CHAPTER 49: THE NAME THAT CALLED HER

The Hall of Order had been emptied of its usual audience.

No media. No broadcast. No applause.

No Councilors or Representatives of Houses.

Only Councilor Zhen and her House Elders, along with Councilor Vale and his, remained.

The moment had been planned for centuries. The first seed was planted when Saen was conceived. A love child between a Roen - a true Roen - and a Zhen.

The Zhen family had finally acquired Roen blood in their lineage.

———

The blessing and the curse that made the Roens prosper and hold their absolute power was in their blood. A pact made with an immortal - a divine being.

It started off on a whim. The immortal took an interest in a young man with great ambitions. A brilliant young mind. Gifted. Industrious.

He had everything but lacked one thing - God’s grace.

Failure after failure.

No matter how hard he tried. How genius his idea was. How meticulous his plans were.

Just when he thought he was close to achieving true greatness, he failed.

Unfortunate weather. Wrong direction of the wind. A freak accident.

But he was a zealous man. Devoted. His faith unshakable.

He prayed. He sacrificed.

All for nothing.

In the end, in his darkest hour - when everything he wished for became unattainable, when everyone he needed deserted him, and when every hope he’d ever had was crushed-

He met a silver-haired woman.

She quietly listened to his lamenting.

She smiled as he talked of his suffering.

She laughed as he confessed how his faith had now turned into a burning rage.

What an interesting young man you are - she said.

You have a heart, a heart that loves so much and hates so much - I like it, she said.

Then she leaned in closer to him, a grin on her face.

Say, young man. Why don’t we-

Build a tower that’s so tall that it could touch the sky?

How? The man asked.

The woman, her gray eyes flaring, asked in return.

Who needs God’s grace when you can have devil’s blessing?

That was the start.

The young man was Roen, who later came to be known as the Founder.

A revolutionary, a pioneer, and later- an icon.

———

Cassian led Lin. Her shoes echoed faintly against the marble floor, but even that sound felt absorbed into the air, swallowed by the solemnity of the moment.

Though she had once marched here in full view of the Council, this time, there were no eyes to applaud. No ritual but obligation. A final sealing.

The light in the Hall had been dimmed. The Roen banners hung on the walls, now flanked by the Zhen and Vale banners.

Under the high ceiling and the towering pillars, Lin looked very small.

At the foot of the dais, Cassian stopped.

"The Compact demands a bearer," he said quietly. "The Guardian Protocol was signed under your seal. This is a reaffirmation."

Lin did not respond. Her eyes followed the edges of the steps, the chair at the top - a throne by all intent, the one she claimed as her own in the Grand Council.

But it was not hers.

It never had been.

Yet, she began to ascend again.

Each step sounded impossibly far from the next. As if time itself had lengthened the distance between movement. The great seat above waited. Like a cage disguised as a crown.

Cain and Abe stood at the far end of the hall, behind the pillars, in the shadow - unable to do anything but watch. Elune was not present.

The last time Lin had entered this room, the councilors sat in rows and admired. They rose and bowed. They respected.

She did not fully understand what was happening, but she felt she was doing the right thing - and she did it well. She performed to the expectations, or according to Cassian, performed above the expectations.

It was nice to be praised.

Now, though, she couldn’t even remember what she had thought it meant.

She reached the final step.

She looked down and saw his figure - small, composed, watching. Behind him, Councilor Vale and Councilor Zhen stood in formal arrangement. They gave no signal, no nod of approval. The Elders of each house were all present too. They looked expectant - or even triumphant.

This was no coronation.

It was ritual.

Lin sat.

The chair was colder than she remembered. The moment her body touched the surface, something flickered in the hall - a reaction. The Hall seemed to twitch, once - as if it couldn’t bear to watch what was to take place, but had no other option than to bear witness. Such was its function.

Cassian wrote the date and time on a scroll. The moment was logged.

"Lin Roen," Councilor Zhen called, voice level. "Do you accept the duty placed upon you under the Guardian Compact?"

Lin knew she was meant to say yes.

Saying yes now - firmly, in a determined tone, would have made everyone here happy.

A round of applause, smiles of acknowledgment, a warm welcome.

All the things that she lacked previously could have been fulfilled.

An easy thing to say.

She’d come all this way because she couldn’t say no.

Yet, something inside her held her back now.

She felt something awaken inside her.

The girl Lin had seen in the Archive.

The girl that she saw in her dream; the one who ran around the silver-haired lady.

This girl was grown - and was still growing - inside her. She looked both happy and sad at the same time. She too was expecting Lin to say yes now - as if that’d free her from something that Lin couldn’t see.

But with the emergence of the girl, with her growing presence, Lin felt she was fading. She always thought when God assigned a color to everyone at their birth, she must have gotten the color gray. She made everything - and everyone - dull.

There was no vibrant moment in her life, no vivid memories, no instances she could recollect that bloomed with rainbow-colored joy. But she accepted her life to be such. Since a long time ago already. Her happiness was a quiet one. She was content to just be there and not draw any attention to herself - a person she was never comfortable with being.

In this final moment, though, even her gray color was fading. She was becoming transparent. Her soul was being unthreaded from her body. Her heartbeat started to sound foreign to her. The blood flowing in her veins no longer felt hers.

Lin Roen wasn’t dying. She was disappearing.

Her memories were laid on the ground as a jig-saw puzzle. It wasn’t anything impressive, but it was hers - a picture that told the story of her life and who she was.

The girl inside her was undoing the puzzle. With each piece she picked up, Lin was losing a piece of herself. Lin wanted to ask her to stop, but she could not speak. The girl only smiled, as if to say everything was fine and all Lin had to do was let go.

As the girl continued to harvest Lin’s memories, tears started to roll down her cheeks.

She may not have had a memorable life, but whatever they were, those memories were hers.

She may not have liked who she was, but whoever she was, this was the life she lived.

Lin always wanted to hide in the background, to remain unnoticed.

But there was something incredibly sad about being forgotten.

Not only to have her life cut short and all the future denied, but having her past taken away - to be erased completely, as if she’d never existed.

Lin was used to being alone. Solitude was her home, her comfort.

But for the first time in her life, she wished - she wished with all her heart that somebody, somewhere, would remember her.

It was a wish that she denied herself all her life.

A desire that she never admitted she had.

She wanted to be loved.

She’d been telling herself she didn’t need such things. Something like love was too overwhelming for her. It was something that she didn’t deserve. She wasn’t entitled to affection. She wasn’t worthy of being acknowledged. Her life wasn’t interesting enough to be remembered.

But now she realized.

All this time, she was lonely.

Incredibly lonely.

As the girl was about to pick up the last piece of Lin’s puzzle, Lin’s mind drifted toward the last beautiful thing she saw, a rather recent memory that still remained before her complete erasure.

A silver-haired lady stood in a flowering courtyard, and the girl - the one who was now consuming Lin from inside - running away from the lady. The girl found something - happy. Lin wished that she too found something happy.

It was all too late though, and perhaps she should just be happy for these two instead.

But her heart was filled with a sudden longing at the sight. Looking at the back of the silver-haired enigma, she wanted to call out to her one last time. She wanted to see this lady turn and look at her, to see, to witness - and to keep in memory who Lin Roen was even if everyone else in the world forgot.

Then she remembered.

The name she once heard in a dream and found beautiful.

The name she had no right to say.

Lin hesitated, but finally dared to call out to her, in a whisper.

"Lucille"

———

Luc’s eyes flared open.

The darkness around her swirled.

Her body suspended in the void twitched.

Her hair glowed in silver - her gray eyes shimmered.

A voice had called her back. Fragile, but true.

Lucille had been summoned.