44. The creature created him

Chapter 44: The creature created him.

Freya put a hand out before either of them could set foot on the first step down, and something in her face stopped Eto cold despite the pull he clearly felt toward the dark below.

"Wait," she said. "Before we go down there, there's something you both need to hear. Something I should've told you the moment I found it, and I'm ashamed I didn't."

Mikaela turned from the stairwell, unease already prickling up the back of her neck at the tone in Freya's voice. "What kind of something."

"The Knight Commander had me dig through records this past week. Anything that might tell us what we're actually hunting, not just old woman's stories from fifty years ago, but something concrete." Freya's jaw worked, like the words that came next cost her something to get out. "He called in a favor with the City Lord himself to get me into his private library. Took three days just to get through the door."

"And?"

"And everything Elara told us is true. All of it. It really is a demon out of Tartaros, a shapeshifter, and it feeds exactly the way she said, on children, on their energy, their light, whatever you want to call the thing that makes a kid a kid instead of just a small quiet body. It takes that from them and leaves them hollow." Freya paused, and the pause stretched long enough that Mikaela's stomach started to sink before the rest of the sentence even arrived. "But there's more to it than that. More than Elara knew, or more than she had the chance to learn back when she went south."

"More how."

"The Feyra doesn't just wear a disguise. It doesn't put a face on the way you'd put on a mask and take it off again when you're done with it." Freya's eyes had gone distant, like she was reciting something she'd read too many times not to have it memorized whether she wanted it or not. "It becomes the thing it's pretending to be. Lives the life. Sees through the eyes of whoever it's copied like it actually is that person, not a creature wearing them. Over time it forgets what it started as. It makes friends as them. It falls in love as them, if the disguise is old enough to have grown up enough to fall in love at all. It builds an entire life, and somewhere in all of that, the line between the demon and the disguise just, stops existing."

Mikaela felt the floor tilt underneath her even though she hadn't moved an inch. "You're saying Finn is real."

"I'm saying Finn was never just a mask." Freya's voice had gone quiet now, careful, the way a person spoke when they knew the next words were going to hurt whoever heard them. "The creature created him. Lived as him. Grew up as him, however many years that's actually been, climbed all over strangers as him, made Nora blush as him. Whatever Finn is, he's real in every way that matters to the boy himself. He's a part of the creature and he's separate from it at the same time, and nobody I found in that library, not one record, not one account, had an answer for how you're supposed to pull those two things apart without destroying both of them."

Silence dropped over the three of them, thick as the cold air rising out of the stairwell below.

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"So if we kill it," Mikaela said slowly, "we kill him too."

"That's what it looks like. Yes."

Eto had gone very still through all of it, arms crossed, eyes fixed somewhere past Freya's shoulder, and Mikaela didn't need the translation finished to see the shape of what he was thinking, because it had already settled hard and immovable across his face before she'd even started putting the words into Keth for him.

She translated it anyway. Slow. Careful. Watching his face the whole time for some crack in it, some flicker of the boy he'd carried on his shoulders and swung through the air laughing.

There wasn't one.

"Understand," he said, once she'd finished.

"Eto." Her hand found his arm. "Did you hear what she just said? Finn is real. He's not just some, some costume the thing is wearing, he's an actual person in there, he loves Nora, he's got a whole life it built around him, and if you kill this thing you're killing him too. A real boy. Fourteen years old."

"Know." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Goal same. Kill it. Stop it. No more kids."

"You can't mean that."

"Mean it." He turned to face her fully now, and there was nothing cruel in his eyes, nothing cold for the sake of being cold, only the same flat certainty he'd carried since the night he'd watched Nora sit empty against a wall of rubble. "Feyra eats. Feyra hurts. Every day it lives, more kids like Nora. More kids like the others in home. I stop that. If Finn part of that, Finn part of that. Not let it hurt again."

"He's a child, Eto. He didn't ask for any of this." She hadn’t heard him speak that much in… well ever. He had never strung together so many sentences. The strain on his face was evidence enough.

"Know that too." Something moved behind his eyes then, brief, there and gone, the first real crack she'd seen since Freya had started talking. "Still stop it."

Freya had gone quiet through the exchange, watching the two of them with an expression caught somewhere between grim agreement and genuine pity, and she didn't offer an opinion either way, only stood there with her sword still drawn, waiting for whatever came next.

Mikaela looked between them both, at Eto's unmoving resolve and Freya's careful neutrality, and felt something settle cold and certain in her own chest, a decision arriving whole and sudden the way decisions sometimes did when there wasn't time left to argue them out loud.

She stepped back from the stairwell.

"Wait here," she said, though neither of them was looking at her closely enough to catch the shift in her voice. "I need, I forgot something. At the inn."

It wasn't even a good lie, and she knew it wasn't a good lie the second it left her mouth, but neither Eto nor Freya moved to stop her, both of them still caught up in whatever silent standoff had settled between them over the fate of a boy who might or might not exist depending on how the next hour went.

She didn't go to the inn.

She turned the opposite direction the moment she was clear of the ruined church doors, breaking into a run the second the dark swallowed her from view, cutting through narrow lanes she barely had to think about anymore after weeks of walking this city, heart hammering with something that felt equal parts fear and determination.

There had to be another way. There had to be, because she refused to believe the only ending to this was a dead boy laid at the feet of a demon they'd finally managed to corner, and if nobody else in that church was willing to look for it, she'd go find it herself.

The barracks annex came into view at the end of the lane, torchlight flickering warm along its walls, guards posted at the door who recognized her enough to wave her through without much question.

She found Elara exactly where she expected to, propped up in a chair near the children's cots, awake despite the late hour, watching over Nora and the others with the quiet vigilance of someone who'd stopped trusting sleep to keep anyone safe.

The old woman looked up as Mikaela came through the door, breathless, and something in her face must have shown the shape of what had brought her running, because Elara was already reaching for her cane before Mikaela had said a single word.

"You've learned something," Elara said. "Tell me."