Chapter 7 - 6 — Six Years Earlier [II]
Aten.
Not Sol Invictus.
I kept staring at the word, waiting for it to turn into the other one.
I had reached for that card believing it held the fire that killed my father, since the white-gold heat crawling up his arms was the only power of his I had ever seen.
But the name was different, and a different name meant a different Ability.
So he owned at least two of them, both solar, both sitting at the top of the ranks. And through the whole massacre he had only ever used one.
My hands went cold even with Aten’s warmth still sitting inside them.
Mimesis had laid out three of his Abilities for me to pick from. Sol Invictus was either one of the two I had just let disappear, or it had never been on the table at all, and I did not like where either answer went.
Because it meant one power had been enough. One had opened eight elders and burned Thunder Sovereign out of my father’s chest, while the rest of him stayed folded up and unused.
He walked into our home and took it apart without ever showing us more than a third of what he was.
Aten was only the first power Mimesis had put in my hands, so if I understood the rest of it, every death after this one could hand me something different.
I focused on the card, on the single word printed across it, and something under my skin answered.
Warmth gathered in my palm while a thin gold light came up across my fingertips, and the air around them began climbing in temperature fast enough that I felt it on my wrist.
I shut it down straight away, because the last thing I needed was to scorch the room or make a noise loud enough to bring somebody to my door.
The light went out, but the heat stayed in my fingers for a few seconds longer, and that was all I needed to know it was real.
I took the device off the table beside my bed and woke the screen.
The year read 2101.
I scrolled, checked the time, then checked the date again, because six full years was not a number my head would hold on the first pass.
Then I saw which day it was, and my stomach dropped.
The final day of school, and the morning of the Regional Awakening Ceremony, when every student aged eighteen and nineteen across the region gets called into a PSB hall to find out who woke up a Player.
I already knew how this day ended, since I had lived through it once.
I awakened nothing.
I remembered the examiner keeping his face flat while he read out my result, which landed on me worse than pity would have. I remembered the hall going quieter as I walked out through the middle of it.
That was the morning people stopped seeing the future head of the Myrmidon Clan when they looked at me, and started seeing its useless heir instead.
Except this time I had Ouroboros and Mimesis and Aten before the ceremony had even opened its doors.
Six years of memory did not fix everything, though. I still did not know where Aurelian gathered his followers, or who brought the clan barrier down from the inside, or how far back the plan began.
But I had time now, and time was the one thing nobody had ever given me.
Time to move my position inside the clan, and to get strong enough to stand at my father’s side instead of behind him.
Time to find the people who would one day walk through our gate, so that I could stop the massacre before it ever reached that night.
Something moved out in the corridor, cloth and then footsteps.
I crossed the room and opened the door.
My father was standing a few feet down the hall, younger and whole.
There was no burn anywhere on him, and no blackened hole through the front of his shirt, and no lightning dying out underneath his skin.
His hair sat darker than I remembered it, and his forearms, the ones I had watched blister down to the bone, were only his forearms.
I stopped in the doorway with my hand still on the frame.
The last thing I had of this man was his lightning going out while my uncle’s fist came through his chest.
I had watched him drop in front of the throne and stay down, and as far as anything in my body was concerned, that had happened minutes ago.
Now he stood in a clean corridor, doing up one of his sleeves.
I could hear him breathing, and that was the part that reached into me, because it was such an ordinary sound and I could not stop listening to it.
My throat closed, and heat pushed at the backs of my eyes, so I swallowed hard and forced it down, since I could not walk into a PSB examination hall red-faced with no reason to give anybody.
I did not go to him, and I did not say any of the things stacking up behind my teeth, like you die tonight, or he comes through our gate in six years, or I watched you go.
We had never been that kind of father and son, and I could not remember him holding me even once.
So if I crossed that corridor and put my hands on him, he would not be moved by it. He would be confused first and suspicious afterwards, and suspicion from him was the one thing I could not afford this morning.
So I stood there and looked at him and said nothing at all.
Past his shoulder, through the open entrance, the clan car was already waiting on the drive with the driver standing beside the open door.
My father’s frown deepened.
"Why are you staring at me like that? The driver is already outside. You’ll be late for your Awakening Ceremony."