Chapter 42
Shine
He opens his eyes slowly.
He blinks several times; his eyelids stick together as if they have their own weight. The light in the surroundings—gray, soft—forces him to squint again. He inhales deeply, and a yawn escapes him, long, clumsy, dragging in a gulp of air that makes his chest crackle.
It takes him a few seconds to locate where he is. The stale smell of the room, the murmur of something dripping in the distance, the cold seeping in through his neck.
Under the blanket covering him, he moves his right hand and slowly pulls it out. The feel of the rough fabric disorients him. He rubs his eyes with his palm, wiping away the moisture of sleep, and feels his lashes stuck together.
"Huh?" he murmurs, half-hoarse.
Only then does he notice he's sitting in a chair, and that someone—he doesn't know who—covered him with that blanket. He stays still, his breath held, looking around, trying to understand who covered him from the cold.
"Oh… right. The changing of the guard."
The thought comes to him slowly, piercing through the fog of sleep. He sighs and lets his head drop forward for a moment before moving.
He pulls his other arm out from under the blanket; the cold air touches his skin and goosebumps rise. With a small push, he stands up, careful not to let the blanket slip to the floor. He holds it with one arm, adjusts it against his chest, and stretches it a little, searching for an edge.
He folds it once.
The blanket crackles, rough between his fingers.
He folds it again.
When the fabric is in a more or less orderly square, he places it on the table. His palm rests on it for a second, still. Then he removes it, breathing deeply.
"Who took the next shift?" he thought as he turned his head, the voice in his mind still drowsy.
He began to search with his gaze. He looked toward the door, then the corners, then toward the partially fogged window. No movement, no shadow, only the murmur of the wind filtering through.
He turned once more, doing a full spin on his heels, out of pure habit, as if the other could suddenly appear behind him.
Nothing.
The silence stretched a little longer than he wanted to admit. Finally, he let out a breath that was half-sigh, half-complaint.
"Tsk…" he exhaled, tilting his head wearily.
The air escaped him as if he were also releasing the rest of the sleep clinging to him.
He straightened up fully and brought his arms behind him, stretching until his shoulders cracked. His back responded with a slight pull, a reminder that he had spent too long asleep in a chair.
He exhaled slowly. The air came out warm, heavy.
"A bit of a warm-up with something should do…" he thought, rotating his shoulders in circles. "I have to get used to a healthy body now."
The thought made him smile slightly, as if he still didn't quite believe the idea. He raised his arms again, leaning to one side, then the other, feeling the muscles wake in short tugs.
For a moment, he let himself be carried by the routine, stretching his mind with each movement, letting his thoughts flow without hurry, in time with his breathing.
He yawned again, longer this time, as if his body still resisted starting. The air filled his lungs until it hurt, and his eyes moistened a little.
When he finished, he raised his right arm and wiped his face with it, dragging his palm from his forehead to his chin. The warm friction took away some of the heaviness of sleep, but not all.
With a small snort, he tapped his cheeks twice.
"Come on, wake up," he murmured to himself, barely audible.
He repeated the gesture, a little harder, until his skin burned slightly and the buzz of fatigue began to dissipate.
"Thinking about it…" he thought, turning his head again to give a general glance around the room.
The place had changed slightly: now some chairs were in different places in the room, some empty, others with sleeping people covered by blankets or uniforms used as blankets, the table next to Eilor with disordered papers, other tables with people on top using them as beds, the wall lamp trembling slightly from the draft.
He ran a hand over the back of his neck, letting out a sigh through his teeth.
"Will some of us here know me from my academy days…?"
The thought mixed with another yawn he couldn't contain.
"They'll probably refer to me as Kaep."
He nodded slowly, more to himself than to anyone else, accepting that idea like someone adjusting an old garment.
"Eilor…" —he repeated mentally— "I'm starting to like that name."
An almost imperceptible smile curved his mouth. He tested the name silently once more, moving his lips without sound, as if he wanted to feel its weight before making it fully his.
"According to Father, that would be my new name for my adult stage…"
He paused for a moment, his gaze lost on some point on the floor.
"Haha… adult…" he laughed softly, without real humor. "All the more reason I should use it."
The echo of his voice mixed with the silence of the room.
He rested a hand on the table, thoughtful.
"Adult…" he repeated in his head.
Mentally, he calculated: he must be about twenty-four years old mentally now, or thereabouts. That idea made him raise an eyebrow. It was an age that sounded more mature than he felt inside, but he liked how it sounded.
He breathed deeply, letting the notion of that "new stage" settle in his chest, half expectation, half doubt.
"…"
"But… why only today was I able to interfere with my younger self?"
The question hit him harder than he expected.
He lowered his gaze, letting the silence cling to him.
"I was trapped in that space… watching eighteen years of Kaep's life… most of it, at least."
The memory passed through him like a long shadow. Eighteen years observing, unable to do anything, only watching Kaep's memories, as if his previous life were a repeated film.
He inhaled slowly, trying to order the thoughts trembling in his head. Then he raised his hands in front of him and clapped them together slowly.
He kept his hands together, fingers extended upward, right at chest level. He closed his eyes for an instant.
"In that sense…" he thought, slowly lowering his hands.
"I'm grateful that, however good Kaep's memory was, he still wasn't capable of remembering in minute detail every hour, of every day, of every month."
The thought drew a heavy sigh from him, almost of relief.
"If it had been like that…" he continued mentally, "I would truly have been locked in that place for eighteen years."
He went still. The phrase resonated in his mind as if he were still saying it.
Eighteen years. Every month. Every day. Every hour. Every minute.
He imagined that eternal loop, that prison made only of memories… and his body reacted before his mind.
A shiver ran down his back, sharp, quick. He felt his muscles tense, the air sticking in his chest for a second.
He passed a hand over the back of his neck, trying to dispel the sensation, but the idea remained there, vibrating.
For the first time since he woke up, he fully understood the magnitude of the time.
*-…-*
He tried to ignore the sensation still running down his back. He didn't want to think about that, or the possibility. So he forced himself to think of something else.
"Will Kaep be able to free himself… like I did?"
The question arose on its own, like an unasked echo.
The thought hung suspended in the air, floating, without an answer.
…
Silence.
So dense he could hear the beat in his ears.
He shook his head once, forcefully, trying to expel the idea.
"No…" he murmured almost voicelessly. "It can't be."
He took another deep breath, fixing his gaze on the floor, searching for anything else to think about besides that possibility. But the doubt, like a splinter, remained there, hidden, resisting disappearance.
…
"Maybe now he's watching the memories of his life…" he thought.
The idea passed through him slowly.
He lowered his gaze. His eyes remained fixed on the floor, on an unimportant point, while his mind traveled far away from there.
His fingers clenched tightly into a fist, his knuckles whitening.
"Long eighteen years… or short?"
The doubt slipped between his teeth in a barely audible murmur.
Eilor frowned, making a face between weariness and confusion. He tried to measure the time he had spent in that space… but how do you measure something without days, without nights, without a body?
The memory was only a sequence of chained moments.
"Hmm…" he let out, allowing the sound to fade.
"At least now I can understand more personally who Kaep was… I suppose."
The thought drew a slight, almost melancholic smile from him.
"Haha…" he laughed weakly, letting the sound die immediately.
"Ahh… it was too strange."
He ran a hand through his hair, looking into nothingness.
"The more I looked at the boy, the more certain I was… 'Him'. That is Kaep."
The echo of the phrase remained floating in his head, mixed with loose images: gestures, tones of voice.
"And now…" —he continued silently— "the one I left in that space isn't Kaep either. He's nothing but remnants of that Kaep."
A twisted smile formed on his lips unintentionally.
"I'd say he's closer to being like me… and I couldn't be like Kaep either."
He leaned forward a little, resting his elbows on his knees, his gaze lost on some invisible point in front of him.
"I wonder how it feels to be Kaep… the real Kaep."
The question didn't sound sad or curious, but strangely empty, as if he already knew there would be no answer. Without realizing it, he found himself observing his own hands, trying to recognize in them something of that boy he once was… and who was no longer anywhere.
"…"
"And to make it worse…" he muttered through his teeth, letting the words escape almost without voice.
"The image of the parents…"
The phrase broke in the air. For an instant, he thought he saw them—not as a clear memory, but as flashes, fragments: a hand on his shoulder, a distant laugh, a tone of voice.
"The more I remember it…" he thought with a clenched brow, "the more certain I am of the idea that 'he' and I are not the same person."
He felt the certainty weigh on his chest. It wasn't rage or sadness, but a feeling of separation, as if an invisible line had been drawn between what was and what is.
Eilor straightened up with a slight push and turned the chair to face it.
He took the backrest with one hand and, with a slow movement, let himself fall into the seat—The screech of the legs on the floor broke the thick silence of the room—letting his head fall back, looking at the ceiling without really seeing it.
"We are not the same…" he whispered.
And as he said it, he didn't know if that relieved him or sank him a little deeper.
In front of him, on the table, the sheet and the copper pen. He observed them for a moment.
He picked them up carefully. The sheet, when turned, showed the empty back. A new, clean space.
He rested the tip of the pen on the paper and stayed still for a few seconds… He started writing it anyway.
The first lines came out tense, crooked, as if the copper weighed more than normal. His face hardened as he progressed. His expression betrayed him: what he was leaving there wasn't something pleasant.
The sound of the dry stroke on the paper filled the room, in time with his held breath.
"My handwriting was so bad…" he thought upon seeing the first trembling lines on the paper. The letters leaned irregularly, some cramped, others crooked, as if the hand still wasn't quite used to the body holding it.
He let out a brief sigh and rested the tip of the pen again.
"Doesn't matter," he thought. "As long as I can understand it later."
He began to note down what he remembered.
His handwriting grew firmer as he progressed.
However, at times he stopped, his gaze fixed on the paper. But he continued.
"My first day of life…" he wrote, pausing for a moment with the pen tip suspended.
Then he added, "Or the first memories that gave me life… to me, and to 'him'."
He stared at those words, reviewing them with his eyes.
He set the pen down again and continued.
"Everything started under the storm. The sky was chaos, and the sea moved as if it wanted to swallow the ship."
As he wrote, the images returned with force. He remembered the dizziness, the weight of the saltwater in the air, the sound of ropes hitting the masts.
"I could barely stand. The dizziness wrecked my head, and soon after… I fainted."
The stroke stopped for a second. He swallowed.
"I woke up some time later, and the first thing I found was disaster. I lost—due to an unfortunate mishap—to a fish monster."
His hand trembled as he wrote it, but he didn't stop.
"Now I know it wasn't really a monster… but another crewman. Someone who, somehow, had changed, corrupted by something I still don't understand."
The silence of the room enveloped him again.
He set the pen down, looked at it for a moment, and thought that putting it into words didn't relieve anything. He sighed.
"After…"
The pen remained suspended over the paper.
Eilor inhaled slowly.
"Afterwards, I had the memory at the port…" he finally wrote, with a slow stroke.
"…where I was saying goodbye to my parents."
The next words took longer to arrive.
"But on that occasion, my parents… who are now my parents… were other people."
He stared at them, incredulous, as if by reading them on the page he could force a logical explanation. None came.
He straightened up a little and started writing again, this time more hurriedly, making the writing smaller and moving toward the edges of the sheet, using every blank space.
He noted the physical appearances of both sets of parents: their gestures, hair color, voices, small details. The more he did it, the more conscious he became.
He gripped the copper pen tightly. The metal felt cold and firm between his fingers, but not enough to contain the tremor.
The stroke became harder, deeper, to the point of marking the sheet beneath.
Eilor closed his eyes for an instant, trying to regain his composure.
His breathing became heavy, irregular, and for a moment he was afraid to keep writing.
"Who were they…?" he wrote, and the question kept vibrating in his head long after he drew the question mark.
His eyes ran over the phrase again and again, as if expecting the ink itself to give him an answer.
"My adoptive parents, apparently."
The memory of the port returned suddenly, along with its sensations.
He couldn't deny that he had felt they were his… but now, knowing what he knew, knowing how he was now, that scene felt borrowed.
He let the tip of the pen rest on the paper again.
"…My parents are…"
He stopped, pressing his lips together.
"…Kaep's were: Ivan and Lis."
The names of both came accompanied by the image of the first time he visited the academy: the visit, Ivan's gaze, Lis's smile. Everything so clear that for a moment he thought he heard them again.
The air weighed on his chest.
"They look…"
He took a breath, his lungs tense.
And exhaled slowly, letting out a slight tremor along with his breath.
The pen trembled in his hand, as if unwilling to write the next word.
"…"
"My father at the port was tall…" he wrote slowly. "Taller than Ivan, with black hair."
He stopped for a moment, trying to mentally reconstruct that face. The images, the height, the voice, and the shadow of dark hair remained firm.
"And my mother…" he continued, the stroke a little firmer. "…also a redhead, but younger than Lis."
As he wrote it, a slight pang crossed his chest.
"And since I kept the surname 'Hardbrick', I have no doubt they were sisters… and with a few years' difference."
Upon finishing the line, Eilor slowly lifted the pen.
He looked at it for a few seconds, the tip stained with ink, trembling slightly from the pressure he had exerted.
He felt something move inside him: an old, dense sadness, as if it had been waiting for that recognition to emerge.
He pressed his lips together, trying to contain it.
He didn't want to cry, or let that emptiness overcome him again. He inhaled deeply, his chest hurting a little, and let the air out slowly, measured.
Only then did he realize he had been writing with his teeth clenched the entire time.
Confused, he brought his left hand to his head, sinking his fingers into his hair. The pen remained firm in his other hand, gripped so tightly the copper left a mark on his fingers.
The pain came first as a faint buzz, then as a pressure piercing his skull. He closed his eyes, trying to order the whirlwind of thoughts, but he couldn't.
It was something denser, tangled, like a blockage.
He could feel it there—present, throbbing—but every time he tried to touch it with his mind, it vanished, leaving him empty.
Sweat began to run down his temples, fine, cold.
A drop fell on the edge of the paper, leaving a small stain on the dry ink.
He clenched his jaw, breathing through his nose to not let himself be overcome by the internal wave.
The blockage kept growing, digging in behind his eyes, preventing him from assimilating what exactly was hurting him:
Truth?
Memory?
Nostalgia?
The pen trembled in his hand, threatening to slip, but he didn't let go.
But he couldn't.
Every time he tried to contain it, something inside him yielded, seeping out against his will.
First it was just a knot in his chest, then a current rising to his throat.
He kept trying. Harder.
He clenched his teeth, shook his head again and again, as if he could shake the thought out of himself.
His whole body trembled.
The pen, trapped in his right hand, creaked under the pressure of his fingers.
The copper felt slippery, warm, as if absorbing his heat.
Trying…
Trying…
Each repetition was more frantic, more empty.
The tremor rose to his shoulders, and a trickle of sweat ran down his neck.
"Shit…" escaped his mouth, barely a whisper at first. "Don't come out… I don't need more…"
His tone failed.
"I don't need more sad memories, no more…"
His breathing broke, irregular.
His heart beat against his chest with painful force.
"Shit… when I finally managed to get to this point… after… after…" his voice dissolved in the air.
He swallowed with difficulty, his eyes burning without tears.
"No…" he said through his teeth. "I don't want… to cry."
He remained motionless, panting, his body rigid, the pen still in his hand, as if letting go meant surrendering.
The subsequent silence was absolute.
Only his breathing and the slight tremor of the sheet under his arm.
…
…
A nearly imperceptible sound—a slight change in the air, a presence that wasn't there before—
Pop…
Before he could react, a small hand rested softly on his right shoulder.
"—!"
The contact was like a shock.
Eilor—in an involuntary reflex of alert—shuddered and tried to stand up abruptly.
His heart raced wildly, his muscles tense.
But the reaction was clumsy: he was trapped between the chair and the table, his body numb from tension.
He tried to push himself up, turn, move away from the hand, but the movement was brusque, uncoordinated.
The edge of the table hit his hip.
The chair moved backward with a harsh screech.
The pen flew from his hand.
He tripped over one of the chair legs.
His balance left him completely.
He fell to the side, pushing the table in the process.
The papers, the folded blanket, even the inkwell, jumped into the air.
For a second, chaos filled the room: everything was in free fall.
Eilor fell to the floor, landing hard on his backside. The impact shook his back, and the air escaped in a short gasp.
Without thinking, he immediately pushed himself forward, spinning around.
The table was about to hit the floor, the open inkwell was about to shatter, the sheets bending under their own weight, the blanket falling in slow motion.
He instinctively extended his hands to catch everything.
But nothing fell.
-…Huh?…-
He remained still, his arms extended halfway, not understanding.
The objects floated.
The inkwell, the sheets, even the pen spun slightly in the air, suspended, as if time had stopped just for them.
The silence of the room was barely saved, only interrupted by the faint buzz of whatever was holding everything in the air.
Eilor slowly lowered his arms, his chest still heaving. He turned his head toward the origin of the touch.
There she was.
The girl from before.
Her hand was still extended, her gaze fixed on him, her eyes wide open.
Her breathing was rapid, as if she had been as frightened as he was.
The faint glow around her palm, identical to the faint glow of the force holding the objects in the air.
Eilor said nothing at first. He just looked at her, confused and astonished.