Bernicia Reliquay woke in the only room that had ever been hers, where she had slept since she left the nursery. In the dim light of early morning she saw the familiar furnishings around her: her tall bed, her dressing table, her reading chair, the dragon-painted urn from far Kadakan. Across the room her favorite tapestry was only a dark rectangle, but she knew the design by heart and could easily summon it into her mind. In its center, a man and woman looked into each other’s eyes. They were young and richly dressed, the man in red, the woman in blue. They were the only pretty part of the scene. They stood amidst fearful lifeless crags where every step would have brought risk of death. In the top right corner raged a distant storm, and in the top left a far-off city burned. But their eyes were fixed on each other.
The most important thing in the room was the window beside her bed. From there, she could look out across the city and the harbor to the sea and the far horizon. When her brother became Viscount he had offered her grander rooms in a newer and more lavish part of the palace, but she refused. He did not ask why, so she did not have to invent a lie. What would she have said? “I am comfortable here, I like the sea breeze, I like the carving around the windows, it is close to the library.” If would not have been difficult. She had always been adept at concealing her thoughts, and her brother would not have been curious anyway. He never troubled himself about the whims of women.
The true reason she needed to sleep by this window was one she would never reveal to anyone: because from here she could look out to the sea and prove to herself that her nightmares were not real.
She did not see the Wave, for she had not been born. And yet she saw it almost every night in her dreams. She had never seen it, but it was the most important thing in her life, the shaper of everything. She had never seen it, but it had scarred her mind like it had scarred everything else in her world.
It had come out of the terrible storm that raged that day all across the Middle Sea. People said the storm was the Mage Lords fighting on their island, but no one knew, for they were gone and had left no explanations behind them.
The Wave had roared across the storm-dark sea, tall as a range of hills, faster than the wind, louder than thunder. It was vaster than the reach of human dreaming, more deadly than human malice could comprehend. It had reached out all around the Middle Sea, crushing every city on its shores and erasing thousands of smaller places. Nor was that all, for it was charged with the dark power of whoever had sent it and whatever foul world it had been summoned from, and all those it drowned were transformed into monsters.
The old world had been shattered and a new world, the one where Bernicia lived, had been born. A lesser world. A fallen world.
In her dreams Bernicia saw the wave a hundred different ways. Sometimes she rode on its crest high in the sky, watching its awesome progress across the sea before being hurled downward to her death when it reached the land. Sometimes she stood before it on the shore, seeing it tower above her, feeling in her skin the coming crash of cold water and colder death. Sometimes she saw it as if from on high, watching it consume cities and nations. Sometimes she was in the palace as water rose around her, chasing her higher and higher until she reached the top of the tallest tower and looked out to behold nothing but the storm-tossed sea where her city should have been. Usually she woke when it struck, but sometimes she was taken inside it to be drowned and reborn with a mostly human body but the ravening soul of a shark, always hungry for human flesh.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
But whatever form the dream took, there was only one way to soothe the fear it brought and still her wildly beating heart: to look out through this window and let the dawn show her that the sea was still there, unchanged.
She stood and walked to the window, letting the view work its healing magic upon her. Once the night terror had passed her favorite part of the day would begin, when she was alone, looking out across the slumbering city, imagining it as a place of peace. The city was not truly quiet, for the fishermen were already loading their boats and the bakers already stirring the coals in their ovens and preparing the day’s first batch of loaves. The night watchmen were still out, making their rounds. But here in the palace only a few servants moved quietly through the halls and corridors. In her room at dawn there was no one she had to fool or impress, no need to hide her thoughts. She could let them wander free along all the paths she must block off as soon as she passed out her door.
Usually at this time she looked straight out the window toward the sea. But if she turned to her left she could see something else: the drowned half of her city, ruled by wave-spawned monsters. No lights ever shone there, and there was no sound but the wind. Not even birds flew. Beyond the rubble wall that divided Calyxia in half was a place that was no longer of this world. The power of the wave had seized it and carried it off to the dark realms of horror and shadow from whence it came. All Calyxians tried to forget that this kingdom of death was there, just over the wall, but the shadow it cast was always on the edge of their thoughts.
If she leaned out a little and looked to her right Bernicia could see the full sweep of the city from the harbor to the great market and the landward wall. Facing that way she saw the pattern and color of her city, the bustle of its commerce, the banners flying from the towers of its strong walls. Beyond the wall loomed hills covered with vineyards and olive groves, and beyond them the distant mountains. Facing that way, she could almost believe that everything was well in her life.
But that was a lie.
Sometimes, when she could do it without being detected, she would look hard at an older Calyxian, always asking the same question: who is more unlucky, you are I? I, who never knew the Empire, or you, who must always have its glory in your mind as you look around at this blighted, shrunken age? I, who have never known peace and safety, or you, who know what it was like to have those things and must now live in an age without them? I for whom the Mage Lords are nothing but stories, or you who knew them and can never forget sights you will never see again?
Some people had survived the wave in body but not in spirit. They had lost all hope and all desire. They would not even speak of the past, like mothers who will never name a dead child. They passed numbly through their lives until they died, perhaps only wishing to be reborn into the time before.
But others had fought on. They had built new ships to replace those smashed by the Wave and sailed them across the Middle Sea, finding that some old cities were gone but others were like Calyxia, damaged but determined to rebuild. With the rulers of the empire gone they had relearned how to govern themselves. They rebuilt their cities, or as much of them as was needed with so many citizens gone. When pirates attacked their cities they fought back, and they defended their lands against invaders from the mountains and the vast plains. Bernicia’s father had been one of those who never despaired but fought until his dying breath. But he had died, battling over a border fortress now lost, leaving his children to lead a besieged land.
Bernicia turned from the window. She must now summon her maid and dress for another day of receiving ambassadors and presiding at festivals, smiling at everyone to keep up their spirits, never letting any of them see the storm of worry and doubt that raged ceaselessly in her own soul.
