Chapter 37: Farewell
"Sevan."
"Let go."
"No."
"You've done enough. Stop interfering."
I stared at her, the cold touch of snake scales making my entire body rigid, but the strength in my grip didn't loosen one bit.
She underestimated just how stubborn I could be.
"Unless you kill me first."
"Let go." She said it again.
"You've kept snakes for so many years," I said. "You know what moves through these mountains, when it moves, what routes it takes. Every time the Dark Wizards' people pass through this area, your snakes notice them."
I didn't release her wrist.
"The Dark Wizards need to be stopped," I said. "Someone needs to obtain intelligence that the Wizard's Tower can't reach. What your abilities can accomplish, the Wizard's Tower cannot."
After hearing my words, the snake around my ankle stopped making threatening sounds and slowly retreated.
She was wavering.
"You're giving me a reason to continue."
"I'm telling you what you have," I said. "From now on, you're no longer someone living in the shadow of your husband's death. It's time to look at the world."
She fell silent in that moment.
I needed to make her see herself. I didn't use any moral arguments, nor did I speak to her about the value of life. There were still too many valuable things in this world, too many things worth protecting.
Her wrist gradually relaxed in my hand.
The wand dropped from her grip and fell onto the grass in front of the tombstone.
I supported her.
Her entire weight rested in my hands.
She leaned against my shoulder for a while, her expression somewhat dazed. Then she lifted her head and looked at the tombstone.
"Serqathi," she said, speaking to that stone. "I'll stay a while longer."
After she said that, she straightened herself and walked back toward the manor.
She left the wand on the grass in front of the tombstone.
Before leaving the garden, I looked back.
One of the snakes glided over from the edge of the garden. It moved to beside the wand, raised its head from the grass, looked at the wand for a moment, then coiled its body around it.
It went still, keeping watch over the wand.
She led me back to the main room.
She sat down at the table by the fireplace. Her strength had recovered somewhat now, enough to sit on her own. She stared at the fire without speaking immediately.
I sat down across from her.
Then she remembered something, stood up and walked to the bookshelf against the far wall of the main room. The bookshelf was stacked with books from top to bottom. She reached into the deepest layer of the shelf, feeling behind the books, and retrieved something.
She placed the object on the table.
It was a device about the size of a compass.
The casing was made of a metal I didn't recognize, darker in color, with several scratches on the surface. The pointer was a thin bone that had been enchanted with some kind of directional magic, resting quietly at a specific position within the casing.
"Tell me where you're going," she said. "I made this twenty years ago. Once you set the direction, it will point to that place forever. This way you won't get lost."
"I'm going to Aethon."
She didn't even need a map, setting the coordinates with practiced ease. After testing its stability, she pushed the device across to me.
"Take it."
"Thank you."
"I thank you too," she said.
I rubbed the surface of the perpetual compass with my thumb and placed it in my backpack.
There were no more farewells between us. When I reached the front door, Sevan didn't cross the threshold. She just stood inside the doorway watching me.
As I stepped out, the snakes in the garden also emerged from the grass, watching me leave.
When I reached the edge of the manor grounds, I looked back one last time.
Sevan stood at the front entrance.
The black marking on her left wrist was more visible in the sunlight. That mark had stopped at her upper arm, not advancing toward her shoulder.
She gave me a single nod, then turned and went back into the manor.
That compass made a significant difference in my travel efficiency.
Previously, I had to stop every few hours to determine direction, comparing the sun's position, the terrain's contours, and the map's markings before I could confirm my next heading. That kind of judgment took about several dozen minutes each time, and adding in the time lost to correcting wrong turns along the way, the accumulated daily time loss was substantial.
Even with all that, I still constantly took wrong turns, which really frustrated me.
Now I hung the compass on the button on the outside of my coat. That thin bone pointer steadily indicated one direction, and I just had to follow it.
I could devote all my attention to the road conditions and observation.
The terrain began to change.
The birch forest ended on the afternoon of the second day after I left Sevan's manor. Beyond the birch forest was a stretch of open alpine meadow, its color having turned to tawny brown in autumn. Walking further, coniferous plants began to appear.
Coniferous forest replaced deciduous forest.
The first to appear were a few isolated white pines, about five people tall, with straight trunks and needles that made a rustling sound in the wind, completely different from the sound of birches. Walking further, the density of white pines increased, and by the evening of the second day, the entire valley was filled with these trees.
On the third day, the trees changed.
After the white pines came a type of coniferous tree I had never seen before. The height of these trees exceeded what I could describe with everyday vocabulary.
They were approximately twelve people tall. The trunk diameter was wider than several people could encircle with their arms joined together. The bark was deep red, cracked into long vertical patterns. The lowest branches of each tree were at least three people high off the ground.
I looked up to observe—the canopy disappeared into thin mist.
Third day, evening.
I climbed up a ridge and stopped at the top, glanced at the compass to confirm direction, then let my gaze sweep forward.
In the distance was a shape that didn't look like natural geology. The edges of that shape were too regular, and it reflected some kind of light in the setting sun that I could see even from this distance. Its position in the mountains looked like a seal, pressed there by some force with stability.
That was Aethon.
The road took a turn in the final stretch.
That turn went around a rock formation jutting out from the mountainside. The moment I followed the road around the bend, the entire city appeared before my eyes all at once.
I stood there.
My hand rested on the ties of my hood, forgetting the motion I had intended to untie it.
The city was built on an enormous basalt plateau.
That plateau wasn't man-made. It had been thrust up by the crust in some violent movement long ago, angular and defined, colored in alternating layers of deep gray and ochre. The volume of the entire plateau was so massive that from this distance I couldn't immediately determine where its boundaries lay.
The city spread out along the plateau's contours.
The architectural style was completely different from the rock's roughness.
I could see colonnades. I could see vaulted domes. I could see steps carved from whole blocks of stone. Every building had a quality that made you feel it hadn't been constructed but carved.
"Not like a human city" was the first sentence that came to mind.
It was magnificent, but not ostentatious. It was precise, but not cold. It was as if some more ancient will had chosen this location many years ago, and humans had used stone and time to trace out that will's outline.
The road extended from beneath my feet along the edge of the plateau toward the city's entrance. The distance prevented me from immediately judging this stretch's length. The city gate was the space between two giant columns, those two pillars extending from the ground to about three people high. The diameter of the columns was approximately twice what I could embrace. The columns had no decorative carvings, only inscriptions carved in rings along their length.
When I walked beneath the city gate, I looked up.
I recognized a few words and pieced together the general meaning of that line.
They did not look—they were seen.