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 lifted a hand to wipe away the dark stain at the corner of Fleur's mouth, but the moment his fingers brushed against her skin, he flinched and forced his hand back.
"I think you may have a fever—"
"I'm not sick," Fleur said adamantly.
As Abel gritted his teeth, his gaze was involuntarily drawn to the reflection of the wind chime in her iris.
Following her line of sight, a question slipped from his lips almost instantaneously,
"Do you think that statue could be tied to how we obtain the artifact?"
After some thought, Fleur responded, "That might explain why something so jarringly out of place was left here."
A slender thread of hesitation stirred within her. 'But why? The passage keeper wouldn't assist us… this must be a visible convenience meant for her own ends.'
After a while, the muscles along Fleur's jaw tensed
Any explanation of what she felt seemed to elude her, sitting at the very tip of her tongue, then retreating the moment she reached for it.
It felt disturbingly akin to her mind forcibly withholding knowledge.
These overwhelmingly intense sensations of déjà vu had first seeped into her thoughts after the ominous melody began humming.
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?'
"This wind chime must be stirring fragments of my erased memories in order to distract me somehow."
"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 and 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.
There, behind the chime's mounting, was a bare, unassuming metal loop.
Recognition ignited in Abel's mind.
From his prior observations of the other statues, he recalled similar loops that had been meant to cradle the 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 coiled in Abel's gut as he became increasingly perplexed. "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. "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 loud breath. "You saw the lanterns on the other statues. Rusty chains, and hardly transparent glass, but this one… this one is pristine. Unnaturally so."
Instinctively, Fleur cast about, tentatively searching their surroundings.
As her gaze fell upon the wilting blooms protruding from Maerci's long, skeletal fingers, she weighed the implication: the passage keeper's Passage was their curse and their body.
It followed, then, that they would cling to control by any means, because if they did not, their form, with it, would corrupt them, sooner or later.
Once the truth had materialized, Fleur understood: Maerci must have broken the laws to stave off the inevitable.
"No wonder this felt out of place! 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.
He tersely 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 sound 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 emptiness 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, "Unfortunately, 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?"
Abel's eyes drifted to the subtle slump in Fleur's posture, then a shadow crossed his expression as though he felt reluctant to give voice to his thought.
"Perhaps," he said after a long pause, but his placid mask had slipped immediately afterward.
Dread filled his throat as he annunciated each word. "You've been the only one that these anomalies are targeting. This place… it must be tied to you,"
To Be Continued…