This Glorious Sadness; Ch 1, Keanu p2

[covenmouse]

Title: This Glorious Sadness
Verse:  Their Silent Reverie
Genre(s): Angst/Dark, friendship, action/adventure
Length: 12,300 w (both parts)
Summary:  The Shitennou live, reborn to new lives but haunted by demons of the past.  Their task is simple: they must cleanse the Earth of the Moon Princess's taint.
Warnings: dark themes are touched upon, including mental disorder, emotional, physical and sexual abuse, death and murder.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon and make no profit from this work of fictional fun.
A/N:   This will make no sense at all unless you've read This Sweet Madness, at the very least.
Status: Ongoing

Prologue  [Note: this is also the final chapter of Viva La Vida, but it's important enough to reitorate.]

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Keanu

Part One

Helios allowed him to take the book back to his cell, along with a handful of others. No matter their unease with one another, the priest did seem to sense Keanu’s respect for books, at the very least. Keanu put the stack on one end of his straw-stuffed mattress, sat on the other, and turned on his inner glowworm.

He was partway into a diary-the first volume in a series by a young acolyte who would, according to Helios, become a high priestess of the realm-when there was a knock at the door. “Come in.”

Zoe peeked inside, then slipped through the door and shut it behind herself. She was wrapped in a blanket, much as he had been that morning, and she paused to stand at the foot of his mattress. The girl blinked rapidly, and he thought her eyes might be adjusting. It always seemed to take a minute or two before the lack-of-darkness extended to anyone but him. Even now, he wasn’t entirely clear on how it worked, only that it did.

“Books?” She looked down at the stack, and he nodded.

“I thought I’d do some research.” Scoffing slightly, Zoe’s lips twisted into a brief smile. She fidgeted in place, then shoved the books toward the wall so she could sit. Keanu shut the diary. “What’s up?”

“I wanted...I wanted to know what you’re thinking.”

“About?”

Taking a deep breath, Zoe held it a moment. She had one of her wrists in hand, and was rubbing her thumb over the scars across her veins. Keanu didn’t think she realized she was doing that, and decided it was best not to point it out. Eventually, she said, “What Bach-Beryl was saying at dinner last night. And other stuff. You were upset.”

He rested the back of his head against the cool stone behind him. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of this I’m still not making sense of, to be honest. The memories are there but they’re...parts of them are vague, distorted. Like trying to remember the details of your first day of kindergarten. It’s too far in the past.”

There was a hesitation to Zoe’s nod, and he said before she could reply, “You don’t agree.”

“Well...’agree’ isn’t really the term,” Zoe said slowly, “But it’s not exactly, ah, like that. For me. Some of it is, but other times there’s these...it’s as if I’m...”

“Back there?” She met his eyes then, and for a moment they were green. Keanu sighed. “I have them too. The hallucinations, I guess you’d call them. They don’t really help so much as...”

“Yeah.”

Keanu pursed his lips. “From what I’ve been reading...do you remember the story of Gaea, and how she crowned the original Kings?”

“Yeah. She split her power between them, so that the people of Earth would rule themselves under their own free will.”

“And from those kings came the five noble houses, from which the successors are chosen,” Keanu said slowly, more for his own benefit than hers. There was something nagging at him about this, but he shoved the doubt away. Old legends like these always sounded a little incomplete, he thought, the truth would always be diluted and distorted through time.

“One from each house must sit in order to maintain the balance that keeps the Earth’s powers in check,” Zoe continued. “Oh. We have to replace...”

“Yeah.” Keanu rubbed his face. “That’s what Beryl was on about, and she thinks it should be her. She’s done it before, after all.”

The girl snorted distastefully. “No. That’s-after all of this? No freaking way!”

Jun had had much the same reaction, Keanu thought. He put the diary he’d been reading aside and sat up straighter. “Who then? We need someone adequately blooded of the Central house, who can use magic. The priesthood doesn’t exist to choose from anymore, and if there are still mages among the common folk, they’re so scattered we’ll spend ages looking for one.”

Zoe frowned and bit her lip. He could see the anger in her shoulders, her hands clutching at her arms. “I don’t like it.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I don’t either. But...”

“We have time.” Keanu met her eyes, and they pleaded with his. “It won’t go wrong immediately, right?”

“I...don’t know.” He got up and paced in the small space available. “Helios mentioned the Ginzushou at the table, remember?”

“Something about that, yeah.”

“Well, Beryl mentioned it before. Back at D-Point.”

A glance at Zoe told him that she remembered. It would be hard to forget that blasted rock-Beryl had been driving them all insane looking for it. He resisted the dark humour that thought brought with it. “She wanted it because that’s what was blocking us out of Elysion. It had tied its power to the natural barriers of Elysion, and sealed Elysion off from the rest of the planet-”

“And put it into the stasis mode thing, yeah, I know.” Zoe rolled her eyes. “Helios told us that earlier, what about it?”

“The barrier is still there, sort of. It’s weak now; it’s let us through, and it’s let the rains come again. Soon enough it’ll fail altogether and this place will be completely open.”

Zoe leaned back on her hands. “So? The Moon Kingdom is destroyed. They can’t invade again.”

He stopped and looked at her. “Yeah, but the modern world can. Besides, the barriers have a secondary function-a dam, against the currents of energy. It’s a back up, to keep the high king and, well, us, from being overwhelmed in the event of sudden fluctuations.”

“Like the death of a king, and no chosen heir,” Zoe said softly.

Keanu sighed and nodded. “Yeah. Elysion is already sick from having been...dormant so long. If all this power spills everywhere, and the barriers fail completely...Even if we had a proper king to anchor it back to the Earth while the we get the barriers up again, it’d be like-like-”

He fumbled for an appropriate metaphor. Zoe found one first. “Over feeding someone who was starved. Too much too soon and their body rejects it.”

Suddenly exhausted, Keanu nodded. “Yeah. Exactly. Which is why the Kings exist in the first place. To make sure this doesn’t happen.”

Flopping back down onto his end of the mattress, he stared up at the ceiling and for a moment they were left in darkness again. He felt, rather than saw, Zoe shift over next to him. Then her hair brushed his neck as she laid down beside him.

Finally, out of the darkness, she said, “You really ought to talk to Jun.”

“Why?”

“Just...do it, okay?”

After a moment, Keanu nodded. Zoe stayed there with him awhile longer.

The pit was roughly fifteen feet wide by seven feet deep. It had taken days of tireless effort for the four of them to dig it out, and now it was a swimming pool. With corpses.

There was a prickling on the back of Keanu’s neck which had everything to do with the legions of spirits staring at them. They were expressionless to the last, but he imagined hatred radiating from them like a fog.

“I think we made stew,” said Nick. Zoe punched his arm.

In hopes to forestall any fighting, Keanu said, “We’ll have to wait for it to dry up.” The last thing he wanted was to have to fish either of them out of that mess. Shuddering, he turned from the sight and headed back for the shrine. The others followed.

Jun jogged to catch up to him. “We’re just going to leave them like this?”

“You want to just throw the others in on top of that?”

“No, but-” Jun stopped, and so did Keanu. The boy chewed his bottom lip, blue eyes flickering over the spirits still visible beside their sodden grave. “We can’t just leave them. Every day they get worse.”

Keanu looked in turn to Zoe then Nick, neither of whom would meet his eyes. Carding one hand through his hair-it was getting shaggy, and he really wanted to cut it-Keanu sighed. “What do you propose we do? We can’t dig in this mud, we can’t throw them in that. All that’s left are funeral pyres and you...”

The mere mention made Jun shudder and he closed his eyes. For a moment the boy’s form overlaid with his former self-with the horror of scar tissue and pain Mars had left him. “I can deal. I should have in the first place. Lets just get this done, okay?”

“No.” Zoe grasped Jun’s shoulder and scowled at him. He flinched away from her, so she looked to Keanu instead. “They’ve waited centuries already. They can wait a few more days.”

Nick scoffed, but Zoe glowered him into silence. “I’m sorry, and I want to help them, too, okay? But we have bigger problems to deal with.”

“Like what?”

Zoe looked to Keanu, who nodded. He straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. Before he could start, his eyes landed on the spirits not too far from them. He turned and looked at the shrine behind them, then to the west where laid the castle. “Not here.”

The other boys looked confused, but they followed as Keanu led them to the forest.

A couple hours later the four were sitting at the end of an old pier, their feet dipped into the waters blow. Jun and Nick had listened in relative silence to Keanu’s explanations of what was to come, and now sat in contemplation of it. Finally, Jun put his hands in his face, elbows on his knees, and let out a slow breath.

“You really wanna crown that loon?” Nick scratched his neck. “She already fucked it up twice.”

“Technically, she didn’t.” Keanu leaned back on his hands and closed his eyes as he let the sunlight bathe his face. “The first time was my fault, and the second she didn’t get much chance.”

“It was not,” Zoe said sharply.

“You weren’t there,” Jun muttered. Zoe scowled at the three of them, then jerked her gaze off to the end of the river. Before the awkward could settle, Jun continued in a normal volume, “It still wasn’t your fault, though, Ken. There wasn’t any good solution.”

“Sure,” said Keanu. He didn’t want to argue about it. “The answer is ‘no’, I don’t want to crown her. She’s...forgive me, but she’s fucking nuts. I don’t know what we’re going to do with her, but I’m not allowing her to rule.”

“Great.” Nick chewed a piece of long grass he’d picked up somewhere when they’d been walking. “What’s plan B?”

“Nonexistent.”

“Even better.”

Keanu got up and began to pace the length of the pier. Nick turned his head to watch them, but otherwise the three didn’t move. “We need someone of royal descent, who has the ability for magic, who is not insane, and, most importantly, is on our side. That doesn’t leave a lot of options.”

“Don’t sound like it leaves any options,” Nick snorted.

“Helios.” They all looked to Jun, who lifted his head enough to meet their gazes. “Your mother was Princess Alcyone, wasn’t she? He was Kunzite’s brother. That makes him a Prince of the Central house, same as Kunzite was.”

Keanu nodded, and hung his head. “Yes, but we can’t use him. As I said, we need someone who is on our side.”

“Helios dethroned En-Ma-the traitor,” Zoe protested with hardly a hiccup. “He believes we’re right. What more-”

“He believes that King Aethlius disowned Endymion,” Keanu interjected, “But I don’t think he believes in Endymion’s guilt. Subtle difference though that may be, it still makes his alignment questionable. If it were just us that had to deal with it, I’d take the chance, but...”

They looked as one to the castle, as though it, too, were a participant in this conversation. Perhaps it was.

Zoe sighed. “You, then.”

“Me?” For a moment, Keanu stood staring at her, speechless. Then he shook himself bodily, like a dog might shake water.

“Yeah,” Nick seconded, “Why not? You were the heir. You shoulda taken it to begin with.”

“Back then. There’s no way to tell that I’m of the proper house now.”

“You could try,” said Jun, “By that reasoning there’s no way to tell that Beryl is, either.”

He was outnumbered, Keanu realized with a start. They weren’t going to back down.

And they were right. Though the idea made his stomach churn, he found himself nodding. “Alright. I’ll try.”

Zoe and Jun left together, back to the shrine he supposed. What tension Jun had gained at the idea of re-crowning Beryl had faded as soon as Keanu had agreed to take it instead. The edict Zoe had levied against him the night before replayed in his mind. Yet another thing to worry about, he sighed.

Keanu had resumed his seat at the end of the pier, and Nick appeared to be taking a nap stretched width-wise across the middle of it. It was peaceful out here. Laying back, Keanu pillowed his head in his hands and closed his eyes to the brilliant blue sky overhead. Somewhere in the woods birds sang, and the river swayed the pier gently as it babbled by. He hardly noticed the footsteps traveling up the pier.

The board beneath his head creaked, and Keanu sat up with a yelp. Turning about, he looked up to find no one there, and no Nick on the pier. Slowly, his pulse resumed a normal rate. “Nick?”

There was no sign of the boy down either side of the bank, and Keanu frowned. A fish bumped his foot and he looked down into the hollow sockets of a young girl, grinning up at him from beneath the surface of the river.

He pulled his feet from the water and stood up to stare in horror at the thousands of bodies churning in the water. Ghostly giggles flew upon the wind, kissing his cheek and threatening to blow him from the pier.

As he backed his way toward the shore, bony fingers clutched at the edge of the pier. Water dripped from the child’s corpse as she pulled herself from the water, a grin vivid on her face.

“You promised!” The wind screamed.

He turned to run, and promptly fell over Nick.

“Gah!” The other boy shoved him off and rolled over to get onto his feet. “The fuck, man?”

“I...” Keanu paused.

In the distance birds chirped, and the water lapped at the pier beneath him. There was no child, no corpses what so ever, and Nick crouched on the pier, staring at him. Thunder-heads bellowed to the south.

Shaking his head, Keanu climbed to his feet. “Fucking ghosts,” he muttered, and Nick nodded.

There were two routes back to the temple: down the river, over a bridge, and back up through the naked forest, or go through the town and up the cliff-side path. It took less time to go through town, but they had mostly been avoiding that. With dark, rolling clouds encroaching from the south, however, Keanu and Nick silently agreed to chance the town, even if it meant dealing with more pissed off specters and hallucinations. At this point, that was even beginning to seem normal.

The path they were on wound its way past the destroyed gardens at the back of the castle, and into the nobles’ quarter. They were spared the sight of the corpses hanging from the castle gate by a conveniently placed monolith of a house which had once belonged to the Kingdom of the North. Technically, it still did, though Zoe seemed to hold no interest in reclaiming it.

Keanu dimly remembered having spent a week’s vacation at the house, and getting lost more than once in the network of hidden hallways built into it by a paranoid architect. Zoisite had teased him for a fortnight after.

It was also where they’d found a copy of the proclamation, signed by King Aethlius, which removed Endymion from the royal line. No one had wanted to brave the castle for the original, and the previous King of the North, Kalunite, had kept meticulous records in his personal library. Fortunately, Helios accepted their word once he saw the king’s seal. Keanu swallowed hard at the memory of the boy’s face gone ashen, and the way he’d winced away from the parchment as though it’d bite.

All the houses along this lane were lined by high, ivy laden walls. Above them stared open windows into the homes of the highborn, foreign officials, and certain merchants whose money had lofted them to title. From time to time, at the corner of his eye, Keanu would see faces staring out at them, alerting him to which homes held bodies they’d need to remove.

Rain had washed away much of the stink, though Keanu knew it would only be temporary. If winter did come, as Pythia seemed to think it would, then maybe they’d be relieved of the worst of it for awhile. Long enough to burn everything. If he could get Zoe to agree to that.

He’d just begun to register a faint itch underneath his skin, a sign he was beginning to recognize as a warning of magic in the area--either by his own doing or another’s--when Nick muttered, “That’s coming in fast.” Keanu glanced at the other boy, who was watching the sky. A gust of wind slammed against them hard enough that both boys stumbled backward several steps. Nick cursed.

“Come on.” After a quick tug on Nick’s arm, Keanu took off at a run. He wasn’t as fit as Kunzite had been. Keanu hadn’t been trained in sprinting in armour, or sparring for hours, or anything more than a few hours of mulching; he was beginning to regret his lack of athleticism.

They made it over the bridge into the merchant sector before the first crack of lightning lit the sky and cause Nick to shy to a halt. Several steps ahead, Keanu turned when he noticed and found the other boy staring at the grey haze of rain in the distance. A haze which was speeding toward them.

There was a shop to Nick’s left. Getting wet wasn’t too worrisome, but the lightning and strange itch under Keanu’s skin had him worried. He didn’t want to be caught out in the storm. Hesitating only a moment longer, he strode back to his friend’s side, grabbed Nick’s arm, and drew him into the abandoned shop. The door shut just as a curtain of rain dropped outside of it.

Immediately, Nick shook his shaggy head and knotted his fingers into his hair. “Sorry, man, I...”

Keanu waved a hand at it, and moved further into the room. Immediately he’d begun to glowworm, and he lacked the will to be annoyed at it this time.

They found themselves in a jeweler’s shop and, to his relief, there was a distinct lack of corpses in the main room. Broaches and necklaces hung from pegs on the walls, or on display on shelves. Each piece was unique, and there weren’t many. At the back was a work bench, and a stool before it. Several wicked-looking tools were laid out over the dust-covered table, lined up neatly over top a worn piece of linen. Keanu could imagine the old shop keeper putting things in their place for a night, maybe an assistant tidying up after him, assuming they’d be back to work again in the morning as always.

Lightning cracked, casting Nick as a silhouette against the shop’s single window. Itching at one arm, Keanu carefully perched himself on the stool. “I guess we have to wait.”

Nick scrubbed at one arm as well, the move seemly unconscious as he stared at the shelves. Then, with a great huff, the boy put his back to the window and sat upon the floor. “Can ya knock off the glowy?”

Closing his eyes, Keanu bowed his head a moment and took a deep breath. Wind howled like a banshee through the streets and rattled the window over Nick’s head. Keanu blanked the distraction from his mind and concentrated on exhaling as slowly as possible. This time the itch never lessened, but when he opened his eyes again the shop was dark save for intermittent flashes of lightning.

So much noise surrounded them that he was a little surprised when he heard Nick say, “With everything what’s happened, ya wouldn’t think all this is still a big fuckin’ deal.”

“Hm?”

“Kings and crowns and fuckin’ politics.” Nick tapped a heel loosely against the floor. Thunk, thunk, scrape, thunk. “Ain’t nothin’ left to rule. Ain’t no people need us to rule. What the fuck should it matter what house we come from or don’t?”

Sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, Keanu nodded his head lightly and braided his fingers under his chin. “Yeah. I wouldn’t think it did either, man, but...Dammit, I don’t know, ok?”

The next flash of lightning briefly revealed Nick staring at him. Thunk, thunk, thunk. In another instant it was dark again and Keanu was grateful for that. “Mm, a’ight. I just don’t think we should get too caught up on that, y’know? No more nobles to feel slighted, no more rules about dress or speech or what you can fuckin’ say to a guy. No offense, but you being king don’t mean jack to me. You’d still be...you.”

Chuckling softly, Keanu gave a brief nod.

“Kinda don’t sit right,” Nick continued slowly, “This whole ‘king’ business. King’a what? King of a ghost town. King o’ gouls. King’a the slaughtered inn--” He heaved a sigh. “That ain’t the point, I guess. S’more, y’know, why’s it matter who does what? Y’put Beryl on a throne. Ain’t a throne of anything.”

“I see your point,” Keanu said a minute later, “Maybe it shouldn’t matter. Maybe we could just let her have her throne, placate her, and move on with the barriers in place.” Sighing faintly, Keanu closed his eyes. “She does have experience, however limited. It’s more than I do. But I thought you were against her. Why didn’t you bring this up before?”

Thunk, thunk, tap, thunk. “Jun.”

Thunder growled above them. “You know what’s going on there?”

“Nah.” A hesitation and lightning flash later, Nick continued, “He don’t trust her. Not like any of us do, but, eh, it’s more’n that. Edgy, kinda. Ain’t my business, so I don’t ask.”

“Didn’t mean to ask you to pry,” Keanu said. “Zoe wants me to talk to him, but--”

“But you don’t wanna pry.” Nick’s hoarse laugh echoed out of the darkness in a way that reminded Keanu uncomfortably of the ghosts that inhabited their old home. Thunk, tap, thunk, thunk.

“Yeah.” Washing his hands over his face, Keanu groaned. “I don’t like the idea the idea of her thinking she has any power over us, even if it isn’t true. I’m not sure if it would be true power or false, at this point. She could refuse to maintain the barriers if we disobey her.”

Nick grunted. “True ‘nuff. Didn’t think’a that.” Scrape, thunk, thunk, tap. “Guess that’s what makes you th’leader.”

A shriek of wind rattled the door. Keanu stared at it a moment, until the movement stopped. He looked back to Nick. On the other side of the window, a little girl stood tapping her finger against the window. She met his eyes. “Nick.”

Dark dots began to appear on the girl’s neck. As his companion scrambled away from the window, Keanu watched her throat slit open. She grinned at him, her mouth a gaping blackness, and then ran off into the storm. Her giggles echoed over the noise of the raging storm.

Keanu climbed off the stool and sat down next to Nick, where the boy had pressed his back to the far wall of the shop. Shoulder to shoulder, back to solid wall, they stared at the door and window equally. Once again the door began to rattle.

The handle twisted and the door slammed open. Rain poured in, saturating the old floorboards and blowing into their faces. His skin crawled, burned like fire ants writhing inside of him, through his organs, his blood, and into his brain. Falling on top of one another, the boys crawled as far from the door and the water as they could get, but the puddle inched along the floor after them.

A skeletal hand slapped the threshold, then another after it. Too busy trying to brush the invisible ants from his hair and skin, and having no success, Keanu barely noticed the corpse pulling itself inch by inch across the floor. Its fingers latched around his ankle.

“You promised!”

click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh

Someone was humming a faint, familiar tune, beneath the steady counterpoint of the spinning wheel. A chair creaked in time, and somewhere nearby a fire crackled.

click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh

The world was a blur of darkness and flickering firelight. With his eyes cracked open, Kunzite could just make out the shape of a woman sitting next to the hearth. Her long, silver hair blazed an orange pool about her figure, and when she looked up the horn protruding from her head glittered gold. The humming ceased.

click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh

“Good evening, my prince.”

“Mom?”

Alcyone took her foot from the pedal and allowed the spinning wheel to slow to it’s stop. She looped her place about the needle, then stood and went to the bedside. The mattress gave slightly beneath her weight. Placing a hand upon his brow, the princess hummed. “No fever. That’s good. But Kunzite, you must be more careful than this. Taking so much at once...it is not wise.”

He groaned faintly and shut his eyes.

“I know you didn’t mean to,” said Alcyone from the darkness, “Everyone makes mistakes. All there is to do is learn from them.”

Fingers combed through his hair.

“Do you remember, my Kunzite? Do you remember where I died?”

There was a little shrine in the slums, he could see it in his mind’s eye. It was half fallen in and deserted. Over the lintel was a crescent moon written in his mother’s blood.

A light scorched the backs of his eyelids, annoying and insistent that he wake. As insistent as the shaking of his body and the nonsense words shouted near his ear. Keanu groaned again, forced his aching eyes to blink, then promptly flopped his arm over them.

“You asshole,” muttered Zoe, and the hands left his shoulder, leaving him free to roll onto his back.

Someone moaned to his left. “Waa’th’fuk?”

“Dunno,” Keanu managed, and winced. His throat scraped around the words, and his lips felt like they were cracking. A tangy, metallic taste in his mouth said they probably already had. If that weren’t enough, every inch of him, every tiny molecule, seemed to be having a screaming fit.

“You were missing all night,” Jun said from somewhere in the darkness.

“We’ve been worried sick.” He could imagine the glares Zoe was giving him and the way she gesticulated as she yelled, all punctuated by a drum beat of stomping sneakers. “You didn’t come back, and then the storm went screwy. There was all this lightning and banshee howling, and someone kept screaming something about promises. We even heard it at the shrine.

“And then we couldn’t find you. Anywhere. We searched the whole god damn village.”

“If y’don’t stop yer screamin’, you’re gonna wish ya hadn’t found us.”

“Bring it on, buster, I can take your--”

“Guys.” Keanu sat up, waving one hand in their general directions. It was a mistake to uncover his eyes, and he winced away from the open window. “Gah.”

Immediately it was dark.

He could still feel the presence of the others, and that was all that kept Keanu from panicking. After a long pause, Zoe squeaked, “What did we do?”

“Didn’t do anything,” said Jun. There was a scuffle of shoes from where Keanu thought the window was. They traveled toward the door, and the knob rattled. A flash of the night before sent daggers of fear down Keanu’s spine, but before he could call out to stop Jun, the door opened. There was...whiteness on the outside. Light, against which Jun’s form was a silhouette. Somehow the light didn’t spill into the room; it was as though someone had just cut a line in the air through which no light could cross. Like being on the privileged side of a two-way mirror.

“Maybe I’m dreaming,” Zoe muttered.

Keanu shook his head. As soon as he did, the world snapped back into normalcy and something deep inside of him began to scream all the more loudly. He collapsed forward onto his bent knees and held himself.

Nick sat up; he’d been laying directly beside Keanu, but seemed a little better off, at least in the coping department. Watching their leader through slit eyes, Nick scratched his dark, locked up mane. “Over reaction, much?” His voice was as hoarse as Keanu’s, but he followed the question with a dry, rattly laugh. “Ain’t ya ever had a hangover?”

“I don’t drink.”

That got another short bark of laughter from Nick. The boy pulled himself to his feet and offered Keanu a hand. “Yer almost eighteen.”

Eventually, Keanu took the help and tried not to wince as his joints protested with cracks and pops. “Even if that were legal, I still wouldn’t. Intoxicant.”

“Yeah, s’what it’s for.”

Keanu rolled his eyes. “You’re a comedic genius, I’m sure.” Arms around one another, the pair limped slowly for the door. Zoe frowned at them, but neither she nor Jun said anything, even when they stopped at the door to adjust to the light as best they could. Little by little, the quartet made their way through the muddy streets of Elysion as Nick and Keanu pieced together the events of the previous night.

The only comfortable position he could find was on his stomach, face in pillow. That worked so long as he could hold his breath, then he’d have to turn his neck and gulp like a goldfish. Still, Keanu tried, and was for once thankful of the inky blackness in the temple bedchambers. Blackness that was natural, unlike the void he’d created that morning.

Even now, hours after the fact, that little, indefinable part of him still blazed within him, swollen and feverish. Keanu knew that even if he wanted to light his little chamber he wouldn’t be able to without a candle. Normal methods. Great.

As weird and annoying as the glowworm effect had been, it was a little strange to not be able to use it.

Someone knocked at the door and he groaned. It swung open, and shut again. When Keanu turned his head to breath, he found Pythia standing in the flickering light of an unshielded candle mounted on a tray with what smelled like lunch, or maybe dinner; Keanu wasn’t certain how long he’d been laying down. She set the offering on the floor beside the mattress, then sat on her knees beside it. “I thought I would see how you were faring.”

“Like roadkill, I imagine.”

Though her brows furrowed, the maiden offered a small smile. “That is to be expected, I suppose. Prince Nicholas isn’t doing much better.”

Neither of the shrine maidens would call them by their first names alone, though they’d tried often enough to get them to. That the title used was ‘Prince’ and not ‘King’ had not escaped Keanu’s notice, but he’d never cared to question it. He still didn’t.

It was awkward to continue laying down while another watched him, so he forced himself to sit up. His head stopped spinning after a moment, and he glanced at the food she’d brought him. Somehow he was managing to be both nauseous and hungry. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

They stared at one another. Keanu looked back to the tray, then sighed. He slid off the mattress and onto the floor before picking up bowl of hot, thick soup she’d brought him. Instead of using the spoon, he brought it to his mouth and took a testing sip. It wasn’t so hot that it burned, and it seemed to steady him a little. Pythia smiled.

Keanu stared into his bowl, watching the potatoes bob around other vegetables and chunks of meat. “These storms...I thought you said they meant Elysion would heal? But they’re...”

“Destructive?”

He nodded.

“Yes.” A sad smile flickered upon Pythia’s lips. “Nature is like that sometimes. Wild, unpredictable, counter intuitive. Like a forest fire. It cleanses the earth and allows things to start anew.”

“Great.” That was an analogy he didn’t want mentioned to Jun. After another sip, as she seemed to expect it, he continued, “There was something weird, though. I’ve walked in rainstorms before, even rainstorms here. This one...When the water touched me, it felt like I was going to burst. Be consumed from the inside out.”

Pythia was still. He watched her as she watched her hands in her lap. “I think,” she said slowly, “You want me to tell you what this was.” When he nodded, she shook her head. “I am sorry. If I could, I would, but it is not in any of the information to which I was privy.”

“You think it has something to do with being a Shitennou?” She nodded and Keanu sighed. That was great. “Thank you, Pythia.”

The maiden rose and gave a bow. “If you leave the tray outside the door, I will make certain it is taken care of.”

Keanu thanked her again, and watched her leave. When he was alone, he set the unfinished bowl back upon its tray and climbed back into bed. He watched the candle burn itself to a nub long after he’d gone to sleep.