"What did you see?" I asked.
Ignis didn't respond right away. He turned his ruined face toward the ceiling, and the cracked skin around his empty sockets pulled tight as though he were looking at something that existed far beyond the woven reeds and clay above us.
Snik shifted nervously beside the mat, glancing between the two of us, and I noticed that even the marrow crawler curled in the corner had its head down, which told me that whatever was about to happen was serious enough that even a mindless armored beast could feel it pressing down on the room.
When Ignis finally spoke, his voice had changed. The rasp was still there, the exhaustion was still there, but underneath it ran a resonance that I had heard from him only twice before, once when he had foretold my arrival in Ke Jun's dying world and once when he had read the Heavens' assessment of my tribulation. It was the voice of a seer channeling something that did not entirely belong to him.
"When the final turning comes to pass,
and the wheel has spent its glass,
the walker of worlds must find the flame,
the one who remembers every name.
The sword and shield must rise once more,
though he recalls no oath he swore,
and the soul untouched by either light must stand beside them in the fight.
Four threads woven, or none at all,
two hungers watching, one must fall.
The turning ends where it began, save it now, or no one can."
The last syllable left his lips and the resonance drained out of the room all at once, and Ignis sagged back against the mat, releasing a long, deep breath that emptied him from the inside out. His fingers, thin and gray against the woven fibers, trembled slightly before going still.
"That is all of it, Walker," he rasped out. "Every single word that the Heavens of that world allowed me to bring back with me. And now I am afraid that this old seer needs to rest, keeping those words inside my head has been taking more out of me than anyone would be able to understand."
I stayed kneeling there beside him for a moment and let the prophecy settle down into my memory where Azure was already recording each syllable carefully and then I bowed my head toward the old Ash-Seer.
"Thank you, Ignis. You didn't have to do this. You could have stayed here by the lake telling stories to the children and living out your days in peace, and instead you turned your sight toward something that had nothing to do with you. I appreciate it. This helps more than I can explain."
Ignis made a dismissive sound in his throat and waved one bony hand at me as though swatting away an insect.
"Do not thank me, Walker. I did not do it for you." The corner of his dried cracked mouth lifted into a half smile. "Seers are nosy creatures by nature. We spend our entire lives pressing our faces against windows that were never made for us to look through. You gave me a new window to look through and I was not able to resist doing exactly that. That is all this was. Simple shameless curiosity and nothing more."
I laughed a little at that because I had spent enough time around Ignis by now to know that the humility was as much a performance as Snik's entire ruling persona, at the end of the day, the seer was an old being who cared far more than he would ever admit. But before I could say anything else, the humor drained out of his expression, and he turned his face toward me with a serious look.
"Be careful, Ke Yin." I couldn’t remember the last time he had used my time, he always uses some title, Walker, and hearing it now made my spine straighten. "When I cast my sight across the barrier into that world, something was waiting for me. I don’t have the words to describe it. It tried to block my scrying, and when blocking failed, it reached for me directly." His hand drifted up to touch the blackened cracks radiating across his temples. "These marks are what remains of that touch. If the Heavens of the Two Suns World had not thrown themselves between us, shielding my sight until I could withdraw, you would have no prophecy today, and you would be attending my funeral instead of my bedside."
I nodded slowly, there was only one thing in that world with the power and the motive to strike down a seer across dimensional barriers. The Otherworldly Being. It was watching the approaches to its claimed territory, and it had noticed a blind old man peeking through the window, and it had tried to kill him for it without a moment of hesitation.
I stayed with Ignis until his breathing evened out into sleep, then rose quietly and slipped out of the dwelling into the crimson-tinted evening of my inner world, where the Blood Moon hung low over the lake and the Leech-kin settlement murmured with the sounds of families settling in for the night.
"So," Azure said, materialising beside me as I walked along the shoreline. "Shall we take it apart line by line, or would you prefer to brood picturesquely by the water first?"
"Line by line," I said, though I appreciated the offer. "The walker of worlds is me. That part isn't exactly a mystery."
"Agreed. Though I find it interesting that everyone seems to know what you are these days. Ignis, Meek, the Sect Master, the Otherworldly Being, the Heavens of two separate worlds. For a secret identity, it has remarkably poor coverage."
He wasn't wrong, and that thought bothered me more than I let show. There had been a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when the fact that I came from somewhere else was a secret I guarded with my life, something I hid from elders and friends and enemies alike because I had no idea what would happen to me if the wrong person learned it.
Now it felt as though half the entities I met greeted me by the title before I opened my mouth. The list of people who didn't know was starting to feel shorter than the list of people who did, even though I knew, rationally, that in the Cultivation World the secret still held. Very few people knew the truth. It only felt like everyone.
"The one who remembers every name," I continued, forcing my thoughts back on track. "That's Kal. It has to be. He's the looper in that world, the only person who carried memories across thousands of resets." I stopped walking and stared out across the crimson water, where the Leviathan's massive silhouette shifted in the depths. "But Azure, I watched him die. I watched that thing pull his soul and his blood out of his body and absorb them, and then his corpse fell out of the sky. And the reset didn’t save him, but if the prophecy says I need to find him, then that means he isn't gone. Trapped somewhere, maybe."
"Which raises the obvious question," Azure said quietly.
"Where?" I exhaled. "The Being consumed him, or at least it looked as though it did. If Kal's soul is still intact somewhere inside that thing, or sealed inside the Red Sun where it made its nest, then the first step of saving the world is somehow reaching into it and pulling my master's soul back out of it without somehow getting killed." Saying it out loud made it sound even worse than it had in my head. "I don't even know where I would start. I don't know if there's anything left to free. And finding out isn't going to be simple, because the moment I start poking around near the Red Sun, the thing living inside it is going to notice."
"One problem at a time, Master. The sword and shield?"
"Beric." That one came easily, because the imagery was almost literal. The man had spent his entire life as Laelyn's shield, and in his final moments he had turned himself into a sword, wrapping his arms around a Rank 7 elder and detonating everything he had. "But the loop reset after that. Beric died in the last cycle, which means the reset brought him back as an ordinary soldier again, with no tattoo, no power, no memory of any of it. The prophecy says he recalls no oath he swore. That fits perfectly." I frowned at the water. "Last time, the world itself empowered him. It chose him, activated something in him when I revealed the truth. I have to assume I'll need to recreate those circumstances, or something close to them, and hope the world makes the same choice twice. It wasn't really me who transformed him. I was just standing nearby when it happened."
"And the soul untouched by either light?"
That was the line I had been circling around, because I didn't know. "Untouched by either light. Someone with no red sun cultivation and no blue sun cultivation, someone pure." I turned the words over. "Lady Laelyn came to mind first, but she was born with a Cerulean Vein, so she's been touched by the blue sun since before she drew breath. That rules her out if the prophecy means what it says. And nearly everyone else of consequence in that world belongs to one academy or the other." I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated. "A mortal, then. Someone significant enough to be named in a prophecy about the fate of the entire world, and yet completely outside both cultivation systems. I can't think of who that could possibly be."
Azure was quiet for a moment, and I could feel him not saying something, which usually meant he had a theory he considered premature. I decided not to push. If he wasn't ready to voice it, then the evidence wasn't there yet, and speculation without evidence had gotten me into trouble before.
I shook my head and started walking again, following the shoreline toward the meditation plateaus in the southwest. Standing around in the Cultivation World turning riddles over in my head wasn't going to answer any of these questions, because every answer that mattered was on the other side of a dimensional barrier, inside a world with one or two loops of life remaining and a monster wearing the sky.
I had rested for a week. I had celebrated with my friends, apologized to Yggy, checked up on my new residents, taken on a servant, and eaten scallion pancakes on the back of a stone beast pretending to be a hill.
The exhaustion from the last loop had faded, I was ready. One final trip. The prophecy called it the final turning, and the Otherworldly Being had told me the same thing with its own mouth, so both my enemy and the Heavens agreed on at least one point. Whatever happened next in the Two Suns World would be the last thing that ever happened there, one direction or the other.
"Azure," I said as I reached the base of the plateau. "Thank you for keeping an eye on everything in here while I've been running around. The new residents, the disputes, the harvesting rotas, all of it. I know it's been a lot."
"That is quite literally my job, Master," Azure replied, and I could hear the dry amusement in it. "Though I will admit the Stone Emperor's lecture complaints alone deserve hazard compensation." Then the humor faded from his voice. "Good luck, Ke Yin. Bring yourself back."
I nodded once, held the sight of the crimson lake and the distant golden glow of my suns for a heartbeat longer, and then released my hold on the inner world. My eyes opened in my pavilion; it was time to see the Sect Master and return to the Two Suns World.
A/N
Comment below who you think this line is talking about: "the soul untouched by either light must stand beside them in the fight."