Overview:

---

After the sixth treasure—the scroll and quill representing Captain McKinley—is revealed, all six treasures begin to surround Ser Cerulean Arlentis. One by one, they glow with a brilliant white light before transforming into individual pieces. The Guardian of the vault, the Griffin, then presents Cerulean with the seventh and final piece. As Cerulean brings it together with the other six, the seven pieces unite and form Pandora’s Box. Within it lies the one thing that remained after all the evils of the world were unleashed: hope.

Seventh_piece_comes_home.sav 

The Griffin takes the scroll without touching it.

That is the first thing that goes wrong, and I want to be clear that it goes wrong quietly. No thunder. No chord. He just looks at the bundle in Cerulean’s hands, and the bundle decides it would rather be in the air, and it rises off his palms and hangs there at chest height, turning very slowly, like it wants everyone to see all of it.

Cerulean’s hands stay open under it. Fingers spread. He has not decided yet whether to be worried.

The vault does the thing it does when nobody is talking. Sound goes long in here. A dropped coin gets four seconds of afterlife off the ceiling, and right now the only noise is Cielo shifting his weight, hoof to hoof, on polished stone that was not built for hooves.

Then the eastern dish empties.

The sword goes first. Bronze, notched along one edge, the leather grip worn pale where somebody’s hand used to sit. It lifts off the pile of objects like it has been called, and behind it comes the lyre, then the folded tapestry, then the mirror, then the brush, in the reverse of the order they were won. Five things sliding up out of the dish and drifting across the open floor toward the boy standing in front of the altar.

“Wait.” Cerulean’s head snaps toward the altar. “Wait, no. Griffin. Why are they leaving?”

The Griffin says nothing. Four legs. Wings flat. Watching the way a teacher watches when the answer is already on the board.

“We put those there. Those are ours.” He turns as the sword passes behind him, tracking it, and his cape swings out and drags a small avalanche of coins off the nearest slope. “How am I supposed to tip the scales east if the east keeps giving everything back?”

Cielo makes a low sound. Not a whinny. Something further down, the noise a horse makes when it has smelled a storm.

The five objects reach Cerulean and do not stop.

They go around him.

Wide, at first, a slow orbit at the width of the altar steps, brush and mirror and tapestry and lyre and sword strung out in a ring with the scroll still hanging at the center of it above his hands. Then the ring tightens. Cerulean turns inside it, twice, trying to keep all five in view at once and failing, because that is not a thing a person can do.

“They’re circling me,” he says. “Cielo, they’re circling me.”

Cielo has gone completely still. Ears forward. He does not look at the objects. He is looking at his rider, which I notice, and file, and do not say anything about.

The scroll drifts up out of Cerulean’s hands. He grabs after it on reflex, one gauntlet snatching air, and then lets it go and just watches it join the others.

And then the ring breaks in half.

Three peel left. Three peel right. It happens fast and it happens neatly, no crossing, no bumping, six objects sorting themselves like they rehearsed it in a room I did not get to see. They settle at shoulder height on either side of him, three and three, evenly spaced, hanging in the air on nothing.

Left side, from the outside in: the tapestry, the mirror, the brush.

Right side, inside out: the lyre, the sword, the scroll.

Then they light.

Seafoam green comes up first, out at the far left, the color of shallow water over sand. Pink next to it, warm and unembarrassed about being pink. Yellow beside that, the yellow of a kitchen at seven in the morning. Then the gap where Cerulean stands, and then orange, loud, the exact orange of a stage light. Scarlet after it. Cyan at the end, cold and clean.

Six colors and a boy in white armor in the middle of them.

I have been in this sim room for a long time now. Long enough that I have opinions about lighting. And this is the first time the vault has stopped looking like a bank vault, because all that gold on all those slopes is suddenly reflecting six things that are not gold, and the whole chamber goes soft and strange and full of colors it does not own.

Cerulean looks left. Looks right. His mouth is open a little.

“It’s like they’ve become my wings,” he says.

Nobody answers him. I would have. That’s the job I don’t have.

The scarlet one hangs closest to his right shoulder, steady, bright, absolutely fine. There is a boy in a mountain house about eleven hundred kilometers from here with a cracked collarbone and a bowl of something bitter, and the sword is glowing like nothing at all is wrong, and nobody in this room knows why that is worth noticing except me.

Moving on.

Cielo is the one who sees the scale move.

He whips his head around, mane going everywhere, and the giant balance is dropping on the eastern side with the empty dish riding it down. There is a counter cut into the stone column behind it, seven notches, faint, the kind of detail you only find after you have been staring at something for two hours. The dish passes the fifth notch. Keeps going. Settles on the sixth with a sound like a cathedral door closing somewhere underground.

Sixth level. Empty dish. Nothing on it at all.

“Okay, that’s cheating,” Cerulean says, delighted. “That’s great, but that’s cheating.”

“You have done well, Child.” The Griffin’s voice fills the space without getting louder. “For that, I shall grant you your reward.”

“Hang on.” Cerulean lifts a hand, and the six colors swing gently with the motion, all of them, like they are tethered to his shoulders. “No. Hang on. I haven’t won. You told me the rules yourself. Lowest notch on the east, highest on the west, or it doesn’t count. That was the whole speech. You stood up on two legs for it.”

The Griffin regards him.

“I did,” he says.

“So I’m at six. Six isn’t seven.”

“No,” the Griffin agrees. “It is not.”

He comes down off the altar step. It takes him a while. Up close he is enormous and old in a way the myths never mention, the feathers along his neck gone thin and pale, the lion half moving with the care of something that has learned exactly which joints to trust. He stops in front of Cerulean, inside the ring of light, and the six colors slide over his face like sun off a pool.

Then he opens one talon.

There is a piece of something in it. Small. Off-white, or bone, or old ivory. Curved on two edges and broken on the others, and no bigger than the last two joints of a thumb.

“Take it.”

Cerulean takes it. Turns it over. Turns it over again.

“This is the reward?” He is trying very hard to be polite. I can hear the effort. “I don’t want to be rude. But it’s a chip. It’s a chip off something.”

“Yes.”

“Off what?”

“Off the only thing in this room I did not win, buy, or take,” the Griffin says. “I have kept it since before your people had the word for it. I have never once had a use for it.” He tips his head. “Nor have I ever been able to weigh it. It has no weight. Do you understand what that means, on a set of scales?”

Cerulean’s eyes go somewhere for a second. Then come back.

“It means I was never going to win,” he says. “Not with gold. Not with anything I picked up in here.”

“No.”

“You could have said that on the first day.”

“I could have,” the Griffin says. “And you would have stopped looking.”

A sound goes through the vault then. High and long and thin, a single note held out past the point where any note should hold. Tsiiiiing. It comes off the walls and doubles back on itself and it makes every hair on Cielo’s neck stand straight up.

The six lights break apart.

Not shatter. Nothing dramatic. The tapestry simply stops being a tapestry, the way a word stops being a word if you say it enough times, and what is left hanging in the air is a small curved fragment the color of old bone, seafoam green light bleeding off its edges. The mirror follows. The brush. On the right, lyre, sword, scroll, one after another, each one collapsing inward and coming out the other side as a chip no bigger than the one in Cerulean’s palm.

Six pieces. Six colors. One boy holding the seventh.

“Oh,” Cerulean breathes. “Oh, this is the middle one. The one you gave me. It’s the middle.”

The fragments come in.

They come slowly, which is the part I think about afterward. They could have snapped together. Instead they drift, all six, converging on his cupped hands from both sides, and they arrive in an order that is not random, and I watch a boy in silver armor stand absolutely still while six pieces of something find him.

Yellow first. Then pink, then seafoam green from the left. Then orange, scarlet, cyan from the right.

They touch, and there is no seam.

What is sitting in his hands when the light drops is a chest. A small one. Small enough to close both fists around, with a lid on tiny hinges and a plain band around the base and not one single jewel anywhere on it. It is not gold. In a room made almost entirely of gold, it is aggressively, deliberately not gold.

It glows white. Warm white, the color of a lamp left on for somebody who is coming home late.

Behind Cerulean, the giant balance moves one final time. The eastern dish, empty, goes down to the seventh notch and stops there hard. The western dish, carrying a mountain of gold, rides all the way up to the top of its arc and hangs there, higher than the treasure has ever been in the whole time we have been in this room.

Complete victory. Utter loss. Same lever, same second.

Cielo sits down. Just sits, right there on the polished stone, back legs folding, and stares.

“Griffin.” Cerulean has not looked up from his hands. “Griffin, what is this?”

“Tell me the story of Prometheus.”

“What?”

“You know it. You knew me on sight in the doorway. Tell it.”

Cerulean blinks. Then he does, and he does it fast and slightly out of breath, the way you answer a question you were not expecting from a teacher you like. “He stole fire. From the gods, for people. And Zeus got angry about it, so he made a woman, Pandora, the first one, and there was a gift at the wedding. A jar. And she was told never to open it, which, honestly, if you don’t want somebody to open a jar, maybe don’t give them the jar.”

Cielo snorts from the floor.

“She opened it,” Cerulean says. “And everything bad in the world came out. All of it. Sickness. Pain. Every awful thing. She got the lid back on but it was already too late.”

“Yes,” says the Griffin. “And what stayed inside?”

Cerulean looks down at the small white chest in his palms.

“Hope,” he says. “Hope stayed.”

Neither of them says anything for a moment. The chest keeps its light. Out past the altar the vault runs on and on, slope after slope of coins and cups and crowns and statues going back into a dark the lamps never reach, and all of it is now, officially, on the losing side of a scale.

“It is not gold,” the Griffin says. “It is not jeweled. It will impress nobody. When you first came into my hall you told me that a thing can carry more value than it appears to.”

“I said that about a paintbrush.”

“You were right about the paintbrush.”

“Then come with us.” Cerulean says it fast, before he can talk himself out of it. “You’ve been in this place alone for, what, a couple thousand years? There’s a ship. There’s a whole team. Well. There’s some of a team. My cousin cooks.”

The Griffin makes a sound low in his chest that I am choosing to read as a laugh.

“I am the guardian of this mountain,” he says. “I do not leave it.”

“That’s a rule, or that’s a habit?”

“You are a very rude child.” The wings shift, settle. “It is a rule. But understand me, Paladin. I am more than a keeper of scales and old cups. Should the need arise, I am able to ward off evil.”

“That’s an oddly specific thing to mention.”

“It is.” He does not elaborate. The old creature lowers his head until it is nearly level with the boy’s. “Carry it to your people. What is in it is the only thing that ends Typhon, and it is not a weapon, and it will not open for anyone who is not brave, and good, and wise. The hardest fights are not the ones on the field, Paladin. Remember that when you are on a field.”

Cerulean does not say anything.

He stands there with both hands cupped and the small chest lighting the underside of his chin, and Cielo gets up off the floor and comes over and puts his nose against the boy’s shoulder, and neither of them moves for a while.