Knight, Heir, Prince

He meant it, too. Going and fighting Lucious in the open like that wasn’t the right strategy, because it didn’t achieve enough. Lucious wasn’t the problem. The whole Empire was the problem. He’d briefly thought that he might be able to persuade the king to change things, but the truth was that his father didn’t want things to change.

No, the only thing to do now was to find ways to help the rebellion. Not just the rebels on Haylon, but all of them. Alone, Thanos couldn’t accomplish much, but together, they might just bring down the Empire.

CHAPTER SIX

Everywhere Ceres looked on the Isle Beyond the Mist, she saw things that made her stop and stare at their strange beauty. Hawks with rainbow-colored feathers spun as they hunted things below, but were in turn hunted by a winged serpent that eventually settled on a spire of white marble.

She walked over the emerald grass of the island, and it seemed as if she knew exactly where she had to go. She’d seen herself in her vision, there atop the hill in the distance, where rainbow-colored towers stuck up like the spines of some great beast.

Flowers grew from the low rises on the way, and Ceres reached down to touch them. When her fingers brushed them, though, their petals were of paper-thin stone. Had someone carved them that fine, or were they somehow living rock? Just the fact that she could imagine that possibility told her how strange this place was.

Ceres kept walking, heading for the spot where she knew, where she hoped, her mother would be waiting.

She reached the lower slopes of the hill and started to climb. Around her, the island was full of life. Bees buzzed in the low grass. A creature like a deer, but with crystal tines where its antlers should have been, looked at Ceres for a long time before springing away.

Yet she saw no people there, despite the buildings that dotted the landscape around her. The ones closest to Ceres had a pristine, empty feel, like a room that had been stepped out from only moments before. Ceres kept going, up toward the top of the hill, to the spot where the towers formed a circle around a broad area of grass, letting her look out between them over the whole of the rest of the island.

Yet she didn’t look that way. Instead, Ceres found herself staring at the center of the circle, where a single figure stood in a robe of pure white. Unlike her vision, the figure wasn’t fuzzy or out of focus. She was there, as clear and real as Ceres was. Ceres stepped forward, almost to within touching distance. There was only one person it could be.

“Mother?”

“Ceres.”

The robed figure threw herself forward at the same instant Ceres did, and they met in a crushing hug that seemed to express all the things Ceres didn’t know how to say: how much she’d been looking forward to this moment, how much love there was there, how incredible it was to meet this woman she’d only met in a vision.

“I knew you would come,” the woman, her mother, said as they stepped back, “but even knowing it is different from actually seeing you.”

She pulled back the hood of her robe then, and it seemed almost impossible that this woman could be her mother. Her sister, perhaps, because she shared the same hair, the same features. It was almost like looking into a mirror for Ceres. Yet she seemed too young to be Ceres’s mother.

“I don’t understand,” Ceres said. “You are my mother?”

“I am.” She reached out to hug Ceres again. “I know it must seem strange, but it’s true. My kind can live a long time. I am Lycine.”

A name. Ceres finally had a name for her mother. Somehow, that meant more than all the rest of it put together. Just that was enough to make the journey worth it. She wanted to stand there and just stare at her mother forever. Even so, she had questions. So many that they spilled out in a rush.

“What is this place?” she asked. “Why are you here alone? Wait, what do you mean ‘your kind’?”

Lycine smiled and sat down on the grass. Ceres joined her, and as she sat, she realized that it wasn’t just grass. She could see fragments of stone beneath it, arranged in mosaic form, but long since covered over by the meadow around them.

“There’s no easy way to answer all of your questions,” Lycine said. “Especially not when I have so many questions of my own, about you, about your life. About everything, Ceres. But I’ll try. Shall we do this the old way? A question for a question?”

Ceres didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed her mother wasn’t done yet.

“Do they still tell the stories of the Ancient Ones, out in the world?”

“Yes,” Ceres said. She’d always paid more attention to the stories of combatlords and their exploits in the Stade, but she knew some of what they said about the Ancient Ones: the ones who had come before humanity, who sometimes looked the same and sometimes looked like so much more. Who’d built so much and then lost it. “Wait, are you saying that you’re – ”

“One of the Ancient Ones, yes,” Lycine replied. “This was one of our places, before… well, there are some things that it is still best not to talk about. Besides, I’m owed an answer. So tell me what your life has been like. I couldn’t be there, but I spent so long trying to imagine what it would be like for you.”

Ceres did her best, even though she didn’t know where to start. She told Lycine about growing up around her father’s forge, about her brothers. She told her about the rebellion, and about the Stade. She even managed to tell her about Rexus and Thanos, though those words came out choking and fractured.

“Oh, darling,” her mother said, laying a hand over hers. “I wish I could have spared you some of that pain. I wish I could have been there for you.”

“Why couldn’t you?” Ceres asked. “Have you been here all this time?”

“I have,” Lycine said. “This used to be one of the places of my people, in the old days. The others left it behind. Even I did, for a time, but these past years it has been a kind of sanctuary. And a place to wait, of course.”

“To wait?” Ceres asked. “You mean for me?”

She saw her mother nod.

“People talk about seeing destiny as if it were a gift,” Lycine said, “but there is a kind of prison to it, too. Understand what must happen, and you lose the choices that come with not knowing, no matter how much you might wish…” Her mother shook her head, and Ceres could see the sadness there. “This isn’t the time for regret. I have my daughter here, and there is only so much time for you to learn what you came for.”

She smiled and took Ceres’s hand.

“Walk with me.”

***

Ceres felt like days had passed while she and her mother walked the magical isle. It was breathtaking, this vista, being here with her mother. It all felt like a dream.

As they walked, they spoke mostly of the power. Her mother tried to explain it to her, and Ceres tried to understand. The strangest thing happened: as her mother spoke, Ceres felt as if her words were actually imbuing her with the power.

Even now, as they walked, Ceres felt it rising up inside her, roiling like smoke as her mother touched her shoulder. She needed to learn to control it, she’d come here to learn to control it, but compared to meeting her mother, it didn’t seem important.

“Our blood has given you power,” Lycine said. “The islanders tried to help unlock it, didn’t they?”

Ceres thought of Eoin, and of all the strange exercises he’d had her doing. “Yes.”

“For people not of our blood, they understand the world well,” her mother said. “But there are things even they can’t show you. Have you made anything stone yet? It’s one of my talents, so I would guess it will be one of yours.”

“Made things stone?” Ceres asked. She didn’t understand. “So far, I’ve moved things. I’ve been faster and stronger. And – ”

She didn’t want to finish that. She didn’t want her mother to think badly of her.

“And your power has killed things that have tried to harm you?” Lycine said.

Ceres nodded.

“Do not be ashamed of that, daughter. I have only seen a little of you, but I know what you are destined to be. You are a fine person. All that I could hope. As for making things stone…”

They stopped in a meadow of purple and yellow flowers and Ceres watched her mother pluck a small flower from the meadow, with delicate, silken petals. Through the contact with her mother, she felt the way the power flickered within her, feeling familiar but much more directed, crafted, shaped.

Stone spread across the flower like frost over a window, but it wasn’t just on the surface. A second after it had begun, it was over, and her mother held one of the stone flowers Ceres had seen lower on the island.

“Did you feel it?” Lycine asked.

Ceres nodded. “But how did you do it?”