The Marechal spoke again, his voice as grim as ever.
“Then I forbid that you try. There will only be one outcome if you do and that way lies folly.”
A sob escaped her. She knew he spoke the truth.
“I cannot do it, Marechal. Please …”
Melisse did not finish her phrase, one that would have been a terrible demand to make of the swordsman.
He nodded his understanding as pearls of sweat streamed down his face.
“I know … which is why I shall do it for you.”
She could see how unsteady his legs were, yet he strode forward to the wall of flames with as much force as he could muster.
Then instead of plunging headlong into the flames, he came to a sudden stop.
His mouth opened and closed, seeing something in the flames, and as Melisse followed his gaze, she saw it, too.
It was his reflection, but one in which a crucial detail was missing.
The reflection in the shining wall of fire was his perfect mirror image, but that image did not wear the scar that had marked him ever since the fall of his father’s tower.
He did not move, frozen despite the searing heat, as he saw who he had once been before he had been torn apart, body and soul, then flung into the greater world with no knowledge of who he was or from where he had come.
“Is it my own ghost?”
She did not know if his question was meant for her or not.
“I don’t know,” she said, “Please, Marechal … I cannot bear this.”
Yet he did not move, choosing, instead, to pose another question.
“Will I find again those I’ve loved and lost?”
Melisse sobbed. She had no answer for him.
Her fire roared, its avarice for destruction insatiable, and Melisse gripped her own sides with hands that flickered with flames dancing along her fingers.
Soon, her power would rage beyond her control.
“Please,” she said again, and still the Marechal did nothing.
With no warning, she felt the ground beneath her feet tremble, once, then again and again, as if a giant came to witness the horror she was about to perpetrate.
The swordsman stiffened.
“Do not fear, Marechal,” Melisse said with dawning certainty. “It is the Black Boar of Summer. He has helped guide me in recent days, I think.”
The creature’s presence was unmistakable to her. The same sentiment of a vast ancient power — one and the same as that she had sensed in the darkness following her encounter with the old soothsayer woman not so long ago.
And with the Boar’s coming, Melisse felt a second presence.
She risked a glance over her shoulder to see the great beast surging into view in the darkness and upon its shoulders, she could make out that someone was perched there.
As to who the Boar’s rider was, the night held jealously still to its secrets.
And when the swordsman spoke again, Melisse understood that he did not speak of the Boar at all.
“Yet, I am afraid.”
The Marechal’s words hung in the air, his voice thin, become a phantom of himself.
It was then that Melisse felt someone approach. However, these were not the footfalls of a towering, cloven-hoofed beast. Softly, but not easily, as if with a dragging limp, someone drew near.
It was the Boar’s rider. It could be no one else. There was no one else.
From the corner of her eye, Melisse saw the silhouette of the person who had remained in obscurity until then, and the shock of what she saw took her breath away and her fire buckled, threatening to crash down into embers over the understanding of a mystery coming to a sudden, impossible conclusion.
The figure limped past her toward the Marechal as Melisse’s thoughts whirled with implication.
The Boar spoke, startling her further, but instead of the inhuman ancient tone it had used with her until then, the beast spoke with calm and warmth.
Do not falter, child. Be strong, for he needs you now to be so when he cannot.
Melisse tightened her focus, resolving to hold steady no matter what was about to be revealed.
Chapter Sixteen — The Marechal
The swordsman heard an aged voice speak in the darkness. A woman’s voice.
“You shall not go alone.”
The son of an alchemist, his given name, Etienne — a Marechal in service to the realm and to its laws shuddered as his dark past flew into the present on jagged wings.
His back stiffened, and his reflection in the fire swung its head sharply to stare at the form resolving into a second reflection standing just beside it.
“You came to me not so long ago, but you did not recognize me. I cannot blame you, for I no longer recognize myself,” she said.
He remembered what they had said to one another not long ago.
Aid me now, or you will wish you had never heard of me.
And on the heels of his callous demand had followed her puzzling response.
I have already wished it, Marechal, year upon year … yet there you stand.
The figure’s reflection grew more distinct and where the old woman stood hunched over, her image in the flames stood with the straight back of a healthy young woman in her prime.
Both, though, wore a veil that obscured any hint of a face.
Her aged tremulous voice rose in the darkness.
“Look only upon who I was, Etienne, not at me now. For you have already seen me as I am and know far more than you would like.”
She paused then, as if searching for the courage to continue.
“The Boar carried me home to my mother’s care. Later, she told me that it was the talisman in the Boar’s possession that had preserved me until then. Afterward, the fullest extent of her skills were required to save me, then restore my health as best as she could.
“You did not recognize me when you came to me at last.”
Words spoken in a house in a distant swampland whispered through the corridors of his thoughts.
Our dealings are done, Marechal. Begone with you. I grow tired of you. I grow tired of you and your misplaced past.
“Nor did you have any true recollection of your earlier confrontation with my mother and the Guardian. But it was I who had given you the knowledge of my home, placing it so deeply into your mind such that should you forget all else, that, at least, would remain. Would that the magic had been strong enough for the rest of your memories.
“Mother did all that she could, but in the end, the sickness that silently gnawed her from the inside out joined hands with the exhaustion of her efforts on my behalf. Together they wrung the life out of her. She could have chosen the forbidden, dark arts to save herself.
“She did not.
“Over the many years since then, I devised diabolical schemes, each one worse than the last, to heal myself, to restore to me the beauty of my youth.”
She sighed at her own memories before going on.
“And my anger at my fate grew into bitter hatred as rumors reached me of the great swordsman, the Marechal, who brought swift justice in the name of the realm and whose visage was as comely as any legend.”
There could be no mistake. The voice he heard now was one and the same as that which had summoned the demon named Blue to aid him in his search for Melisse.
The price you paid today, Marechal, is a paltry thing against what I once paid in your very name. It is as nothing in comparison.
“My love in mourning swiftly turned to bitterness while I sought the means to heal myself, to restore my youth — to risk everything while dreaming of finding you again, Etienne, and that you might see me as I had been. I risked dreaming of loving you and seeing that love reflected in your eyes.
“Then I learned to hate you, once I discovered who you truly were and that you lived, ageless, unhurt, with no thought for me or the love that we had shared. All the while, I had become hideous with old age, with my ghastly wounds ever upon me.
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��Forgotten, the wisdom of my mother who did not tempt darkness in a bid to save her own life.
“Of a long lived race, I have lived longer than any for none dared delve so deeply into the black arts. However, that foul work and so many years weigh as heavily upon me as ever and for that there was no remedy save for illusions that were only that … impermanent, hollow.”
She paused for only an instant, but the wide-eyed Marechal made no attempt to interrupt her.
“The female homunculus that I had named my daughter during your mutual encounter numbered among the worst of my experiments. She was the aborted attempt among countless others that I had hoped might restore my body … my face. My beauty.
“Then, not long after you came to seek my aid, a descendant of my sister, gone south so very long ago, had been born to see clearly where my own sight had grown dim with obsession and corruption. Before her last breath was drawn, she drew the Black Boar of Summer back into this world from beyond the veil of creation. She bade him understand that the time for carrying the burden of our errors, yours and mine both, Etienne, was about to come to an end.
“He brought me here, Etienne. And together, you and I shall cleanse ourselves in bright fire and end this blight upon the earth.
“Alexandre … Etienne. My love.”
The old stooped woman and her reflection which stood tall in the youth of her memories reached up and tore the veil hiding the truth away at last.
The Marechal gasped, then spoke in strangled tones.
“This cannot be,” he said, swallowing, while not daring to look to the woman standing next to him.
“I saw … pieces … of you in the rubble of the tower.”
The reflection of the young woman lifted an arm in the same moment that Melisse saw the old woman shift what remained of a severed limb within her empty sleeve. The young woman reached up with the opposite hand to touch her face, her fingertips drifting across one of her eyes, as the old woman’s only hand reached up to her own disfigured face and missing eye.
“I should have died. Aye, in that way I would have worked far much less mischief in the years afterward.”
Etienne’s back shook as a silent sob wracked him.
“I should have known. I am sorry.”
“To what good, Etienne?” she asked. “I was not bound to this place the way you were. The Boar carried me away, my soul intact. Even if you had found my body, that memory would have been stripped away as just as everything else was once you stepped beyond the bounds of the magic wrought that day.”
A single, lonely tear rolled down the old woman’s face.
“I, too, am sorry. In the beginning, I had no knowledge whether you had lived or died when the tower fell. Later on, I did not know you had no memory of me until you came to ask me for my aid. The Boar had long since disappeared from the world. If not through him, there was no other means of knowing what had befallen you.”
The Marechal hung his head.
“I did not know, in truth,” he said before going on.
“I have always felt that something terribly important was missing, something that pulled at my heart as I searched the eyes of the women I have known since then. Each one of them but a pale reflection of something so utterly lost to me that I could not name it while desiring it more than anything else. No matter what I did, it has been an emptiness that has dogged me without ceasing all my days.”
The old woman raised her voice, the sound of it strong and clear with resolve.
“Raise your fire, child. Let it rage now.”
In the shimmering reflection, the young woman reached for the alchemist’s son who wore no scar and took his hand in her own.
“The loss you have felt has come to its end, my love. As do our overlong lives, but we do so together and it is for that we have no need for fear.”
Melisse’s vision blurred as the couple held hands then walked resolutely toward their own doom.
The wall of fire crackled with anticipation of imminent destruction, when, from behind Melisse, it was as though the clouds riding the night sky parted to let fall exquisite spangles of starlight that in turn made of her fire a silvered, eldritch magic.
The flames stopped their incessant shifting like a wild beast pacing within its cage of iron bars. The crackling anger of its heat quieted to sudden calm and silence.
Then the Boar spoke in her mind.
Your power must be tempered with mine own, that of the Talisman still in my possession. Together, with flame and starlight, we shall make a crucible for these two. Together, we shall bring their earthly existences to an end, not in violence … but in the peace they both deserve.
The Boar’s magic poured forward in a flood and Melisse understood as she reached for her own, urging it to rise fully so that the deed would be quick for the man and woman who approached their destiny at last.
They stopped one step away from the flames then infused with silver and something resembling grace.
Their words were meant for each other but in that place where silence held sway, the sound of their voices carried easily to Melisse’s ears.
“Myri. I am so glad to have found you at the last,” said the Marechal, his eyes resolutely turned to the vision of the beautiful young woman in the flames.
“And I, you. Etienne … Alexandre. My love.”
Then they walked into the fire, hand in hand.
Their reflections came to join each of them, melding to become one and the same so that a scarred swordsman stood within and without an unscarred alchemist’s son; as did an old, crippled witch with a likeness of exquisite beauty and stunning blue eyes that brimmed with love for the man at her side.
A screaming sound broke loose from nowhere and everywhere. The sphere, lifestealer, shuddered, then burst apart just as a sickly green haze lifted up from the Marechal’s shoulders, its tendrils clinging to him like taloned claws before being ripped away and apart by fire and eldritch magic.
Relief spread across the swordsman’s face and he smiled.
Then, from one instant to the next, the couple’s flesh blew away in fine ashes that rose languorously skyward, dust mingling with spangled starlight so that the difference between them became meaningless.
What remained were the images of two people standing face to face, their forms filled with light, their eyes on one another with smiles upon their lips.
Next to a frighteningly beautiful, dark-haired woman, stood a man who wore no scar except, perhaps, for one which glinted in his eyes, its name being the knowledge of his past, all of it at last, coloring the innocence of a man who had known that most precious of things in his youth — true love. He turned then to look outward at Melisse and the beast standing near to her, then he bowed deeply at the waist to them both.
He straightened, then lifted his arm, his hand held palm outward. Then he pushed it toward them, gently.
The wall of flame and magic that shone more brightly than any moonbeam was silenced immediately, like a heavy velvet curtain falling down all at once to be lost in inscrutable shadows.
At the same time, the world rushed by Melisse and the Boar, the dim contours of the wasteland surrounding them become a blur of grey forms that slewed back into focus almost as quickly as it had begun.
Melisse looked around herself to discover that she and the Boar both had been displaced. They now stood at the far boundary between the desolate land and the countryside in which life still flourished.
Only now, she sensed nothing of the horror lurking nearby, invisible, and endlessly hungry to strip away all life that wandered its way.
Now, there was nothing at all but the breaking light of a new day, its glow coloring the grey sky with hues of warmth that would not tarry long before it made itself known.
“Is it true? Are they dead?” Melisse asked, more to herself than to anyone else.
Her answer came from the hulking mass of darkness that stood so tall next to her that she had to crane her head back to look up and into its shi
ning red eyes.
They no longer live as you do, if that is what you mean. However, their existence continues here. Witness the power he wields. Such is not the work of a phantom, child of fire.
She nodded.
“And what just happened…?” she began to ask as she considered the fact that she had made no effort yet to veil the flames of her magic, yet something else had and had done so swiftly and definitively. Nevertheless, when she extended her senses inward, searching for her fire, she felt it there, its ferocity calmly waiting for the next chance it might have to burn the world to the ground.
It is simply that we are not welcome here. New powers are born; old, forgotten powers awaken.
His great red eyes looked down hard at her as if he expected her to understand his meaning.
A thought flickered in the recesses of her mind, something to do with herself and the innumerable things she had learned since the fire had first taken root within her.
Then the thought was gone as her eyes caught sight of a tiny red-throat flying overhead, the beginnings of a new day’s light just enough to see the color for which it is named. She watched as the little bird landed upon a lifeless tree stump well within the boundaries of a place that once meant certain death.
She smiled as it ruffled its feathers, then dipped its head to bob back up just like a courtier bowing before royalty.
The Boar spoke again, interrupting her pleasure at the sight of the bird.
His reign here is absolute, but it is one where life shall burgeon then flourish. It is well. Nothing more is required of us other than our own departure.
Melisse waited a moment before responding. She waited to see if tears would come now that her task was over, but her eyes remained dry and her heart felt lighter, the weight of her burden gone.
“I thank you, Black Boar of Summer. Without your intervention, I am afraid to imagine how things might have turned out otherwise.”
You honor me too much even if any other the outcome might have meant that the swordsman exist forevermore with poison fouling his newly mended soul. For the prevention of this, my reasons are my own and you should never forget that the better part of all motivation lies hidden and secret with cold reasoning at its heart, even if clothed in goodwill.
The Marechal Chronicles: Volume VI, The Crucible: A Dark Fantasy Tale Page 18