Page 30 of We Were Eternal Once

That word again, that insult. I grind my teeth. This is why I stopped speaking to the humans in the taverns. Their conversation was dull at best, and tedious at the worst. They were food and nothing else. As such, you were the only other I spoke to. This was the longest conversation I’d had with someone other than you in decades.

“She is more than just a maker,” I hiss.

“She?” Theon’s eyebrows rise, considering me anew.

“Yes, she. Aletheia,” I say.

“The Mother of Silence?” Theon asked, his already white face paling.

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I don’t have an answer, because I do not know.

I think back to this moment often. What if I had left when I wanted to? Broken his wrist, left him crumpled on the ground as I walked out of the library. Used the words and names he gave me to start my own research. Would I have ever found answers? Would I have found the others like us on my own?

What would my life have looked like had I not stayed to hear his words?

“Your maker is an Elder?”

Knowledge is a Curse

Elder.

That is the word that spurred my obsession with this library. It was the word whispered by the vampires in Rome. It was letters you danced between and refused to face. I had my answer at last, though it invited more questions.

You were an Elder, just as Gaius and Livia said.

There are no Elders. A lie. I’d always suspected this was the case—your retreat from the word was proof enough.

But—no, perhaps it wasn’t a lie. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? You warned me not to dig or ask. You didn’t entertain questions that were too painful to answer. But lie? Never.

Not to me.

“You’re mistaken,” I tell Theon. “There are no Elders.”

He scrubs his face with one large, sprawling hand. “Then she is dead? And you live?”

“No, she is not dead,” I recoil. The thought of you being dead burns me from the inside. I dig the heels of my palms into my thighs to keep from shaking. My evening meal sloshes in my stomach, threatening to be upended on the table.

I close my eyes and try to steady myself. Dead. How did I even form the word?

“Then there are Elders,” Theon says. When I open my eyes, it’s to his critical face, his gaze tracking over mine warily. I bare my teeth and he flinches.

“You’re a feral thing,” he remarks. “Your turn to ask a question.”

“What is an Elder?”

“I thought there are no Elders,” he says. I hate the smirk that slides across his face, as though he’s caught me in a lie.

“There are none, but once there were, yes?”

“Is that your question? ‘Were there once Elders?’”

“No. My question is what is an Elder.”

He drums his fingers along the top of the table, considering. “I don’t know much about them.” I wait, staring at him. Willing him to answer, to give me something. If this is how it will be, prying information from him like picking thorns from the hem of a dress…I’d rather kill him and explore the library myself.

Does compulsion work on others like us? I should try.

“The Elders are the originals, the first to die and rise again. Their numbers are unconfirmed, though it stands to reason that there was a first, does it not? But who? No one knows, because the Elders haven’t been seen in centuries.”