Chapter 751: River of Time: Seventeen and Seven
’How long had it been?’
The question arrived in his mind in a small, detached voice that did not seem to belong to him.
He had been hung from four crystalline chains in the spread-eagle posture of a sacrificial lamb.
He had been hanging there for — how long? —
He could no longer be certain whether it had been twenty minutes or two hours or longer than two hours, because everything had stopped meaning anything to his concussed sight some time ago, and the only thing he could feel was the patient sequence of impacts arriving from the ten Titans walking their slow patient circle around him.
Sometime in the early going he had told himself it was survivable. That the lesson was a thing he could take while he found a way out.
That the regimen would, eventually, crack open the cosmic register seated in his chest and let him touch what was his, and the moment he touched it the chains would shatter and the constructs would fall and the lesson would conclude with him breathing hard and the cathedral hollow still and Eira nodding once in patient approval.
It had been wishful thinking.
It had been hope.
He had never relied on hope in his entire life and today, at the seventy-second strike of the helpless beating, he had been relying on it for some time, and the hope had returned to him the same patient nothing the Void-Ice element had been returning to him for two-plus hours.
The seventy-second strike. Or was it the seventy-third?
He had lost track of which construct was striking him in which sequence —
The blood from his half-severed ears poured into his ear-canals at the rate of a small slow continuous stream, and his hearing had reduced itself to a thick wet underwater ringing in which the Titans’ impacts arrived as muffled deep cosmic thuds he could no longer localize to specific Titan.
His eyes were not functioning either.
The fractures from the hair-grab had been compounded over the last hour by — he was not sure how many — other strikes, and now both his eye-sockets were full of his own dark blood.
The upper rims of both eyelids had been opened by some weapon-edge he had not seen coming, and the blood from those cuts ran down across his eyes in slow continuous red sheets that reduced the cathedral hollow to a smeared blur of pale crystalline blue-white shapes moving through a red haze.
He could not, see Eira.
He could make out, dimly, the suggestion of her on her frost-disc above.
He could see, more dimly, that her mouth was moving but he could not hear what she was saying because his ears were ruined, and he could not read her lips because his vision was ruined, but he had been fairly sure for some time now that she was saying something about legacy boys not having his mercy if they were in the same position, something about reaching inward, something about commanding what was his.
The same patient pedagogical commentary she had been delivering with surgical disinterest.
Saying her Master would understand the lesson when his body was prepared to understand it, and not before.
She was grinning now.
He could see that, but not cruel. It was the small private grin she wore when, somewhere around the sixteenth severed limb, she had decided that her master’s stubbornness was, technically, a form of cosmic comedy.
By the twentieth severance she had healed, the ten Titans had changed pattern.
They had stopped delivering individual strikes and had begun delivering combinations — coordinated multi-Titan sequences that arrived faster than his body could catalogue, the bond reaching desperately along whatever was being severed in a given second to repair before the next severance arrived in the next.
He had lost count of his limbs. He had lost count of his teeth and which side of his face was supposed to be intact.
And then, on the next strike — he could not be sure whose halberd or whose saber or whose mace, because the patient teeth had multiplied around him in a slow merciless ring — another attack opened his chest from one side to the other in a long horizontal canyon, and his vessel’s internal volume of blood, which had been dropping for some time now under the bond’s careful management, dropped further, and he felt his entire world ending and turning dark.
It was not new.
He had been losing consciousness in patches for the past hour. The bond had been bringing him back each time.
This loss of consciousness was not the same as the others.
’Why?’
’Why was this one —’
’Wait.’
’Why was this —’
—
’Why was —’
—
The world did not simply go black.
It tore as something inside his mind gave way like rotten fabric, and he fell sideways through it — not into darkness, but into a river... or maybe it was just what he was feeling.
It seized him without warning. Cold. Fast. Merciless.
The present did not fade; it was ripped away. The cathedral hollow, the chains, the Titans, the pain — all of it was torn sideways as the river took him under. He had no breath to scream or hands to reach for the surface.
There was only the violent, disorienting pulls of years collapsing in on themselves, the past rising like floodwater to drown the present.
**
— a song was playing on the radio.
’Mmm?’ He knew this song.
His mother’s favourite he had wrote her.
It was the same slow patient melody she hummed in the kitchen on mornings and her voice arriving on the second verse like a held secret finally unfolding.
It was halfway through the second verse when his small? ears registered it, and the woman’s voice was just lifting into the chorus, and his mother was humming along in the front... seat?
’Sunlight?’
Late-afternoon Paradise sunlight, slanted through the window at the angle that meant they were about an hour from sunset, the gold of it catching the small dust-motes drifting through the cabin and warming the cream upholstery of the back seat and lighting his mother’s dark hair in a long beautiful halo against the headrest.
’T-t-that scent.’
It was strangely... his mother’s.
Phei had known every day of his life, but he had not known, on this afternoon, that he was about to spend the next ten years searching for it on other women and never finding it again.
Aunt Melissa’s necklace caught the light hitting the side of his eye, from the other side of him.
A small gold chain at her throat, the pendant a tiny phoenix in flight, glinting against the pale skin of her collarbone every time she laughed.
How long has it been since he last saw that necklace in Melissa’s neck?
His seven-year-old? eyes followed the glint without thinking.
Without knowing why, the small bird-shape made his chest tighten.
His eyes then, without his command, found his father’s notebook that had a sticker on the back.
A small cartoon dragon.
He had put it there himself two months ago on his father’s birthday, with his small hands and his father had pretended to be disappointed about how small his birthday gift was and had then laughed and had then never removed it.
And now the sticker was the same small private joke between them it had been since the day he had stuck it there, and he could see it from his back-seat angle every time his father shifted the notebook on his lap.
He was strapped into a child-safety seat.
Five-point harness. Padded: the straps came over his small shoulders and crossed at his small chest and locked into a buckle his small fingers could not, in the moment, work.
He was seven years old.
He was also, somehow, seventeen.
The doubling did not arrive in his head as a thought: it came as a pressure in the small chest of the seven-year-old body — a sudden cold knowledge that should not have been available to him at this age.
The future memory of every loss the next ten years would deliver pressing down through the hollow space behind his ribs, his mother’s scent entering his nose at the same moment his mind, somewhere outside the cabin and inside another body altogether, registered that he was about to lose this perfume, the sticker and their owners... forever.
’Mummy?’
The thought came in his small voice.
Wait — that’s —
Daddy?
"Daddy?! Mummy?!"
His small voice had crawled up out of his small throat against his small will and it came out thin — thinner than it had been a moment ago, thinner than any sound he had ever produced — and it did not carry.
His mother’s had been cut off by his father’s words.
"— It’s mother’s wish, my love, the Kozukis and Tanakas are coming Sunday, both girls and their families, the three families have essentially —"
"Mummy?"
His small voice. Trying again.
"Mum — Mummy — Mummy please —"
She turned her head.
Just a small over-the-shoulder glance at her son who’s future they were discussing. Her pale golden eyes catching the late-afternoon Paradise sunlight through the window.
She smiled.
The smile reached her eyes.
It reached every part of her face. It was the smile she had given him every morning of his life and it had been so absolute that the seven-year-old body had simply assumed all mothers smiled at their sons that way, and the seventeen-year-old who had not seen the smile in a decade broke somewhere small and private at the centre of his ribs at the sight of it.
The river did not release him.
It dragged him deeper.
