The Book of Black Redemption

by A L Hart

  I sensed his magic before I turned and saw him standing there behind me, the grass far shorter than it’d been moments ago—and the giant . . . he was no giant anymore, but my height. It was the last thing I processed just as his foot rose and cracked into my chest, sending me flying backwards like a ragdoll.

  Barely able to register the gaping fire in my chest, another blow blasted me from behind before I could even hit the ground. My back, it’d gotten used to being treated as a punching bag, the screaming pain burrowing into the tendons like an old friend, yet when I crashed into the ground, heaving, gasping in ragged, bloody breaths, my lungs felt as though blades were shredding them from the inside.

  Vision gone hazy, I rolled over and stared dazedly into the oddly colored sky. Why was I even here? When jumping through that portal, I’d expected to find Jera and the two Imperial Beasts facing off on the other side, but instead, I’d found strange impressions of nature, two mages in the middle of hunting and giants who weren’t actually giants at all, enraged by the trespassing.

  As black and purple blotches played at my field of sight, two faces came into view.

  “You are far from human,” said the man. “As those blows would have destroyed the shell that they occupy.”

  “And no human or mage could escape our wards with such ease.”

  “And you—” I forced in a wet, hot breath only to sputter up more blood. “Aren’t giants.” Inside, the energy I’d absorbed spread to my injuries, attempting to repair the tatters and broken bones. Numbness was fast spreading.

  The man kneeled in front of me, hand placed over my heart as though to check for a pulse, yet I knew he was moments from plunging it deep and ripping the organ free. Though, I’d learned from the one time Jera had vaguely brushed the notion, that whatever I was becoming, whatever dark energy or ability likened me to the Maker, there was one thing it wouldn’t tolerate.

  Having my heart damaged. I didn’t know why, but it was a portent, black warning that stirred within me whenever a threat veered near it.

  “If we are not giants, then what are we?” he asked, those eyes of green and hair like silver starlight painting him as some apparition.

  Another heave, metallic tang coating my tongue, I ran a recovery of my memories, and there was one person who stood out in particular, one who was all too familiar with memories in and of itself. Whose size fluctuated. Who hair was as fiery as the female before me with silver streaks akin to the male’s. A woman who spoke of Skashora as though it were a city she’d imagined, only because she’d forgotten it.

  “You’re like her . . .” I answered faintly. “You’re faeries.”

  “W-who divulged this information to you?” the male faery demanded, shock lacing his words more than the underlayer of anger. When I could only manage a cough and heave, he curled his fingers to claws, threatening to stab them clean through my chest. I felt my energy shift then, restless, daring him.

  “Valen, let the male breathe.”

  “We don’t know what he is, where he came from or what he’s capable of, Neer. For all we know, he could be with the seelie. They’re the only ones who know about us.”

  “If you would give him a moment to calm his mind, I can retrieve the answer myself.”

  With a grunt, he reluctantly leaned away, but that slightly feral glint in his eyes told me one wrong move and I’d figure out just what happened were he to rip into me. I stayed still.

  My thoughts, none of them were too secret, but just as well, they were all fuzzy, unstable. Pain blotted their perimeters, butchering them into incomprehensible pieces. Confirmed when Neer clutched her head and took a step back.

  “Perhaps we should have refrained from battering him so intensely.”

  That’d have been great.

  “I did,” Valen claimed, yet the burning hole in my chest begged to differ.

  I coughed again, sputtered, then tried to seize what may have been my golden ticket out of here, since teleportation didn’t make me the invisible god I’d assumed it would: “I know a faery . . . her height changes. Hair like . . . yours. Has more magic than dark energy.” I struggled to suppress a swallow, throat clamping down harder with each word I forced through. “Niv. Her name is Niv.”

  The collective stun to gleam their features was the last thing I saw before I gave myself up to the darkness.

  Ch. 3

  I woke to the sound of fire in the hearth, the scent of spring filling my nostrils, heavy blankets tossed over me. There was no pain, but a tranquil, cool current of peace flowing in my head. An unnatural, false pretense of peace I could identify instantly seeing as these past two months had been everything but that.

  I would have stayed. Here, wherever I was, wrapped in the serenity, head heavy from the first dreamless sleep I’d had in too long. But what always came with waking was recollection. The talking cat, the portal, the mages and giants. As gratifying as it would be to sink back into unconsciousness where those beings didn’t exist, it would accomplish nothing. Set me further back from my goals.

  Which was a forever growing list.

  Find Jera, who was no doubt singularly focused on finding Ophelia/the talking cat. Which made that my objective as well, seeing as I needed her for the primary goal: find Graves and Jai and repair the cracks in the Shatters’ gateway.

  But first, before any of those unlikely things were pursued, I had to figure out just where I was.

  The last thing I remembered was being hoisted over Valen’s shoulder, drifting in and out of consciousness, the faery-giant speculating on all of the possible ways I could have known their daughter—

  Niv was their daughter!

  I sat up, opening my eyes to a room shroud in elegance, black stone making up the walls, the hearth, the inglenook in which a small fire crackled soothingly. No windows, but crystal cut chandeliers hung from overhead, something about their pale orange light not quite . . . right. The bed was made up of weighty covers a shade of cream, the pillows beneath sinfully plush and rich in texture. A thick, strangely pleasant scent hung in the air, sweet, chocolatey, reminding me of the shop. The pastries. And, inevitably, the woman who was all but synonymous with pastries.

  I ran a hand through my hair, staring across at the fireplace.

  I didn’t like where my head was at, defenseless against the anxiety creeping into it.

  Back at the shop, that cat, Imperial Beast, whatever it was, there’d been something disturbingly jovial about it. Disconnected. And when it’d hopped onto the bar counter moments before opening the portal, it’d done something even more disconcerting: opened its mouth and produced a blue orb of light that haunted my thoughts even now. There’d been something horrifyingly wrong about that light, something cataclysmic at its center.

  What if, when Jera and Tathri followed the beast through the portal, what if it’d killed them both on sight?

  If Imperial Beasts were as strong as I’d been told, what chance did Jera stand against it alone? And Tathri, I didn’t even want to breach the questions on that front.

  “Then perhaps you might answer mine?”

  I jumped, tasting my heartbeat at the back of my throat.

  There, shadowed off in the corner, sat Neer, her eyes surreal emeralds in the scarce light. Even seated, she was towering, yet nothing like the enormous size she’d taken to out in the meadow. At this size, my mind didn’t struggle at the brink of comprehension.

  “Where am I?” I glanced around the room again, but it was still as sparse as it’d been before, only this time I spotted the door on the other side of the room.

  “My home,” she answered to my surprise, then she stood, her movements hushed and graced, her eyes resting on me the entire time. “What is your name?”

  I balled my hands into the covers. “Why not see for yourself?”

  “Going through another’s mind is invasive. Your thoughts, however, do leak out from time to time all on their own.”

  I couldn’t hold back a mirthless laugh then.
They could all but punch a hole through my chest yet had reserves about invading one’s privacy? “You would have gone through my mind when we were out in that field.”

  “You were perceived as an enemy threat, but only upon your unconsciousness was I able to get a more thorough understanding of your mind, your heart. Neither rang malicious, even if one has been tainted.”

  She had to mean my heart, which only brought my thoughts around to what I’d done to the pixie. That night had actually been the last time I’d seen Niv before everything fell into crazy territory. If these were her actual parents, which appearances alone seemed to validate, then could I trust them?

  Inoli and Jera both had stressed the brutal nature of the creatures within the Shatters, and if the near instantaneous pummeling upon arrival didn’t verify their claim, I didn’t know what did.

  It wasn’t like I knew Niv all that well, either. She was a faery who owned a nightclub and had terrible memory. Occasionally converted other beings’ emotions into drinks and got intoxicated off of them, and was no stranger to enabling others to do so. But she’d helped us when she didn’t have to, multiple times.

  That said, I didn’t think Niv remembered her parents, and suddenly, her paintings were making a whole lot of sense. Particularly the one I’d seen in the hall of her club, that of the screaming child on the cliffside, the looming, faceless figures behind her.

  I wanted to help, but I also remembered how tightly faeries held to their names. To give them up would enslave them. Would it have been wise for me to follow suit? Or did this rule only apply to faeries on Earth, those who had prices twisting the laws of their being?

  There were too many rules and I wasn’t even sure of the game.

  So I stuck with the truth, “My name is Peter.”

  She stopped at the foot of the bed, taking a seat and tucking the tail of her gown beneath her. “And I am Neer. Tell me, Peter, before you passed out, you mentioned a name. Niv. By any chance could you have meant Nivere?”

  I glanced back to the fireplace. I was in a world I knew nothing about, surrounded by creatures stronger than me at every turn. The smart and wise thing would be to play good with the faery-giants regardless of if I could trust them or not. But it also meant I had to have leverage, because who was to say they wouldn’t discard me the moment—

  “We’ve no intent to kill you.”

  “Thought you wouldn’t go through my head.”

  “When one is anxious, their thoughts leak, as I’ve said. Now please, tell me this information and you have my word, no harm will come to you and yours.”

  “Mine?” Another quick glance around the room. I was the only one here.

  “The two mages, are they not with you?”

  I stared at her blankly, shutting down my thoughts. Flatly, I said, “Yes, they’re with me.” Either that, or I was fairly certain they would become nothing more than blood splats in the ground. Even if it was bizarre of her to assume two men who’d tried to bargain away my life for their freedom would be my acquaintances. Maybe cruelty really was a universal language here.

  Hurriedly, I steered us back to Niv. “The man, Valen, I heard him say Niv was your daughter—is your daughter.”

  The firelight took to her eyes like it belonged there, throwing shades of green that only served to remind me how unnaturally beautiful she was, and how dull I was in comparison. She folded her hands on her lap, gaze drifting. “If this is all true and you are not from our world, then I am to assume you do not know a thing of what’s happened here.”

  “It might be safer to assume I don’t know anything about this world as whole. At all.”

  “How is it you came to meet Nivere?”

  “Um, she helped me with something.” I didn’t see any need to explain the prison break or how slightly off the rocks Niv came across as.

  The ghost of a smile touched the faery’s lips. “She did enjoy that. Sad to say, it was that helpful nature that got her into this mess.”

  “What mess, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Neer shook her head, but her eyes returned to mine as she said, “She was never supposed to go to your world. We tried to keep her from doing so, but she was determined to break the spell. She hunted down any dark elf she could to open the gateway.” At my confusion, she wrung her hands, then, “Apologies, it’s not often we encounter someone who is not aware of Skashora’s curse. Do you know of the Epilogue?”

  “The apocalyptic event that wipes out the majority of the people here every millenium?” Or Earth’s equivalent of the biblical flood.

  She inclined her head. “Years before the most recent Epilogue, the faery races—the giants, seelie, elves, pixies, and more—we all entered into a pact, something that is not too common a thing among any of the species here. In this pact, we were to work together, combine our magic to shield the entirety of our species from what doom awaited when the Epilogue came.

  “Among us all, there was unrest, distrust, as nearly every species in this forsaken world has been at war since . . . since the beginning of time. But for this, all faeries vowed to set aside their differences and work together for the survival of our species. And yet, when the time came and the skies turned their blood red, that was when the lies and deception began. A small insurgent rose within the seelie, those who would rather die than see the faery races form an alliance. A group came to the giants, spoke of how the seelie plotted to turn on us, steal our magic to protect themselves. Fear, Peter, is an ultimate weapon, and it was this fear that brought the giants to join that small group of seelie and attack the seelie race at large. But the thing about the seelie . . .”

  She examined a ring one her finger, a purple gem glinting furiously in the light. “They are strangers to trust more so than any other creatures in this world. When the giants and rebel seelie turned on them, were they surprised? No. Instead, they were prepared. They slaughtered the traitors within their ranks with frightening ease while the giants stood by and watched, but when the seelie turned their sights to the giants, they told the seelie that their only reason for the broken pact was because of the lies the corrupted seelie spread. They showed the giants mercy then.

  “A useless mercy it was, for the moment the giants returned to their land to uphold their end of the pact and help protect all faeries, they found Skashora had been invaded by remaining rebel seelie, those who’d branded themselves unseelie. Because the giants stood by and watched their rebel brothers get slaughtered, rather than kill us all, they cast a curse over Skashora, a curse which turned all the giants into stone, throwing them into a deep state of sleep right where they stood, so that when the Epilogue came, whatever it may be, the giants would be defenseless to it.”

  “How did you and Niv survive it, then?”

  She smiled, but it never reached her eyes. “Giants with children beneath a century old were strictly protected by a powerful, rare spell and hidden underground. Valen, Nivere and I were one of the few families protected.”

  “Are you the only giants who survived?”

  “Not at all. Ironically, the same curse which turned the giants to stone is the same curse that protected them from the Epilogue. However, because they survived, Nivere found it to be her duty to lift their curse, her thanks for protecting the few families they did. But this curse . . . we found it to be practically irreversible, even by the unseelie who cast it.”

  So somewhere in this land, there were a bunch of giants turned to stone? Why hadn’t I seen them? There’d only been fields of so much grass my eyes had stung trying to discern its end.

  “The more dead ends Nivere encountered, the more obsessed she became in breaking the giants’ curse. It was only when happening upon a particularly knowledgeable vampire that she discovered what she figured would be the answers she needed. Giants, like all fae, use magic far more than dark energy and as such, they are susceptible to dark energy above all else. And there was one male riddled to have a master control of the substance.”

  O
h no. I prepared myself for the dismal news to come.

  “The Maker was said to be King of the Incubi, his reign beside Queen Ophelia known across all the lands in the Shatters. But as many know, the incubi, succubi, demon race as a whole, despised the faeries more than the unseelie despised the seelie. The demons were our common, most deplored enemies.”

  I shut my mind down further, blackening it to keep images of the twins and my association with them from leaking. But that aside, I realized this was the reason Niv had wanted my dark energy upon our very first meeting, my memories. She herself was curious of spells, not for power’s sake, but because she’d unconsciously been pursuing this long sought goal.

  “Even so, Nivere was intent to storm their castle and drag this Maker back to Skashora if she had to, anything to free her kind. But upon arrival, she found the Maker was no more. The details of his death were never clear, but when Nivere searched Queen Ophelia’s mind, she found truth in the claim. The Maker was indeed gone—only, Nivere saw that Ophelia believed him to be in the human realm. She went to the human world then and never returned.”

  My mind raced under the realization of why Niv’s memory was so terrible. Something I’d overlooked since coming here because I’d been so caught up in simply trying to stay alive: going through the gateway came at a price for everyone. But for faeries, that price had been iron I thought?

  Unless, the few who knew about the price assumed the price of susceptibility to iron was universal to all faeries when in actuality, the price only applied to specific races within the faery specie. Niv was of the giant race. What if their price was their memory? What if Niv had passed through the gateway to find the Maker, only to forget why she’d ever entered my world?

  The only reason Lia and Jera didn’t remember Niv was likely because the faery-giant had erased the memory of her ever having been there.