A Third of the Moon and the Stars Struck

by Jade Brieanne

  Jin’s hands tightened around Onyu’s neck and Onyu rolled her eyes. The power Jin tapped into was brilliant with light, but what it provided in luminosity, it lacked in strength. She is still a cub at this. So, with a gentle hand, she pried Jin’s hands from around her neck and gathered a little energy under her feet. Using alar, she disappeared from in front of Jin, only to reappear behind her. She hauled her hand high behind her back to immobilize her but she underestimated Jin’s speed again. She shook Onyu’s hold loose, pushed off the wall, and twisted up and over Onyu’s head. She landed on the ground feet below them and flipped backward until she was out of reach.

  When she was far enough away, Jin fell to one knee. “Why–why does it feel like I’m on fire?” she groaned, her body shaking.

  Onyu eyes narrowed. The red in her eyes was a sign, but the temperature of Jin’s skin was abnormal and her spiritual mass was afflux like uncontrollable rapids. “Your spiritual power is bleeding into your bloodstream and pouring emotions into you. That’s why you feel so angry.” Onyu took a step forward, but Jin growled as she approached, her eyes, now a polished, pinkish mix of red and silver, flashing even as her other knee smacked against the ground. “Let me help you. You have to power down. You’re poisoning yourself!”

  “Help? You did this to me!” Jin cried out.

  “That’s not true Jin. You have to listen to me through your anger and distrust! The Araboth path draws power from within, using your soul like a generator connected to a super dense source. We have to cut the connection!”

  Jin’s hands hit the ground and she seemed to shrink into herself, moaning in pain. The tips of her hair were beginning to turn grey, a sure indication of spiritual poisoning. “Oh, god,” she groaned, rolling over onto her side and then her back. “It hurts!”

  “Onyu!” a collection of voices above them called out.

  “Just–just do something!” Benja’in-su yelled. “She can’t do it! She can’t!”

  Onyu looked up above the concrete wall to the apartment windows of Nuh. Benja’in-su was leaning out of one, her face colored with horror. Onyu looked around. Most of the Nuh Morg’ah’nee were at their windows. Hundreds of them…no, thousands. That was enough of a sign.

  The Morg’ah’nee could smell spiritual death.

  Onyu used alar again, flashing to Jin’s side. Most of the color had been drained from Jin’s hair and her eyes were a ghostly white with no pupil or iris showing. She grabbed a branch lying on the ground and began drawing symbols into the ground, all the ones associated with Zachariel and Raphael, Yin and Yang, those who would help her find a balance in Jin’s soul. She tossed the branch away and looked down at Jin.

  It’s never this bad. It’s never ever this bad.

  “Raqia Path,” she cried and she felt the power hum from her hands, up her arms, to her back, and then back down again. “5th disciple! I command you!”

  The power flooded out of Onyu and into Jin…and Jin screamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  There was always a moment when you’re sleeping and then you’re not. The lull of rest, being unaware of what the body is doing and then suddenly you are aware of everything. Jin felt that as she continued to lay perfectly still in the bed, her lids pulled over her eyes, her mind trying to shut out all of the noise.

  She felt someone beside her. Felt, not as in the way you can feel someone in the room with you but in a different way. Color and sounds filled her mind.

  “I know you’re awake.”

  Jin sighed and shuffled a bit to let Onyu know she was right but she didn’t open her eyes. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, feeling small and lost.

  There was a noise, maybe a hum or a grunt. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Then why me? Why is this happening to me?”

  “You think this is happening to you. That is wrong. These things are happening because of you, which is something that is out of your control. There isn’t some grand scheme to make you suffer, Jin. You were born with a unique soul, one colored and influenced by someone who did great things. You were born and strings of purpose were born with you.”

  Jin huffed. “What if I don’t this to happen to me? What if I don’t want to do any this?”

  “Then you would be dead.”

  Jin squeezed her lids together tighter, red and blue and white dancing behind her lids. “Why?” Her voice sounded so pitiful, so weak. She didn’t understand why she sounded so weak.

  “Because,” the spiritualist explained, her voice gentle and soft, “when your strings of purpose showed an anomaly, fixing that anomaly included our interference in your death. You would have never met Kithlish, Tahir or Rooke. Or Aria. Or me. None of this would have happened because you would no longer be alive.”

  Jin opened one eye and then the other. Her room was her room. She saw the nightstand, the lamp, the door to the bathroom. Onyu sat on top of the chair that had always been there.

  Everything was the same. Except the room was no longer white.

  “Blue?” It was the same color blue that had flashed in the room days ago when she’d fed the fire.

  Onyu’s attire matched the room. Her dress was a body-hugging ankle-length number in a deep navy with a circular cutout right below her collarbones. A long scar was right above her left breast. Her hair was different, as always. It was braided into hundreds of tiny individual braids and then looped on top of her head. Her golden neck rings were there, and so were huge golden hoops. She peered at Jin from her place on the chair, her chin supported on her fist.

  “It means we are getting somewhere. The room is reflecting more of you.” Onyu paused. “You fainted yesterday.”

  Images of the previous day flashed in front of Jin’s eyes but the only thing she could remember was the pain, the burn of something she didn’t quite understand.

  Slowly, she slid up the bed and sat up. Her wrist felt heavy and she looked down. Two bracelets, each about an inch wide, adorned her wrist. Engraved into them were the vestiges of two phoenixes. She rotated her wrist before lowering her hands. Taking another glance around the room, her gaze drifted to Onyu. “What happened?”

  “You weren’t as ready as I anticipated.”

  “Being ready requires some sort of–of preparation. You gave me a half-assed speech and a weird science lesson and threw me to an army of bird people. What exactly were you expecting?”

  “I was expecting…your soul, for Aria to…” Onyu paused and looked off, her face drawn together in contemplation. “There is so much to explain,” she mumbled. “Okay, I’ll start with souls. Do you want to know about them? About what’s going on with yours?”

  “Of course I do!” Jin shot back, exasperated.

  “Very well.” Onyu turned towards the clock on the wall. The clock, now blue with white hands, behaved normally today, sixty seconds for every minute, moving in smooth, predictable ticks that Jin could count off in her head. With a flick of Onyu’s hand, the clock began moving erratically, speeding up until the face was a blur of movement. With another flick, an image began to form, one of a round object floating in a starlit space.

  “This,” she said, pointing to the glowing floating ball, “is a soul. It’s not what an actual soul looks like, those cannot be seen, but since we know the anatomy of one, this representation will work.”

  Jin nodded, her fingers rubbing just under her collarbones. She again noticed that her pocket watch necklace was missing.

  “It is made up of two parts.” The image of the soul shifted to show a cross section–a larger silver portion encircling a golden portion at the center. “There is a silver force that feeds the body called nephesh and a golden force that feeds the spirit called ruah. For humans, the nephesh is immensely larger than the ruah. For angels, it’s the opposite. Mutare have a slightly larger nephesh due to their human heredity but they still own considerably large reserves of ruah.”

  “Okay,” Jin said, trying to keep up. “Nephesh. Ruah. Got it.”
>
  “Your soul is different. It is split into three parts–ruah, nephesh and kufsah or a container. There are beings whose physical makeup is just kufsah. Our Great Mother uses them. For you, this container houses a soul, it has housed this soul since you were born.”

  “Aria’s,” Jin answered.

  Onyu nodded. “In theory, because we are very ignorant of this manifestation, reincarnation works as a transfer of energy. Reincarnated beings may have the drive to complete something their predecessor failed to complete or they are driven to love someone similar to someone their predecessor loved. Small things like that rather than…a completed model such as yourself. You are every bit of Aria, even in the way you talk, even though I must say Aria had a bit more bite and outright Saharan wit.”

  “I know,” Jin said, dryly.

  “Trust me, I understand.”

  “So the reason all of this is happening is because I have Aria’s soul embedded in mine?”

  “More or less.”

  “Did…did Aria die in the war? On the bridge? Was she some kind of a martyr?”

  “Yes and no,” Onyu said, her smile fond yet sad. “When the rebellion turned into an all-out war and Khavah refused to dispatch Seraphim–an elite fighting force of angels–it was up to the Mutare ranks to mobilize and fight. Aria formed the third member of the Team Fox–”

  “Key’s Team Fox?”

  “Yes, but at the time it Captain Song’s Fox and Aria was a part of a three-man team that included Kano.” Onyu paused and tilted her head. “You’ve met Kano? He is the current co-leader of The Fallen.”

  The name sounded familiar. “Maybe.”

  “Well, as I said, all Luminary Squads are spectacular, but Fox was a different echelon of lethal. Song was smart and ruthless, Kano efficient and methodical, and Aria was special. Aria possessed, outside of her brilliance, loyalty, and reckless abandon, an incredibly rare power mutation of the Angel Path Zebul.”

  “Path?”

  “Paths are routes to certain powers. But the mutation of the Zebul path allowed Aria to see things that others couldn’t see through something called Synthesia. She’d smell a scent and hear a sound or see a color and taste a flavor. When wielded it as a weapon, she could virtually see the life energy of a person and was able to read that person, down to the strength in their swing, the emotions they felt. She used to do many great things such as predicting how an enemy would react. Her second ability was not a path power and not something many understood. It allowed her to possess another person and fight on their behalf. Soul Step. By rare, I mean Aria was the only angel to ever possess it.”

  Jin scratched the back of her head, sort of impressed but shocked. Then a thought hit her. “Wait. I hope you guys aren’t keeping me around because you think I’ll be her.”

  “Nobody is expecting you to be her. Remember when I said you didn’t end up here accidentally? Aria sent you.”

  Jin’s brow raised. “From where? The last I saw of her was on a bridge, which by her words, was a discarded timeline. Which means she wasn’t a real thing. She’s like an old VCR tape or something.”

  Onyu winced and Jin leaned towards her, her brow rising even higher. “What? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Onyu waved towards the clock and the image of the soul reappeared. “With your soul acting as a protective blanket over hers, we were never able to see Aria’s. It also explains why you knew nothing of any spiritual powers. Humans with spiritual powers tend to display it–psychics, preachers with healing hands, prophets, mikos, even some scientist. However, when Shen murdered you the first time, it set off a chain reaction. One, Caeli was informed of your presence as well as Aria’s, two, you began to exhibit control of ruah and three, Aria became aware.”

  “Aware of what?”

  “That she existed inside of you. It was the final step. Even if by some miracle someone knew beforehand that she existed inside of you, no one could reach her without her being aware.

  “That’s when she began affecting your timeline from outside of the Causatum. That is when she started to visit you in your dreams, as a warning. There were attempts to save your life outside of the actions of Tambour and The Fallen. Yet, when she and Ahn conspired to stab you–”

  “Wait a damn minute,” Jin said, raising a hand in alarm. “What do you mean Aria conspired? You mean she had something to do with me being stabbed by that lunatic?”

  “Ahn and Aria are cousins and have always thought…alike.”

  Jin pressed her lips together. The sound of blood was rushing in her ears and it was making it hard to think. The anger was almost irrepressible. Onyu stopped her with what she must have considered a calming touch to her leg.

  “One thing Ahn is, besides incredibly reticent, is smart. He is the most empathetic angel of The Above. So he may seem insane to you, and I understand your reasons for thinking that, but Ahn would never put you in danger. Mortal danger…that is. That strike? It was well placed and aimed as to not kill you. He also did it in a location where you would have received the quickest care. He elevated your safety above his own. For all we know, they are planning his execution.”

  Jin felt a phantom pain in her chest. She winced but the pain was secondary. The confusing swirl of emotions she felt came first. “I don’t care what happens to him.”

  Onyu nodded. “What Ahn did that night was connect Aria with her source of pure ruah, the ruah she’d stored in her sword. Up until that moment, you were the dominant soul fragment. Up until that moment,” she reiterated. “Now Aria is. Meaning she…” Onyu paused, her brows drawn tight.

  Jin flinched. “She what?”

  Onyu sighed. “She replaced you as owner. The magnitude of her ruah and nephesh energy eclipsed yours. Now she is you…and you are here.”

  “Here,” Jin fumed.

  “Yes. Here. You were sent here because Aria wants you to survive. For a long time, she thought that maybe she could guide you but…you simply weren’t strong enough. She decided, ultimately, that the switch was necessary.”

  Jin was silent for a long stretch of time, the hum from the clock hands being the only sound in the room. When she spoke, her voice shook. “You mean to tell me, I am stuck here, indefinitely, without access to my body, all based on some ghost’s executive decision?”

  “Aria’s body.”

  “No,” Jin said as she threw the covers to her knees. “My body. The body I’ve had for twenty-seven years. My body. The one my parents conceived, the one my mother gave birth to. My body! And what am I supposed to do? Play reindeer games with you until she decides to give me back what rightfully belongs to me?”

  “You’ll never get it back,” Onyu answered carefully.

  “I don’t accept that.”

  Onyu exhaled and looked at Jin with a frown that was tinged with remorse. “You’ve lost something and you feel wronged…”

  “How fucking perceptive of you!”

  “…and it will take some time for you to adjust, to accept this.”

  “Accept this? Accept? Go to hell!”

  Onyu stood, staring down at Jin’s anger with something akin to helplessness. “This is a lot to take in. I’ll leave you to your thoughts.”

  “And now you’re running away?” Jin growled through clenched teeth.

  Onyu retained her silence. She moved the chair back beside the wall, silent, and made her way towards the door. As she opened it, the noise of people moving about Nuh filtered into the quiet bedroom.

  “Not that this is any consolation to your situation but you are helping an entire realm. Sometimes sacrifices are necessary for victory.” The door closed behind her with a click.

  Jin stared at the door, blind with rage. “I am no sacrifice.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  They left her alone, as Onyu promised, for ten days. It was a guess. It was always a guess but instead of time, or things constructed of time, such as the clock that served no master, she counted the days using her circadian cycle. When she
woke up, which was always right when the sun was painting the sky pink and orange, it was hour zero. When she went to sleep, which was always right as pinks and purples shifted into blues and black, it was hour sixteen. She didn’t understand how those numbers worked for her, but they did. Ten days in a row she woke up at hour zero and went to sleep at hour sixteen.

  In her room was the bathroom that she and Aiden shared. At hour one, because she always spent an hour in the bed staring at the ceiling, thinking,

  always thinking, she would get up, brush her teeth and shower. Steam would fill the bathroom and she would inhale deeply as if it were the only thing that kept her from hyperventilating and ramming her head into the tiles until everything stopped.

  She would spend minutes, hours, standing in front of her bathroom mirror. It would be fogged up when she stepped out of the shower and she would stay there long enough for the condensation to disappear.

  Her hair was white. A lot of it had fallen out as well. Where her hair used to dance around her shoulders when she laughed, it now caressed the nape of her neck when she sobbed. It was white. White. Devoid of all color. Devoid of everything.

  On day five, she tore her room up. She kicked holes in the walls. She snatched the sheets off her bed. She smashed her lamp against the floor. Black smashed against black. The room was black now. Onyu said it would reflect what was inside of her and she felt dark, like she’d fallen into a hole. She tore the blinds down.

  As they hit the ground, she realized she’d never grieved. She’d watched, as if she’d been detached from emotions, as Aiden worked through his stages of grief. She comforted him, counseled him through his anger and sadness with her mind, her words, and her body as if that was the correct way to deal with sorrow. It wasn’t. Aiden was still insecure, still haunted and Jin still had little patience for his insecurity, his demons. Aiden was still overprotective and Jin was still too independent of the cause and effect of trauma on the human psyche to understand it. They both needed help but at least Aiden had received something.