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TRAS Chapter 90: A Study in Shadow
🕑 Added 2025-04-03 16:02:52 +0000 UTCIt was obvious who they saw—they’d be up there this whole time. Ailn was more caught up in the question of what it meant.
The chamber was completely dark, save for the light from their lanterns, and Ailn found himself wondering, for a moment, what happened to the illusion when no one was around.
“Do you ever get lonely, Noué?” Ailn asked. He couldn’t help himself.
“I don’t ‘get’ anything,” the reflection replied. “Do you talk to your body pillows like this?”
“...Yeah, I figured you’d say something like that,” Ailn said, rubbing the bags under his eyes. “Why’d you become an artist, Noué?”
“I told you. The labor of my life was tru—”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Ailn and the reflection stared at each other. After a long silence, she answered Ailn’s question.
“Because I was good at it,” the reflection said. “Because all other artists are my lessers. Because the work was important. And because no one else could do it.”
“Important.” Ailn let the word tumble around in his head. “Important like helping grandma write her autobiography, speak her truth and tell her story?”
“Do I seem like that type of hack?” the reflection asked.
On the other side of the chamber, Kylian and Naomi were attempting to come to grips with what they’d just seen. As their eyes readjusted to the darkness, a lull of irresolution held their tongues, and in the silence they wrestled with their thoughts.
All of them had just witnessed something remarkable. But it was Kylian who first addressed it.
“I would be remiss to be anything less than forthright,” the knight said cautiously. “That apparition we just beheld—if we all saw it—I cannot think of as anything else, anyone else except the goddess Lumitheia.”
“...I must concur,” Naomi said. The water mage shuddered, holding herself beneath her arm. “I am not one for myth, nor superstition. But I am not the type of fool to ignore what appears right before me.”
Safi blinked a few times, looking back and forth between Kylian and Naomi, puzzled by their consensus.
“What are you talking about?” Safi asked. “That was Cora.”
“...Cora?” Naomi shivered again, unable to stop herself from peering up into the darkness. “Do you mean to say that is how she usually appears to you?”
“Of course not,” Safi said, sounding somewhat testy. “You’ve all seen her… she’s like a big billowy blanket! I guess she just, you know… glammed up a bit?”
With one arm crossed, and the other propping up her chin thoughtfully, Safi continued delivering her interpretation. “She got stronger in the cave, somehow. Good air, I guess. Does this mean she’s a full human now? I want her to try pancakes!”
“Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn Lady Fleuve,” Kylian said hesitantly. “But if her appearance differs from usual, how are you certain that woman was Cora?”
“Because it is,” Safi frowned. “How do you know you’re you, or Renea’s Renea, or I’m me?”
“I tend to look the same day to day, for a start,” Kylian sighed, finding that his eyes unconsciously drifted toward Renea over on the other side of the chamber. She looked ill at ease. “Is something amiss there…?”
There was.
The young girl was worried about her brother.
She had no idea what she just saw. Was it really Lumitheia? Was it an angel? Or something more sinister? The only thing she knew is that she was grateful.
The sight seemed to have helped Ailn break out of whatever trance he’d just been in. He seemed… calm now. But even by lantern light, his exhaustion was all too clear. She’d just been too caught up in her own emotional turmoil to notice.
“Noué, don’t you think you could have made more art if you’d taken care of your own health?” Ailn asked bluntly.
“Every artist has a shelf life,” the reflection said flatly.
“That’s a pretty awful thing to say, all things considered,” Ailn said. He wasn’t hiding the fatigue in his voice anymore. “Is that what you said to the people who cared about you?”
“Yes. It was.”
“That’s why you didn’t eat?”
“...Sometimes, I forgot. Drop it.”
As Renea watched her brother interact with the reflection of the artist long gone, she resisted the impulse to drag him away.
It was the same basin. The one he was just staring at—so fixated, so haunted and… helpless.
When he was staring into the water, what was he about to do…? Renea gripped her own wrist tightly to keep it from shaking, hoping she’d never have to see him look like that again.
“Why’d you stash your vault away in an abandoned smuggler’s cove?” Ailn asked.
“Everyone finds inspiration differently. Artists more differently.”
“Do they find inspiration from drowned spirits?” Ailn pressed.
The reflection took her time replying. There was a subtle flicker of emotion, the faintest ripple in her eyes of molten gold.
“Sometimes, kids grow up, and realize all of a sudden their dog didn’t actually go to a farm.”
Ailn furrowed his brows in response, while next to him Renea’s expression scrunched with curiosity and anxiety. And even though she wavered a moment—biting her thumb in thought, trying to avoid the reflection’s eyes—she cleared her throat and asked it an honest question.
“I-isn’t that a lie, though?” Renea asked. “A beautiful lie. Ruhs, and not Areygni.”
“You’re right,” the reflection said.
And that was it.
Renea felt a swell of irritation, having to deal with two cryptic jerks instead of one, but she stifled it. She looked toward Ailn.
“Areygni,” Ailn muttered. “The beautiful truth.”
He fell silent after that, seeming to let the ancient word roll around in his mind. So, Renea watched his eyes.
Her brother walked off into his own world, sometimes, whenever he needed to think deeply. It was a little alienating, if she were to be perfectly honest. And yet it had never worried her—until today.
If he entered another trance… Renea shuddered, not realizing she was holding her breath. He was staring into the water again. His eyes were out of focus again. She reached her trembling hand out, ready to—
Renea stopped herself, grabbing her own wrist again instead.
This was different. He wasn’t lost in thought. He wasn’t in a trance. He was just listening to the sound of the water. His eyes weren’t out of focus—they were relaxed.
He looked like… he was letting himself rest a moment.
Then, unbidden, he gave the water a wry smile. It was a tired one, but it was real.
“... Was it a good life, Noué?”
The silence continued. There was an eerie weight to it, so much so that Renea felt like the reflection had simply closed the book on the conversation. And though she’d been compulsively avoiding its gaze, Renea decided to look into the basin one more time.
The reflection had almost fully blurred.
Just a mess of colors. Not even its eyes were distinct anymore.
“Nice try,” it said. “But you’ll have to figure it out yourself.”
The image was hazy, and imperfect. But it gave a soft smile back. And then, on the dark surface of the water, even though it was continually disturbed by the cascade above, the reflection turned painfully still.
___________________
Naomi did not know what a wavelength was. If anything, ‘length’ seemed a rather cumbersome metric for the fluid movement of water.
“It’s like a slinky! No, wait. It’s like a radio. No, wait… it vibrates like a bell, but I’m not talking about sound, I’m talking about light,” Safi droned on. “So then all these different lights kinda move differently and some are really energetic and some are really sluggish, but they all want to go down deep but the water likes to eat the light waves—”
“...What?” Naomi blinked. “Light… wave?”
“Right, light waves,” Safi nodded. “There’s the really fast kids and the really slow kids who never get picked, but the slow kids actually get picked first by the water ‘cause it likes to eat slow kids. And as you go down and down the faster kids get caught and it gets darker, blue and then brown and then no light at all, get it?”
She truly did not. It seemed Naomi was one of those slow children, left in the murky dark. Or eaten at the… top…? Safi’s explanation was not exactly illuminating.
“...Y-yes, I believe I follow,” she nodded, crossing her arms and looking away.
“Do you truly?” Kylian asked. The good knight looked utterly baffled. “...I suppose I’ll have to seek your counsel at a later time.”
Naomi coughed lightly. “My explanation may… differ in style. I would imagine.”
“So you do get it!” Safi beamed. “Cora just doesn’t get enough sun.”
To Naomi’s relief, Ailn and Renea approached from the other side of the chamber.
“Duke eum-Creid!” Naomi called out to him. His brows knitted in mild confusion at her seemingly eager tone. “Were there any findings of consequence? I noticed you speaking at length with the artist’s reflection, no?”
“..Uhuh,” Ailn said. “I’m almost certain of the right portrait. So there’s that.”
“Certain?” Naomi echoed. “Certain is a strong word, is it not?”
“It’s a strong intuition,” Ailn replied ambivalently. His eyes slowly scanned the portraits. More than once, he seemed near to speech—only to reconsider his tack. Finally, he simply said, “Let’s just say I arrived at the answer a little differently than I’d intended to.”
The duke pointed at each portrait in turn. “Think of it like this: the four portraits each make a statement. One says, I was misunderstood. The second says, I regret nothing. The third, my life was empty.”
He paused. “And the fourth was, I lived happily.” Then he gave a resigned shrug. “Which of these is worth saying?”
“Is that… the extent of your explanation?” Kylian asked.
“That’s right.”
There was a moment of considered silence, and all their eyes drew to the watercolor.
It was not so much that the duke’s answer was convincing—it was that it was hopeful. And for that alone, it stirred the heart.
“...It is a suspiciously beautiful sentiment,” Naomi said honestly.
She took a moment to appreciate the portrait: the slight impishness apparent in the waver of Noué’s coy smile, the way her happiness reached the crinkle of her eyes.
Naomi found herself wishing she could have seen it before it started to decay. Age would corrupt the others. But as the watercolor’s pigments washed away, this joyful Noué would simply disappear.
“Assist me, Duke eum-Creid,” Naomi sighed.
“Ailn’s fine,” the duke replied.
“Can I call you that, too?” Safi asked, popping up behind them.
“Sure, why not,” he shrugged.
“You’re quite stingy with words, you know?” Naomi remarked. “It leaves us floundering, Ailn.”
Again, Ailn paused, taking the time to curate his speech. Whether it was politeness or fastidiousness, Naomi couldn’t tell.
“... An exhausting analysis wouldn’t really help,” Ailn said finally. “It’s simple, and that’s what makes it hard.”
“Then if not analysis, how is it you would come to understand it, Ailn?” Naomi’s eyes narrowed. Then she sighed. “Please. Be explicit.”
“Well, I…” Ailn paused.
He said nothing for a long while. And the others, noticing Ailn’s uncharacteristic struggle for words, grew restless as they waited for his explanation.
“Because we’re a little too similar, I guess,” Ailn said.
“...In the sharpness of your tongue?” Naomi asked dubiously. “You are not the only one—”
“In our obsessiveness,” Ailn interrupted.
He’d already seemed out of sorts, but now there was something else in the duke’s exhaustion—a flicker of bitterness in Ailn’s eyes that Naomi didn’t miss.
It was fleeting, but in that moment, what she saw struck her with pity.
“Then…” Renea drew near. She clutched her brother’s sleeve, tightly. “You think she was happy because…?”
Seeing his sister’s worry, Ailn’s expression softened. “The labor of her life was truth, right? And she didn’t let anything deter her.”
“She was fulfilled. She had fun.” His fingers found his wrist, twisting absently as if to wind up a toy. “She had her fair share of pain… and gave a little more of it than her due.”
His cadence slowed a touch. His voice softened.
“But… she did what she had to do,” Ailn said. “Because to her, that was a life worth living.”
“Which, in sum, was enough to call happiness I suppose?” Naomi surmised irresolutely. At this point, what did she know? “It is as sensible an answer as any.”
There truly wasn’t much to say. It was a simple solution, as good as any, in the complex web of the myriad interpretations of Noué Areygni’s life. Did the evidence accord? Was it the most coherently reasoned? Naomi had so thoroughly lost her footing, she dared not judge herself.
Purposelessly—perhaps in hopes of exchanging a few words, or just to see the expression on its face—Naomi walked to the basin, holding her lantern above it.
She froze.
“It’s…” Naomi’s voice shook. “She’s not moving.”
A sense of loss, unexpectedly sharp, jolted through her. Her arms, suddenly heavy, fell limply.
It was not as if the reflection were real—nor pleasant, to be frank. What loss could there be in the stillness of an already insensate illusion, one no more meaningful than a rock?
None that she could think of. Yet for reasons she truly could not fathom, her heart caught in her throat.
“Then that seems… a clear sign that the duke’s deductions were correct, no?” Naomi remarked. She wore a chagrined smile. “Unless perhaps, the illusion wishes to play a final prank.”
But it did not. It remained inert. And Naomi’s smile quietly dropped, her cheeks as heavy now as her arms.
She looked toward Ailn and Renea, who’d last spoken with it. As usual, the duke was inscrutable, while his sister appeared lost within herself.
Safi, cheerless, said nothing. Her eyes fretted, and her lips trembled, her mouth buttoned up as if she distrusted the words she might speak.
“...It’s quite painful to look at,” Kylian said honestly. The knight’s expression took on a dutiful sorrow—restrained, but legitimate. Then, he met Naomi’s eyes gently. “There’s no shame in grieving even for things which we don’t understand.”
“Grief?” Naomi repeated. A swell of emotion surged through her. “We concluded she lived a happy life, no?”
Muddled as her feelings were, she smiled wryly; they started to crest, and so Naomi smiled all the broader for it. “It is something to celebrate,” she said sincerely. “Especially as it seems we’ve found the legendary vault.”
All eyes turned to the dark tunnel underneath the watercolor portrait. Though it was as tall and wide as any door, the tunnel’s depth—unknown yet unmistakably considerable—gave it quite the ominous presence. Especially since all four of the tunnels looked identical.
“...It is all yours, Duke eum-Creid,” Naomi said, crossing her arms. “Oops. Ailn, I meant to say.”
___________________
As Ailn pressed on further and further into the darkness of the tunnel, he felt the hairs raise on the back of his neck. It was getting colder, and soon he heard the soft patter of shallow water pooling beneath his feet.
Momentarily, though, he was on dry ground again.
Ailn dipped his lantern closer to the floor of the tunnel. The slope was uneven, and depressions in the ground collected water into puddles. Now that he stopped to listen, he could hear the faint trickling and gurgling sounds of water flowing in and out of small fissures and pores in the rock.
He was most likely near the water line.
Cautiously continuing on, it wasn’t long before he reached the end of the tunnel, and entered what was presumably the vault. Curious to finally see what they’d spend so long searching for, and what was so meticulously hidden, Ailn raised his lantern to get a good look.
It was big. He’d expected a small chamber, used for storage. But instead, the cavern was vast—larger, even, than the antechamber if not quite as tall, with a shape that reminded him of a massive longhouse.
This was a smuggler’s cove, alright. Or it used to be, before Noué had appropriated it.
At the same time, the cavern’s natural features were carved into stone furniture. There were alcoves turned into shelves, and some recesses deep enough they were essentially closets. Ledges along the wall were smoothed out tables, with large rocks for seats.
Rusted shackles were clustered in niches along the far wall. He recalled Naomi’s words.
‘I very much doubt they were only moving wines and spices.’
At this point it was clear: these smugglers were moving more than just goods. They’d mastered this cavern into a cozy space for a vile task, and Ailn had to stifle his repulsion.
He sighed, rubbing underneath his eyes with his free hand. Unfortunately, he could also understand why someone calloused enough would take the space for themselves—all its amenities were already fashioned, with no worries of rot or decay. Stone needed no maintenance.
Halting a moment, Ailn gave it some thought. They’d passed other caverns on the way here that were likely just as furnished—Cora had prevented them from entering any. Why go so deep?
That’s when the painting on the cavern’s wall a little bit ahead caught his eye. Paintings, actually. He walked up to the closest one.
It was Lumitheia.
…No, it was Cora, probably. And it looked pretty amateur. The shading was patchy, way too dark in places, with edges too distinct. The highlights were too bright. The nicest way to describe it would be ‘flat.’
A harsher critic would call it muddy and discolored.
Even its materials outed it as a fledgling work: sailcloth stretched over rough wood, with cheap looking pigments.
“Last hundred paintings of her life?” Ailn muttered, glancing down the line of paintings. “Yeah, right.”
If anything it was the first hundred. Now that he thought about it, it made no sense that she’d have the time to produce new works at the same time as she was working on her magnum opus.
The next piece was… Cora again—still mistaken as Lumitheia. A young blonde woman, caught in a beam of light in the dark, hovering gently above as if going toward the light.
“It’s got soul,” Ailn admitted.
Lacking refinement and resplendence, it had charm instead. The kind of innocent radiance only an excited kid could really capture in their art.
The next piece was, again, Cora. Noué got her hand on some pastels. The texture was uneven in spots… even cakey. She must have been so eager to use them that she just slathered the pigments on—literally getting carried away with crayons.
It looked like Cora was posing.
She was definitely posing. Her arms were tucked shyly behind her back, face turned lightly away. Unlike the last two paintings, she stayed grounded despite her wings, one foot delicately pointed in front of the other.
With each successive portrait, Noué’s art got better, while Cora, inversely, seemed to slowly lose her divinity. She was becoming more human.
As if in parallel, Ailn realized he’d been climbing a subtle ramp along the wall. The far end of the vault was essentially a second story, and he’d reached a sort of landing, where he stopped, completely struck by the jump in ability.
“I’m not sure about the pieces from her childhood, but this is definitely worth something…” Ailn mused.
The portrait was in silverpoint. It was a distinct step into artistic maturity, from the luxury of the material to the delicacy of her lines.
Rather than a full bodied portrait, this was a head study. The fine details of Cora’s face were portrayed so intimately, down to the dimples in her smile.
Past the landing, a long succession of silverpoints lined the wall, as the ramp wound its way to the second story’s ledge. Noué seemed adamant on refining her technique. Cora adopted increasingly complex poses, set against a broader range of environments. Here, she sat at the top of a cliff. In another, she lay sidelong in the water.
Slowly her smile disappeared.
And when he reached the second story, a final portrait in charcoal waiting at the top, Cora’s expression was one of sorrow and fear.
She was prone, facing the viewer and crawling through a cramped space. Her head was craned painfully and her eyes tilted upward. Wet strands of hair lay half disheveled across her face, while the rest floated on the shallow water in which she was partially submerged. A single hand took up a third of the composition, disproportionately large with foreshortening, almost as if pressed desperately against the medium itself.
Even through the dark and rough medium of charcoal, Ailn could tell by the shadows that she was facing a light filtering through a thin slit.
Noué’s shading was perfect.
