Twelve || Anamnesis

"I really think I should walk Elena home," Rue said. "It's getting dark, and Mira doesn't like her to be out this late..."

"Don't worry," Mel said. "I've sent along an escort. He'll keep her safe."

Rue was still dubious, but he nodded. "All right."

Mel set down two sets of cups and saucers, and in the middle of the table she placed the kettle and a small plate of tea biscuits. She took her seat, and nodded to the chair opposite her. Slowly, Rue slid into his seat, and she smiled at him.

"Now that we're comfortable," she began, "I'd like to ask a few follow-up questions."

He had expected as much. He nodded.

"First, the simple part. Who was this woman, and why is she so important to you?"

Simple. Right.

. .

Her name was Claire.

Claire technically lived in a little town on the northern edge of East Heaven Kingdom, Greenvale. More practically, Claire lived outside the city, in a broad clearing in the nearby forest. The meadow housed a small cabin, a swath of land set aside for a few crops, and a barn, where Claire had kept her horse and a few pigs; she had later added a chicken coop, so she could gather the eggs and sometimes the meat. It wasn't much to live by, but she knew how to hunt and supplemented what she could harvest for herself by going down into the nearby valley and catching deer. When that wasn't enough, she would go into town and trade eggs and venison and any extra crops she had for supplies she needed; bread, seafood, dairy, cloth, tools. Sometimes she went into town to work an odd job here or there to collect a bit of actual money, if she wanted to purchase something a little more extravagant, but mostly she kept to herself and her land.

She was also uncommonly kind, generous, and warm, and willing to assist strangers far more than she had any reason to.

"Really?" Mel asked. "She sounds a bit misanthropic to me."

"It wasn't that," Rue said. "She just valued her privacy."

"So how did you meet her, if she kept sequestered in the forest."

"I collapsed on her lawn."

"Come again?"

. .

Exhaustion and malnutrition, he supposed. He had spent the last couple of days dragging himself through the snow with no food or shelter, relying entirely on snow to provide hydration. The area was utterly foreign to him, and by that point it was a bit past nightfall and starting to snow again when he saw the glow of the light outside her door. By that point he was barely pushing himself on, his strength rapidly waning, and he barely made it to the first step of her porch before just couldn't go any further.

She clarified to him what had happened months later, when he could finally ask her about it. The animals had started going crazy. They did that when there was an intruder – some wild animal or monster usually, the forest did house wolves – and when she heard the commotion she had gone out to see what was causing it. She had certainly not been expecting to find somebody passed out at her door.

Greenvale was too far away to take Rue for more proper medical treatment, especially with the snowstorm starting to pick up, so Claire took it upon herself to try and help. She brought him inside, got him warm, let him sleep somewhere comfortable, and when he woke up some time later she provided him with a warm meal.

. .

"That's what you mean by she saved your life," Mel said.

"Right," he said. "But there was more to it. She could have left it at that, gotten me fixed up and headed back toward the village. She worked out that I wasn't from there, though, and that I couldn't just walk in anyway."

"Why's that?"

"I didn't understand English."

Mel nodded. "I suppose that would be a complication." She frowned slightly. "But she understood you?"

"That's the thing," he said. "She didn't. It was... very weird, trying to speak with her. She felt the same way, I'm sure, but she never got impatient about it. Or maybe she did. She started teaching me English after about a week."

"What were you doing here that you didn't know the language."

"I don't know."

. .

The truth was, he didn't know much of anything.

Rue's first memory was only five years prior – a few days before he met Claire – when he woke up in a tomb.

Confusion set in immediately; where had he been, where was he now, why was he there? The relevant questions were out of reach, although he could at least dredge up a name, which was not terribly helpful to him right then.

There was something else, though. He had a powerful feeling that, whatever he had been doing before waking up in that tomb, it had been important. He couldn't begin to think of what it was, but that sense of purpose managed to give him some kind of drive. He was weak and sore and his head was swimming, but with that thought he managed to find his way to the entrance of the tomb. It was sealed off, but clearly meant to be opened; even in his enervated state he managed to force the door open. What was waiting for him outside wasn't much of an improvement; it was a dark night, under heavy cloud cover, and snowing.

There were lights on the horizon, at least – Greenvale, he would eventually learn – and he followed them in hopes of finding civilization. He arrived at the edge of town too deep in the night for anybody to still be awake, but on the outskirts he found a poorly-sealed barn. Not exactly ideal, but it was warm and there was a roof and there was a water pump he could drink from, and it was certainly better than being locked in a tomb.

He managed to slip out of the barn before the owner came by to feed the animals, and headed into town. His first priority was to find somebody who recognized him and could tell him what had happened; his second priority, trying desperately to become first, was finding something to eat.

He found people, all right, but when he tried to speak to them they didn't respond kindly. Not that they were aggressive, but they were certainly wary. He had been confused at the time, but in retrospect he doesn't blame them; stranger walks into town speaking in tongues, looking as out-of-place as he did... he wouldn't want to get directly involved, either.

He searched town, less enthusiastically this time, speaking as little as he could and trying to pick up what words he could. None of them helped, not on their own, and as the day wore on it was becoming increasingly apparent that nobody in town knew him, or had ever seen him, or even recognized what language he was trying to speak.

Unfortunately, that meant he couldn't communicate a need for food or shelter. Maybe if he had been carrying some kind of currency he could have finagled something from a market stall, or gotten a room at an inn, or bribed his way onto somebody's floor, but as it was he was there was very little he could do. And, behind it all, there was still that terrible, throbbing realization that he was supposed to be doing something.

He gave up on finding anything in the town and tried to find a map that could help him get his bearings, only to find that he didn't recognize the area and, of course, he was completely unfamiliar with the alphabet. Even if he had known the names of the nearby towns – which, he later found, he did not – he would never have been able to read them.

That was why he left the way he did, choosing a random direction and hoping it would work out.

. .

"I never did find anything out," he said, "but... after I was with Claire for a little bit, I didn't feel like I needed to. I couldn't completely shake that feeling for a while – that there was something I was forgetting, something I needed to do – but eventually she just let me forget it. I had other things to do. Better things."

"She gave you a purpose."

He mulled over the word. "No," he said. "Not a purpose. Almost the opposite. She let me... not worry about, I guess. Being with her I didn't need a purpose. It was good enough just to live."

. .

In exchange for what she had done, he insisted on giving something back. For the first week or so she refused to let him do so and insisted that he put all of his extra energy into learning what she was teaching. As it turned out, he had a preternatural gift for absorbing the language, and at the end of that week was more than capable of arguing his point to her without much difficulty. Claire resisted at first, although it seemed her objection was less because she didn't want his help and more because he made it sound like an obligation rather than a genuine desire.

"If you're going to help," she finally said one day, "then I want you to do it because you want to do it, not because you're paying me back for anything."

And that, he agreed to.

Which was good; Claire had been dedicating a lot of time to his recovery and his study, and had been somewhat neglecting her normal tasks. She taught him the basics of maintaining the field and keeping the animals happy, although she ultimately decided to take on those responsibilities herself. The main thing she taught him was hunting; how to make a clean kill, how to keep as much of the animal usable as possible. She also let him attend to the wood-cutting; she had never particularly enjoyed it, herself, and it turned out he was pretty good with an axe.

They fell into a routine. On good days, Rue would go out to the valley to hunt while Claire tended to the livestock and the field, or made a trip into town to sell any of their overstocked goods. In the evening they continued the language lessons, although it wasn't long before Claire decided to move off of spoken word and onto written, and after a couple of days he had the phonemes worked out and Claire started shoving her small library of books at him.

She invited him into town and he was given a proper introduction to the townsfolk. The ones who had been present for the minor fiasco of his original arrival proved to be apologetic and understanding; the town as a whole was pleasant and welcoming. After a few visits Claire encouraged him to take a few of the market days on his own, and he got to know the town better. And, after a couple of months, it was simply normal.

. .

"I'm starting to understand," Mel said. She drained the rest of her tea and reached for the kettle, pouring another cup. "Did she actually know what you are? Or aren't, I suppose."

"She was well aware. The thought didn't even occur to me until she brought it up."

"What prompted that?"

Now he hesitated. "I... I think she asked very early on, actually. Before I could understand what she was saying. I couldn't answer, of course, so she waited a little while to ask again. I still couldn't answer, but for, ah, different reasons." He hand pressed against his forehead. He closed his eyes and sighed. "But I think she asked because of this." He hooked his thumb under the cloth headband and slipped it from his forehead.

Beneath the cloth was a fragment of crystal, a lustrous ultramarine that his snowy bangs could not hope to conceal. The shard was embedded cleanly in the center of his forehead, the edges perfectly flush with his skin; an integral part of the body.

Mel sat up a little straighter in her seat, her eyes widening slightly. Rue turned his attention back to the table and found himself focusing on a point in the air somewhere just above the surface, his heart pounding a little quicker than he was used to.

"That's... very pretty," Mel offered.

He shot her a narrow glare, and she couldn't help but laugh.

"It is!" she insisted, but her good humor quickly vanished. "I understand why you hide it. That's not..." She searched for a better word, but had to settle for the first one that came to mind. "Normal." Mel settled down again, leaning forward on the table. "What was Claire's opinion?"

"It didn't matter," he said. "I mean, she didn't think it mattered. She was just curious."

"And your opinion?"

"I was worried," he admitted, "for a little bit. That maybe whatever I am would be a threat to her, or put the village in danger. Somehow. She told me to stop being stupid."

"What stupendous advice," Mel said. "She was a wise woman."

"Yes," he said. "But that time, I was right."

. .

Although not for quite some time.

The question had called in him some small amount of anxiety, and sometimes it would also call in him that old niggling thought, that there was something he needed to attend to. Once she had planted the thought, he tried to ignore it, but for the next few nights it bothered him to restlessness, and interrupted him when he went out hunting, abruptly overwhelming his other lonesome thoughts and distracting him from the task at hand.

Claire noticed, of course, and that was when she took him aside and told him on no uncertain terms that he was being ridiculous.

"I don't care what the answer is," she said. "You're my family now, Rue, I don't care what you are."

Then she added, "But if you insist on having an existential crisis, try not to have it when I'm depending on you to bring back a deer."

He could agree to that.

And it helped, what she said. The idea bothered him for a bit still, but he could cast it aside by remembering what Claire had said; it was the first time she ever referred to him as family, and that was a powerful word. And as time went on, it bothered him less and less, and then ceased to bother him at all. Even that nagging sense of obligations unfulfilled left him entirely. The remarkable thing, as he saw it, was that she did nothing special about it at all; she simply lived life, and through her example Rue learned to do the same. For two years, he simply lived, and he was perfectly happy with that.

Then, winter.

Greenvale's name came from the evergreen forest it was nestled near, and within which Claire had chosen to live, but in winter the snow painted everything in whites. Winter was not a particularly harsh season, generally, but it did bring with it quite a few snowstorms and some rather cold wind. One such storm had been more aggressive than usual, shutting them inside the house for a couple of days.

The storm ended a few nights after it began; cloud cover gave way to stars, and when the lights in the cabin were turned down the moonlight set the meadow glowing silver. It was a gorgeous night, silent and still; hard to believe it had been storming for the past few days.

It was the first opportunity they had since the storm had begun to check on the animals. Claire had the foresight to provide them with extra food and keep them securely shut, but Rue wanted to check on them while they had the opportunity. The snowstorm had struck from nowhere, and even though the sky was clear there was no guarantee it would be like that come the morning.

So he bundled up, left the house, and headed to the stables. Partway there, he heard a minor commotion; the animals were agitated. Afraid.

He returned to the porch, picked up an axe, and headed back toward the barn.

Wolves lived in the woods, and maybe they figured the boxed-in animals would be an easy meal; maybe all of their prey was still in hiding after the snow. He didn't think a wolf could get into the barn, but so long as he was there he could at least try to frighten it away.

He checked around the barn and around the chicken coops, but there was no sign of anything in the meadow and he couldn't see movement beyond the tree line. There was no sense trying to chase after something, not in snowbound woods, not in the darkness. He planned to turn around and check on the animals, now that he knew they weren't in immediate danger, but he was sidetracked rather abruptly when he turned to face the house and saw someone move.

Making his way across the meadow was a man, cloaked in black and moving with palpable purpose toward the cabin.

Rue shouted out to him, warning him away from the cabin. The man stopped what he was doing and turned his attention to Rue. The man approached. Rue's grip on the axe handle tightened.

"I've been looking for you, Rue," he said. "Come with me."

Rue didn't recognize the man. He was not one of the villagers; he was not one of the traveling merchants; he was not one of the travelers who regularly stopped in Greenvale. Therefore, he had no reason to know Rue's name.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted to ask the inevitable questions – where are you from, how do you know me, what do you want – but he knew better than the test it. The man didn't seem to be carrying any weapons, but he wasn't going to risk what might be under that heavy cloak.

So his reply was simple and terse. "No."

Which caused the man to falter. "No," he repeated. "What do you mean, no?"

Rue shifted his stance and made sure the man could see that he was still holding on to the wood axe. "I mean no."

The man took a step forward, his arm sliding out from beneath his cloak. "You don't want to do that," he said..

Rue attacked.

Rue didn't mean to get into a true physical altercation; the man seemed unarmed, and Rue didn't want to hurt him, just scare him off.

The fight went poorly from there.

Rue was not a bad fighter – he hadn't been formally trained, but he had some amount of muscle memory to back him up – but his opponent was far better, and not so unarmed as Rue had thought. He did everything in his power to fight the man off, but the man had formal training, greater agility, and absolutely no compunctions about harming Rue.

The confrontation couldn't have lasted thirty seconds before Rue crashed to the ground, the intruder keeping him pinned tot he ground.

That should have been the end of it.

But suddenly the man staggered, a screaming growl rising in his throat, and Rue barely managed to flip himself onto his back to see why. There was the man, shivering now and hissing in pain, a trail of crimson rapidly blooming behind him on the snow. In front of Rue was Claire, still in her purple nightdress, wielding a bloody pickaxe.

She turned to look at him and gave him a tight not-quite-smile. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"Fine. I'm f– CLAIRE!"

She snapped her attention around. Too late.

The blow set off a burst of sound, like snapping twigs, and sent Claire flying. She hit the ground, rolled, and came to a stop several feet away, face-down in the snow.

The pickaxe had fallen just in front of Rue.

He acted on instinct, threw himself forward, grabbed the pickaxe, and tore after the man, and suddenly the situation was quite different. Rue was no longer surprised, and no longer concerned with holding back. The man tried to keep on the offensive, but even if Rue had allowed him a moment to breathe he couldn't have possibly continued to fight, not with the ragged wound pouring blood down his back.

And then the man retreated. Rue almost gave chase – it would have been a simple matter to follow his trail – but he couldn't leave Claire. It sounded like he had broken her ribs. She needed medical attention.

Or so he told himself. But he knew before he had returned to her that it would do no good.

. .

"I tried to wake her up," he said. "It was stupid, but I just sat there, waiting for her to start breathing and open her eyes. There was no blood. I tried to trick myself into thinking that maybe– I don't know what I tried to tell myself."

"She died defending you."

He said nothing.

Mel picked up a biscuit and tapped it against the edge of her saucer. Her eyes flicked away to a distant corner of the room, her jaw tight, and she remained silent for several seconds. Then, slowly, her gaze returned to Rue. "That's her soul, then."

He looked at her, expression unreadable.

"You never asked how I can tell you aren't human," Mel said. "It's your soul. Or not your soul, specifically, but... a shadow. A second soul." She lay the biscuit down on the saucer and pushed it aside, giving him her undivided attention. "That's why you aren't afraid of what will happen if you bring her back. Her soul is there, with you. It just needs a proper body."

"That's right."

"How did you do that?" Mel asked. "Subsume her soul like that?" She paused, then sighed. "Sorry. You wouldn't know the answer to that any more than anything else, would you?"

He shook his head. "I wasn't trying to make it happen. I... I saw it leave her body, and I asked her not to go, and she... she didn't."

Mel stood up. "That's a valiant reason to search for a Relic, I'll grant you that."

He straightened somewhat. "So you understand," he said. "I have to get whatever's hidden under there. I have to bring her back. I owe her everything. It's... it's my duty."

"Oh, I completely understand," Mel said. She stepped around the table, approaching him. "And while it's very valiant, you have to understand. The power in that Relic, if it were unleashed on the world, cannot be easily contained. Breaking the seal could be catastrophic."

"How do you mean?"

"Valen's goal was to control the universe through his ultimate Relic," she said. "If that's what's guarded by the altar – even a prototype, anything of that nature – then its power cannot hope to be contained by man. Trying to use it without understanding it could tear apart the world. Do you understand that?"

"I can't just not try," he said. "If I could just get Claire back–"

"That's a no, then," she said sharply. "Let me re-iterate; bringing that Relic into this world could destroy it. Destroy us. Destroy everyone. Are you willing to risk everything on the possibility that you can bring this one woman back?"

He pulled away from Mel, almost falling off the chair to do so. He tried to formulate words, but his mouth had gone dry and all he could manage was a faint exhalation of breath. Mel pulled back, giving him a little more room, and closed her eyes.

"Finish your tea," she said. "Head back to town when you're ready. I need to check on Terence."

And without another word she swept past him, disappearing into her room. Rue turned, almost tried to call out to her, but his words caught in his throat again. He relaxed back onto the chair, feeling somewhat shaken, and looked down at his cup. Back to the door. No words.

He finished the rest of his cup, replaced the cloth headband, and left.