LTSV - Side Stories - 9 - Melody (Patreon)

Once the dust from Cecily’s ascension as a Saintess and the subsequent violent attempted coup, Cecily found a quiet place to have a very intense identity crisis. 

She’d told Adramalak that she was Cecily, not Melody, but Melody’s memories were beating under her skin like a second heart. The truth is that, even before she’d digested all of Melody’s memories, she known that didn’t want to be Melody.

Melody hadn’t been an independent person. That had been beaten out of her early on in her life. She might have learned to do better if she’d lived to grow older. Cecily thought that she might well have been on the path to doing it when King Heron’s men caught her that night, but it hadn’t happened in time to save Princess Alanamira and that failure haunted the rest of Melody’s days.

She’d had strong feelings for her princess, even though they’d never met. Cecily thought that Melody might have been projecting a little; that, by saving the Princess from the Demon King, she could save her past self in spirit from the people who’d owned her from the moment of her birth. 

The Veiled Goddess had shown her a vision in that temple, as part of her awakening. One second she’d been kneeling in front of the altar, wrapped up in her real father’s arms as he whispered reassurances in her ear that she was safe and that her mother would still love her even if they lacked a blood connection. He’d been in the middle of promising that they’d make sure that Sir Rousseau couldn’t hurt her anymore when Lady Serapha stepped onto the dais and everything went bright and fuzzy.

She opened her eyes in a strange non-space. In that space was a mirror. In that mirror was the image of a tired-looking woman, about twenty-five or thirty, with short sandy blonde hair. She was dressed in unfamiliar robes, which looked a little clerical to Cecily. She held a plain wooden staff in one hand and was touching the glass with the other. When Cecily looked down, she realized that she too was touching the glass and that the woman in the mirror had looked down with her. 

Startled, she met the woman’s eyes and was assaulted by a tidal wave of memories that were and were not her own. 

She, as Melody, remembered being born into a strange, almost feudal society structured around a caste system. She was born of the Os caste, which was a sort of chattel caste. There were other castes of slaves. In fact, almost the entire population of that small country was chattel, except for a small caste of freeborn masters. Most of the slave castes were tied to a specific plot of land or a particular organization, except for the Os caste. An Os could be sold freely and Melody had four different owners before she was seven.

Melody’s memories of how her country was destroyed were vague, but she did remember one thing. There was a monster swarm that swept the small country and tore almost everyone in its wake to shreds. Their army, which was mostly made up of untrained and enslaved prisoners of war, could do nothing to stop them. A neighboring country sent another army with a battlemage at its head; Princess Alanamira. The battlemage turned the tide of war almost all by herself. She called down lightning from the sky and razed entire battlefields by herself.

Princess Alanamira claimed Melody’s sacked country in the name of her father, King Heron. She spent about seven months as their interim governor and she made sweeping policy changes. There wasn’t really anyone left to oppose her. The entire region would need to be resettled by colonists. Melody’s ethnic group had been all but wiped out in the catastrophe and almost none of the survivors were freeborn so they weren’t about to argue when she outlawed the caste system. Melody was one of the few people who’d been rescued by temple missionaries and she found the temple lifestyle agreeable. She liked their humanitarian values and became a novitiate.

She never forgot the distant heroic figure who changed the course of her life.

A few years later, Dark King Adramalak kidnapped Princess Alanamira and forced her to become his bride. By then, Melody had awoken great powers as a Priestess and Oracle to the Gods. When King Heron put out a call for heroes to rescue his daughter, she was one of the first to answer. 

Melody was dedicated to her mission and found unexpected companionship in the other members of her party, although her memories of them were overshadowed by one particular figure. Peleon Sunblade was a young man of excellent birth and Melody had heard that he had been the leading candidate for Princess Alanamira’s hand in marriage before her abduction. He dominated the group and, even though they had no official leader, he gave the orders. Before long, they were known as ‘Peleon’s Blades.’

Peleon’s face twisted and melted in Melody’s memories like a destroyed watercolor painting. Cecily kept imagining Andrei in his place, even though she tried not to. It was confusing and upsetting. The same thing happened when she tried to remember the other Blades. Her memories as Cecily kept trying to superimpose the faces of her current friends on Melody’s memories of her old ones. 

In the vision, she was caught in the grips of that confusion when another figure appeared in the non-space with her; a lithe dark-haired woman with dark tan skin and pale gray eyes. She had hair down to the floor and the part of Cecily that would now, forever, be Melody recognized her.

The last time Melody had seen that face was when Princess Alanamira’s hand slipped through her fingertips and disappeared beneath the opaque waves of the Dark Lake. 

“Your highness?” she whispered, almost paralyzed with hope. She fell at the woman’s feet and reached out, despite all parts of her knowing better than to do that, to touch the hem of her red gown. It felt real. “You’re alright!”

“For a given value of ‘alright’,” the Princess replied, sounding deeply skeptical. There was something about her tone that shook the hold that Melody’s memory had on Cecily and she slowly started to recover herself. “Why are you here?”

She grappled with the memory of Melody. It was like fighting a giant serpent. Melody did not want to go quietly. She wanted to hold her princess’s hem and weep at her feet in shame, gratitude, and grief. 

When Cecily felt like herself again, she wasn’t kneeling at Princess Alanamira’s feet again. She was in front of another, familiar, and beloved figure; Mira was standing in front of her. 

“Mira?” she asked blankly. “How did you get here? Where did the Princess go?”

All at once, Cecily realized what it was about Princess Alanamira’s tone that had shaken her. She didn’t have Mira’s face or figure, but she sounded just like Mira when a stranger was touching her and she was about to have Mister Adelram snap their hand off at the wrist. 

“It’s you,” she heard herself say as the vision began to fray around that point and Cecily was suddenly back in her own body—except her body was different. She was hovering off the ground in the Temple of Blood. Her dress had been changed into a gown made of white samite. The was a sword in the air in front of her and she felt a voice from everywhere and nowhere say, ‘TAKE IT.’

Later, Lady Serapha would explain to her that the visions the Veiled Goddess bestowed on her Saintesses were rarely literal. The dead woman whose life memories Cecily now had was what the Veiled Goddess believed she needed in order to serve her function as Saintess and Cecily wished she could believe that when, almost immediately afterwards, she found the Demon King absconding with her sister. 

Adramalak was still a touchy subject for her, even weeks later. Mira had made it clear that she could take both of them in a fight at the same time, so Cecily was now less worried about him hurting her sister than when she had been when she found them in the alley together. She wasn’t fully reassured, but as she got some time to dissect Melody’s memories she found less and less evidence that Adramalak had actually done anything to hurt Princess Alanamira either. He had, by all accounts, been a loving and protective spouse.

Melody’s memories of King Heron were like her memories of Peleon. There was another face fighting to cover his up, but a less familiar one and Cecily didn’t realize whose until she charged into that reception room, intent on ensuring that her (current) Princess, sister, and all the royal children were safe. That was when she’d finally seen Prince Regent Hurandel in person, rather than as a glamorized state portrait. That was when she received Melody’s last and most painful memories. 

Even then, although she’d understood in an instant that Hurandel was a dangerous and untrustworthy person, it took her every spare moment for days until she winkled out the reason why. It was in that last memory, before Melody went under, when a man started to paint on her skin with blue paint that burned her. Melody had recognized the paint, but Cecily took longer to make the connection between that paint and the strange patterns painted on Princess Alanamira’s body when she fought the monsters. They glowed white hot when she used her magic, like phosphorus. 

There was something wrong about that paint, but Melody’s memories held no answers for her.

Lady Serapha had told her that the vision was allegorical, not literal. So maybe that scene at the end where Princess Alanamira turned into Cecily’s Mira wasn’t a warning about Adramalak. Maybe it was a guidepost about who Cecily could go to with her questions about the lost princess.

Still, nothing in the world could have prepared Cecily for the moment when Mira looked down at her and said, “Melody, I know who I’m talking to. Do you?”

‘Allegorical,’ she’d said!!! Cecily vowed in that moment to never listen to Lady Serapha again.