Title: Knowing things
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: Teen
Length: 1900 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Umi and Clef. About six months after the end of Rayearth 2. (I am failing to be shocked how swiftly I have returned to last minute posting XD)
Summary: There's a difference between mending and healing, apparently.

oOo

It wasn’t like Clef to vanish so entirely that Umi couldn’t find him in any of his usual spots - not when she knew the hiding places as well as the common ones. But today she couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. The last anyone had seen of him was Ferio, several hours ago, and he just waved along the corridor and said ‘I think he was going downstairs?’.

So down Umi was going, past the public rooms and the Council chamber and rooms where the guards practised, finding passages she’d never taken before which led underground. At first there were places she recognised, where the families with children had stayed, as deep into the safety of the castle as they could get - but the corridors kept on going, and she found a set of stairs that was covered with a faint layer of dust - with one set of footprints clear on the pale stone.

She peered down the stairwell. It was dark and creepy, and she was doing her best not to wonder how far underground she was already, but she could see a faint light at the bottom. So she took a breath, and started down.

The last thing she expected was to find a great hall, lit from gently glowing crystal sconces high on the walls, with columns about the edges and a ceiling high enough Selece could have stood upright here. Everything was cream and gold, apart from the five-foot high glass-like globes that were set in a circle about the walls, and about a still pool in the middle of the room. Those globes were deep blue and green and purple, and some of them seemed to glow deep within. Others…

The rebuilding hadn’t touched this place. Whatever it was, not enough people had known of it for that first bright burst of Hikaru’s remaking to fix the stones that had fallen from the vaulted ceiling, and the workgroups hadn’t been here to fix it more manually. Some of them had obviously fallen onto a few of the globes, leaving terrible-seeming cracks, two of them even chipped. The damaged ones were not glowing like the others.

Clef was stood in the middle of the room, staring at those broken globes. The trail in the dust went that far and no further. Umi had been searching for at least an hour; she wondered, uneasily, how long he had been standing silently in the middle of the room.

Whatever this was, she wasn’t going to leave him to it.

Dust and grit crunched under her shoes as she crossed the room, and Clef raised a hand in her direction, but he didn’t turn, and he still didn’t say anything. “No good afternoon?” she asked, and her voice seemed very small in the vast space.

“Good afternoon, Umi.” Clef shook his head at her, and she relaxed a fraction. “Did you need me for anything?”

“Oh, nothing much.” She peered at one of the broken stones, now she was nearer. The crack ran straight through the heart of it. “I just didn’t want to get on with my homework just yet. What are these things? They’re massive!”

“These?” He nodded at the closest globe. “These are the storage stones which hold the belongings people managed to save from their homes, when they fled to the castle. The ones they had no use for at that time, or no place for, or just wanted to keep safe.” His voice twisted on the last word. “Half the national library is in one of these, but mostly it’s people’s most loved possessions. The furniture their parents made for them when they moved out, the first item their child crafted for them, that kind of thing. Irreplaceable ones. I came down, now that the land is getting more stable, to see if we could start bringing things out.”

Umi looked from him to the broken stones, and winced.

“As you can see, not everyone is going to have their belongings returned to them.”

“…Hasn’t anyone been down here since Cephiro was remade? It’s been almost six months now. Surely someone else will have noticed?”

Clef shook his head. “Not many would be able to see the stairs, even if they were stood right in front of them. This place is protected. And I haven’t had the time…” He paused, and took a breath. “Nor have I had the will, to come here again. I should have checked earlier. At least people would know by now…”

Umi glanced back at the stairs, confused. Nothing had stopped her getting down here. “Where are we?”

“The most secure part of the castle,” Clef said, softly. Umi stared about again, at the ring of polished globes about the still pool, at the ceiling stretching high overhead. A chill ran up the back of her neck and across her scalp, making her hair prickle.

“…I feel like I’ve been here before. Clef, why do I know this room?”

He sighed, and sank down to the ground, and Umi flinched. She’d never seen him look so defeated, not when the world was falling about them, and he didn’t even seem to see the broken stones anymore. He was looking beyond them, at something she couldn’t see.

“This is where she sent me away.”

No question who ‘she’ was. Only one person was haunting all Cephiro enough to be definitive. Umi folded down onto the floor next to Clef, watching him, not quite daring to speak. They’d talked about a lot of things, these past months, but never directly about Emeraude.

Clef waved a hand at the pool. “This is the entrance to the water room, where she locked herself away from the world, in a place not entirely of this dimension. I think you found her here. When I built this castle, I used what remained of the old one as the foundations - this room is far older than I am, you know. Older than her reign. I thought… this was where we would end up, the last place that would remain if we couldn’t find a new Pillar. And I thought that these things would be safe here until that happened.” His voice strengthened as he went on, and more than that; he sounded almost angry, now. “I thought, if nothing else, that when people handed us their last precious belongings, we had somewhere to keep them safe!”

Echoes rang around the room, repeating his last words, and Umi saw him shiver. She shifted so her knee was just touching his leg, the least conspicuous way she could think of reaching out. He didn’t move away, so she decided that was a win. But what to do next…

If she asked stupid questions, at least he’d get angry with her. She was used to that - they were good at arguing. Maybe it would take the stillness out of the way he sat.

“I still don’t understand. Can’t you just use a spell and mend it?”

“I would have to know every item within it, what it was made of, the weight and the importance of it. Every item, all at once, and know they were in this stone and not the next.” He waved at it. “More than a hundred people have belongings in each of these, and three are broken beyond use!”

They were certainly broken. There were chips of crystal on the floor just in front of them. Umi frowned, picking one up. “What about a healer, then? I know you say you’re not great at that kind of magic, but if Fuu tried it - I mean, she fixed me without knowing-” she cut off the ‘what I feel like’ on the basis that just sounded dodgy. “How I’m made. Except generally, I guess, we’ve all done some biology at school, but I don’t think that’s enough for what you mean.”

“Healing is an entirely different thing! Healing is for living things - for animals and plants and people. Not for objects!”

Umi pouted at him. “I don’t see why not. It’s still fixing them, isn’t it?”

“All living things know what they are. It’s written into their being, in every tiny part of them. Healing gives them the power and direction to rebuild, but it uses the template they already have within them! Even Cephiro is alive, in her own way - when Hikaru healed her, the template was the memories of Cephiro in the hearts of all who love this land. Which is why she’s a little confused at times - no one remembers things quite the same way. Inanimate objects… that’s different. They don’t know themselves, you have to do the knowing for them.” He waved at the stone. “I’ve failed. That’s all there is to it. If you’ll excuse me, I will go and start to let people know. If I tell the priests, they can spread the word, that some will have nothing salvageable. Perhaps they can even make it hurt less.”

“Clef…” Umi grabbed hold of his arm, and flushed, let go. But he stayed where she had stopped him, while a thought gathered itself together from the things he had said. “…Clef, you said Cephiro is alive?”

“Yes? More than even before, now a hundred thousand souls stand as Pillar. Why?”

“If Cephiro is alive… then these stones, they’re a part of her.” Umi looked back at them, and part of her was sure of what she was saying. “There are people in Cephiro who know these things, aren’t there. The owners would know them well enough to mend them, and the owners are a part of Cephiro - they’re connected, like you said, creating her. So surely there is a template that we can use to fix them?”

Clef stared at her, his eyes very wide, and then back at the stones. “It’s- it’s possible. It would never have worked before the change, but now… if they are still alive…” And suddenly he grinned, standing straight as he hadn’t since she walked in. “It’s worth an attempt!”

He shot off for the door, and Umi jumped, then ran after him. “Where are you going?”

“To fetch Presea! I’m a little better at mending than I am healing, but I think we need an expert for this!” He waited a moment at the bottom of the stairs, until she caught up. “Are you coming too, or do you need to start the homework you are trying to avoid?”

“I’m coming,” Umi insisted, grinning back at him. “I even know where Presea is - found her when I was looking for you.”

“Lead the way, then,” Clef said, and waved an arm at the stairs.

oOo

An hour later there were three shining globes where there had been broken fragments, and Presea was grinning as triumphantly as Umi felt.

She didn’t even care that she was going to be doing her maths review on the way to school tomorrow. It was absolutely worth it to see the look on Clef’s face when he accessed the spell and started to pull things out of it - and they came whole and undamaged.

oOo