The Last of Her Line

by Valerie Veden

  “Tell me, why?” Her voice rose to a shout and I halted, but not because I had decided to answer. No, there was a wall of power preventing me from leaving the summerhouse, and its magic felt different from anything I knew. Kamila, though older than me, had weaker inborn magic. I wondered who had taught her to create this.

  “Why?” she repeated, and madness gleamed deep in her eyes.

  “Why does it matter to you?” I answered evenly. “You are free now. You have never loved Sedd, anyway.”

  “Don’t you dare speak about him!” She cried out, her voice filled with pain. “What can you know about love? What can you know about losing the one most precious to you?”

  She took a deep breath and went on almost calmly.

  “Do you know that Sedd loved you more than any of his brothers and his parents, even more than me? Whenever he mentioned you, his eyes, his voice, changed. His beloved sister, his cherished gem, the little innocent baby that became the prettiest girl of our kingdom. The princess who did nothing to avenge her family but saved the traitor instead, saved the one guilty of their deaths! Mervin an’Toel had never been one of us, not truly, his tainted blood was destined to show itself sooner or later. But what about you, Riel Shorall? What excuse do you have?”

  I remained silent, trying to find any weak spot in the wall of power. The wall was solid. It spread both above us and beneath, turning the summerhouse into a cell.

  Besides, Kamila didn’t need my answers. The deep hatred in her eyes showed that everything had been decided and the sentence passed.

  “The real traitor is you,” she said resolutely. “Only those you believe and love can betray you. We never trusted an’Toel, we knew he could become an enemy, but it was you, the golden child of Shorall, it was you who really betrayed all of us. Not just your family, but your people, too.”

  The wall of power had no weakness. Any moment now it could move and squeeze me to death.

  We hit simultaneously. Kamila’s magic blow knocked the breath out of me, but mine had also made Kamila shudder convulsively. Then the power walls squashed me from all sides while a thread of Air began choking me. However, you didn’t need to breathe to send a thread of your own; you just needed to stay conscious.

  Kamila’s protective shield seemed impenetrable for all the Elements – all classical Elements. My adversary didn’t even gasp in surprise as ice covered her face and body, became her face and body. My combat magic teacher would have been delighted with the swiftness I had called in the Frost Element.

  Kamila was still alive beneath the icy shell. I needed to make just one little step to push her and break into frozen shards. Yet the wall of power wouldn’t bulge, preventing my breathing, and red circles swam in front of my eyes. Then I understood. Frost could turn Kamila’s blood into ice, her heart could burst, but it wouldn’t help me. It wasn’t her who had built the wall.

  I was losing consciousness. My lungs burnt and begged for air, my eyes couldn’t see, but still I could hear. My last memory was a string of words in an unknown language said by an unpleasantly familiar male voice.

  Interlude 1.

  Thor Ash’Corga looked at the moving sphere with an expression of open wonder.

  Mervin hid a smile, reminding himself that his own reaction of half a year ago wasn’t much different. It was then he had first seen the Lord Dragon creating the shields-between-the-worlds, intertwining pure Elements with the energy of the Abyss and his own unique power.

  “That’s just an example,” Karos put his hand away and the sphere slowed and changed its color from transparent gray to deep blue. “Such a shield would be enough for one small town; the shielding of the whole country would take several weeks.”

  Mervin stopped listening. He knew perfectly well everything the Lord Dragon was going to say to the prince; they had discussed that together before the audience. Mervin was more interested in an odd feeling he had had for the last few days that now increased. The feeling of wrongness and growing danger.

  Karos and Thor went on discussing the alliance and paid no attention to Mervin who stepped closer to the window. The view didn’t look inspiring: rain, rain and rain, obscuring everything in the distance. Mervin closed his eyes for better concentration and listened to the chorus of the Shield threads above Quein, the ones he had helped to create. The shield wasn’t finished yet but Mervin could define the condition of defense.

  Everything seemed quiet, as it was yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and a week ago.

  “…if the energy supply is the obstacle, all our temples are ready to…”

  So, the conversation had turned to the temples. The islanders had been accumulating magical power into the tirinin crystals for many centuries, and each of their temples held at least one such crystal – a great asset in case of a war.

  Thor continued speaking but Mervin’s attention shifted to the threads again. It seemed their chorus changed. A moment of silence and…

  The prince stopped in the middle of a sentence when the Lord Dragon abruptly turned to the taheert.

  “What are you doing? Merv…”

  The closing Gates cut off all the sounds of this world.

  Chapter 5

  The air was so tasty, so sweet. I could breathe again, the horror of suffocation slowly receded, but I didn’t know where I was.

  I regained consciousness in a small oval room with white fluorescent walls, a low ceiling and no furniture whatsoever. There were no windows and no visible doors, either. Whoever had brought me here hadn’t cared about my comfort and left me on a cold floor.

  I reached for my magic but it was blocked. Slow minutes ticked away while I tried to remove the block. Not that I truly believed in the possibility of such an easy escape, but it was a way to do something and not just contemplate my upcoming – and gloomy - future.

  Suddenly, a part of the wall disappeared and an old acquaintance walked through.

  “Your Highness,” he nodded in a parody of a court bow, but his eyes never left my face. Our last meeting had taught this Kadari well.

  “Stinn ar’Gor, such a surprise,” I tried to smiled pleasantly but felt it came out feral. The previous unease melted into anger and my face tingled unpleasantly from the blood rush. “To what do I owe our lovely meeting?” Even to my ears, my voice sounded furious.

  “I have missed your marvelous beauty, Princess,” Stinn smiled back icily.

  “Touched,” I nodded to his words.

  We grew silent but the air almost rang with the tension.

  “We have been looking forward to your visit, Your Highness,” Stinn said. “Please, follow me.”

  The ceilings outside were as low as in the room and roused an instinctive desire to hunch my shoulders. I shook the unpleasant feeling away and held my head high.

  One turn, another turn, and I came to a sudden halt. I knew the place, though never before had I visited it, at least not in the flesh. It was the fortress of ar’Gor clan the Other-Riel had destroyed in the mirage future.

  “Where are we?” I wasn’t going to betray my knowledge. “Why did you kidnap me? I won’t move from this spot until I get the explanation.”

  “That’s all right, Your Highness,” the Kadari said in a soothing voice, though his eyes looked at me mockingly. “It’s all right, because I don’t need your cooperation.”

  I wanted to say something else, but my tongue stopped obeying me. Then my feet resumed walking, paying no attention to my desperate commands to stop. At first, my legs felt stiff, but soon the body found its rhythm and the fluidness of movements returned.

  The only things that remained mine were the circling thoughts and the growing horror. Stinn had used Mind magic – the craft neither we nor any other sapient races I knew about could wield.

  There was one exception, though. The Djennajs, the first people to betray the Lord, the Chaos Gods’ favorites. Our priests claimed all the Djennajs had been destroyed. Were they wrong? Or had the Kadaries learned that most elusive craft
by themselves?

  Either way, it made the Kadaries more dangerous than I had ever imagined.

  “Here we are,” Stinn gestured with his right hand, making the wall in front of us disappear. In a huge hall that revealed itself, slender gray columns held the grayish dome of the ceiling. Bare walls glistened a polished gray and only the floor differed in color, with the shade of dried blood. I took it all in in a second, and then my eyes settled on a black stone slab in the middle of the hall, suspiciously similar to a sacrificial altar.

  I drew my eyes away from the altar and looked at the Kadaries gathered in the temple. There were so many of them, and all the faces turned to me were filled with happy anticipation.

  Either the shock made me stronger or Stinn had loosed his grip on purpose but I could speak.

  “Why me?” I forced out.

  “You may ask our Lords yourself,” the Kadari answered with a pleased smile. “In the afterlife, of course. They wished for you to be delivered. In exchange, they promised us special powers. Your sacrifice will be the beginning of our rise and the el’Tuans’ fall.” He made a broad gesture, pointing to the slab. “Your last bed awaits you, Princess.”

  My horror began chocking me; my blood thumped, making all the other sounds impossible to hear. Dying on the Chaos altar meant your soul would be the Chaos Gods’ meal. There were no rebirths for those sacrificed.

  There was only one entity able to help. I didn’t know Her name, I didn’t even know if Specters had names. She had left me, but if there was a chance of Her return I would do almost everything for that.

  “Come back!” I cried out in my mind. “Return to me, make us whole! Save me! Please!”

  There was no response.

  The stone slab under my body felt warm, like animal guts freshly cut open. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t do anything but stare at the dome of the temple, covered with symbols, all of them variations of the Chaos rune.

  The ritual began with singing, scratching and ugly. The runes above followed the perverse rhythm, swirled and spun, their dance enticing and wicked.

  I felt myself falling upwards into the swaying runes and into the sky of the dome. My thoughts began mixing up, making me more anxious with each passing second. Memories flashed in front of my eyes like glass splinters.

  …the royal hunt, a cavalcade of handsome riders, and a graceful deer, running ahead, – a noble game for noble el’Tuans…

  …a small sitting-room in a royal palace, I, with a rueful expression on my face, and Father, berating me for yet another etiquette breach…

  …The taheerts’ lab, the remnants of an artifact frame, scattered everywhere, the walls and me equally spotted with black and somewhere suddenly orange, and Mervin, looking at me with an unreadable expression, but the corners of his mouth are suspiciously tugging up…

  My memories galloped faster and faster, the images dissolved into shadows. My personality, my magic, my very Self were falling apart and disappearing. Each passing moment made me less. I felt a surge of horror, but almost immediately it was stolen away. When it happened I stopped feeling my body, I couldn’t see and couldn’t hear. I ceased existing…

  Interlude 2

  The sky of the Abyss, ever serene, met Mervin with a furious storm. Winds of power rushed by, carrying fragments of non-existing realities, and the star way wasn’t set once and forever. It was changing before his eyes with the outlines of familiar constellations distorting; and all over the place, he saw spinning spirals of dark matter, feeding on space and time. Shields around a few protected worlds shuddered from outer pressure, and the flight through the Abyss felt more like a fall.

  The Kadaries’ trace was the space touched by wrongness. It was the only trait that felt familiar. That and the faint fragrance of Riel’s magic, intertwined with her kidnappers’.

  All the rest was as if the Abyss Herself went crazy or was fighting some enemies he hadn’t yet seen.

  The kidnappers’ trace brought him to a splinter of the world that belonged to the clan of ar’Gor. Their town, a great rocky fortress of many layers, was surrounded by a pulsing milky-white wall. The wall didn’t let Mervin inside and the only thing that managed to break through it was his Dark magic.

  Chapter 6

  Who am I?

  Everything circled around me; bright spots of different colors changed places and flowed into each other.

  What am I?

  Emotions, the names of which I didn’t know, flooded me.

  Why am I? Why do I exist?

  The feelings of my body returned. I had arms and legs. I had a heart to push blood through my veins, I had eyes to see and ears to hear. I could feel again, were it heat or cold, softness or hardness, love or hate.

  I… What does it mean - “I”? What does it mean to be myself?

  I remembered something, some things, but they were shards and slivers of the whole and didn’t fit together. My body and my soul had been shredded to pieces and then put back together, but poorly, with big gaps between the parts.

  To become myself, to become whole… What does it mean – to be whole?

  I sat up slowly and looked around, trying to make sense of my surroundings. There was space, limited by walls, floor and ceiling and filled with – slowly, unwillingly, a definition emerged from the depth of my memory – “the Kadaries.” The space around me was filled with the Kadaries. I knew they were sapient creatures and I knew I didn’t like them.

  Yes, I didn’t like them. It was a brief sliver of emotion, but a strong one.

  All the Kadaries lay on the floor, seemingly unconscious; at least nobody protested when I stepped over their prone bodies, heading to the exit. Perhaps outside I could find something important and necessary, something to make me whole again.

  Narrow corridors stretched ahead filled with bodies and things. I paused before a long bright stream of frozen metal, which lay on the floor next to another unconscious Kadari. For a moment, I stared at the metal thing; its name waited at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t remember it.

  Then, a strange feeling flooded me. The feeling of urgency and necessity to hurry, to run, with neither thoughts, nor explanations of why and where.

  I ran. One turn of the corridor and another until a wall blocked the way. I knew I could go through it and get outside. I had to.

  I pressed my hands to the stone, touched it with my face, my lips, and my body fell inside it. I made two steps in its viscous matter and the cold of the outside hugged me.

  The air wasn’t transparent there; it looked white, felt abrasive and scratchy and swirled around me.

  I hurried again through that wrong air, through the freezing cold. I ran and fell into the iridescent hollow that had suddenly appeared in the whiteness.

  “Riel!” a male voice exclaimed, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. At first, everything seemed dark, but almost instantly I realized that I could see, if I wished so.

  The owner of the voice was a man, pale-skinned and black-haired, from a sapient race but not the Kadaries. I knew him. I was sure I knew him. I headed to him, first slowly, then running, and threw my arms around him.

  After the outer cold, his body seemed pleasantly warm, but that thought was short-lived as I realized something much more important: his closeness made me more whole. Parts of my Self, the few I could salvage and glue together, began shifting to fit properly. Yet so slow it was, so painfully slow.

  “Alive,” the man whispered, hugging me back. “Riel, baby…”

  The sound of his voice caressed me, and I smiled happily, asking the first question that came to mind.

  “Is Riel my name?”

  The man jolted and squeezed my shoulders, then cupped my face in his hands and looked me into the eyes. The hug was broken and the parts of me began quivering again, wobbling in their places, ready to fall apart. There was little time left for me.

  “What has happened to you?” He asked. “What did they do?”

  “I…” I h
ad no idea what to say. Who were these “they”? What did “they” do? It didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered but my wholeness. This man could be, had to be, the one to return my Self to me.

  I looked into his worried eyes, and smiled soothingly. Then I stood on my toes, tugged him to me and touched his lips with mine.

  One more part fit its rightful place, and that part had his name.

  “Mervin,” I whispered. “I remember now. You are my el’ero.”

  The man froze under my touch, but didn’t protest, didn’t say anything. I kissed him again and each thumping of our hearts, so close to each other, brought new memories, made me more myself.

  “Riel,” Mervin decided it was time to resume questions. “What’s going on?”

  “I am trying to become myself,” I answered honestly, “to put together my shattered parts. I am like a broken fresco…” I swallowed, trying to find the right words. “Being shattered, being not whole, hurts.”

  “Did they begin the sacrifice?” He asked evenly, but beneath the calmness a cold anger seethed. I frowned, trying to find the needed memory in the crowd of others.

  “There were runes moving above me.”

  “So they did.” He said grimly, as if I had confessed of my imminent death. “Chaos never releases its victims.”

  “Maybe so,” I didn’t care about Chaos. The only thing that mattered was the man beside me. Yet something pushed me to add, “I could cease existing soon.” Mervin’s face darkened, and so I said, “When you are close to me, I feel better. I can remember.”

  “Your el’ero, right?” his mouth quirked up at the corners in a sad smile, but I just kissed him.

  Grain by grain, my memory returned. All the memories – sweet and bitter, merry and frightening – swirled around. They agreed to return in exchange for a kiss, for a touch, for a shared breath.

  Mervin’s eyes were filled with both happiness and sadness, as if he knew something hidden from me. Still, it made no difference. We were together and nothing else mattered.