by Jada Fisher
“Okay,” Mickey said, running a hand through her hair. “I wish I could say that this was the most surprising thing that’s happened, but since this is the second time we’ve met a doppelganger from another dimension, it’s maybe less than my top five. Why is she here? You gotta collect ‘em all or something, Davie?”
“She told me that I could still find a way to defeat Faeldrus and that it had to be me.”
Mickey’s eyebrows shot up. “She did? And what was this super-secret thing that apparently no one in the worlds knows?”
“Well, we didn’t get to that part.”
“Didn’t get to that part? That seems like the most important part to get to.”
“Yeah, normally, I would agree, but then the building cracked in two and we were flung into a dimension where Bronn was tiny and now apparently he can shift into a tiny, super-cute form.”
“I was not cute,” Bronn objected. “I was compact.”
“You were freaking adorable,” I contradicted before continuing. “But anyways, I managed to summon my grim reaper friend to help us find her and one thing led to another so now we’re here.” I let out a long breath, finally allowing myself to feel. “I’m so glad you’re alright. And I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? What for?”
“I failed, Mickey. I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t good enough.”
“Oh, Davie, no. None of that.” Her hands cupped my face and even though I knew it was selfish to take the precious little time we had, I leaned into her touch. “You may be our leader, but you’re not a monolith. We were all outpaced and beaten. Faeldrus got the jump on us with Mallory and, well, we just couldn’t recover.”
I tried to argue, because all the guilt inside me definitely didn’t agree, but then she was looking into my eyes in the way that only an older sibling could. There was so much love there, so much affection. Like she could see the part in me that had really hoped that we had had a chance. “We all tried, Davie, and no one more than you. But sometimes you can try all that you want, do every single thing right, and you can still lose.”
Her words sank right down into me, and I felt myself sort of collapse, as if she had given me permission to just be weak like I felt for a moment.
If it had been before Faeldrus had returned, I would have been much too heavy for her to support me, but, well…a lot had obviously changed since then.
There was a soft grunt from behind us and then a strange sort of yelp. I steadied myself and turned with Mickey’s arms still supporting me to see that not-Sokhanya was sitting up and looking around blearily.
“You found me,” she said, blinking several times as if she couldn’t quite believe that we were there.
“We did,” I answered, taking a cautious step towards her. “Are you alright?”
“I… I thought…” She swallowed, shaking her head, before her eyes flitted to the other corner of the room. “I saw you and thought I was dead.”
“Me?” Maedryell said, sounding surprised. “Huh, normally, that is the case so I can’t exactly fault you on that assumption.”
She then looked up to Bronn, squinting. “You…you were the dragon?”
“Yeah, both of them.” He bent to set her down and she went to her feet on shaking legs. If it were a different situation, I might have pointed out the humor of Bronn reiterating he was both the big and the small dragon, but it wasn’t quite the right time. “Are you alright?”
“Thirsty. Hungry.” Her hands moved rapidly, and I knew enough sign to know that much. But then a strangled sound came from the other side of the small, crumbling room we were in.
I didn’t need to turn to know that was Sokhanya, our Sokhanya, returning from her bathroom trip. I wasn’t even sure if I had ever properly explained multiple worlds to her or if she knew. It was difficult to explain something so complex when we were still working on a lot of the basics of communications. Would she think it was a trick? Would seeing double of herself alarm her? Make her upset?
All of those quickly-populated worries vanished when she raced forward and stopped just in front of her double. Except…double wasn’t exactly the right word. Sok was shorter than not-Sok, and thinner. Her hair wasn’t as thick, and her posture was much worse.
To her credit, not-Sok only reacted with a sharp intake of breath and then a flurry of rapid signing. Sok watched in fascination, something pinched in her expression as her counterpart huffed and grunted along with her quick signing.
“Why isn’t she replying?” Not-Sok asked eventually, voice sharp.
“She’s still learning ASL,” I answered, feeling a twist in my stomach. We didn’t have time to explain Sok’s truly awful backstory, but also it felt wrong not to. “We all are.”
“If she does not know ASL and doesn’t have a hearing aid, how does she communicate?”
“I. Write,” Sok said with some effort, her brows furrowed. “I. Watch. Mouths.”
“You can read lips?” Sok raised her hand and tipped it to one side, then the other, a sort of ‘so-so’ and not-Sok’s unhappy gaze was on us again. “Why am I like this here? What did you do to me!?”
“Whoa, whoa!” I supplied, both hands up. Well…both if I still had them. Sometimes I forgot that I was down to one hand until I went to do something with my missing arm. Ugh. “We’ve been helping Sokhanya. That’s your name in our dimension. She was captured by anti-humanist dragons when she was a kid and held as their captive for over a decade. As you can imagine, they weren’t exactly nice about it. Sokhanya’s come a long way, and I think she would appreciate it if you talked to her like an adult. And if we all survive this and stop the apocalypse like you said we could, maybe you could teach her some stuff that us hearing folk just don’t get.”
“And name,” Sok said firmly.
“My name? Oh. My American name is Clarity, but my birth name is Bopha.”
“Bopha,” Sokhanya repeated, the word clunky in her mouth. “Hello. Bopha. Sokhanya.”
“Hello, Sokhanya,” the other woman said before extending her hand. “Nice to meet you.” They shook on it, and a strange sort of feeling filled me. It couldn’t quite be called satisfaction, but it was a good one at least. I wasn’t going to complain. Good feelings were in short supply.
“Alright,” Bopha/Clarity/Not-Sok said, turning and looking to the rest of us. “Let me tell you about what I dreamed before my hearing aids need to be charged.”
Strange to think that I had almost forgotten the entire reason that we had needed her, I’d been so caught up in our own personal little drama.
“Do I need a pen and paper for this?” Mal asked. “Or would—”
She didn’t finish her sentence, yelping and diving to the side. The reason she had to do that was because a giant dragon’s foot suddenly tore through the roof, crashing down into the center of our circle.
“Faeldrus!” Maedryell cried, summoning her scythe to her hands again. “Get to safety, all of you. I’ll hold him off.”
“Can you do that?” I called, scrambling to my feet and looking around to make sure that no one had been crushed. Somehow, all of us had survived and no one was a fine paste beneath the dragon’s foot. “What about no direct interference?”
“No direct interference with mortal affairs. Faeldrus isn’t a mortal, and he and I have plenty of history together. Now go!”
I didn’t need to be told twice.
“This way!” Mal cried, grabbing my one good hand and hauling me after her. Thankfully, Mickey grabbed Sok and all of us were scrambling away together. We rushed out of the building and onto the street, and boy-howdy, did it look almost exactly like the awful pocket dimension that the rotted dragon had been locked into.
Except more actively on fire.
“Come on! I scouted this earlier. I think it should be safe for now. Concrete and all.”
I didn’t know why Mal was telling me to ‘come on.’ She had such a tight grip on my hand that it wasn’t like I couldn’t follow her.
Our grou
p raced into what definitely had once been a three-story parking garage, heading down to a sub-level. After Bopha’s being buried alive in her collapsed building, I wasn’t so keen on being underground.
But that was where we went, tucking into a back corner under concrete stairs, all huddled together.
It was…strange. The lot of us so tightly packed, breathing hard and trying to listen to see if the rotted dragon was coming to finish his chase. Although we’d only had a short, half-hour break from him at best, I’d almost forgotten about his presence for a few moments. A mistake on my part, but I guess I got caught up in all of the talk about maybe having a chance to defeat him.
A moment passed, then another, and then finally there was a stillness. Had Maedryell chased Faeldrus away or was he just out there, searching?
“That spirit,” Bopha said after the silence started to linger on uncomfortably long. “That was death, was it not?”
“Well, no, not the literal spirit of death, but she is, uh, I guess you could say that she’s an immortal charged with guiding all of our souls to our ancestral afterlife. Apparently, us being scattered across all the worlds can make us get a little…uh, lost.” It was a hard thing to surmise in hushed whispers, but I was pretty sure I pointed out all the relevant information. Or at least I hoped I did.
“Immortal?”
“Yeah, she’s not alive, technically. She has no body, so she can’t die. She just is. And apparently, her life is tied to Faeldrus’s as well. He can’t die either. Sounds stupid, but they did it so he couldn’t just kill himself then find a way to bring himself back like I did.”
“So you already know the solution then.”
“I’m sorry, I what now?”
Not-Sokhanya affixed me with a stare that was both perfectly calm and yet entirely cold. “In order to defeat the great dragon, the spirit that keeps it alive must be destroyed.”
6
Great Gain Requires Great Sacrifice
“Uh, what now?”
That was Mickey, because I was too stunned to respond. There was something about the matter-of-fact way Bopha/Clarity/Not-Sok said it that unnerved me. Making it sound as simple as breathing.
“The rotted dragon cannot be killed or defeated because his fate is tied to the one who betrayed both him and us. As long as she exists, he will not fall. So, she must not exist.”
“Can… Is that even possible?”
That was Krisjian, because I was still blinking stupidly at her. Sure, Maedryell had tried to kill me. And sure, she was one of the primary reasons that Faeldrus had been able to rise to power in the first place. But the only person I’d ever outright killed was Baelfyre, and now the small, Asian woman in front of me was basically saying I had to sacrifice someone in cold blood.
…someone who didn’t even have blood! How were we supposed to kill a grim reaper anyways? She wasn’t even technically alive.
“Don’t we need her to guide us to the afterlife or something?” Mickey continued, and honestly, thank goodness for her. I was staring so long that my eyes were dry, and it wasn’t until I felt Bronn’s strong hand against my side that I remembered that blinking and breathing were important.
I couldn’t say why I was so stunned by not-Sok’s deadpan delivery. I’d certainly heard some grim things. I’d watched my best friend die. But maybe it was those very things that made me so sensitive to the idea of possibly ending another life.
“Hey.”
The timing couldn’t have been worse, but suddenly, Maedryell popped into existence in front of us. I might have let out a yelp, but given the situation, I was pretty sure it was justified.
“I think Faeldrus is tracking your growing magic,” she said. If she’d been a mortal, I would say she was breathing hard, her form flickering before us. A more accurate way to describe it would probably be to say that the smoke around her was growing and fading like a heartbeat, more transparent than opaque. “I can probably take all of you someplace safe, but he’ll find it eventually.” She let out a soft, mournful sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh but definitely didn’t come out that way. “But as long as I keep you away from him, he seems to be too caught up in finding you to finish what he started.”
I opened my mouth to say something. Granted, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. ‘Hey, me and my friends were just discussing killing you to save the world’, but that seemed a bit on the nose.
I didn’t have time to think of anything else either, because then she was whisking us away back into the in-between place. I heard some startled yelps all around me, and I briefly remembered that most of them had only been on the rush of colors and energy once or twice. It seemed impossible, but the experience was turning a little old hat for me.
We eventually tumbled out into what I could best describe as a cave with sharp spikes of metal sticking up in certain places. It definitely had a sci-fi feel to it and that immediately put me on edge.
“Where are we?” Mal asked, already on her feet and looking around. Trust her to adapt faster than anyone else. The girl had a flair for surviving, alright. I supposed being born after the apocalypse could do that to a girl.
“An empty realm. There was maybe life here, once, and long, long ago. Enough to make oxygen, at least. Although you may find that this balance is a bit headier considering the air pressure here is much more dense.”
“Oh, um, alright. I suppose—”
“You have to die.”
That put a kibosh on about all the conversation that might have come to that and our heads swiveled to Bopha. She didn’t say it maliciously or happily, just as matter-of-fact as everything else.
“I…feel as if I have missed something.”
“It’s simple,” the woman continued, her hands moving even though most of us could only comprehend just about every other word. “Faeldrus’s life is tied to yours. You were the one to keep him from finding a loophole to escape—which, clearly, he did, by the way—and you are also the one to give him his immortality.
“A curse, sure. When he was rotting piece by piece in that pocket dimension our ancestors pushed him to, it wasn’t a great thing, but now he’s released and doesn’t have those same checks in place, so he can accrue power without anyone to stop him.”
Maedryell said nothing for a long moment. I expected her to argue, to object, but instead, her form shifted. It was almost like she was sitting down, except there was no chair under her.
“Interesting premise. We are tied. I suppose ending me would be easier than trying to find some obscure way to undo the curse. However, there are a few hang-ups in that plan.”
I couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact she was being. A strange oracle had just told her that she would have to die with no context and she was sitting down as if for tea.
Then again, considering her entire identity and existence revolved around death, maybe she wasn’t that perturbed by it.
Or maybe…
Maybe she was interested in the release.
I hadn’t thought about it, but she’d been cursed for thousands and thousands of years. Everything she ever knew or loved was long gone. What was it she had said while we were in that fake diner together? Something about how delicious the coffee was and how it had been ages since she’d tasted anything, and it hadn’t really been tasting it. It had just been the information my mind had supplied her with.
Maybe she wanted a break from all that. What was life without death, after all? Just an endless existence of watching everyone else pass on.
…okay. Maybe it made sense that she was so nonchalant.
“First of all, I don’t know how to die. Believe me, I’ve been at this a real long time and watched a lot of very smart and magically-inclined people who haven’t so much as found a clue.
“Secondly, I don’t know how to sever the tie between the two of us. So even if you didn’t want to kill me—and to be honest, you sound ambivalent enough on the topic—we couldn’t do a backdoor-loophole-what have yo
u.
“Third, even if we did manage to subvert one of these two points, you then would have to kill Faeldrus. Taking me out wouldn’t hurt him. So you would find yourself facing down an opponent more powerful than any other that’s ever existed. More powerful than when it took our entire people and nearly destroyed our world to put him away. Is that something you think you can do?”
Bronn sat up straighter, his hand leaving my arm. “I would. Me and the remainder of my forces—”
“Forces? What forces?” Maedryell retorted. “Your dragons are scattered to the winds and realms, some of which where dragons have never existed. As you can imagine, not exactly going well for them.
“Look, I would lay down my life this second if I could. But the issue is I don’t have a life. I’m not dead, I’m not living, I just am. And if you could find something to end this, I am all ears. But right now, my best plan is keeping you away from Faeldrus.”
“Why can’t we do both?” Mal asked, also extremely calm. Why was everyone so calm!? We were talking about the end of the world and possibly killing an ally! Admittedly, we had gotten off to a rocky start, but she’d more than proven herself.
We’d already lost Mallory. We’d lost the world as we knew it. Why was everyone around me seemingly so okay with losing someone else! I just wanted all of the loss to stop. Was that too much to ask?
“Pardon?”
“The guy’s only chasing after Davie right now, right? Sorta a revenge or control thing. So ferry her all around the dimensions, take him on a real chase, and buy us time to research.”
“And pray tell, how exactly do you plan on researching?”
Mal gestured to their little almost-circle. “We’ve got four oracles right here. I’m sure you could get a couple more while you’re out and about running circles around Faeldrus. Maybe with all of their powers combined, we can cook something up.
“Of course, being a non-oracle person, I’d come with you. You know, for protection,” Mal interjected.
“For…protection.”