by Loki Renard
A golden glow emerges from the darkness, followed by a crown of blue. The Earth rises out of space to catch me, as if I am something special to it. As if I belong there. Once again, I am standing on a green grass plain, the volcano above me, the river gleaming in the distance - and the field of grain where Tres’ song once drew me.
I walk toward the grain, hoping that somehow I will be returned to her.
I hear a faint note, something that I don’t dare believe is a song. It is probably a bird. The animals around here are prone to melody. Though I start at a walk, I am soon running. I can see a female figure in the field.
She sees me. I open my arms to her. Now she will run across the fields of grain in what seems to be slow motion. We will be reunited in…
“MONSTER!” She screams, spinning on her heel to flee from me.
“No! Tres! It’s me! I’ve come back for you!” I roar the words after her, but they only make her scream more loudly. It is not hard for my powerful scythkin frame to overhaul this human and in a matter of yards, I swing her off her feet. I try to embrace her, but she is flailing and wriggling and screaming so loudly my ears ring.
“Shhh. Tres. It’s me.”
“LET ME GO! LET ME GO!”
I have a sudden flash of clarity in which I realize the woman in my arms is not her. She doesn’t even look like Tres. Whatever my idiot broodkin pumped into me has been clouding my judgement, imposing my desires on the world. The woman I have in my arms does not have a mane of fiery red hair. She is blonde, and she is terrified. She’s bleeding because I have grabbed her too roughly. I drop her and watch her run like a wounded animal back toward the low huts which line the riverbank.
Chapter Eight
Tres
I feel Vulcan.
He’s close.
We’ve not been separated. Not properly. I don’t think it is possible for us to be taken apart. I am certain that there is some part of him in me, and some part of me in him that will never allow us to be anything other than together.
I was told my death would be the end, but it was not even close to the beginning. I know more about myself now than I ever did in life. I know that I have powers I could always have used, if only I knew they existed.
“What are you doing, princess?”
I bristle. I hate it when Lykar calls me that. I hate it when he speaks to me at all. He has not allowed me out of this cave room since I arrived. He has made me prisoner, while telling me how free and powerful I am. He insists he will free me just as soon as I behave, but I have no intention of behaving for him, not ever.
“I was talking to Vulcan.”
He smirks at me and shakes his head.
“Your song may reach between the realms,” he admits. "But that alien will never penetrate this place.”
“You don't know what he will do,” I say.
“I know males are faithless and feckless…”
“You were," I say. “You abandoned my mother and me, but Vulcan is not like that. He would never leave me. He saved my life more than once. You ruined it.”
“You are going to have to learn to speak to me more respectfully if you’d ever like to leave this chamber,” Lykar drawls. “The king will not tolerate being spoken to this way.”
I curl my upper lip in disdain. I do not like being Lykar’s captive any more than I liked being Trelok’s sacrifice, but I know this will come to an end. Vulcan is coming for me. Somehow he will use all the technology he has, his talking rocks, his flying ships, his science, all of which can reach across time and space.
“He’s coming for me,” I tell Lykar. “I think he’s already back on Earth.”
Lykar rolls his eyes at me. “He could be crawling out of my anus at this very moment, and he would not be able to come for you. He doesn’t belong in this realm. He is a creature of another realm. It is better to forget him.”
“I’ll never forget him. He is my mate. I am his.”
“No. You are mine.”
“How could I possibly be yours? I barely know you.”
“But you have my blood in your veins. Or you did, when you were alive. You know, as soon as you calm down and accept your afterlife, you will enjoy it. You have rank down here, Tres. You are my daughter. That means something. It means you have respect. It means you can create your own offspring, if you find another of our kind you can relate to in that way. You have an entire after life waiting for you, Tres, just as soon as you leave the memory of the old one behind.”
“I want to be with Vulcan.”
“Ridiculous,” he laughs. “He’s barely sentient. Just a brutal monster killing and breeding, like so many others. You might have thought you were in love with him, but he was never capable of loving you.”
I felt loved. When I was in Vulcan’s arms, it felt as though nothing could touch me. But death claimed me anyway, so perhaps it was all a stupid human illusion, as Lykar says. It still feels real, inside whatever I have left of my heart.
“I want to go to him. He came back for me. I can feel him above.”
“You were never made for him. Whatever unnatural union you may have had is over. Leave it in the distant, alternate past, where it never should have happened.”
I thought if I ever found my real family, we would have something in common. But we have nothing in common. Lykar is a glib liar who only cares about what things look like.
He is sitting back in front of the mirror he was sitting in front of when I met him for the first time. He is obsessed with that thing. I think it is his connection to the human world, past, present, and future.
“What does the mirror do?”
He looks over his shoulder at me. “This is a looking glass. It shows me the world beyond. The world is always changing. Through this glass, I can pluck at the strings of time, play the world like the instrument it is. Humans believe Earth was made for them, but that is a sign only of their arrogance. They are an amusing parasite. Nothing more.”
“So I am half-amusing parasite.”
“As I have said before, one drop of faun blood makes you whole. As for amusing, yes. You bring with you an entire set of suppositions which are laughable here, in this realm where there is no pain, no suffering, no fear. You should be in ecstasy, but you’re not happy. You want your lover. The brutal alien.”
“Who saved me. Who kept me safe. Who loved me more than anyone. Please, let me go to him.”
“No,” Lykar says. “If you want to feel better, drink the water at the back of the cave. It will help you forget, and you will begin a grand life anew. You have subjects waiting to meet you. Thousands of fauns who will lay themselves down for you if you command it, because you share my blood.”
“That’s what you say. I haven’t been outside this cave.”
“Nor will you, until you accept your place here, drink the water, and assume your crown. It is waiting for you, Tres.”
He reaches into the mirror and pulls out a pretty band of sparkling jewels. “This could go on your head.”
I stare at him blankly. “… okay?”
“This would mean a lot if you were born later,” he says. “You’re not very sophisticated are you?”
“You’re not very nice.”
He sighs and flings the crown back into the mirror where it disappears. “I could give you everything, Tres. All the power you never had. All the lovers you want…”
“I only want one. Vulcan.”
“Not going to happen.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “It’s going to happen. It wouldn’t surprise me if Vulcan reached right through that mirror and crushed your throat.”
“You are beginning to try my patience,” Lykar growls. “You are ungrateful.”
I absolutely do not like Lykar. At first I was relieved to see someone who mirrored myself back to me, but I have been in this cave for what seems like eternity, and there is no obvious way out. I am trapped, a prisoner of the faun-king, and he expects me to be grateful.
“What s
hould I be grateful for first? Being abandoned by you? Growing up waiting to die? Being left to die of a head injury? Being incarcerated and kept from my loved one?”
“You should be grateful that you are something more than dust.”
“I’d rather be dust than be trapped here with you.”
He looks at me, then his anger melts into laughter. That is the kind of reaction that makes me think I could have liked him if I had known him in another time, another place, if he had bothered to be the father he could have been.
“You’re so fiery,” he says. “So brave. Perhaps I owe you an apology, but a thousand apologies will not make up for the loss of your lover. So you will have to do what so many wayward children do.”
“What is that?”
“Hate your father, until you realize that he could never be what you needed.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Lykar?”
“It means I did not know what happened to your mother. I did not know you had been conceived. I did not feel anything in this realm until you began to sing, and by then you were already almost fully grown. I made this place for you. I waited for you. I could see your life was pain, but if I had entered your world, stolen you away, I would have interfered with the destiny already in motion.”
“I’m glad you didn’t come for me,” I say. “Vulcan came for me. And he will come for me again.”
“He can’t,” Lykar says. “It is not possible.”
“He will make it possible.”
Vulcan
The humans have decided to kill me.
It is reasonable, under the circumstances, and I’m agreeable to the idea. Tres died on this planet. Wherever her soul has gone, `I feel as though the portal, such as it is, must be nearby. I never planned to die for anybody. I thought my end would come on the conquest of some planet, but I would die a thousand times for her.
The humans are very angry about the whole thing. I have to help them to catch me by more or less lying down for them and retracting the sharp ridges of my body so that the ropes they’re trying to bind me with stop breaking.
They chatter to one another, these blonde women with all their deformities. I notice that Trelok the coward will not come near me. He keeps his distance as the ladies paint their hands and press them against my skin, covering my ridges and valleys with the same paint Tres was covered in when I found her that first time. This is the sacrifice I will make, to follow Tres into the next human realm.
I am not certain what has happened in terms of time. I don't know if I’ve picked up where we left off, or if there was a skip back or a jump forward, but I sense she’s no longer on this planet. She has gone to the ancestors. And so must I. I must die like a human, and hope that I am taken through to the same dimension where the human dead are kept.
Dying as a human might is tedious. The ritual forces the women to labor up the mountain, scrabbling under my weight. The male does not help. He leads from the front, carrying nothing but a sharp stone knife which will do nothing if he tries to stab me with it except break.
The sweating, bleeding, grunting women carry me into the familiar cave. The one where Tres was left to die the first time. The one I carried her to after she passed in my arms. I didn't know why I did it, I just knew that it felt right for her to be here, in the place I first found her dying.
I can smell the blood from the wound on her head, the wound fate inflicted and I could not fix. I feel a rush of loathing and rage, but I have to quiet myself. I am here, with her. I am as close to her essence as I can get while still being clothed in flesh.
A scythkin cannot afford to be afraid of death I have always believed that death is not an end of existence, it is a phase shift of energy. Death is the greatest lie ever told, but it is a lie told by my meat which screams to continue being me. But I am not my meat. I never was, and nor was Tres. We were not two bodies who fell in love with one another. We were two souls, and I know mine will find her when it is free.
By dying here, I am surrendering myself to the mythology of this planet. All places have their alternate dimensions, their machine elves, their fairies, pixies, and the occasional gnome, to use the human words for it. They are considered to be outside of nature, but they are as firmly embedded in it as the stars in the sky, which is to say, they’re often on fire.
I will find these things. I will take them to task. I will not stop until I have Tres in my arms.
It takes an intolerably long time for the humans to slay me. They have to experiment with many methods. In the end, my own blades are used to cut into me. I take the pain, because it is what I deserve. At long last, my vision dims for the final time. I told Tres I would die for her, and now I am. The pain, such as it is, dulls too. Excellent. Everything is going to plan.
Tres
“Hmmm. Well. How interesting.”
Lykar has been staring into his mirror and making remarks for a while now. I have tried to ignore him. I sense he is trying to bait me into something, something I won’t like. His apology was a start, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am stuck here as his captive, and also, that he is a liar. I don’t have proof that he is lying, it is just the feeling I get whenever he looks at me with his laughing eyes.
“What?” I ask finally.
“You were right,” Lykar says, his smile devious. “Let me show you the bold monstrous beast who has come to save you. It’s going terribly well for him.”
Seeing Vulcan’s face makes my heart sing, but when I see what is happening to him, that song turns into a wail of sadness. He has returned to my tribe. Trelok’s tribe. He must have been looking for me.
They are killing him. Like vermin they swarm him. I see his power and his greatness amplified as the life goes out of his flesh. It seems to me that he is looking directly at me, calling me with his every thought.
“This is the face of your great love,” Lykar says. “He is nothing more than meat to them, and soon he will be nothing at all. Where is his power now? What can he hope to do? How can he save you from me, when he cannot even save himself?”
I turn and I throw my clenched fists at the faun-king. I want to hurt him. I want to make him bleed the same way my Vulcan is now bleeding, but I cannot, because I cannot even hit Lykar. He grabs my wrists and he holds me firm and he looks at me with that smirking, sneering gaze and I feel my hatred flare into a single note. When I open my mouth, it emerges in a shriek, but it isn’t sound that emerges. It is force which hits him square in his chest and sends him flying across the room as if he is nothing more than a feather.
His expression would make me laugh if I had any mirth left in me, if I could feel anything other than the most pure outrage.
“What… was that?” He picks himself up and looks at me with a confused expression, a mixture between disbelief and anger.
“That was me,” I tell him. “I am not Trelok’s sacrifice. I am not your princess. I am me. Tres.”
“Well, Tres,” Lykar says. “Your hero just died.”
I could scream. I want to scream, but instead, I sing. My voice has always been my power. If Vulcan’s soul is loose in the world, then I need to find it. I need to bring him to me.
“Stop that,” Lykar says, clapping a hand over my mouth. “Those bleats will deafen me and change nothing.”
Vulcan
Human death is strange. I suppose it’s scythkin death too. Actually, I don’t know what it is. Scythkin don’t really have legends around the afterlife. We don't have time for philosophy or conjecture. Right now, I’m standing in some kind of underground forest.
The way environments have been wrapping themselves around me lately is somewhat disorienting, but it is also the least of my problems. I wonder if I have gone anywhere since this began, or if I have been in the same place with events playing out around me one after the other, a biological movie with no sense or meaning besides the feelings I have for Tres.
Looking down at myself, I see much the same form as I am used to seeing, a fact
which further adds to the strangeness of having passed. I am beginning to think that nobody ever goes anywhere. Time and space simply slip around us all, making us think we are the authors of our existence, but really it is nothing more than a consistent mirage.
“YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.”
I had hoped to hear Tres’ voice, but that is not her voice. It is male and deep and it resonates. I turn toward the source of the voice, and see a tall, hooded figure coming toward me. I cannot see a face. It is holding a piece of gardening equipment in a bony hand while the other rises and points toward me, as if trying to clarify that I am the subject of what it is saying.”
“YOU… DO NOT… BELONG HERE,” it intones again. “BEGONE! BEGONE!”
I was not sure what kind of reception I would receive, but this hostility is entirely human - and utterly foolish. I have not come to the end of mortality to be told to leave.
“Give me Tres, and I will leave,” I say. “Your human mythologies speak many times about going into the underworld and then returning. I know it’s possible.”
“IT IS POSSIBLE. BUT. NOT TYPICAL.”
The being somehow shouts and whispers at the same time.
“But it happens, according to the tales, and it appears to be happening now. Bring me the girl Tres, and I will begone with her. She will never return to the world you guard. She will be taken to the stars and live for eternity there.”
“NO.”
“YES.” I mimic the creature’s tone. There is something officious about him, as if he feels as though he has the right to decide the fate of all. I do not listen to the one authority a scythkin is supposed to - the first hatched from the clutch. I will not listen to this gaunt creature who appears to be mostly garment.