Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 831: Brightwater

Almond came back the next afternoon.

He walked out of the north with Big D, Rudra, Natalia and Silvester. They were dusty and limping, and Silvester kept stopping to sit down on rocks. The whole camp came out to meet them.

Almond did not see any of it. He was looking for one face.

Lily was standing at the edge of the fresh graves. She did not run to him. She waited until he reached her, and then she put her arms around his neck and held on.

"Kael told you?" he said into her hair.

"Kael told me."

"Sixty thousand beds."

"I heard." She pulled back and looked at him. "You’re a D."

"So are you," Almond said. He had seen it the moment he came close, the faint lines still hanging at her shoulder. "Kael told me that too. On the road. He said a Smother came."

Lily nodded.

"He said you used Threshold raw."

"I let go of Shelter first," Lily said. "Kayla checked. Every night. Both of us are fine."

Almond looked at her for a long time. She could see all of it in his face. There was fear, and anger that had nowhere to go, and something that was very nearly pride.

"I’m not going to shout at you," he said finally.

"Good."

"I want to. A great deal."

"I know." She took his hand. "Shout at me tomorrow. Today, come and see who we lost. Their names are written down. Big D will want them."

Big D took the list from Maya without a word.

He read it standing up, by the graves. Nine names. He read each one slowly and moved his lips a little as he did.

When he got to the end, he folded the paper and handed it back.

"I have them," he said.

Then he turned and looked at Lily.

She had been waiting for this for nine days. She had practiced what she would say. She had pictured his face. Now that he was standing in front of her, every word went out of her head.

"Big D," she said. "There’s something I have to tell you."

"I know," he said.

Lily blinked. "You know?"

"You’ve been holding your stomach since the night we came through the Door." He said it quite plainly, as if he were talking about the weather. "Every time you think nobody’s looking. I’ve been watching people a long time."

"Kayla told you."

"Kayla didn’t tell me anything. Kayla is very good at that." He paused. "Almond didn’t tell me either. I told him."

Lily stared at Almond. Almond held up both hands.

"He worked it out on the road," he said. "I swear I didn’t say a word."

Lily turned back to Big D. She opened her mouth. Then she closed it again, because she could see his face now.

He was not smiling. Big D almost never smiled. But something in his face had gone soft, in a way she had never seen in all the years she had known him.

"How many?" he asked. His voice was rough. "On that line of yours. How much does it weigh?"

Lily opened her status and showed him.

He looked at the faint line at the bottom for a long time. Soul Weight: 1.

"One," he said quietly.

"It hasn’t done anything yet," Lily said. "Give it time."

Big D let out a long breath through his nose. Then he put one heavy hand on her shoulder, very gently.

"Well," he said. "Then I’d better make sure there’s somewhere decent for it to grow up."

He took his hand away and walked off toward the camp without another word.

Lily watched him go. Her eyes were stinging.

"He’s going to follow me around for nine months," she said.

"Longer," Almond said. "Much longer."

They left for Brightwater the next morning.

All of them went. There were thirty-nine thousand from the camp and six hundred from inside Greywatch’s line. The wounded came on stretchers, and the children walked in the middle with Liam and Ruyi.

Hessa had sent a message with Kael. Greywatch’s own fourteen hundred would stay where they were. "But the gate will be open, if anyone wants to walk north and see," she had written. "And some of them will."

Some of them did. A hundred and forty people from Greywatch walked out of their line that morning to join the march. Most of them were young. Some were old enough to remember the stories of Brightwater as it had been.

"Two hundred years," one old man said to Almond. He was walking slowly with a stick. "My grandmother was born there. She got out a month before the Lull came. I never thought I’d see it."

"You’ll see it," Almond said.

The march took four days. Forty thousand people move much slower than ten.

On the second day, the Enders came.

They had been following the camp since it left Greywatch. They were a mix of everything. There were Closers and Strayers, a pack of scavengers, and two Wearers that crept along at the edges where the tiredness could catch stragglers.

On the first night out of Greywatch, they would have been a disaster.

Now they were not.

Maya had every hunting party tied on its Thread. Rudra held True Heading at the front, so that no Strayer could turn the column. Natalia marked every Ender within a mile through the grass and the hills, so that nothing could close without being seen. When the Closers appeared inside the column, there were parties already waiting with orbs ready in their hands.

When the two Wearers crept in at dusk, Big D walked out to meet them alone.

Unbowed.

The tiredness broke over him and did nothing at all. He walked up to the first Wearer and put his hands on it. A few minutes later, he walked up to the second.

"That one fits Noah," he said, when he came back. He was carrying a fist-sized heart. "Somebody tell him."

The fight on the second day lasted most of an hour. Twenty-three people were hurt. Nobody died.

Lily watched the whole thing from the middle of the column, with a ring of spears around her and Kayla’s hand on her arm. She had Turnback ready the entire time. She never had to use it.

"Look at them," she said quietly.

Kayla looked. The camp had moved like one body. People had covered each other without being told. Asuras and Skytheum soldiers and woken constructs were standing side by side, holding a line that a week ago they could not have held for a minute.

"A week ago, this would have killed half of us," Lily said.

"A week ago, we didn’t know anything," Kayla said. "Now we know a little."

They saw Brightwater from the north hill at noon on the fourth day.

The whole column stopped on the slope and looked down at it. The white ring, the green city, the river running through the middle. And all the way around it, the long gray shape of the dead Lull, already sinking into the grass.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then the old man with the stick began to cry.

The dead came first.

Hessa, Ainen, Marcus and Orla had spent the last week walking the city. They had found the bones in every house and street, and they had not moved them. They had only marked each place with a strip of cloth. Ainen had said it was not right for four people to bury sixty thousand. Everyone should do it.

So everyone did.

It took three days. Forty thousand people went through Brightwater house by house. They carried the dead out to the fields beyond the river and laid them in the earth. Nobody rushed. Nobody complained.

Big D did not know their names. For the first time in his life, there was a list too long for him to know.

So on the third evening, he went to the great hall in the middle of the city, where Hessa said the old wardens had kept their records. The walls were covered in names. They were carved into the stone in long rows that went all the way up to the ceiling. Every person who had ever lived in Brightwater was written there, from the day the line was first found.

Big D stood in the hall and looked up at the walls for a long time.

Then he started reading.

He read all night. Almond came and sat with him for a while, and then Lily, and then Silvester and Hiroshi. People drifted in and out. Nobody spoke. Big D stood with his head tilted back and his lips moving, name after name, by the light of a single lamp.

When the sun came up, he was still reading.

"How many?" Almond asked him, a little after dawn.

"About a third," Big D said. His voice was hoarse. "I’ll finish tonight."

"You don’t have to do it all at once."

"Yes, I do," Big D said. "They waited two hundred years."

He finished at midnight on the fourth day.

Then he came out of the hall, walked down to the main square, and took the seed out of his coat.

It was glowing brightly now, a hundred colors at once. It had been getting brighter every day since they crossed the white stones. It lit up his face and his hands, and it was warm enough that he held it carefully.

A crowd had gathered without anyone calling it. Thousands of people stood in the square and the streets around it. They stood very quietly in the dark.

Big D knelt on the old stones in the middle of the square, where a fountain had once been. There was a patch of black earth there, open to the sky.

He dug a small hole with his fingers.

"It was a power," he said. He was not talking to anyone in particular. "Same as the decks. So it shouldn’t have come through. But the gatekeeper said what we carried, we’d keep." He looked at the seed in his palm. "So this is what’s left of home. All of it. The tree, the fields, the tables. The stone with the names."

He put the seed into the hole and covered it with earth.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then a single green shoot came up out of the ground. It was no taller than a finger. It had two small leaves, and the leaves were every color at once.

That was all. It did not grow any further. It did not glow, or sing, or do anything that anyone could see.

But all around the city, the white stones of the line lit up. They glowed brighter than they had when Almond first walked in, and they stayed lit. The light ran all the way around the ring like a string of lamps.

Orla made a small sound.

"I’ve lived inside a line my whole life," she said. "I’ve never seen one do that."

Big D sat back on his heels and looked at the little shoot.

"Well," he said quietly. "Welcome home."

Almond and Lily climbed the tallest tower in Brightwater that night.

It was half ruined. The top floor had no roof, and they could see the whole city from it. The river shone silver. Lamps were burning in a thousand windows for the first time in two hundred years. The ring of white stones glowed all the way around.

"We did it," Lily said.

"The first part," Almond said. "We have a home. That’s all. We don’t know who rules this region now that the Lull is dead. We don’t know what’s watching from the north. We don’t know where the other nine kingdoms are."

"Almond."

"Yes?"

"Stop."

He stopped.

Lily took his hand and put it on her stomach, the way she had on the first night.

"We have a home," she said. "That’s not all. That’s everything we said we’d promise." She leaned against him. "Let it be enough for one night."

Almond let out a long breath. Then he put his arms around her and looked out over the lit city.

"One night," he said.

Hessa found them there an hour before dawn.

She came up the broken stairs fast. She had a hand pressed over her eyes, as if she was looking at something very bright.

"The Door," she said. "My orb. It keeps watch over the places I’ve asked it to. I asked it to watch the Door, because of your friend’s fire."

Almond was on his feet. "What’s happening?"

"Someone came through." Hessa lowered her hand. "A whole kingdom. They found the fire. There are thousands of them, all at F. They don’t know anything."

"Which kingdom?"

"I can’t tell. But one of them is a very old man in white furs. He’s standing in front of the fire, and he’s shouting at it."

Lily began to laugh.

"Corvin," Almond said.

"And they’re not alone," Hessa said. Her face had gone grim. "Something is coming toward them through the grass. It’s big. It’s bigger than the Lull."