Hereditary

by Jane Washington

  I thought I saw relief pass across his face, and suddenly I wasn’t sure that he was controlling me anymore. I simply needed to be here.

  The others noticed me when Nareon did, and I found myself facing Davery and Enon. They seemed uninjured, and most shockingly of all, alive. Harbringer shoved me aside, and the two scowled, switching stances to prepare for another battle. Someone tried to grab me from behind, and I elbowed them, but they only grunted and grabbed me tighter. It sounded like a man, so I aimed my elbow lower, and struck again. This time they dropped me, and I fought with the oncoming darkness in my mind as I struggled to keep a hold of my Force. I figured that if I were always channeling the one, then I couldn’t possibly channel the other at the same time, and the last thing I wanted right now was to accidentally kill every person in the room.

  I cast a glance back to the doorway, but none of the soldiers seemed to have succeeded in pushing through the invisible barrier yet, and so I concentrated on getting to Nareon, who looked to be struggling as he fought some kind of internal battle with the circle of men and women surrounding him. They were all muttering quietly, their eyes closed and their fingers twitching occasionally, though they didn’t move from their position, with their hands upraised to Nareon. His grey eyes followed me as I pushed my way into the middle of the circle, and I felt an odd force pushing against my own power. I hadn’t been doing much more than keeping up a steady flow of Force to keep the death ability at bay, but now someone was pushing against it, trying to push it back in. I seemed to realise that the thirty-or-so people surrounding Nareon and I were all Force-users at the same time as they realised who I was. One-by-one, their eyes opened and slid from Nareon to me, before settling back on Nareon.

  I felt as if they had just assessed me, and dismissed me, and I could only watch hopelessly as Nareon’s face creased in pain. Here was the old synfee King, almost brought to his knees. I turned then, and tried to spot Harbringer, my heart lurching even more as I saw him surrounded by more of the Force users. He suddenly jerked and flew back against the wall, and I screamed my rage, lashing out with my own power before I had the chance to form it into any kind of intention. The group who had been advancing on him paused, and two of them crumpled to the ground, dead or unconscious I wasn’t sure, but at least they turned from Harbringer and instead decided to join the circle surrounding Nareon and I.

  If they had been ignoring me before, they certainly weren’t now. I felt a crippling force of pain spread through me, and a sudden pull that I knew instinctively, was drawing away my life force. I wondered if this were what it felt like when I fed from Nareon, but then dismissed the thought. This was Force.

  Nareon’s presence flooded into me again, and while there was no specific order that I felt or heard, I began gathering my own Force in response. I gathered enough of it that I felt the electricity of it in the air, and a sudden cold descended, raising goosebumps along my arms. The murmurings of the other Force users increased, and began to sound panicked, but the tone only pleased me, and at Nareon’s silent command, I released my power. It tore through the throne room like a cyclone, ripping one of the walls away and spraying everyone with miscellaneous matter. I yanked the connection open and searched for Harbringer until I felt him, and then I pulled him toward me. It was like drawing a bowl of water, or trying to move a concentrated sphere of fire. I knew there was the danger that all those unique parts of him could fly apart if I lost control, but eventually his unconscious body slid to my feet and I dropped down immediately to check his injuries. There was a gash on his head, but he was breathing, and I hadn’t seemed to accidentally rip anything away—either on the inside or on the outside—when I had moved him. I crouched over him protectively, watching Nareon as Nareon watched me.

  I was prepared when he filled my consciousness again, and began to draw on my power, but I was not prepared for the ability that he had decided to draw from. I struggled to resist him as the darkness crowded into my head, doubling the amount of Force that was already flying through the room in an attempt to overpower the will to unleash the death ability.

  “No,” I begged, my voice ragged, “please Nareon, I can’t.”

  He wasn’t listening to me. He had fallen to his knees, and there was a steady trickle of blood seeping from his nose. The other Force users were advancing on him, and I glanced desperately at them, noting the various expressions of triumph on their faces. They were killing him.

  “No…” I moaned again as the darkness finally slipped from my mind.

  I tried to channel it, tried to push it in the direction of the people advancing on us, tried to get it as far away from Nareon and Harbringer as I could, but Nareon seemed to have other ideas. I wasn’t sure if it was my connection to him, or if it was simply because I was conscious this time, but I felt exactly where he was directing my power. He was directing it toward himself. I yanked it from him with a violence and a strength that I hadn’t known I possessed until that moment, and nearby, I heard someone laugh.

  It was a man directly to my right, the man who I had turned the darkness toward. The man who should have been dead, the minute my power collided with him. I realised with a sickening jolt, that they were all unaffected by my recent show of Force, whereas Nareon seemed to have suffered exponentially. It didn’t hit me until I felt the darkness collide with Nareon, and I ran to him, clutching him as he fell into me.

  He didn’t die instantly, as the others had, but he held onto me, kept a tight grip of my mind, drawing more power from me, and directing it as he willed. I was lost, tears streaming down my face as I clung to him, unable to deny his efforts even as the death ability wound it’s dark poison through his heart.

  When he released my mind, I couldn’t help but feel that it was because he was done. Even in death, he was setting his own terms. It was unnecessarily cruel, that his body disappeared as his life slipped away, but I didn’t spare a moments thought for it, as I had now become only a vessel for the furious power that welled within me. I stood carefully, turning to the others, ignoring their expressions of confusion and suspicion, because all that mattered in that moment was that they died. I lashed out, again and again, not caring which ability I used, only that it caused as much hurt as they had caused me. I knew that some of them ran, and I could feel that some of them died, I could feel it because I absorbed their energy, their power, and it only made me stronger and more furious.

  When the room began to flood with Nareon’s men, I fell to my knees and let my head fall against the red carpet that ran through the centre of the room to the empty throne. I stayed that way even when I heard Harbringer’s voice, stayed even when people began to touch me, urging me to stand, and eventually, I stayed even as darkness descended, and a fine mist began to blow through the damaged wall, settling along my spine and gradually soaking my dress to my skin.

  When I opened my eyes and sat up, I still hadn’t cried, but I felt utterly depleted, as if I had spent the entire evening sobbing my heart out. Harbringer sat next to me, a bandage across his head, and another wound about his left forearm. Grenlow and a small group of men and women were standing over by the door, talking carefully, and they all turned immediately, somehow knowing that I had awoken. I looked away from them, toward Harbringer.

  “He’s dead.” I said.

  Those inky black eyes ran over my face, and then he nodded. I didn’t realise that I had finally begun to cry until he reached over and swiped at one of my tears.

  “There’s something else you need to know.” He whispered.

  Grenlow approached then, with the other men and women in tow, and one by one, they fell to their knees before me.

  Confused, I looked behind me, and then froze, because half of the kingdom seemed to have gathered beyond the destroyed wall. They all stood there, in the darkness and the pouring rain, golden-tinted eyes glinting at me in the night. And then, one by one, they began to fall to their knees.

  For a horrible second, I thought that they were thanking
me for killing their king, and I felt the darkness surge up sickeningly, but Harbringer put his hand on my knee, and when I looked at him, he shook his head sadly.

  “Nareon named you his successor.” He said, though the words sounded alien coming from his mouth.

  I blinked at him, sure that I was going insane, and the sympathetic expression on his face had me scrambling to my feet, backing up from him, and from the others.

  “No,” I shook my head, “this is all a mistake.”

  I rounded on Grenlow, snapping, “Stand up. Tell them that this is a mistake.”

  He rose to his feet, and while he didn’t look particularly happy about it, he didn’t confirm my words. Instead, he turned, and took a small wooden box from the woman behind him, carrying it over to me. He tried to pass it to me, but I refused to take it, and so he sighed and opened the lid himself. Inside was a small, rolled length of parchment. It lay half-uncoiled in a velvet lining, and seemed to be so old that I feared to touch it lest it crumble apart beneath my fingers.

  “This is our Hereditary Scroll,” he said softly, “Our ruler’s are not chosen by the bloodlines that run through our population. They are forced by the bloodlines inked in this scroll.”

  “I don’t understand.” I said flatly, suddenly wanting to turn away from the little scroll.

  “The scroll presents the name of the next ruler, on the hour of the old king’s death. The more powerful the old ruler, the more influence they will have over the scroll’s choice. No new ruler has been chosen for hundreds of years.”

  I saw myself reaching for the scroll then, and wondered if I were even in control of my own limbs anymore. Perhaps I allowed it because for a moment, it felt as if Nareon were still controlling me. My fingers brushed against the dry, rough surface, and then curled around the edge of the scroll, drawing it out of its little box. It unrolled itself as I pulled it away, and the black letters of my own name winked at me from the centre of the parchment.

  Beatrice Harrow.

  “The throne still needs to accept you,” Grenlow continued, but I blocked out the rest of whatever he had to say, and turned my eyes to the ceiling, the Hereditary Scroll falling from my fingers.

  I wished that Hazen where here to put me to sleep, that Cale and Rose could be standing either side of me, grasping my hands and lending me their strength. And Nareon…

  My heart clenched, a vicious shudder ripping right through me until it broke apart completely, shattering into a million empty pieces in my chest, and I fell forward again, sobbing into the carpet. And then I felt it again. And I picked myself up from the carpet, without even realising that I had done it. I looked down, astonished, and stopped crying immediately.

  “Harbringer.”

  He stepped forward, and I grabbed him, pulling him close enough that nobody else would be able to hear me.

  “Who is in my head?”

  He didn’t seem to understand, but then his eyes widened suddenly, and he froze, grabbing my head and pushing his way into my mind.

  “Impossible.” He whispered, “I can feel him, in your mind.”

  I jerked my head free, and began to pull Harbringer out of the room, pausing for a second, and motioning Grenlow to come with me. I led the way back to Nareon’s glass-walled room and then turned on Grenlow.

  “Why did Nareon’s body disappear?”

  His face creased into something that resembled sorrow, and I gave him a minute to compose himself.

  “I’m not sure Lady—er, Your Highness.”

  “Bea.” I snapped, “my name is Bea.”

  “Yes Your Highness. I don’t know why his body disappeared.”

  I turned my head, catching sight of myself in the glass window. My glamor was still down. Strange, I didn’t feel the slightest tinge of hunger.

  Nareon, I sang in my head, feeling stupid, show yourself.

  I didn’t think anything could surprise me anymore. But suddenly, the King himself was standing behind me. I could see him wavering into existence in the window, and when I turned, he really was there, grinning down at me.

  “I didn’t expect you to figure it out so quickly.” He said, as Harbringer stared on and Grenlow fell to his knees, eyes wide with disbelief.

  I wanted to run forward and hug him, or fall to the ground with Grenlow in relief, but there was a niggling feeling in the back of my mind demanding to be acknowledged. It was anger. Nareon had used me again, and had somehow, irrevocably used me to save a piece of himself, to tie some part of himself to this world through his control of my mind.

  “That’s why the scroll chose me.” I muttered.

  He nodded, and went to sit in a chair, except that his seemingly solid form slipped right through it, and disappeared for a second, into the room below. When he reappeared, he seemed unsteady on his feet.

  “That’s going to take some getting used to.” He grunted, taking a cautious step, as if testing the reliability of the carpet beneath his feet.

  “I can’t believe you would do this.” I jumped forward and would have struck him, except that my hand flew straight through his chest.

  He winced, and I jumped back, rubbing feeling back into my suddenly numb knuckles.

  “You don’t even know what I did, so how can you complain?”

  “Tell me what you did then!”

  “I simply made sure that you killed me before the others did.”

  “Why Nareon!” my voice had risen again, and I supposed it was probably panic, at the way he had said you killed me.

  It was Harbringer who answered, stepping up to my side, a curious amusement shimmering in that black gaze.

  “When a synfee kills a person, that person’s power, energy, life—everything is transferred to the killer. But if the person being killed is stronger than the one doing the killing, a part of their soul remains, attached to that person.”

  “I always intended to remain forever, and haunt the person who finally managed to kill me,” Nareon intoned glibly, “I was quite looking forward to it.”

  I fell into a chair, “so why did you choose me? Why didn’t you just let the others kill you and haunt them forever?”

  “Because combined, they were stronger than me. They would have directed my stolen power to their chosen leader, and the Hereditary Scroll would have named him the new ruler. I couldn’t have that.”

  “Him? You knew who he was?”

  “Is, little spitfire, who he is. He escaped.”

  “The good news just keeps on coming.” I mocked, throwing him a glare, which he ignored.

  “You willingly enslaved yourself.” This came from Grenlow, and he looked and sounded utterly horrified.

  Nareon rolled his eyes, gesturing to me, “I enslaved myself to a beautiful Queen. It’s not so bad, as far as second lives are concerned.”

  “It’s not a life at all.” Grenlow countered, seemingly at ease going against the former King’s words, now that said King wasn’t able to smite him for insolence anymore… or could he?

  “What do you mean, enslaved?” I asked.

  “Exactly as the man says.” Nareon again tried to take a seat, and again fell straight through the floor.

  When he re-appeared, his expression was faintly amused, and he continued speaking as if nothing had occurred.

  “I can only appear when you summon me. I can only use my power when you order me to, and I can only disappear when you request it.”

  “And then where do you go?”

  “Wherever ghosts go.”

  “You’re a ghost then?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  I sighed, but had begun to realise that things weren’t quite as bad as they had seemed. Except for one.

  “I can’t be this kingdom’s queen.” I turned to Grenlow, “You have to make the scroll pick someone else.”

  Nareon laughed, but Grenlow only sighed, rubbing his temples.

  “Oh spitfire, it truly doesn’t work like that. Besides, you won’t even need to do anything. R
uling is all about instilling enough fear into your people that they all do as you say, and then leaving the rest up to your High Council. And I will help you, where you need it.”

  “It’s not that simple Nareon, I’m young, but not so young as to be completely naïve to what needs to be done here. I’d still need to track down the rest of the Force users, I’d need to find their leader, I’d have to stop their damn disease from ruining your entire kingdom, and then, presumably, I’d need to heal the lands that they already have destroyed. And—”

  Something else struck me then, and I stared down at my faintly golden hand, “Why am I not attacking people?”

  Nareon shrugged, “I suppose you inherited that from me, when you killed me. I’d love to see how strong your compulsion is now.” He clapped his hands together delightedly, “you might be the strongest ruler this kingdom has ever seen.”

  I pulled my glamor back into place and carefully opened my connection to the physical world, revelling in the onslaught of wriggling, thriving energy that flooded into me, causing me to smile in pleasure, even though I was now far from the ground.

  “Wow,” I breathed, “do you think I could live off this?”

  “Unfortunately, no. You will still need to feed.”

  “Great,” I closed off the connection, some of my new-found wonder slipping away, and then turned to Grenlow, “What are your other options?”

  “Well,” he seemed to chew it over, “if you died, another ruler would be chosen, but it will most likely go to whoever led the attack last night, as much of the King’s energy had already been stolen by the time you killed him.”

  “Ah… any other choices?”

  “The Ki—Nareon is right, if you elected a High Council, most of the work will be done for you, you wouldn’t even need to be here. It has been done before, a long time ago. And there is still the throne test, you will need to pass it before your Queenship becomes official.”

  Nareon waved his hand dismissively, “the throne test will not be a problem, as soon as she is rested, she can get it over and done with, and then a High Council can be established.”