Work Text:
In another reality, Yurie finds the key.
It is buried in a chest filled with other useless things; jars of eyes and dirtied beakers laid out to throw off any who would search it. The rusted key does not gleam like hidden treasure. The only clue to its importance was the size.
The Lunarium door opens, groaning the whole while, giving way to a long balcony Yurie had never seen. There is no sound when the door finally settles, except the faint creaking of a rocking chair.
It is his. It must be, but it should not be here. It should be in his grand study, at a giant oak desk littered with books, papers, models of the universe, charts of the seas. A dozen candles, burnt through in a matter of days. Just like his most dedicated pupil.
Yurie approaches quietly, as if she may shock someone who found peace in these nightmarish ruins. His face is drained of color, of human blood, fungus growing from deep beneath his skin to curl over his robes. The only reason she knew the face to be Willem’s was the mask that hid it.
“Master?” She whispers. Was that still the right word?
He only groans, raising one arm to point his staff at the edge of the balcony and the moon beyond.
“The moon, sir?”
He looks at her, and his smile cracks the white skin of his face as though it were plaster. Yurie would have run even if she had not known the way, rather than look at the many masks her old Master now wore.
The moon pulled her. Something in the back of her head pushed her, a warm, familiar presence. The same odd feeling she had felt twist up her heart when she had arrived, like she was seeing Rom without seeing her, now focused into a guiding arrow that she could only follow.
Cautious steps take her to the edge and she peers down into the lake. There is no ladder, no rope, only the surface of the water reflecting her face and the moon. What makes her hesitant now is a mystery, for all the places she’s already seen that were far less beautiful than this.
Images haunt her, one of Rom drowned beneath the surface, nothing but remains. Of Rom looking at her with disdain for leaving all those years ago, only coming to see her a sparse few times, never reuniting her with Ebrietas. Of Rom seeing nothing but a stranger come to disturb her peace, a long-forgotten friend.
Days without her flood back into her mind, she and Ebrietas sitting together and silently pondering her whereabouts, her wellbeing. The times she had returned to Byrgenwerth to see her in secret, to refresh the memory of her lips and face, the feeling of Rom’s rough fingertips on her body had only served to make parting more painful. Ebrietas lacked even that reminder.
She became distracted and distant without her, her vigor to complete assignments that sent her to the most exciting parts of her world faded with the presence of any scholar who valued her efforts. She could not comfort Ebrietas any more than she could comfort herself.
The thought of returning to that life when Rom lies just ahead is more repellant than any mystery that lie waiting in the lake.
She leaps, she dives, and she pierces the surface of the lake to find she held her breath for nothing.
Something catches her fall and sets her gently upon the surface of the lake beneath the lake. As soon as she opens her eyes she knows what, because Rom is meeting her two eyes with a dozen of her own. She scrambles to her feet and dashes forwards, terrified that what she sees is just another layer of visions, as if she could disappear into the whiteness surrounding her if she could not reach and touch her soon.
Rom stays where she is. Yurie comes face to face with her. There is a moment of silence, of hesitation between both of them, and then Yurie drops to her knees and wraps her arms around Rom’s head, kissing the hard carapace, and Rom shifts forward on her hundred legs just to be closer.
“It’s you.” Yurie whispers, her voice choked with tears, “It’s you, it’s you…”
Rom clicks soothingly, like a cricket, or a watch moving too fast. She may lack Ebrietas’s ability to hold her, but the close nuzzle of her hard face gives the same warmth.
Rom is not like Willem. Willem is grown over by ancient things, and Rom has become them in her entirety. The flora is her skin, not grown using it, her carapace a true face and not a mask. She radiates the singing energy Yurie always felt from Ebrietas. She is still and whole.
It is the stillness that unsettles her. Rom had never stopped moving, for anything or anyone.
“Do you know how I have searched for you? How Ebrietas has?” She wipes her own teardrop from where it fell on Rom’s face, “She sent me here, you know.”
How relieved she is, when Rom sends an image to her mind. It is Ebrietas in sharp detail, though the room surrounding her is bathed in fog. It wavers like a question.
“Yes, she is well, though I loathe to leave her. But what of you? How are you here? Where is here?” She is frantic, the questions clouding her heart finally able to spill into words.
Rom clicks louder this time, as though trying to slow her. She curls her tail around to form her body into a half moon shape, tapping the shrimp-like appendage on the ground. Little ripples radiate from it.
Yurie accepts, settling against her soft side, running her fingers through the puffy plants, breathing in her warmth.
Rom starts at the beginning:
She had taken part in the scene projected behind her eyes. It was the early days at Byrgenwerth, when Yurie and Rom had finally managed to cross paths after years of walking the same halls. The room is reconstructed before her eyes to fit the new perspective. The double vision of seeing the room both from the doorway and in periphery eventually faded, things moving into place like a dream.
Rom is standing hunched over a microscope. She adjusts a tiny square of glass beneath the final magnifier, then picks up a pen lying next to her to scribble some short note into her book. Next to her sits a piece of pale blue vegetation, a dark stem with glowing puffs for flowers. Yurie had seen them before. She had picked them.
She does not look up when Yurie enters the room.
“Miss Rom, yes? I’ve brought the pearl slug you requested…” She mutters, holding out a tiny glass box. The slug is curled up tightly inside, huddled in a corner.
“Set it there.” She writes down a new observation.
Yurie places it next to carefully arranged tools, and it already begins to bleed grey sludge within the box, as though it had already been laid upon the table and cut.
Rom looks up to examine it and it is whole again. Yurie remembers seeing her face for the first time here, round and dark with eyes sharper than needles.
Her many eyes were soft now. Not empty, but as though they searched somewhere Yurie could not pinpoint
“Thank you.” Rom says flatly as she takes the creature from its box with her bare fingers, fearlessly letting it crawl across the palm of her other hand. She seemed to almost adore it for its unique beauty, like it was a kitten, or a small bird.
Her eyes turn sad as she puts it back and marks the box for later dissection.
“Who are you?” Rom finally asks just before Yurie leaves, like it was the least important thing on her busy mind.
“Call me Yurie, miss. I’ve been told that I will be assisting you with your research.”
“Yes, they told me I would have someone. I’ve really hit a stride, you know. The conditions under which these flowers grow is becoming more apparent to me, and I believe they have medicinal properties. Even if not, should it not do us good to know how our planet used to be? There must be reason they die on the surface, but the Tomb should be devoid of life after so long…” She trails off, though Yurie is still listening with rapt attention. She had caught her tongue like someone else should have a dozen thoughts ago.
“But what do you think?” Rom asks.
“Excuse me?” Yurie was scared she had heard wrong.
“Tell me what you think.” She is sincere, and pulls up a chair for Yurie. She sits beside her, stiff and unsure.
Yurie touches the delicate stem of the plant, “I think…. It is not so simple as what is alive.” Her words threaten to shake.
Rom’s eyes are bright. She grabs the notebook off her desk and sets a pen to it, “What do you mean?
“I do not think the Pthumerians and their Great Ones want to leave, so they do not. It is not like us, where we grow old and die. They grow old and grow older,” She bites her lip, “if that makes sense? I’ve seen them down there, skeletons and ghosts. Little blue men like in children’s stories. Sometimes it feels like I’m stealing from them.”
Rom nods, the scratch of her pen on paper furious.
“… I think their bugs are sweet. And their old clothes are quite pretty. I found a pointed hat, all eaten through by moths. It was on a coffin with one of those worms in it – you know, they keep taking from the Great One’s chamber?” She whispers that, as though she is not supposed to know.
“I had heard of the coffins – Micolash proposed that it was worship.” Rom says.
“Do not think me strange,” Yurie continues in a whisper, “but when I see those things…like little offerings, yes? Like leaving flowers at a grave… I think the Pthumerians cared for them.”
“The Great Ones?”
Yurie nods.
Rom’s pen stops. “Willem presumes it fear of their monarchs, Micolash presumes it worship. You think they cared for them?”
“I know it is foolish.” She bows her head.
Rom puts one hand over hers, “I think it is brilliant.”
--
Yurie must leave, but before she does Rom asks her to bring a tank from another lab, along with dressing for it. For the slug, she says. Just this one, of course, but she needs data on its dietary habits.
“Why this? I know this.” Yurie says. Rom silences her with a low rumble. She gets the sense as the scene lingers on that it is not only for Yurie’s sake that it is drawn from her. Rebuilding, using blocks from two different sets.
“Weren’t we naive.” Yurie laughs, “It really was worship. They had their queens and keepers….”
Rom curls tighter around her.
“Well, I suppose we were not entirely wrong.”
Next is less a memory, and more a confession:
Now it is not Yurie’s sight at all. Before her is Mother Kos.
Micolash stands at the head of the room, and Rom—whose eyes she looks through—sits next to him. He is still disheveled, though lacking the cage so many had come to know him and his followers for. Now he looked much like any other student if not for the untied shoes, the unbuttoned jacket and vest.
“Before us is an opportunity unlike any other.” His voice is familiar, high and nasal as he addresses his students, “Our hunter friends have assisted us in attaining this specimen – and a true Great One she is, as any can see – in an act of great generosity. Now, let us not waste it. This will be our path forward, upward into the heavens! Out of our tiny skulls, our limited vision, she will cleanse us…”
Rom is focused on Kos before them. Her glow is too familiar, her long tendrils, her slick skin. She was more than salvation, she was the next step, from her they would wrench the ideal. As they had her child, that tiny wisp of life they failed to bring back with them before it disappeared out to sea. Micolash continued in his poetic lecture beside her.
“Today, you are all privileged enough to bear witness as my assistant Rom and I will look inside her.” Like it is a show, a magic trick, a miracle more than an act of scientific research, “Be thorough in your observation. This is not just a privilege, but our duty.”
When Rom picks up her scalpel, pulling her mask up over her face, she is struck with images of her Ebrietas beneath the blade, her green eyes dull and dead.
She cuts anyway.
--
That night, she can’t sleep. She stares at the wall, the ceiling, the insides of her own eyelids, and all she sees is cold, faceless students. In her vision, she is one of them, as calculating and cruel any person could be.
She climbs out of bed in the early hours of the morning and runs to see Ebrietas.
She imagines her embrace, vibrant and so very alive. She remembers being caught between her and Yurie in a sleepy haze under both their loyal guardianship. Anything would do to wash away the coldness in her throat.
When she gets there, she wishes she never had.
The air is still and hostile upon her entrance. Ebrietas has her wings folded close to her back and her head bowed into the water before her alter.
“Ebrietas?” She asks with a shaking voice. She does not move or lift her head.
Rom’s chest is tight as she approaches. Something radiates from Ebrietas then, a small wave of force that urged Rom to stay back, creating a twisting in her head. It shines around her like a field of tiny blue, and when she tries to reach out and touch, it stings.
The tears are already flooding to her face. She does not need to ask to know what she’s done, to know why for the first time Ebrietas will not have her. Rom cannot look at her hands, for fear that the blood will still be there.
“Did you know her?” She whispers, trying to push back the tears. Make amends, make amends.
A low, long cry bursts from Ebrietas.
“I’m sorry.” She whispers. It doesn’t sound like nearly enough, but no words could ever be, “I’m so sorry. I would never let them, you know that? Not to you? Yurie would never let them. We— “ She pleads, and her voice is pushed back down her throat by another wave of mournful energy.
Rom stands just a couple of feet away for what seems like hours. Her feet go numb as her head in the cold water. Knowing in her mind that she had not been responsible for the death of Kos did not lessen the weight in her chest.
“You won’t forgive me.” It isn’t a question.
There is no hateful response, no anger or rage, and that cuts Rom deeper than a reprimand ever could have.
Rom leaves on heavy legs, a string of ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ in her wake.
--
She arrives at Yurie’s door as the sun begins to peek over the horizon. Yurie answers groggily, her short hair sticking up in a dozen different directions and her eyes clouded with sleep.
“Rom?” She holds up the little candle she brought to the door.
“Can I come in?” Rom’s voice is weak.
Yurie seems to come to her senses when she hears the breaking in Rom’s voice, and gathers her inside. She clears a space on the bed to set Rom’s shaking body down and wraps her arms tightly around her.
“What happened?” She whispers.
Rom opens her mouth to find it dry and snaps it back shut. She studies Yurie’s anxious face in the candlelight for any sign of knowing what it is she would say at all, and finds nothing.
She settles on that: ‘nothing’.
“You should stay anyway.” Yurie insists, her brow furrowed tight in concern.
Rom leans into her, burying her face in Yurie’s chest when she can hold back the tears no longer.
At least her mind is quieter in Yurie’s arms.
--
Yurie’s tears have returned when she comes back to herself.
“If I had known…” She whispers, petting Rom soothingly, “You know that she always missed you?”
Rom is silent, but she trembles.
“If she was angry, she never told me. She just asked, again and again, always for you. I wished I could have told her….” She trails off, as Rom groans sadly. Yurie wonders silently if that only meant she knew little of Ebrietas’s true feelings. She prays that is not the case.
They are both swept back into memory:
She retreats into herself. Back and forth from the lab to her room, only staring at the jars and books and crates in her arms, the tips of her feet and the wooden planks of the floor that she had come to memorize. She does not visit Ebrietas. She does not seek out Yurie. She cannot face them.
They will not remain much longer in any case, and Rom tells herself that it is for the best. Laurence will take the most important people in her life somewhere better. He will guide them with more compassion, more competence then Willem and Micolash. She must believe this, or her heart will break.
She must not think of time spent in the gardens, or smiling faces, or tendrils wrapped around her.
Before her lies a bench with two vials: one of Kos’s vibrant, red blood, and one of the blue-grey sludge taken from one of the fish men in the hamlet. On the other side of her, two large rats cowering in a cage. Students surround them; lined up and faceless. No eyes or hair, just a dozen people who may as well have been mannequins lined up to watch their first live experiment.
“As you know – Rom has spearheaded the efforts, of course! – we have learned much about the effects of this paleblood -- from the creations of Mother Kos-- on flora,” The respectful words, ‘Mother’, at least sound sincere from Micolash’s mouth, “Granting them a new life. They grow similar to that which we find in the Tombs, the coldblood flowers, as we have begun to call them. Kos’s blood itself has been…less than ideal. The plants grow monstrous, with thorns and spines, before withering…”
Rom doesn’t need to hear his speech. She’s heard it a dozen times already. He never stopped talking.
“…We wish to see what it has to offer to living specimens. Be warned, there may not be much in initial observations, but you all deserve to see the birth of a new being. Something greater.” He opens the cage and removes one fearful rat, setting it before Rom. “Begin with the paleblood, if you will.”
She considers its dark eyes, and cannot move her hand to pick up a syringe.
“What about me?” She speaks up, loud enough for only Micolash to hear.
“Hmm?”
“Could I inject the blood? We intend to use it ourselves, why not human subjects – “
“This is not Laurence’s treated, brewed blood. And we do not choose subjects lightly.” His face turns grim.
“And you are not the only one in charge of choosing subjects. Why was I not consulted previously?” She tries to keep herself steady. Some gall, to blame Micolash when she had been floating through the days under his guidance and doing what she could to not think of anything.
“We cannot risk you dying.”
“I believe that is my risk to take! We will learn more from me than them, I know it.” She is loud enough now that the confused murmurs of the students stop.
They stare at each other, and Rom has already shuffled the rat back into its carrier. Micolash studies her face, and his grim confusion starts to give way to his natural, gleeful curiosity. All the better that he thought her bold.
“Very well.”
Rom exhales. For all she had scolded Micolash for his fervent attachment to Kos when she first arrived, to treat her like a willing guest or subject, she now took part in her own selfish desires. To be close to Kos, to feel something of her in her own veins. To remember someone who she had never known. She supposed it would be something of an apology, to bear a part of her.
“We will continue this on the morrow,” Rom announces, to everyone’s surprise, “we’ve settled on last minute changes to the plan.”
No more formality than that, she takes the blood, the rats, the syringes, and leaves Micolash to clean up in her absence.
--
They gather the same group of students the next day for the demonstration.
Rom is anxious, though the trembling was something of a welcome change to the stillness that had followed her like storm clouds rolling in.
“You truly believe it better to ingest the blood than to inject it?” Micolash questions her one more time, tapping the cork that held the vial shut. He seems more sincerely curious than skeptical at this point.
“We only let the plants absorb it. We have no idea how such direct contact will affect a living creature.”
“Then why not continue with the other experiment?”
“…The rats will not tell you if she says something.”
Micolash raises his eyebrows, “You think she will deign to speak to you, then?”
“I think we have no way of knowing.” She does not meet his eyes, instead picking up the paleblood vial to uncork it.
He laughs, more with excitement than mocking. “You are brilliant, Rom. Truly.”
She ignores him, and taking a deep breath, downs the vial. It does not taste like the copper of human blood, it is bitter and cold, like breathing in winter air. Her vision goes dark, and she only notices Micolash catching her at the last second.
(It is like floating. The blood glows under her skin, and lends her lightness. She cannot open her eyes to see her room. Her whole vision is taken up by the sea and all the starts beneath it, a figure she knows to be Kos gliding past her like some massive ship, a creature she does not know with tendrils of red and black, hiding in the reflection of the moon on the water.
She sees Ebrietas with her wings as they once were, full and grand, holding her up against the sky.
Rom calls out to her, only to find her voice swallowed by distance.)
She awakes in the infirmary with vision so unclear that she goes back to sleep.
--
Yurie is dizzy, like all the times before Ebrietas had truly learned how to speak with her, magnified a dozenfold. She takes her cap off to rub her eyes, like the little colorful spots will help the ache in her mind.
Rom clicks, apologetic.
“It is okay. I am okay. Keep going.”
--
The next morning was the last chance she had to see Yurie. She had flagged Rom down in the hallway, asking her questions about projects that had since gone to the wayside. A lot of her spare time now went to dreaming. If not dreaming, writing down the dreams and what she saw to share with Willem and Micolash.
Yurie calls across the hall to her: “Good morning!”
Rom is anxious to look up, wondering if Yurie’s happy voice hid an angry face. If Ebrietas had told Yurie how she had felt about Rom’s meddling with Kos. She feared she could not explain what she was doing now, why she was spending all her time in Willem’s Lunarium, staring up at the moon. If she said it aloud, it would seem no less cruel than cutting her open to disturb her after death.
--
Yurie thought none of those things. More than anything in the world, she had worried why Rom hid from her, yet not from Micolash who she claimed to barely tolerate.
--
“Oh,” Rom looks up, “Good morning.”
Yurie looks at her sadly, and she rushes off to meet Micolash.
--
They do little but discuss until the sun finally sets. Willem and Micolash argue with her every assertion, and talking to them is becoming more of a struggle than it is worth. Ebrietas would listen. Yurie would listen.
She has little luck seeing the worlds she wishes until the moon comes out, so she sits with her feet on the edge of the balcony and waits.
“She ignores me. I try to talk to her, I know she’s there, I can feel her swimming…But she ignores me.” Rom tries.
“She should not even be there. You are speaking only of your own dreams.” Willem contests, for the fourth of fifth time today.
“For a creature so great to simply die alongside her tangible form? You are the one speaking in dreams, Willem.” Micolash is laughing.
“He is right, this time. I see her. She’s…” Rom picks her brain for words, “… somewhere else.”
“Anyone could have guessed that.” Willem huffs, “You are sure those rats would not have told us more?”
Rom scowls and closes her eyes, her head craned up to the moon, and breathes the steady breaths she finds take her closer to it.
(Her face is visible now. It is animated, exhaling little bubbles, sometimes her lips move as though speaking, her eyes are white and empty and shine like searchlights through the ocean depths. Every time she calls, her voice travels further. She knows if she can just keep reaching, keep swimming, she will reach her ears.
She is fighting the tides, but Kos does not swim away from her. She even notices Rom this time, her head rising high like the periscope on a submarine. Tense but curious that she would see another in her secret galaxy that Rom could only see with different eyes.
In here, at least, she had more. Every one of them round and large, to see in every direction and guide her deeper into the sea.)
When the vision blinks out it is hours later. She reaches up to touch her face, almost disappointed that the eyes from her dream were not there. For now, Rom can only see straight ahead.
--
The changes become more tangible soon, and for that she is grateful. It is like a gift to find the first sprouts rising from her back, strange protrusions she had thought to be the itch of her coat. Willem kept asking if she felt sick, and she only shook her head and craned her arm to pet her new skin.
Another morning, she finds her teeth sharper. The next, her callouses that lined her feet and hands became almost stony, spreading in patches along her skin. Rom wonders if she should be afraid.
(Every time she drew closer. Rom knows her voice must be reaching the not so distant figure now, for she seems to respond. Like a whale’s song, it shakes the water around her, and when it settles so do the tides, creating more space for her to approach, to grow.
‘Do you hear me?’ She asks.
Kos blinks her blinding eyes.
Rom understands her purpose in this dream, or aspect of a dream, but when she sees Ebrietas overhead she wishes to reach up to her. Only for fear that she may reach and grasp nothing does she not.
She wonders if Ebrietas feels her here.)
Far worse than any change is the way Willem looks at her. For her teeth, she does not open her mouth as wide, for her hands and feet she wears gloves every day and her boots and robes showed no sign of skin apart from her neck and face. For his gaze, she can do nothing.
Micolash’s is worse, but at least he studies her quietly. Willem is asking questions, following every change that comes to her with an intensity he will not acknowledge.
“Tell me what she looks like.” He asks, one of her hands in his. He takes off the glove to look at her hard skin – it looks more like carapace now, than stone.
“I can only see her with my eyes closed.” She mumbles hesitantly, and tugs her hand away to pull the glove back on.
“When you are dreaming?” Willem tilts his head.
“Not just then. Even in the dream I need…other eyes. Better ones.” Rom traces the parts of her face that she thinks (hopes) they might be.
Willem hums at that, and Rom is surprised anything is of interest to him. “To have more eyes…”
“Not just for looking ahead –“ She stammers to clarify, rubbing her hands together, the stone that covered most of her fingers rubbing even through the thin cloth of her gloves, “—for looking in. Down.”
“How close are you?” He whispers, like Micolash would not hear him to pose another argument.
“I could touch her.”
They go to the Lunarium again. The whole night, she stares into the lake.
Willem brings his chair, knowing it will be long. Micolash seems content to stand, if not stare into the sky himself. He whispers something to no one about the eyes Rom spoke of.
Rom knows they watch her expecting something grand, a miracle to tell all about, to brag of their success. Rom feels as though she is just holding a hammer and nail, ready to build the last link in a bridge that would take her…
Somewhere. It would take her closer.
(Kos is almost upon her. She is down in that lake, close enough to feel. She calls Rom higher and lower all at once, her mind just out of reach.
She is patient as ever at the end of the path beneath that mirror surface. Rom cannot believe that she would allow her to approach for all that she had faced, but she radiated a longing like someone who had been too long without a comforting touch.
That, she understood.
‘I’m sorry.’ Rom tries, one more time, praying it would reach her.
Kos blares back a curious tone, and Rom’s mind is full to bursting. Her voice is a thousand whispers, backwards and forwards, mournful and joyous, from every angle and every point of light in the sky. If Ebrietas spoke to her like this, if she could, what would she say?
‘For hurting you. For the hunters.’ She tries again, knowing her voice was heard. ‘I’m sorry. I only wanted to see you like this…’
Kos brings her face close to Rom’s, and she is warm. The wings from Kos’s sides surround her, and questions flood her mind. The flora on her back grows wild, encasing her in blue vines and white flowers, each connected stem another link and key in the cipher that would let her finally understand.
Not only is Kos in her mind, but some great formless beast, the creature in the moon and all her hidden secrets, those thousands of voices all recognizable as different creatures who hid in this pocket --
Ebrietas, gazing down. Rom is finally able to look back up and meet her eyes. She knows that where Ebrietas is, Yurie must follow.
She turns her gaze back to Kos and finds she cannot open her mouth to say what she wishes.
Instead, she thinks, drawing from Kos the necessary strokes of smoke and light to put together: ‘Thank you’.
Rom’s body lumbers towards the universe in the lake, and as she steps off the edge it all goes silent.
Not for lack of sound. Not for lack of matter. For the fact that everything for one moment made perfect sense, in Rom’s mind and all the others that she could feel becoming part of her.
The change is painless and liberating, to be free of the human vessel that had held her back so long.)
--
Yurie shoves her face into Rom’s side, desperate to dull the furious pounding that Rom’s vision planted in her head. Her eyes are red, her face stained with tears that she was surprised to find clear.
“Enough, please,” She begs, “I am sorry. I am so sorry…”
Rom cuts the vision from her before she has finished speaking, curling as tight as she can around Yurie, placing one of her many tiny legs upon her lap in an attempt to soothe. ‘I am sorry.’
The pounding fades in time, and she could not complain for anything that had her in this embrace. She is more envious of Rom than anything, to be able to handle the beauty that seared Yurie’s eyes.
“Now you are here…” She finally says, to a ripple of acknowledgement from Rom.
“Can you come home?” Yurie asks.
Rom presents her with a very good answer: the vague feeling of ‘where?’
Yurie laughs sadly, “I suppose that is true. Though I find it hard to believe there is something you do not know.”
She crawls out to sit in front of Rom’s face. She had to kiss her, after all of that. It wasn’t even a question.
“Do you like it here?” She asks.
Rom blinks, and once again has no answer to an important question. Yurie knows that if she asked: where in the heavens can I find something? The answer would be swift, and clear. But things like ‘home’ and ‘want’ – they are lost to her, at least in importance.
“Come home to me, then. To Ebrietas and I.” She presses her forehead to Rom’s, staring hard into the dark eyes still in her line of sight, “That is why I came to you.”
Rom is silent, as though unsure. All she is now lies in this lake, with this college. If Yurie could not understand when Byrgenwerth was, let alone where, what use would Rom have to try? Anxiety grips her heart. Is this more important? Hidden away, like a book with secrets the rest of this dead world would kill to have, to understand. Someone could find her, someone could kill her--
“Do you still love us?” Yurie’s voice trembles.
Rom has no hesitation then, and a single rune projects into Yurie’s mind: Yes.
“Then I beg of you. I do not know how, but I will not falter now. I will bring you home. I will bring Ebrietas here, and this will be home. I will run from here to Yharnam on bare feet for days if that is what it takes. We will find a way.” She speaks with confidence that only Rom allowed her to find, all that time ago.
Rom’s presence in her head is quiet. A silent warmth for an eternity of waiting. Then, a small rune begins to become apparent. The stem grows firm, the ghostly fog that it rises from forming into solid limbs.
‘Yes’ appears to her once more in its most radiant form.