It was the first Sermon since Yeul's first birthday celebration, nearly two weeks ago.
Caius led the way through the serpentine, narrow hallways of the Temple of Etro. He could hear Yeul's quick footsteps behind him, following close. He wondered what Yeul would say to the people gathered in the Audience Chamber. Without her access to the timeline, the seeress could predict nothing for Paddra's future.
But Yeul refused to cancel or delay the Sermon. She insisted on pretending that nothing was wrong to prevent panic among her people.
He wondered how far Yeul could bluff her predictions.
Suddenly he realized that Yeul's steps had stopped; she wasn't following behind him.
Caius stopped and turned. The seeress was standing several steps away, stock-still in the white marble corridor. Her eyes were closed, but it seemed as though she was having a vision. Instantly Caius was relieved; perhaps Etro's wrath was fading. Yeul would have something to say at the Sermon. And perhaps life would go back to the way it used to be.
He waited half patiently, half torn with anxiety to see what Etro had revealed.
If Caius had known what would happen at the end of all this, he might have tried to break her from the vision prematurely.
The vision was a long one but when Yeul's eyes finally opened, Caius saw her take a reflexive step back. The blood drained from her face and she was pale - so much paler than she had ever been, when he watched her slowly starve in anguish. The look on her face pulled at his heart; it was one of complete, tearful horror.
"Yeul," he said urgently, afraid of what she had seen.
At the sound of her name, Yeul seemed to collect herself. She smoothed her expression with a slight, painful wince and straightened her spine. She raised her head to look at him and suddenly she was the calm seeress once again, wearing the cool look that Caius at one time had described as aloof confidence. "Caius," she responded, and it was the voice that he had first come to know when he was newly appointed as a Guardian.
When she said nothing more, Caius pressed, "are you... well?"
She clasped her hands together. They were shaking badly. "No, I am not," she said. "Please tell the people that I am... unfit to stand before them," she said, stumbling a little over her words.
For a moment it looked as though she might say something else. But she turned abruptly, her robes spinning out around her in a flash of color. She walked away, back down the pristine white hallway. Caius stood and watched her.
Yeul had made it to the end of the hall when she suddenly broke into a run.
He stared after her. His logical mind couldn't seem to fit the pieces together. What had happened? He had his directions to relay the message but still he stayed motionless, replaying the sight of Yeul fleeing before his eyes. The pull to follow her was strong. He wanted to catch up with her, to ask her what was wrong, to lend her the strength she obviously needed...
In the end he obeyed Yeul and went to find the priestesses of Etro.
Caius went to find Yeul as soon as he could. He found her sitting against the far wall of her room, crouched beneath one of the long square-shaped windows. Her arms were wrapped around her folded legs, her forehead pressed against her knees. She wore only a long under-shift. The ceremonial robes were discarded in scattered heaps, as if she had shed them while running through her room. In one of these heaps, Caius glimpsed the gold shine of her delicate crown, peeking out between layers of woven fabric.
He stopped in her doorway. "Yeul, are you - "
"Please don't." She cut across him. "I am not fit for company."
He took a few steps toward her. "Yeul..."
"Don't." A tremor shook her steady voice. "Don't, please. Don't - don't look at me."
Caius cringed. There was something he had never heard in her voice before: self-hatred. Yeul's vision must have truly been painful to behold. He wondered what Etro had shown the seeress. More proof of her displeasure, perhaps. Or worse: evidence that Yeul's well-meaning action had wrinkled the fabric of time further.
"Please go," Yeul whispered.
Reluctantly, Caius backed out of the doorway. "I will leave you," he murmured, watching Yeul's curled form. She didn't move.
That evening Caius invited Yeul to dinner. She hadn't moved from her position by the wall. She didn't acknowledge Caius when he called her. After waiting for several minutes he turned away and murmured what he had before: "I will leave you."
"Please grant me peace," Yeul murmured.
Caius stopped and turned. He waited for her to say more, but she never did.
Caius returned soon after with some food. He set the plate by her side, watching for a response. She didn't move. It was as if she were made of stone.
"Yeul," he said. "Yeul, please. Eat."
One hand tightened around her legs, but otherwise she was motionless.
"Yeul." He didn't want to see her punish herself like this again. He thought of telling her how watching her skin turn grey and her eyes develop shadows made his heart twist in his chest. He wanted to tell her that he wished the goddess was angry at him, instead.
He watched her for a long time. Finally, with a miserable glance in her direction, he turned and retreated to his room for the night.
He dreamed of his former life again. His memories showed him the quiet Yeul, standing atop the city gate, staring down at the attacking armies. She looked brave and courageous, but there was a healthy glow to her cheeks that Caius knew, even in dreams, was inconsistent with real life.
He might have awakened a few times in the night. Or perhaps he did not, but his memories seemed to be mixed with the soft sighs and moans of Yeul crying. He remembered staring at his dark ceiling, with the slant of sharp moonlight across it. Though he listened, he never heard a sound.
Yeul had not touched her food.
Caius braced one hand against the doorframe, staring at her pale form. She was asleep now; one arm had fallen away and was lying limply at her side. Otherwise, she was in the exact same position.
He shut his eyes and sighed. After a long while he went away.
All morning he convinced the guards, the priestesses, and more of Yeul's caretakers that she was well. It seemed that when she fled back to her room from the Temple, she had instructed that she was not to be disturbed at all costs.
Caius sighed again when he heard this. Inside his chest, the painful ball of worry and concern grew a little larger.
He returned upstairs at lunchtime with another plate in his hand. What he saw of Yeul surprised him: she was awake and playing with something small in her hands. As he watched, he glimpsed a color - dark red - flash between her white fingers.
"Caius."
He looked at her in time to see her eyes flicker back to the object in her hands. Assuming that this was as close to a greeting as he was going to get, Caius walked to where she was sitting. He held out the plate. "I've brought you lunch."
She shook her head. She kept her head down, her eyes averted. "No thank you."
His rising hope began to wilt. "You must be hungry."
"I'm not. Really, I'm not."
Caius lowered the plate. Slowly he knelt down before her, the armor on his kneecap rocking a little on the edge of her skin rug. He put down the food and looked up into her face. "What is wrong, Yeul?" He asked gently.
Her lips pressed into a small line. Now that Caius was closer, he could see that Yeul was toying with a short string of crimson beads - the half-finished bracelet that she had begun a few weeks ago, before the conversation with the spymaster. The last peaceful evening, Caius realized, before everything went wrong.
Yeul was staring hard at the beads in her hand. One of her thumbs was rubbing the top bead, her fingertip white with the effort. "It was my fault," she said shortly. "I am entirely at fault."
Several minutes passed and Caius waited for her to continue. Yeul kept her eyes on the glass beads, but he knew she wasn't really seeing them.
He remained still, silently listening.
In the past, his patience was always rewarded. Yeul, though often a reserved, quiet girl herself, seemed to have a dislike of utter silence. Or perhaps she simply became tired of the stagnant hole in the conversation and relented. In the end, her resiliency crumbled and she always told Caius what she was withholding.
Now Caius was waiting again.
More minutes passed.
Yeul's hand stilled and her eyes shifted away from the beads, away from Caius, toward the floor by her bed. "When I banished the Ugallu into the Void Beyond, it... I changed the future," she said. Her voice was so low, it was nearly a monotone. "When the Ugallu emerges, the future world will be less prepared for it than we were. I was shown the pain, the agony, the death wrought by the Ugallu in its terrible vengeance - and all as a result of my careless decision."
Caius shook his head. "You were not careless - "
"I was. I have destroyed the order of the timeline and condemned to death the lives of millions of innocent people. In my presumption to know what was right, I broke vows that should not have been broken. Paddra should have been ravaged. I should be dead," she said tonelessly.
"No," he murmured. But his eyes searched her face and he knew, with growing dismay, that Yeul had sincerely come to believe what she was saying. "We took the only option there was to save Paddra; there were no alternatives," he told her. He willed her to see that the situation wasn't her fault, that they had done the best they could under the circumstances. He hated seeing the blank, resigned look on her face.
She shut her eyes. "Every Yeul dies around my age," she said faintly. "I've broken my promise to the goddess by selfishly staying alive and living beyond my numbered days."
"You protected the people - "
"They will hate me." Her eyebrows scrunched together. "And... and I will deserve that hatred. I will." She pressed her eyes tighter and a small tear squeezed out. "I will be remembered as the Yeul who destroyed everything, and... and I did."
"Yeul." He stared, frozen, at the tear sliding down her cheek. He had never seen her cry before and it shook him. At once he was angry, furiously angry, with Etro for breaking down his strong, happy Yeul into this fragile, insecure girl who sat curled in front of him. He hated that Etro could lightly sacrifice an entire civilization while faulting her seeress for trying to save it. He wondered how such a fickle, capricious goddess could be so honored, so revered.
He wondered how he had been so blind to it before.
"I am as much at fault as you," he said, attempting to comfort her. "Please, don't... don't cry."
She opened watery eyes and blinked miserably. "It happened so fast," she said in a choked voice. "Remember? We looked for answers but there was only one, so... but the Ugallu was nearly here and there was no more time to search..."
"I know," he said quietly.
"And I have let everyone down." She sniffed and brushed at her tears with the back of her hand. "I should have thought harder or searched further or been less independent - "
"Yeul, no." Caius sighed. The rage in his heart had given way to doleful sympathy and he moved to sit beside her, against the wall. "You are not to blame. This is... a catastrophe you could not have prevented."
More tears gushed down her cheeks. "Then why do I feel so guilty?"
He opened and slowly closed his mouth. He didn't know how to reply in a way that would satisfy her. Instead he opened his arm and reached out to her. Yeul smeared her tears with her thumb and ducked under his elbow. She pressed her cheek to the smooth part of his armor, directly over his heart. Her small body curled against his and, even through the layers between his skin and hers, he could feel the warmth of her touch.
Caius carefully laid his arm around her shoulders and she pulled closer to him, her eyes fluttering closed.
He leaned his head back against the cool stone wall and stared out through her chamber doorway. Through it, he could see the broad archway that led to his room. His heart felt heavy, with foreboding or simple worry he didn't know.
But back then, he was naive enough to be hopeful. Perhaps all will go well, in the end, he thought. His fingers tangled unconsciously into her long silky hair. Perhaps we can heal from this and move on.
