Chapter 53: Decode (Patreon)

[A/N]: Damn...

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The journey back to Wichita started bittersweet for Terry. Sweet because he felt that he had finally solved not only his farm’s problem, but potentially Wichita’s night problem—and by extension, the tyranny of the sanguine. But as excited as he was to test his new portal capabilities, it was impossible to continue experimenting with Vlad standing five feet away.

Instead, he pulled out the white rose and the strand of his mother’s hair that he never was without and continued mapping the genetic material to the metaphysical mold. He had been feeling on the verge of a breakthrough for weeks now and that fact that he hadn’t gotten there had started to fill him with frustration whenever he picked the task back up.

It was because of that that he found himself simply staring at the rose, not quite  diving into the task.

A few minutes passed where he wasn’t actually doing anything and he felt Vlad glance over a discreetly. He ignored the glance, letting his mind wander, but couldn’t ignore the second or the third glance.

“Something on your mind, Vlad?”

The man shifted uncomfortably at being caught staring, but then steeled his nerve and looked over.

“I’ve been wondering, why are you always staring at that rose?” He looked forward, their stone platform continuing to cut through the earth. “Feels like every time I look over, you’re staring at it like it’s the most interesting thing in the world.”

Terry chuckled lightly, masking the pain he always kept buried around the others. This wasn’t the first time someone had asked him about the rose—how could they not, given how often he had it out? But this was the first time he considered giving an honest answer.

He didn’t know why, but something about being alone with Vlad, surrounded by miles and miles of stone felt incredibly intimate; like anything said in the confines of this tunnel was sacred.

“It…it was my mother’s.”

Vlad visibly flinched but didn’t turn back.

“Oh…sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He hesitated, then, the words spilled out before he even realized he had resolved to say them. “It has memories embedded in it. Hers, I think. I’ve been trying to crack it for almost a year now.”

He glanced back, a cryptic expression on his face—sympathy mingled with surprise, it seemed.

The air felt charged, an awkward energy passing between them, before Vlad spoke.

“I…I lost my mother, too.” His voice was low, barely perceptible without Terry’s enhanced hearing.

He was stunned speechless at the proclamation for a moment, then realized he needed to say something, anything.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Vlad.” The man grunted, not quite looking back, but angling his head slightly to acknowledge Terry’s words.

Feeling a chance here to finally bridge the divide between the two of them, he took a chance.

“How…how did you lose her? If you don’t mind talking about it,” he quickly added.

Vlad stood statue-still, only his aura visibly shifting to Terry’s senses. Emotions raged beneath that surface, but they were impossible to decipher.

As Terry opened his mouth to pull back the question, let Vlad off the hook, the man broke the tense silence, his words clipped.

“You know I was exiled from Moscow?”

Terry gaped in surprise for a moment, too stunned for the moment to realize he was supposed to respond.

“Uh, Flore…had mentioned something.”

The mention of Flore pulled at his heart but he focused in order to give Vlad his full attention.

The man nodded, his back still turned to Terry as he parted stone before them.

“My father…” Raw heat injected his voice. “My father had her killed…to make room for his new bride. When I…protested, he had me exiled. They had a new son, so I wasn’t…needed.” He said the word with a strange inflection, as if he were echoing back something he had heard.

The silence hung for a moment and Terry didn’t rush to fill it. After a few seconds, he spoke.

“I’m sorry, Vlad. That’s terrible.”

He shrugged in a casual way that belied the raging torrent of emotions playing across his aura.

“I’m alive. Gaining in power.” His voice dropped low, sounding almost like a promise to himself. “One day, I’ll be an S-ranker and he’ll have to acknowledge me. Then…he’ll pay.”

He stirred, glancing back with a surprised look as if he hadn’t meant to speak out loud.

“I hope you do, Vlad,” Terry replied, locking eyes with him.

The man turned fully to look back at Terry, searching his face as if wondering if Terry were mocking him. When all he saw was Terry’s earnest expression, he nodded once, then turned back to focus on the tunnel he was forming with his aura.

Thinking the conversation over, Terry turned back to the rose, when Vlad spoke up again.

“What about your mother?” he asked. “How did she die?”

Terry hesitated a moment, wondering how to explain the situation. Vlad mistook his pause as reluctance and quickly added, “You don’t have to—”

“No, no, it’s not that…I’m just…” Terry sighed, rubbing at his face. “I’m not sure if she’s dead…”

“Oh,” Vlad said, a hint of surprise in his tone.

“There was a sneak attack of neighboring supers,” Terry added. “She fought them off while I was taken away. We…never saw her again. No body, nothing.”

Vlad didn’t reply for a moment and Terry wasn’t inclined to push for a response either way. A few seconds passed before Vlad turned back.

“I hope you find her, Terry. I really do.”

He nodded, feeling his eyes drawn toward the rose pinched between his fingers. “Thanks, Vlad. Me, too…”

A natural silence followed and neither said anything as they continued their journey through the earth. Terry’s thoughts felt jumbled, disordered, so he turned his attention back to the rose.

He lost track of the time as his mind traced over the genetic material, referenced his mental mold, and connected the two with a flex of aura and intent. So he had no idea how much time had passed when his mind stumbled over the genetic mapping and ran out of material to identify.

A notification flashed in his vision and he stared at it in utter shock, not believing his senses until he had re-read it multiple times.

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Metaphysical cipher decoded.

Genetic material mapped.

[The White Rose] Quest Updated

1 of 4 White Roses decoded.

Decode and enter memory lattice?

 -

The realization finally hit him and he gasped. His lungs felt constricted as he considered that notification looming in his vision.

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Decode and enter memory lattice?

 -

“What’s wrong?” Vlad asked.

Terry stared wide eyed for a moment before registering the man had spoken.

“What?” he asked slowly, glancing up from the rose. “Oh, I…I cracked it. Her memories…they’re in there, waiting for me to relive them…or something.”

The stone platform came to a grinding halt and Vlad was by his side in a moment, regarding the rose in awe.

“Well? What are you waiting for?” Terry glanced up in shock at that question. “What? You’ve been working for months to crack this, right?”

“Well…yeah.”

Vlad waved toward the rose. “The answers might be right in there! Are you really going to wait a second longer?”

Vlad’s words shocked Terry into that realization.

The answers might be right there…

He suddenly realized why he hesitated. Fear…

“I’m afraid.”

Vlad pulled back, pursing his lips as he nodded.

“I get that. But there’s no turning back now, right?” His eyes took on a far off look. “If it really has your mother’s memories, can you imagine?” He flinched in surprise, a chagrined expression on his face. “Sorry, this is personal. I shouldn’t inject my opinion.”

Terry waved away his concern, hiding the fact that his gut was twisting into knots.

“No, you’re right. I…I have to know.”

Vlad nodded, returning to his position at the front of the platform.

“Do you want me to hold us here. We’re still about an hour away but—”

“No,” Terry replied quickly. “I’m ready to get home. I’ll…I’ll work while we move.”

The platform rumbled, stone grating on stone as Vlad’s aura flexed.

With the man partially distracted with his work, Terry felt slightly less self-conscious about the decoded rose in his hands. He regarded that notification once more before biting his lip and steeling his nerve.

With a thought, he accepted and felt his mind drawn into the rose, leaving his body behind like an empty shell.

Sensations dimmed, his mind swirling inside a vortex of memories as if he were ringing a drain. Then, sight returned and he found his disembodied mind drifting in a colorless void. Beneath him, a series of golden balls of light arrayed in a line like a string of pearls. On one side, the light was dim, then incrementally brightened the further along the line he went. Instinctively, he recognized the dimmer ball of light serving as the oldest memory, while the other end held the freshest.

He regarded the string of memories and decided to start at the logical choice—the beginning.

With a thought, he focused his intent on that dimmest ball of light and felt his mind drift toward it lazily.

The nearer he came to it, the faster he moved, until it felt like he were falling into the light at a free fall.

When he crashed into it, a scene began to resolve before him. Sun flashed across a paved street, birds flitted across the sky, and buildings sharpened into focus as his mind approached from above.

With a start, he realized it was Wichita he was hovering over. It had been so long, he hadn’t recognized it in the daylight.

Another shock took him as he neared a cluster of people below. Three people walked on a nearby trail, the shade of the trees originally blocking them from his view.

He felt himself instinctively pulled toward those three people, his body shifting toward one of them in particular.

The owner of the white rose.

The three figures grew clearer as he was right on top of them and his mind blanked as he recognized himself flanked on either side by his mother and father. The three of them were holding hands, which surprised him; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d held his father’s hand.

But as he was nearly on top of them, he realized that the Terry below was much younger—probably six or seven. The younger him was laughing with youthful abandon as his parents both counted to three and swung him through the air. His feet kicked at nothing before he came back down to the ground.

A sense of melancholy filled him as he watched the scene. But he was pulled from the raw emotion as he felt himself about to inhabit the memory-bearer’s body. He watched his mother, bracing to enter and witness the memory from her point of view. But he was shocked as the trajectory carried him past her and into little Terry’s body.

Before he could acclimate to the switch up, he was fully inhabiting his younger self, seeing the surrounding trail from his eyes. More than that, he felt his mother’s palm in his left hand, cool and soft to the touch. In his right hand, he felt his father’s rough, calloused hand rubbing against his own soft skin in a way that probably bothered him at the time, but felt so comforting to current Terry.

The air was cool, but he felt a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead, his legs aching as if he had been running a few minutes before. He glanced up at his mother, his heart aching at the sight of her beautiful face, the easy smile on her lips.

“Can I run ahead?”

It was his own voice, he realized. Higher, that of a child, rather than his own puberty-infected voice.

His mother chuckled, shaking her head lightly.

“Aren’t you tired yet?” she asked in fake exasperation.

“Nuh-uh!” he replied.

She looked to James, raising her eyebrows in question. Her smile never waned as she looked toward his father and he felt the love in that gaze. He felt a sort of vindication in seeing that his parents had loved each other—at least, at the time of this memory.

Younger Terry flipped his gaze over to his father, pulling lightly on the man’s hand in the way that he was convinced would get his father to agree. James grinned back at his mother before nodding.

“Burn all that energy, kiddo.”

Terry ripped his hands from their grip almost before James finished the sentence. He was tearing down the trail in an instant.

His mother called after him. “Stay where we can see—”

A terrible sound caused Terry to flinch in surprise. Thunder cracked the air, echoing over him for multiple seconds. When it ended, he found himself crouched behind a tree, cowering in fear.

Younger Terry was covering his ears, his gaze glued to the tree bark. But older Terry recognized that sound, knew what that thunder had represented.

Terry finally recovered his senses and looked over toward the safety of his parents…only to see both of them on the ground.

He screamed out and James cut his gaze over, shock and anger coloring his face. Terry’s heart pounded so hard he could barely think. He raced from the cover of the tree, his little legs eating up the distance in moments.

James yelled something back at him, but his terror was his entire existence, his sole goal to find the safety of his mother’s arms.

But as he neared, he realized slowly that something was wrong. His father was screaming at him now, his face a mask of desperate fury. The words solidified in his mind as he stared in horror at the scene before him.

“Stay back! Terry, get back, goddammit!”

“Mo-mom…” His eyes swapped between his parents, not understanding what he was seeing. “Mom, get up!”

But his mother didn’t get up. She lay on her back, red staining her dress and pooling beneath her. A hole three fingers wide was punched directly into her chest—the entry wound for a bullet, older Terry realized. But younger Terry was hysterical, his lungs struggling to catch his breath as he hyperventilated.

“D-d-dad! W-wh—”

James wrapped Terry up in his arms, stroking his hair with blood-soaked hands as he turned away from his mother.

Terry’s mind recoiled from the memory on instinct, pulling him away from his younger self.

How? he thought. She was dead, it was painfully obvious. But how…

The only possible solution hit him like a punch and he staggered in the colorless void as he rose above the strings of memory.

He took a few moments to gather his chaotic thoughts, then regarded the memories floating below him. There were dozens strung together and he knew he would need to comb through them all; if not to piece together the truth of his mother, then at least for himself. He’d never be able to rest easy knowing there were memories—his memories—hidden inside this rose.

But he couldn’t go back to that first memory—not right now. The image of his mother laying in a pool of blood was too much. He moved to the second memory, praying it was less graphic.

As he drifted down toward that bead of light, his bedroom materialized before him. It didn’t quite match up with his memory—different posters lined the walls, toys for a younger Terry strewn about the floor. But it was undeniably his room and he felt his anxiety peak as he considered what dark secret this memory hosted.

He fell into his younger self, finding himself face down on the bed, tears and snot coating his face. His throat felt hoarse from crying and he clutched at his pillow as a fresh round of tears took him.

A soft knock sounded at his door, startling him. His voice didn’t have the strength to respond, but he wouldn’t have even if he could.

A moment later, he heard it open softly and he turned away, both embarrassed by the snot coating his face and angry that whoever was there had come in anyway.

But as a soft hand touched his shoulder, he flinched; there was a familiar tingle to that touch. He whipped his head up.

There was his mother’s face staring back at him, her skin pallid, her cheeks hollow. But there was no denying it, that was his mother’s face.

She smiled softly, tears slipping from her eyes.

“Hello, sweetie.”

“Mom!” He threw himself into her arms, not caring for a moment that her skin was colder than usual. He pulled back, looking up at her. “Mom, I-I saw y-you…”

She stroked his hair, pulling him back in.

“Shh, shhh now, Terry. Everything’s fine. Everything’s gonna be fine…”

He ripped himself from the memory, from the rose entirely.

Would you like to remove accessed memories and re-encode?

The notification hung heavy in his vision and he blinked blindly at it for a moment. Then, he indicated no with a thought.

There was no way I’m giving these memories back, no matter how horrible. The awful truth is too important.

Mom had been a revenant…