Marina of the Sea

Sunlight streams down upon the long winding halls of Riin Cosas, wide ceilings of prismatic glass sparkling in the noon sun. Clerics rush through the halls, flanked by eager novitiates. There is so much to do, so much to manage. The whole temple is a hive of activity, the beating heart of a network that is slowly struggling to adapt to a new world. It is a beautiful day.

Chono tugs absentmindedly at the heavy ring on her finger, striding through the patterned halls. The weight of her role as First Cleric is not something that she feels she’ll ever be truly used to, but it is becoming more familiar, at least. Handling the endless feuds of the First Families, the rebuilding efforts on Quietus, the lingering remnants of Kess’ cloaks. There is little time for rest, but she has held up so far. The work gives her a sense of purpose, at least. Things have been improving, even if only slowly. 

A younger cleric runs up beside her, loose reports in hand. His face is flushed from trying to keep up with Chono, and he takes a deep breath before speaking.

“First Cleric, the schismatics on Kator want an audience with you before the season’s end. We also found the files you requested on Sa Lejan, it’s damning stuff. There’ll also need to be a decision about the upcoming reception, if you haven’t reconsidered-”

Chono cuts him off with a slight wave of her hand, nodding once. She takes the files without a word, suddenly distracted. Something just visible on the edge of her gaze, a chipped fragment in the brickwork. 

“My position on that matter remains unchanged. I’ll review these-”, she points to the files, “as soon as I can. Thank you.”

He cups his hand in gratitude, and then backs away - perhaps sensing something in Chono’s gaze that makes it clear she would prefer to be alone. 

As the cleric vanishes away round the corner, Chono quickly moves to the disturbed pattern in the wall, feeling the cool bricks against her palm. She feels a surge of emotion rush through, relief and desperation all mixed into one. Her fingers reach around, searching for the tiny device. There- in the usual spot, tucked away behind the loose carving. 

Not daring to look here in public, Chono quickly takes the prize, and hurries towards her chambers, suddenly feeling uncharacteristically impatient. It hasn’t even been that long, yet she treasures each all the same. 

As she crosses into her offices, she reaches up towards a small lockbox kept up on a shelf behind her grand desk. She looks around for a moment, checking that the room is empty, the doors sealed. All secure. 

Carefully, with a focused sense of purpose that reminds her of a religious ritual, Chono unlocks and opens the box. She lets out a slow breath that she hadn't realised she was holding, looking down at all the carefully preserved letters. With the newfound device in her hand, she reaches down to pass it against the inside of the box. It pulses slightly, the decryption protocol that Jun had provided working to unlock the contents. 

Slowly, the device unfurls in Chono’s hands, rippling out into a grey paper-like substance. The carbon fibres shimmer and resolve into words, the letter taking shape before her. As it does, Chono reflects on how Six has managed to keep sending these things, even going to all the work of getting them smuggled into the very temple of Riin Cosas. A flair for the dramatic, Chono supposes - this sort of thing has always been Six’s element, even if a simple cast message would surely be far easier to arrange. 

The letter finishes forming, and Chono reads it carefully, heart beating loudly in her chest. She misses them terribly. Every moment of contact with them is a delight, yet ignites a deep and endless desire. They have both had  this same effect on each other throughout their lives, pulling on each other from across the stars. 

She finishes the letter, then reads it again. They’ll be together again soon. She has felt their absence in every room, and a selfish part of her cannot help but wish that they had never been parted at all. Yet it was the right decision, she feels. Six needed to be themself again, and she had her duties here as First Cleric. It has been hard, but she is so very glad to hear from them, to know that they are both ever growing and changing. They come, they go, they return again. They are two worlds on shared orbits, spinning and falling together through the expanse of the Black. 

With a smile on her lips, Chono places the new letter into the lockbox, and reaches under the desk. Taking out a sheaf of paper, she readies an old inkwell, and begins to write. For so long she had been unable to respond to Six, hearing their silent cries without the possibility of calling back. Now things are different, and Chono begins to write everything she has, all she had always wished to say. For they are no longer alone, and their shared dance through the stars is all Chono had ever wanted.

I saw my family for the first time today. Haila and Asika, and their son - the Professor I told you about? I only intended to meet them in passing. I am still so very afraid of being seen by others. I had feared they would detest me, cast me out on sight. Perhaps that is what I would have deserved, after all the harm I have caused to my own people. Yet they treated me as if an old friend, even after I told them who I was. They showed me a station delicacy - something made from seaweed, it seemed like? 

They were kind, Chono. I wish you could have been here. 

I found I wanted to tell them the truth, despite everything. It is a new impulse - I am not sure what to do with it. I have always been so ready to lie, to shape reality to whatever I needed it to be. It was survival, perhaps. I have never had the luxury of honesty before. The truth of myself has always been buried deep, hidden away from all possible perception. It is terrifying to be so open now, yet I am glad nonetheless. I do not think I could have borne it any longer.

So, we talked for a while. I suppose it was hard to stop once we started. They spoke about life here out here on the station, the work they’ve been doing, the new fleet of asteroid miners. They know more about shipbuilding here than even the best yards back on Teros. I knew their history from Drae’s journal, but it was quite something else to see them all in person. Asika has my eyes. It is a strange familiarity. I know Drae would be proud of them all. I hope she would not think too harshly of me. 

In turn, I told them about Principes, about Esek, about you. About this strange and doubled life I’ve led. Perhaps they’re all cloaksaan agents, and this will be my last letter. Yet I want to trust them. I think I have to learn to trust again, no matter how painful. If I want to exist, I cannot hide forever. I want to be a person.

They trained us to be weapons, at the kin-school. Hands of the Kindom. Clerics and cloaks alike, all tools of their control. I thought I wanted nothing more - we all did. They took away everything we had, created a world in which we were left directionless, and then offered a path of respite. Of course we took to it so readily. I molded myself in their image, even long after I had left that place behind. They built it up within us.

Before anything else, I hated Esek for taking that from me. For denying me a purpose. For making it so I could never be a part of something greater. Now, I look back, and I wonder if I would have been any better if I stayed. Perhaps Esek, for all her monstrosity, spared me from a worse fate. I know she took you from their grasp as well. 

The Kindom survived by forcing people into the shapes it needed. Esek might have been borne from that system, but she never accepted it for herself. She set up its fall, in truth. Ha! I wonder if she would be pleased or outraged? Both, I suspect. 

Yet I struggle to find any way to forgive Esek, even if I can no longer hate her as I once might have. I still often wake screaming at night, thinking I’m back at Soye’s Reach, feeling the weight of the rubble pressing down on my chest. I think of my cousins, the family she already took from me. Of the Ironways, the lives she destroyed without a second thought. I cannot forget such things, the marks she left on the world. On me.

Esek is gone, though. She does not need my forgiveness or my hatred, in the end. We all change the worlds in unforeseen ways. The currents bring us all to somewhere we never imagined.

It is a new day. Tomorrow, Haila offered to show me around the aquaculture gardens, and to meet her mother. I find I am looking forward to it greatly. There is a world to explore, a life to live. We escape the bindings they placed on us, only when we take the choice to exist, no matter what. I will be a ghost no longer.

Chono, my love, I have crossed stars to find what you always knew. If I am free to choose, then I know what path I will always pick. I am a traveller on a slow orbit, but a traveller returning. Through winding paths, we always somehow find a way home. To die for you was all too easy, for I was already dead. Now you have asked me to live, and I find myself having to learn what that means. I am getting there, though. 

These worlds we live upon are not always the easiest places. Yet if I we are to live, I would always choose to do so at your side, Chono. Together amidst the currents. 

I will see you soon. I am always returning to you.

Chono, light of my heart, we will meet again.

Forever yours,

Dearest Chono,

I think of you so very often, these days. I always have, really. You are a current pulling me inexorably to shore, time and time again. No matter how far I try to sink, your hold on me remains. Even out here in the Black, there are some ties that no distance could ever sever.   

I am still learning how to exist. It is perhaps a lesson that no one ever fully completes, but it is a struggle regardless. I wish I could see myself through your eyes. I want so desperately to be real.

It is a long journey we are on here, but I am glad to not be alone. I do not want to let you down, Chono. I do not want to let myself down. That’s something new, at least.

It is strange, to go through so much of life without caring about having a self of my own. It was safer to be someone else, or to be no one at all. I was only a revenant, and to have personhood was a luxury I could not afford. 

I thought it would make me more like her, more able to win in the end. Everything I cared for was cut away, piece by piece. She took everything from me, and so I salted the ground such that nothing could ever regrow. It was easier to have nothing than face that loss again.

I believed that even you were lost to me, Chono. As if she was taunting me, converting you into one of her creatures. I could not see how anyone could ever work with her willingly, especially knowing her as you did. I feared she had made monsters of us both. That we were never more than pawns in some greater game.

Yet, despite a lifetime spent studying her, I am starting to realise all the ways in which I never truly understood Esek. We shaped each other, perhaps. I have for so long feared that I would become her in truth. That one day I would find that I wasn't playing a part any more. I saw myself in Esek, and saw how we might one day end up entirely identical, a perfect recreation of the other.

I have had time to reflect, however.

There are shared elements between us all, but I want to believe that I can be more than just the performance of a dead hand of the kindom. That Six is someone worth being.

The difference, perhaps, lies in our ability to change. I chose to become Esek, I remade myself. I cannot say if I was right to do so, but I like to think that I still retain that capacity to evolve, to choose.

Esek also had that same choice. She chose to be what she was. Every act of cruelty, of unexpected altruism - all the contradictions of humanity. I wonder if she could ever have become something more. I know you hoped that she might, eventually. That deep within her, a heart could one day grow. Yet, that was never what she wanted. Esek was an event horizon all of her own, a final state of existence. She did not want to change, and while there was something admirable about that certainty of self-possession, it also means that her actions and their consequences were ultimately all as she desired. 

I wanted to feel that same way, to be like her in that respect. To have such clarity of vision. Yet to do so is a trap, an enticing but all-too-deadly dream. To reach that state, to stop changing - that is to no longer be alive. Perfection is an illusion. 

If I chose to be Esek, I can choose to be Six. Whatever paths brought me here, I can still build something new. Maybe we can’t go back, and maybe the weight of the past will forever cling to us. 

I think it is worth trying, regardless. 

For so long, Chono, I thought you were fixed in place. I thought it was easy for you, that you didn’t have to try at all. That being Chono, being yourself was simply a natural response. I envied you, but I have come to see that you were ultimately working the hardest of any of us. You have fought to keep that sense of self, and that is what people admire. 

You know all of this, I’m sure. You were always so far ahead of me in these things, Chono.  

I still have a long way to go. The journey is never a simple one. But I’m coming back to you, Chono, my love. I always will. 

Through whatever this world can throw at us, we will find a way to live. Whatever it takes.

Chono & Six, Six & Chono

Oh, Chono. Wondrous, impossible Chono. You were always the best of us, the noblest. You could make people believe, truly, when you spoke. Something changed in their eyes, afterwards. A new light. Some said the gods themselves spoke through you. Perhaps, though, your power came from a far closer source. 

I always felt that it was you that they ended up believing in. That your very presence was enough for them to trust in something greater than themselves. You made it all look so easy, though I know it was anything but. You never wanted to be worshipped, you were only ever just yourself. That was enough. That was so much more than enough. 

People search for fixed points in the world. I know I always did. That was something of what you offered, someone who was good, and true to themselves, and unbowed by the tides of the stars. Someone who would not bend to all the pressures, who stood tall against everything. Not some god at a far remove, but a person, like them. Who could understand, and would do the right thing.

It was an illusion, of course. Yet it was so easy to believe, because we all wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true, Chono. I needed someone good, to make this all worth it. To be someone who could deserve the world, and inspire that spark in others. I didn’t want you to be human. You were to be my saviour, I fear. Someone who I could give the authority to judge me, and one day tell me that I was forgiven. That I had done right - that I too, was good.

So, in the name of the gods, Chono - why, oh why did you have to love Esek Nightfoot?

She was a wound in the world. You knew that, right? A force of nature that came and destroyed. She dropped down from the heavens to ruin my life on a whim. How could you love her? She was evil. She had to have been evil. You don't understand Chono, you can’t love her. There could never be anything worthwhile in Esek. 

Because…because if there was something there, if she was human after all… If she was a person capable of great evil, yes, but also possessing a heart - if she was anything other than a monster….

Then what am I? 

I have consecrated myself to her destruction. I have unmade myself to be her undoing. I have hunted her across the stars, to take apart every moment of her life and legacy. I will strike her name from the books of history, so that her memory will be nothing more than ash and ruin. 

She cannot be human. What I have done, requires a monster to be fought. If I am ever to be forgiven, then Esek’s destruction must have required this. There cannot be any other way, because if there was any alternative, then I have destroyed myself for nothing. 

People need their fixed points. Esek was an impossible monster, so it was right and just for me to do anything needed to take her down. You, Chono, are good, so you can judge this. Please do not love her. Please do not care for her. You cannot be human either. We must all become something else, in order for the world to make sense.

Please, make the world make sense, Chono, I beg you. 

I know the truth, of course.

None of this was fate. 

I have defined myself by Esek.

Whatever she is, I can be her opposite, a perfect reaction to cancel her out. 

I loved her too, ultimately. How could I not?

She offered the same thing that followers see in you, Chono. A platonic form of a self, an ideal that a life could revolve around. Someone whose very existence shapes the perspectives around them.

In my own way, I worshipped her. Every trap, an act of devotion. Every scheme an altar upon which I could prove myself worthy of her. I hated her, and I loved her. I killed her, and I became her. She was the focus of my whole life.

Who am I without her? 

She made me her disciple, in truth, even if it was never admitted. I thought I could make myself perfect, deserving. 

I wonder at which point I stopped being myself. When the Esek inside me had fully grown, and had become so familiar I could no longer see any part of myself that wasn’t utterly entwined. It was long before any physical changes, I think. She claimed dominion over my mind before I even knew who I was. Esek was a fixed point, so I made myself into the same - the only way to challenge her, to undo her. 

I do not think I succeeded. I killed her, but I did not stop her. I cannot ever escape her. I see her in every mirror, in every moment of agony, in every injustice in these worlds.

Yet in some ways, I made her into that monster. I needed one to fight, so I created one. All her worst crimes were borne from my own actions. I will not blame myself for these, but I cannot deny my own role. She may have accepted her part enthusiastically, but I cannot truly say that this was not what I wanted.

There was a terrible part of me that rejoiced with every act of cruelty she performed. That secret thrill that she was worth it. The worse she became, the more noble I would be for destroying her. 

Chono, please, I want you to judge me. To weigh up my life in your hands, and see if I was right.

I did not want you to be corruptible, to be someone who could love Esek. I did not want us to be three people whose lives were bound together by chance and misfortune. We had to be something more.

I want you to tell me I did good, dear Chono. That Esek was a nightmare, and I saved everyone by stopping her. That whatever I did to myself and others was a noble and worthy cost for the heroic deeds I performed.

I want you to tell me I am a monster. I want you to know Esek, to see her as she was, and see that evil in me too. That callousness, that disregard for life that I cultivated to match hers. I want you to discard me, to condemn me. 

What I cannot bear, is for you to see me as I am. To see the person that still hides beneath, the kin-school student who was beaten and told that it was because I was extraordinary. The person that longed for a community that was torn away, that desperately wanted to prove they were more than just the bloodline of a monster. The person that loved you, Chono, without hope of salvation or promise of worship. 

I am terrified of being a person.

I hope, one day, that this fear will fade. Oh, it can never truly go away, but I still dream of the time when I could just be Six. Esek will always be with us, but Esek the person, not the monster. For she was no different than us, in the end. 

It seems impossible, and yet…

I am here. I am alive. I will try.