Chapter Text
i.
“Concentrate,” Shuro Chi says, watching her pupil.
Cedoni shifts her legs, bouncing one knee. Meditation has never been her strength. There is so much to see around her in the Dreaming City—Queensfoil leaves sway in the wind, the great amethyst slabs glint and glimmer in the light—and she tries to see it all. Every sound distracts her. Shuro Chi hears someone pass by on a walkway below them, and immediately Cedoni's head turns in that direction.
“Concentrate,” she says again, “or you will never bond a Harbinger.”
Cedoni settles her hands on her legs, exhales long. Maybe this time she will—
There's a crash from below. Cedoni runs to investigate, and Shuro Chi lets her go, giving up on their lesson for the day.
ii.
There is only one thing that holds her attention. Cedoni can sit for hours, studying the map of stars and planets, the place the Awoken will meet their final fate. She's not the only one with such an intense interest. Many of the others in the Coven would know that map anywhere.
Cedoni draws it with her fingertips on table tops. Traces the rings of obit until she sees them in her sleep.
She never says a word about it to her mentor, but Shuro Chi recognizes the shape of her preoccupation as only another so afflicted could.
iii.
She watches as Cedoni and Arriel sit, heads together, speaking in low voices. She cannot hear them, but their conversation is intense, none of the loudly cracked jokes or laughter. Something is amiss, she can sense it. But Mara has sent for her, and so she goes.
Later that night, Arriel goes, too. He takes all the Coven has taught him, takes things that are the Techeun's. Things that should never leave the Dreaming City.
Cedoni blames herself. She is not the only one.
iv.
“You will die,” Shuro Chi tells her.
“Cedoni may die,” she says, “but I won't.”
Somehow, there is a truth in this, but it doesn't stop Shuro Chi from trying again to dissuade her from going. “If you leave, you cannot return. The Queen has made that clear. You will never become a Techeun. You will never be able to come home.”
Cedoni is unsure, and hides it poorly, always too easy to read. But she shakes her head. “I have to. Ever since he left, I've been dreaming of bones and shadows and sundering. Dark water, as far as I can see—a real ocean, one that bends around the curve of the world instead of flowing off into nothing. I don't know what all of it means, but I know my place isn't here anymore.”
“Just because he's gone—”
“It's not about him. It's about what he took. What he'll do with it. Don't you feel it? Everything's changed.”
Shuro Chi had felt it, but she does not want to admit it is so.
“Your place is here,” she says.
Cedoni argues back by leaving.
v.
For a very long time, there is no way for news to reach them, and even if there was, who would know to bring it? Her dreams tell her the worst has come to pass. Cedoni found her great, dark waters, and they have taken her.
When they go to the Reef, and she does her duties for Mara, she begins to hear more of the happenings beyond Vesta. Arriel is a name that some know; she hears of his rise, of his darkness, of his fall. Of Cedoni there is never any whisper.
But there are far greater concerns than what happened on Earth in the years before the Lightbearers created their City. The same City whose Guardians now give Mara dire warnings in secret and arrange plans to fight the coming Dark. Guardians who claim they are ready to sacrifice all for the Traveler, for the Light, for humanity—but it is the Awoken who pay most dearly when Oryx arrives.
vi.
Time without Mara passes slowly. Things in the Dreaming City change. By the smallest of increments at first, so that the truth sneaks up on them, snares them in its trap. It is worse than anything she has imagined.
And then she can not even fathom imagining. Or thought. Or will. Her very self is not her own. But sometimes, for fractions of fractions of a second she comes back to herself. She remembers the map. They are still surrounded by these same stars. It cannot be the end.
But when their rescue comes, it is not anything she ever could have expected.
Petra and a Guardian—a Guardian—are the first ones to hear from Mara, to know that she is alive, and they bring her only news of death. Uldren is slain. Shuro Chi does not know which of them did it. But it was done.
She does not expect that Mara will invite the Guardians into the Dreaming City. Allow them to run rampant through their sacred places. But it is done.
Most of all, she does not expect that she will wish cave to the the breaking of taboo, to see one of the Traveler's living dead and tell them of their first life. But Petra's Guardian lands in the mists, and when she steps out into the daylight Shuro Chi sees a ghost, and she wishes.
vii.
They are not saved.
At first, it seems they may be. The Guardian—Shuro Chi must call her by her title, she cannot use this new name—and her team defeated Riven. Though she was Taken, Shuro Chi and her two remaining sisters are freed. It tastes like hope.
But Riven's betrayal and revenge cannot be escaped. Even in death she has won. And Guardians, so many they cover the City like a swarm of locusts, cannot find a way to break the loop.
For seven cycles, the ghost comes to them. At first, she is always with one or two others. They reclaim relics, retake the monastery, delve deep into the Ascendant Realm to slay Dûl Incaru—and they charge the Well to speak to Mara.
For seven cycles, Shuro Chi keeps her distance and watches. She does not want to see what once was Cedoni act like the creature called Savin. But they are trapped together in this curse and she cannot help but see. The ghost hungers, but it's different than Savin's greed, familiar. She burns with questions and curiosity, ravenous for knowledge.
Shuro Chi knows she is not the only one who remembers. The Corsairs watch her, ask for back up, supplies, intel. At first they do not bend to memory, but the weeks drag on and they're stuck, and it wears resolve thin.
viii.
“When you—when I—was young, I used to have trouble concentrating on my meditations,” Shuro Chi says.
It is the first time she has slipped. Since the Dreaming City was opened, many Guardians have taken up the invitation. They will kill anything, climb anything, die any number of times to loot the Awoken's treasures. But they are also hungry to learn, the ones called Warlocks especially. She gives them small lessons when they come to her, and it is a comfort, a small reclaiming of the past. Once again she is a teacher.
And when the lost one approaches her, she does her best to treat her the same. Somehow, it's not so different to tell her of the Harbingers and prophecies, of history and innovation. Sometimes, it's too much the same.
She cannot see if the Guardian reacts, and she says nothing about the blunder. She does not, however, ask for another lesson for quite some time.
ix.
Mara has left them. Again.
Her battles are something different than theirs. Her goals have always been shrouded. But her people have need of her more than ever, and she is gone.
The Guardians talk to each other in low voices. Some think she has sacrificed her people to her ambition. Some say she is the danger. Some are just angry that she said she'd kill their Traveler if she could. The Corsairs hear them and grow uneasy.
There are fewer and fewer of the Traveler's Chosen in the Dreaming City. They've plundered their fill and and are tempted away by newer, more powerful trinkets and challenges. Part of her is relieved to see them go, the rest worries that they've lost the aid they need to escape this fate.
The Guardian that first came with Petra, the one whose name she still cannot bring herself to use, says nothing, continues to return without fail.
Sedia is the one to break. She sets the Guardian after the Taken as always, and later tells Shuro Chi what she's done. What she's said. Not the whole story, barely anything at all. But enough. Enough for her to know that she is known—not as a Guardian, but as an Awoken.
“She was ours,” Sedia tells her. “She should know this was her home.”
Shuro Chi says nothing, asks for no further reason. She wonders if it will be enough when duty becomes too heavy to bear.
x.
She finds her staring at the same map of stars.
She looks over as Shuro Chi approaches, questions shining in her eyes. But she doesn't ask. Instead, she says, “I remember this. I remember I stared at it for hours. I needed to know it, I needed to be able to recognize them anywhere. It wouldn't have done any good, knowing we'd reached the end. But still, I couldn't leave it.”
Shuro Chi inclines her head, assenting.
The Guardian rubs the bond on her arm, working up the nerve. It is strange, Shuro Chi thinks, how many different types of courage there are. A woman who will run headlong into danger will hesitate to speak certain words.
“Sedia said it was taboo to speak of the old days. The Vanguard doesn't like it when we try to find out who we were, either, but please—I can't keep walking around here, half remembering. I know that you knew me. Who was I?”
“Cedoni,” she says. “Welcome home.”
There are a thousand other questions, but she has asked the first, and it has been answered.