Chapter 3: The Dance
Nearing the summit, Kikuyo took the steps to her secluded domicile two at a time, lifting her robes to free her lithe legs. She burst through the door without knocking. The familiar earthy odor of Edera’s tea filled her nostrils, but did little to calm her.
“Edera!” she called out, her voice cracking with surprising desperation. “Edera, I need to speak with you. It’s urgent.”
The heavy oak door swung shut behind her, muffling the village below into a dull rumble. The air inside seemed refreshingly cool. Beneath the stronger balm of Edera’s tea, Kikuyo now detected notes of aged paper, drying lavender, and the faint, metallic musk of ink. Scrolls and leather-bound codices, whose titles had faded over centuries, crammed the shelves that soared into the shadowed ceiling. This was her sanctuary, the only proper home Kikuyo had ever known.
This evening, the knowledge displayed seemed more like judgment than solace.
Edera didn’t look up from her desk. The only sound was the precise scratch of her quill as she transferred text from a brittle scroll to a fresh sheet of vellum. She had pulled back her graying auburn hair into a severe braid, a few stray strands catching the warm glow of the single moonstone lamp on her desk.
“Hmm, flustered, panicked.” Edera’s voice was dry as dust. “Someone has been visiting her secret ruins again.” She finally set her quill down and looked up, her pale blue eyes sharp as shards of ice. They traveled from Kikuyo’s wind-whipped hair to her dirt-smudged robes, missing nothing. “The lighthouse that you think I’m unaware of, I presume? I told you the crosswinds on the bluffs are treacherous this time of year.”
Kikuyo’s mouth went dry. The bracer hummed against her skin, a clumsily loud secret. The words tumbled out in a rushed, chaotic heap. “It wasn’t the wind. Edera, I found something. A chamber hidden beneath the ruins. I found a bracer. And when I touched it,” she choked on the vision, the scale too vast for language.
“It showed me. Showed me the start of everything. Before the Moon. Before the war. It was different, challenging.” She clutched her wrist through the fabric of her sleeve; the warm metal reacted unnervingly alive. Kikuyo saw the falling shadows, recalling the cataclysm all over again.
Edera’s face, usually a mask of calm discipline, tightened. A flicker of something raw and fearful arose before she forced it into sternness. Edera stood with a groan and stiff movements. “You activated a relic? Kikuyo, the Titans did not craft artifacts for us. The relics in those ruins represent the remnants of a power that unraveled existence. We record history. We do not meddle with its source.”
“I didn’t mean to! It fused to me.” Her confession relieved and terrified her. She took a step forward, pleading. “While on the path back, I ran into Kaela and the others. They talked about the Sons and Sisters moving north to root out heresy. And when Kaela touched me…”
Kikuyo hesitated.
She remembered the image: a bright, molten thread of gold flowing from Kaela’s finger into her arm. The sudden, shocking warmth flooding her, the way Kaela had stumbled, momentarily diminished. And that a hungry, possessive part of her reveled in it. How could she explain that? How could she confess to her steadfast, moral guardian that she had, however accidentally, stolen something vital from another person?
Kikuyo swallowed the detail whole, leaving it to burn a hole in her diaphragm. “She said something cruel. Then I became different. Stronger. This bracer changed me.”
Edera was silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on Kikuyo’s hidden wrist. The lines around her mouth seemed deeper, etched by a sudden, profound weariness. She walked around the desk, her practical robes whispering against the stone floor.
“Heresy,” she repeated, the words hanging in the quiet air like a verdict. She stopped in front of Kikuyo and vibrated air through her lips. “Show me.”
The scriptorium air, usually thick with the comforting aromas of tea and drying ink, now felt thin, charged. Kikuyo’s fingers shook as she pushed back the coarse gray sleeve of her robe. The bracer lay against her skin, no longer cold metal but something else entirely: warm, alive. In the blue moonstone light, the two opals, bright once more, pulsed together with a deep amethyst radiance.
Edera’s sharp intake of breath was a blade in the silence. She leaned forward, her severe braid slipping over her shoulder. The silver locket at her throat, engraved with the crest Kikuyo never queried, swung free. “By the Moon…” she whispered.
Her hand, usually so steady when transcribing ancient texts, trembled as Edera reached out. She didn’t touch the bracer itself, but hovered a finger just above its surface. The swirling patterns etched into it shifted like smoke under glass. As they watched, the amorphous swirls resolved, coiling into two distinct strands of energy. One was a searing, violent crimson. The other, a deep, calm cerulean. They twisted around each other in a silent, perpetual struggle, warring serpents frozen in an eternal dance.
“It can’t be,” Edera’s pale eyes widened with a fear Kikuyo had never witnessed. This wasn’t the cautious worry over a missed footnote or a poorly mixed ink. But a visceral, primal terror. “Kikuyo, what have you done?”
“I told you. I’ve done nothing! It simply happened.” Her voice cracked. “What do you suspect?”
Edera tore her gaze away from the bracer and locked onto Kikuyo’s. The usual pleasantness vanished, replaced by a glacial intensity. “The texts, the forbidden codices locked away by the order. They speak of a concept. A theoretical unity. The scholars of the First Century called it the Concord.” She gestured weakly at the pulsating opals and swirling bands on the bracer. “Red for the fire of the depths, for Father’s rage. Blue for the Moon’s cool grace, for Mother’s stoicism. Fundamental opposites. They cannot mix. But annihilate.”
“But they’re not,” Kikuyo said, her own fear overshadowed by a spike of rebelliousness. “They are dancing.”
“A dance that ends in mutual destruction!” Edera’s voice rose, sharp with panic. She gripped Kikuyo’s arm with surprising strength. “This item is no mere relic for archiving. This is a key. And you’ve unlocked a room the Titans have tried to destroy for nearly a millennium.” She released Kikuyo’s wrist as if the bracer had burned her. “The vision you had. Describe it again. Every detail.”
Kikuyo did, the words tumbling out in a hushed rush. A moonless void. Falling shadows, the bluish-black tentacle and the crimson hand. The golden halberd followed by the impact that birthed the world and its Moon. Then how the Titanic corpses sank into the molten core.
As she spoke, Edera paced the narrow aisle between bookshelves, her footsteps silent on the worn throw. Edera stopped, her back to Kikuyo, one hand resting on a shelf of books bound in what looked like hardened, scaled hide. Then she said, “The official lore states the will of the Moon and the Deep created Mother and Father whole, pure.” Her fingertips brushed the scaled hide. “But the oldest fragments, the ones we don’t show apprentices, they suggest a different origin. A more violent one. That they were not creators, but remnants. Carrion feeders on a divine corpse.”
Edera paused and turned her gaze back to Kikuyo, her eyes narrowing on the bracer as if seeing it for the first time. “It must have been enormous when you first saw it in that chamber,” she said, her voice tight. “Did it shrink to fit you?”
“No, it didn’t shrink at all,” Kikuyo’s own confusion deepened the furrow in Edera’s brow. “It was always this size. It fit my wrist perfectly from the moment I touched it.”
Edera shook her head as one confronted with a historical account that defied all known logic. “An origin before the Moon and Deep aside, the Titans built the forges to create the Sisters and Sons,” she argued, more to herself than to Kikuyo. “There would be no need, no conceivable reason, for them to craft a bracer our size. The power within it should be impossible for a human to channel. It should have vaporized you.” Her words trailed off, and her pale eyes widened. “Unless.”
“Unless what?” Kikuyo pressed. She hated this suspense, this feeling of being a specimen under a lens.
Edera finally spoke, her voice a hollow whisper, her gaze fixed on a point somewhere past Kikuyo’s shoulder as if afraid to look at her directly. “The ultimate heresy. A being neither fully human nor fully Titan. The texts have a name for such an abomination, something unfit to draw breath.” She swallowed hard. “A Nephilim.”
The word hung in the silent scriptorium, sucking the air from the room. It felt heavier than any ancient tome, a label that carried the weight of a death sentence.
Edera’s voice held a desperate edge as she said, “But the order could kick me out for simply breathing the possibility, let alone investigating it.” Edera met Kikuyo’s eyes once again, and the raw fear in them terrified her. “You must listen to me now, girl. No one can see this. No one can know. Keep it hidden, keep it secret, wrapped and under your sleeve. Until I can resolve this, you are in unimaginable danger. Understand?”
Kikuyo nodded meekly. The weight of Edera’s warning pressed down on her like the weight of the sea. Her adoptive mother’s fear was tangible in the quiet scriptorium. More frightening than any historical account of battles or plagues.
Edera took one last, long look at the bracer, her expression a mixture of academic fascination and deep-seated dread. Her fingers, almost of their own volition, reached out and brushed against the thin, golden etching that swirled between the dominant red and blue opals. “Such an odd color,” Edera noted aloud, her head tilting. “Neither Mother’s blue nor Father’s red. But you mentioned a golden halberd in your vision.”
Kikuyo stifled a gasp. She saw no golden etching on the bracer when she first pulled it from the chamber in the ruins. The memory of her encounter with Kaela on the path flashed in her mind. And how the strange, molten thread of gold flowed from the woman’s fingers into her own arm. It must have come from that.
As Edera’s finger remained on the metallic thread, a hint of that same impossible gold, faint as a sunbeam through dust, flowed from the bracer into Edera’s touch. Kikuyo noticed the subtle transfer. One that Edera, for all her sharp observation, Kikuyo noted, seemed completely unaware of. A few strands of silver hair at her temples shimmered and deepened, returning to the vibrant auburn of her youth.
A slow, uncharacteristic smirk fell upon Edera’s face. Her off-hand rose, fingers absently tracing the line of her neck and the underside of her chin as if feeling a newfound smoothness. For a brief instant, Edera appeared to Kikuyo just as she always did. Yet undeniably more vibrant. Her features appeared subtly sharper, the weary lines around her eyes less pronounced.
Edera shook her head, the odd expression vanishing as quickly as it came. “Remember what I said, Kikuyo. Keep it hidden. Keep it secret.”