Chapter 44
"The Heelia Stone Born of Grain and Blood"
-Part III-
Not only had the seeds ceased to rain from the canopy above, but the petals drifting across the water now shriveled at the edges before sinking into the silt.
The peculiar vitality bled away from the bank, as if the stream was expelling its essence into the encroaching gray.
Even the plant-life flanking the shore succumbed swiftly, as the closest ones on the statue's far side collapsed into two brittle, desiccated filaments and drooped like decayed antennae.
Abel's gaze remained fixed on Fleur's vacant glaze that now enveloped her features.
There was no exhaustion on them, no trace of pain, not even the faint tremor of surprise.
The dark stain at the corner of her mouth had yet to fade.
He lifted a hand as if to wipe it away, but the moment his fingers brushed against her skin, he flinched, and a sharp warmth forced his hand back.
As Abel tightened his jaw, he fought to suppress the surge of foreboding strain seething through his bones.
"I think you may have a fever…" Abel murmured.
His voice carried the subdued compassion of someone speaking to a dying animal. "Let's go back, or at least somewhere with cleaner air. You can breathe fresh again, then we'll—"
"I'm not sick," Fleur interjected with an adamant tone.
The statue towering above bore no sign of gears or strings that might have allowed it to move as the others had.
Across from them, Maercie's presence pressed into the lush canopy like a misplaced painting left to fade in the sun.
However, Abel paid them no heed.
He found himself being more involuntarily drawn to the reflection of the wind chime in her iris.
Beneath his concern, however, an even ghastlier current began to stir within him: something ineffable, like the faint sonority of a recollection resting just beyond her awareness.
Thus, following her line of sight, a question slipped from his lips almost automatically, though the answer had already formed within his mind:
"Do you think… that statue could be tied to how we obtain the artifact?"
Fleur turned to him then, her expression edged with the faintest deadpan.
Abel's grimace tightened as he lowered his eyes and surveyed the statue from its head to its weathered base.
His hand reached toward the lower arm, which was stiffly drawn back as though designed to be pulled down.
Quietude stretched between them, but was disrupted when Fleur spoke. "That might explain why something so jarringly out of place was left here."
A knot of anxiety twisted within her mind. 'But for what purpose? The passage keeper wouldn't assist us… then this must either be a snare meant to draw our attention or some visible convenience crafted for her own ends.'
After a while, she became aware that her limbs no longer obeyed the subtle rhythm she once commanded.
The muscles along her jaw tensed and shifted imperceptibly.
Abel, as always, caught it.
Ordinarily, his attention would have been distributed across their surroundings, probing for distortions or unnatural traces.
But after they had emerged from the long corridor, it kept returning to Fleur.
Every change in her expression and slight adjustment of posture pressed against his composure like a splinter beneath the skin.
Even the small cut marring her cheek seemed to gnaw at his nerves, amplifying his impatience into something dangerously close to desperation.
Fleur's next words carried a rawness in her throat, like thorns being pulled through coarse fabric.
"I'm starting to suspect… it might be an auditory trigger of some kind," she abruptly halted as if her suspicion emerged through resistance. "Or… or perhaps a sort of importation. I keep… renewing these strange things in my head."
Her brow furrowed. Even as she spoke, the right words seemed to elude her, setting at the very tip of her tongue, then retreating the moment she reached for them.
It felt disturbingly akin to knowledge forcibly withheld, as if her own mind had decided to turn traitor.
This disquieting familiarity, an aching, gnawing sense that she'd lived through this before, had first seeped into her thoughts after the faint, crystalline notes of the windchime drifted down the stream.
In plain terms, what she was experiencing was a phenomenon so common among those who had endured the sequences of the Sequel that it had earned a name of its own.
A reverent.
Fleur's fingers curled into her palm.
Inwardly, she cursed the bitter limitations imposed upon them.
'Damn it. The renewal of sequences doesn't even take everything, so why these? Surely I've walked this a thousand times before… yet all I have is blankness. What's the point of surviving if you're robbed of knowing you did?'
Clenching her fingers in visible frustration, Fleur's voice deepened slightly as she spoke with more resolve. "I suspect… this wind chime is somehow stirring fragments of my erased memories in order to distract me."
"Then perhaps meddling with it a few more times might 'impart' clearer knowledge," Abel remarked, his tone faintly laced with irony yet calm enough to sound like a casual suggestion.
"I'm only half-certain it's the cause. It might simply be the atmosphere here…" Fleur lowered her eyelids, masking the subtle tremors in her expression.
She stifled any mention of the strange bitterness crawling under her tongue, as if something indiscernible strove to force its way out whenever the liquid slipped across her palate.
Abel furrowed his brow slightly, and he studied the indigo-flecked bloom more intently as it swayed in the stagnant air.
He let his eyes trail along the slender wooden arm from which the chime dangled, and spoke almost as if in passing, "Shall we test it again, just to be certain?"
But before his fingers could rise to make contact, a glint of something caught his eye.
His hand stilled midair, before his fingers stiffened subtly at his side.
There, behind the chime's mounting, was a bare, unassuming metal loop.
It did not belong to the wind chime; rather, it seemed entirely disconnected, an orphaned remnant from elsewhere.
Recognition ignited in Abel's mind.
From his prior observations of the other statues, he recalled similar loops that had been meant to cradle lanterns.
'Was it broken off? Or… replaced?' The thought struck him like a cold draft creeping along the spine.
Unlike the pitted and rust-eaten fixtures of the other statues, this piece gleamed faintly in the gloom.
The small metal scrap appeared polished, as though someone had recently installed it, then just as deliberately swapped it out.
A tumult of sensation roiled in Abel's gut, and confusion flickered in his mind like a snuffed lantern. "There should have been a lantern hanging from the palm…"
Fleur's head turned sharply, her brow creasing. "What are you saying?"
"That ring behind the chime." Abel raised his hand to point deliberately. "This chime isn't the true accessory. It must've never belonged here. A lantern was originally intended to hang from that node. So, when it was removed, everything was thrown off."
He drew in a breath that sounded far too loud in the secluded atmosphere. "You saw the lanterns on the other statues. Rusty chains, and hardly transparent glass, but this one… this one is pristine. Unnaturally so."
Comprehension dawned across Fleur's features.
Her eyes widened slightly, and she began scanning their surroundings in mounting urgency.
"No wonder this felt out of place! Maerci must've set it here deliberately. Her garden has fallen into ruin, just like the original statues. She tried to hide them, but the underlying sequence pulled them back onto the original path, despite her attempts to shift their positions."
"The lantern was likely concealed in an adjacent corridor. Only part of it remains here, so that the passage has no choice but to adapt to the new lamp. It can't be moved back without separating the seam."
Abel nodded pointedly, as though he'd just won a long, spontaneous argument. With a skipping step that splashed water around Fleur's knees, prompting her to scowl, he added, "The wind‑chime must've been a temporary exchange, since tampering with a passage's resources risks the keepers' control over it."
His gaze found Maerci who stood steadfast amidst her garden's slow reversal.
"The first hum was from you. You tried to suppress the old statues by reasserting artifact interference. But it failed. Now that we've reached the destined site, everything reverts to its intended alignment, favoring us now." Abel's tone shifted, letting gravity settle around his words as he addressed the tall, white‑haired woman.
Every passage binds a fixed number of artifacts, one lantern per statue, and only one keeper holds domain control.
Yet these constructions did not remain single‑purpose, they were ingeniously adapted to serve multiple facets.
Such a design meant that even when one piece failed, it would not spell utter ruin.
When a participant faltered at one threshold, they were not abandoned.
The passage offered a path of redemption and tested alternative options within a bounded framework that was both constrained and guided.
Yet every system carried its boundaries; an underlying rhythm that preserved the integrity of the sequence.
Not even the artifacts escaped its governance
"'That is off‑limits,' Fleur finally remarked. 'Interference among their designs is barred. The Keepers are bound by their own designations."
Abel didn't acknowledge her. "Not entirely."
"But The Abundant—"
"They're bound by invocation," he interjected calmly. "There's no stipulation forbidding interchange. If they traded rather than assisted, then technically…"
Fleur's gaze lifted, her expression taut as though straining to piece together threads in the void above. "Then this chime… It's likely just a stage. It triggers a separate obstacle, hallucinations, perhaps."
A recollection stirred at the back of her mind, of the voice she vaguely recalled hearing before Maerci's appearance.
'She's trying to entangle our minds… slow our progress.'
She sighed heavily, and the gesture hadn't come from frailty alone, but as if releasing a coil of suppressed tension before she added, "Alas… she's succeeded. All we've done is name something that doesn't even belong."
Abel swiftly inquired, "What do we do if there's truly no way around it?"
For a long moment, silence reigned between them.
Abel's eyes drifted to the subtle slump in Fleur's posture, then a shadow crossed his expression as though he loathed to give voice to his thought.
"Perhaps," he said after a long pause, but his placid mask had slipped immediately afterward.
Anxiety tugged at his vocals, and he swallowed hard before forcing it out. "You've been the only one affected by these anomalies because this… is connected to you."
To Be Continued…