False Miracles

  I am a weapon, not a person.

  The red ground she was so deeply fixated on was still there, and so were the twins on either side. Halle was a few steps behind her, where she had originally stood before letting go of the rapier. The Academy was even further, dark clouds hovering over it. Noiseless.

  It felt like barely any time had passed at all. Like she hadn’t been in control. But she was, she knew that.

  I need to clean this up.

  “You did a good job, Ty.”

  “There’s blood on the ground,” she pointed out bluntly to Halle, unamused by her act.

  Halle nodded. “For now.”

  Ty made eye contact with both Seth and Pia, numb. “There’s something else?”

  Their eyes darted to the sword in her hands, so she followed.

  The blade was a shimmering red. Glowing. The bodies—she could see the auras of the Ancients slowly being absorbed by her sword, a steady stream of pale rainbows that clung desperately to her weapon like children returning to their mother. And the bodies, much like the auras, faded into the sky as golden lights, leaving no flesh behind.

  “Am I taking them?” she whispered, lifting her sword up in front of her, angling it toward the heavens so that the gold caught the sun. If she hadn’t known better, it looked the same as it always had. Clean the blood off, and no one would have been able to tell that it had felled nine Ancients.

  Silence.

  If she looked the same as she always had, no one would be able to tell that she had felled nine Ancients.

  Ty let the sword fall to her side as Halle approached with a basic water spell to wash away the blood on the ground. When she got to Ty, she stooped down to meet her eyes. “You look like you want to say something.”

  She averted her gaze, watching the twins retract their spell and leave. “You all make it seem so rudimentary.”

  “You’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure.”

  Her eyes shifted back to the healer.

  “Here, lift your boots so I can wash them. There’s still a bit of blood.”

  “How many more times?”

  “That’s one…and the other one…okay. There we go.”

  “How many more times?”

  Halle stood up properly and offered Ty a familiar leather scabbard. “Enough for you to get used to it. Now let’s put your sword back so we can go find your beloved professor.”

  But a split second before the child took it, the thin, pale hands that offered it retracted, letting go of the scabbard. Ty, snapping out of whatever daze she had put herself in to stop herself from processing her new reality, managed to catch it before it hit the ground, but not before the presence that had surprised Halle made themselves known.

  “You did it?”

  Ty’s eyes widened, her grip on her sword tightened, and she spun around to face the broken voice at the gates behind her.

  “You did it.” The Headmistress’s trembling words were quieter the second time, her expression no longer furious as she tilted her head back and looked up at the sky, blood dripping down from the side of her temple onto her tattered, once-immaculate coat, the exposed tactician’s dress underneath teeming with deep lacerations so dark it looked like rot. Her long ashen bun was undone, red matting distorting her hair in random places all the way to her hip. Fresh, crimson blood was still dripping from her hands.

  Hopeless.

  “Let’s go, Ty.”

  A hand tried to pull her forward, and she found herself unmoving.

  “I’m so sorry,” the Headmistress spoke again, scarlet tears now running down the sides of her face as her shoulders shook. A bloody hand covered her face. “I’m so sorry. I failed you. Mom failed you.”

  “Ty.”

  The tactician shook her head, meeting Halle’s soft, unaffected gaze. “You can’t leave her here like this.”

  She could see Halle’s eyes turn to stone as she waited, gauging Ty’s resolve before she offered a dry, uncomfortable chuckle. “I’ll take care of her. Why don’t you go back inside to check up on Nate? He should be in the infirmary.”

  Nodding, Ty shakily sheathed her sword and fastened it to her side before walking back up the hill, her body like lead wading through a deep swamp, unable to think about anything other than the counting in her heart at every step she took. With every life she stole for the promise of redemption, a promise she was not sure she could fulfill. The sound of her sword bouncing against her leg, an announcement of the sins she carried.

  Look at me. Here I am. This is who felled me.

  The words from the nightmare came back to her. The sparkle of her pristine sword. Her own reflection in it. Lies strong enough to save the world. What sins had been committed, what she was saving them from, she did not know—but it was what the Earth Mother wanted, what the Ancients wanted.

  Am I supposed to have fought back?

  Ty stopped at the end of the Great Hall, on the opposite end of a ruined courtyard that mattered little to her, on the path leading either to the lecture halls or to the dorms.

  She found herself walking toward the dorms, until the deafening silence was no more, where her silent, still world ended, and the new one began.

  Students. She could hear students chatting, see them through the open doors of their dorm rooms. Whispers of a lockdown could be heard through those closest to her—even though it was against policy, even though there had been nothing about the end of the drill, there everyone was, pretending like everything was rudimentary.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Arriving at the corner of the buildings, feet at the edge of the grass, she stopped to look across to where her own class dorm was. The door was open, just like everyone else’s. There was someone sitting in the doorway leading into their common room.

  She locked eyes with them.

  They stood up.

  “Theo,” she whispered, hearing the plea in her voice.

  Standing still, watching him blink a few times before dashing toward her, she was sure it was her name that he mouthed before she was hit with that unforgettable warmth. Before the numbers in her heart began to count correctly again, before the cacophonous rattling of her sword stopped.

  “Where have you been?”

  Lies strong enough to save the world—

  “Come.” She pulled away, held his hand. Started walking again, but away from the dorms, while he followed.

  If I look the same as I always have—

  “They rang the alarm bells right before the duel was supposed to start. I saw you…near the stage with Moriya. And I assumed you’d be okay—I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Everything’s okay.” The words sounded unnatural and detached, but they sounded like the correct words to say.

  “Where are we going?”

  Ty let the question answer itself as they approached the infirmary, pushing open the door and walking inside.

  She remembered this feeling.

  Walking down the center to the end, turning her head to look at all the unoccupied cots, the stained-glass windows of the shameful Graces who could do nothing but sit idly by and wait for her to rend their souls from the Earth, the child held fast onto her companion’s hands.

  “He’s here.”

  Her delicate words echoed off the cool stone as she continued to guide him like she did that one time, when she thought she had all the power in the world. When fire was in her heart, only to be extinguished once she reached the end she had so desperately sought since she had been born.

  A reason. It was a reason to exist.

  When the sound of weeping could finally be heard, she didn’t stop. She continued, holding onto the courage in her heart that no one believed she had, and held fast onto it, onto Theo, onto her resolve as she entered the head physician’s room, where life was.

  “M…Moriya,” breathed her courage.

  With her back to them, Chel was shaking like a leaf, her muttered spells barely audible above the ragged gasps and sniffles that wracked her body.

  You are the reason for her suffering.

  “Can I come in?” the Child of Hope dared to speak despite Halle’s words ringing in her head. “I can help.”

  Silence.

  Without a word, Chel stopped reciting, stepping aside so the two at the entrance could see what her small frame had been hiding.

  After seeing the state that the Headmistress was in, she should not have been surprised. Nate was half-naked and limp, his arms looked like they had been forcibly torn from his body, held together only by metal contraptions. Thin, precise stitches ran from his neck and under the bandages over both his legs as if he had been flayed, with several more going around his arms connecting the limbs together. Blood was already beginning to seep through the stitching in some places, smothering the white and darkening the bruises scattered like paint across his pale skin.

  She walked closer, watching Head Physician Lundkis work on a segment of his exposed torso, his gloved hands and instruments covered in even more of what little blood Nate had left.

  “I’ve just finished setting his ribs back into place,” the physician mumbled before taking his hands out of the professor’s chest and reaching for some thread on the silver platter beside him. “I’m going to sew him back up, but there are no guarantees. His wounds don’t appear to be closing as they should. At the very least, you should thank the Graces there was no damage to his head. No magic short of reversing time can fix that.”

  A sob escaped from Chel, whose bloodied, gloved hands were covering her face from the front end of the operating table.

  Lundkis didn’t even bat an eye. “Zoi’s applied some kind of warding on him—she’s never done it before, and I don’t know what it is. He doesn’t even have an Anesthese applied; I had to inject the compound into him. He’s going to bleed out unless we either dispel the warding or continue casting a Stymie-Sustain for hours like what Chel has been doing.”

  “Spells don’t last that long,” she replied.

  “Well then, tactician, consider this: how many drops of Ancients’ blood in books is his life worth?”

  She had no answer, and he knew it, focusing now on preparing the last remaining stitches despite the futility of it all.

  The solution was so obvious, though—it was as simple as lying on the grass, putting her head to the ground and dreaming of flowers. It was simple as helping her friends, as simple as saving the world. She couldn’t save everyone, but this? She was here. She had the power to. It cost her nothing but a little time. Why would she not save him?

  “I’ll do it.”

  Letting go of Theo’s hand, feeling the blood return to her fingertips, which she placed onto the cold body that had once been her warm wall, she bent her head down so she could feel his cool skin against her forehead. Closed her eyes. Imagined her anima as brilliant purple flowers, the same ones that belonged to his beloved tactician. He lay in a field of them, and the soft purple petals caressed him gently, turning as red as his blood. Sapping away his pain, his hurt.

  “C-Chel…”

  Ty slowly opened her eyes and retracted her hands from the professor’s warm skin. She straightened and stepped back.

  “Well, there we go,” the Head Physician spoke first, sitting with his hands in his lap with an unsurprised, expectant look directed at the tactician.

  Then she examined Nate, his chest no longer showing any signs of having been bruised or cut into, even. She could see Chel’s tears on the cold metal, her red, bloodshot eyes. Still as stone, as if moving the slightest would have destroyed the illusion of life Ty had conjured.

  “Chels…i?”

  “How could you?” she squeaked out angrily before covering her face again to mask her tears.

  His reply was low and labored. “Don’t…don’t cry.”

  Implacable, Chel crumpled onto the floor. “How could you?” she echoed again and again, unable to stop the tears.

  “A miracle,” Theo whispered under his breath.

  Yes. A miracle. She bit her lip as her mind processed the bitter words, eyes scanning the professor’s unstained body, still unable to meet his eyes that gazed up at the ceiling. An uncomfortable, but not unfamiliar, pain spread in her chest.

  Is it really?

  She lowered her head, leaning forward in an awkward bow. “Thank you, Nate. You…” Her chest stirred and constricted, the words in her heart mixing until they spilled. “You may think of yourself as a weapon, but you are a person to us. You are important to us. Please…please take care of yourself.”

  Before anyone could reprimand her childish words, see the tears in her eyes at hearing the very words she wanted to be spoken to her, the tactician bolted out of the infirmary and away from the Graces’ watchful gazes.

  * * *

  Ty wiped the tears from her eyes and hurried down the main Academy path as the school bell tolled noisily from above. “Nothing. Nothing happened,” she answered insistently.

  “So you’re not going to tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s about what happened to Moriya, isn’t it?”

  Her pace only quickened, spotting students pouring out of the dorm side of the schoolgrounds as she headed to the front gates. “It’s just—” She faltered, realizing that there was no need for her to protect who she was looking for. “It was the Headmistress.”

  “The what?” Theo blurted, laughing briefly in disbelief before he saw she was serious. “Why would she?”

  “Yes, she wanted…”

  Trailing off, she came to a dead stop at the entrance of the Great Hall looking out toward the front gate. The feeling came rushing back to her—the nausea of divine providence.

  “She wanted…?”

  “She wanted to take me away, and he stopped her.”

  Am I going to feel this way forever? she wondered to herself as she walked up to the gate, looking out at where blood used to be. Washed away by water, dried up by the sun, the earth eliminated all evidence of their existence; what remained was humanity’s burden.

  “Why was she taking you away?”

  “She’s—I don’t know—she wanted to protect me or—”

  “From what?”

  “I…I can’t tell you. I know I’ve been asking a lot of you, but…you have to trust me, Theo. Please.”

  Silence.

  The tactician turned to Theo, his unchanging face. The resting thin lines his lips made as if he was always thinking about something—that would almost always turn into a smile for her—the deep brown eyes that reflected the world he abhorred—that softened whenever she was around—the dark eye bags below them—from spending so much time with her—the pillowy, pale cheeks with a hint of pink—that she loved to kiss in the morning if she woke up before he did.

  “Do you trust me?” she whispered.

  The chatter of students resuming their regular school life stood no chance against the deafening silence between them as she searched for the answer in his eyes.

  Unchanging.

  She finally broke eye contact, smiling and chuckling shakily as if nothing was wrong. Turning to the students making their way toward the front gates, putting her hands in her pockets and walking to the side so she wasn’t blocking the entrance before speaking again.

  Two steps. An expanse that could not be traversed.

  “It’s okay. I don’t trust myself either.”