Well, he also has hooks for hands and apparently heals nearly instantly. But, hey, you’re doing great.
Aaron frowned at that but didn’t answer, focusing on pulling himself up one handhold at a time. Luckily, there was enough separation in the stones that had been used in the castle’s construction that handholds were easy enough to find. A fact he was thankful for as he didn’t relish the idea of having to backtrack to try to find another path. As far as he was concerned, the only thing worse than climbing away from the ground, in this instance, would be climbing toward it. Both likely meant death, but climbing up, at least he didn’t have to stare at it—knew it was somewhere far below him, sure, but that was manageable. Something a man could stand. At least, that was what he told himself as he grabbed another handhold and another, forcing himself on faster, trying to gain ground on the creature.
The wind, this high, was a fierce, cruel creature with a mind of its own, cutting through his clothes and skin, making his fingers numb, and reaching out hands of air to try to rip him free of where he clung. He gritted his teeth and pressed on, grabbing the next stone only to have it come loose in his right hand. He swung left, wincing at the pressure on the fingers of his left hand, and the stone hurtled past him, missing his head by inches. He let out a cry of surprise and fear and for a terrifying moment, he couldn’t seem to get a hold with his right hand. Then, finally, he managed to grasp a stone that didn’t give, and he stared down at the ground far below, swallowing hard. Salen’s Bell, he thought, if someone was standing down there, they’ve just had a really shitty day.
He glanced up at the creature, but it was moving on, apparently oblivious of his pursuit. The one good thing about the wind—it blocked out any sound of pursuit.
Particularly any womanish screams of terror, the Virtue said.
Yeah, Aaron said through gritted teeth, starting up again, not the mood I’m trying to set—hey, and thanks so much for chiming in, lightning bug. Not all of us can fly.
The creature reached the balcony in another few minutes, climbing up over the railing and disappearing above. Shit. Aaron pressed on, forcing himself to reckless speeds and wondering how exactly it was he managed to get into these kinds of messes.
It’s a rare skill, Co supplied.
Just like being a person without a body, Aaron thought back, as he planted his foot on a stone, crouched low, and leapt up, knowing that if he wasted anytime the queen would be dead, and he’d have done this whole thing for nothing. “Well,” he said, gasping, as he set himself for a moment after catching some handholds. “That went well.”
It will, Co said, until it doesn’t. Try not to die, Aaron. You have no idea how tedious it is having to explain to someone what I am and what the bond means. I’d really rather not do it again, not so soon.
Aaron grunted, leaping upward again and catching another handhold. “Yeah,” he gasped, his arms burning with strain, “I can see how that’d be really inconvenient for you. Tell you what, for you, I’ll do my best not to end up splattered on the cobbles somewhere below us.”
He kept on in this way for another minute or two and finally reached the balcony, his arms burning, his fingers numb from the biting cold, but not so numb that he couldn’t feel the sharp ache in them when he forced them to straighten out. He heard screams from inside as he was pulling himself over the balcony’s railing and saw that the balcony door had been broken in. Straining with effort, he managed to leverage his body over the railing and tumbled to the balcony floor, landing in a gasping, shivering heap. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to steady his breathing and get his racing heart under control.
Another scream came from within, and Aaron lurched to his feet, moving toward the balcony’s broken door, all too aware of the fact that he had no weapon. No weapon and, what was worse, no plan. His dad had once told him that not having a plan was, nine times out of ten, the reason why men died in battle.
Aaron leaned in the doorway, glancing inside. The inner door to the queen’s chamber had been thrown open and two guards lay dead or dying inside the room’s entrance, gaping holes through their chests, and he was pretty sure he knew what caused them, having seen it recently. The creature stood over the queen’s bed, staring at her, that grizzly smile on its face. The queen gaped at the creature, her eyes impossibly wide in her pale, sickly face. Even as Aaron watched, the creature’s arms finished reverting from those long, spiked appendages to normal, human arms. Aaron glanced at the guards lying dead on the floor, their swords drawn but no blood on them. They never stood a chance. Salen’s Fields, but what am I doing up here.
Being a hero, Co said, you can do it, Aaron. We can do it.
Heroes die, firefly, he thought back. It’s what they do best. How many stories you heard of heroes and the amazing things they’ve done only to find out they live next door? None. Heroes die, Co. It’s what they do.
He considered it then, really considered it. He could let whatever was going to happen—and there was no real question about what that was—happen then leave. The castle, the city. Shit, the country, if he had to. The thing was a demon or something worse, but apparently even demons couldn’t fly. Well. Probably couldn’t fly. He could sit here on the balcony and let it do what it had come to do—he damn sure wasn’t climbing back down, that wasn’t even a question—and then leave.
But what would Adina think? He started to snap back at the Virtue until he realized that it hadn’t been her speaking it all but his own thoughts. And anyway, what would she think, knowing that he’d stood and watched her sister die, knowing that he’d let this thing—whatever it was—get away. And, thinking bigger for a second, what would happen should the queen die? Would the creature take its place? He thought that the most likely as it had shown it was capable of taking a man’s form. And, once it had, how long before it hunted down Adina and Leomin? They were loose ends waiting to be tied.
The creature was making its way leisurely to one of the guards now, reaching for the dead man’s sword. Damnit, he thought, it’s suicide to go in. You know that. But, to his surprise, he found himself going in anyway, not just going either but running, sprinting directly at the creature with every bit of speed he could muster.
The thing, whatever it was, didn’t turn until the last moment and by then it was too late for it to react. Aaron barreled into it, sent it hurtling across the room to slam against the wall and, barely slowing, scooped up the sword from where it had slipped from the thing’s hands. He lunged forward, stabbing the thing in the stomach before it had gathered its wits.
The creature screamed in surprise and pain, its hands going to the steel piercing it. “There,” Aaron said, panting, “Got you, you fucker.”
The creature’s scream grew quiet and quieter, then they changed. Not screams at all now but laughter as the creature studied him with that mad grin. Gritting his teeth, Aaron forced the sword up, straining with the effort as it tore through the creature’s internal organs, but the thing only laughed louder. Then, with a speed Aaron didn’t expect, it swung an arm at him, the hand becoming something that looked similar to a smith’s hammer. He lunged to the side, barely managing to avoid getting struck in the face. Still, he did not dodge the blow completely, and it hit him in the shoulder with shocking force sending him flying across the room in a roll to fetch up against the room’s ornate writing desk with a painful thud.
He shook his head to clear the dizziness that had settled there, groaning in pain, and glanced up to see the creature pulling the sword out of its stomach, the damage healing even as it did. “Oh, Aaron,” it said, “you have caused me more pain than most, that I’ll grant you. Oh yes,” it said, as if to answer a question he’d never asked, “I do feel pain. I have felt more pain in my life than you could possibly imagine. More pain than a dozen men, more pain than thousands. The difference, Aaron, is that I do not die. I will never die.” It finished pulling the sword out by the blade. Then it glanced at the queen, still staring at it, frozen with shock and fear
. Smiling, it grabbed the sword by the handle and started toward her.
Aaron winced, grunting with pain. Each breath was an agony, and he was pretty sure a few of his ribs were cracked, if not broken altogether. “What are you? Who are you?” He managed.
The creature paused, glancing at him. “Oh, Aaron,” it said, “now, you’re hurting my feelings. Don’t you know me? Even after all this time?” It shifted before his eyes, becoming Owen, the mad grin on his old friend’s face strange and alien. “I’m your best friend, Aaron,” it said, “don’t you remember me?” It changed again, Owen still but this time Owen as he was as a child. Small and frail, the blood slicked blade huge and unwieldy in his hands. “I’m me, Aaron,” it said. “I always have been. You’ve known me since you were a child—though, I confess, I was not a child myself. Or, at least, in appearance only. You see, Aaron, I have lived for millennia. I have watched whole family trees wither and die and pass on to time only to be forgotten. What am I, you ask? I am eternity, Aaron Envelar. I am everything and everyone. “
“No,” Aaron said, shaking his head at the sight of his childhood friend, the one who’d taken a beating for him, who’d rubbed ointment on his wounds after the headmaster’s attentions, standing there with that mad, bloody grin. “You’re not Owen. You can’t be.”
“Can’t I?” The thing asked, feeling its nose. “Broken, wasn’t it, Aaron? Broken by my father—a drunk,” he said, his voice childlike and scared, “he beat me, Aaron. Me and my mom until my mom left and there was only him. Only him and the beatings and nothing else. Only the pain and the beatings and the few moments in between. You do remember my nose, don’t you Aaron? The story I told you? The way you understood my pain, the way you comforted me when I could no longer hold back the tears. Don’t you remember?”
“You’re not him, you bastard!” Aaron shouted, anger flooding him, “You can’t be him!”
“Oh, but I can,” the creature said, “and I have, Aaron. I have been thousands of people at thousands of times,” and as he spoke, his body shifted from one visage to the next in such succession that Aaron thought he would go mad. Now, a short, balding man Aaron didn’t recognize, now a young woman with aristocratic features, an old man, a fat woman, a thin child, all looking down on Aaron, all with that same bloody, cruel grin, and the blade in their hand.
It went on for thirty seconds, a minute, and in that time Aaron saw a hundred different people, a hundred different souls. Men and women and children who had died, maybe, so that this creature could take their place, or who’d never existed at all, yet still he felt the loss of them. Finally, when he thought he could stand no more, the creature settled on an image.
“I was your friend,” the woman’s mouth spoke, “rubbing ointment into your flesh, feeling the sting of the headmaster’s switch. I was the servant,” it said, gesturing at itself, its form that of a heavy-set, middle aged woman with a confused, scared expression on her face, “who witnessed your Leomin as he killed the old man.” It’s grin widened, staring at Aaron and there was madness there, dancing in its eyes, “I was Leomin,” it said as its flesh changed and suddenly the Parnen captain was staring back at him, “as he dug the knife into the old fool’s throat, and oh, the blood, Aaron, the blood that gushed from that wound. I was all of these, and I was more. I was the man,” he said, shifting to another form now, that of a man in his twenties, his muscles lean and well maintained, his stance the stance of a man trained to kill, “I was the man, Aaron,” it said, “who killed your parents. Who watched their blood seep from their bodies and pool at my feet. The man who stood in the darkness and watched a young child creep down the stairs, scared of the darkness and what it might hold, the youth who seemed to know what he would find even before he found it, but went on anyway. I was there, watching as the youth screamed and cried and held their dead bodies to him as if by the degree of his love he might perform some miracle of rebirth. But he did not, Aaron. You do remember don’t you, Aaron?”
Aaron screamed then, and Co screamed with him, their voices a brutal melody. Old rage and old pain mixing together in those screams, and there was power in them, such emotion that the room itself seemed to shake. The creature winced, seeming uneasy for the first time as it witnessed the outpouring of grief and fury, watching warily until it was done, until Aaron’s head slumped to his chest, and he wept, his face buried in his hands, the man becoming the child he’d once been, and then it smiled. “Yes,” it hissed, “yes, Aaron. I have been a murderer, and I have been a saint,” it said, shifting to an old man in a priest’s clothes. “I have been evil, and I have been good and all the things between. I will tell you my name, Aaron Envelar,” it said, “so that you might know it as you die, might know it and despair.”
It changed again then to the figure of a man of what appeared to be thirty to forty years. A man who would have been handsome if not for the worry that creased his brow, for the envy and jealousy that danced in his eyes. “Once, a long, long time ago, I was called Boyce Kevlane.”
There was another scream then, but this time it wasn’t Aaron’s but Co’s, the Virtue’s shriek one of betrayal and pain beyond mortal imagining, and it tore into Aaron’s mind like glass, so that he bent over, his hands tearing at his hair, wild and unknowing in his pain.
Co … he thought, each word an impossible effort, you’re … killing me.
Abruptly, the scream began to lessen, subsiding into terrible, heartbreaking whimpers of a child abandoned in the darkness by those who had been meant to love it. “Yes, child,” The creature said, “it is me. Do not fret, for we will be together again soon. The vessel,” he said, meeting Aaron’s eyes, “is insufficient to your power. Come to me, and we will rule everything until it burns and there will be nothing left to rule. You understand, don’t you? It is the greatest gift of compassion we can give them. They live only to hurt, to lie and betray, to regret and mourn. To age and to die and to watch all their loved ones die with them. It is a gift, little one.”
The Virtue suddenly appeared a few feet between Aaron and the creature, the normally calm magenta a raging storm of light and shadow. “You would kill them. All of them.” The Virtue said, but whether she disapproved or not, Aaron could not tell, for her voice was flat and without emotion.
The creature nodded, smiling its bloody grin, “I would kill them all and put an end to their pain, little one.”
“You do not understand them, Boyce Kevlane. Teacher and master. You have forgotten what it is to be one of them.”
“Have I?” He hissed. “I have forgotten nothing. Do you not think I remember watching Caltriss, my best friend? Oh, and how they all loved him. His people, even his enemies. I, myself, loved him more than any other. Do you think I don’t remember that, little one? Do you think I don’t remember that spell? I knew the laws, the words, yet his spell was greater than any I might conjure. His was a spell of being, a spell which was not cast and could not be ended but with his death. Do you think I do not remember the way she would look at him and only him? All the while too caught up in the spell to even see me? To even know that I existed beyond the ways in which I served him? Too enthralled to ever see me as a man with a man’s needs and wants, a man’s love?”
“You speak of Elisandra,” Co said, still in that strange, alien voice, so different than the one Aaron had come to know.
“Yes,” the creature hissed, “I speak of her. I loved her, and I coveted her. And I told Caltriss the spell would fail, that it had to fail. We were not ready, I was not ready, yet he insisted. I told him it would be the death of him. I warned him. ‘Boyce,’ he told me, ‘all men die. But men who are not willing to sacrifice everything for those they love, for others, never live.’ He told me the spell would work. He told me everything would be okay, and I believed him. Don’t you understand, I believed him, and I lost everything! I lost the man and the woman both!”
“The barbarians,” Co said, “they … were not kind.”
The creature screamed then, and if A
aron’s pain was old, this thing’s was ancient, a pain beyond understanding, beyond reckoning, and beyond cure. “As my body lay broken and battered on the ground near the castle, broken, but not dead, they came. They came with their axes and their swords, their fire and their desire, and as I lay there, I heard her, little one. I heard her scream. I heard her beg. Even from that distance, even though she was at the top of the castle, and I lie broken at its bottom, I heard her.”
His eyes danced with madness as he stared at Co floating in the air in front of him, “They knew me when they found me alive, student. They knew me, and they rejoiced, and they gifted me such pain as you cannot fathom, yet the physical agony was nothing compared to what those screams had wrought. For years, they gave me the gift of pain only to watch me heal again. I tried to kill myself, dozens, hundreds of times,” it said, laughing wildly, “but I cannot die. I am eternal. I am a god.”
“The Virtue of Adaptability,” Co said and now there was something in her tone now that Aaron recognized. Compassion, “it would not let you die.”
The thing chuckled then, but there was no humor in it, only madness. Only darkness. “The barbarians died, eventually,” it said, “as barbarians will. As all men will, if but given time. And, I decided, her screams still fresh in my ears, the years having done nothing to dampen their sound, that I would do as Caltriss had wished. I would gather the Seven Virtues together, to create something beyond all mortal reckoning. Beyond even the reckoning of the gods. Caltriss had wanted to save the world of men, but I will burn it. I will watch them die and feast on their blood and their sadness until there is nothing left. Men die—it is the way of things.”
He motioned to her with his hand, “Come with me, little one. Too long have we been apart. We will do this together. Once this queen of theirs is dead, I will take her place, and we will see that the whole of this world falls beneath the sword. It is a mercy. It is compassion.”
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