Beautiful and Broken

21.

It was dark again by the time we managed to make ourselves presentable. Ivan was standing outside the door, maybe just waiting, maybe guarding us.

"Step in, Ivan, and give me a status report." Clearly it took Aleksander much less than me to switch back into business mode.

"Yes, General. The King and Queen are in exile, Prince Vasily dead, killed by the nichevoya, along with more than half of the Grisha we found at the palace." Ivan turned to me before he continued. "Prince Nikolai would like you to know that the Sun Summoner is conscious and they are both ready to speak with you."

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Nikolai looked like an illustration from a fairy tale, the handsome young prince in his shiny uniform. Alina's hair turned white, giving her figure an unearthly quality in spite of the dark circles under her eyes. The contrast was stark between their tense postures and the relaxed way Aleksander kept his hand at the small of my back. We sat down facing them, Aleksander stretching his long legs under the table, something of a distraction as it made me think of things completely unrelated to our present circumstances.

"Altair. Would it be rude of me to ask you to tell me more about yourself?" Nikolai had the advantage of all people raised in high society: when confronted with the most improbable of situations, just fall back on your manners. "I'm a witch of Atlantis," I've announced, straightening my back. And did I just raise my chin just slightly just the way an acquaintance of mine uses to do? 

"I've been sent by the Atlantis Council of Magic to investigate the Fold and find a solution for ending its existence." I turned out to do a little more in the end, only violating every single rule and regulation of the Council in the process. Oh well.

"Atlantis?" Nikolai asked bewilderedly.

"I know, I know, we don't exist. Please take my presence as a proof of the opposite."

Alina was regarding me with a doubted look. "Just whose side are you really on, Altair of Atlantis?"

"No one's. Or everyone's, as it goes. I'm on the side of the land and its magic." It must have been hard to piece it all together: me, first standing against Aleksander, now sitting besides him as he quietly regarded me with a mischievous grin. I couldn't help them with this, they just needed to roll with it.

"Now, if you'll allow me to explain why I've requested your attention. Please bear with me, I need to start this from the very beginning, to be able to make it clear in the end."

"We're all ears," Nikolai answered. Did I hear correctly that Alina uttered a small grunt?

"One of the base laws of magic is that it needs to be used, it needs an outlet to express itself. In the times before ours, when no humans were able to wield it, the magic created its own beings: dragons, unicorns, elves and trolls and so on."

"Fairy tales," Alina interjected.

"There's much truth to the fairy tales," I've continued. "After a while, the first witches and wizards were born, same in Ravka as in Atlantis or any other part of the world. But at a certain point, the circumstances of which I was unable to decipher, the mages in Ravka decided that the act of creation, the most fundamental act of magic, was forbidden – merzost. As you can imagine, this hasn't done any good to the magic itself, along with the fact that Grisha were persecuted by the people who didn't wield magic. So the magic of the land did what it did a long time ago: it created a being on its own, to wield it the way it was always intended – the daughter of Ilya Morozova."

"My mother?" asked Alexander incredulously.

"Just think about it: your grandfather a Fabrikator, your grandmother without the ability to wield magic. There is no logic to their daughter becoming what she is. And still, she existed, but she was also human, vulnerable, in need of love and protection her parents were unable to give her. She was shunned by his parents, rejected by all the other people surrounding her, and then finally, left alone."

I've stopped, taking a long breath before I could continue. This was the hardest part.

"She was meant to wield her magic in its fullness, to revel in it, to change the fate of her land into something better. But the way she must have felt, all her loneliness, her pain, her suffering, it turned her magic, the magic of the land itself, into shadows, and her into someone more powerful than any other Grisha. And his son inherited her full powers, along with the darkness residing in her." I looked at Aleksander. His eyes were fixed on me, the hints of tears in their corners. I reached for his hand under the table.

"If you're curious of what I'm talking about, you only need to look at the Fold. That is what happens when magic is misused, when it gets broken. And still, it made another attempt to heal itself. It created the Sun Summoner."

Alina was staring at me with wide eyes.

"You must see the pattern. You don't even know who your parents are, you just appeared out of nowhere, with powers that nobody's ever heard of before. You're his opposite, the light that is meant to balance the darkness. But a light that also needs to be balanced itself. If you happened to win, to destroy him, the same fate would have befallen Ravka, except maybe with monsters of light instead of monsters of darkness." I've paused again, taking in their reactions. It was pretty much what I expected, utter shock.