The Last of Her Line

by Valerie Veden

  I could have easily destroyed all the mortals inside with my power, but without blood the picture would lack perfection. I wished it to be perfect. I wished to enjoy each moment of my victory. The air groaned when I drew my blade, made out of living ice. The sword liked killing as much as I did. It sang, cutting through flesh and letting souls go free.

  I went through all the halls and private rooms, finishing off a few survivors. Oh, Kadaries, it was so easy to hate you, so pleasant to kill! After I had destroyed even the memory of your existence, I would miss that ease and pleasure.

  Next levels of the building were empty but for the Abyss beasts, enchanted by the Kadaries. I released them from the binding spells and the beasts ran to me, their amber eyes shining with happiness. Some of the creatures looked like animals of the constant worlds; others were unique in their beauty, though mortals would call all of them monsters. The beasts wanted to return home, but they would have to wait until my business was over.

  The lowest layer of the fortress was different, with more magical shields and warriors, and one of them cut through all my defenses and lightly wounded me. He deserved my attention. I looked at his features, twisted by anger and desperation, and laughed. Stinn ar’Gor, my old acquaintance. You had overcome my sleeping rune in the camp, you had wounded me with your silly iron. You were a funny riddle. Pity, I wouldn’t waste my time solving you.

  One sharp movement, and the mortal, almost halved, fell down, his eyes still staring at me. Would he recognize my face under the bloody mask of splashes?

  His eyes opened wider in the last surprise, pale lips tried to say something. Was it my name or a damnation? I listened, curious, but no mortal could talk with a cut trachea. Stinn’s eyes glazed over.

  All the warriors were dead. I came up to a high set of iron doors, which opened courteously, letting me in. The Kadaries’ treasure waited for me there. The treasure, which they had fruitlessly hoped to save, a few hundred of children, from babies and toddlers to pre-teens.

  The children were silent, looking at me with incredulous horror.

  “Mummy!” a little girl in the corner cried out. She trembled, hugging a doll, black-haired and pale as the child herself. The girl’s hair tangled down in a half-finished braid. It seemed I came early in the morning.

  “You will meet your Mummy soon,” I promised soothingly, wondering what to do. I didn’t like seeing children’s blood. It had to be something easy and painless, similar to the sleeping rune.

  “Why are you killing us?” it was the first question I had been asked here, all the rest being either pleadings or imprecations.

  I looked around the hall seeking out the speaker. It was a girl of fourteen with a baby at her breast. Not surprising. The Kadaries tried to breed as soon as they could as their life expectancy was quite short.

  “Why?” I echoed the question. “Because you still exist.”

  The Kadari girl looked at a loss of words. I smiled at her, making a final choice. Rune Sho-Rin, “Sweet Death.” I would be kind this day.

  I was ready to draw it, but my fingers froze in the air. I looked around the hall, searching all those scared faces. Silence ruled the place with only uneven breathing and rare muffled sobs breaking it. One fluent gesture and the first Kadari clan would be finished off. I was so eager to continue my quest of the Abyss purification, but my hand wouldn’t move. Did some of the children possess empathic Gift, strong enough to influence me?

  No. The wish to spare them came from inside, from the depth of my mortal Self. I, Riel Shorall, didn’t want to kill.

  The vague idea took shape and strengthened, pushing at me, making me back down. The personality that had grown during the last seventeen years was trying to take over. I felt waves of her-my emotions: disgust, pity, anger. With them a stubborn decision came, I won’t kill children.

  It was as if my Self lost its wholeness. I had never felt such a pain before. It was tearing me apart, it was… terrible.

  I jerked back and then a star blazed up in front of me, blinding. When my vision cleared, there was no hall, no Kadari children, no fortress on the dead splinter. I stood in front of the Mirror of Truth, still touching it with my palms.

  The temperature grew cold, my breath was coming out in whitish puffs. Wide-open, scared eyes looked at me from the mirror, the eyes of Riel Shorall. There was no eternal perfection anymore, I was just a mortal girl of seventeen years old.

  “What am I?” I whispered to my reflection.

  “What am I?” its lips moved.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “Kill… kill… kill,” echoed around.

  “Let them live,” I continued stubbornly, staring at my own eyes. “Their life is that of hardship, there is no sweetness in it.”

  “Their life… is sweetness,” the echo argued.

  “Father didn’t want their death!” The words, my last argument, burst out.

  “Father didn’t want?” The echo sounded surprised.

  “He called it a whim! He loved them!”

  “He loved.” The echo agreed sadly. “He loved them.”

  I leaned closer to the cold glass, touching it with my forehead.

  “What are we going to do?”

  The Other Riel remained silent for a long time.

  “I don’t know,” I finally heard her mental whisper.

  “We already have one present for Father,” I smiled, anticipating the Brothers’ surprise at our find. The Other Riel mirrored my smile, then her face grew serious.

  “I have been waiting for so long to destroy the Kadaries. A thousand years ago, I made a bargain with the youngest prince of Shorall, helping him to survive the Lord Dragon’s purge. In exchange for that he gave me a blood oath that the next girl born to the dynasty would belong to me, would be my vessel. I knew he would try to avoid fulfilling his part of the bargain. He would make a special curse, preventing any girl to be born from his seed and the seed of all his descendants. I knew time would pass and the mortals would forget the reason of the curse. I knew the only race capable of removing that curse were the Kadaries. Sooner or later, some Shorall couple was bound to wish for a daughter and the Kadaries would be eager to help, to get a hook of gratitude at the ruling dynasty. Such a girl would have an innate affinity and instinctive feel of the Kadaries’ magic. She, I, we together would be finally able to come through all the Kadaries’ wards. The traitors are a cursed people, blemished. Their souls are dirty. The Abyss needs to be purified of their presence.”

  “But they weren’t always like that,” I remembered some glimpses of the Other Riel’s memories. I remembered the Divide, the Gods’ battles, the wars that had been shaking the Abyss for so long. The Creator, betrayed by some of his children, fell and was imprisoned, but the Chaos Gods, His enemies, didn’t stay victorious for long. The immortal and powerful entities, called Specters by mortals, sent them fleeing and purified the Abyss of the traitors as well as they could. The Kadaries were among few who survived.

  “Yes, they were not always like that,” the Other Riel agreed. “But the Kadaries gave themselves over to the Chaos Gods, they were changed like raw clay and they remained in that new shape. After the first wave of rage from their betrayal had passed we had tried to return them, to make them as they had been, but we couldn’t.”

  “And you began killing them,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she said. “We began killing.”

  The mirror of the Truth started to melt, the mirror labyrinth disappearing with it.

  “I am you,” I whispered to the empty space.

  “I am you,” came back the faint reply of the echo.

  Chapter 9.

  The mirror walls disappeared, replaced with a boundless savannah of high green grass and a blue dome of sky above, the sun frozen in its zenith. The grass rustled under the wind, making the only sound here. It was too peaceful, too beautiful and quiet to be real, yet the Other Riel’s millennia of life experience told me that world wasn’t an il
lusion.

  While I was in a mortal body, I couldn’t understand everything the Creator’s Daughter was. She let me see some of her memories, mostly foggy and unclear, just the main outline of the events She had lived through. That was enough. Otherwise, I felt, my mortal mind would have succumbed under the weight of the countless centuries.

  The wind brought a few grains of sand from a desert to scratch my skin, icy breathing of snow-clad mountains to cool my face, and a few tears of the sea to run down my cheeks. The wind sang of wild horses, running in vast herds, of wolves, creeping in the dark, of hyena laughter, but it didn’t sing about any sapient race.

  I had heard the wind, the witness of the present. Then I kneeled in the grass to listen to the earth, the witness of the past.

  My search went deeper and deeper, below the millennia of quietness.

  Then the sky cracked and white fire poured out of it in unbearable deathly brightness. Out of the fire, my Brothers, full of holy rage, came, and cries of dying mortals deafened me.

  This world had been a home to another condemned race, less lucky than the Kadaries. I saw glimpses of them: winged people, small-boned and swift with huge faceted eyes. Never before had I heard of them. Had my Brothers destroyed even the memory about that race?

  The Mirror of the Truth had shown the crack between my mortal and immortal parts, which must have been the priests’ intent from the very beginning. Now they would try to break my soul completely. Were I truly a mortal girl possessed by a demon, they would have already succeeded.

  Protective shields covered this world so tightly it would have taken all my full power to break out. The shields felt old but not rusty. Somebody took good care of them. This world must have held something precious, something worth all the effort.

  I leapt up into the air and opened my wings, glittering whiteness of magic and flesh.

  The savannah seemed boundless but then a sharp blade of water flashed ahead – a river, with ruins on its banks.

  I landed in front of the only whole structure here, built out of pale-blue marble with thin towers spearing the sky and… I wasn’t alone anymore.

  Two priests stepped out of the building shadow. They looked at me, silent, so I spoke first, “You’ve said I shall return myself or shan’t return at all. I became myself.”

  One of the priests shook his head. “We cannot allow an immortal creature into the mortal worlds. Mergence, made by you, twists the nature and must not be. You could see the horrible things those called Specters had done here. We shan’t let it be repeated.”

  “My Brothers avenged Father’s demise.” I pitied the destroyed race, but that pity was not enough to doubt the wisdom of the Elders. I was the youngest among my Siblings, while my Brothers had lived since the very beginning of time and matter.

  “They did the evil thing,” the second priest said firmly.

  “But you are Father’s Children, too.” I leaned closer trying to reach to them through the barrier of their icy perfection. “He made you. All the traitors who rejected the Creator were to be punished.” I sighed quietly. “The people of this world betrayed Him and my Brothers destroyed them. It had to be done.”

  “You wish to follow the steps of your Brothers,” the first priest said. “We looked in the Mirror of the Truth, too.”

  “I haven’t made a final decision,” I gave them a tiny smile. “I might let some of the Kadaries live.”

  “We shan’t let you destroy any lives.” The second priest said.

  “You don’t have enough power. You could have done me enough harm before but not now.”

  “We tried to save the girl, whose body you have taken.” The first priest countered. “Now we have no choice but to destroy your mortal shell.”

  “The mergence is over,” I informed them. “We are the same. You can’t destroy my body without destroying me, and you don’t have power to do the latter.”

  “If mergence is over what will happen to you, Incarnated One, if we kill your el’ero in a right way?” The second priest asked.

  Their words caused me a sharp pang of pain, but it passed when I recalled that they were yet nothing but enemies. Not my Brothers, not until Father returned and gave them their memories and rightful place back.

  “Is it fair to kill an innocent man?” I asked softly.

  “It is one mortal life against millions.” The second priest said.

  The first priest added, “We shall pray for a happy rebirth of his soul and the soul of the girl.”

  I didn’t try to explain that I had always been Riel, or, better to say, Riel had always been me. I had planned for my awakening to happen later, with Riel in full possession of her power. Yet the girl had first stirred me with kijstas, then she had opened the Portal and woken me fully.

  Mervin.

  Killing somebody’s el’ero “in a right way” meant a long and painful execution. They would destroy Mervin’s magical aura slowly, layer by layer, making him instinctively reach out to me, asking for help and power. No distance would be a barrier for that. I wouldn’t be able to refuse and that would continue until both of us, completely exhausted, died. The immortal part of me would remain, but Riel would cease existing.

  The stronger the sorcerer, the longer his dying. Mervin, with his unique Dark magic, would live a few weeks, not enough time for me to escape the trap, but longer than any mortal could endure and not go mad from pain. Many centuries ago, I had seen such a thing done and since then I had always killed swiftly and hated torturers.

  The priests had found my weak point. However, I still had a choice. Not to obey them, not to die together with Mervin, but to do something else entirely. I could kill my el’ero myself. If I gave him more power than any mortal could safely sustain, his heart would burst in his chest. It would be a quick and painless death, a pure blessing in comparison to the priests’ threat.

  “No!” A desperate cry came from the depth of my Self. “I don’t want to kill him.”

  My duty called, and the death of my el’ero, the death I had never wished for, would set me free. It would give me a flash of power, strong enough to break through the shields of this world.

  “No! I won’t let you! Mervin is mine! Mine! I won’t give him to you! I won’t give him to death!” The cry grew in volume and strength, the crack at the place of our mergence got bigger.

  “We can reach an agreement.” I looked at the priests expectedly. I didn’t know their vulnerable spots, didn’t know any attachments; I knew nothing that could have been used against them.

  “We need nothing from you, Incarnated One, but this: leave the body of the mortal girl,” the first priest said.

  “Otherwise, and let Savato be our witness, we shall do anything to destroy you,” the second one added.

  The last phrase wasn’t a real oath, but nobody would call the attention of the Equilibrium Force in vain.

  I could kill Mervin or I could go. Mervin was only a mortal, while I had been waiting for this incarnation for many centuries. And yet, I couldn’t let the divide grow bigger.

  Interlude 3.

  The face of the Incarnated One remained unreadable, her eyes cold. Finally, she inclined her head in acknowledgement. “If I agree to your terms, how will my Self leave this world?”

  The priest answered evenly, letting not a drop of his gleeful triumph through the icy veneer of his expression, “As soon as the mortal girl is freed, we shall create a crack in the shields, big enough to let you out.”

  “I want an oath that none of you, your kind or your allies will put a net of obedience over me or otherwise retain my Self.” The Incarnated One stared at them, unblinking. The control over a Specter was possible, for a short period, but the priest had seen enough countries destroyed by such experiments.

  “We shall give you this oath,” he nodded.

  “By the name of Savato,” she demanded.

  “We swear by the name of Savato,” they said.

  A symbol of Equilibrium, a brilliant crimson b
all, appeared in the air.

  “Later, you will pay for this inconvenience.” Her tone implied she planned to extract the payment herself. The priest remained silent.

  The Incarnated One made a few steps, then halted and raised her face to the sky. For a few moments, nothing happened, then her body trembled violently and the girl, a mere mortal once again, fell down on the ground. The chilling cold of the Incarnated One's presence disappeared.

  PART 3

  SACRIFICE

  Chapter 1

  The first thing I felt was the warmth of the sun caressing my skin and urging me to wake up. The first thing I saw was the blue sky above. The first thing I sensed was somebody’s presence next to me.

  Mervin.

  The taheert sat by my side, close, but not touching. For a few moments, we stared at each other; then Mervin gave me a tiny smile and broke the silence.

  “You have slept for five weeks.”

  “What?” I sat up abruptly. “What do you mean?”

  “You have been unconscious for five weeks. Thirty-seven days to be exact.”

  At my incredulous look, Mervin added, “You were in my castle. I brought you here just an hour ago.”

  I smoothed down the long sleeves of my dress and looked around. We were on a small hill. In front of us, the silky surface of the sea waves moved slow and steady. Behind us, green woods spread east and west. The uniform greenness of trees was broken by the dark towers of Mervin’s castle deep in the middle of the woods.

  “I have forgotten your domain is that close to the seashore,” I said softly. “It’s beautiful here.”

  Silence stretched again, a comfortable, cozy kind of silence; the kind where you didn’t have to say anything, when your companion felt your need to take time to remember, to understand and to think over whatever happened. Mervin could be sensitive – if he wanted to be.

  It was truly beautiful here. The sky was clear and transparent, with only a few fluffy clouds spotting the summer blue. The wind off the sea brought gulls’ cries and fresh air tinged with the scent of salt.