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Emmanuel is not a pirate.
At least, not a very good one. He still feels awkward in battle; out of place somehow, like any second now everyone is going to notice this pastry chef who’s somehow conned his way onto a pirate ship. Not to mention that Captain Brandish is more than a little intimidating, if he’s being honest.
But he needs the extra pay, and doing these supply runs is a public service, and it’s all only temporary, only a stopgap measure while he saves up enough money to get the bakery on its feet for real.
Still, when he hears the call to prepare for boarders, Emmanuel has to fight back nerves. He takes a deep breath.
Florent, one of the other recently-hired hands, gives him a smile. Which is easy for him; Emmanuel has seen Florent in training. He’s good at this.
There’s a thud as a pair of boots land on the deck, and Emmanuel’s hand goes to his sword. The woman that the boots belong to scowls and Emmanuel exchanges one last worried glance with Florent before he loses him in the sudden chaos of battle.
Emmanuel stands frozen a second longer, then shakes himself. His gaze flicks across the space, looking for an opening, and there—Emmanuel lunges at the orc man, and their swords meet. Their gazes meet.
From that first moment when he locks eyes with Lem King on the deck of the Kingdom Come, Emmanuel’s life becomes infinitely more complicated.
***
“Come with me,” Lem says, and Emmanuel refuses. Because of course he does, because he’s not about to uproot his entire life for this person he’s only just met, as much as—even though—
So Lem leaves, and Emmanuel stays. The Ordennan army decimates Nacre.
Emmanuel spends a week stuck in the bakery after the one of the cannons caves in the side of the room where the door is. It could be worse, probably, but in the moment Emmanuel can’t imagine anything harder than sitting there, listening to the sounds of war outside, the boom of the cannon fire and the dull, metallic clanking of the Ordennan troops.
Finally, he’s had enough. “We have to get out of here.”
The others agree.
It’s Florent—Florent, who he worked with under Brandish, who just happened to be buying a loaf of bread when things went bad—who’s the one who’s best at it, pulling the huge chunks of rubble away from the entryway. It takes a long while, but they do it, everyone working at it slowly.
They are close when it happens. So, so close.
The rumble of the cannon outside, a sharp, booming crack from the remaining ceiling above the doorway, and then before Emmanuel can really register it the ceiling is on top of him and everything is pain, and black.
Emmanuel dies.
It’s funny, because, you know—growing up in Nacre, death was all around him. It’s less an end than a transitional point, and it was never something he was scared of. But there’s still a moment, as he takes his final breath, through the pain of the fallen building’s weight, where he’s terrified—not of anything in particular, if he’d thought about it, just in a raw, instinctive way that fills him to the brim until he wonders if that isn’t what killed him rather than anything else.
And then it’s over, and he’s fine, and he manages to crawl his way out—his body still damaged and torn, his clothes ruined, but still—well, not alive, but extant.
The bakery is in ruins. Nacre is in ruins, he realizes, as he forces himself to survey the rest of his surroundings. The Ordennan army continues to march its streets, and he can hear more cannons in the distance, and he doesn’t understand how there can possibly be more damage left for them to do.
A hand on his shoulder—for a fraction of a moment, he daydreams it’s Lem, come back to… to rescue him or something equally ridiculous. But when he turns he finds himself instead facing a different familiar face from his days on the Kingdom Come. Florent’s hair is matted with what looks like blood but he smiles at Emmanuel all the same.
A few of the others are getting to their feet now too, and for a moment Emmanuel is distracted by helping unbury someone else.
Down the street, though, the strange shapes of the soldiers—those are people, right, under all that armor, they have to be people?—approach. Emmanuel glances at Florent. He isn’t scared of the Ordennans, but he can’t imagine winning this fight. They are still standing in the street, outside the ruins of the pastry shop, and Emmanuel can’t see a way forward that doesn’t end with all of them in an Ordennan prison.
He’s about to ask if Florent has any idea what they do now, when he hears an Ordennan soldier—this one dressed in much more ordinary armor, not like these others, this one clearly human—shout some order, and in an instant the whole group is on them.
They run. Down the street, in the opposite direction of the Ordennans, and it’s slower going than it should be, probably. Emmanuel can’t seem to think straight, just knows that there is danger and destruction in the direction of the harbor so instead they head inland, and Emmanuel doesn’t stop to look behind them but he knows that the Ordennans are gaining.
Then, they catch up. It’s as simple as that. One of them grabs Florent by the shoulder, and their hand isn’t a hand at all, but something made of metal, and Emmanuel just stares for a moment like an idiot and then the thing puts a sword through Florent’s back.
Emmanuel stumbles away, on instinct, reaches for his own weapon but of course he doesn’t have one. The metal knight removes its blade, dripping blood, from Florent’s spine and turns to Emmanuel, and Emmanuel stumbles backwards, trips, scrambles back to his feet.
Florent isn’t moving.
Emmanuel waits a heartbeat, and then another, and then another, and Florent isn’t moving.
Understanding hits Emmanuel like a tidal wave, and he steps backward again, turns and runs. He moves as fast as he can, with no real aim but away. Away from the anchor and away from the horrible, unmoving object that had once been his friend.
He can’t get the image out of his head, of Florent’s form lying there lifeless.
Emmanuel knows that this is how things works for the rest of the world. You live and then you die and maybe you get a warning but maybe you don’t. Still it’s hard to wrap his head around someone just vanishing without warning. Here one second and gone the next. It’s something out of legends, surely, stories from a different age. Not reality. It couldn’t be reality.
***
Here are the things Emmanuel is able to bring with him when he leaves Nacre:
- The clothes he is currently wearing.
- A few honey rolls and some assorted silverware, the last remains of the bakery.
- A sword, picked up off the ground in the midst of the chaos as a means of self-defense.
- The memory of his dead friend’s smile, the quiet sounds of the market street at noon, the way the sunlight glittered off the ocean in the early morning.
- A New Archives ID card.
- A poetry book.
***
The book sits untouched on the bottom of his bag for several months. He was never one for poetry, really, and he hardly has the time. But it’s as he’s packing up his things to move on for the third time in as many weeks that he catches sight of it there and finds himself pulling it onto his lap.
Poems written by a god. How many other books like this are still in existence? How many of them burned?
He sits down on the floor of the tent and begins to page through it. Some of the pieces are familiar, lines he’d heard quoted and talked about, vital pieces of culture. Others are new to him. All of them remind him of home, of the hole in his chest that is the ancient city by the sea.
As he turns a page, he catches sight of something in the back of the book, where the neat print is replaced by a different handwriting. Brows furrowed, he flips it open.
The differences between the rain on these old terra cottas…
***
There is a group of them, in Rosemerrow. Folks who made it out of Nacre intact. They live close together without proper housing and get suspicious looks when they go into town together, and spend their hours hoping and praying that the Ordennans don’t get tired of all this one day and come busting down their nonexistent doors.
This cannot possibly continue. One of these days, he knows, their luck will run out.
“I have an idea,” he says to the others, now, as dusk starts to color the sky a dull gray.
“Go on.” The one who’s responded is a young woman named Cerise, the first person Emmanuel found after he made it out of Nacre’s city limits. She looks at him expectantly.
“We split up,” he says. “We split up and we tell them we aren’t from Nacre.”
None of them respond right away. They exchange glances with one another. Then one of them says, “Is that the whole plan?”
“More or less,” Emmanuel says, and it does sound silly to him now. “I… Listen. They think that we are not undead unless we are decomposing.” The Ordennans and their “curse.” He’s heard enough by now to understand that they don’t understand anything. “If we do not tell them we are from Nacre, they will not know.”
“I mean,” Cerise says, “they might know when we don’t know anything about the place we say we’re from, or look like we’re from there, or sound like we’re from there—“
“We will say we are from Velas,” Emmanuel says. She’s right, probably. He knows what the risk is if this goes wrong, but he has to believe it’s worth trying. “Lem told me—“
“Tristero, Emmanuel.” Cerise laughs. “It’s always Lem, isn’t it? Honestly, I’m still not convinced this man is real.“
“He is real,” Emmanuel says, “I promise.” Sometimes he doesn’t really believe it himself, that one man could be even partially responsible for all that chaos in the last days of Nacre. That a man Emmanuel still doesn’t really know can stay in his mind after all this time. Maybe those two things are more related than he’d like to admit.
Cerise laughs. “Fine, go on. What did your poetry boy say?”
(The head chef looks at him doubtfully when he tells them where he’s from, but they hire him anyways.)
***
For a moment, he doesn’t believe it. After all, what are the odds? Lem King, here in Rosemerrow, right here in this café?
But it is him. Emmanuel would recognize him anywhere. His eyes light up up when he spots Emmanuel, and Emmanuel grins back at him. It shouldn’t be possible, really. The odds should be a million to one against it, and yet there he is, here, now, and this isn’t a chance Emmanuel can pass up.
Then a star falls from the sky, and things, of course, get complicated. That always seems to happen with Lem. But he comes back, afterwards. They have a moment to breath. They have each other.
They both know it isn’t going to last.
He and Lem talk again, days later. They sit at the kitchen table in the tiny apartment Emmanuel shares with Cerise and Lem explains that he is going back to the Archives, to the mountains. He doesn’t know when he’ll be back in Rosemerrow.
“I understand,” Emmanuel says. He doesn’t know if he does, but if Lem is leaving soon he isn’t going to spend their remaining time arguing about it. He puts his hand on top of Lem’s, on the table, and Lem’s gaze rises to meet his. This has to be enough, Emmanuel thinks. They have to somehow make this be enough.
He squeezes Lem’s hand. Emmanuel’s glad he’s here, really. Whatever tomorrow brings, they’ll have this.
“I have something of yours,” he says, finally. “Or—it is not yours, but it was never supposed to be mine either, and I think you should have it.”
He stands, crosses the room, and pulls a book off of the shelf. He sets it down in front of Lem. “Here,” he says, before he can change his mind.
Lem, slowly, pulls it towards himself, flips through the first couple pages. After a moment, laughter in his voice: “I didn’t think I was going to be seeing this again.”
Emmanuel sits again. He watches, feeling more nervous than he should. Giving Lem a book is not the most exciting thing to have happened between them in the last couple days. “The last one is my favorite,” he says, and Lem’s brow furrows as he opens the book to the last page, the one marked up by handwriting.
“Oh,” he says. Blushes dark green.
Emmanuel smiles.
Then Lem says, “Come with me.”
Emmanuel blinks. “What?”
“Come with me,” Lem says, and Emmanuel refuses, again, like an idiot. Because of course he does, because he’s finally managed to build something here and he’s not about to abandon that, as much as—even though—
So Lem leaves, and Emmanuel stays. The Heat and the Dark decimates Rosemerrow.
It’s hard to look directly at: horrible, clawing tendrils of dark that seep across the landscape and consume everything they touch. The starstuff isn’t much better. Emmanuel makes it out of the city only because he happened to be towards the eastern edge when it hit. He brings nothing with him.
(He has the thought, later, that thank Tristero he gave Lem that book, or else one of the last remnants of Nacre might have been destroyed along with Rosemerrow.)
It’s a little bit like déjà vu. People standing in the shattered remains of a world that once made sense. Little groups of refugees start to form outside the city, some sticking tight together, others wandering in search of missing loved ones. Emmanuel knows most of them won’t ever find them.
***
“We go east.” The woman’s name is Rosana, and Emmanuel has seen her before, once or twice, when he dared to return to the refugee camps. She is actually from Velas. “Directly away from the destruction.”
Murmurs of agreement travel through the group. It’s the obvious plan, but no one up until now has been confidant enough to suggest any at all.
“We should head towards the Archives,” Emmanuel offers, and Cerise squeezes his shoulder. “I know someone there. We will be safe.”
***
A shopkeeper in one of the villages where they’ve stopped for supplies gives Emmanuel a strange look and says, “I thought the Unstill had already moved on?”
“Unstill?” Emannuel says. “I don’t know this word.”
The shopkeeper raises an eyebrow. “You folks aren’t nearly as hard to spot as you seem to think you are. Don’t worry, I’m no Ordennan. If your money is good, that’s all I care about.”
Emmanuel leaves that particular conversation feeling like he’s still missing something.
He doesn’t put it together until after they arrive at the Archives, when he sees them—sees the person he will later learn is Corsica Neue, speaking with someone, confidence in her every movement, and he sees that the others are the same. Not in their confidence, but in their undeath.
Unstill. He isn’t sure he appreciates the need to talk around the thing.
One of them catches him watching. They makes eye contact, and the next thing he knows they’re approaching him.
“You’re one of us?” they say.
“No,” Emmanuel says. “No, I am…” He’s glad that these people have figured out how to be. All the same, he and the others from Nacre are different. They grew up with this. Emmanuel knew this was coming. These Unstill did not. “I am not from around here.”
“Huh,” they say.
Emmanuel sighs. “We’ve come from Rosemerrow,” he says. “I believe Rosana has already spoken with your leader…?”
“Ah,” they say. “I… see.”
They start to turn, and Emmanuel says, “Wait.”
They look at him. “Yes?”
“I was wondering—“ Emmanuel feels somewhat silly asking. “Do you know how I would go about finding someone around here? I have a—a friend—“ Boyfriend? Are they there yet? “—who lives here, but I don’t know…”
“I can’t say I do,” they say, with a sympathetic smile. “Good luck, though.”
Emmanuel’s stomach sinks. “Thank you.”
***
They spend the night there. Soon decisions will have to be made about whether they should stay or move on, but for now, they are here. Emmanuel still does not know where Lem is, and it isn’t a big deal, really, when he thinks about it, but lately everything’s falling apart and it just… It would be nice to see him, is all.
He’s in the Unstill village the next day when he hears a voice he half-recognizes, and turns.
Emmanuel is on his feet in an instant. “Hey!” The two of them—one human, one elf—look at him. “Sorry,” Emmanuel says, approaching, “excuse me, are you—you are friends of Lem’s, correct? I remember seeing you with him in Rosemerrow.”
“Something like that,” says the human. Emmanuel is pretty sure his name is Ephrim, if he remembers correctly from the brief introductions that were made (it feels like years ago now).
“You’re the guy from the restaurant, right?” the elf says—what was his name? Thorondir? Throndir? “I think I remember you.”
“That’s right.” Emmanuel smiles.
“Throndir,” Ephrim says quietly, “do we really have time for this…?”
“I promise I won’t take too much of your time,” Emmanuel says, his nerves bleeding into his voice. “I was just wondering if you knew where Lem is now?”
“Oh,” Ephrim says. “Well.” A pause. “Throndir?”
“Oh, I—okay.” Throndir looks at Emmanuel and takes a breath. “So. Lem’s not… here, anymore? There was—some stuff happened. I wasn’t here for most of it. Point is, now he’s—well, he’s where I was, which is like, this weird underground… magic… place.”
“Is he alright?” Emmanuel says.
“I mean, I assume so.”
But he’s not here. Emmanuel came all this way, and it wasn’t because of Lem, no, but he’d thought it had been part of the deal. Go to the Archives, get to see Lem again. It was a foolish thing to put so much of his hopes on, yet here he is. Emmanuel takes a deep breath. “How far is this underground magic place?”
“I… guess I don’t really know,” Throndir says.
“Far, I think,” Ephrim says. “But the trip was done by pattern magic, so it’s more or less irrelevant.” Ephrim glances towards Throndir again. “Look, I’m sorry about your boyfriend, okay, but now we really have to get going—“
“I still don’t understand,” Emmanuel says.
Ephrim sighs. “Look, if you want, I guess you could go talk to the archivist guy who was involved? He probably actually understands it, whereas I… do not. He lives—” Ephrim points. “—that way.”
The two of them give him directions and a name, and Emmanuel nods, and thanks them, and follows their directions to a small house built into the mountainside.
As he approaches, he hesitates, on the doorstep. Lem, it seems, was caught up in so much that Emmanuel still does not understand. That is hardly anything new, but it remains frustrating nevertheless. It isn’t unfair for him to want to know where his—well, his boyfriend, is, is it?
Emmanuel knocks on the door. There is no immediate response, and after another moment, he tries the knob. Not locked.
“Hello?” Emmanuel calls, stepping inside.
A man, an older orc, appears from another room, and he looks at Emmanuel a moment in confusion. “What are you doing here?”
“I apologize,” Emmanuel says, stepping backwards. “The door was not locked, I wasn’t sure if—“
Emmanuel breaks off at the sight of a bag on the floor, its contents splayed across the room. It’s Lem’s bag. He’s sure of it.
Emmanuel steps towards it, looking down.
“Oh,” Uklan Tel says. “I’m sorry, I’ve been meaning to clean that up.”
“No, it’s… This is Lem King’s?” There is a cold stone in the pit of Emmanuel’s stomach.
“Yes,” he says, uncertainly. “You know him?”
“He’s my…” Emmanuel doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Lem King is a man who twice now has dropped into his life unannounced and turned it upside down, and that shouldn’t make him anything to Emmanuel but a nuisance, but when he thinks about him there’s a warmth there, and a longing.
“Your what?”
Most of the stuff on the floor is junk. Weeks-old rations, rope, spare violin strings, shattered chunks of mirror. Emmanuel is about to drag his gaze away from it and actually answer Tel’s question when he catches sight of a familiar cover.
He reaches down and picks the book up. “This is mine,” he says, his breath catching. And it isn’t his, not really, it belongs to the city of Nacre. But he needs it back.
Tel says something else, but Emmanuel doesn’t hear it. He flips through the pages—all water-damaged, a few torn out, but somehow still more or less legible.
He reads the words over. The differences between the rain on these old terra cottas…