether Aren is just a name I was wearing until the real person came back."

---

For a while, there was only the sound of the village in the distance.

*Heir,* said Bulawan at last, *I knew the man who made that choice. He was brave, and tired, and he made one of the hardest decisions anyone has ever made, and I have loved him for longer than your language has had a word for it.* A silence. *But I have also watched you, for the last year and a half. You are not him wearing a name. You are what he hoped would come next. He gave up his memory so that someone could be asked, rather than told. You are the answer to that question.*

Aren said nothing. His throat was too tight.

*You need not decide tonight. You need not decide this year. The rest will wait. It has waited this long.*

"Not yet," Aren said, finally. His voice came out rough. "After the harvest festival. I want one season. One ordinary one, with nobody carrying anything."

*That seems a very reasonable thing to want.* Something in the gold eyes crinkled, and for the first time Aren understood that Bulawan, in its own ancient way, was smiling. *I have waited a thousand years. I believe I can wait a season.*

---

He found Lira on one of Doran’s benches, in the end, though not at the seventh point. Doran, true to his word, had built two more outside the record hall, with very little ceremony and the unmistakable air of a man who had decided symmetry was a hill to die on.

She moved over without a word.

They sat for a while in the quiet, listening to the distant drums, while above them the first stars came out over a valley that had, for the first time in a very long time, nothing left to be afraid of.

"Bulawan?" she asked eventually.

"Bulawan."

"Everything all right?"

"I think so." He thought about it. "Ask me again in spring."

She smiled and leaned her shoulder, lightly, against his.

"I will," she said.

*End of Chapter 151*