Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  Sixtine also felt the threatening energy. “What was the underlying reason for Jessica’s presence?” she asked, her voice betraying the urgency.

  “To give birth to you. Among other things. You were born in the pyramid, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Vatika nodded, as if she appreciated the confirmation of an intuition. “And to help her fulfill her destiny, of course. There were always two of you.”

  Sixtine frowned, trying to understand the meaning of her words, and she was going to ask more questions, but she lost her voice.

  A gray veil had just wrapped around the woman’s body in front of her. An ether shroud, the color of the moon, blurred the green of her coat and the outline of her presence.

  Vatika immediately noticed the change on her face. “What do you see Sixtine?” she asked in a panicked voice.

  Sixtine looked away, looked at the depths of the green river that flowed at their feet. “If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll tell you,” Sixtine answered.

  Vatika’s shoulders relaxed for a moment, a faint smile appeared on her face. She sighed resignedly. “You’ve already found all the answers, Sixtine. You think if I articulate them, you’ll be able to believe me more than you already do?”

  She placed her hand against her forehead. She was shaking so much that she had to hide it in the folds of her dress.

  “Why did I come back here?” Sixtine asked, the voice is hard.

  “Because it’s your destiny. All roads, in both worlds, will lead you to what you must accomplish. You cannot leave this body until you have fulfilled your destiny,” Vatika stopped talking and her eyes widened. “Oh, my God…”

  Sixtine felt the air of the cave thicken with fear. The river was bubbling with foam. “What do I have to accomplish, Vatika? Tell me!”

  “There were always two of you. One to avenge, the other to save. The secret of the two worlds kept. Sixtine, what do you see, will I die?”

  “Tell me who I am!” Sixtine exclaimed.

  “You’re an angel!”

  Vatika’s response hit Sixtine like a punch in the stomach and took her breath away. At that moment, Vatika turned her whole body towards the clearing. She fell to her knees, collapsing like a rag doll. Her face was bloodless as she joined her trembling hands in a prayer.

  Sixtine followed her begging gaze.

  The moonlight from two openings in the cave sky projected a magnified silhouette, drawing two gigantic wings against the silver rock.

  It was Thaddeus.

  35

  Thaddeus remained motionless, dust particles dancing around him in the moonbeam.

  Sixtine needed proof that she was alive and well, she found it in the radiant heat wave that revitalized her whole being when she saw Thaddeus. He wasn't looking at her, but she knew he saw her.

  A dangerous glow shone in his darkened eyes, and he directed them towards Vatika. She knelt on the water, the ripples of the river wetting her thighs. She recited inaudible prayers as she swayed back and forth.

  “Pride. One of the seven deadly sins.” Thaddeus's familiar voice was as sharp as ice.

  Vatika shook her head, doubled her prayers, perhaps trying to drown out Thaddeus's words.

  “You are so proud of your acquaintance that you couldn't help but talk, even though you knew it was against the law.”

  “She asked me,” Vatika squealed in a small voice. “I don't know everything.”

  “You know too much. You have been given consciousness and knowledge. You have been given the full spectrum of earthly experiences, the freedom to think and imagine. You have been given the whole world here, now. And yet you don't have enough! You have to drag your thirst for conquest into the next world as well?”

  “If you have given me the means to unravel its mysteries,” Vatika stuttered, “then why punish me if I guess them?”

  “Pride!” Thaddeus shouted. “You didn't just guess them! You saw some truths and built a church out of it to establish your power and enslave others! Of all your pride, the worst thing is to believe that you can rewrite the order of things? Deceive the perfection of the balance between life and death with cheap magic?”

  “Thaddeus, I swear to you, I've never done anything but follow destiny! I never forced anyone's hand! Punish men and their rituals, you have already punished the High Light, and you have done justice. But not me, Thaddeus. I've never been more than a humble guide!”

  “You're lying! You know the moon changes the currents of the river and you have put it to work for your purposes. You and Elizabeth resurrected an old secret society to which no one belonged to make it a powerful cult that has already crushed thirty lives. It's over, Vatika. It is time.”

  With a trembling hand, she reached for something in the folds of her dress. A sinister smirk twisted her face. “Who did you come for? Just for me?”

  “No, for all of them.”

  “And it is you who accuses me of pride,” Vatika laughed, gripped by a fit of hysteria. “They're all here, all twenty of them, I've seen them. The world above has given you so little power, you're almost as weak as a man. It's easy to kill me, but how are you going to do it for the others? It’s one against twenty?” Vatika closed her fingers around a glittering object.

  “You are so drunk with the few mysteries you have uncovered that you forget that you know so little,” Thaddeus scoffed.

  He then approached the shore and Sixtine's heart pounded wildly in her chest. Vatika stood up on her knees, her hands joined, shaken by a violent tremor.

  “I will stop, Thaddeus,” she begged. “I can keep the secret of both worlds, yours, and Sixtine's. Nothing will ever come out of this cave again, I swear. You were sent to do justice, so be just, and show mercy!”

  Thaddeus kept moving forward, towards her. “Would you rather wander around in this cave for the rest of your life than face what you've been waiting for, for thirty years? Where is your courage, Vatika?”

  She started sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks. Sixtine then saw what she had in her hands, a tiny glass vial. She raised it in the air, her chest shaken by violent turmoil.

  Thaddeus stopped.

  The angel and the priestess stared at each other in a final face-to-face encounter.

  Then Vatika emptied the contents of the vial into her throat. Green liquid flowed from the corner of her lips.

  A sad and resigned smile passed over Thaddeus's lips. “Poor Vatika. You have spent your life in contemplation to prepare for your own ascension and to secure eternal peace. And yet, you've forgotten the essentials.”

  “What?” Vatika made in a strangled voice, her eyes exorbitant.

  “The love of a little girl.”

  Vatika's face turned into the cold color of marble, then she collapsed on the shining moon floor.

  36

  “Two angels,” Sixtine whispered and gazed up at Thaddeus, who stood mere inches from her.

  Her sentence sounded like a question, and she rested her head delicately on his shoulder.

  “Alone in the world,” Thaddeus whispered.

  “In what world?”

  “In this one. Only this one matters.”

  Sixtine sighed miserably and pursed her lips briefly. “I don’t know what my destiny is.”

  “You’ll find it. I have no right to guide you. It’ll come to you. Have faith. You are only at the beginning,” was his answer.

  “What about you?” she asked, glancing up at him.

  “Tonight, my destiny will be fulfilled.”

  “Tonight?” Sixtine asked, catching her breath. “What happens then?”

  “You go back to where you came from.”

  She understood but didn’t want to admit it. “Do we have to go back where we came from?”

  “I’m mortal again.”

  Sixtine’s belly tightened: could she still hope? Did life offer them the future she so dreamed of?

  At that moment, a voice sounded in the cave. A voice which made Thadde
us’s shoulders flinch, even if it was for only a moment.

  “You always wanted to prove that you knew more than anyone else, didn’t you, son?”

  Helmut von Wär had entered the clearing, his black robe skimming in the silver puddles.

  “I’m not your son,” Thaddeus gritted his teeth.

  “How long has it been? Fifteen? Twenty years that you’ve been waiting for this moment?”

  “Eighteen years, seven months and twenty-two days.”

  “So dramatic,” Von Wär chuckled.

  Men emerged from the shadows; they were all Vietnamese, some of them carried guns. They surrounded Sixtine and Thaddeus and grabbed them. Sixtine glanced over her shoulder and saw that Max and Florence had also been taken prisoner. Florence, supported by Max, seemed to be delirious with fever.

  Von Wär took one look at Vatika’s body lying on the bank of the Green River, and then seemed to forget about it, discarding the idea of her much too easily.

  Thaddeus didn’t struggle against the grip of the men. He stood so motionless that the men holding him by the arms could not help but jolt every time he spoke.

  “So, now what?” Thaddeus asked. “What do you want to do with me? You can’t kill me. That takes all the fun out of it.”

  Helmut von Wär chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. Ancient history is full of resources. The elders wrote about devils like you, they knew exactly how to do it and passed on their knowledge to us.”

  He signaled to the men to bring him a chest. “Do you know who Proteus was? Virgil tells us that this god of ancient Greece had the bad habit of changing form. He possessed the gift of prophecy and, of course, men wanted to learn from him. But every time a human approached him to ask him to share his knowledge, he would escape by changing form.”

  Thaddeus’s fiery gaze remained on his stepfather’s face when he grabbed the small chest and turned the key.

  “But Aristaeus, Apollo’s son, had a particularly pressing question to ask Proteus. He spent time wondering how he could prevent the god from changing form, and finally imagined a small invention for which a good part of humanity can still thank him today.”

  Out of the trunk, he retrieved a pair of antique handcuffs. “These were used by the Neo-Assyrians, great warriors, very inventive.”

  He placed the cuffs around his stepson’s wrists and clicked them into place.

  “I never understood why you didn’t put a bullet between my eyes,” Von Wär said, his mouth so close to Thaddeus’s face that he must have felt his angry breath. “It would have been easier. But you were probably too much of a coward.”

  Sixtine could read all the contempt Thaddeus had for Von Wär. Instead of giving Von Wär the reaction he wanted, Thaddeus smiled at him with cold indifference. “You still don’t understand why I’m here.”

  “Oh, yes. Messenger from heaven, avenging angel to punish us for daring to imagine a better life in the next world. Even if we were just doing what our ancestors did.”

  “That’s why the ancestors are nowhere near heaven.”

  “Eden watchdog, huh? But this is where your mission ends. And you can spend eternity facing the crimes you have committed.”

  The men helped him tie Thaddeus’s handcuffs to a ring sealed within the rock, so that he faced the large mosaic representing Elizabeth von Wär.

  “You can’t win,” Thaddeus called out. “Your fate and the fate of others has already been decided, long before you arrived here. Everything’s on track, it’s too late.”

  Von Wär clenched his jaw. “So be it,” he spat. “At least you’ll pay for what you did. Heaven does not have a monopoly on justice.”

  “What should we do with the others?” one of the men asked, motioning to Sixtine, Max and Florence.

  Von Wär made a vague gesture. “Anything you want. Just make sure they’re never found.”

  37

  The three candles danced weakly against the rock, and moths swirled around them, annoyed and hypnotized by the orange flame. Sometimes a bat would scratch the yellow halo with its quick shadow. Max watched over the candles like a mother watched over sick children.

  Florence was lying along the wall, her face hidden under her arm. Beads of sweat ran down her shaky chin, her breathing was jerky.

  Sixtine closed her eyes, relived the image of Thaddeus handcuffed in the clearing. No matter how much she let go, no matter how much she tried to use that strange knowledge that lived inside her, she saw no way out. With this feeling of helplessness, something else grew.

  Presences lurking in the dark.

  Was she intended to remain there, witnessing the slow death of two others? She was also a prisoner, if she forced her death as she had done by diving from the top of the skyscraper, she would find herself right here in the huge cave. Perhaps she would arrive on the banks of the Green River, unable to save her companions lost elsewhere in this rocky maze. Or perhaps she would stay here, torn apart by the absurd experience of a life and death chained in the infernal loop of eternal restart.

  By winning immortality, she had won hell.

  Florence began to moan, echoing her own thoughts. “We’re gonna die here, aren’t we? When the candle goes out, is that it? No one knows we’re here, no one’s coming to get us. Huh? Is that it? Is that it?”

  She was ranting, the fever taking a hold of her mind while Max was trying to reassure her, but there was no longer enough hope to comfort her.

  “The candles will only last a little longer,” Max said. “I have a few matches left if they go out.”

  His tone was meant to be reassuring, but when he wanted to extract a moth that the wax had taken hostage, his hand trembled.

  Florence must have known it was a lie, but believing, at that moment, was all she had left. Max warned Florence that he was going to inspect the surroundings; perhaps he would find something combustible to keep the light going. She moaned again, and he promised to come back soon. When he left her, she approached the two remaining candles.

  The need for light, Sixtine thought. It was such a strong instinct in humans.

  “I never understood why moths are attracted to the light,” she said as Max approached.

  “They try to mate with the flame. The pheromones of female moths are slightly luminescent, and contain the same frequencies as the infrared spectrum of fire.”

  “They seek love and they find death,” she muttered tragically.

  “Yes. Nature is mysterious.”

  “Cruel if you ask me.”

  They were careful about their steps, but walked barely fifty feet, at the edge of the light. They were surrounded by an ocean of emptiness and darkness. Under their feet, about six feet away, was a short platform, but it ended in a chasm. Beyond that, the light would die.

  From time to time, Sixtine detected movement in the rocky darkness. They were never straightforward visions, but rather the fleeting impression of perceiving shadows where there were none. Nefertiti and the monkey were lurking so close that their murmurs excited the nerves of her whole body.

  As soon as she tried to find out where they came from, they would run away.

  Max, standing beside her, contemplated the darkness. His voice almost made Sixtine jump.

  “I spent years trying to understand why the Egyptians built the pyramids. They impress us, these magnificent structures that tower out over the desert. We would start from their external appearance to understand them, but I think I understand now. We should not look at their external form to understand their reason for being. You have to look inside. Not the rooms, not the secret passages. But the void, the nothing. Gigantic darkness inhabited by the invisible. Man wanted to reproduce what had fascinated them since the dawn of time, from the decorated caves. The pyramids are nothing more than huge caves, the crossroads between the world of the living and the world of the spirits.”

  “Do you believe in life after death?” Sixtine asked. “I didn’t think you were the type to dwell on the invisible and the spirits.”


  Max remained silent for a few moments, looking at the darkness in front of him. “I don’t know,” he whispered at last. “I remember when I was in the collapsed tunnel, when we gave up hope, something strange happened.”

  He swallowed, smiled, as if surprised by his own audacity. “I saw you.”

  “Me or Jessica?” Sixtine asked.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Jessica had blue eyes, amongst other things.”

  Max stared at her. “I’m sure it was you. And yet, I can’t be convinced I really saw you. I felt your presence, rather. A few moments later, the tunnel opened, and they came to rescue us.”

  Sixtine did not dare to interrupt him, and let silence encourage confidences.

  “When we were at the top of the pyramid,” he continued, “you told me that you didn’t need to be protected. You were right. When I was in the tunnel, I’m pretty sure you protected me. You know, Sixtine, being near you, here, now, even though I don’t know how to explain it, I’m not afraid anymore.”

  Max’s smile was simple, generous, as if it were the last thing left in this world. Then he moved away to return to Florence’s side.

  Sixtine glanced at him as he sat down beside Florence, opened her mouth to speak, but the emotion extinguished her voice. With a tight throat, she faced the dark ocean again.

  Max, by giving her the gift of his fragility, by offering her a very simple truth, revealed a much more essential one. Just as hope was fading, he had opened her eyes.

  Sixtine saw the order of things in its purest form.

  Tears rose, tears of gratitude and recognition.

  Then her gaze was lost in that darkness that gave rise to all fears. Something moved.

  A queen of Egypt, a hysterical monkey, forty-two judges or death itself. It didn’t matter. It was there. Sixtine’s eyes were wide open.

  She turned her head towards Max and Florence, bathed in the dying light.

  He stroked her forehead, she cuddled up against him.

  Max looked up at Sixtine. An imperceptible nod answered the question she had not asked.