How long did it take for someone to grow that somewhen-else look? One lifetime? Two? How easy was it for someone to fall back in time and lose all sense of the present?
I couldn’t imagine. The present pressed around me, harsh and sharp and real.
Over the next week, I translated more symbols with the sylph’s help.
Getting new meanings for different symbols was easy now. The sylph knew several words for every symbol and knew how different modifiers worked, but they couldn’t always tell me what meaning a symbol had in specific context. So a sentence could read “People approached the city,” or it could read “Humans attacked the prison.” Or something else entirely.
But after days of going through a promising section of text, I’d found a translation that confirmed my fears. After lunch one afternoon, I passed my notebook to Stef for her opinion.
Chatter quieted as she read, and a few sylph skittered from the cave. Cris stayed, identifiable by his shadow rose.
After a little while, everyone waiting and watching Stef, she handed back my notebook, her tone sober. “That looks right to me.”
“Thanks.” I accepted the notebook and flipped back to the beginning of the story. “Then I guess if everyone is ready to know . . .”
“We are.” Whit set our dirty dishes aside and cleaned his hands. “Then maybe we can move on from this cave.”
I nodded. We’d move on, but I doubted he’d like where I was thinking about going. “Get comfortable.” As I spoke, I adjusted my sleeping bag so I could lean against the wall, my notebook on my knees. Cris hovered nearby, while Sam sat cross-legged beside me. I offered him my free hand, and he held it in his lap, tracing the outline of my fingers.
The memory magic on Whit was cracked and fading, though he wasn’t completely free of it yet. It took time. But Sam and Stef would remember everything I was about to tell them, and the more we reminded Whit, the better chance he’d have of recalling it later.
“First, I need to tell you what these books are. They’re history, but as Meuric said, no one wrote them. They’re simply written. I don’t know when, or how, but this one”—I reached to open one of the books—“talks about my birth.”
Whit snatched up the book as though to read it right now.
“How is that possible?” Sam leaned over to look at the book with Whit, but frowned and sat back when he couldn’t read anything.
“No one wrote the books. They’re written as history happens. But they do belong to phoenixes. They were stolen, along with the temple key.” I shook my head. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start with what you’ve been forced to forget.
“Before your time, the old world passed away. A new age dawned with cataclysmic events and the rising of creatures that had once been legend. Dragons, trolls, rocs, centaurs—and phoenixes. Humans perished by the millions during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all over the world. Hurricanes washed the earth clean. Only a small number of people survived the destruction, and it wasn’t long before they would fall, too. That’s when all this starts.”
“There were humans before?” Whit asked.
“Lots of humans, it seems.”
“Then they’d have had their own society. Technological advancements. Ideas and dreams and culture. What happened to all of it? How could none of that have survived?”
“Surely a lot of that world did survive.” I couldn’t stop my pitying look. “But Janan wanted you to believe he created you. Why would he have allowed a previous society’s culture to stay? He erased it from your minds, just like he erased so many other things. But when you had flashes of inspiration or ideas for inventions, maybe some of what you’d learned in your very first lifetime leaked through the memory magic.”
“So our inventions.” Stef glanced at her SED, my flute, our lanterns. “None of what we thought was ours is ours.”
My throat tightened, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if she was right or—Or what. The books didn’t tell me.
Sam touched my leg. “What happened next?”
I eyed my notes. “The cataclysm was before phoenixes began recording history, so whatever incited it is a mystery. We may never know. It’s not important, anyway. Only how people reacted to it.” I found my place again. “Humanity dwindled as the other dominant species carved out territories across the world. After a hundred or more years of living with the constant threat of extinction, a new leader was born.”
“You should probably mention that people weren’t reincarnated.” Stef glanced around the group. “People just lived and died, like everything else.”
“That’s how the population grew smaller.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
She ducked her head.
“Anyway, this new leader’s name was Janan. He was strong and had plans to lead his people not just beyond their current problem—always getting slaughtered by the various creatures living around their small territory—but into a greater way of living: never dying. He saw how phoenixes rose from their own ashes, and was jealous. So he took dozens of his best warriors, and they went hunting a phoenix to discover the method of its immortality.
“They caught one and demanded answers, but the phoenix couldn’t tell them.” My voice broke. “So they hurt it and demanded again, but still the phoenix told them nothing. As they tortured the phoenix, its blood began leaking onto them, changing them. They didn’t realize it, though.”
Stef and Whit stared at their hands, and Sam had his eyes closed, as though seeing everything in his head. Sylph songs quieted.
“Soon, other phoenixes arrived to save their comrade. They were furious, but they didn’t kill the attackers. If a phoenix takes a life, it would cost their cycle of birth and death. Instead, to punish the attackers, they conjured tower prisons in the most dangerous places in the world, like jungles or deserts or over immense volcanoes. Inside the towers, the attackers wouldn’t starve or die of thirst. They’d get what they wanted—immortality—and they’d be alone for the rest of their eternal lives. Because the phoenixes separated all the attackers so they couldn’t conspire again.
“The towers were empty. They had no doors. Only a special key could affect the stone.” I glanced at Sam, who pulled the temple key from his pocket. It glittered in the faint light of lanterns.
“That’s the key?” Whit asked.
I nodded.
“How did we get it?”
I turned back to my notebook. “Meuric stole it. He was there when Janan and the others attacked the phoenix, and when the phoenixes took everyone away. But he didn’t take part in the attack himself; he hung back in the forest, hidden. When he returned to everyone else, he told them only that Janan and the warriors had been captured and imprisoned by phoenixes—not what they’d done to deserve it. He sent a party to steal the key, and they brought back not only the key, but a pile of books, as well.”
“These?” Whit asked, touching the leather spine of the book nearest him, and I imagined he was wondering if he’d been the one to grab the books. Maybe he and Orrin had decided together to take the books. The beginnings of their library, later locked away for five thousand years.
“Those books,” I confirmed. “Many people were lost in the attempt to steal the key, but when the survivors brought it back to Meuric, they had what they needed to free Janan. They went after him, and found an enormous wall circling a seemingly infinitely high tower.
“But inside the tower, Janan had been learning about the magic leeched from the phoenix, and he realized there was a way to achieve immortality after all. Like Meuric, he didn’t tell everyone the truth about what he and his warriors had done. He said only that he’d learned the secret to immortality, and the phoenixes had grown jealous and locked him away for it.