Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 833: Grudge

There was nothing there.

Almond stood on the low rise and reached for her name again, and again, the way a man pats his pockets for a key he knows he had a moment ago. He could see her face. He could see her hands holding his on the wall. He could see her smile.

He could not find her name.

"No," he said. His voice came out strange. "No, no, no. I had it. I had it this morning."

A heavy hand closed on his shoulder.

"Look at your arm," Big D said.

Almond looked down.

On the inside of his wrist, in large, careful letters, written in charcoal, was a word.

LILY.

And under it: ONE.

It came back like a door flying open. Her name. Her voice. The faint line of light that said one. The tower in Brightwater. The first night on the march, when she had held his hand against her stomach in the dark.

Almond’s knees almost went. Big D held him up.

"Lily," Almond said. He said it twice, out loud, to make sure. "Her name is Lily."

"Her name is Lily," Big D agreed. "And yours is Almond. You’re from the bottom world, same as me. And you are not losing anything else on my watch."

Big D turned to the others.

They were all swaying. Natalia was staring at her own hands as if she had never seen them before. Kael kept looking around at the grass with a puzzled frown. Rudra was saying something under his breath, over and over, and it took Almond a moment to realize it was the names of his old ships.

Remember.

Big D said their names.

He said them one at a time, clearly and slowly, the way he had read the names of the dead on the Shelf.

"Natalia. Kael. Rudra. Marcus. Clovelle. Hessa."

Each time he said one, something cleared in that person’s face. Natalia blinked hard. Kael stopped looking around. Rudra stopped saying the names of ships.

"Write your names on your arms," Big D said. "All of you. Now. While you still know them."

Clovelle had the charcoal. They passed it down the line. Almond wrote ALMOND under Lily’s name with a hand that would not quite stop shaking.

"How long does that hold?" Rudra asked. He was holding his arm out in front of him and reading his own name like it might run away.

"As long as I’m here," Big D said. "And I’m not going anywhere."

"We can’t do this for eleven thousand people," Marcus said.

He was looking down at the camp. The old man in white furs was still walking through it, grabbing people and shouting into their faces. But for every one he reached, three more had stopped moving. Dozens were walking slowly away into the gray grass.

"Big D only knows our names," Marcus said. "Not theirs."

"No," Big D said. "But he does."

He pointed down at the old man.

"I can carry a voice to everyone at once," Marcus said slowly. "But only one voice."

"Then we give you the right one."

Big D looked at Clovelle. She was sitting in the grass with her head between her knees.

"One more," he said. "Down there. To the king."

Clovelle lifted her head. She was gray in the face.

"That’s fifteen," she said. "That’s the last one I’ve got. After this, I’m finished for days."

"I know."

Clovelle looked down at the old man in the furs. She watched him shake a woman by the shoulders and shout her name until the woman burst into tears and held onto him.

"Fine," she said. She held out her hand. "Everyone hold on."

Short Road.

They came down in the middle of the camp, ten feet from the old man.

He spun around with a knife in his hand. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. He looked at the eight strangers standing in front of him in the gray dawn, and for a moment he clearly did not know who they were.

Then he looked down at his own arm, at the letters carved into the skin.

CORVIN.

He looked back up. His eyes went to Big D, and then to Almond.

"Regalon," he said hoarsely. "You’re the Regalon boy."

"I am," Almond said.

"Where’s little John?" Corvin demanded. His voice cracked. "I’ll kill him. He knew. He came through first and he knew, and he didn’t send anyone to warn us."

"He didn’t know about this," Almond said. "Nobody did."

"I’ll kill him anyway."

Big D stepped forward.

"How are you still standing?" he asked. "Everyone else is going under. How are you still standing up and shouting names?"

Corvin glared at him. Then he held up his hand, and opened his status for the first time in front of strangers. His hand was shaking.

[Name: Corvin]

[Life Rank: F]

[Soul Weight: 4,410]

[Life Imprints: Crown. Winter. Grudge.]

"Grudge," Big D read.

"Nothing I hold a grudge against can make me forget it," Corvin said. "I worked that out an hour after it came. That thing is trying to take my people." He bared his teeth. "I will never, ever forget that. So it can’t make me forget anything at all."

Big D looked at him for a long moment. Then something happened to his face that almost nobody had ever seen.

He laughed.

"I like you," Big D said.

"Marcus," Almond said. "Can you carry his voice?"

Marcus nodded. He had blood under his nose already.

"Corvin," Almond said. "You have Crown. What does it do?"

"My people hear me," Corvin said. "That’s all. When I speak as their king, they hear me as their king. I’ve been shouting it at them for hours. But I’m one man. I can only reach the one in front of me."

"Not anymore," Marcus said.

He put one hand on his own temple and the other on Corvin’s shoulder.

Voice.

"Talk to them," Marcus said through his teeth. "All of them. I’ll carry it."

Corvin drew himself up. He was a very old man in white furs, cut and filthy and exhausted. He did not look like much of a king.

Then he spoke.

Frosthold.

The word went into eleven thousand heads at once.

You are Frosthold. You are mine, and I am yours. I am your king, Corvin, and I have been your king for longer than most of you have been alive. You held my walls. You crossed this door behind me. I know every one of your names, and I will not let that thing take a single one of them.

All across the camp, people stopped walking.

Come back to the fires. Sit down by someone you love. Write your name on your arm and look at it whenever you forget. And if you forget again, look at me. I’m the old man in the furs, shouting. I will be right here.

The people walking away into the grass slowed. Some of them turned around. They began to drift back, slowly, toward the fires.

Marcus sagged against Corvin. Blood was running freely from his nose now.

"That’ll hold them," he said. "For a while."

"How long?"

"As long as that thing is alive."

They went after the Forgetter in the full light of morning.

It stood at the edge of the camp, white and enormous and still. The grass around it was gray for a mile in every direction. Up close, its many legs were like the trunks of old, dead trees. Its body was a great white mass high above, with no head and no face.

Up close, the forgetting was much worse.

Almond felt it pull at him with every step. It took small things first. He forgot the name of the hill they had folded from. He forgot what Ainen’s cleaver felt like in his hand. Twice, he forgot why he was walking toward the white thing at all.

True Heading.

Rudra had set it the moment they left the camp. He had fixed it on the Forgetter, and nobody who followed him could be turned from that line. They could forget why they were walking toward it. But they could not stop walking toward it.

"Big D," Almond said. "What’s my name?"

"Almond."

"Thank you."

Natalia marked it.

The red light was very deep, almost at the center of the white mass. It was high up between the legs, where they all joined the body.

"It’s in there," she said. "I don’t..." She stopped. She looked down at her arm. NATALIA. "I don’t know how to get to it."

"Kael," Almond said.

Kael was staring at the Forgetter with an empty look. Big D said his name. He blinked and came back.

"Six steps," he said. "Up one of those legs. I can do it. I can take one of you."

"Me," Almond said. "Big D, Corvin, come as close as you can. When I open it, I may forget why. One of you has to finish it."

Kael grabbed him by the belt.

Quickstep.

They ran up the trunk of a white leg as if it were a road, with the gray world tilting sideways around them. Kael threw him the last few yards. Almond landed on the underside of the great white mass and hung there with both hands sunk into its ashy skin.

He could see the red light right in front of him.

He could not remember why it mattered.

He looked at his arm. LILY. ONE. ALMOND.

He remembered.

Quiet Edge. Sever.

The line was there, thin and pale. He cut it. The white skin opened along it with no sound.

And the forgetting came out of the wound like a flood.

It hit him full in the face. Everything went white. He forgot the cleaver. He forgot the hill and the camp and Brightwater. He forgot the word written on his arm, and then he forgot that he had an arm at all.

He hung there in the white, holding on to something, and he did not know why.

Below him, Big D started to climb.

He did not need Kael. He climbed the white leg the way he had climbed the Lull, hand over hand, with his jaw set. The flood of forgetting poured down over him. It did nothing at all.

Remember.

He had sixty thousand names from the walls of Brightwater. He had four hundred and twelve from the Shelf. He had the name of every Regalon he had ever known. He had Tomas Reed, and nine from the Smother, and four from the first night.

He was not going to forget a single one of them for this thing.

And behind him came Corvin.

The old king climbed slower. His hands were bleeding on the white bark. The forgetting crashed over him, and his face only got angrier.

Grudge.

"You came for my people," Corvin said to the Forgetter, through his teeth. "You came for my people."

They reached the wound together. Almond was hanging beside it, empty-eyed, with his hands still sunk in the white skin.

Big D took hold of him by the collar.

"Your name is Almond," he said. "Your wife’s name is Lily. You’re going to be a father. Hold on."

Something flickered in Almond’s eyes.

Corvin did not wait. He pushed past them both and shoved his bare arm, the one with his name carved into it, straight into the open wound up to the shoulder. He found the heart. It was cold and pale and slow.

Winter.

He was an F, and he did it raw, with nothing to soften the cost. It was the oldest thing he had, older than his crown and older than his grudge. It came out of him all at once.

The Forgetter’s heart froze solid in his hand.

The white mass shuddered. All of its legs locked at once, every one of them. Then, very slowly, the whole enormous body began to lean.

"Down!" Big D roared. "Everyone, down!"

It fell for a long time.

When it hit the gray grass, the ground shook all the way to the Door. White dust rose up in a cloud that hid the sun.

When the dust cleared, the grass around the body was already turning green again.

Almond lay on his back beside the fallen Forgetter. Big D had dragged him clear as it came down. He was staring up at the sky.

He lifted his arm and looked at it.

LILY. ONE. ALMOND.

He did not need the words anymore. It was all there. Every bit of it.

He covered his eyes with his other arm and lay there for a while.

Corvin was sitting a few yards away with his back against one of the dead white legs. His right arm hung limp and gray with frost to the shoulder. He looked a hundred years older than he had at dawn.

"Is it dead?" he asked.

"It’s dead," Big D said.

Corvin nodded. He closed his eyes.

"Good," he said. "Somebody go and find little John. I’d like to kill him now."

Frosthold had lost forty-one people.

They were the ones who had walked away into the grass before anyone could reach them. Kael and Natalia searched the gray land all afternoon, and Marcus’s Voice called out across it. They brought back two hundred more who had wandered and lain down and were still alive. But forty-one had walked too far.

Corvin read the names that evening, at the fire beside the Door.

He knew every one. He did not need to look at a list. He said them all, one after another, in his cracked, hoarse voice, with his frozen arm in a sling.

Big D stood beside him and listened.

"I’ll have them too," he said when Corvin finished.

Corvin looked at him. "You have your own."

"I’ve got room," Big D said.

Corvin was silent for a moment. Then he gave one short, stiff nod.

Big D took the Forgetter’s heart.

Corvin had frozen it solid, and it had cracked when the body fell. Big D held the largest piece of it in both hands for a long time. It was cold, and white, and heavy.

Remember.

It folded slowly. It went in on itself like a book closing. The orb it left was white and gold together, like old paper in lamplight.

[Power Orb: Keeper of Names]

[Quality: C]

[No one whose name you have spoken can be made to forget who they are.]

His status changed.

[Life Rank: C]

Hessa was standing beside him. She looked at the C for a long time, the same rank she had worked her whole life to reach. Then she looked at the old man holding it.

"Ten thousand years," she said quietly. "Orla told me. Is it true?"

"More or less," Big D said.

"And you remembered all of it?"

Big D closed his hand. The orb was gone into it.

"Somebody had to," he said.

Almond sat by Ainen’s small walled fire that night. It was still burning, the way Ainen had promised it would.

He looked at his arm in the firelight. LILY. ONE. ALMOND. The charcoal had smeared, but the letters were still there.

He did not wash it off.

Across the fire, Corvin was eating a bowl of something Hessa had cooked, one-handed and with great bad temper. Big D sat beside him. The two old men had not stopped talking for an hour. They seemed to be comparing how many names each of them knew.

"Four days’ walk to Brightwater," Rudra said, sitting down beside Almond. "With eleven thousand people who don’t know anything. And Clovelle can’t fold again for a week."

"Then we walk," Almond said.

"And the next kingdom that comes through? And the one after that?" Rudra looked up at the great Door. "There are six more kingdoms still to come, Almond. We can’t do this every time."

"No," Almond said. "We can’t."

He looked at the fire, and the Door, and the eleven thousand people sleeping in the grass around it. He thought about it for a long time.

"Then we put something here," he said at last. "Something that stays. So the next one who comes through has somebody waiting."

"A sanctuary? We can’t make lines. Nobody can."

"I know," Almond said. "But somebody did once. Every line in this layer was made by somebody."

He looked south, toward Brightwater and the little shoot in the square, and the white stones that had lit up all at once when Big D planted it.

"I’d like to know who," he said.