Emrys finally straightened up a little.
"Alright. Let's leave the question of being single and grandchildren for later."
"No, I want you to promise me that I'll see my grandchildren before the next 4,000 years."
"F-Four thousand?"
Emrys was stunned by his mother's completely absurd perception of time.
In the end, all he could do was sigh and nod.
"I promise. Now can you explain how you know all these things about me?"
"Think about it. You have all the pieces."
"You're not helping."
"That's the point. You're smarter than this."
"Are you sure you're not just trying to buy time?"
"I don't see the point of doing that."
He opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it.
He started digging through every corner of his memory to find the answer, and he found it quite quickly.
Now that he had it, he had to admit it was pretty obvious.
"The lake Mobius."
The lake Mobius. The mysterious lake that lay within Unlimited Blade Works.
"Oh, so that's what you call it?"
She said it in a light tone, the way you'd react to the name a neighbor gave their cat. Emrys turned his head toward her.
"Is there a problem with the name?"
"Not at all, it's pretty. I didn't think you'd have so much imagination."
Damn, now I can't tell her I ripped it off from a lake in some manga. What was it called again, that manga? So much time has passed since then, I've almost forgotten everything about my previous life.
She laughed, a short laugh, then her voice grew more serious.
"You guessed right, anyway. I'll explain how it works, but there are other things you need to know first. Otherwise the rest won't make any sense."
He felt his mother tense up, like someone hesitating at the edge of a cliff. She was trying to keep her tone light, and only half succeeding.
"Why do I feel like you're about to give me bad news?"
"It's not bad news. Well, I don't know how you'll take it, and that's what worries me." She sniffled, very discreetly. "Sorry. I've never had to say this out loud."
"Then just say it all at once. It'll be easier. Whatever it is, I'm not going anywhere."
She took a breath.
"You're an adult now, you have a kingdom, people who count on you. You deserve to know your real story, the story of your origins. And the first thing is that I'm not your biological mother."
Emrys froze, mouth half open. His fingers clenched on his knees. It felt like the ground had just given way beneath him. He quickly went back over his memories, looking for a moment when she could have told him, a clue he might have missed. There was none. He had never tried to check.
"But then... Who..."
"Emrys." She had taken on an ironic tone, almost amused. "What were you expecting? In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a lake. I don't really see how I could have had a child."
He looked at her in silence for a few seconds. Then a laugh escaped him, nervous at first, then more genuine.
"It crossed my mind earlier, when I noticed you were sort of the lake, but it didn't really strike me. With everything that's incredible and improbable in this world, I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd told me you laid me on the shore."
She smacked him on the shoulder.
"Ow! What was that for?!"
"I understand what you mean by that, but your metaphor was disastrous."
He smiled in spite of himself. Then he stayed silent for a moment.
Suddenly he pulled her into his arms, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower.
"It doesn't change anything for me. You're still my mother."
He felt something give way in his mother's heart. As if an immense weight had left her shoulders.
He couldn't see, but if he could, he would have seen tears running down his mother's cheeks.
"Thank you," she said at last. "You have no idea how much of a relief that is."
They stayed like that a little while longer, then pulled apart.
"I thought you'd get angry, to be honest."
"At who? You? Why?"
"For hiding this from you all this time."
"It's not like I ever asked. And anyway, you never really had enough time to tell me. That's all. Like I said before, it doesn't change anything. Continue."
His mother took a moment to calm down, then went on.
"You've seen the place we're in. Well, figure of speech."
Emrys didn't need to see it. He could imagine it easily: a black sky, flat as a ceiling, a stretch of water that doesn't move, and nothing else as far as the eye could see except bones and corpses.
Besides, he used to play with them when he was little. Even though back then he didn't know what they were.
"There's only a desolate, worthless wasteland as far as you can see. Nothing to do, nothing to look at, nothing to feel. There was only boredom."
"And you couldn't leave?"
"No. I could look through the surface of the outer lake, that's all. But there was nothing very interesting to see, and that went on for thousands of years. Then, after humans appeared, I'd watch them come to fish, and realize the water was solid, and argue, and throw coins while making wishes, and realize the water behaved like stone. It kept me busy for a while, and then it ended up boring me too."
"You really had no other hobbies?"
"Of course I did. When I was too bored and the weather was on my side, I'd count the raindrops. I could feel them falling on the surface, one by one. I counted up to a million once, then I messed up and had to start over."
"Really? To that point?"
"At some point I started bringing people here, to talk with someone about what was going on out there, but they all ended up dying from the lake water they swallowed. That's actually why there are all these bones."
I knew there was something off about this lake's water. Makes you wonder if it's even really water. It feels more like magical energy so concentrated that it turned liquid.
"It cheered up my existence a little, but my life came down to a boring, endless wait."
"What were you waiting for?" Emrys asked, without much hope that she'd answer.
And as he'd feared, she didn't.
"That's none of your business," she went on, smiling. "So, under those conditions, one day I felt something near the shore. Something I hadn't brought here."
"What?"
"At first I thought I was imagining it. I didn't see how anything could appear in this place. But it was really there. A soul. It didn't come from an animal, or from a human passing by. It didn't belong to any body, any place. It was just resting on the ground, as if someone had put it down and forgotten to come back for it. It was tiny and fragile, like the soul of a newborn."
"So even you don't know where I really come from."
"Oh, believe me, I tried. But I found absolutely nothing. Truth is, I couldn't search for much, stuck here."
Emrys said nothing. He'd be lying if he said he didn't want to know where he came from, but it was only simple curiosity.
I guess whatever made me reincarnate in this world just made me spawn here.
"I stayed there watching it for a long time," she added. "I didn't dare get close, afraid it would disappear. One wrong move and it would go out. I wondered if it was lost, if it was scared, if someone would come looking for it." Her voice tightened. "No one came."
Emrys reached for her hand and found it without difficulty. It was cold, like water, but it squeezed his with surprising strength.
She let a silence pass. Emrys felt her sadness rise, slow and steady, and a few drops fell on his hand. He had sensed a lot of grief with his Haki, the villagers of Fondval's, the grief of children who had lost their parents. This one had a different quality. It didn't try to make itself seen, it simply flowed.
"Are you crying?"
"It's just lake water."
"Is that true, that lie?"
"I prefer it to the truth." She laughed through a sniffle, then rested her head against his shoulder. "It feels good to finally say it to someone."
"Continue. What happened next?"
"Next..."
She stopped. Without changing position, she raised her eyes to the black sky, straight ahead, the way you look someone in the eye.
"One second," she said. "What comes next is private."
His mother raised her hand. A soft, very precise magic gathered around her fingers, like someone closing a window without letting the shutter bang. Then she closed her fist.
Emrys heard nothing and felt nothing.
"It's done. Now we can talk in peace."
***
On the other side, the image broke off abruptly.
For an instant she still saw Nimue's face in close-up, staring straight into her eyes, then there was nothing. Only a black surface, like a window covered with a cloth.
She stayed there looking at it for a moment, hands resting on her knees, a little disappointed. She would have liked to know what came next. Then she shrugged, not offended.
"Okay okay, I get it. It doesn't concern me. No need to be so violent."