Forty-Five: Secret Trade
“Keeper of Secrets?” Lilith tilted her head like a curious sparrow. The Little White Dragon studied the ground, soft soil veiled in crystal like frost, a gray hush hiding a sentient world beneath.
“What’s with that name? What secret do they guard?” she asked the Demon girl beside her. Abaddon didn’t answer; she had her locust unclamp her, then stood on the soil and raised a slender hand like a pale branch.
From her thin wrist, a purple locust flew out—no, more a bruise-colored, swollen fly; Lilith couldn’t tell what creature it was, the way mist blurs a shoreline.
The bug hung in the air for a heartbeat, then folded its wings like shutters and speared down into the earth. The purple thing tunneled into the soft soil; the ground shivered like a drumskin, and an old, deep voice rustled at Lilith’s ear, like roots speaking under rain.
“Child of the divine, what do you seek?”
Confusion lifted like fog; Lilith realized the aged voice was the Keeper of Secrets Abaddon had mentioned, and “child of the divine” meant her. She didn’t know why she was called that; but Tartarus was hailed as the Dragon God, so a god’s child felt like a robe draped over her shoulders.
“I—I’m looking for the Vampires traveling with me. We were split up when we stumbled into this pocket space.” She weighed her words like seeds in a palm, then chose honesty for the faceless Keeper—sir, or madam? The voice gave her no shore to judge by. A lie would tear like wet paper; better to tell the plain truth.
“It’s my bad,” Abaddon chimed in, sheepish. “I tugged in folks who shouldn’t’ve been pulled, like snagging threads on a loom, y’know? I mistook them for my believers and sucked them all over like a whirlpool. She got separated from the rest. Can you help reunite her with the others?”
“One secret for one answer. One memory for one request.”
“Any secret? Or does it have to be your own?”
“A secret is a secret. Secrets don’t belong to people; they belong to memory, as memory belongs to the world, like shells to an ocean.”
“Who even understands that? So if I hand you one secret, you’ll tell me where Eliza and the others are?”
“One secret for one answer. Pay any secret, receive an answer to one question.”
The Keeper spoke, voice flat as a still pond, a machine grinding out replies. No matter how Lilith prodded, the old tone circled those two lines, again and again, until her ears felt rubbed into calluses.
“Sorry, that’s just how they are,” Abaddon muttered, rubbing her sore backside and shrugging like a statue begrudging motion. “Stiff as stone. I can’t make them budge. The ‘secret’ they want isn’t what most folk mean by secret. I barely ask them things myself, so I don’t know the exact rules. It’s not what you’re imagining. Good luck.”
“Thanks… I guess?” Lilith answered, dazed, like a kite bumped by sudden wind. Since becoming a dragon, her sky filled with riddle-mongers. Tartarus never spoke plainly; Asterios always trailed smoke around the truth; Nidhogg—say no more, that wicked woman never handed her a full picture. Even Eliza hid plenty from the Little White Dragon; Lilith had to piece clues like shards of porcelain. And now even Abaddon, broad-browed and big-eyed, the kind who looked unstudied, had turned cryptic.
Could this world please not be like this? She’d never missed Miss System so much—drifting by like a paper lantern, never speaking in riddles. The divine gift, clean and strong, beat this crowd of knot-tongued speakers by a mile.
“Ahem.” Lilith cleared her throat, reeling her thoughts back like a kite string to the Keeper. The Little White Dragon didn’t need them to act; she didn’t have to pay with a memory. A single secret should buy an answer.
She thought she wasn’t the mysterious type; but tucked in her pockets, she still had a few stones called secrets, for example—
“I once knocked over Asterios’s Stellar Liquid. Her batches are specially concentrated and pricey, like bottled starlight. I feared she’d punish me, so I staged the place to look like leakage from misuse. I never told her the truth.”
She picked a small matter like a pebble from a riverbed. The Little Dragon had no plans to lie to the Keeper; every word was true, though neither Asterios nor Lilith cared much, the way ripples forget the stone.
Asterios wouldn’t mourn a bottle or two of concentrated Stellar Liquid; even if Lilith confessed, nothing stormy would happen. The Little White Dragon just didn’t want her teacher to know it was her clumsy paw.
So Lilith figured this would fit the Keeper’s standard for a secret.
“A thing known to two, even unspoken, is consent granted. It’s a candle in open air, not a secret.”
The old voice cut her offering thin as a blade, no hesitation. To them, this was done under Asterios’s tacit leave; it wasn’t a secret, but something practically public.
“Huh? No—even if my teacher knows, it’s still my secret, right? I’ve never told anyone.” Lilith couldn’t help arguing, her brows stitching tight like woven thread. She started to grasp why Abaddon didn’t understand the Keeper’s definition either.
“Secrets rest upon memory. Each memory carries a unique secret. Choose a memory, tell me the secret hidden behind its images and sounds, and gain an answer to one question.”
The Keeper didn’t bite her challenge; they laid out their creed like stone tablets. Lilith met Abaddon’s eyes; in the Demon girl’s dark lakes, she saw resignation guttering like a dying ember.
