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“She lives?” is all Yurie manages to say.
Ebrietas does not nod, but reaches into Yurie’s mind, sending flashes of the Byrgenwyrth spider, as if she is shining through miles of smoke. Bright, loved, empty, full, Yurie tries desperately to put words to the sensation Ebrietas is impressing behind her eyes. The only full image they can piece together, each adding their own, is of their old friend Rom.
--
She stood barely at Yurie’s shoulder, tightly curled hair falling in waves over her shoulders despite the lazy ponytail. The tail of her uniform drags across the floor behind her, her mind too busy to ever stop her work to file for a new one. Yurie keeps asking if she can simply hem it, and Rom keeps telling her she likes it this way.
Yurie isn’t sure that’s true. She’s seen Rom trip.
“Rom,” Yurie calls out across the hall, “Good morning.” It was the only time of day she ever saw her anymore, before she disappeared to the research hall to speak with Micolash for hours on end, at times Yurie would not see her again for days.
Yurie knows her place, she is more often sent to collect reagents from the still accessible parts of the Tomb of the Gods than she is invited to the table with the thinkers. Being raised among natural scholars did not a scholar make.
Rom never discounted her. She listened to her ideas on the off chance she had them, wrote down her suggestions for further experimentation, and listened happily when she told of her forays into the deep woods near Yharnam, or the tomb itself. Rom herself could hardly transform a weapon, so going on her own was something of a dream.
Rom had even introduced her to Ebrietas, for which she was always grateful.
The past few months had changed her. Everyone was somewhat quiet, tensions growing between groups of students as Laurence and Wilhelm went at each other’s throats, people rallying to either side before a conflict was even openly acknowledged. But Rom seemed worse off than most, almost like she was disappearing.
“Oh,” Rom finally seems to notice Yurie, and waves weakly, “Good morning.” Is all she says. Her eyes are rimmed with dark, dark bags, and more than that, they seem unfocused, and not just in the way of someone who hasn’t slept in too long.
There are no updates. Not a mention of her personal attempts at growing Lumenwood, nothing of her work with the blood of Kos, not even a smile. Yurie missed that. When Rom smiled, it covered her whole face.
She was gone in moments, to Micolash’s next lecture.
--
Though she had lived the memory in its entirety, exactly as she had remembered it, when she returns to herself it has been a matter of moments. Ebrietas has turned her face away, staring down at the altar in front of her. She radiates something that makes Yurie’s stomach churn, her tentacles twitching and frantic.
“What should I do?” she doesn’t know why she still asks aloud.
Ebrietas reaches to her again, and hits a wall built of Yurie’s own memory.
--
Rom had brought them all together.
Yurie knew of the presence of the Old God, of course, there were none who did not, but her location was secret to all but few. Even many of the hired prospectors who first stumbled on the sleeping giant were denied access.
They had, of course, disappeared since.
Micolash, Willem, Laurence – it was men like them who knew her, who were permitted to know her, but Rom had her ways. Unassuming, quiet. They underestimated the depths of her drive.
They had been together in the Lumenflower gardens, pretending it was a quiet place for study. Rom rests with her head in Yurie’s lap, letting her long, thin fingers comb through her dark curls. Reports from Micolash lay untouched next to them, not that his handwriting was legible anyway.
Yurie drones on, retelling some tale of cutting down such horrid scourge beasts in the ruins of the forest settlements in search of a rare reagent, maybe with the slightest of exaggerations. She really had nearly been run through with a pitchfork, but the part about grabbing it out of the beast’s hand—the part that made Rom gasp – was up for debate.
“It loses its charm, sometimes, with your hand buried in something’s rib cage every day.” Yurie admits.
“Yurie! That’s disgusting.”
“And you playing with Kos flesh is sanitary?”
“I wear gloves.”
“As do I.”
“Properly disinfected?”
Yurie huffs, and tries to seem properly offended even as she continues to pet the woman in her lap. Rom is trembling with laughter on her, a deep belly laugh that rings louder than she ever speaks.
“…How would you like something less stale, then?” she says when her laughter subsides.
“And what might that be, my dear?”
“Let me show you.”
Rom takes her by the hand, however reluctant Yurie is to leave her indent in the soil, and drags her off to a tiny door, hardly visible among the garden walls. She never would have seen it had she not watched Rom open it.
Runes danced across its surface, ones Yurie was more confident in reading than anything related to blood. “Communion” in three forms, it’s most complicated version, unlike the one she had memorized.
She takes her across a balcony above the alter, and to an elevator that seemed to descend into the center of the world.
--
“I’m sorry.” Yurie whispers, “You were trying to tell me something.”
Ebrietas sings a high note, one that resonates pleasantly in Yurie’s gut. Forgiveness. Agreement. Missing her too. A tentacle curls around Yurie’s hand. She may speak well with the gods, but human comforts never lose their meaning.
“What did you need me to do? For her.”
Images of shields, gilded Cainhurst armor, people throwing themselves in front of others, over them. They don’t make Yurie’s head hurt as much, but she’s always surprised by the clarity with which Ebrietas remembers her and Rom’s stories, such small details from such a small span of time.
--
“You know so much more than us, but you deign to use our words.” Rom had once said, after she and Yurie and Ebrietas had tried to trade coherent tales for hours.
Ebrietas shows them her plain room in the tomb of the gods. People leaving. Long, empty hallways.
They tell her of bustling castles, cities, settlements and towns, and she listens.
--
“Protect her? From what?” the second it leaves her mouth, she knows the answer.
The night had gone on too long, both knew, already the dusk had felt like days and the hours passed like honey dripping down the skyline. The ward was overrun with beasts, remaining scholars and doctors that were not lost to time were lost to the old blood, roaming with their lanterns and canes, students infested with maggots—
Ebrietas rests a tendril on her holstered cane.
Yurie nods.
“Where is she?”
Ebrietas sends her an image of a lake more like a mirror, so still you would only know it was water from bugs leaving their tiny trails across it. Something rests beneath it – something more precious than gold, though Yurie cannot quite see it, again lost in the swirling smoke.
The building, though, is the moved Byrgenwerth campus. She would know it anywhere, though she had only visited its grand halls once. It rests somewhere ravaged by time, though everything had been in the hours of this night.
“I will go to her.” Yurie assures, running a hand down the side of Ebrietas’s face, “Do not fear for me”
Ebrietas coils her tendrils tighter around Yurie’s arm for just a moment, another holding her tight around the waist, close to her face. Yurie kisses her for a long moment, and the tentacles reluctantly fall away, still twitching in the water.
She must leave with that, if she lingers any longer she will not be able to.
--
“The world is shaking.” Rom had said to her once.
The last words she ever heard from her, whispered breathy against her lips in a dark corner of the campus where she had slipped in to meet her.
She had to run before she could ask Rom what she meant.
--
It seemed apparent now, staring at the remains of Byrgenwerth: the world had been trying to crack open, and it had finally succeeded.
She climbs the dusty stairs of the main hall, quietly, as if she may disturb something sleeping. Old chairs, that look as though they have not been used in a decade, books falling apart, eaten by moths and time.
Byrgenwerth had not been empty for so long. Had it? She tries to think, she tries to piece together events, a story, an explanation, and smoke swarms her mind’s eye.
She opens the chest, and takes an old uniform into her hands.
It is filthy, bathed in dust that Yurie tries to shake away along with moth balls that had long lost their effectiveness. Just one. Something compels Yurie to bring it to her face, and inhale deeply.
The smoke clears for one sharp second, showing her the lake, showing her someone glowing beneath it, different now though filled with the same light. She is flowering at last, bathed in moonlight.
Yurie gently places the uniform back in the chest and closes it quietly.
Footsteps that are not her own ring against the tile floor, lacking the wet sound of a mangled student, almost certainly boots.
Yurie draws her cane, and prepares to guard Rom – whoever she is now, however she is now, whenever she is now.