Cataclysm

What the Dark Remembers

The scream that woke half the east wing came from Ashryn's room, and Gaia was moving before she'd fully understood why, guard forgotten, collar's dampened power flaring instinctively toward a sound that every part of her recognized as a child's terror.

She reached the doorway a step ahead of Vessa, who arrived breathless and already reaching for a healer's kit she wouldn't need, because what was happening in that dark room had nothing to do with a body's wound.

"It's not real, it's not real, it's not—" Ashryn was thrashing against blankets soaked through with sweat, eyes open but unseeing, caught in the particular, merciless grip of a nightmare that had clearly worn the same grooves through her mind more times than anyone in this fortress had ever fully acknowledged out loud.

"Ashryn." Gaia knelt beside the bed, voice low, steady, the same voice she'd used on a hundred frightened mortals over a hundred quiet years of unsanctioned mercy. "Ashryn, you're here. You're safe. Whatever you're seeing, it already happened, and it isn't happening again."

"The fire," Ashryn gasped, still half-caught in it, small hands fisted so tight in the blankets her knuckles had gone pale. "It doesn't stop. It never stops, it just keeps—"

"I know." Gaia reached out, slow and careful, and pressed a hand to the girl's forehead, letting the faintest thread of her power — warm, gentle, nothing like the harsh gold flare she'd have used in battle — ease through her like a hand smoothing wrinkles from a sheet. "I know it doesn't feel like it stopped. But you're twelve years old and you're in a warm bed in a fortress your king built specifically so it could never happen to you again, and I promise you, Ashryn, you are safe."

It took long minutes — Vessa hovering silent at the doorway, unwilling to interrupt something she clearly recognized as beyond her own gruff, practical comfort — before Ashryn's breathing finally slowed, before her hands unclenched from the blankets, before the girl blinked up at Gaia with the dazed, exhausted clarity of someone surfacing from very deep water.

"You stayed," Ashryn said, voice thick with sleep and something rawer underneath it. "You didn't have to. You're not even supposed to be up here."

"I wasn't going to let you sit alone with that," Gaia said simply, smoothing the girl's hair back from her damp forehead. "Not tonight. Not ever, if I can help it."

Neither of them saw Kevian in the doorway until Ashryn had drifted back to sleep and Gaia rose, quiet, to find him standing exactly where Vessa had stood minutes before — silent, unmoving, watching with an expression stripped so bare of his usual careful control that Gaia felt something catch painfully in her own chest at the sight of it.

He said nothing. He crossed to the bed instead, brushed his knuckles once, gently, against Ashryn's sleeping cheek — a gesture so unguarded it looked almost stolen, something private he'd forgotten anyone else was there to witness — and then turned and left the room without a word, and Gaia understood, watching him go, that she had just seen something none of his own soldiers were likely ever shown.

She found him an hour later on the ramparts, because some instinct told her he wouldn't be anywhere else, staring out at a dark horizon with no Spire visible on it at all, the night having swallowed even that thin gold seam.

"She has that nightmare often," Gaia said, coming to stand beside him, closer than she had the evening before, though she couldn't have said exactly when the distance between them had started shrinking.

"Every few weeks. Worse around the anniversary." Kevian's voice was low, rougher than she'd heard it, stripped of the flat control he wore like armor everywhere else in the fortress. "I used to sit with her through it myself. Vessa's better at the comfort part than I am. I'm better at making sure nothing that caused it ever gets close enough to touch her again." He glanced at Gaia, something raw and unguarded still lingering in his face from the doorway. "You were good with her. Better than good."

"I've had a great deal of practice," Gaia said quietly. "More children afraid in the dark than I could count, across a hundred years of shrines the Pantheon didn't think were worth watching closely."

"Tell me about your family," Kevian said, abruptly, as though the question had been building behind some dam that Ashryn's nightmare had finally cracked. "Not the Pantheon. Before. Whatever a goddess has instead of the childhood I lost."

Gaia was quiet for a long moment, choosing her words with the particular care of someone reaching for something she rarely let herself examine directly. "I don't remember a childhood the way you do," she admitted. "Gods Ascend differently than mortals are born — there's no cellar to hide in, no mother's hands to remember. What I have instead is a very long memory of being told, gently and then less gently, that the way I feel things is a flaw to be corrected rather than a gift to be trusted." She looked at him, steady. "So I understand something about being taught that softness is dangerous. I simply chose to keep it anyway, and you chose to bury yours. I don't think either choice was wrong, for what it's worth. I think we were both just trying to survive people who never should have had that much power over either of us."

Kevian didn't answer immediately. He was closer than he'd been a moment ago — she wasn't certain which of them had closed the distance — and in the dark, with no Spire light to catch the gold in his eyes, he looked less like the king of a fortress built on hatred and more like the boy Draven had once hidden in a collapsing cellar, still carrying every year of that fire behind a face that had learned, very young, not to show it.

"Gaia," he said, low, and it was the first time he'd said her name since the shrine at Ashwell, the first time it hadn't sounded like an accusation.

Neither of them moved for a long, charged moment — close enough now that she could feel the warmth radiating off him against the cold night air, close enough that the space between them had stopped feeling like distance and started feeling like a decision neither of them had made yet.

It was Kevian who stepped back first, jaw tight, something almost like panic flickering across features that had learned, over thirty hard years, never to let panic show.

"You should sleep," he said, rough and abrupt, already turning toward the stairs. "Long day tomorrow. Lyris has news from the Spire she wants to bring before the full court."

Gaia watched him go, her own pulse unsteady in a way she hadn't felt in longer than she cared to admit, and stood alone on the ramparts for a long time afterward, staring at a horizon with no light on it at all, trying and failing to convince herself that whatever had almost happened up there had meant nothing more than two lonely people standing too close in the dark.