by Kody Boye
Death
The Brotherhood, Book 3
Kody Boye
Death (The Brotherhood, #3)
By Kody Boye
Copyright 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Kindle Edition
Cover art and design by Philip R. Rogers
Beta-read and proofed by Lori Parker
Interior formatting by Kody Boye
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the proper written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
The Willow Wand
It has been cast
The Holy Ones
Were meant to last
And as the Angels
From High Above
Come Sailing Down
With Trumpeting Doves
There will be a cry
There will be a call
One great person
Was meant to fall.
They will be lifted
High above
By the hands of Heaven
The One who Called
Who rang that Phone
Long Distance Call
And there will be Someone
Who will answer that call
They said, “Hello?”
There was no reply
They said, “Who’s there?”
Is it time to die?
And on the brink of nothing
—The cool, the calm—
There was a sense of everything
—The high, the tide—
As there comes a moment when, in time, He does call,
They say He is everything
He is Us All
There will be no pain
No misery
No rise, no fall,
No struggled breathing
No demise or bawl
For there are in great times of need Ones who Watch
They aren’t in the shadows
They aren’t in the fog.
The Willow Wand
It has been cast
And God above
Was meant to last
He will lift you
And take you high
And though some may not believe
There will be
One final reprieve.
* - * - * - *
In memory of my family:
Grandpa Jim and Grandma Shirley
Grandpa Larry and Grandma Betty
My uncle Bud
My cousin Shane,
whose presence in my life has taught me lessons, given me passion, and ultimately made me the person I will be for the rest of my life.
And in memory of my friends:
Spider, Jamie Eyberg and Z.A. Recht,
whose bodies may be gone, but whose souls live on forever through their writing.
Brotherhood Novels by Kody Boye
Blood (The Brotherhood, #3)
Sword (The Brotherhood, #2)
Death (The Brotherhood, #3)
Also by Kody Boye
Amorous Things
The Diary of Dakota Hammell
The Midnight Spell (with Rhiannon Frater)
The Tragedy of Louis Décor
Love and Other Horrors
Sunrise
Wraethworld
Foreword
I think one of the most amazingly-universal things is how quickly life can pass and how swiftly death can be thrust upon us. Four years ago, I began rewriting The Brotherhood out of fear that I would lose my ability to write due to a suspected brain tumor. Little did I realize what all I would lose in the process.
It’s natural that everyone loses someone within the first eighteen years of their life. By the time I left Idaho at the age of consent, I’d already lost both grandparents on my father’s side and, more recently, my grandfather on my mother’s. There’d always been doubts in my mind about my family being able to see my success, or at least what I thought I considered to be success, so when I lost my grandfather Larry shortly after beginning the first in this series, I was devastated. In a way, I’d felt like I’d failed—cheated him of seeing what I could do with a talent I knew would one day support me.
Because of that guilt, I vowed that I would do everything in my power to make sure one of my biggest supporters, my grandmother Betty, would see The Brotherhood until the end.
Sadly, life does not work that way. It was little more than a month after I released the first book that she was stricken with illness that soon took her life.
There are several moments in my life I can vividly remember—the day my Grandpa Jim passed when I was seven, when my mother came into the room and told me the news; the stormy afternoon my Grandma Shirley slipped away after existing in a catatonic state for three days; the night my mother woke up to tell me that my Grandpa Larry had passed and then the night I drove to a local plaza in Austin, Texas at nearly midnight and listened to Lady GaGa’s The Edge of Glory when I experienced the realization that my Grandma Betty would not survive. Death is undoubtedly the most powerful cause in the cycle of life. After the grand or even slight appearance of something marvelous it strips from the world an asset that can be used in many ways. There is usually little to no warning. Death can sometimes be defied, altered, postponed or hastened, but in the end it is alwys the same result.
Throughout my life, I’ve lost an incredible amount of people, both family and friends. The most haunting of these revelations is the idea that, while writing Death, inspired one of the darkest questions I’ve ever thought of.
What would happen if you could do something to bring someone you love back to life? If there was a magic—or, undoubtedly, a curse upon the body you could inflict upon yourself to bring back someone whose life had been cut short—would you do it?
This is the central focus of Death, and what I believe is the most terrifying question of all.
3/21/13
Chapter 1
A man carried the dove in a cage gilded and lined with silver. His head hung low, his face all but unseen, any and every who looked upon him would have been apt to see the fact that he bore little to no expression upon the pale frames of his lips. His chin cleft, his stubble harsh—he appeared to have walked straight from the oppressing nature they had all very well endured over the past few weeks bearing the very thing that would deliver one of the fallen to the world beyond the mortal realm.
Standing before the funeral pyre with his head bowed and his emotions all but ready to break, Odin tried not to look at the body of the man who no more than a day ago had revealed himself to be his father.
How will I go on, he thought, if I have no one to guide me?
At his sides, Carmen and Nova stood stoic, silent in their grief and all but perpetual in the depressing nature, while ahead the man with the gilded cage stepped forward and set it on the platform directly above the Elf’s head, all but ready and willing to begin the ceremony whenever instructed.
“Odin,” a voice said. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Odin replied, raising his head to regard the cloaked man before them.
He looked to be a visage of horror, this man with the gilded cage, for his face was shrouded in a darkness so great and grand Odin couldn’t help but wonder if his intentions were pure or just a ploy in order
to deliver something far worse than what his nature specifically implied.
Stepping forward, careful not to disturb the dirt at his feet or the tension within the area, Odin wrapped his hands around the edge of the funeral pyre and tried not to look at his father’s face.
After so much time, after so many years, he finally had the answers to some of the most important questions in his entire life.
I am what I am because of you.
Somehow, whether due to the miraculous chance of fate or the inability to openly express the emotions that lay taut and pulled within his chest, he resisted the urge to reach out and touch the Elf’s delicate skin, his hands of which bore no masculine traits or humanly flaws. There was no discoloration where his knuckles lay rigid, no veins upon which blood could travel, nor, Odin noticed, were there lines upon the curves of his fingers.
“I could have asked you so much,” he whispered, reaching up to stroke the Elf’s hair from his eyes. “I wish I could have.”
“The knife,” the cage carrier said.
Odin barely bothered to look up when he heard the sound of the knife being drawn from its sheath and passed from the cage carrier’s hands to Parfour’s, who’d specifically asked to lead the ceremony in light of the situation before them. He couldn’t imagine how the boy must feel, given his age and his place within the world, but if his own emotions were any indication, he knew the young man must be burning up on the inside.
“Odin,” Parfour said.
He took the knife from the boy’s hand and circled his fingers around its hilt.
You may be gone, he thought, but you will live on.
It had been his decision to take from the Elf’s head a strand of hair which spilled over his shoulders and down to his feet. Carefully freed from its braid and stroked until it lay perfect over his skin, it looked to be shining in the faint twilight of the gloomy afternoon day, a sight which reminded him of all the glorious things in the world.
Perfection would have not been the word to describe the Elf before him. Even in death, Miko was the most beautiful thing he could have ever laid his eyes upon.
By pure, concrete will alone, and with force of which he felt he was incapable of having, Odin turned his head up to look at his father’s perfect, porcelain face, then reached out to take the strand of hair between his fingers.
“Dear God,” Parfour said, just as Odin raised the knife and carefully cut the piece of hair away, “or Gods, or Demigods, or Deities or Enlightened, please deliver upon us the clarity of which we, the mortals, often do not have, and please, dear God, or Demigods, or Deities or Enlightened, deliver us the power to move on in this most horrible time. Deliver this man’s soul to the world beyond and forever cherish him within Your arms.”
When the piece of hair from the Elf’s brow fell perfectly within Odin’s hand, Ardut stepped forward, took Odin’s palm within his, then trailed it up to Odin’s brow, where he then bowed his head and streamed the power of magic through his wrist and out into his palm.
One brief moment later, Odin felt the fibers of his father’s hair connecting to his skull. Like snow, dust and ash, it seemed to meld with his skin as though a passing glance of the wind upon his brow. It held no pain, no sympathy, no enlightenment or any justification upon which he could base his morals. It held nothing—nothing but pure, simple touch.
Had he the honest urge to describe what he’d just done, Odin would compared it to vanity—pure, selfish vanity.
“Would anyone like to speak to High Mage Unisto before the ceremony continues?” Parfour asked.
“I will,” Nova said.
As Odin turned his head up to look at Nova, he saw in his friend suffering he could not have even begun to describe. The grief of a nation, the loss of a child, the death of a familiar or the passing of a friend—in Nova’s pale, amber eyes, so clouded with hurt they seemed pieces of the pale yellow moon on an autumn night, Odin saw his life flash before his vision, all his hopes and dreams condensed into one single, tragic moment.
A sob escaped his chest and tore through his throat.
Nova stepped forward and took him into his arms.
“It’ll be ok,” the older man whispered, snaring his fingers in Odin’s shirt.
“How can I go on without him?”
“Life goes on,” Nova whispered. “It has to.”
“I don’t think it can.”
Choosing not to respond directly for reasons Odin couldn’t imagine, Nova leaned forward, pressed his hand over the Elf’s, then offered one slight smile. “Well, partner,” he said. “I guess this is it then. The end.”
The end.
How horrible it felt to hear those words.
“I’ve come a long way since I’ve met you,” Nova continued, bowing his head and taking a long, deep breath. “You saved my life a few years ago. I know you already know this, but it’s nice, being able to remember like this. I… I’m sorry I couldn’t have remembered sooner, when you were still here. Thank you for all you’ve done. There’s nothing I could have ever done to repay you.”
Carmen stepped forward. In one small hand, she held a flower the color of lavender on a warm summer day. “I didn’t know you,” the Dwarf said, carefully reaching up to set the flower within Miko’s large, outstretched hands, “but I know you were important to a lot of people, especially to the men I call friends. I’m sorry I never got the chance to know you. I hope you’re happier, wherever you are, and I hope that your life… or afterlife… whatever you want to call it… is full of smiles and dandelions.”
“Would anyone else like to say something?” Parfour asked.
Though no one else responded, most, if not all bowed their heads.
“Jackson,” the boy replied, turning his attention to the man who bore the dove in the gilded cage. “Will you free the dove and place it over our friend’s heart?”
“Yes, sir.”
It seemed an act intricate beyond the measure upon which it could be weighed within the normal world. A lock shifted, a gate opened, a bird taken into a pair of gnarled hands—it could have been described as contemporary, a thing that could have very well occurred at any other time during any day of the year, though Odin knew otherwise: knew that, in spite of everything, doves were not often asked to take souls to the beyond, to whatever place existed beyond the world of life. For that alone, he felt it not only necessary, but essential that such a traditional passage be performed upon his dead friend’s body.
When Jackson stepped forward and stood directly before Odin and Nova, the man extended his hands forward for one single, needed touch.
“Take our friend home, little buddy,” Nova said. “I know you’ll do a good job.”
Odin’s finger strayed one moment too long when he touched the bird’s head and felt its down feathers.
The creature cooed.
One last sob escaped his chest.
Jackson stepped forward, pressed the bird to Miko’s breast, then bowed his head. “By the Gods, by the world, and by all the good in this world, please, our Masters, use this vessel to deliver this man’s soul home.”
The man released the bird.
It stayed but one moment, then lifted into the air.
Odin turned his head up.
They watched it sail the wind until it could no longer be seen on the horizon.
“By tradition,” Parfour said, stepping forward in the moment Odin turned from viewing the scene before him. “You are to be given his sword.”
“Thank you,” Odin said, taking the weapon between his palms.
A low, dull hum sounded in his head.
Are you aware? he thought. Do you know who I am?
“Odin,” Nova said, pressing a hand to his palm. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” Odin said.
Two men stepped forward with burning torches.
“Whenever you’re ready,” one of the men said.
Odin and Nova reached forward and took the burning constr
ucts within their hands.
“Goodbye,” Odin whispered. “I love you.”
He set the torch at the foot of the pyre.
The flames burned strong.
He could not bear to watch his father burn, so when the flames grew high and covered the world, Odin turned and made his way back to Dwaydor. Cold, alone, and bearing the weight of what seemed to be the entire world, he made his way through the open gates and back to city hall without so much as a word to anyone.
Once, when he passed a man who appeared to be completely oblivious to the happenings around him, he thought briefly to strike him in the face, if only for such indecency. My father’s dead, he wanted to say. Do you even care?
How he managed to contain himself he did not know. That, however, did not necessarily matter, for in that moment, all he wanted was to be alone.
After letting himself into city hall, he made his way through the throng of bedding, marched into the hall, then locked himself into one of the offices, where he quickly slid down the wall and bowed his face into his hands.
“How could this have happened?” he whispered, struggling to maintain his composure even though he was completely isolated.
How, why, when—had Miko died in spirit alone, separated from his group and shot in cold blood? Had he suffered, for in those moments leading up to the time Odin and Nova had made their way toward him he surely must have felt some sort of pain. Most importantly though, had he felt as though there was any way to save his life—that regardless of his mortal injuries, he could be delivered from pain, from agony and sorrow and brought back into the real world?
I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner.
Could he have possibly saved the Elf’s life had he summoned Ardut upon the moment of finding him lying in his own blood?
With no way to know, Odin allowed himself to cry for the first time since leaving the scene. The tears hot and heavy, burning his face and streaking dirt down his cheeks, he shook his head, cast his hair over his eyes, then slid down onto his side as far as both his and the Elf’s sword would allow him.