Human Again

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by E. L. Tenenbaum


  But even as they spoke, their words were like the bark of that villager’s foolish dog, the one that had tried too hard to warn its master about the truth of the man approaching him before I silenced it by tearing it to pieces. The stories they told now replaced those barks, each one reaching deep inside me to awaken the long-slumbering beast.

  On and on it went, until a familiar darkness began to cloud the edge of my vision. If they didn’t stop, they would unleash a beast more terrifying than any danger we had faced on the battlefield.

  “ENOUGH!”

  The ferocity of my yell was not only enough to silence the group, but also to cause an echo that reverberated in my skull long after it should have ceased. My body was trembling, I had to set my glass down. Where? Where? I let go and it shattered at my feet.

  A group of confused and hesitant eyes turned toward me. Most of them very quickly sobered up.

  The beast clawed at my throat, yearning to be let free.

  I mumbled a hasty, quieter “excuse me” and made my escape, uncertain if I’d be able to keep it in after being so long out of practice. I burst through the first door I could find, stumbled onto a small balcony overlooking the quiet gardens. There was no one but me and the stars and the dark shadows cast in the moonlight.

  My body was shaking so strongly now I didn’t dare grab the railing before me for fear I would break it, pull straight through the stone and mortar, then smash it back into the earth from which is was formed. Perspiration beaded at my temples from the effort of staying in control, sweat dripped down my back. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  Why? Why? Why?

  Why would it never be enough?

  What frightened me even more was the unexpected heat that had suddenly boiled within me, the fire a direct opposite to the cold fury I used to wield. What was happening to me? Why was my blood hot as lava in my veins?

  There were footsteps somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t place them past the beast’s slowly growing roar. My lips peeled back, revealing the jagged white tips of my teeth. Saliva started to form, threatening to drip out with the beast’s hunger. This was equal footing?

  A hand at my elbow.

  The trembling, the fire, the unknown surging within.

  My precarious hold on the beast snapped.

  I whipped around, leading with my arm, and made contact. My mind understood what I had wrought a moment too late. I tried to pull back but the damage was done.

  Kiara was sprawled on the ground at my feet, a hand raised to a cheekbone that would very quickly start to bruise. I was panting as I stared down at her. Horrorstruck, I slammed the beast back, forcing it down, down, down, until my vision cleared.

  I immediately knelt beside her but she scooted back. I tried to raise a hand to offer help but she raised her own to stop me.

  “Kiara?” I rasped and I hoped the tone of my voice told her everything I wanted to say.

  I didn’t mean to. I would spend a lifetime on the frontlines of any war rather than hurt her. Please don’t leave me. Please understand. Forgive.

  With one hand still out to stay me, Kiara shakily rose to her feet. Her hand remained at her cheek, whether to hide what I had done from her or from myself, I don’t know. She must have seen something new in my eyes then, something in my demeanor that suggested that still, after everything, something lurked.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m going to Lyla,” she said, her voice oddly calm considering how her heart must have been breaking.

  Mine was. Splintering so finely the pieces could well have been lost in the night. The hurt in her eyes was more than I could bear, and sensing it the beast pawed against me demanding more. Even at my worst, I had never attacked Kiara. When Daimyon intervened that day in the garden, I had stopped my hand before it could connect with her, barely. So what had gone wrong this time? Why I hadn’t I pulled it back?

  “I will take Jaxel with me,” she continued, “and you will not follow. And if you ever touch me like that again, you will never see me again.”

  She only lowered her hand after her back was turned. With chin up, she walked away from me, careful to keep her steps even though she probably wished to flee from me as fast as her feet could carry her.

  I watched her go, unable to move for the shock coursing through me. Following it came a pain so acute I could hardly stand. Why had I blackened my light, swiping my darkness across it before I could stop myself? It almost felt as if I’d tainted her, somehow ruined her goodness by allowing the beast to touch her.

  I wanted to claw out of my skin. How could I look at this face, walk in this body, lay claim to a soul, after the terrible thing I’d done?

  Despite it all, however, it was good for me to hear those words from her, good for me to see the steel she so carefully hid and so infrequently used under all that kindness. At the least, it reassured me that, if needed, she would not be a helpless lamb if she ever saw the beast again.

  Once I could no longer see her, I leaped over the railing into the garden below. Then I took off on a mad run toward the forest, somewhere, anywhere away from Kiara and the truth of what had just occurred.

  I ran and ran, just as I used to, and only turned back when the sun came up, seeking to sneak back into the palace early enough so no one would know I hadn’t been there. As it was the morning after such a grand celebration, everyone was sleeping in, but one peek into Kiara’s room and I knew she was already gone.

  I took a long hot bath, not so much to calm myself as to be rid of any evidence of the night I’d spent with the animals I was so much alike. Then I climbed into bed, but didn’t sleep. I tossed and turned for hours, my body rolling about my bed as surely as my soul was wrestling with the beast. I sweated enough to need another bath, but it did little to help me. I stayed to myself as much as I could over the next few days, made up an excuse about Kiara running off to see an ill sister, anything but the truth to explain her sudden disappearance. At night, I stalked the halls, the beast on the prowl, fighting, fighting, fighting as the hours ticked by to regain the calm that had guided me since the day Kiara agreed to stay in my life forever.

  For days, I struggled to force the beast down. With meditation, with physical exertion, with music, all of which were finally proving somewhat effective in subduing the beast. Finally, I felt the first touches of serenity as the very tips of its fingers ventured back toward me again. That afternoon, I clipped a rose from the garden and gave it to Kellan with explicit instructions to ride the wind and deliver it directly to Kiara.

  He took off like an arrow, on a mission from which he would not rest, not until he had put the sun back into my sky.

  She returned with him as quickly as she was able, and, after taking one look at me and assuring herself that I was myself again, flung herself into my arms and held onto me tightly, as if she could hold onto my very humanity, my dulled image of the Divine.

  I clung to her in turn, ever grateful that she had returned to me despite what I’d done to her. The only one who had ever believed in me. The only one who had ever given me a chance. That moment told me more than words ever could, that moment she came back to me once more, that moment that said I was still someone worth fighting for.

  That was the only time anything like that ever happened between us, but the cause of it would linger on. It would take some time still for me to realize that Yarrow had been right in his prediction that the faery had perverted the fury inside of me. The damage the curse left behind was a final mockery of me and all I’d done during the time the beast was winning the war over me. All the love, the passion, the warmth that had saved me, that had brought me back to myself, was now turned against me. The icy fury that had once frozen my veins and trapped my heart had been transformed through love into a blazing inferno. One I never saw growing until it set my blood ablaze.

  A little while later, Kiara and I traveled to Laurendale to offer condolences to Queen Ella on the sudden passing of King Alex a mere year after attending their
coronation. We had first traveled there for their wedding over five years prior, a notably festive event not only because he had been the crown prince and an only child, but also because of the faery tale that had ushered it in. The prince had held a masquerade to celebrate his military victories and, in a show of goodwill, opened the party up to everyone in his kingdom. There he’d been captivated by a mysterious lady, who never revealed her identity and slipped through his fingers before he had a chance to discover it. One night, at a ball he’d held just to see her again, he coated the stairway with tar and one of the lady’s glass slippers stuck when she tried to escape him once more. The prince had used it to search the entire kingdom for her, and finally, finally found his mystery lady as a servant in her own home, the kind and beautiful Ella, whom he’d promptly whisked away from her past for a future in his palace.

  By all accounts, and having met the kind and beautiful Ella myself in the years since, their life was the perfect faery tale. Something I would’ve envied more, except Alex didn’t get many years to enjoy it. But no one knew about that then, as kings and queens, princes and princesses, knights and diplomats from all over the realms gathered to celebrate their happy day. The next visit, however, was a markedly somber one, the homage paid to a life cut short a stark difference to the celebration of the future we had previously been part of.

  I knew Alex would want me to stay the few days Kiara insisted on, though in many ways I was also staying for myself, staying so long among so many people to prove I could make it through such an intense time without incident.

  And I did. Well, I made it through without incident from me, though I did have a rather curious encounter with the violently lovely Princess Lyla.

  It happened on the third or fourth night after the funeral, in a rather innocuous stretch of hallway that had no significance other than that it was a passage from one wing of the palace to the next. For whatever reason, Kiara had gone to bed a little ahead of me. I suppose she might have been tired from all that had been going on, late nights talking with and comforting Ella, the flurry of emotions, but those details are rather hazy. I was going to check on her, or maybe I too was turning in for the night, when I became aware of footsteps behind me. In such a busy place, it shouldn’t have raised any alarms, but instinct told me they were following me.

  At a secluded corner, I turned around sharply, and Lyla had to stop herself short to avoid slamming into me. Her snow-white cheeks were flushed, though whether it was from upset at her own sense of loss or chasing after me was difficult to ascertain.

  “Evening, Lyla,” I said, my senses on extra guard not only because this hallway meeting was odd but also because of who her husband was.

  “Early night,” she remarked.

  The timbre of her voice made me suspect that an overload of emotions was playing a large factor in fueling whatever this confrontation was about.

  “I’m going to check on Kiara,” I told her.

  Her face darkened. “Yes. Kiara.”

  “Something the matter?” I asked politely.

  “What you did to her,” she blurted out, hands on hips, a defiant glare shooting daggers into me.

  I should’ve turned and left her there, should’ve told her she didn’t know what she was talking about, but Kiara had gone to her to seek sanctuary when the fiery beast had caught me, and therefore her, unawares.

  Noticing my lack of response, Lyla dared take a step closer. She’d always been formidable, but she was coming at me with something else entirely. There was a fury about her then, a kinetic energy cackling menacingly with each step. I fully expected her to strike me, even with imagining the amount of damage Daimyon had probably taught her how to inflict. I would’ve taken it from her, too, stood silently as she beat or stabbed me or whatever sort of punishment she saw fit for what I’d done to my Kiara.

  I deserved it and I welcomed it. Kiara would never lash out at me, from compassion and fear, but Lyla was surely not afraid. Good. Let me feel the pain I caused her. But it wasn’t weapons or fists that Lyla flung at me, but words. Words that etched themselves deep into my bones so that I could never forget, could never escape what transpired between us that night.

  “You ask too much of her,” she hissed. “You and your darkness, you have her trapped.”

  The words sparked from her mouth and lit the air between us. If my rage was a void, a hungry darkness inside me, her anger was bright and blinding, a white-blue streak of lighting slashing through a moonless sky.

  “You don’t understand,” I tried to tell her. “You and your perfect ever after.”

  The words were hardly out of my mouth when she cut them off with a snort. “My perfect ever after?” she almost screamed. She gave a short laugh. “You believe that drivel about true love’s kiss? I awoke when Daimyon finally got me to stop choking on that poisoned piece of apple.”

  I stared at her astounded. I should have been shocked by her admission of another celebrated faery tale that was never quite true, like my own, but I was too upset to think about her and Daimyon at that moment. All I could think of was her accusation that I had imprisoned Kiara once more and so had to set her free again, send her away and once more block out all light from my life. Didn’t anyone understand what it had taken from me the last time I’d done so? Why couldn’t once be enough?

  I had no idea what she intended by revealing the truth of her life to me, but I know that I was not the man to meddle in relationships, especially between people like Daimyon and Lyla. I could hardly hold onto my own as it was.

  “Kiara insists you’re a good man,” she challenged, “but I know what my eyes see. Daimyon and I didn’t have it easy, but we knew it was up to us to build the life we wanted. We didn’t blame others, we didn’t duck responsibility.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked tightly.

  Lyla narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m saying,” she enunciated, “that your life will never be a faery tale if you don’t slaughter that blasted beast and make it one. For her.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I hissed.

  Then, needing to get away before something worse happened, I bid her goodnight and rushed to my rooms, my long legs eating up the floor beneath them. She didn’t try to follow me. But her words did.

  How could I explain to her, how could I explain to any of them how impossible it would be for me to live if I ever let Kiara go again? Perhaps I was being selfish by not insisting she leave me, but she was the one who’d vowed to stay with me. Why was any part of that so difficult for others to accept? Surely if Lyla questioned Kiara’s decision to marry a so-called beast, then others did as well.

  But how was it that no one could see it?

  My rage was a darkness trapping me in a stone cold, blackened room, one buried in depths far deeper than the forgotten dungeons lost beneath the isolated Monsephe castle. The stronger it raged the less air there was for me to breath, so I was left to gasp fruitlessly as the walls continued to close in around me.

  Then, somehow, by Heaven’s grace, I was given a match and I waited as long as possible to light it, facing down the darkness until I could physically, emotionally, mentally take it no longer. I had struck the match and watched it flicker, catch and burn, not caring that it took the last of my air for it to stay alive. But once it was strong enough to illuminate, I could clearly see where the void was, could clearly see the pitfalls awaiting me if I didn’t watch my step. That little flame was Kiara, a tiny light that ignited a blazing fire in the blinding blackness of my mind.

  How could I ever let that go?

  Why would I when she’d promised to be forever mine?

  So the years passed, each bringing with it the ups and downs that unfold in the days of any lifetime. I would go for months on end without an incident, then all of a sudden the rage would erupt like a dormant volcano, and either Kiara would duck away, or I would squirrel myself away before I had the chance to hurt anyone. I would lock myself in my rooms or go running, always running, praying all
the while that the ground beneath my feet would absorb the beast so I could stomp it to death along the way.

  It wasn’t until a decade later, after both of my parents left this world, after we thought it no longer possible, that our only child was born.

  If Kiara had been my sun, this boy was my universe, the most perfect being that I could ever or would ever lay eyes upon. However, as I knew of the darkness that ran in my blood, of what voids could open should any pain befall him, as I was afraid of what I’d pass on to him, wondering if this was how my father felt when he first looked at me after Adlard died, I made an important decision then.

  I would stay away from him. I would leave him to his mother’s goodness and her loving care. I would not infect him as I once had the servants in my charge, I would not poison him with my evil at all. And I certainly would not think about how much my distance from him mirrored the way my father acted toward me. Maybe Father’s distance came from his own fear of awakening within me a beast he harbored in himself. There’s no way to know, but I wouldn’t get close enough to risk it.

  For the first few years, when he was still too young to understand, I gave him just enough attention, ruffled his hair, bent to kiss his forehead, so Kiara wouldn’t be suspicious. I knew she wouldn’t agree with what I knew I had to do for the boy’s sake, so I didn’t tell her. However, even then, I forced myself to become cold on contact. I didn’t allow myself to feel as I smiled and encouraged him to walk, talk, and succeed in his studies. As he grew older, I withheld myself, so I’m sure he wondered at what he possibly could’ve done to drive me away. I complimented him, encouraged him, but only as much as was necessary, always reasserting my distance as soon as it was done.

  He never said anything to me about it, and I don’t know if he spoke of it with his mother either, but maybe he’d heard the story of our faery tale and knew not to address the issue. As far as I was concerned, the boy was Kiara’s son. I allowed him to call me Father, but I did not allow myself to feel that way toward him.

 

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