The Book of Black Redemption

by A L Hart

I clutched my head, trying to keep up with it all.

  “My mate, Valen, he has been trying to enter the human realm since to find her, but finding one who could open a portal took Niv shy of three centuries, and in that time the probability of finding a dark elf has lessened drastically due to many going into hiding or being hunted to sell to the highest bidder. I suppose it’s enough to know she’s alive.”

  “Does Valen know what happens to those who cross the gateway dividing our worlds?” I asked slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Did any immortals in the Shatters know how crossing over to my world worked, or was it something you could only find out by doing so? Sort of like the afterlife, a concept built around speculation, religion and science, but no one really knew what waited on the other side.

  In this case, I did. “Going through the portal comes at a heavy price, and if I’m right, I think Niv’s was her memory.” For clarification, to ensure there was no misunderstanding, I added starkly, “I don’t think Niv remembers you or Valen or her reason for going to Earth.”

  Neer’s mouth sat open, the crackling of the fire filling the silence.

  “But I think, the night before I came here, she was starting to. When I mentioned the Shatters, she said there was something she had to do.”

  “And then what, Peter? What did she do? Did she remember her mother and father?”

  Again, I had to block out all thoughts as I recalled Jera bursting into the room, beyond enraged at the drink the faery had given me, then threatening the faery’s life. “She went home,” I said. “Back to her paintings.”

  Neer was on her feet then. “I must report this to Valen. He will be thrilled to know we have someone who can open the portal and take us to our daughter.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t open the portal. The talking cat did it.” At her dubious look, I said, “The Imperial Beast. It’s why I’m here. I’m looking for it and my friends.” Amongst other things, like saving Earth.

  “Then we will help you find this Imperial Beast if it means a way into your world, back to our daughter.”

  I blinked. While that was something of a relief, two faeries willing to help in my expedition, I didn’t think Neer fully understood the concept behind prices.

  I explained it to her clearly this time.

  When finished, she narrowed her eyes. “You cannot be certain we too will lose our memory.”

  “You’re right, but from what I know, they say the price you pay will always outweigh your objective.”

  Her hands balled at her side, her eyes brighter than the fire as she demanded, “If that is true, then what is the price you paid to come here?”

  I stilled.

  It wasn’t something I’d had the chance to consider.

  What price had I paid to come here? If prices always outweighed goals, and if my goal had been to save my world, then . . .

  Just how terrible was the price I’d paid?

  Ch. 4

  They treated me like royalty. Which I was beginning to think they themselves were. Neer wasn’t lying, not all of the faery-giants had been turned to stone. There were quite of few of them who milled around the massive estate, some of them my height or even smaller.

  Neer insisted I bathed, but it was only when shown to what loosely passed as a bathroom that I realized by ‘bathe’ she meant to have others do it for me. Three faeries tried to accompany me inside the spacious, cavernous room where steaming water rained from the rocky ceiling, and when I declined, they shared a look like I’d just insulted their entire lineage.

  They were gone before I could apologize and explain that where I was from, showering alone was kind of a thing. If this could even be called a shower. It was as big as a bedroom, the walls and ceiling made of dark brown granite. The floors consisted of some beige, grainy rock, the relative darkness of the space lit by little tawny floating lights.

  There was a nature-esque intrigue to it, I decided, as I stepped beneath the water only to find no soap. Instead, the water itself was scented, and when I searched for the source of the water, I found it literally just fell from a formless dark space above as if powered by magic—which it likely was. Everything here was, from the floating lights to the way the fallen water seemed to drain into nothing.

  It was mystifying.

  It kept my mind off of building concerns.

  What was my price? Where was Jera? Just who was Lia? Who was Tathri? How was Danny? Would I ever see any of them again?

  I stayed in the soothing steamy room for what must have been two hours. Half of that time was me figuring out how to put on the clothes hung on one side of the cave-like shower. A form-fitting long sleeve shirt, surprisingly mobile for leather. Three clasped belts ran the length of my torso, two straps at the waist hooked the leather pants’ heavy belt. Going by the triangular slots around the calves and thighs, I was going to assume these clothes had once belonged to the battle-hardy and blade-wielders.

  Which they couldn’t have possibly thought I was.

  Not a moment after opening the large door leading back into the corridor, was I carted off by two servants. I didn’t ask any questions. It was easier that way and gave me the opportunity to observe. The servants were reserved, their skepticism of me starkly written in their side glances and considerable paces between us.

  It wasn’t until they reached two towering double doors that their shoulders seemed to relax. Pushing it open, a dining hall was revealed with walls of gold and the most aromatic smell of various meats enough to make my mouth legitimately water. A long table sat at the center of black marble floors, blue light emitting from what might have been candles aligned down the length of the surface.

  Valen sat at the head of the table. He’d changed out of the clothes worn out on the field, and into something more regal, dark. The vested top of a deep purple laid over a black long sleeve, jewels encrusted along the cuffs, each of them the shade of the green eyes staring back at me. Arm propped on the armrest, chin resting on his fist, he looked irrefutable bored.

  “Please, sit.” He waved a hand towards the seat adjacent to his.

  I swallowed. Even though they’d patched me up, it didn’t mean I’d forgotten how breakable I was, how he’d made that apparent upon our first encounter.

  “In Skashora, Peter, when a faery gives you their word, we will see it through. We said we would not bring you harm.”

  And he could say it a thousand more times but that wouldn’t make me any less paranoid. Something I was feeling a lot of lately. Still, with the servants lined up at one side of the table, their faces completely washed of expression, I didn’t really see any other choice but to take up the seat beside the man.

  Not one second after, those silent, stoic servants were moving. As if my sitting had triggered their motion. They flocked around me, laying out the eating utensils and piling food onto my plate without abandon. It was only when they placed another empty plate beside the one nearly overflowing with potatoes, lamb slivers, carrots, and then entrees I couldn’t begin to name, that I shook my head.

  “Thank you, but this is fine,” I said sheepishly, borderline ill looking at all the food.

  They continued as if I hadn’t spoken. And when that plate was filled, they brought out another.

  “Really guys . . .”

  One of them flicked a quick gaze to Valen, who nodded his head. They continued to pile.

  “I’m not trying to be rude,” I said slowly to him, which really translated to I wasn’t trying to accidentally offend their culture and wind up dead. “But there’s absolutely no chance of me eating all—”

  A hot fork of meat and vegetables was shoved into my mouth, and before I could finish choking, another was shoveled in soon after.

  “You must keep up your strength if you are to find your female,” he said. At my wide eyes, he explained, “All mated creatures carry a scent, is how I know. Besides, do you truly believe I’d have allowed you to be in the same room along with my own
had you not belonged to another?”

  I struggled to swallow, two faeries hurrying to stuff my mouth with another fork full before I could get a word in.

  Valen gave a small chuckle. “That was my way of a joke. To be honest, were she to take another to her bed, I might be relieved.”

  Chewing slowly to keep the watchful faeries at bay, I considered his words. For once an immortal who wasn’t insanely protective of their mate. It would have been a refreshing change of pace had he not proven to be insane in other manners. Like having his servants feed me endlessly.

  “For that, you might want to express gratitude. You are too thin with very little muscle to your vessel. When you go back out there in search of your female, do you truly expect to stand a chance against those creatures as you are?”

  When I swallowed this time, I quickly turned my head from the coming fork and rushed to say, “I don’t think food is going to make the difference—”

  The faery scored the fork in my mouth with haste, glaring at me as if I was a child refusing to eat vegetables.

  “No, but you want to have the best chance possible, yes? Because it would seem your capabilities are limited. The vanishing spell you did, that is a trait only expressed in the fae, and seeing as you are not of our kind . . . what are you?”

  I wished there was an actual answer to that outside of: human infected with dark energy. I wished there was an explanation to all of this I’d gotten myself caught up in.

  “I’m human,” I said bitterly around the food.

  “You most certainly are not. Come, I would like to show you Skashora before I show you to the armory.”

  One last fork of food was shoved into my mouth before all three servants stepped away in unison, bowing to Valen, backing my assumption of royalty of some form.

  I felt sick, thirsty, and out of place. It wasn’t homesickness. It was disorientation, a surreal fog settling over the part of me that was so used to the coffeeshop. So used to normal things like waking up in my bed in Wamego to a normal sky, normal daily expectations like handling customers and managing the upkeep of the business.

  Not sweating to think of how much longer I had to live. Not encountering numerous oddities testing my mind at every turn, my once grey imagination.

  Normal was beginning to reach a point of nonexistence.

  Or maybe the strange things in my life were the new normal.

  Maybe things would simply never go back to the way they were.

  *****

  I was getting closer to believing that the moment we stepped outside of the estate and the sight before me, inexplicable, different, frightening, threatened to finally undo me. So many things I’d come to know and accept—wings, a girl with rabbit ears, the existence of demons and faeries and more, the secret organization hunting down immortals I’d never known existed—but this, this I found my mind refusing to accept.

  Imagination was only so elastic, and I felt mine thinning.

  Outside of the estate, ascending far, far up into the now mammatus, pink clouds and purple skylight, was a concrete wall with crenellations big enough to shadow out half my view of the sky. It stretched both east and west, no end in sight.

  The estate, I found, was actually a grouping of structures banded together to create one large domain. An estate big enough to house a city, which was precisely its purpose, Valen had told me.

  This estate, this wasn’t Skashora, but a miniscule sliver attached to the real thing. Which lay just behind the mammoth wall. This was nothing more than a meeting ground for when the giants conducted business in what they deemed a smaller size.

  But when they were large . . .

  Valen crossed over the field of high grass towards the entrance to the wall. The moment he stepped into its dark clutches, another of those floating lights appeared directly between us, lighting the sanded path.

  “Since the curse was placed upon the giants, many remain in the front estate, as they are allowed to better overlook the fields in the event of enemy arrival,” Valen explained.

  “When I was trapped in that ward, I definitely didn’t see this wall.”

  “Skashora is heavily glamored around the entirety of the land. Hidden, if you will.”

  I tried to jog my memory back to that moment when Niv had been talking about the city. Even if she had been talking about the painting she’d made, it likely likened back to the actual land she was from. “Niv, she gave me one of her paintings, said it was of Skashora, but I think it was more a subconscious memory. She described the mountains as high, which I think might turn out to be an understatement, but she also said it snowed here and that it was . . warm?”

  Valen nodded, shadows crossing in his gaze. “Yes, and when it does, a haze falls over the land. A good haze like a pleasant dream, even. Say what you will about this wretched world, but it does have its beauties and small pleasures.”

  We approached the light at the end of the tunnel and then . . .

  The city sat off far in the distance, yet I could see it all as clear as if I were right in front of me, and what I saw made for conflicting emotions. The mountains were breathtaking, green with their icy tips and rugged slopes interrupting the purple sky. They rose and fell in the background, surrounding the city like a fortress. Yet it hadn’t prevented the tragedy that rest before us.

  What was I supposed to feel? Awe or horror? Which was I supposed to choose when witnessing the colossal city and its inhabitants, the hundreds and hundreds of statues who wore the face of us humans? They filled the land and its towering building structures much like pedestrians in the middle of Kansas city, only these were unmoving. Frozen in time. The pose in which they’d frozen made no sense, their hands all thrown up and shielding their faces as if a ball of fire had been hurdling down at them at an unstoppable speed.

  I tried to imagine what’d happened all those years ago. An unseelie faery, by the directions the statues all cowarded from, he or she must have risen high above, and this curse the unseelie placed over the land, it probably hadn’t been a chant. No, it had to be something tangible and larger. Larger than the giants themselves if they would shy from it.

  “It was a great blue light,” Valen said sadly. “And within it was a force of terrible, immense power. So much that . . . it was a wonder it did not destroy this world as a whole.”

  My brows creased as I thought back to the blue light Lia/the talking cat had produced in the shop. I’d sensed utter and complete destruction inside of it, inevitable damnation. “The unseelie are that powerful?”

  Valen shook his head, silver strands slipping down strong shoulders. “No. When the unseelie took high to the skies and began to cast the curse, the amount of power within it, the sheer deadly force of it, why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it wasn’t magic they’d used but dark energy.”

  Which faeries didn’t wield.

  I looked to him. “I thought you were with Neer and Niv in a protection spell beneath ground when this happened.”

  He nodded. “I was, but upon surfacing, when Nivere hunted down the unseelie to see if they could undo the curse, she brought back one of them who’d witnessed the curse performed. We all inspected the unseelie’s mind, saw what he saw, felt what he felt, and ever since, I’ve had my suspicious it wasn’t an unseelie who cast this curse at all.”

  But if not them, then who?

  “Never mind that. I came here not to incite pity, but to show you to the armory, find you a proper weapon for when you set out.”

  “A weapon,” I repeated blandly, when I wanted to say that a weapon would do me little good seeing as I wouldn’t know how to use it.

  “And not to worry, based on the skills you displayed in the field earlier, we are not mistakened into believing you’re capable of defending yourself alone. In exchange for taking us to Nivere, we will lend you several soldiers to assist in your protection when searching for your female, as I’m certain that is your first priority.”

  Assist was a generous way
of putting “do all of the fighting for you”.

  “I would like that very much,” I tried to say as deadpan as possible without sounding every bit as weak as I felt. At this point, I would accept help from a two-headed talking pelican if it meant getting back to my world, of cars and radios and old predictable human nonsense. Not this world with its overlords capable of smiting an entire land with one person.

  “Let us hurry,” Valen said under his breath. Just being here must have haunted him, reminded him of all he’d lost, and truth be told, seeing this, the hundreds of giants, their lives stuck on pause, it wasn’t hard to understand why Niv had gone and searched for the Maker.

  These were the giants who’d used their magic to help protect her and her parents. Had someone protected my family and I from the semi-truck, I’d probably still be attempting to repay the debt to this day. Especially if they’d suffered as a result of it.

  I moved to catch up with Valen, only to come to a stop when the sound of rushing footfalls echoed through the tunnel behind us.

  A faery dressed similar to me in the black getup of leather, only he had a sword and such a violent rush in his eyes, I jerked back when he came to an abrupt stop before Valen.

  “Sahil, speak,” Valen ordered.

  “It’s her,” the faery hissed vehemently, hand clutching the hilt of his sheathed sword. He spit furiously at his side as though to curse the very existence of the one he spoke of. “She has returned.”

  “Who, Sahil?” Valen barked.

  “The stealer of the Golden Chalice.”

  Valen’s eyes widened and all at once, he adopted Sahil’s rage in a flash. “Go, and do not allow her to get away this time. I want her alive.”

  When the faery-knight bowed and departed as abruptly as he arrived, Valen’s eyes shot to me. “Follow me and do not stray. I will take you someplace safe.”

  Safe? “Who is this she?” Did I want to know?

  “One we have wanted for a very long time. She stole something from us once, and she must be back for something else. While we may not be interested in humans—or whatever it is you are—she may very well be interested in you, but you’re our only lead to our daughter. I won’t let her have you. Just stay close.”