Seirra: Chapter Twenty-Three

It was unbelievable.

No. The idea that Margaret was the girl who would help me save Aquania was beyond unbelievable.

My breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my mouth and for a moment, I was suspended, floating with no ability to move. And then I felt my heart begin to thump furiously as excitement slowly took form inside me.

Margaret was my Fate.

She was my princess.

All this time, it was her.

It was her. I couldn’t be happier.

Doris knew and had she been alive right now, she would have told me about it. A bubble of mirth almost escaped from my lips when I remembered one important fact.

The Fates had always been a royal and a Celari.

How was this even possible?

I whipped my head and saw that Marina’s face registered the same freezing confusion that I was feeling. Several seconds passed before I saw her blink twice and close her hanging mouth to swallow the shock that Doris's note gave us.

“Care to explain this?” she exclaimed, being the first to find her voice.

“Uh, I honestly wouldn't know how,” I replied, my voice almost a whisper. “I mean, the tradition had always been clear. The Celari leader finds his or her princess or prince and they get married.”

“Perhaps the former Oracle was mistaken,” Erwann guessed as he reread the words written on the scroll. The notes were all about the veil and the Crystal Key of Saol.

“Impossible. Doris was the best and the wisest. Granted, Oracles could never really point out facts but the clues they see with their powers are way past an inference. What they see are almost always true,” I countered. For one, Doris was indeed the best. Second, I wanted her words to be the truth that I could not possibly believe otherwise. “Besides, how else are we going to explain why the kiss didn’t work yesterday?”

“There’s that,” Erwann considered. “But as you said, the Fates were never anybody else except a Celari and a royal. How can a human be involved?”

“What if,” Marina’s brows were furrowed as she tried to analyze the situation, “Margaret isn’t exactly a human?” She raised her eyes and stared at Erwann and me, waiting for our reactions.

“I haven’t met her so I can’t be sure. But that’s possible. Are you sure she’s not your sister, Princess?” Erwann replied as he rolled back the scrolls and returned them to their respective canisters.

I answered on behalf of Marina. “Can’t be. For one, Marge is surely not Aquanian. Her eyes are blue, not green. And if she isn’t human, Grampa would have known. He’s a Huntre and he never once told me anything about it.”

“Urgh! Why does Doris have to be dead? She could’ve answered all these questions so easily!” the princess complained, swimming over to lean on the cave’s wall as she crossed her arms in front of her.

I had the same complaints but I decided to keep it to myself. Marina could do the complaining for both of us. My head started pounding with all the new information we had gathered and I raised one of my hands to try to ease the headache.

“Doris’s death was planned,” Erwann began after a few seconds of silence. His voice had gone grave and serious. “And keeping Margaret away from Aquania could only be the enemy’s motive.”

That, by far, was the most alarming idea we had come up with this morning. If the enemy did know that Margaret was the girl I needed to find, then there was a huge chance that the attacks we had while I was on land wasn’t necessarily to take the Key but also to kill Margaret. A shiver of dread rushed through my spine. We weren’t together as of the moment but if the enemy was desperate to keep the veil weak, then Margaret could be in danger. My hands balled into fists.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“That’s possible.” I let air fill my lungs in an attempt to organize my thoughts. “Nevertheless. Let’s go study those other scrolls. We might find some clues there,” I announced, wanting to start finding a way to sort things out as fast as we could.

“Agree. After all, what good is this info if you can’t go back to Grasveld Aisles to fetch Margaret?” Marina asked.

“Damn,” I muttered under my breath. No matter how many problems we could solve, if we couldn’t bring Margaret in Aquania, everything would be useless.

Marina took a gulp of breath and she replied with: “We’ll find out how. Don’t worry.”

She had taken on a determined look—her eyes unwavering and her shoulders set. It was the way she looked when her sense of responsibility got the better of her. Apparently, the ‘princess’ in her had resurfaced.

I gave her a small smile in response. “The Crystal Key won’t be able to bring me back on land until another human year has passed. We have to find another way.” I pursed my lips as the gravity of the situation hit me. “I don’t mind getting cursed with aging when she sees me but there’s also the matter of bringing her here. We have to remember that she’s not a mermaid.”

Erwann gritted his teeth and Marina pounded her fists on a rock as our list of problems grew with no solutions being thrown in. We began opening all of the scrolls, disregarding our earlier plans of going over it one by one.

Two scrolls contained the history of the Fates and the remaining were obviously enchantments which we couldn’t really understand. Marina began studying the spells as Erwann and I tried to figure out if Doris had hidden a clue anywhere in the two other scrolls. Everything that was written was all familiar to me that two peculiar incidents almost escaped my notice. I reread them again and it took all of my willpower to keep myself from whirling and twirling in excitement.

“Look here,” I said, placing their attention on a passage in the scroll I was holding. “One of the Celari leaders had decided to become a Huntre before it was found that he was destined to be the next to take over the leadership.” I traced the words we were reading with one of my fingers until I found what I was looking for. “The current princess who could only be his Fate used magic to bring him back to Aquania.”

It was almost identical to my situation with Margaret. If this was any indication, then we had not lost hope. There was a way to bring Marge here even if she was a human. I heaved a sigh of relief and enthusiasm.

“Curious how the Celari became a Huntre. You have a different case than most Aquanians, don’t you?” Erwann asked.

It baffled me as well but it wasn’t our problem as of the moment. “In any case, we have to find out how that princess brought her Fate back here.” I remembered the other incident I saw in the scroll that Erwann was holding. “Here’s another one,” I pointed towards the words, explaining as I allowed them to read. “It happened way too long ago but the Celari leader didn’t exactly marry a royal. This was never mentioned during the Ceremony of Kys yesterday.”

“So it seems,” Erwann agreed. “Perhaps because it happened centuries ago and everybody thought that it was an isolated case.”

I tilted my head in thought, having the same ideas as Erwann. And then I saw Marina squinting at the words in both of the scrolls, as if trying to decipher more from them.

“I knew it!” she cried suddenly. “These were isolated cases but it’s practically the explanation for what’s happening right now!” She whipped her eager eyes at me. “Seirra, the tradition expects the Celari leader to find his or her Fate. Fate being that someone he or she falls in love with.” She began scanning the words again. “See?” She pointed at several phrases. “Yesterday, we heard facts but Doris described the love story instead of just narrating what happened.”

She raised her head again. “I think that you Celaris happened to like falling in love with royals that the elders had assumed that the Fates’ identities should be that way. They thought those two incidents were merely isolated cases when in fact, they still kept with what the tradition indicated.”

Erwann began to nod in understanding. “The fact that you were of the same age as Seirra and your being a lost princess added to the confusion. Everybody thought it was you.” He suddenly lifted his hands as if in surrender, and his cheeks colored with embarrassment. “Not that nobody wanted to find you, Princess. We are indeed glad that you are back.”

It made Marina laugh. “Don’t worry about it,” she replied once she had calmed down. She had charmed Erwann with that smile and he was grinning back in no time.

“So that’s one mystery solved,” I mumbled with a slight smile. It was a wonderful revelation, knowing that falling in love with Margaret was not some joke cast upon me by destiny. What worried me more though was how to get her here in Aquania. “I guess now, all that’s left is to interpret what those enchantments are.” I said, pointing towards the scrolls Marina was holding. “Perhaps Doris left them with these other scrolls because that was how I can go fetch Margaret.”

They nodded and we were concentrating on the contents of one scroll when a trembling sound reverberated around us. And then the walls of the cave began to shake. We looked up and found a water current surging furiously at us, obviously controlled by magic. Pieces of rocks started to come off the walls due to the water pressure which made it even more difficult for the three of us to escape. A few seconds too late and we would have been crushed dead.

The current followed us out of the cave and if not for Marina’s magic, it would have hit us unconscious. She raised her hand in time to block the current with another, directing it to a different direction. Erwann and I drew our swords immediately as we got ready to face whoever it was that controlled the water. All three of us began to keep magic flowing through our fingers, bracing ourselves for both close-combat and long-range strikes.

The bubbles from the currents cleared and we found ourselves face to face with our enemies. Unfortunately, there was no telling if they were Aquanian or not.

As of the moment, we were no longer sure who exactly our enemy was.